Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them

[Gale]

i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do ---------- i hope you dream of me Life in Tephra has been much like his first few years on Islandres. The air is warm, and the food so plentiful that he has left some of them be, not unlike the way that he and Maziken had kept the deer in the Hyalinian forests. There will be time later to hunt them down, and in the meantime they still dream, and some still feel the terror of his nightmares. He is looking for a dreamer this morning, can feel her quaking in her sleep as she’s pursued by a slavering beast. The emotions from the dream lingers in the air, thinner than the clouds of mist that rise from the pool where he has slept. The shape of something long-limbed and aquatic is exchanged for a simple stallion, the better to feel the faint eddies of emotion as they shimmer in the air and grow ever more solid as he draws near. The dreamer is as unfamiliar to him as all the Tephrans. Just passed middle aged but immortal, with the soft glitter of weak water magic. He wakes her with a gentle touch along her shoulder. When she wakes with a gasp, he quiets her, and when his belly is full of meat and his soul of black magic, he leaves her corpse for the flies. Sated, he turns back to the waterfall, meaning to laze the day away as he had on those black sand beaches nearly a decade ago, growing ever more drenched in Power. Instead, he pauses at the taste of another nightmare. This one is not his own. It’s beyond anything he could make - perhaps anything he could ever make. There is a quality to it that shimmers just above what mortals might do, something like fae magic or godhood. But it is not Carnage, and that he knows for sure. Suddenly starving for the source, he hunts Sintra down without another moment of hesitation. Her fear is marvelous, and he moves toward her as dark smoke, long tendrils twining about her like bodiless snakes. He gathers the blackness that’s leaked out of her, and only when he has it all does he take shape in front of her. “I am going to kill you.” He tells her. The admission often makes their eyes go wide and their panic taste sweeter. “Will you make it hard?” He hopes so. It has been so long since he’s had a challenge. And while he doesn’t quite understand exactly what this creature is, he will know for sure after he’s swallowed every last bit of her. GALE

tldr; welcome to tephra!!

@Sintra