The world was cold and dark. Gwin felt all of it on his naked and exposed skin. With a shiver he pulled himself up and tried to look around. He could see better than most in the dark and was vaguely able to make out his surroundings. He seemed to be in a…tunnel? He was surrounded by stone on all sides except for two openings in front of him. All he could see from either was pitch black. His ears picked up the distant rhythm of waves.
'Waves? Shit..'
He was in the stormseas, he had to be. The distant rhythm of waves echoed in the cave making it hard to find its source. Gwin was utterly scared. Every single Citadel on the stormseas was either in the water or floating in some way which meant he would be swimming. Gwin hadn't even registered the foreign feeling of having two arms again yet. He felt the cool and wet stone under his left hand and jumped.
He coughed in embarrassment.
'Yea, duh'
As a sleeper his body in the waking world and the real world would be different until he became a master. He was pulled from his stupor by the sound of something else echoing in the caverns. Gwin froze suddenly petrified by fear.
'A nightmare creature…'
He could only pray to the dead gods that it was a dormant beast. Thankfully whatever it was didn't seem to smell him or at least if it did it decided he wasn't worth the meal. He could smell and hear things all around him. He smelt the acrid stench of something rotten and fishy.
Gwin sat for what felt like hours deliberating what to do next. He did not have a way of attacking since he had received a tool as a memory in his first nightmare and memories were far too valuable to be given out to every sleeper by the academy when most would just end up dead. He was going to have to be smart. He was kind of missing his Legacy group mates right now even if he didn't get along with some of them…one of them. Surely one of them would have had a spare weapon type memory for him. After an eternity in the claustrophobic and wet stone, light reached Gwin in his hiding hole. It was extremely faint and hard to notice but Gwin could tell it was day out. The overall gradient of the dark cave had shifted slightly
He couldn't hide forever if he wanted to get out of here. Gwin carefully exited his hole and was met with a sprawling set of tunnels in front of him forming a labyrinth in the black stone. Each tunnel was small enough to where he couldn't stand in it and instead had to crawl. The idea of meeting a nightmare creature in a small tunnel while crawling was not a pleasant one but he had no other choice.
Gwin picked the tunnel he saw the most light coming from and began crawling. It felt embarrassing due to his lack of clothes. But thankfully no one was there to watch or be behind him.
Soon he found himself overlooking a vast drop down. He seemed to have been placed inside of a large cliff of black stone. On either side of the exit he had found was a large plane of black rock with similar holes breaking the even surface. Down below he saw something that made him freeze however.
Down below was a picture of black mud and strange coral-like growths coming from the ground to form a vast labyrinth of crimson. Colossal stalks of kelps lay limply on the bizarre growths. It looked like an ocean with the water stolen from it. This stretched as far as the eye could see. Down far below him he could see vague shapes through the thick of the crimson labyrinth moving around.
'Gods…where the hell am I?'
Gwin had absolutely no idea where he was right now which was an ill omen. He had at least a vague idea of every single region of the dream world, death zones included, and not a single one of them met this description. Gwin felt himself starting to panic.
He must be in an undiscovered region of the dream realm which either meant he was the first to be sent here or any others who had been sent here had been unable to claim a citadel and return. Neither were good for him.
A shrill shriek pulled him from his panic and he turned his frantic gaze downwards. What he saw filled him with dread.
There were several tunnels at the bottom of the cliff too and something had just entered one of them. Gwin watched as its large red body squeezed into one of the holes. It was too big to fit and yet somehow it did anyway. Gwin was frozen in fear imagining what other abominations were hiding in these tunnels with him.
He decided it would be best for him to hide and explore these caves better for a way down. He had to have been over 200 meters up and the cliff extended upwards another hundred meters or so. Looking up he realized this cliff looked like a rectangle that was pointing upwards. It was flat and had sharp corners. It's perfect geometry was not comforting…