In the darkness she had rested for nearly three hundred years. The unending kingdom of dreams her domain, a place that swirled and spun with the miasma of the unconscious at play. With her gift to reach into the dreams of others she spun nightmares, feeding from those she touched. From these sad individuals she learned, saw the world as it changed through the minds of dreamers. Seasons passed, years, decades, and still she slept. At the mercy of the council who had locked her away. In the possession of the Guards of Soloman she was moved with their band, kept in sacred holdings like a pharoah buried beneath the sands. Wherever they went turmoil followed. Her reach could not be denied, and even in noncorporeal form she shaped and molded those she reached out to. They would carry their dreams into life, act upon them, and shape their world. This was what kept her from succumbing to darkness.

Two thousand and eight, and for the first time someone reached out to her instead of the other way around. Maya, the one whose name clutches the heart of the dead, a feathered thing that perches in the worlds oldest magic. That woman of the ether called to her in her world of nothingness. She was to be allowed freedom, to be untethered from the bonds of magic placed upon her from the council, and given a purpose once again. It didn't matter what it was for Kalika would have done anything to be freed. Once free she could act on her own whims. Could place herself in a position to once again rise to power. They had captured her once by default, but she would not make the same mistakes twice. When Maya lifted the wards from the coffin it was like being shot through with energy, a jolt of electric light that reigned her in and drew her towards reality. Once again she felt the contours of her physical form, but it would still take time to awaken, time to come fully back to herself.

In this time of awakening there was much that she saw through the minds eyes of those she controlled. Those secret minions who through hundreds of years of dream consciousness she had bonded to herself. A fact hidden carefully from those who held her. If they knew she could do such a thing then they surely would not allow her to awaken. From their eyes she saw her chylde return. Marcus, her beautiful golden god, and first among her children. Still as heavenly and full of sadness as ever. She saw him and his rat companion, felt the power he had gained in her absence. By boat they travelled along with her servant Samuel, travelling to what she saw as Paradise. A place thought of but unknown to those she listened to. It was on the boat that she began to truly come back, through a magic she had not tasted in centuries.

Through Marcus she travelled, using his ties to seek out power in the form of a wolf and a human. People her chylde had connected to himself. She would teach him early the lesson she had sought to drill into him long ago. It was her power that had created him, and what was his was also hers. There was nothing she could not have, and nothing she would not take at her whim. Ash and Evie, names in the darkness. From her prison she fed upon them and gave them a taste of the dark sticky realm of her power.

Islands. Through Samuel she could taste the salty air, hear the pounding of the surf, and see the glistening realm of tanned bodies waiting to be plucked like fruit from the vine. Things to indulge her hunger. It came suddenly, her rising. One day she was in the dreams of the telemetric, and the next her hands were pushing the lid from her coffin. Fingers shrunken and wrinkled, skin paper thin as though at any moment the bones might snap. A smell like the dank wet earth of a crypt clung to her, and dust covered her in a fine mist from fabric clothes that had long ago deteriorated. If not for the dream feeding she would not have been able to rise.

Skeletal hands gripped the edges of the box, arms that were nearly bone pushed her up and she made it over the edge. Like a sentinel Samuel stood beside a bath, and the smell of blood hung intoxicating and fierce on the air. A clawfoot tub sat in the middle of the room, and above it suspended from hooks was a young girl, slashes at her wrists bleeding out as she moaned in the last throws of pain before unconsciousness would seize her. With the help of her servant she stepped into the bath, her body submerged in the thick stew of blood. There had been three others who filled this bath to get enough, and her power seemed to make it so that she could soak the sustenance through each pore of her body.

A boy was brought to her, eyes sleepy from drugs. He was laid out in the bath, pressed to the curves of her still withered body. Lovingly she clasped him to her, cradled like a child as she pushed engorged canines into the tight skin of his throat. For the first time in four hundred years she fed as she was made to, and her soul cried out triumphantly. In a burst of power that cry would travel out to the minds of anyone nearby, a cry to excite, to bring to a head passions forgotten. Too soon he was drained and another was brought. Then another. At last she could drink no more. The healing had begun, and soon. All too soon she would be herself once again, and the world would ache with desire at her whim. Those hiding in darkness would tremble, and she would draw the evil of the city to her. The councils bidding would be done, of yes, but she could twist the will of others to her purpose, and in the end she would make sure that they regretted letting her live.