Heartless the Workblog part 3

Last one for the moment - Cast and Problems coming soon.

Set Up:
This is the legacy of the Dreamer, Torikami, his story will be one of the Tales of the Two Planes, the rough title I came up with as a way of getting around those damn search engines and as a framework for a few different semi-related pieces that sprang from what I’ve discarded so far from this.

Torikami is the original dreamer, the entire dream world exists within his dream thus making him undisputed lord. However, so big has the dream plane become that the original dream can no longer support it. It now requires a constant source of fresh dreams to continue to exist. Dreams quickly diminish when taken from the human dreamers so the dream plane is constantly eating itself, eternally needing new dreams to maintain and renew itself. Expansion of the dream plane is now nothing more than wishful thinking.

Until the coming of Orash, the denizens of the dream plane collected the dreams themselves from sleeping humans, though it pained them to do so, making it a haphazard, piecemeal affair. Orash initially added order and stability to the dream collection, creating Collectors that could exist in both planes. But the Dreamer feared the power such a position granted and recruited a group of humans, through their dreams, to be the Balance. They are gifted with the ability to see and interact with the dream plane, a trait passed down to their offspring to continue the role. Working in tandem with the Collectors, the humans maintained the balance between planes, when you ‘slept without dreams,’ it is because they were taken to renew the dream plane. Should the volume of dreams entering the dream plane become too great, sections of it would solidify and merge with reality. In response to the Balance, Orash recruited his own human agents, including the Dream Weavers and the Shield.

Be under no illusion though, the Dreamer cares nothing for Reality beyond continuing to renew the Dream plane. As long as Orash constantly supplies the required volume of dreams, then his methods do not interest the Dreamer, unless they should come to threaten the Dream Plane. Orash understands this and over the millennia has been, slowly at first, collecting more dreams than required and storing them in his fortress (formerly just a place to collect the dreams) next to the bridge to Reality, in order to achieve the eventual merging of the city with his fiefdom. This would give him and his people what he feels is their ‘right’, direct access to the dreams.

Opposing him stands Tajitsu the last living member of the Balance and wielder of the Dragon’s Dream. The Dragon’s Dream is a fabled dream blade that no human can hold. The sword exists in both planes and thus allows the dream being who wields it to walk in both, granting the finality of the real world in the dream plane and the abilities of the dream plane in the real world. In order to control and use the blade Tajitsu has to be literally ‘heartless’. However the sword comes with a price, not only must his heart be removed daily (it’s fucking painful every time, thick scar tissue on his chest, over the heart – taking it out with Mari becomes ritualised) but the blade is slowly draining his humanity, whilst constantly standing between the two planes is robbing him of his sanity.

I love Greek mythology and as per many of those stories, this one does not end well. In essence it’s the story of a hero on the verge of a breakdown, whose life is irrevocably shattered and who falls into darkness.