The audio is now out for Chapter 12: Fever Dreams. Brace for this one!
Yelena succumbs to the rot, but is Yelen’s blood really a cure?
CWs: emesis, fever nightmares involving a lot of mycelial body horror, and grim flashbacks of the time of the dead gods.
Music Credits:
Kevin McLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Intro/Outro:
Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins
Soundtrack:
SCP-x4x
Redletter
Morgana Rides
The Stages of Grief
Midnight Tale
Worldbuilding: Nightmare and Memory
I used Yelena’s fever as a way to explore the idea that dreams carry memory in the way that wind carries warnings. We’ve already seen this with Yelena and Velna sharing a dream-memory nightmare, and I wanted to use this chapter to return to that.
When Velna shows up in Yelena’s dream and asks, “Where are you?”, she might actually be dreaming herself, and the dreams crossing over. But also I wanted to explore the idea of what happens if you have the rot inside you, the essence of the dead gods – what memories does the rot itself hold?
So you have this body horror sequence of extreme acts of torture and abuse, self-destruction, and so on, all in the service of divine access.
Yelena is stuck in these nightmares, first watching, then participating.
I’m hopeful readers will be able to see this is not a moral judgement on Yelena or any of the people she sees in the nightmare – it literally isn’t, it’s simply a glimpse back in time to the way things were, and Yelena is trapped in the nightmare realm for a time witnessing them.
You will find out more about the third thing, water carrying laughter, in the next chapter!
Leave a Reply