A Distant End
Larval Nightmare Lords—often misidentified even by themselves as ghosts—have memories like sieves when compared to beings living on similar timeframes. This is for a very good reason: Pupation only happens once the fog of ages has eaten away everything that had ever made them think and feel like their original species, and eroded every part of them that wasn’t already a monster.
For Averna, this happened in her 1260s. The last grain of her humanity slipped through her fingers when she forgot that her grief over Acerbus’s death had been because she’d loved him. She’d held onto that knowledge for almost a thousand years, but with centuries since she’d felt any love but the possessive jealousy of a dragon hoarding its gold, the substance of it faded to abstraction, then meaninglessness, then nonexistence.
And then she bloomed.
For kilometers around, her being unfurled as a wave of blistering heat. Scars had always been her favorite feature, her idea of beauty, so deep gouges carved themselves into her landscape, molten and shimmering. The souls of all unable to escape before they cooked to death became bound to her. Their fear would fuel her as she continued to distort reality within the new bounds of herself. Still young, she wouldn’t yet be able to slip away into the Nightmare, but it would only be a matter of time. The ones she’d let escape spread story and horror of her to others, and brought in more victims lured by bravery and principle. Most died and joined her fuel core of captured souls, but she let some go, shaken and scarred and only mostly empty-handed. And then, then, when panic and rumor and despair wrapped around her like a filmy shroud, she vanished.
The Nightmare isn’t rigid like the universe we live in. It’s fluid and completely malleable to the wills attuned to it. To anything else, it’s a dreamlike, disjointed place where time and space are mere suggestions. Some forms of life manage to flourish there, in the unbound, unshaped spaces between Lords. To them, perhaps, their universe isn’t any more a nightmare than ours. Nightmare Lords just have no reason to let their victims escape to those places, and within the Nightmare, their grip on reality within themselves is absolute. Escapes they don’t allow don’t happen.
Emerging from the Nightmare to possess a spaceship is a classic feeding tactic, made stronger by the very fact it’s done often enough for a mythology of speculation to form around it. Averna plays with the crew before she reduces them to lumps of fleshy magma. It’s not only out of sadism and to feed on their fear; she needs to know how the ship sends a distress signal. The communications officer is left unmelted only from his nose to the bottoms of his lungs, to say absolutely anything that might convince a rescue party to climb into her new nest of perfidy and horror. If they are willing to reach through her fires for keys that burn their skin, if they’re able to find the doors she’s hidden, and if they survive being made beautiful, she’ll let them go to feed her with stories. If they fail, she’ll make them feed her with their souls.
Either way, she’ll start the game all over again.