As I walked across the plain, all quiet and ashen grey, I realised that I was dreaming. For how long I couldn’t say, minutes? hours? days? weeks? months? years? decades? centuries? aeons? I encountered many strange phenomena in this space: the arcane utterance of a whining wind which I heard but never felt, rocky structures that would move whenever my gaze wasn’t upon them and huge fleshy tunnels in the earth, which respired and wheezed like great throats of unknown depth. Eventually, my path was stayed by an immense stone wall which in both directions seemed to stretch interminably. Discovering a narrow tunnel bored into the rock, I proceeded slowly downward into the inky dark of this passage without inclination of where it might lead if anywhere at all. As I moved through this impenetrable gloom, feeling the way with my hands, the cold smoothness of stone gradually gave way to a damp warmth as the walls began to contract then expand in glacial respiration around me. After some time, maybe hours, maybe days, a cold grey light greeted me as I emerged from the yawning passage into an encirclement of needle-like mountains. It was amid this clearing that I saw it.

 

The creature was burdened with a huge, censer-like helmet composed of iron crudely hewn, pitted and pocked with corrosion and rust. Atop this brutal helm stood a holed dome from which a reeking black smoke issued; a fine rain of ash powdering the ground like a grey snow. I knew it was aware of me as it stood upon a lawn of grass and small white flowers in the centre-most point of the clearing. Silently I approached, my steps cushioned in the ashen dust. Slowly it turned to me, the chains which hung from its preposterous headgear clanging and hissing as it did so. As I stood before this doleful apparition it began to dip its great beak to the ground, as if bowed in solemn performance of some strange primordial ceremony. With head lowered in this funereal prostration, the cap of the holed dome swung open with a groan, a thick smog swimming from the orifice which smelled like the cambrianic soil on which no living thing ever walked. 

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Without instruction, without provocation, I proceeded to climb into the monstrous mask. Settling myself within the coffin-like enclosure, I felt a warm resolve in the painless ignition of my flesh and clothes, that in the kindling of my body lay a recompense for the sinew, bone and all other raw matter that comprised it. My form becoming fuel for the creature's cephalic furnace, I closed my eyes and awaited the quiet passage through oblivion's yawning expanse.

 

When I awoke, I found myself back in my bed with a red dawn in my eyes.