A Dream of Peril

Rhythmic chanting fills your ears as you close your eyes and submit yourself to The Sleep of Stone. You feel pins and needles in your extremities as the effects of the ritual begin to take root in you, and in an effort to distract yourself from the sensation, you think of the choices you made that led you to this point. Choosing to serve, choosing to work for the greater good, choosing to do what was Right for the people around you. Choosing to, rather than simply live out your days, commit your very being to safeguarding the future from some unknown armageddon. You’re not sure if knowing that you will wake up to the darkest moment of mortalkind is helping the situation at all, but it’s what you have right now. The chanting is louder now, stronger, and the feeling at the ends of your limbs has shifted towards numbness, but your conscious thought is still focused on reviewing your past. Others before you have made the choice to join the ranks of the Sleepers, and you wonder what went through their heads during this experience; does everyone feel like this, or is it just you? The numb feeling has spread through your chest, and you just realized that you stopped breathing; stopped being able to breathe. But they told you this might happen beforehand—none of them could tell you exactly what it would feel like, though—no one had ever entered The Sleep of Stone and woken up before… Returning to your thoughts, you wonder: Who will you meet at the end of days? What stories will they have to tell of their own work, their own histories? What will the world to which you will awaken be like?

You attempt to open your eyes for one last look at your world, but find that the magic has reached your head by now. You hear nothing, see nothing, sense nothing, feel nothing.

—

The next moment you are aware, a vision flashes into your mind’s eye. A sphere of silver light, brightest at its surface, occupies the center of this vision, but also you view yourself within the sphere, somehow a passenger and observer simultaneously. All around you, a profound darkness, inexplicably devoid of light or color, creeps into your periphery, and begins to press against the sphere. Where the two make contact, you see the light brighten in resistance; but that light does not illuminate the darkness, merely repels it for an instant. You watch this scene unfold for what simultaneously feels like the blink of an eye and an eternity until you notice the cracks beginning to form in the shell—small at first, and then spreading, meeting other cracks, and growing until the entire surface of the sphere looks like impossibly delicate filigree. With that final image, the sphere shatters inwards, and the darkness presses in towards you. You would feel fear if you were capable of feeling anything, as the darkness approaches you, the passenger, and you, the observer. The last thing you see is a flash of the selfsame silver that composed the sphere, surrounding you for one last moment.

—

Next time:
PrinceCon 49: The Sleepers Awaken
March 6, 2026, 5pm EST
Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building (Louis A. Simpson Atrium), Princeton University