Dreams:
As you sleep on the Moss Covered Pylon, you all have the exact same strange and eerie dream.
You see a young girl playing in a vast green field. The sun is shining down brightly upon her, and the wind smells of roses. And she has a playmate. It is a being of pure fire, a man made of smokeless flame. They are laughing and playing and enjoying the springtime sunshine. She calls him Old Man, which is also his Old Name. As they stroll through the field, the sun follows her wherever she goes. She casts no shadow. But the man of fire does, and it grows larger and larger as they walk further and further.
Then the scene shifts. You are running frantically through catacombs and labyrinth, corridors lined with skulls that have eyes staring at you from every direction. Everywhere is darkness, though your senses are unhindered by it. You have become the darkness. And you here his voice. He is coming for you, the Angel of the Abyss!! But before he can reach you, you find the thing he fears the most. A massive Iron Door, and your persecutor fears what is behind it more than anything in existence. You grasp the handle, piercing all barriers of resistance, and throw it open wide and free.
And you find that the prisoner is you. Now free, you step outside and stand again looking in the vast green field. Although it is no longer spring, it is now autumn. The sky is red and the shadows of storm clouds gather in the west. The sun hands low in the east, it is rising to battle against the coming storm of darkness. The girl now stands alone on hill, hair fluttering in the wind, radiating with light as she prepares for the battle to come. But which side shall she take? Which is the path to choose?
But suddenly from behind, the Iron Door closes shut upon you. You turn around and find yourself still locked within. You pound upon the door with all your might, but you are as weak as a kitten. Try as you might, you can’t put any force behind. You struggle to shout, but you cannot make a sound. You know you are dreaming, you remember going to sleep on the pylon. You figure that if you could only shout, you could wake your sodales and they could help free you from this cage.
And then you do, you all wake up mumbling incoherently for a moment, then your mind clears and you become focused and awake. You are on the other side of the valley, beside a road of black gravel. You can see it leads up alongside a winding ridge, leading up high to the Black Tower f Val-Negra, perched on a cliff overlooking the valley below.
The Zodiac has switched to Cancer and it is now summer season. All of your spells and effects of a duration of less than a year have expired. You have to perform your Parma rituals and other preparatory spells and such. Captain Alexandro has the men set up a perimeter so you can do so at ease.