#((Screenshots pulled from the legacy version of TSWDB. Credit to Vohmer.))

[creepy-crowleys]

The darkness behind her eyelids was almost indistinguishable from the darkness surrounding her, and so it took Crowley a few moments longer to process that she was no longer dozing in one of the soft beds of the Tabula Rasa, but on a bare mattress in somewhere entirely new.

Or. Maybe not entirely.

Ancient wood, worn smooth with the passage of countless feet and warmed with a constant flow of anima, caught her as she rose from the unfamiliar bed. A single massive, broken branch of the World Tree jutted from the darkness like a splinter, suspended in nothing and leading nowhere but to a great fall. Even after the End, Crowley had never seen the tree look so gray and lifeless.

With nowhere else to go, Crowley stepped out into the nothingness beyond the branch’s shattered end.

In this dream, I am falling.

A voice caught in the wind that rushed past Crowley’s face as she fell.

I wonder to myself, is this death? Is this how everything ends?

Quiet. Sad. Empty. Resigned.

I think this is what I want.

A woman she’d never met and never would, but sounded so familiar all the same.

But then the ocean comes rushing up to meet me.

It wasn’t until she’d broken the water’s surface like a stone that she fully realized it was there - an ink-black sea, frigid and dark and only broken up from the shadows above by the faint haze of mist clinging to its surface. 

Crowley thrashed furiously to bring her head above water, gasping lungfuls of air and sputtering water through chattering teeth. If nothing else, the biting cold cut clean through the dreamlike fog that had followed her since she’d fallen asleep in the Tabula Rasa. Turning slowly in place, she scanned the horizon for any sign of land or some new destination, anything at all that stood out against the mist.

And there she spotted it: A tiny firefly glow against the darkened sky.

Twisted shadows clamored around her as she paddled through the dark, ichorous tendrils tugged at her limbs, and a thick scent of rot - fish and flesh and seaweed - cloyed at her senses and memories both. Tentacled monsters, real and remembered, threatened to drag her under. She would drown here. She was going to drown here. She-

Her fingers closed around the golden mote of light, warm and buzzing.

[creepy-crowleys]

The gunshot was deafening in the mostly empty tomb.

Crowley barely felt the impact.

...At all.

There was a long moment where neither woman moved, equally baffled by what had failed to happen. It hit them about the same moment:

Lorraine didn’t have powers anymore.

And without any kind of magic charging it, the pistol wasn’t nearly strong enough to even break the skin of the fully powered Bee. 

“...Um,” Crowley began, quickly stepping back to avoid a furious swing at her head. “I’m really not,” she blocked another attempt and hardly felt it, “trying to bring you back.” She caught the next swing and Lorraine strained to even budge her grip. “Lorraine,” she said firmly, continuing once Lorraine stopped struggling and fixed her with a steely glare from behind her mask. “I’m not making you-”

The Fragments of the mutilated bee anchored to her anima resonated. The phantom of Lorraine dissipated, and Crowley froze in confusion, realizing too late what was happening.

The Fragments were reassembling.

Crowley lunged for the tiny mote of light. “No! Stop! She doesn’t want this! Please!”  The Buzzing remained silent as she clapped her hands around the reforming bee. “Please. Let her go. She-”

Crowley’s pleas died in her throat as the entirely expectable happened: She was stung. 

White hot agony ignited through every nerve, every neuron, blasting her with a pain and psychic noise her mind blistered to comprehend. She dropped like a rag doll to the dusty stone floor as the little bead of light darted to back to its home and the shining silhouette on the tomb began to stir against her will once more.

[creepy-crowleys]

The Council of Venice had found her, you see. They had made her their agent. They erased the frightful records of her past. But they could not erase the past within her. They did not comprehend. They did not suspect that a terrible drive, given years to work, can do impossible things. How could she live a lifetime knowing what she knew? How could she live forever?

Crowley’s footsteps echoed against the cobweb-coated walls of the seemingly neglected tomb, pockets of red flame illuminating colorless pillars.

And at the end of hall, Lorraine’s final resting place: the remains of her anima, still and silent, bathed in a cold, white light.

Crowley stepped closer to pay her respects to the woman she’d never truly met and yet spent the last week journeying alongside. The translucent form flickered, appearing briefly more solid. 

“You.”

Another flicker and a solid hand wrapped around her wrist, forcing her back as the form of the masked Venetian agent she now knew to have been Lorraine peeled away from resting outline of her anima.

“I sent you away. Nothing to see here, I remember telling you that,” Lorraine hissed through the mask, distress hovering at the edge of her voice as she pressed forward, driving Crowley ever further from her resting place. Crowley felt the woman’s eye’s studying her from behind the lenses of the mask, and she barked a frantic laugh, turning back to her own ghost. “...This is the only dream I really, you know.”

Crowley gently pulled her wrist away from Lorraine’s distracted grip. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would still be here.”

Lorraine’s head swung back to her. “You can’t feel it, can you? You can’t feel what Gaia is taking from us.” A smile curled on her face behind the mask, cruel and despairing at once. “And you’re going to bring me back.”

Crowley flinched at the accusation. “What...? No! No, I wouldn’t-”

The other woman stalked towards her, furious and manic. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be back there. I not going to let you take me back.”

“I don’t want-”

“This was the only way.” Lorraine’s voice cracked as she levelled her service pistol at Crowley’s chest and fired.

[creepy-crowleys]

They offered me Gaia and I took her because I didn’t have a choice.

Crowley froze for half a heartbeat, fumbling a key into the lock.

The voice was different. But it was no less one she’d heard before.

But she chips, she chips away at us. Can’t you feel it? Don’t you know what she is taking from you?

Lorraine spoke to her through the voice modulation of the plague mask she’d worn when they’d met in-person.

- She had just wanted to be left alone after all.

A key clicked into the lock just as the spikes began to graze the top of Crowley’s head, and the whole mechanism stalled.

The Fragment lay at the end of a short prison corridor, shining gently.

[creepy-crowleys]

The first thing Crowley noticed was the ridiculously high ceiling of the small room she was in.

The second was the metallic screech of it scraping against the surrounding walls.

The third were the foot-long spikes glinting in the weak light as it lowered from the darkness above.

She was on her feet fairly quickly after that last one.

The small square cell had little to offer - a sink, a toilet, some piles of trash - besides the ever-present bed she woke up. A single metal door stood on one side - her only visible exit - while racks of keys hung from the other three. Straightforward enough, even with the quickly escalating pressure of the spike ceiling above. She could figure this out.

She wouldn’t die to someone else’s nightmare. Not like this.

[creepy-crowleys]

She kept running.

Through crowds of doomed artists, through people she swore she recognized but couldn’t name, ever away from the killer behind her who struck down everyone in his path, down the winding and seemingly endless, unbranching path.

Her lungs burned and her legs ached, and when she skidded on the ice of a spilled drink by one of the commune members to their uproar of laughter, she stayed seated for a moment to catch her breath and reconsider her approach.

A broad swing of a blade severed the heads from those around her, putting a swift end to her small break.

She kept running.

Until she was certain she would collapse if the dream continued much further.

Until finally, tantalizingly, all color drained from the branch ahead of her - a small, broken side path - and the light of the Fragment flickered into view.

Crowley collapsed into it more than grabbed it in relief.

[creepy-crowleys]

Always away from the past, always into the future. My life in flight.

Crowley bolted for the crowd, shouting for them to move, to run, and wriggling through the gaps between them when they refused to heed her. The eyerolls and uncomfortable giggles and snorts of derision settled on her like physical weights, hindering her movements as the Shade of Billy Lee approached.

She knew with sickening certainty she couldn’t stop him. This wasn’t even real: his victims were all long dead, there was no one to save now. She couldn’t protect anyone.

She still wanted to try.

She pushed her way through the rest of the crowd and out the other side.

Their dying screams chased her down the branch.

[creepy-crowleys]

Crowley stepped out onto the familiar, footworn branches of Agartha. The darkness of her previous nightmare about it had receded, but the ominous red glow that now filled the infinite space was little improvement. 

A short distance ahead, two figures fled further down the branch before she could call out to them.

In this dream, I flee. There is only one place to run.

The invisible weight of unseen eyes descended on Crowley the moment she stepped away from the platform. The entire limb trembled. A spotlight ignited around her. Something was coming.

Run.

The phantoms of the house congealed in her dream, memories of the massacre of the 60′s - poets and painters and writers, who had been sacrificed to the muse of one man who now took shape behind her, as monstrous in form as he had been in action all those decades ago. Billy Lee lumbered towards her in all his wrathful, Filth-touched glory.

[creepy-crowleys]

The mist shrouding the path from the sideshow alley peeled back.

The dream continued.

Crowley knew this path, she’d been down it before, and her heart sank at what she suspected lay at the end. And of what the dead woman must have experienced to hate this place so much.

In the real world, the heart of the amusement park was little more than a caretaker’s shed, but here...

Nathaniel Winter’s - the Bogeyman’s - the founder’s - tomb loomed from its stone pedestal. 

And the form of a young child lay curled at its foot.

The secondhand grief threatened to consume her. A voice that wasn’t her own tore from her chest as she sprinted towards the prone form. “Callum!” 

She pled with herself not to see the crimson stain that bloomed on the child’s back.

We sing a sad song for Lorraine. We sing a sad song for Callum. Mama duck and little duck. We tried to warn her about the nature of the park. But her ears were not tuned then, you see. She could not hear our shouts. Not back then.

She didn’t see where Winter emerged from, only that he dropped like a spider - all twisted and elongated limbs - over the child’s body, the swell of his power forcing her back for only an instant before fury took over. “Get away from him!”

Crowley roared, throwing her full weight against the warped nightmare figure of the long-dead real estate mogul-turned-wannabe magus and sending them both toppling away from the child’s body.  The icepick given to her as a souvenir from Chad found its way into her hand and, from there, into the Bogeyman’s abdomen repeatedly. It was all the monster could do to rip the woman away from himself and toss her aside, and scramble to the semi-safety of the top of his tomb.

What little climbing speed and distance his longer limbs afforded him did little to buy him much time as Crowley caught herself readily from the throw and had already vaulted up the rock face and started up the side of the tomb before he could recover. The spindly limbs shattered easily under her furious assault, the tomb itself beginning to crumble as the nightmare was torn apart. By the time the roof collapsed beneath them, there was little left of the monster to dissipate into dust and guilt.

Crowley panted in the rubble as the Fragment of Silence hummed in the dead child’s hand and let the grief wash over her.

[creepy-crowleys]

By the time Crowley caught up to the wayward jeans and they crumpled to the ground like the ordinary pieces of material they were, she thought she was starting to get used to the jeers and laughter and faceless looks of disgust. She at least felt numb to it - nauseous on some level maybe, but disconnected enough that so much felt like as distant buzz. She didn’t doubt it would hit her later, when she was back home and it was safe to process everything again, but for now...

For now she could take solace in being half-dressed, hugging herself tight as she scanned her surroundings.

Her shirt and jacket hung suspended in the air some yards away - tantalizing close but just as ready to run as her jeans had.

Impossible, they said. Improbable? That one touched by Gaia could give back her gift. That one imbued with anima, could end their meat sentence prematurely. How to do it? How to cut out the bee inside? It took her decades, with little hope to support her. Can you imagine wanting something that badly, sweetling?

...Yeah. Yeah, she kind of could. That was why she was there, wasn’t it?

She chided herself to stop thinking and focus on the chase through the crowded al-Merayah streets and alleys, across walkways and over barriers, until her jacket too came to rest beneath a stone arch.

The abandoned Fragment of Silence resonated in her pocket the moment she pulled the jacket of over her shoulders and breathed a small sigh of relief.

[creepy-crowleys]

She felt no less exposed once she found herself in the dream. She reached to tug her jacket tighter to herself and came up empty. The desert sun prickled at her skin. Someone choked on a laugh.

In this dream, I am vulnerable. All the eyes of the world are upon me and they judge me and find me wanting.

Crowley pushed herself up on the bare mattress and found herself in a facsimile  of al-Merayah’s busy marketplace. A crimson sun bathed the desaturated sandstone streets and structures in an ominous red twilight. Someone in the crowd snickered more openly and more heads turned to face her. Her cheeks burned as she figured out why.

My clothes, my gear, everything is treachery. I am alone.

The crowd broke into raucous laughter as she lunged from the blanket draped over the otherwise bare mattress only to have it ripped away from her and yanked, impossibly, into the space where the mattress met the bedframe.

A mortified giggle escaped from her own lips as she inched back on the mattress, arms crossed tight over her bare chest, eyes welling with tears, and nowhere to run with her back against a wall. Haha. She hated every part of this.

Subtly, up ahead, the light shifted. A stray pale beam against the red illuminated the jeans she’d been wearing standing - somehow - on their own just beyond the laughing crowd. It was only a matter of getting to them. No problem. Right.

The sun-warmed stone street felt like nothing under her bare feet as she crept forward, curled tightly into herself as she approached the laughing crowd. Even with the dream devouring their faces, she could feel every scalding eye blistering on her skin. 

Not one of them tried to touch her as she inched through, past the edge of the crowd, always parting just enough to pass if not to feel comfortable.

The laughter and whispering became a cadence in her head, something to focus on as the pair of jeans bolted away from her.

Fast forward. Initiate playback. A woman lays in a bed. She performs surgery on herself via dreams. She has seven scalpels, and their names are: Basiphobia, Dementophobia, Gymnophobia, Coulrophobia, Paranoia, Claustrophobia, and a scalpel yet to be named. Sparagmos. The bee came undone.

[creepy-crowleys]

The chase continued for what could have been hours, through winding hallways and endless rooms - boardrooms and offices and lounges - in increasingly bizarre and impossible arrangements, each with a ringing phone waiting tantalizingly just within reach - only to vanish before the call could be received. 

Twitching specters hampered her pursuit at every turn. Slamming doors and shifting furniture and distorting walls made every room into a challenge.

And the ringing continued.

It was almost a relief when the next room contained nothing more alarming or complicated than thirteen ordinary workdesks. Crowley didn’t trust it to last, but after needing to clamber around on the ceiling of the room prior, it was delightfully simple. 

All the more so when the phone stayed solid beneath her fingers. She nearly flinched at the unexpected feel of smooth plastic after chasing nothingness for so long. Prize finally obtained, she tentatively raised the handset to her ear. “...Hello?”

Static blared across the speaker.

UNLAWFUL EXPLOIT DETECTED! They did a wrong thing, sweetling. They kept a captured bee in that container. They artificially placed the bee in that woman. They made her like you, but not like you. Suddenly she could hear us, and our voice may have not sounded too kind.

Crowley hissed sharply, barely having time to cover her ears before every phone in the office went off at once, resonating loud enough that her eyes welled with tears. Rivulets of blood seeped between her fingers. Running for the office door, she slammed against it, clawing at the knob to no avail as the deafening ringing swelled.

And suddenly went quiet.

Crowley squinted through tears certain her hearing had failed, only to catch sight of a tiny mote of golden light hanging in the air at the center of the room. Just like in the previous dream.

A Fragment of Silence.

A piece of the dead woman’s bee.

Crowley ached for it and the still unknown woman who had been so desperate to escape it as she cupped it in her palm like a firefly, a tiny kernel of light and warmth in a cold and sterile world.

[creepy-crowleys]

Crowley jolted awake on the third ring.

A sterile grey hallway stretched beyond the foot of the bare mattress from the night before, colorless surroundings only broken up by the faded red slats of wood that hung haphazardly from the tiled walls.

In this dream, the telephone is ringing.

The same quiet voice resonated in Crowley’s head, and right on cue, a phone in a room ahead of her began to ring anew.

I know that answering it is the only way to stop something tragic from happening.

Crowley padded carefully into the unfamiliar office - mostly unremarkable save for it’s emptiness and desaturation, and the medical curtains that shielded parts of the view. The phone in question sat plainly on an ordinary desk with computer and chair at the back of the room. A red light blinked at her with every ring.

She reached down to answer it...

And yet, I can never reach the phone. I am always too late.

...and it disappeared from under her fingers.

A new phone began ringing from somewhere down the hall.