+ Reader beware, this post contains some TPM spoiler elements.

It was night in the dream and it was raining heavily outside. We ... me and a few other children that I must have known somehow ( I don't remember how many) were in room, a study of sorts. I recall 18th century decor and some other eccentric and abstract objects and works of art. And we were waiting for someone very important to us, to this place, a man named Jakobius Cromweld. He owned this place ... the Tower ... the Tower of the Great Few it was called; a 25 storey,  Gothic building that was 150 years old.

One of the children, a boy younger than I was, was very close to me ( an early iteration of Jerod, I think). I asked him what was happening and he explained that some of the children had snuck into the basement of the tower and accidentally awoken and freed an evil spirit that Jakobius Cromweld's ancestors had sealed and imprisoned beneath the Tower's foundations. Jakobius and some of his guards had gone down to the basement to rescue the children and seal the spirit once more.

Then suddenly, as the boy was explaining what was happening, a guard (an early iteration of Sebastian) stormed into the study, yelling and telling us to follow him. Jakobius and the other guards had failed to seal the spirit. The Children that had snuck into the basement had been killed along with some of the guards and Jakobius himself had been captured by the spirit.

The Tower suddenly went into some sort of lock-down mode, and all exits were completely closed off. the guard told us that this was the spirits doing. We had no choice but to use the spiral staircase all the way down to the ground floor.

But on these stairs, someway down the floors we encountered the spirit itself; which was a floating red mask with wisps of smoke trailing behind it. Suddenly the entire spiral staircase begun to shake violently and many sharp and rusted blades begun to pop-up from the steps, stabbing and killing the guard and some of the children. We were forced to run into a nearby room where a glowing white orb rolled onto the floor in front of us and, kinda like that game board from Jumanji, it displayed a kind of riddle that we had to solve within a limited time in order to leave the room alive. We weren't able to workout the riddle in time and some form the spirit appeared in the room and killed one of the kids (whose name was displayed on orb) before letting us leave.

We ran out of that room into another, the orb following after us, displaying yet another riddle which we couldn't solve. Another form of the spirit appeared and killed another kid just like before.

I don't remember too well but after several more failed attempts at trying to solve the orb's riddles and a few more deaths ( Oh, yeah ... and a failed attempt to destroy the orb itself ), we devised a plan to use secret rooms, passageways and staircases hidden throughout the tower to make it to the ground floor.

The last three of us successfully made it to the entrance of the tower but were unable to leave through it because of the lock down mechanism. This forced us to go down to the basement where the controls were located. In the basement we discovered, to our shock, that Jakobius was in fact the one whom had 'partially' released the spirit through a blood ritual which would only be completed when all the children, including me, had been killed. Once the spirit was completely released, Jacobius planned to use its evil power to ... meh - I don't remember ...

Anyway, the three of us fought him and though the other two were killed (my close friend actually sacrificed himself to save me), I managed to defeat but not kill Jakobius, start an out of control fire and release the lock-down which allowed me to leave the burning tower.

As I ran across the grounds of the Tower and fled into the nearby woods ...  then I woke up abruptly and I felt this sharp pain on the left side my ribcage, then in my heart ... And for a moment I thought that I'd somehow brought the evil spirit back with me from the dream and into reality.

I sat bolt upright, grabbed a pen and paper and violently scribbled the details of the dream onto the page. Early details of what would become my debut novel ...

TBC