A dream does not always start as a dream, nor does a nightmare always start as a nightmare. Describing either as an ever-changing sea like most people do does not even begin to describe their volatility. It does not give them justice, and cannot hope to capture their significance to the dreamer involved. Whereas you would need at least a few cubic meters of water to make but a pinprick in a vast ocean, a single droplet of a person's dreamscape wielded in the wrong hands or for ill means can be far more devastating than the sharpest of blades.

I'm no stranger to those pains. In fact, for all my power and all my wealth, the most elusive object to me has always been a persistently good dream. I will have sequences – some shorter than others – where I feel like I am safe, but, just as life is fleeting, that safety rarely lasts the whole night. The one constant reminder that I'm alive, whether controlling a doll or in my real body back home, is that the terrors of my sleep will never rest.

The cost of being alive for so long, as I have learned well in my old age, is that you will inevitably pick up memories as you go through your days and there's no guarantee that they'll be good memories. Likewise, the more bad memories you have the more nightmares they can generate. That's why most of my nights are filled with regrets from the past: memories of terrible tragedies I was too weak to prevent or simply manifestations of the fears that arose from those horrors. It's almost always the same: me, usually in the body of child, stuck in some apocalyptic wasteland where I'm forced to watch the shadows of the dead mock me in perpetuity. I see them moments before their deaths, but cannot do anything to save them and cannot escape from blame. There is nothing to do but beat my hands against the wall until the skin on my knuckles goes raw and my voice grows hoarse from screaming for mercy.

Hell, dear reader, doesn't have to be a physical place. It can be in your mind, in your soul, burned into your very essence so that you can never escape it. What's worse, sometimes it hides behind the veneer of a shiny, innocuous dream about family, much like it did during the war between Naota and Xunatar.

The night that their game began, I was having yet another nightmare. Robin had recently awoken from her slumber, but, because she was still overwhelmed from her transformation, we were sleeping in separate rooms of the mansion. As such, she wasn't able to stop me from sleep walking that night, and I ended up travelling completely out of the Void and into the Valley of Vada before anyone noticed I was gone. I had no of way of knowing that I was walking straight into the thick of a battle that was none of my concern, nor did I realize when I finally opened my eyes that I wasn't still dreaming.

When I came to in that valley, I found myself inside of what looked like my childhood home. I thought it was another dream especially when I saw all the bits and baubles all around. There was a mirror across from the chair I was seated, reflecting the bed behind me that was decorated in egret quilts and pink tones. There were also perfumes and incense stands on the quarter dressers next to it; and across room in the far left corner was a changing screen. Makeup and grooming products sat on various dressers next to it; and next to that, buried in meticulously ordered papers and writing utensils, was a desk meant for studying.  

There was no mistake: this was my room as a teenager. But because I could not remember how I had gotten there nor why I still had my fox ears in my reflection, I merely assumed it was all a dream. The fox malady had not shown up until long after I left that place, so why would it show up now unless none of this was real? No, I merely counted my blessings that I was out of my nightmare for the night when, in reality, I was forgetting how swiftly the winds of dreams could change.

Meanwhile, back at my mansion in New Salem, Robin began stirring in her bed around the same time that I woke up in that fever dream. She was first alerted to something amiss when she heard me shuffling in my bed again, but hadn't forced herself out of bed until she heard me activate one of the picture portals in our room. See despite the rabbit transformation and how difficult it had been on her – what with the frayed nerves it generated – she never once stopped worrying about me; so as soon as she sensed that something was wrong, she went to my side.

Unfortunately, the only thing she discovered after entering the room was an empty bed. I had already disappeared into the valley by then: a fact that sent Robin's protective instincts into overdrive. She panicked while still under the influence of her medical procedure, and her frantic rustling that resulted from this panic was what eventually summoned our steward to her side.

"She's gone," Robin exclaimed as soon as Adel entered the scene! "Natsumi went sleep-walking! She left the house!" Her distress in those statements was justified. After all, her beloved had just walked unconscious into the unknown and she, who normally took it upon herself to fulfill the role of guard, was helpless to defend me. Adel would have been the same way had Eden gone missing, but, seeing as that was not the case, she was able to keep a level head when Robin could not. Instead, she had the rabbit warrior explain what she heard up until my disappearance and then deduced where I might have gone. She told Robin that the sounds of the portraits – as she heard them in the woman's memories – in our home were very distinct when they were used as portals, to the point that even the untrained ear couldn't mistake them for a normal gate travel spell. That meant that I must have used one of the portrait portals in my room and that they merely had to find which one in order to follow my trail.

Of course, that was a task that was easier said than done. I had 16 portals in my room in total, each to wildly different parts of the globe; and, as the duo searching for me would later discover when they tried to use Robin's Salt Flats Mirror to narrow down the search, they couldn't just use magic to really nail down which one. My room from my childhood was reminiscent of Nisshoki, true, but Nisshoki was not on the portraits in the room (ironically). Therefore, the two women would have to hunt cautiously and without the aid of trinkets, especially since it would take them too long to track down our Seeker's Maps for a better hint. Once they bypassed that first step, however, Robin's Sacred Heartstring or her Arc of Want would lead her straight to me.

Back in the room of memories, though, the dream continued without Robin or Adel to stop it. I had a chance to look at myself then, although the sight I beheld confused me greatly. In terms of age, I had reverted to looking at least seven years younger than normal, which was an age I almost never chose. I was also wearing what looked like a shoulderless, funeral dress with plentiful white ruffles and a choker around the neck. It was an ensemble I wouldn't be caught dead in were it my decision on what to wear, and, what's more, it felt like the pieces had been chosen for me.

Because of those coincidences, I could feel that I wasn't alone in that eerily familiar place, but my body wouldn't move despite my apprehension. The whole event felt like I was in a trance. I kept combing my hair as if nothing was wrong and humming an old folk tune from my homeland up until I heard a knock on the door.
 
"Excuse me, sister, are you decent?" I recognized the voice that came from the knocker. Surprisingly, it was Naota, but I had no idea why he of all people would be there. Not to mention he was calling me his sister, which made his unexpected visit all the more irritating.

'I'm not your sister, you nitwit,' I tried to say in return to his careless remark, but, while my mouth obeyed the command I gave it to open, those were not the words that came out.

"Yes. Please come in, brother." A spell of dreams had ensnared me, compelling me to act according to its script. Like the nightmares of sleep paralysis that plague some individuals, I was stuck acting out some sort of ludicrous brother-sister routine without being able to deviate from that routine's course. I was perfectly aware of what was happening around me, but my body and my words acted according to my role in the dream regardless of my own desires. The knocker, who shortly entered the room in a suit fit for royalty, also followed that script, but I could not tell – even as he walked over to me – if his participation was involuntary like my own or not. Either way, he gave no outward appearance of being under duress whilst lecturing me as only a relative could.

"Still not ready? The ceremony's only an hour away!" Naota, or at least someone who looked an awful lot like him, stood in front of me with a disappointed expression. He looked like he was ready for some high-to-do event, but wore the face of a brother annoyed at his sister for taking too long to get ready for said event. I, similarly, reacted with the face of said sister: one who was shy and overly apologetic.

"My sincerest apologies! My hair is being too stubborn and won't comb properly, especially on my tail. The other noble families will never let me hear the end of it if I go out there with bed head!" The excuse sounded very much like something a normal teenage girl would say, as did Naota's sigh for an older brother in such a situation.

"It can't be helped," he quickly lamented, "I'll comb it for you, then."

"Thank you."

And so sure enough, this strange "brother" who looked like Naota's identical twin sat down beside me with a brush. He started grooming my tail first, and then moved onto my head whilst maintaining a silent attentiveness. The interaction between us was a mostly tender, albeit awkward one: a treasured memory you might see in a normal family. But what initially appeared to be benevolent affection quickly turned to wicked malice.

"You're just as pretty as mother, Natsumi. If only she could see you in that dress; she'd be so proud." That phrase which broke the silence of the room as something typical for a family experiencing loss echoed with hints of haunted dreams and broken promises for me, taking with it whatever brief happiness I felt in this dream. Every word was loaded with the same, suffocating twist of expectation that I have known since childhood: all the thinly veiled insults and references to standards I was supposed to uphold. My family was relentless like that, because, to them, I was just a means to further their status rather than a daughter or a sister. That's why I wanted to leave the script as soon as "Naota" mentioned my birth mother so casually, because she, along with my sisters, had always been the backdrop of every criticism my father or brothers ever made about me. I was never good enough for them, and I had never been good enough for them after mother died giving birth to me.

Sadly, however, my body refused to listen despite these deeply held feelings of betrayal. In fact, rather than simply reach the end of this overly mundane dream without further incident, my memories of that time betrayed me. Instead, something sinister came my way.

The change didn't happen immediately. In the beginning, I only noticed a slight increase in my anxiety paired with some accelerated breathing, but nothing beyond that. Truthfully, events didn't spiral out of control until I heard his voice in my head again: the voice of the dead man.

'So pretty. How can you look so pretty and not be ashamed?' I had hoped to forget that speaker; but, even now, I could still feel his hand forcefully grabbing my face as he said those words again.  What was once minor anxiety turned horridly oppressive with the appearance of his memory. I saw that demon in human skin standing over me once more with his knife, taking care to bind me properly to the chair with shackles so I couldn't fight back. Naota kept brushing my hair as if nothing was happening during that time, but now he too had the face of the demon. I saw him, both of them; felt their grating disapproval; and then started screaming as the standing one dug his knife into my face. 'You don't have the right to smile like that!'

I told you at the beginning of this story how volatile dreams can be; and, although this room which mimicked my childhood was technically only a manifestation of a dream in reality, it shared in the chaotic nature of its ancestors. The voice that I heard, the one belonging to the demon, was that of my brother, my real brother on the day that he had come to "reclaim the family honor." His memory, or rather the memory of the day he died, was what turned the pastoral dreamscape into the wicked nightmare it became.

Back on my home world when my brother was still alive, the independence of women was an issue that was tolerated instead of embraced in our country. There was an overwhelming prejudice against those of us who sought to live apart from a husband or family while still making a living: one that limited what fields were acceptable for us to work in. Moreover, any woman who wasn't qualified enough to join the army was only valued by society based on her beauty or her ability to bear children. Overall, it was a culture I despised and was glad to be rid of after exile.

Years after that event, however, my brother took it upon himself to remind me that I could never escape from my heritage. Around the same time that our father became bedridden before his death, he came to find me in the south. He approached under the banner of peace, and said he merely wished to talk, to reminisce; and I, being the naive girl I still was at the time, believed him. I let my guard down, and paid for it.

During that meeting, my brother shackled me to a chair and used a knife to carve an old version of our family crest into my face. His intent was to steal the beauty he saw in me; to make my worth plummet in the eyes of our country out of revenge for disgracing our family name. He did it with some magical wax on the blade too so he could make sure that I couldn't remove the pinwheel scar later on without significant if not impossible amounts of effort. To add insult to injury, he even took care to leave my eyesight intact so that I could know what I had lost. He was a sadistic demon, tormenting his captive till the end.

My brother died after inflicting that on me, stabbed in the back by a Good Samaritan who had heard my screaming. I tried to forget him afterward, to not give such a vile man the pleasure of a home in my wounded heart. But now that the war between Xunatar and Naota was in full bloom, his memory came back to haunt me. The scar reappeared on my face as if it was being freshly carved, and the screaming started again. The excruciating pain from the dream blade felt like my face was being branded, but it wasn't until I started bleeding profusely from the mark's completion that the Naota clone seemed to notice anything at all.

"Sister, what happened to," he started to say when he finally stopped nonchalantly grooming me, only to be pushed back when I forcefully stood up and knocked the brush into his nose. Then, and only then, did the spell break. Whether from blind rage or overwhelming panic, I was finally able to move of my own accord, standing up before smashing the chair I had been sitting on over this imposter's head.

"Shut up," I yelled at him while covered in sweat and blood! I looked down at this phony that I had just bludgeoned in the middle of a little girl's room; my wound still stinging fiercely as my breath turned inconsistent from exsanguination. Then, as he finally came to his senses, I started shouting at him again. "Years ago, my real brother came to me under the pretense of reconciliation. He told me he wanted to let bygones be bygones; that the family didn't despise me anymore. Then, when I was in a situation like this with him, he took a knife and carved our family's crest into my face. Does this look like the action of a loving brother?! Huh?!"

Perhaps I was saying all that as a coping mechanism, but, regardless of the intent, it didn't stop my tears. This man wasn't Naota, and his very presence had caused me such heartache that I felt like a lost child again. I never wanted to remember this feeling in the first place and yet he had made me remember it.

"I don't know who or what you are," I finally whispered in defeat whilst standing in a far away corner of this pink prison, "and I honestly don't care. Nothing gave you the right to mess with my head. You're not my brother, but you may as well be scum just like him for pretending!" I broke down crying then, my tears mixing with the blood on my face. For the first time in so long, I was back to being a little girl who had just been completely shattered into a bawling mess on the floor.

Robin and Adel heard me in that state, and came rushing to my rescue at a moment's notice. They had managed, through the assistance of my daughter Lizzie, to retrace my steps; and they found the room I was located in at the southernmost border of the Valley of Vada, where Naota's influence was at its weakest. As I would later discover, that room was actually a standalone cottage that looked more like a fragment of a house in the middle of nowhere rather than part of an actual settlement. It was surrounded on all sides by the rainbow rivers native to the valley, and was clearly generated by the pastoral portion of the land.

Obviously, however, something had gone wrong, because now nightmares were invading the fringes of that space around the cottage. My fiancé and friend both kicked down the door as the furthest river started turning black, and the former rushed to my side practically throwing the Naota clone against the wall as the real Naota's influence retracted.

"Natsumi!" Robin shouted my name as soon as she drew near, but grew pale when she saw my face. She had seen me cry before – one of the few in the world to have that privilege, in fact – but the blood and open wound I had this time around were more than she bargained for. In that instant, her thoughts danced between fear and worry for my safety, forgetting all about the man in the room and his potential role in causing the tragedy before her eyes. Nay, unlike me and my tendencies toward revenge, Robin put me to shame by caring solely about my well-being.

"Natsumi…" She repeated my name in reverence knowing revenge could wait, and slowly approached before scooping me up in her arms. Hoshi No Kage's plating was cold to the touch when she did so, but I was still too startled to protest. The nightmare of my brother's betrayal had shaken me dearly, as had my own blood loss. I was practically immobile for the moment, and that alone scared Robin more than anything else.

My steward, on the other hand, reacted quite differently to the currently unfolding events. She knew that Robin would care for me to the best of her abilities, and so chose to guard instead of interfere. Adel, you see, had been with me far longer than my soon to be wife; and it was from that experience that she knew I would live, that I had suffered far too many scars to let the receipt of yet another stop me. If nothing else, I was tenacious, and that tenacity, Adel surmised, would see me through.

By the same token, however, I typically attracted the most formidable enemies when, like now, I was at my weakest. An obstinate protagonist always attracts equally obstinate antagonists when they falter, after all; and Adel, having abundant knowledge of this fact, realized how foolish it would be to ignore the Naota clone that had been looming over me seconds before. Oddly enough, that man had stopped moving once the bedroom had been invaded. He lay motionless upon the floor as if dead after Robin shoved him out of the way, and actually began experiencing rapid necrosis of the skin at about the same rate that the rivers outside were turning black. In just a matter of seconds, "Naota" didn't even look human anymore. Instead, he became a blackened corpse at the foot of the bed: one straight out of a horror novel. And then, when the last river outside turned black as the Void, he twitched back to life with a ghastly, garbled voice.

"We've been waiting for you…" Whether this thing had ever been a man or not was no longer of any importance now that its true nature was revealed. Adel's caution had been vindicated the moment it split in two, prompting her to swat it through the wall with the arm of a giant. Our worst fears, for once, had been realized, for, in the moment that Naota started losing control of the crystal valley's fringes, Calamity's Edge had found its way to Revaliir.

The clone of Naota – as was revealed in the moments before Adel defended us from him – had actually been a chomper mutant from the infamous plague city itself. Something had drawn it out of the Void – likely the clashing energies between Xunatar and Naota – but it had apparently hit a wall when encountering the light god's dream barrier around the Valley of Vada. This chomper reverted to its former, human self under the effects of that dream, a form which just happened to mirror Naota as I remembered him; and so he ended up in the skit.

Given the fact that chompers do not retain their human memories, though, the dreamscape must have focused entirely on mine in the construction of that skit. It put the chomper and me into a dream that played on my memories and my experiences; constructing the room and our clothes appropriately to match my every expectation. Something obviously went wrong in the plan, however, because I'm fairly certain that Naota would have kept us in that dreamland if he had any knowledge or say in the matter.

Regardless of how it happened, something twisted the dreamscape at that distant point in the underground and turned it into a nightmare. I was forced to remember a torturous and soul-rending experience from early in my adolescence, and the beast masquerading as a human was freed from its prison. I daresay that I might very well have ended up worse than I already did had Adel and Robin not come along at that exact moment; but, thankfully, I didn't have to worry about that.

Or did I? Robin was acutely aware of Adel's help in taking care of the first chomper, but she was no fool. Where there was one, there was always more, and she could hear them all congregating around the house. It wasn't just chompers, either. With the dreamscape seceding, Void Stalkers began trickling into the valley. They were scouts from various, nearby nests: small enough to avoid panicking prey but harbingers of far worse things lurking on the horizon. Soon, Naota's dream would be surrounded by monsters; and, if we weren't careful, we'd get stuck right in the middle of them all.

My friends took this as a sign to flee inward toward the protection Naota's domain offered them. Robin was the first to suggest that in fact.

"There's too many coming this way," she told Adel. "We can't stay and fight! We have to leave!" She was right: we couldn't stand and fight. My steward saw this and agreed, but I stopped them before they could follow through.

"Don't." Having finally regained my senses in Robin's arms, I reached up around her neck and tugged lightly on her helmet. "Just take me home," I sniffled.  "Please, just take me home. I don't want to see Naota's face right now, nor do I want anything to do with his dreams of false hope and happy fantasies. I just want to hug my family tonight." Both Robin and Adel frowned painfully when they heard me say that. The former clearly wanted to argue, but she gave up when she looked me square in the eye and saw my pain.

It wasn't that I necessarily blamed Naota for the nightmare I had just experienced. It was more that I couldn't stand him anymore. Few things angered me greater than deities who purposefully induced complacency in the hearts of men while giving misleading answers as to why they did it; and yet Naota was doing just that in this war of his. His dreams allowed for a false sense of calm to fester whilst suffering continued unabated around them; and what's worse was that I could imagine him claiming this was for the people's own good.

I could feel Xunatar's presence in the area. I knew that Naota's heavy handed response had to be a sign of a war between the two of them; and yet that just made me even more determined to avoid him altogether. The vampire hunter, despite whatever his original intentions might have been, had turned the people of Revaliir into his pawns on a chess board, just like almost every other deity before him. Hell, even I came close to that as Secrets, but, unlike Naota, I never professed to be good. I also never started any holy wars or presented myself as the holiest thing on the planet; and, frankly, I would never have been able to live with myself if I had.

Something had changed in Naota since his ascension that made him this way: made him into an insufferable hypocrite. It was slowly turning him into a ball of pride too blind to see his own reflection in the mirror and too drunk on power for me to be able to stand near him anymore. Above all, I hated being indebted to a man like him, and the thought of having to go to him for help yet again was more soul crushing than I could stand right now.

I would rather risk the dangers of the Void so I could return home instead of that. More than anything, I just wanted to be with my real family tonight: the one bonded not by the waters of the womb or the frail winds of acquaintance, but by the blood of everlasting friendship. My family was, and always would be, those I chose to share my life with regardless of whoever our parents were or wherever we came from.

I think both Adel and Robin understood that. Even the latter seemed to soften her gaze despite her innate lack of telepathy; and so my plea managed to change our course on the battlefield. Adel, temporarily taking the form of a dark dragon, destroyed the room we were in, and Robin, using the debris to her advantage, flew off the ground to keep me safe. Together, the two of them carved a path through the straggling monsters with fire and stealth until we had officially reached a relatively safe spot far away from the no-man's land where the fighting grew thickest.

We couldn't just teleport out, you see, at least not without clearing a landing zone for the gate. Calamity's Edge and Void Stalkers were never to be allowed even a chance at discovering paths into New Salem lest we be overwhelmed, and so my rescuers had to destroy all witnesses that might follow us before we could leave. Only after Robin slew the last of their nearby numbers with her saber did Adel have enough time to open a path back home, at which point all of us departed from that wretched place and the slammed the door behind us.

Afterward, and with great attentiveness, Robin finally decided it was time to start sleeping in my bed again. She watched over me for the rest of the night, but not before all the members of my household came in to give me a hug. Even Ana's grinch joined in that group – which was overall surprising considering that the two of us rarely got along. I eventually went to sleep in their embrace with bandages over my eye, at which point SAI finally began helping me recuperate.

In the days that followed, I would spend a great deal of time with my daughters and friends. My eye would take days to recover despite SAI's healing powers, meaning that I wouldn't be fit for combat for some time; and she later told me, unsurprisingly, that the psychological shock from the event had even affected her ability to aid me. Apparently the dream sent her into diagnostic mode as soon as it began, which was why she never said anything until we were back home. Regardless of her excuses, though, I quickly told her I was okay and that she need only do her best rather than apologize.

Later on, I went back to the battlefield to discover exactly what had happened on that night and why I ended up there. Unfortunately, I only came back with more questions than answers. The destruction was done, the short-lived war over. Whoever won was irrelevant, because I didn't care for either side anymore. However, the whole thing continued to bother me for a multitude of reasons.

Number one: why did the chomper say what he did before attacking? Who were the "we" and "you" he was referring to? Was there some sort of plot to lure me, Robin or Adel out of our home? Or were we innocent bystanders caught in a plot against someone else?  If the former was true, why? And if the latter was true, who?

The prospect of chomper intelligence and a potential hive mind was a very real and frightening one back then; and the War of Endless Sleep did little to invalidate that fear.