Like most of his nights since he started walking on the Sloth pathway… Ashen found himself in his own dreamscape the moment sleep claimed him.
For once, he didn't go straight to the training grounds.
The frozen tide of Narkals waited on its usual horizon. The portals dotted the sky in their thousands, each one a door into someone else's sleeping mind. The healing sanctuary sat at the far edge of the dreamscape, its soft light unchanging.
He walked past all of it.
He walked until the familiar terrain fell away entirely and the dreamscape gave way to something it had never needed to be before.
A white space. Blank, vast and silent, like a canvas that hadn't decided what it was yet.
Ashen stood at its center and let his mind go.
Walls came first.
Thick white stone drew itself slowly upward from nothing, growing until it reached a height that had no practical justification beyond the fact that they needed to feel enormous. Between them, pillars followed like monolithic columns that climbed past any reasonable ceiling; their surfaces were smooth, while their scale was the kind that made a person feel aware of their own smallness. They didn't hold anything up. They simply stood just like the way old things stood, because they had decided to be permanent.
Instead of a roof, clouds gathered overhead in lazy drifts, white on white against the dreamscape's sky, pressing together loosely enough that gaps remained between them. Through those gaps, sunlight fell, landing on the center of the space and leaving the edges in shadows.
At the center, a table materialized. Long and high and built from the same pale stone as the walls, with tall-backed chairs to match.
Ashen walked to the head of it and sat down.
The moment he did, something etched itself into the stone above his backrest.
ὑπερηφανία.
Or Akedia. Sloth, in Greek.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he closed his eyes and reached outward through three particular threads… three dormant dream parasites that had lived quietly in their hosts until now. A brief pass through each of their dreamscapes was enough to confirm what he needed.
All three were asleep…
He pulled—
The first figure materialized to his left.
Pink hair, with precise posture, even in the sudden disorientation of being summoned somewhere entirely unfamiliar. It was Lucia Evernight.
Her eyes moved immediately, cataloguing the room, the pillars, the sun falling through the cloud gaps, Ashen at the head of the table… before settling there.
Above the chair's backrest, the letters etched themselves before she'd finished orienting.
φθόνος.
Before she could speak, a second figure appeared. Directly to Ashen's right. She absorbed the space with a single sweep of her golden eyes. It was Alice.
Πορνεία.
The two women looked at each other once across the table's width, then looked at Ashen.
Neither of them said anything yet. That was simply how they operated. They observed first, and engaged second; and Ashen had counted on it, because he needed one more minute.
The third figure appeared beside Lucia.
Blonde hair with pink streaks that caught even the dreamscape's light. Butterfly-blue pupils. Seraphine looked around with wide eyes. Her gaze jumped from the pillars to the cloud ceiling to the sun columns to Ashen with visible delight.
ἁγνεία.
"Ashe—? Is this the dreamscape?" She leaned forward over the table, her voice seemed to be genuinely pleased, even under the sudden circumstances. "Ash, why'd you call me here?"
"An attempt."
"At what?" Alice finally spoke.
Lucia said nothing. But the slight tilt of her head asked the same question.
"At replicating what we did in Esperra."
Alice's turned thoughtful. "...You mean the organization."
"This is probably going to take a while." Ashen glanced across all three of them. "I'll apologize in advance for ruining your sleep, girls."
"As long as it's not some harem secret meeting, I don't mind," Alice said it with a straight face and a small smile that made it exactly ambiguous enough.
Ashen cleared his throat. "Right. So."
He laced his fingers together on the table.
"Unlike Esperra, we can't be obvious about this. Secrecy was optional there. Here, it's essential." He paused. "The problem is that the means here… from scrying, divination, to memory extraction make almost any conventional form of operational security worthless. We could use ciphers, dead drops, and intermediaries. They'd all eventually fail."
"What they can't scry is what isn't anywhere to scry." Alice's voice echoed as she followed the thought to its conclusion. "You want to keep the sensitive information off the table entirely."
"Here." Ashen tapped the stone surface. "Everything that matters gets discussed in this room. The dreamscape is mine. It doesn't exist anywhere a divination can reach."
Then, he glanced at Lucia and sent a question through the parasite thread like a mental knock rather than spoken words. She gave a small nod.
"Lucia has skills that function as anti-spying and anti-divination tools," Ashen said. "Layered together, they can protect against most forms of intrusion. The limitation is that they can only be cast on one person at a time, and with her Singular Envy skill…" a brief pause, "...that person is me."
"So your head is the vault." Alice nodded in understanding. "And her skills are the lock."
"And the alarm," Ashen confirmed. "Anything sensitive, we keep in here. I will use dreamweaving to hold the important memories centrally rather than letting them live in five separate minds that could be reached individually."
Seraphine raised her hand.
She lowered it slightly when she realized she didn't need to, then raised it again anyway. "But—if the memories with… let's say mission information… if they are locked here... how do we actually do our missions? Like, if I have something I'm supposed to be doing, how do I remember what it is?"
Ashen's expression turned smug.
"That," he said, "is where the path skill getting to Masterful stage gets interesting."
He settled back slightly.
"Think of my mind as a central server and the dream parasites as signal receivers… they're already in all of you, pulling barely anything to maintain themselves. I won't strip out all the information. I'll leave just enough of a gap that it feels like you've forgotten something. Like a word on the tip of your tongue."
"As for trigger…"
"The act of trying to remember triggers a request through the parasite," Alice said while tapping her lower lip. From her eyes that had seemed like she was no longer looking at anything in the room, it was obvious that her brain was operating at full capacity.
"Yep. A request that I will receive on my end and respond to. The information then will transfer in your mind until you've acted on it or deemed it finished, and then it gets recalled again." Ashen nodded. "It's vulnerable during the window it's with you. But compared to carrying sensitive intelligence indefinitely in a form anyone with the right skill could extract…"
"Significantly better." Lucia said, clearly impressed.
Alice added in satisfaction. "It's like Server-client architecture, but we're using dreamscapes instead of machines."
Ashen smiled despite himself. "That's the least I could do, given I'm asking Seravelle's Saintess and our illustrious treasure lady to participate in something this suspicious."
He turned to Lucia with the same smile. "Even you, Miss Cultist Culler, are going to have your own notoriety to manage after the stunt you pulled at the Assembly."
Lucia lifted one shoulder. Her expression said, clearly and without any need for words, that she would do it again without modification.
Seraphine and Alice both tilted their heads at the same time.
"The trial…?" Alice said.
"I'll explain everything in order." Ashen looked across all three of them. "Let's start the meeting properly."
⁂
He covered the trial first.
Antonio's accusations… Lucia's defense… the execution…. The atmosphere in the room changed subtly when he got to the part about Lucia raising their joined hand as evidence. Alice's expression remained neutral….
Seraphine's expression was not neutral at all.
He moved on to his rewards before that particular temperature could develop.
The Count's title… The territory beyond the wall… The twenty thousand former Pit criminals now constituting his army…
"How generous," Alice said sarcastically.
"They were very enthusiastic about it," Ashen agreed.
Then he got to Sabrina.
"...Cornelia also assigned her right-hand woman to me for the next three years. As a personal maid."
A pause.
The three women across from him looked at each other.
It was a brief exchange, only a few seconds, but it contained the complete vocabulary of a conversation he very much did not want to be part of.
"Now, before anyone—" Ashen held up a hand from his seat, "—she's a third step. She fought alongside us against the Astrologer during the siege. She is an immensely valuable addition to what we're trying to build, and Cornelia trusts her completely, which means—"
"We'll see~," Seraphine said pleasantly.
"Girls." He looked around the table. "C'mon."
No one said anything.
"She is going to help us immensely," he tried again.
Alice examined her nails. Lucia looked amused more than anything. Actually. If she hadn't promised the other two that they would try to limit their man's womanizing tendencies, she would have defended him here.
Her mind was much more open to polygamy from the environment she lived in, after all, unlike Esperiaan women.
Ashen gave up and moved to the next item.
"Let's talk about the territory." He spread his hands on the table, summoning a rough representation of the map into the dreamscape's air above them.
The meeting found its footing again. Whatever tension had gathered dissipated when they looked at the map.
Seraphine leaned forward over the table, studying the northwestern stretch. "That land is basically dead. Nothing grows there that isn't either trying to kill something or already dead." She hesitated, then said more carefully, "But I might have something for that."
She raised her hand again.
"It's a purification skill. It will take some time, and the coverage area is still limited, but I can treat the soil, making it viable for planting. If you need crops or anything that won't survive regular Seravellian conditions—" she gestured at the territory's representation, "—I can work on patches of it progressively."
"How fast?" Alice asked first, before even Ashen could get to it.
"Slowly," Seraphine admitted. "A week or two perhaps… depending on the land's condition."
Alice nodded once, accepting the limitation. "I'll contribute reconnaissance. The robots I've been developing can be adapted for patrol. They can even act as an early alert for Narkal movement or anyone approaching from the Demi-human border." She glanced at the chosen land's particular positioning on the map. "The distance from the Ashbastion is a vulnerability. An automated warning system will reduce the response window we'd otherwise be gambling on."
"I'll handle resources," Lucia said next. She had been watching the map since it appeared. "I'll keep eyes on viable recruits who could be persuaded to join the territory… like people with skills or knowledge that would accelerate development. I'll also monitor available suppliers that are willing to work with us and flag anyone worth approaching."
"The seller for the initial supplies is already locked in," She also noted. "I finalized it this afternoon."
A brief pause. "The food and tent acquisition from your remaining merit is the smart first move. It gives the twenty thousand men somewhere to exist while the actual infrastructure work begins."
Ashen nodded. "That's the plan."
Bit by bit, the details accumulated… None of it was enough on its own. But each piece made the others more viable.
By the time the map dissolved and the conversation reached its natural end, the sun through the cloud gaps had shifted, its columns moving slowly across the table's pale surface.
"One last thing." Ashen looked at all three of them. "When you wake up from this, you won't remember it. Not clearly, anyway. You will just get the sense that there's something you've almost recalled when your subconscious deems it so. If you don't fight that feeling and try to recall, I will get the request."
"Until then?" Seraphine asked.
"Until then, you won't even know this meeting happened."
She considered that. "I hope I don't get constantly assaulted by deja-vus…"
"You won't. I've got it." Ashen assured.
Alice was already looking at the chair's backrest above her. At the letters etched there. "Πορνεία," she read, with mild interest. "Mine says Envy," Lucia observed, without inflection.
"What does mine say??" Seraphine's voice was confused as the only person in the room who didn't know Greek. "...Fair enough, I suppose."
Ashen looked at the word above his own seat.
ὑπερηφανία. Sloth.
'I really went overboard with the grandness this time,' he thought, amused. 'Well… It's inside my own head anyway. Who's gonna argue with me? heh.''
He exhaled slowly.
"Alright." He looked at each of them in turn. Lucia to his left; Alice to his right; Seraphine beside Lucia. "Time for you to get some rest."
"Wait! Before that, at least give this meeting a name…" Seraphine blurted, stepping in to stop him.
Ashen glanced at her, then at the other two ladies who nodded in agreement, and chuckled.
"Very well. From this moment on, our gatherings shall be known as… Absentia."
He let the word settle before adding more quietly—
"…For those of us who won't remember ever being here."
The dreamscape began to dissolve at its edges first, the white walls fading, the pillars losing definition, the sun columns dimming. The clouds went last.
And when the white room was gone, and each of them had slipped back into their own sleep, the letters above four empty chairs were the final things to fade.
ἁγνεία
φθόνος.
Πορνεία.
ἀκηδία
⛧ ⛧ ⛧