Brandt was enjoying this dream. The person whose dream he had invaded, no he preferred the term joined, was dreaming of being flown around on the back of a giant bird around the world.

Brandt was the bird.

When Brandt entered people’s dreams through his own, he had a choice of what to be. Of course this meant he had complete control over what the person experienced during their nighttime fantasies. For a ten-year-old boy, this was power.

Brandt had possessed this power for most of his life and had mastered the process of searching the surrounding countryside or town for a dream worthy of his manipulation. It was something he could never explain, the dream choosing process. People never understood magic or never wanted to understand because they were too busy or too afraid to. Apart from the village Magi, sent to each village by the villages in the north to protect and help the people, no person with magic was even remotely respected. He had heard about the villages and cities in the north, where having a magical ability was a normal thing to have. He wondered idly what sort of dreams they might have.

Brandt was soon becoming very bored with just entering dreams and experiencing them with the person, he wanted to test his full power out.

First, he dropped the person.

She fell, shrieking and screaming until, still emitting screams to wake the dead from their endless slumbers, she hit the lush green canopy of the rainforest below. He dive-bombed to investigate. Although the woman had long left the dream when she hit the tangle of moss covered branches, Brandt still had complete control of the dream.

He recalled the person back into the dream and straight into the decapitated head in front of him. He then sharpened his beak through the dream and started to peck at the head until all that remained was a bony skull. While ripping the flesh from the hapless victim, the mouth of the head was open and emitting an unearthly scream.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know, she just keeps shivering and mumbling something to herself. You know you’re my last hope.”

“I know.”

Nathan, the elderly man that was examining the woman on the bed, was a Magi. The magi were perhaps the only people that had magic that were respected in the southern half of this world.

“Has she had any illness lately?”

“No, she’s been the perfect picture of health.” Matthew, the concerned husband was wringing his hands profusely. “Can you do anything for her?”

“I’m afraid she’s been taken by a dream walker or, more appropriately, a nightmare walker.”

“A nightmare what?”

“A nightmare walker. It is a human entity that can travel thoughts and dreams while they are sleeping, and modify them. These people usually learn how to use their gift for good, but every so often a dream walker wishes to do more than just help.”

“More?”

“Yes, more. They take the person’s dream and twist it into a horrible nightmare. A nightmare walker can keep a person in a dream for as long as they want and unless the person has a great deal of power in the mind and heart then the person will surely go mad from the experience.”

“Has my wife gone mad?”

“No. She is a strong woman, you are lucky to have found her.”

“Thankyou Nathan, I am forever in your debt.

Nathan was sitting in his home, drawing in his Magi circle with charcoal, luring the walker to him with a spell of attraction. His hands moved with the precision of the finest archer, symbols and eldar writing flowing effortlessly from his the tips of his fingers and onto the floor. The air buzzed around him, magic creating intricate webs of light, dazzling to the eye. He sensed the walker and willed himself into a trance not unlike sleep and felt the walker invade his mind.

The two stood on a field, desolate and barren, nothing for miles but brown, rustic earth. Brandt stood opposing the wizard hands clenched, eyes boring into Nathan’s. Suddenly his hand moved, sending a movement of air that soon sharpened into knives. Slowing time, Nathan grabbed the knives out of the air in front of him and threw to the ground in front of him where they dissipated into dust. Nathan willed the earth up into a hand, brown and massive and made it make a grab at the boy. He did not even blink as he sent a torrent of water at the fist, soaking it and making it collapse as he dodged out of the way of it. By now, the wizard had produced an oddly shaped quartz rock out of the endless flows of his coat.

“And now, you die.”

An eerie beam of light shined from the crystal and focused on the boy’s head. He screamed in agony as his body was sucked and twisted into the rock, which was now tinged a blood red. After the howling stopped, Nathan stowed the rock away in his cloaks, sighing with exhaustion.

He closed his eyes, concentrating for a second, and was gone from the dream world.