Dream

Power flows in a trickle. It is a fact of things: Dream's magic is limited. He has skill to store plague and can cast it from himself at others and he can pull samples from a target if not the full infection but he has not the strength for more. Even with his glowing eyes, with the connection he forged to his element, power is a trickle.

His magic reinforces his body, strengthens his plague, but is not his to wield. It is, he supposes, a gift of plague, a blessing he bears, but it is a frustration, too, that what power he is is already tamed to a purpose and not one he was able to choose.

He serves. He serves well. Kythera finds the way his magic is bound to be fascinating, Bottfly teaches him how to find strength in other things - as she does the maggots in her flesh, the fungi who root alongside her nerves, the beasts and bugs and botanicals she claims as much her kin as any dragon - as she does him and Kythera, and, when the Runeblight arrives, Viria too.

But there are times he cannot.

"Will you help?" Kythera asks, when she goes to innoculate the hatchlings. "You have a vast library."

He dips his face, shakes his head.

"I cannot," he admits each time, every time, and it feels some terrible grave sin on each occasion. "I have not the strength."

Kythera's claws are gentle on his cheek, the maggot Bottfly sets in his crest as blessing soft and familiar. "You have a different strength," she reminds him. "As Bottfly does, as I do. It is why you are our 'servus. You will find your strength in time."

He holds to that, when the doubt takes him. His power is but a trickle, too much bound to other purposes, purposes he never chose, but even a trickle can work great things over time.

---

He is named for dreams. People always forget what kind of dream.

He remembers his parents only vaguely, after the fever of his Trials, but their dialect he remembers well. He loves the nuances of his birth tongue, specific words that modern Draconic generally lacks. In his parents' tongue there is a word for a child's dream, free of fear, and a word for a nightmare, bone-deep and visceral. There is a word for a dream that reveals a terrifying truth of oneself, and a dream which reminds one of the beauty of things. There is his name, which he chose for himself after his trials, a word that Bottfly and Kythera and everyone else usually simplify to Dream but which is so much more.

He is the Fever Dream, the thing terrifying and freeing and revelatory at once. He is the Fever Dream, that which sends a dragon twisting and writhing even as their body desperately needs to rest; he is the Fever Dream, that which makes not only the Dreamer dread and fear, but those which mind them too.

Nightmares claw out your insides, he knows that, and a bad dream unsettles and upsets. A dream which reveals the truth of yourself can shake you, but it is his namesake, that which he chose for himself, that he dreads and knows to dread above all else.

He has stopped fearing most other kinds of dream. He knows the truths of himself, and knows a nightmare is imagined and a bad dream can be forgotten.

But he cannot forget his fever. He cannot forget his Fever Dream.

It is what made him what he now is.

---

He is named for it, Dream. For dreams of many kinds, when spoken in regular Draconic, but in the dialect of his home and his birth he is Fever Dream, the terrible things one might see when pained and desperate.

He dreams even now, some few times. He does not See as Eschar and Parabola do, true-trained Seers who's pure drive reveals to them the future.

But he Sees something. His dreams are something else, revelatory like his namesake is, revealing truths that can only be gathered by the pained and frantic lucidity of a mind reaching for any connection to make sense of things.

In this way, he's made sense of rather a lot.

"Kythera," he says softly, and his master and her mate lift their heads to look at him. Bottfly's eyes are even more watchful than Kythera's; born of Arcane she knows the odd truths he sees even if first he must chew the words over to be sure he says it right in modern Draconic, without the careful filters of his birth dialect to help. "It is almost time," he says. "All the pieces come together. The chaos builds. The connections fail. Now tower can last without a strong foundation."

"Without strong foundations," Kythera says, "the least wind might make a tower fall."

She has always understood. Bottfly needs no assistant, though she is the Necromancer here, but Kythera's magic is odd and her own and he serves her when Bottfly is caught up in her own studies. Together they almost raised him.

"We must prepare," he says. "Lest we all be caught in the downfall."

---

This is Dream, properly Fever Dream, the Necroservus of Bottfly and Kythera. He really does burn like a furnace and his mechanicals are to help him control this. He is obsessively dedicated to the Plaguebringer, much as Eschar the Dedicant Ghoul is, and his utter dedication to the Plaguebringer and to serving Bottfly properly led to his magical breakthrough that led to his Glowing eyes. He is obsessive, driven, focussed... except when the Dreams hit, at which point only Bottfly and Kythera can bring him back to himself.