She Who Lies Dreaming

"We will live to see it. We will see the day when the world is plunged into Nightmares."

Imagine an ocean, a deep one. Imagine the water is black and dark like North Sea mud. Imagine things living in it, thickly-knitted limbs churning like a mower motor left tipped up and switched on, cutting blindly in long grass. You can’t see the limbs, or the things to which the limbs attach, but you can feel their movement in the thick black sea.

They regard you. They hate you. A hate so deep they tear frantically at their own flesh in substitute for reaching yours.

Imagine the sea restrained by glass. Like the walls of an aquarium built on titanic scale. You stand before the sea that rises out of sight and curves to the horizon on each side. You can hear the surface fretting up its waves in storm a distant mile above your head. The glass holds everything back. Inside it you can see brief writhings of that midnight high-pressure world, raging at your presence just beyond its reach.

Imagine that the glass is beautifully made. Etched and engraved with perfect smiling forms. Beyond it, the black water, but, when the light slants just so across the pane, a field of translucent harmony gleams, worked there on its surface by hands and minds that leap the greatest human art. A genius casually employed that vaults with ease the best that man has ever made. Crystal signature of thoughtless superiority. So perfect are its fields and processions that when seen, even glimpsed in a trickle of lateral light, you want to live there, with those frozen people, inside the surface of that glass.

This is how much Isnoth despises you.

This is how much they control that hate.

The knowledge of you stabs them in the flesh with every recollection and event. Though they know it well, the wound of you will not close. Each memory of you, each experience, all evidence of your continued being, is like a knife twisting in the skin.

No other god could absorb such titanic contempt and remain sane. They would be reduced to a raving berserker, living only to kill, directly, the loathed enabler of their pain.

But Isnoth is old; they know much of patience and control. They know that they are born from the substance of your fear and that if there was nothing left to feel afraid, they might well die.

So.

Everything that can be done is being done. The situation is difficult, but there is time. There is always time. They must endure, as they have for so long. They wait and plan for an inverted world, a world where societies and civilisations and empires and species exist purely to instill and sustain fear. A world where dreams enslave the dreamer. Where the walls between sleep and waking tumble down and both realms become one sweet eternal whole.

They will live to see it.

Isnoth, the slumbering goddess is regarded as the patron of the Vorovian Drow and is a goddess of nightmares and is sister to the deity, Lolth. She is very much chaotic evil and is currently slumbering somewhere in the realm of nightmares in the astral, waiting. She communicates with the loyal throngs of her followers via the dreams and nightmares of others and her people. Her symbol is a thickly knotted dark spire and she is chaotic evil. Most of the other gods worshipped by mortals revile her and the drow entirely.