I knew that I was dreaming because I was floating in empty nothingness as if my mind was swimming through and endless dark mire. Occasionally, flashes of comprehension emerged, but they were very brief and far in between. The Dryad part of me told me that this was normal, the whole point of being a dryad was gradual, incremental, slow growth.

The brilliant and now long dead Agromancer Kopusha had designed a masterpiece, a pinnacle of achievement - the [Chrysalis] skill. The Acolyte of Tricameron didn't do it alone in a vacuum - she had scouted countless libraries of the Citadel, combined Animancy with Agromancy based on thousands of research song-spells and incredible artifacts produced by her now fallen civilization. Kopusha's dryad was a "magibiotek" experiment, a bio-organic-magic-anima-construct as she labelled her thesis on Bio-organic life. Its seed, its magical programming, was set up in a way that the dryad could survive almost anywhere on planet Novazem.

I knew that in time, I would evolve into an Astral tree, be able sustain myself here forever, as long as the leaking battery beneath my roots gave me life, warmth and power and so I did.

I dreamt about what would be the best solution to move forward, considered the existence of the gods... of things like the Omniscience and others that the Seditionists worshipped. Unfortunately, I had no idea how gods worked, how they did what they did.

Thinking about evolving into a god-like being had preoccupied so many of my dreams that I didn't manage to design anything else of value.

. . .

Something had interrupted my endless dreaming. A glowing... something emerged from the gloom.

A strange, fractal jellyfish thing was roaming the wasteland of broken men. Its shimmering tentacles sucked the remnants of life and memories out of the hollow, dead things as it moved towards me.

Shit! That was a phantom. A creature of the Astral Ocean. A killer whale!

The silver-blue, jellyfish-shaped hunter whale saw me, grew in size as it got close. Its razor covered tentacles spread out, aiming for me.

It reached the black Obelisk and then... comically slammed into an invisible wall. It screeched horrifically in what sounded like Infrasound and began to circle the perimeter of the invisible field, searching for a way to reach me... to get to my lovely, glowing, emerald tree.

"Yeah, good luck with that pal," I commented and returned to my dreaming of how to design myself to be a god, A Faith Based Spiritual Construct.

I knew that the Alanian Astral Engine Obelisk would keep me safe here practically forever. I knew that it was somehow able to differentiate between a monstrous, mind-less aberration and a phantom that meant it no harm like myself.

The whale circled and circled the obelisk for a very long time.

Occasionally, it left to feast on the field of the dead, then returned again.

Time passed. I still had no clear idea how to become a god. It probably had something to do with Charisma. I attempted to extrapolate the term in my head, but arrived at nothing. Dreaming as a tree was... difficult, slow.

Something new was happening outside. I glanced with my Astral eye-stalk flowers at the scene.

An enormous jellyfish with a hollow, diatom like body, even bigger than the whale jellyfish had arrived. The two creatures screeched at each other in ultrasonic, producing a disturbing cacophony. I wondered if they would fight over me, getting ready for a fun observational experience.

The diatom-shaped jellyfish suddenly stopped screeching and released hundreds of copies of itself from its innards. The little monsters attacked the whale-jellyfish from all directions, nipping at it with small blade-like threads. The Phantom-Whale creature screeched and rushed away, chased by the swarm.

The hollow jellyfish turned towards me. It slowly circled the barrier, without slamming into it.

In panic, I realized that it had intelligence. It looked like it was prodding the shield for a weak spot, for a fracture. It had eventually found one and I could do nothing, for I was but a tree bound to the warmth of the battery. The abomination opened its grotesque maw and released a blinding beam of light into my direction.

As it struck me, my tree ignited, burning up from within. Pain, immense, blinding pain filled my entire tree.

[-50 in Soul]

The Soul-Song resonated.

I wept, the pain was overwhelming, icy, cold. Something foreign, alien filled my head. A single thought began to dominate my mind.

Mother.

The hollow-shelled phantom was my mother. I would do anything for her. I would serve her for all time. I belonged to her. I would make her into a goddess. An all-powerful being that would not be stopped...

Time didn't matter. I had all the time in the world to design mother a new plague unlike anything else, a virus based on fractal mathematics, as mother and her swarm protected me now.

Someday, perhaps in a thousand years time, I would arrive at the answer, would use all of my remaining scraps of Earth knowledge and skills to forge her a unique skill that would turn her into a true divinity and then all of the known worlds would shake in her wake and all people and creatures would bow to her as every door in the universe would open before her.

[THE END]