Chapter Text
Ego slithered through his sphere. Movement was slow, strange forces pushed and pulled and squeezed and stretched. He was contained, yet freer than ever, in having become more aware than before. A barrier materialised in front of him. His eyes were closed, but he would not have seen the difference anyway, for he felt the edge of his world with a part of his body. Before touching it, he hadn't even known his body had parts to it.
Squirming to test the muscles, peaceful as it may be, the Firmament vibrated. It came from everywhere, but turning around revealed that in some directions it was stronger than in others. Slowly came Ego's first experience with sound. Bass, calm and melodic, kept drumming through his whole body, and over time patterns became recognizable. Different units of noise became more distinguished by the day, and an over-active mind strung the phonemes together to words, and through a process combining guesswork with some kind of magic he could not comprehend, meanings were assigned to them. It was rather easy once you had figured out that they had meaning at all, the rest was playing with a million-piece tangram until the picture made sense.
Caesar briefly pulled back. His vision and thoughts were fuzzy, he just had a newfound control over reliving past experiences, and did not wonder where it came from. His actual body was asleep in some forgotten colony, but the mind had entered a completely different realm. He reenveloped himself in the feelings, in his primal experiences that had led to him being himself. He tasted something sharp and bitter, like the ashes from a burnt kangaroo he had had once, but he shooed the sense away.
Before Ego knew any words, he had started to distinct between several categories of vibration. One was the dominant, bassy and often calm, but one other seemed to use the same amount of words in a shorter time span, and most of them had a tone to them Ego took as unpleasant. The vibration of the Firmament alternated between those categories, but sometimes both were felt at the same time. It took him not long to find the word for it: arguing. Bass was arguing. Bass could often be driven by the challenger to start putting more power in his voice, and when they were arguing, all the other categories faded to background chatter.
The biggest change was when, due to a surge of some essence of himself that made its way to his bloodstream, Ego realised that Bass and the other one were beings, nothing different from himself. He was floating in his sphere, surrounded by the Firmament, inside which other entities lived, who could communicate. Ego squirmed. His muscles boiled, his nerves were singed, and his brain burned. He wanted to communicate! He wanted a voice! Bass would often talk of entities that had stopped existing long ago, of nutrition, of some place called China he cared a great deal about. Ego did not. He wanted the freedom of expression! Was that too much to ask, for one existing only for such a short time? It wasn't, he knew it!
Caesar's mouth was full of ashes now. He tried to spit it out, but more would keep spawning. A pleasant memory provided distraction.
Ego desired freedom. The Firmament was responsible for not giving him a voice. It had shrunk dramatically over the past time, and left him so little room to move. He was stuck, and so, so hungry. He used his whole body, and stretched, bumped, pushed, rammed. Bass noticed, and started discouraging it. Ego took it as the worst imaginable insult. Why should Bass get a voice, but not himself? A crack! - something from it came, so alien that he could not assign it by any word other than "light", one of the stranger substances Bass had told him about. He slammed himself against the crack, and little bits broke off, more of this light substance entered his sphere. He charged, and headbutted the hole with the strength of all of his body and mind, and suddenly full freedom was there, but much stranger than he had imagined. The intense daylight burned his retinas, as he had never used them before. The ooze he had thought the entire universe was filled with, was replaced by something sharp and thin, but Ego's muscles rejoiced with their liberty. A dark shadow appeared above him. Bass, when he had still been friendly, had taught him of this. "No, I won't have any of that," were Caesar's first words, his lips still wet and fresh, and -
"Caesar? Caesar, are you there?"
He was startled so much he left the memory to evaporate, and the environment returned to an undefined grey mist. But the ashes were so intense, it was like someone had been nailing his forked tongue to a plank. They pulled at him, in the direction of the new voice. It was a weak and high-pitched one, almost chirpy, and coming from a great distance. "What?" was all he felt a suitable reply.
"Caesar, you are there! Come to me, please, if you want, I want to see you!"
From the direction of the voice, the mists opened and a somewhat murky greyish light shone through a tunnel. It felt warm, but not like sunlight, more like a big demon was breathing on him, minus the moist. Caesar felt his head being pulled towards it, and the pain in his mouth made him follow; it relieved with every pace. Moving was not quite walking, flying, or even swimming, probably a strange hybrid, but he wasn't concentrating on it, which is why it wasn't defined. This was still his own dream area. He was about to leave it.
Going through the tunnel, his head started to jump back and forth between feeling light and heavy, and nausea and euphoria alternated in increasingly rapid succession. Itches spread over his body like fires on the grassy plains of Terra Australis. Something pulled at his lower abdomen, and then it snapped, leaving a sore spot. Gravity, which had been uniform until now, angled, and Caesar found himself to be falling; the light and dark, pressure and relief, hot and cold, torment and elation blinked like a stroboscope from hell and heaven. He gained extreme speed, going about thrice as fast as what he had imagined possible without his intestines leaving him through the back door, and then doubled velocity once more.
The clouds retreated to the far sides, light and darkness both faded, the blinking was no longer recognizable, and in front of him, a large grey plane appeared. Or wait, it was not in front, it was below, and at this terrifying speed he expected to be reduced to a splat on whatever it was made of. Caesar began to feel wind, it ripped at his wings, and pulled them right behind him.
He was almost at the floor. It was grey rocks, or tiles, something geometric yet somehow irregular in a pattern he could not decipher as the new atmosphere made his eyes tear. Caesar tried to slow down by putting all of his strength in extending his left wing the tiniest bit, but with a sickening sound, it slammed back, and the great pain a second later told him that the muscles had strained beyond their normal reach, and the bones were disjointed. The wind disfigured his face, and the last thoughts before hitting was that at least it would be an instant death, without pain. He said goodbye to Jeremy, and closed his eyes.
He was wrong. The impact broke every single bone in his body, most of them shattered into particles no larger than a grain of sand. Every muscle was squished, lots of them ripped. Arteries broke, everything filled with blood. But the skin held together, and for some reason his mind was still there. He could only thank for the instant quadriplegia when his spine disconnected from his brain, meaning he did not feel anything.
"Caesar, are you there? Talk to me, if you will please."
What was this? How were his ears still working? And why was this stupid being not seeing that he was a broken mess, and incapable of anything even faintly resembling speech? "Shut up." he muttered, and went back to waiting for his death.
"Ah, you can speak. Don't worry, you will soon be all right, there's no injuries or death here."
Good God, how he had spoken?
And as Caesar puzzled, immeasurable forces gently reshaped his body to how he was used to it. The bone fragments liquefied, every atom found its place, and crystallised back into the familiar mass. Blood streamed back to where it was supposed to be, nerves, arteries and muscles grew together, and before long his heart started beating again. He turned to a lying position, his tail wrapped around him, almost - no, exactly how it had been positioned when he had fallen asleep. What, when had he fallen asleep?
Caesar opened eyes that had not had their healthy shape a second before, and as his retina healed he began to see around him. It was some kind of a valley, but the strangest one he had ever seen, the tiled floor creating the most amazing curling patterns, and at the horizon tiles raised up to form pillars, creating the impression of hills. Clouds formed half a sphere above him, dark grey on light grey. The only visible object that stood out from the endless monochromatic landscape and sky, was a single brown and purple creature, a dragon, of the species he seemed to recall was a Winchester, though he did not know if he had ever seen one before. He stood up, and felt the urge to yawn.
The dragon was standing a little insecure, rubbing his paws against one another, and looking tentatively at him. Caesar saw white cloth around his midsection, it was wrapped very tightly, and clean as silk.
"Where am I? How did I get here?" he asked a bit defensively, not knowing how to proceed in the strange circumstances. He appeared to be held in some distant land, almost killed and healed by the same dragon, who was almost trembling on his skinny legs just a few meters from him.
"Oh, you were dreaming, but now you have left your dream and came here. This is where I am, and a lot of others too, but in this area we're alone."
Caesar was dissatisfied by the vague answer. "And did you take me here? And when can I leave?"
He shook his head.
"What do you mean? Did you not bring me here, or are you saying that I cannot leave at all? Tell me!" he snapped in annoyance.
The Winchester backed away. He was a great deal smaller than Caesar, but even for that he was easily shaken. "I'm not sure, Caesar. You came here, I did not."
"How do you know my name? And stop avoiding the question, you filthy animal, you're the one who called me!"
He cowered even more, and shrunk a little. "I.. All I know, is that there's some things you could do; they could help you get back to your own dream. You can't wake from this place, this isn't your dream. But we should hurry, there's not much time."
Caesar rubbed his paw on his forehead. He did not know how was he going to extract information from this annoying little guy. "I don't want to do anything, brat. I want to get out, and you called me, so you know where to go from here. I want to go back to my captain, and the real world! I already dislike this place: it is boring, and completely unsuitable for the dragon of the son of a high Earl!"
"You have to follow me."
"Are you deaf?!"
"No, but you have to follow me, to get back, to your... captain. And quickly, before it is too late for you and me."
Caesar cursed quietly. He was stuck, under the control of a magical dragon who did not make sense, and did not feel like he was in charge at all. "I will follow you, for as long as I need to, to get back to my captain, and not a second beyond that!"
The little one unexpectedly gave a little squeak of what seemed almost joy - although his face returned to stoic the second after - and darted away, jumping over the grey floor, in a direction where Caesar saw faintly something large emerging from the ground, off near the horizon. "Then follow me, Caesar. I'm Levitas."
"Doesn't ring a bell." he mumbled. It sounded very faintly familiar, but he hadn't heard the name in a very long time.