Editing Sleepy Marines (section)

== Brother-Marine Vestuvius ==

Vestuvius of the Sleepy Marines curled up in his Battle Bed, attended by servitors who awaited with warm milk and cookies to send him drifting back to sleep should he awake unexpectedly. Consciousness left him within minutes, and training kicked in as he grew aware of himself once more, garbed in powered armor and carrying a bolter. They were what was most familiar to him, but he could easily rearm himself for whatever task was at hand; he was a Dream Warrior, one of the veterans in the fighting at the edge of the Immaterium where dreams drifted by.

A dark room surrounded him, the same bunk which he left, but desolate, empty of all life, even biomechanical creations such as servitors and servoskulls. With a few steps, he approached the door, but instead of opening out to the rest of the barracks, a dark, shimmering room appeared, filled with floating doorways of the Shared Slumber. The doorways led to all sorts of strange, unusual, and even horrifying places, from dark forests to endless lands made of squirming, twisting body parts, crying silently, down to the Red Maze beneath it all, unmappable and filled with horrible daemons who stalked its passages and stole a person, locking them away in some hidden place in the Shared Slumber, lost for eternity.

He was alone, but in their dreams, the Dream Warriors were always alone. But it was no matter. The doors drifted past, each offering a pathway towards worlds unheard of, some pristine, some filled with gibbering madness, Daemons can only dream of letting loose upon the Materium. But none of those were his destination. Instead, a black door with a crescent moon and stars swiftly advanced towards him, opening without a sound to envelop him whole.

There were trillions upon trillions upon trillions of glittering lights, each the private dream world of a sentient creature who was not sucked into the Shared Slumber to wander it endlessly until awakening or being dragged to endless sleep, and endless horror. He drifted through the 'sky', taking care to avoid the green mist which enveloped an immense portion of this area, the dreams of the Orks. They were brutish, just like the rest of the existence of the species, but unlike other creatures, the Orks' dreams were interconnected, and to assault one Ork would be to assault all Orks, and that would be suicide for anyone.

No, instead his mission sent him deep into the darkness, with one red light growing ever larger and brighter, from the size of a pinprick to the size of a world.

Many rookies made the mistake of entering their target's dreams directly. But that direction led only to woe, for to enter another being's dream directly meant that one was completely under the laws that governed that dream, a catastrophe in most cases. Rather, Vestuvius imagined. Imagined his brothers, imagined the might of the Imperium, imagined his guaranteed victory. As his imaginations grew, so did another sphere arose beside the first, the personal dreams of Vestuvius. These he entered, which shrank and wrapped around him until they were no thicker than a strand of hair, and garbed in his armor of imagination he stepped into the other dream.

A burning wasteland stretched forth as far as Vestuvius could see, as cultists looted and pillaged and raped to their hearts content through what was once a beautiful world of the Imperium, with a vast black fortress looming in the distance, shrouded by smoke and the stench of death. The cultists he ignored; they didn't exist here but as a shade, a figment of the imagination, and those that approached him simply vanished as they touched his dream barrier of uncounted victories and his Faith in the Emperor. With a single step, the world warped about him until he was in the inner sanctum of the fortress, a few feet from his target. The man, a traitor marine captain, naked and surrounded by daemonettes whispering about terrible secrets and deadly pleasures looked with horror at the Space Marine, while the daemonettes vanished completely, being naught but dreams rather than true Daemons.

With a roar, the man rose, surrounded in a suit of flame and wielding weapons of pure despair, and charged at the shimmering Dream Warrior, and they fought with thought and body and soul, their selves twisting their worlds to bring to bear as much deadly force as possible while armoring themselves in their own created realities, flashing power ripping apart everything around them until only two glowing figures floated in a dark, nondescript void where only their battle existed. Weeks, months, years passed as their fight waged on, until with a mighty war cry Vestuvius split the traitor open, whose ragged remains faded, along with the void as Vestuvius reentered the universe of the dream worlds. Knowing that his foe was finally dead, not only in his dreams, but in reality as well, he flew back towards the starry door, and back into the dark room of his barracks towards his sleeping body.

With a yawn, he awoke, taking a look at the chrono display. Only 5 hours passed since he first closed his eyes. Plenty of time to catch some sleep and prepare for the next assault upon the dreams of his enemies.







[[Category:Imperial]]
[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]]
[[Category:Space Marines]]