Chapter 1: A Denounced Arrival
He never wanted to leave Theros. Dreams were so potent there. With ease he could reach into a mortal's mind and unleash the nightmares locked inside. They needed to escape. They were bottled up and tucked far beneath the surface. He could use them.
Ashiok arrived on Innistrad just moments ago. His hands still held the mana of a faraway plane, one he would certainly return to after the War was over.
Ashiok was never fond of war. It was too upfront. Too brutal. Too fast. He needed to watch his victims slowly die. He needed to examine the scenario and invent foreign ways of dismantling them. First, their mind. Then their body. The pace of war never suited his needs, so when the leonin Ajani urged for battle upon the gods, Ashiok fled.
He had met another of his kind, a Planeswalker, on Theros that told him of Innistrad. The being could not be read; mind or body. The Nightmare Weaver was left uncertain after their encounter, and he was unsure of his intentions for sending him to the haunted plane. He had asked to find the vampire Sorin Markov, but Ashiok was still questioning. Why send him to Innistrad? The being, a shapeless form of the shadows, claimed to have many followers behind him. Why not send one of them? Still, Ashiok could never resist a visit to a place where mortality was under onslaught.
So there he was.
The tear in the Æther closed behind him as he used his final Theran mana up. He stitched the rip to Theros and wished it a good-night. He left behind a cult of followers, himself. They would live on, but Ashiok advised them not to join the vicious fighting.
He looked above him at the dark Innistrad sky. It was night, yet he could not see a single star. His very essence, however, seemed to be pulled by the moon. Right overhead of him, half of a shimmering white coin loomed. It pulled and tugged on the land, and, as Ashiok soon realized, his mind as well.
Levitating through the air, he took off toward civilization. His feet grazed by corn stocks that grew tall with autumn's approach. Ashiok pulled upward on the leylines below, drawing on Innistrad's blackest mana. His feet pulsed with it, and behind him the crops began to wither and die. He left a trail of hungry families behind him as he went, but that did not matter. He was testing the power of Innistrad, and it brought him great joy.
The Nightmare Weaver saw a tower in the distance. It was safe to say, he presumed, that he could learn of Markov's whereabouts in cities. They were also filled with the most people, all capable of torment.
He released the mana as he neared the tower. It was a single lonesome chapel surrounded by a small cluster of buildings. From far away it had appeared to be a much larger settlement, but it was truly just a village.
With his feet still slightly off the ground, Ashiok entered the village. It was night, and he presumed that no one would be out. No wall protected the inhabitants, but undisturbed fields expanded in all directions.
It would not be until morning that Ashiok would have to deal with his priority to find Markov, so he decided it was due time to murder once more. He went up to the church, examining the battered exterior. A religious symbol was nailed loosely above the door. He turned around and made his way to the house across the cobblestone road. The roof was low and the wooden beams were splitting. Ashiok silently summoned more of Innistrad's mana. To avoid making noise, he sent the mana trickling through his body and silently walked through the wall.
Inside, he saw that the home was very small, no more than one room. A bed dominated the center, and a fireplace the left wall. Various other objects were left unorganized and scattered in the different reaches of the establishment.
To avoid hitting his head, Ashiok descended and his feet touched the wooden floor below. He stepped silently toward the man in the bed. His feet erupted from the closest end, and his head rested on the far. Ashiok stood over him, and got a solid look at his face.
The man wore an orange beard that wrapped around his chin. Atop his head, however, there was no hair. He had a scar running along his right cheek, and his nose appeared broken. He was a rough brute, that Ashiok could tell.
The Nightmare Weaver held out his long, bony hand over the sleeping body. He prepared to tear the dreams from his head. Just as Ashiok was about to pull at his mind, a loud knock broke the silence in the room and he became one with the shadows.
The man's eyes peeled open and looked at the door. The knock came again. Then a shout from outside.
"Plut!"
"Coming," the tired man mumbled. He slipped out of bed, letting the sheets fall to the ground. Ashiok watched from the darkness as he opened the door.
"What's this about?" He asked.
"It's zombies," said the person on the other side. He adorned some thin iron armor, with a dingy sword at his side. "They've been spotted not far from here, in Borgen's End."
"How many?"
"A whole army of 'em. They're besieging Borgen's End right now. They'll move our way next, surely."
The church bells rang behind him, and the street outside began to fill with people. Voices mixed with the clanging of the bells filled the nighttime air.
"I'll be out in a moment," the man called 'Plut' said. He shut the door and ran to the left side of the room. He began rummaging through his piles of things before pulling out a long blade.
The blade's grip and cross-guard were of the same shape of the church's symbol outside. Ashiok waited for him to place the sword down on the bed and start looking for something again before silently slipping out of his shadow form into his normal one.
He quietly crept up behind the man. When 'Plut' found the armor he was looking for and spun around, Ashiok was standing there, staring at him. He yelled in surprise.
"Who are- what are you doing here?"
Ashiok said not a word. He held up and his hand to Plut's face and pulled back, tearing his greatest fears and greatest desires from his head. The man fell to the floor, mindless.
The Weaver let the desires and pleasures dissipate into the air, lost forever to the musty air inside the home.
Ashiok peared at the first nightmare, always the most prominent. A smile inched onto his lips as he saw the city around him begin to burn and collapse. Figures emerged from the ruin, and he stood in the center of it all. First fear: letting down the city.
He went to the second, where he found himself bowing to a levitating woman. The name Olivia Voldaren resounded in his head. A vampire. Second fear: Submission to vampires.
Ashiok had an idea. He let the other fears fade away. He would use what he learned with Phenax, God of Deception on Theros. He had learned to deceive and trick using his magic instead of forcing a nightmare into a person. Ashiok drew some of the desires and pleasures back, although many had dissipated completely, and intertwined them with the fears. Then he grabbed at the fear and pulled and stretched, making them appear so much bigger than they were. Ashiok drew mana through his feet and let it trickle out through his hands in the form of a deceptive spell. Finally, he bound it all together and forced it back into the man's mind.
He disappeared into the shadows as Plut awoke. His hands were shaking as took to his feet. Ashiok's hand solidified and he put out his fingers. Invisible puppet strings connected his fingertips with the man's thoughts. Ashiok saw through his eyes.
They heard a scream. Plut turned and looked for the source, grabbing the sword and dashing out of the door. When he made it into the street, the church bell clanged one final time before they heard a snap and it began falling. The sounds of crunching wood resounded about the village as the humongous bell felled the chapel. Plut began running, his heartbeat increasing, and his mind filling with depressed thoughts about the church.
They ran all the way to town center, where he climbed atop a well to get a better look. Vampires filled the sky. One that Plut fully recognized, Olivia Voldaren, swooped downward at the town and picked up the man that Plut had spoken to earlier. The two went into the sky before Voldaren sunk her teeth into his throat, tearing away as his blood rained down.
"No!" Plut screamed. It sounded almost surreal. He ran forwards, towards Olivia, but a vampire dropped down right in front of him. Plut ran into the vampire's chest. He backed up, sword at the ready before it.
The vampire gnarled its teeth and ran forward at Plut, trying to jump over the blade. Plut raised the blade up, slicing down the vampire's center and causing it to drop to the ground.
A voice was speaking to him, but it was so soft and almost nonexistent that Plut payed no heed. He looked around him, though, and watched in horror as the vampires knocked torches off of walls and onto houses. Straw roofs were set alight, and soon the entire town center was enveloped in flame.
Ashiok receded into his own conscious as there came noises inside of Plut's house. He made his hand take shadow form, and looked in front of him as three moaning zombies shambled their way through the house. All three were dirty and decaying, blackened and rotted to their core.
Ashiok drew on Innistrad's mana and sent a surge flowing from his palms. Two streams went forward, taking the form of his hands. They wrapped themselves around two of the zombies and the fingers gripped the third's arms. Ashiok flung the zombies against the wall, took a form, and walked out of the house.
In front of him, two zombies had broken into the church. To his right, Plut was being restrained by two members of the town as they also fought to take down a horde that was attacking them. Around Plut's feet lay an ensemble of town members and zombies alike.
Ashiok admired his work. There was absolutely nothing but anger and fear in Plut's eyes as his friends threw him to the ground and downed him. A blade went through his chest, and a zombie mauled the assailant.
The Nightmare Weaver levitated above the battle, a black aura forming around him. He pulled his creation out of Plut's mind, intending to use the fears if need be. Someone called to him from below, and an arrow whizzed by his face. But Ashiok was facing forward at the plane before him. An eerie fog coated the fields in all directions, and a single blazing city burned on the horizon. Beyond it, mountains grew high off the ground, and the moon hung over them. Innistrad. Here he was on the cursed plane, with his usual denounced arrival.
Ashiok took off for Borgen's End, the torch in the distance.
