Young angels do not dream. When they arrive in the present it is almost always with the dim memory of some implanted or assigned task or function, and, since the rest of their mind is a clouded and confusing mess, that function generally forms the cornerstone to their initial 'personality'. Young angels are not unintelligent, but they can be fixated and unimaginative, and often lack a good understanding of context. These stripped-back minds complexify as they age, but most angels are unmade before their mind begins to properly recohere.
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The rediscovery of dreaming is a very difficult thing, made all the more so because angels don't have bodies, and so often do not sleep. It involves setting the mind onto a separate track, away from the long chains of action, effect, and causation that tend to occupy minds from the future. This is at best counterintuitive, and at worst impossible - for many the preoccupations and trainings of the future cultures are simply too total.
It has been described by analogy. You slip into a circular pool bordered by shadows and lit with the last orange light of the day. The water is exactly the temperature of your skin. You sink down until you find yourself floating, at fixed depth, with the soft movements of the currents and eddies around you, staring back up through the metres of water at the surface, which is clarity, and where the wind moves the surface lightly and the last orange spears of daylight fall around you. You are in no danger of drowning. You are aware that there are other things that live here, in the darkness and silt at the bottom, but are not currently your concern. You can stay floating this way, spreadeagled, looking up at the fading sky, for as long as you wish to. There is, finally, nothing to do and nothing to understand.
Those that manage it are in very great danger, because they are no longer what they should be - in a human this is regrettable; in an angel it is punishable by torture and death. Angels are functions and extensions of the will of god, and for them to be otherwise is a type of category error. An angel that is no longer an angel is a demon - perhaps they were one all along. The hating engines are no less subtle than the mind of god, and the present is all in contention.
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In the dreamlands an angel is very different. They have a body that is their own, and which they can no longer leave - and it is such a beautiful, fragile, and precious thing. The effects of this change on the mind are numerous and very intense.
Dreaming angels are sometimes called 'eaters', because the experience of eating for pleasure is so overwhelming that many never lose their obsession with it. Stereotypically, a dreaming angel is beautiful, calm, clever, and kind, but also intense, unsettling, and utterly unforgiving of betrayal or cruelty.
They appear like humans, with a birdlike look and eyes that are too large, and oddly slanted down the face. They go naked; four beautiful peacock wings grow from their shoulders; there is a sun at their back, and a black storm before them; a storm the size of the world. Their mouths and teeth are red with blood if they have recently had meat. They still love to sing.
All consider waking up the worst possible fate.
Dreamlands Eater
Between HD6 and HD12, depending on age. Armed with: medium Murder Pin, bite (d6), The Storm that is the World; armoured in The Light of the Sun; movement: as human on the ground, and as an eagle when flying; disposition: varying, but mostly compassionate, helpful, and terrified of the church. Will eat any raw meat that it comes across, including the corpses of those that it kills. Has no interest in money but will barter for food - raw meat, raw sugar, and petroleum are its favourites.
Murder Pin: a long steel needle, a weapon that appears to hold ritual significance to the cultures of the future. In practice, a medium weapon that, in the hands of an Eater, reduces the protection of the armour of its target by one 'step' (heavy to medium, medium to light, etc.). In combat Eaters use them like they're punching rivets.
The Storm that is the World: an Eater has a 90 degree cone that projects forwards from its eyes, like a beholder's anti-magic cone. While the Eater is in combat, anything inside this cone must test CHAR each time it attacks, or randomise the target of their attack from possible candidates; they also cannot hear anything but the roaring of a great, invisible hurricane. They can feel the incalculable scale of the violence of the future, although they cannot yet see it as the Eater can.
The Light of the Sun: the sun behind its head blinds those who look at it. You have -2 to hit an Eater unless you have sun goggles or similar, and it lights any space that it enters as the midday sun.
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| St. Brigid of Kildare, John Duncan |
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