184 Dreams And Nightmares

I would spend my second night within the depths of Htrae by visiting dreams and expanding my underwater kingdom. I had had so much fun on my first night visiting dreams in various forms that I continued that habit.

I visited countless dreams, all of which were of humans far from New Sol, in an array of forms. I enjoyed evoking terror in the hearts and minds of humans, and I could tell that portions of the domains within me, specifically the domains of dreams, evil, and emotions, as well as the subdomain of corruption, all enjoyed my malignant actions. The more I acted the more I enjoyed the ability to terrorize people through their dreams.

Throughout the whole night I persisted in the habit I established the night before. I did not engage with the creatures I was terrorizing. I was instead an inescapable part of their dreams, only moving or acting whenever the dreamer was in a place where they might not be able to see me, such as inside of a building or underground. In those rare moments I would roar, or cause the earth underneath me to quake menacingly. To be visited by me in a dream was a sad fate, as I tormented thousands of dreamers that night.

Some of the forms I took during my nightmarish visits to mortal dreams included that of utterly massive serpents, gigantic and amphibious octopi, and other, more nightmarish entities such as a giant man with no face and chalk-white skin. In a few cases I took on the form of a seemingly normal human whose only quirk was perpetually following the dreamer and staring at them unblinkingly. In those dreams I was actually pretty close to the dreamer, as I sought to always be visible to them.

The people whose dreams I tormented were a diverse crowd. I tormented people of all ages, selecting targets as young as toddlers and ones almost a century old. I was never particularly aggressive, especially if someone stayed where they could see me at all times they were dreaming, but I was persistent. I occupied thousands of dreams that night, and I didn't give anyone whose dreams I was visiting a moment's rest.

________________________________________________

The other thing I did was something that was much more physical. I expanded my submerged home, though not the temple itself. I expanded the actual lake, making it larger and larger.

I did this for a few hours, greatly expanding my submerged home. That said at the same that I was doing that I was carefully populating my strange home. I filled the waters around my lair with an assortment of beasts and other creatures. For the first time in my life I created true elementals.

The first servants I staffed the wall with were water elementals, creatures that were composed of water and were formed through my power over both liquids and spirits. When building them I had the option to shape them, and I modeled the ones I staffed the wall with after giants. They were enormous, vaguely humanoid-shaped entities made of water, and I quietly unified our minds through the creation of my first true hive-mind.

They were given simple orders. They were to ensure that no one aside from Deep-Ones were allowed entry into my temple.

The second group I staffed the settlement around my home was a large tribe of the abominations known as "Deep-Ones". These aquatic, vaguely human-like entities, were made from humans who I stole the sanity of and converted into abominations one by one. The process by which I created them was a simple one. I created amphibious humans and then stole their sanity so that I could convert them.

Deep-Ones, like me, were aquatic and selfish creatures. I killed some time in the night by taking them and using them as experiments for my pleasure-based powers. They were incredibly willing to be used in this way, enjoying the fact that their creator saw fit to drown them in pleasure and cause them to experience mind-bending lust and unearthly satisfaction.

I had my way with both men and women, and I did so without directly touching them. The only ways in which I made contact with them in any sort of physical sense was by using my powers over the cephalopod subdomain, one of the countless animal subdomains I had acquired influence over when I fed and healed the world of Torus, near the beginning of my life. Those powers included the ability to remotely generate and control tentacles as though they were limbs attached to my own body.

________________________________________________

[Cephalopod Subdomain details:

The cephalopod subdomain is an animal subdomain that governs animals like squids, octopi, cuttlefish, and nautili. This subdomain is useful for controlling some of the most impressive undersea animals, creatures like gigantic krakens and humanoid-cephalopod fusions like Scyllas and Cecaelia.

This is one of the handier undersea subdomains, alongside the Cnidaria subdomain that grants those who influence it power over creatures like jellyfish, box-jellies, and sea anemones. By having power over these subdomains you gain power over countless types of water-breathing and water-dwelling creatures of various levels of intelligence.

To gain power over this subdomain, use it to build the influence of cephalopods all over assorted worlds. Use its powers to build viable cephalopod civilizations and spread your worship far and wide, beneath the seas of various worlds.

Cephalopod Subdomain passive powers*:

Alteration: You can grant your followers the features of unevolved cephalopods. This includes things like the shells of nautiluses, bonelessness, camouflage, tentacles, jet propulsion, bioluminescence, and even ink generation. You can also grant your cephalopod followers alterations from other animals. You, of course, also gain these features yourself.

Divine evolution: As a consequence of gaining power over the domain of spirits and the second tier of influence over the domain of faith, you can now transform your animal followers into their divine evolutionary forms. How this manifests differs from animal subdomain to animal subdomain, but in the case of cephalopods, this means you can transform cephalopods into krakens and akkorokamui. Equivalent versions of this power exist for all of your animal and many of your plant subdomains.

Divine animals are not quite unique beings, but they are tremendously powerful creatures who possess immense spiritual energy. It is possible, over the course of a particularly long life, for a creature that began its life as an unevolved, lesser animal, to eventually become a divine animal but such feats are incredibly rare.

Divine animals almost invariably owe their existence to a god, or even a group of gods, who transformed them into mythical entities. Divine animals are usually super-versions of lesser entities who commonly possess magic and are invariably awakened and capable of speech. When created by gods they serve as incredibly pious creatures who often serve as either immense destroyers or are themselves leaders of civilizations.

Tentacle creation: You can create and manipulate tentacles. These tentacles need not be attached to you, and can indeed be created remotely while still serving you as well as any limb attached to your body. You can subject creatures wrapped in your tentacles to be subjected to an array of status effects, and can even cause your tentacles to exude parasitic spores or use them for powers like mesmerizing presence. These tentacles can also be of any length, and can be created anywhere you can detect.

*This includes other powers common throughout the animal subdomains, including but not limited to you gaining a monstrous form and you gaining the ability to awaken animals that fall under the purview of this subdomain, as well as the ability to force them to evolve into their next forms, which are Cecaelia (Humanoid cephalopods) and dire-variants of their current forms.

Cephalopod Subdomain active power:

Transformation: You can transform a creature into a cephalopod of their current size. This power can also snatch away their free-will and can be permanent or as part of a punishment that lasts for a set period of time. You decide if they retain their intelligence. This a once-per-day power that can affect as many as 100 people at once.

Cephalopod Subdomain blessing and curse details:

This is a usual subdomain in that it confers typical blessings and curses. Blessing a cephalopod with it grants them increased power, intelligence, agility, and endurance. Cursing a cephalopod with it does the opposite. Blessing a non-cephalopod with it grants them enhanced charisma with regards to cephalopods and resistance to their abilities, and cursing a non-cephalopod with it does the opposite.]

________________________________________________

One of my more fun pastimes my second night in Htrae had been using my tentacles to ensnare my servants. I created writhing tentacle pits, which deep-ones willingly moved into and then inadvertently spent hours in, being toyed with and sensually touched. For a time my temple was filled with all manner of lewd mewling and I found the scenery and background noise quite relaxing.

This was one of the first moments in my life in which I actually felt like an entity of lust. I didn't often indulge in my pleasure-based powers, but from time to time throughout my life I had felt the impulse to lazily toy with someone in sadistic, often sexual ways. Previously I had ignored and fought back against this impulse. But I didn't want to do that anymore, even if to many surface dwellers I was doing my best to become a seemingly good and benevolent god.

The truth was that I wasn't sure how I felt about doing that to someone I hadn't created myself, but these creatures were direct creations of mine so I felt more confident in subjecting them to my powers. That, coupled with the fact that I hadn't used any mind-bending powers on the deep-ones, aside from what I did to make them deep-ones in the first place, made me feel fine doing this to them.

The final thing I did before I left on the dawn of my third day was that I partially petrified a few of the deep-ones I had brought into my lair. I did this so that I could continue to play with them when I returned. I only partially paralyzed them so that they were helpless while I allowed the pits I had made of my newest sort of limbs continue to caress them and wrack their minds with pleasure.

________________________________________________

The rest of the week consisted of me expanding the village ever outward. I built a number of facilities throughout the village, expanding it a few dozen meters in each direction each day. My phantom-self explored Glendale and allowed me to study an assortment of technology ranging from cars to guns, to even the simplest and cheapest drones.

I built a "hospital" consisting of a number of healers who used alchemy to mix healing potions together, I built an armory that contained a number of light and darkness based melee weapons as well as actual, working guns and ordinary bullets made through me utilizing the creation domain to create each individual part of a gun before properly putting them together.

I also built a school, but for now it would go unoccupied. For the first time in my life I intended to allow followers of mine to have children and for those children to actually be children instead of me intervening and using my powers to speed their growth.

My phantom self spent almost a quarter of a day in Glendale's public library, just touching books and allowing my knowledge of this world to expand infinitely. It spent a particularly long time in the history section of the place, allowing me to well and truly familiarize myself with the scholarly understanding of the world's past. I was never more grateful for my unusual literary power than I was when my phantom-self explored the library. By the time it was done exploring the library I had a truly encyclopedic knowledge of an array of largely but not entirely Htrae-specific set of topics.

________________________________________________

Each night I returned to my temple and I experimented with different abilities. I continued my habit of tormenting dreamers, but in different ways.

I began to take on a more actively malicious role in dreams. In dreams I allowed more of my old, or rather my true, self to shine through. I tormented some dreamers with nightmarish visions of their loved ones rising as zombies and ghouls and chasing after them, intending to devour them. Other dreamers had nightmarish visions of a world where humanity is defeated by my swarm, a post-apocalyptic reality wherein humanity is at best enslaved by an array of insects and where humanity is rendered extinct at worst.

In the rare moments when I detected people who were innately vulnerable to eldritch abilities, people who were already stepping perilously close to insanity, I was extra insidious. Those truly unlucky people saw a whole different kind of nightmare. They saw a world overrun by abominations, where gugs, wendigos, star-vampires, mi-gos, deep-ones, and other insanity-inducing monstrosities were winning a global conflict against a theoretically unified Htraeian population.

In a sense, these dreams depicted the world of Salifinos, a planet in the same solar system as Torus wherein abominations were committing a global genocide against mortals. And more than that, I plagued them with visions wherein they became abominations themselves and turned on those they loved, with a fierce and joyish zeal.

Over the next few nights, many of the people who experienced those truly insidious dreams began to fear their dreams even more than they already had. On the other hand, though, a few of the dreamers who experienced the worst dreams began to relish them. They delighted in dreams wherein they were empowered to wage war on their fellow humans, and in dreams where they felt the dark power and sadistic love of a brutal god of death, warfare, and evil, as well as the comradery of their fellow abominations.

In some dreams, especially for those who lived on coasts, I placed dreamers in an unbelievable vast and impossibly deep ocean teeming with life. The only thing was that the life the oceans teemed with were creatures under my control, sharks, jellyfish, and cephalopods. Towards the end of those dreams, I myself made an appearance in the form of a kraken the size of a continent, who extended a single tentacle the size of a skyscraper towards them. This tentacle would never fail to wrap around their legs and begin to slowly drag them down towards me.

I experimented with this format, and tested variants of it. In some, I made my kraken form impossibly beautiful and made the dreamer fall in love with it and begin to swim towards it themselves. They would smile when my tentacle wrapped around them and began to drag them closer to me. In others I made my kraken form a chthonic, repellent beast who was omnipresent and unstoppable. The results were unsurprising but fun to see anyway.

In the case of those who fell in love with my dream-form, they would invariably visit the beach and go swimming the next day. In the case of those who saw my more repellant dream-form, they would go out of their way to spend the day out of the sight of the ocean, and would even avoid eating squid and octopi, even if they lived in places where such foods were common.

In my temple, I was much more experimental with those I had kept as deeply sexual decorations. I unpetrified them each night, and I tried out various things with my powers on them. One of the first things I did was make my tentacles see-through so that they could see through the appendages that were writhing about on top and inside of them. This delighted them, and in some cases naturally awoke a voyeuristic side to my followers.

In some cases I did things like affix the tentacle-covered individuals to walls, leaving them helplessly bound. In other cases I submerged their bodies into the temple floor until only their heads were showing, and continued to toy with them using my limbs. The whole temple was a sensual and grotesque display to the sin of lust, which as an entity of lust made a small and sadistic part of me deeply happy.

I also made them immortal, and removed from them the need for sleep, food, or drink. This served as a way to turn them from true people, into something more akin to toys with which I could play whenever I wished.

________________________________________________

Outside of my temple, in the physical world I was also hard at work even at night. Using the incredible and limitless range of many of my powers I began to be a mischievous god.

On my fifth night I awoke a number of cephalods, and in the vast depths of one of the deepest ocean trenches in the world, one that was several thousand meters deep, I silently transformed a single deep-dwelling octopus into an akkorokamui and a number of its family members into cecaelias, eerie fusions of cephalods and humans.

As the transformation from deep-dwelling octopus to gargantuan akkorokamui occurred, I spoke to the creature and its family and awoke them. I gave them a single task: capture humans for me to experiment on.

I also altered them and gave them powerful poisons, the ability to allow others to breathe underwater, the ability to endure a range of water pressure and share that resistance with others, considerable beauty, and even a lesser version of my ability to speak too and understand anyone and use any language. The awakened creatures worshiped me innately but as they felt my powers wash over them to gift them new abilities and traits their worship became fanatical and zealous. That knowledge brought a smile to my face.

I intended to transform a number of cephalopods into akkorokamui, krakens, and cecaelias, and dire-versions of themselves but seeing that this one transformation had worked so well excited me. I was fond of water and I liked my temples being submerged, so seeing my first time utilizing an undersea animal subdomain and gaining undersea, animalistic followers working so well excited me. I could influence and awaken any undersea animal on this particular planet, but only a few undersea subdomains were especially interesting to me aside from the one belonging to cephalopods.

Other especially interesting subdomains that involved undersea animals were the Cnidarian subdomain, which included animals like jellyfish and box-jellies, and the Elasmobranchii subdomain which included but wasn't limited to sharks, and rays. I was grateful that this world and Torus had the same sorts of sea-life, though Torus' sealife was admittedly much more magical than Htrae's was.

By the time I had spent a full eight days in Htrae, I was finally beginning to feel at home and I was beginning to gain more followers. It was an exciting time, and one that I quite enjoyed. And so on the dawn of my eighth day I began to become more active once more.