Category:Dream Hosts
From Gothpoodle
When the idigam Kinugal was entered by the pack bearing a relic of Father Wolf, she was freed from her bonds. In the short time between their entrance and her subsequent binding, she fractured a substantial part of herself in the same fashion as the Spinner-Hag and Plague King and forced the shards into several hundred human hosts through their dreams. The victims never woke up and live in a state of perpetual sleepwalking, the shard within them feeding off of their soul for Essence until they are used up and then passing on to another host through the use of common stories of fictional places and dreams in close proximity. The shards are destroyed when the host they are occupying dies. If the host is forced awake, it is merely trapped in their dreams until they next fall asleep.
The driving urge of the Dream Hosts is to free the slumbering idigam. To do this, they seek relics of Father Wolf and the death of the binder, DeAndre Pruitt, so that the ritual cannot be renewed. Dream Hosts merge by sleeping together, during which time one of them will consume the other in the shared dreams of their hosts and emerge with the strongest body to continue the quest. The hosts left behind are generally soulless, malnourished, and often injured.
All Dream Hosts are accomplished onieromancers and the ability to pass between dreams through the deeper Astral Realms. As they grow stronger and devour more of their kin, they gain range and the ability to delve deeper into the Astral Plane. A very strong specimen might be able to enter slumbering Kinugal herself. In the real world the Hosts are generally powerless but the stronger ones can drag people and objects into and out of dreams. In dreams, they are formidable, able to reap their victims for Essence and Willpower, damaging their sanity and souls.
Sleepwalkers are the weakest Dream Hosts (Evolution 1-5), moving from Host to Host as they use them up and only able to enter the dreams of those in close proximity. Sandmen are the stronger ones (Evolution 5+), able to merge the real world and dreams, travel widely through the Astral realms, and adept enough at harvesting Essence from the dreams of those around them that they can sustain a host body indefinitely. Their bodies become half-dream, half-flesh constructs that no longer need nourishment or rest and are malleable: able to change forms, heal damage, and behave less like somnambulist zombies. Sandmen often develop elaborate dream realms which they can pull sleeping and even physical victims into, in order to feed off of them and to reflect their origins as dreams of imaginary places. These realms are often reflective of the dreams of the souls they’ve reaped and their hosts.
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