Young Writers Society

You open your eyes to find yourself in a strange, ethereal dreamscape.

A sky as dark as pitch stretches above you. It’s not the gloom of a moonless night, but has a greater depth and blackness that can only exist in nightmares. Looking at it makes it difficult to breathe. A draft of icy air runs across your skin like fingers, and you feel that the black sky is growing deeper, smothering you, drawing you into itself.

You suddenly know that if you look at it any longer, it will drive you insane.

With that realization, you tear your gaze away and quickly pull yourself to your feet.

A glance at your surroundings reveals that you are standing in an endless expanse of fine white ash. Tiny, delicate white flowers sprout across the plain in clusters that give off a gentle glow. Very far away at the distant edges of the ash field, you glimpse a line of bare white skeleton trees. Otherwise, the world is empty and still.

The chill air kisses your bare skin, causing an involuntary shiver to run up your arms. You come to notice that the atmosphere has a peculiar weight. It presses down on your shoulders and feels heavy in your lungs- as if you were deep underwater.

Silence engulfs you, but when you close your eyes your ears catch the sound of a whispery flutter behind you. Opening your eyes reveals that your surroundings are empty as ever, and you wonder if you imagined it.

The dreamscape is beautiful. And terrifying. It fills you with a sick dread in the pit of your stomach. You close your eyes and wait for the nightmare to pass, but it remains vividly real.

What will you do now?

At that moment, as if in answer to your unspoken thought, there’s a flash of movement in the far distance- a yellow light bobbing among the distant skeleton trees. It flickers once before dancing away into the darkness, as if daring you to follow.






1. Only ONE character per writer please! Include a brief description of their name, age, gender, and appearance in a spoiler in your first post. The code is: [ spoiler ] Enter description here [ / spoiler ] without spaces
2. At some point in the story, I will close the roleplay to new characters.
3. Posts can be anywhere from a sentence to several paragraphs. As long or short as you’d like, within reason.
4. Please don’t write for characters not your own. If writing dialogue or a scene that involves another writer’s character, let them decide their response before continuing.
5. Don’t make any additions to the story that change the lore or mechanics of the dreamscape without asking me first, please! If you have any cool ideas or suggestions for the story, feel free to PM me.
6. Don’t double-post if you can help it, and try to give everyone a chance to get a response in.
7. Let me know if you'd like to leave the roleplay so we can figure out a way for your character to exit the story.
8. Your character can come from any world (modern & realistic, fantasy, etc), but keep in mind that magic is disabled in the dreamscape except in specific situations.

Have fun! This is my first roleplay and I’m excited to see where it goes!

Minra blinked at her surroundings. Her hair and clothes were still damp from the rain that had been falling as she walked home from work. The air around her wouldn't have been too cold if she were dry, but she wasn't, and as a result, she shivered uncontrollably.

What an odd detail to include in my own dream. It feels so real, she thought.

She knew she didn't have the imagination to come up with something like this however. She'd never been as creative as her little daughter, who saw pixies in Christmas lights and made wizards' fortresses out of sofa cushions.

The thought reminded Minra that she needed to wake up soon, as her daughter would be waiting to be tucked into bed.

She stood, shivering and dripping rainwater onto the ash-covered ground, and made a firm decision to ignore the dread growing in the pit of her stomach. She willed herself to wake, as if sheer force of will could make that happen.

It was only a dream, after all. Only a dream. If she continued to wait, she would eventually awake. The dream would end, as all dreams do.

Time passed by, heedless of her reasoning.

Minra stood and shivered and the Black Sky loomed over her, reaching, reaching... Whispers fluttered in the corner of her mind, and a draft of icy air chilled the back of her neck like the breath of a ghost.

After an interminable amount of time had passed, a seed of fear grew in the pit of her stomach. She let out a shaky exhale. Then she took her first step in the dreamscape. She took the next. Then she was running, her feet scuffing up clouds of ash that still smelled of smoke.

She slowed eventually, panting from exertion and the panic that she'd failed to smother. The trees lay ahead. A distant yellow light winked at her.

So she walked forward to meet it.

Carter couldn't remember falling asleep. Maybe that should've been the first thing to alarm him as he came to in his dream, but there were many other things that demanded his attention.

The air was cold. He could feel it biting at his face, like on a cold winter's night in the kingdom, if he opened up a window in the tower to air out the room. But the expanse before him was unfamiliar and barren as if he'd been tossed into a field of snow after a storm. He stared up at the dark, pitch-black sky above him for a moment, trying to see if there were stars, trying to find the moon, trying to find something in the void of darkness. But there was nothing, nothing at all. His heart began to quicken, and he could feel it beginning to pound in his chest.

There was no light in the sky.

He got up and looked down at the powdery ground beneath him. As he kneeled down and scooped with his hand, he realized that it wasn't snow as he'd believed, but it was ash. The ash fell between the fingers of his gloves, back to the ground, and his brows knit together as he frowned.

This dream felt very vivid and very real. Even the air felt crisp as it entered his lungs with each breath. He reached up to his cheek and pinched himself, feeling the dull pain as he squeezed.

It was never a sure-fire test of whether or not he was dreaming, but more often than not, he could choose whether or not he felt pain in dreams. It was a strange sort of thing where, when he was aware he was dreaming, he could do whatever he wanted.

But this he wasn't able to control. This was happening all on its own, and yet, he was aware that this was a dream.

Wasn't it?

He stood up and looked out around him. The only thing apart from the darkness and ash was a grove of trees up ahead, like white, sickly little sticks in the distance. He started walking towards them. If this was dream and he was awake within it, there was something to discover. Something that needed to be found, to be experienced. There always was, and the sooner he found it, the better.

As he drew nearer, there was a light in the distance. It flickered in and out of sight. Like a lantern held in the space between the trees before being hidden again. He hurried forward, but paused when he saw a woman appear, headed in the same direction.

There was something... strange about her. He'd never seen her before. He never saw complete strangers in his dreams.

Who was she?

He called out.

"Hello, over there!"

The light got closer and closer- or rather, Minra moved closer to the light. She approached at a swift pace until she had finally come near enough to catch a glimpse of what it truly was.

The mysterious light was a small flame, floating in the center of an elaborate golden lantern with glass doors. Even stranger, it was held by something long and white that stretched down from the top of one of the skeleton trees.

Minra craned her head to look up- and a voice called out, just as the lantern jumped from the tree and hurtled off into the darkness once again.

"Hello, over there!"

She jumped, whirling around to see what looked to be a medieval knight. The man was about her height and wore a suit of silvery armor, completed by a sword at his side.

Minra might have found him very strange in any other circumstance, but at that moment he seemed the least of the dreamscape's oddities. It was a relief to see another person in this empty, silent place.

"Who are you?"

Carter gave the woman a quick glance up and down. Unarmed, vulnerable, unremarkable, and average. She seemed surprised to see him, just as much as he was of her, though he did not so openly wear it on his face. He gave her a polite bow of his head in response.

“Carter Rahdan, Commander of the armies of the Moonlight Kingdom,” he answered, refraining from embellishing his title. He lifted his head, tilting his face to the side so that his hair naturally fell away from his face. “And who might you be?”

Minra's first thought concerning the man's flowery introduction was that it reminded her sharply of the fantasy books her daughter was fond of reading. The 'Moonlight Kingdom' sounded like something straight out of a fairytale.

She said none of this, but allowed herself to relax a little in response to the man's courtesy. "Minra. Just Minra."

Deciding to play along, she bobbed into a curtsy.

Something wasn't right.

He knew what dreams were supposed to be like, and they weren't supposed to be like this. Maybe it was because he was sleeping like this instead of his usual self lately, but it still didn't explain how real this dream felt compared to his usual ones. And it was so vivid, too - he wanted to tell Lorcan all about it, but Lorcan wasn't here.

There were people present, though. Second studied them from afar for a minute or two, trying to gauge their weaknesses and strengths. One of them were clearly a fighter; the other seemed to be more like the people from Earth. He would have guessed he was back in his home, if it wasn't for the lack of white writing over their head.

He walked over to them, a little skip to his step that he barely noticed.

"Hi," he said, smiling. This wasn't a normal dream, but it wouldn't hurt to be friendly right now. Neither one of them had hurt him, after all.

Carter smiled warmly as Minra courtesied politely, though he could tell it was not a usual type of greeting for her. Her curtsy was crude, but at least it wasn't graceless.

"Pleasure to meet you, Minra. It seems we've both found ourselves in some sort of..." his words trailed off as his eyes caught on someone coming up from behind Minra, practically skipping in his step. "...dream," he finished off, as the young man stopped near them with a short greeting and a smile.

Carter didn't feel like smiling back, but he met the man's expression with a warm grin and a nod of his head anyways. It would be best not to antagonize the foreign guests of his mind. He had no way of knowing who or what they were, or what purpose they were to serve.

"Who might you be?" he asked, trying not to fix his eyes on the boy's hideously green hair.

Something about the man - now that they were talking - put him off, but he couldn't figure out what that something was. He'd just wait for a bit to figure it out, and be as careful as he could be in the meantime.

"I'm Second," he said, giving a warm, friendly smile. Then he faltered - Charlotte said people on Earth didn't really have a name like his. "It's short for Jerry...the Second."

Vanya was sick of dreams. She'd been having them a lot lately. Prophetic tellings of different, contradictory futures, often ending with something like her death or some other tragedy. Those dreams were never not misleading, but still, she let them have a little weight. After all, she'd be a fool to see her own death and not believe it, even if the form of delivery for that message had led her astray before.

This dream, though, was different.

She hardly ever dreamt about people she didn't know unless those people were planning something she was meant to stop, and even then she rarely ever got a clear look at them until she was standing before them in person. That was always some morbid kind of entertaining because they'd often try to chain her wrists only to realize that she didn't have a second wrist for them to shackle, making the first shackle useless. It was usually around the time that they figured out an alternative that Kivvien or someone burst in with her sword and half a plan.

These people weren't villains, though. Or, they didn't look the part. Maybe the guy in armor, but the others looked harmless. Then again, so did Kivvien.

She approached them anyway, debating for a moment then deciding to leave her sword sheathed. If they were friendly she didn't want to scare them off, and if they were unfriendly she didn't want to put them on the defensive right away.

"Hello," she said as she approached, looking to each one in turn as though for an answer while really she was checking their eyes.

Minra warily inspected the newcomers. This dream was quickly becoming less and less cohesive. Two more strangers had appeared, and together they meshed aspects of fantasy and the real world.

The green-haired kid seemed like an ordinary teenager, but the blue-haired girl wore a sword at her side. Minra was surprised to notice that she was missing her left arm, and wondered if she'd lost it in a swordfight.

They both seemed entirely too comfortable with their strange surroundings.

Realizing she'd been staring, Minra nodded a greeting to both with a soft "hello".

He knew what the blue-haired girl was doing. He did it all the time, too. But that was alright - if he hadn't gotten a good look at them from farther away, he would have done the same thing.

He looked the group over again.

"What are your names?" he asked the group. He looked back at the newcomer and gave her a grin. "You just missed hearing mine - I'm Second."

Carter watched with a placid expression as yet another complete and utter stranger approached. A grin didn’t appear until she said hello, but it was only to keep up the pleasantries. But by gods, he hoped no one else was going to show up. None of them looked normal. The only thing that looked in-place was the sword on the girl’s hip, but even that, because it was on her seemed wrong.

“Commander Rahdan,” he said in short, bowing his head slightly. He hoped to speed through the rest of the reintroductions.

"Vanya of Wen," she introduced herself, deciding to use one of her less recognizable titles. A commander. Commander of what, was the question. Not one she needed answered right this moment though.

"I have a feeling we're meant to go that way," Vanya said, gesturing toward the flickering light. She cracked a small smile, "My feelings have only led me astray once or twice," she said, gesturing with what was left of her left arm.

If a joke would dissuade them from following her, it would be nice, but she doubted it would work. Even as she walked, she could sense she wouldn't be walking alone. She wished Kivvien was here, at least she knew what he could do and that she could trust him. These people...none of them were even mages, unless they cast minor illusions over themselves. The general was clearly a fighter, though, so perhaps she could rely on him a little to keeping things from getting unmanageable if they started getting violent.

Minra introduced herself to the newcomers. As everyone spoke their names, she found herself wishing once again that the dream would end.

It didn't.

The green-haired boy was Second and the blue-haired girl was Vanya of Wen. Vanya swiftly decided that they were meant to follow the odd hanging light, and set off without a backwards glance.

"I agree with Vanya," Minra said firmly. "The light seems to want us to follow." And maybe once they found it, the dream would end. She had a hunch it wouldn't be so easy, but one could hope.

Without waiting to see if the others came, she followed Vanya through the skeleton trees. The lantern taunted them by twinkling in the distance for a brief moment before leaping off again.