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used-tissue · 27 days

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CONTENT WARNING: DARK / MATURE THEMES AHEAD!

☆this Dreamtale AU contains themes of time-period-typical homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny; murder/public execution; child labour; cult activity, themes of religion and catholic imagery; mass illness; child death (not either the twins); and semi-graphic mentions of multiple forms of child abuse including grooming, both physical & sexual abuse, and severe neglect.

☆viewer discretion is advised. Please do not read if you are sensitive to any of these topics. (Also, this post will be a little long! Bear with me, please.)

The Apuldor Psalter is a Dreamtale AU (or, well… rewrite would be more accurate) set in medieval (early tudor era, technically, but close enough) england. the twins were "born"/created by Nim in the year 1511 and the incident takes place in 1523, as I am going off the whole "the incident took place 500 years ago" thing Joku said.

It's not entirely historically accurate (in part because of the fact that magic skeletons didn't exactly exist back in 1523, and also i am only half-assing any sort of historically-appropriate economic system—it's not that important to the plot but i am admittedly not putting in much effort there LOL) but I do like to think I did a good job on avoiding more major inaccuracies. (It should be said that I don't formally study the tudor era, at least not yet—I do plan to, possibly, but that's a big maybe and as of current I'm not a professional. just very autistic about medieval and renaissance history HAHA)

For the first four years of their life, before the villagers came, the twins were happy.

They lived almost like wild animals, with no rules and nobody in the world but the hills, the tree, and each other. They lived in a burrow underneath the tree filled with soft things like straw and feathers, and they stayed there at night and when it rained. They ate insects, berries, roots and mushrooms, and they played with each other for hours.

Nim, their mother and the first Guardian of Souls (not using "Guardian of Feelings" for this AU, though their abilities and duties are very similar haha) created them as she was dying with the innate abilities to speak, read, walk, talk, find food, and already have some sort of reasoning capability that would strengthen in time as they got older—if they were completely helpless like normal babies they would grow up no smarter than animals, even if they couldn't die, so they came out physically and mentally more like very young toddlers (think maybe 3-4??) with the communication capabilities of small (but slightly older) children and the survival instincts of… maybe some sort of minor predator? Probably foxes (idk man im not a biology sort of guy HAHA). But they didn't know anything else about the world around them, they had to figure that out for themselves.

(Also—Dream is a girl here, at least temporarily) (she discovers the wonders of being trans after the incident—more on that later) (she's biologically female both so that I can make the twins complete opposites—positivity and negativity, day and night, gold and silver, sun and moon, boy and girl—and so that i can dump medieval misogyny onto her, which—while being very different from 1800s-1950s “women belong in the kitchen blah blah” misogyny—is still misogyny and still something i want to explore)

Nim left behind journals that she had written in her centuries of loneliness before her death, and through them the twins gained some sort of understanding of the world around them, their duties, and who their mother was—and, despite having never really met her, they grew attached to her through reading what she wrote.

When the twins were four years old, everything changed very rapidly. A traveling village of farmers (The Village ™) arrived and, over the course of a year or so, set up a small village in the valley near the hill where the tree stood. At first they were alright, and Dream was eager to make friends with the people of the village, though Nightmare distrusted them.

the villagers were looking for a new place to settle and accidentally found the tree way out in the wilderness; believing (with the priest's—their leader's—encouragement) that the strange-looking tree on the highest hill was a sign from god that the area was blessed, they settled there. (The tree is also part of their local folktales for Reasons, the same way gnomes and fairies and stuff were part of real-life British isles folklore, but for the most part most people didn't actually believe they existed).

It took 2 extra years for the village to be fully constructed (it is very small and they have magic and I'm working with a very short timeline, bear with me lol. Speaking of timelines—the apple incident happens when the twins are twelve. Them being 6 years old like the way they are in canon felt WAY too young for the trauma to set in ((i cannot remember my best friend—or anything at all—from when i was six and i doubt dream and nightmare would remember each other)) and also too short a number for a semi-plausible coherent timeline, so i doubled it. They're 12, not too small but still babies 💔).

The village is a cult.

The villagers were travelling tudor farmers who would set up a small village in a particular place, farm there until it was no longer fertile (around 50-80 years), and then leave, over and over, rinse and repeat (this next bit is extremely simplified and also in small areas partially made up); the majority of villages and settlements in that time period were governed over by lords or minor nobility, but a few villages were run by the Church as an institution. Catholic monasteries would run about 7 or 8 villages at a time (all in different areas) by sending monks or priests to establish and lead them. The Village here was one of these villages, run by a priest from a monastic institution instead of a member of nobility. (Also—yes, the village is catholic,* as this is during the 1510s-20s and the Catholic Church didn't split until 1534. the village is catholic because catholicism was the norm for England at the time) (This also means the twins were raised catholic, or at least converted to catholicism at the tender age of four).

*(please note that I am not saying that Catholicism or Christianity—or any major religion, for that matter—is inherently a cult. I call the village a cult not because of their religion alone but because of the way they practice it and the consequences for deviating from the norm, the conditions and rules—both spoken and unspoken—in the village, how they treat their leader (the Priest) vs how they treat each other vs how they treat the twins vs how they treat “outsiders”, and several other factors. Contrary to the portrayal of cults in popular media, cults are often based around already-existing religions. This is one of them.)

The monastery that owns the village (which is like…. hundreds of kilometres away from the village's actual location) is pretty much the village’s only connection to the rest of the outside world because it's literally in the middle of nowhere lol. The monastery also is not that important and shows up literally never but it's there and is mentioned a few times and also is the whole reason the village exists so I thought it'd be worth mentioning ahaha

The village, being a cult, receives little to no information about the world outside the village. It's tiny (effectively worthless to the rest of the England) and in a secluded corner of the country surrounded by miles of treacherous terrain that's extremely difficult to get through, so nobody from the “outside” really bothers to visit it—the priest leading it is effectively the only communication between the “outside” (through the monastery) and the village through yearly trips to the “outside” after the festival of the Harvest.

At first the villagers weren't too bad—they were confused, reverent, and anxious about the twins all at once but they kinda left the tree and twins alone because planting crops so they don't die next winter was a bit higher on their priorities list. that is, until the village was completed and the village learnt more about the twins and what they represent.

Enter The Priest (I'm deliberately not giving any of the villagers names and giving them titles instead), leader of the village.

He controlled them, what they thought, what they said, what they did. He made the village see him as a messenger, a mouthpiece of god, and they accepted what he said as truth. He got rid of anyone who threatened that control (exhibit A: Neil the cat ((who was in canon Dreamtale too! surprise)) ((Joku just doesn't know how to maintain ocs in my personal opinion)) and his wife, more on them further down).

Dream made the mistake of telling him just what the twins were and what they represented. The priest saw, immediately, that he could use Dream's powers to his benefit, and use Dream and Nightmare to further control the village—and so he set to work making sure Nightmare, at the time six, was feared and hated, while Dream was quickly assimilated into the cult, adored and revered and used as a tool, simultaneously superior and inferior to the mortals. The villagers, on their part, weren't much better. Even without the priest's influence, they would have distrusted Nightmare and exploited Dream eventually—but with the priest there, the shift in attitude was much more immediate and severe.

At first, when the village was new and the twins were very young, the Priest gave Dream (and occasionally Nightmare, just for the principle of it) lots of sweets and praises and wooden toys etc, presenting himself as a charming and trustworthy man (this is grooming.), and Dream became very attached to him. She began to visit the village every single day to be around him and follow him around wherever he went and his public image was boosted significantly because of this—the village adored Dream and her joy and light. Nightmare also followed Dream around (to the displeasure of the entire village) so by proxy he had to be in the presence of the priest very often since Dream spent almost all her time at the church, cleaning, preparing for mass, praying, talking to the priest, etc etc.

Things got very bad very quickly.

The priest became physically abusive to Nightmare at the same time the village’s rumours about the child began to spread like wildfire. He took out all his anger on him (often in front of Dream). He had Dream do a lot more chores than she should’ve been doing for her age (both for him and for other people, under his supervision, as favours to further his public image) and yelled at her a lot when she was too tired to continue and at the same time he was actively grooming her (physical stuff starts happening around when she's seven) and still presenting himself as a trustworthy safe adult and making her believe he still loves her and Nightmare, and that of course all of this is normal (it was not). As the years passed, Nightmare ended up becoming bitter and cynical and scared of everything and Dream became more docile and demure and quiet, basically a husk of herself.

The village is a cult. Nightmare was ostracised from it and treated with aggression and hostility, while Dream was groomed into it by the priest and saw nothing wrong despite the pain it put her through. Dream trusted the village. Nightmare did not.

This version of Dreamtale is much darker than the original, primarily because of the villagers. The villagers were extremely cruel to both Dream and Nightmare, just in different ways. (The priest, who is—to me, at least—narratively the physical representation of the worst parts of the village as a whole, did most of the worst of it. However, the rest of the village wasn't much better—even the few nicer ones, except Neil the cat and his wife, Ruth, were held back from treating the twins with more than a shred of decency due to the influence of the priest and the cult. It's very easy to make good people do bad things.)

☆Neil the cat was one of the villagers who arrived with the village when the twins were four. Out of the village, Neil and his wife Ruth and their newborn Esther (the bible names are on purpose) were the only ones of the villagers who were actually like… decent to the twins and, for a period of time, functionally raised the twins along with their daughter, who grew into a mischievous toddler.

Dream and Nightmare got super attached to the cat family. Neil and his wife were the only (living) healthy adult figures they had and they loved them very much. The priest didn't really care much about what happened to Nightmare, who at nine was already figuring out that something was very wrong with the village, but he wanted to continue to emotionally isolate Dream from all other adults so he could continue to abuse / groom her / present himself as the only adult she can trust and Neil, a genuine trustworthy adult figure, obviously made this difficult for him.

The concept of abuse was different back in the tudor era, and Neil didn't know a lot of what was actually happening to the twins, but he still knew that the priest was not trustworthy from his own past experiences living in the village. Around the time when the twins were nine, Neil and Ruth both tried to get both twins to stop interacting with the priest, seeing the signs of their mental health deteriorating even though both children insisted nothing was wrong, and then Neil tried to convince them to leave the village with him and his wife to leave into the woods and go somewhere else where they'd be safe. (The twins didn't agree at first because of the tree and their Duties, but he… kinda sort of tricked them ? He told them it was just a short trip and promised they'd be brought back after a couple days. Which was obviously not great of him, but he was trying to rescue them).

The priest eventually found out about this and weeks before the trip, Neil's house "mysteriously" burnt down (a mob, encouraged by the priest, barricaded them inside and sets it alight) in the middle of the night with him and his wife and daughter inside.

The twins were distraught but neither of them actually figure out the priest killed him until they're adults. (They were asleep until the house was already well up in flames, but they came to the village as fast as they could where the priest and several members of the crowd “comforted” them. It was an extremely traumatic event for them.)

☆fast forward to another three years later—Dream and Nightmare are twelve, and though they don't know it, it's a few months before the Apple Incident.

(These are their designs for that timeframe!!)

☆some notes on their designs:

yes, i know this isn't exactly historically accurate! The cat family's clothing isn't either. However there is a plausible in-lore reason for this which will be elaborated on Later. The human villagers’ clothing, if they do come up, are more accurate to the early tudor era don't worry

Dream originally had a white cloak, and the black one was Nightmare's, but the priest burnt Dream's after a first (and last) failed attempt at rebellion—more on that later down

Nightmare is silver+blue-grey instead of purple, to match better with Dream being gold+yellow !! They're gold and silver!

Nightmare used to follow Dream to the village every day, and since Dream was in close proximity to the Priest and spent most of her time in the church, and Nightmare clung to Dream, this meant that for a very long while Nightmare was in close proximity to the Priest. At first Nightmare tried to make friends with the villagers and help Dream with the chores she did around the village, but as it became clearer the village's inhabitants didn't like him at all, he gave up. Once the priest's violence toward him got really bad (as in any worse and he'd end up dead bad), around age nine (just after Neil's death), he stopped going to the village with Dream altogether—he very rarely even left the tree. He begged Dream to stop going too, as he could not bear the thought of being away from her, but Dream was actively being groomed and was very attached to the Priest and the village in general (and also she knew that the consequences would be Bad if she suddenly stopped going to the village now that she was expected to.)

Under the Priest's influence on the villagers, as soon as he drew back from the village Nightmare was ostracised to the point where he couldn't safely return and seen as the culmination of all evil. The rumours got super out of hand. Some speculated he was the devil himself (it was the 1500s they blamed EVERYTHING on the devil) and whenever something went wrong it became commonplace to blame him—either behind his back, or to his face. The more fearful ones avoided him—avoided even saying his name—while the braver ones often approached the tree when something went wrong (like tool failure or the death of livestock) and, believing he caused it, demanded he reverse or “fix” it. When he obviously was unable to do that (and also refused to speak to them, both out of fear and hatred) they hurt him, both with their words (lots of yelling, threatening to harm or kill him) or with their actions (throwing things at him—mostly rocks—or occasionally physically hitting him.)

Only a few months after that, Dream tried to rebel against the priest for the first time because she was tired and hungry and cold, and in retaliation her cloak—basically her comfort object—was taken away and burnt. Nightmare ended up giving her his black one instead, though it took a lot of convincing. (She was so guilty and so ashamed.)

By the time of the Apple Incident, Nightmare had become fearful and anxious around anyone who wasn't Dream. He was skittish and startled by small movements or noises, and while he had—at this point—mostly avoided the priest and thus the worst of the beatings were over, he was almost always injured somewhere or another due to the other villagers. Nightmare hated the villagers, and the villagers hated him. Both parties' hatred was born of fear, but the determining factor in their relationship was with whom the power lay. But he also wished, more than anything, to be loved like he believed Dream was loved by them. If the village had somehow become full of kind, good people overnight, Nightmare genuinely would not have held a grudge against any of them anymore (except the priest.) so long as they loved and cared for him. He was just a little kid.

Eventually he began to believe there was something wrong with him—he was unwanted, and in his head that must be because he isn't capable of being wanted. He was unloved, and to him that must mean he isn't capable of being loveable. He believed, wholeheartedly, that it was in his nature to be an evil "demon," even if that wasn't at all who or what he wanted to be. He believed he was an awful person simply for being born, that he ruined everything he touched, that he did nothing but bring pain and hurt without meaning to. (Most of all his biggest fear was that he would "corrupt" and "ruin" and hurt Dream, the one person who he truly felt safe around, the person he loved more than anything. The village told him he would, and he was terrified of it happening. And, ironically, during the Apple Incident it did.) He tried his best to be good, to be kind and sweet and perfect like Dream was, but in the end it was never enough for the village to love him.

He also began to grow jealous of Dream, and that made him feel worse; he still loved her with all his heart, and he didn't resent her at all, but in a way he began to resent everything she represented, and he resented the way Dream was loved by the village (or so Nightmare believed, Dream wasn't having a fun time either) while Nightmare was despised.

Meanwhile Dream’s abuse, grooming and conditioning had gotten extremely bad by the time of the Incident. She was, effectively, brainwashed and spent most of her time in the church helping to clean/maintain/prepare for mass/participate in mass/eat/occasionally sleep; a lot of her life revolved around the priest or the church in some way. Church and Mass, over the years and under the Priest’s hand, eventually shifted into elaborate pseudo-catholic (and often traumatising or disturbing) rituals centering Dream. The village worshipped her.

In her free time she (under the priest's supervision) helped the villagers out (she wasn't allowed to say no), whether that meant doing chores or running errands for them, being a therapist at the age of like… eleven, doing farm work, taking care of children younger than her, or praying for / being prayed to by members of the village. Eventually it went from her visiting the village every day of her own free will to make friends and lend a helping hand, to her being forced to go to the village and leave Nightmare all alone, work, and only go back home very late at night—sometimes she didn't even return and slept in the churchhouse overnight. The grooming and abuse perpetrated by the priest was perhaps the most damaging of what the village had done to her, and by the time of the incident the village and priest had completely ruined how she saw herself and she'd become a husk of the carefree person she used to be. She was completely under the village’s control.

By the time the Apple Incident occurred, the village had made Dream docile, overly respectful, and anxious to please everyone, with an intense fear of failure or being perceived as disobedient, and a tendency to hide anything negative—the villagers didn't like when she "went against her nature" as the Guardian of Positivity and expressed anything like anger or sadness (or god forbid cried. Ever).

All the while Dream still adored the village, believing its people (and especially the Priest) to genuinely care for her and know what was best. She was naive (but really it wasn't naivety, not truly—she was conditioned and punished for not complying, and who could blame a child for giving their love to the wrong people when all they wanted was to be loved in return?)

All in all the twins were not having a good time.

The villagers' treatment of the twins had lasting damage on both of them, even after the village was long destroyed. Both the twins (as adults) suffer from C-PTSD and a whole host of other mental problems between the village's abuse, Neil's death, and the apple incident (which was extremely traumatising in itself).

The twins knew about most of the abuse (not all, though) that was going on with each other but they didn't know how wrong it was—they didn't know what abuse was. Dream knew the priest hurt Nightmare when he was angry (until Nightmare stopped coming to the village), and it was upsetting and distressing and she hated when it happened and tried to make him feel better when it did, but she didn't know just how bad it was until much, much after the Incident. Nightmare knew (from when he still visited the village) that Dream was scolded and yelled at for tiny little mistakes, and while it upset him that she was being yelled at and he felt very sad for her and tried to help her feel better, he still saw it as her “having it better” than him because, in his own experience, while being yelled at was obviously terrifying for him he would have taken it over being physically beaten every single time. (Obviously this is a really bad mindset to have, there's no having it any “better” or “worse” when it comes to abuse, but again they were both very, very small and didn't know how bad it was.)

However they also had no idea about some of what was going on with each other. Dream knew the priest was more “mean” to Nightmare but she didn't know he literally just straight up hated him. She didn't know the rest of the village felt the same way either and she did not know the other villagers hurt Nightmare when she wasn't around. Nightmare didn't know Dream was being overworked (he thought she was doing chores around the village every day for fun, because she wanted to, and not because she was being forced or threatened to, and he wasn't aware of how much she worked every day) and he did not know she was being groomed or abused. Neither of them knew they were being raised in a cult, but Nightmare at least knew that something was very deeply wrong with the village.

Even so they still took care of each other, trying to help each other even if they didn't know the full story as to how their physical or emotional injuries happened. They each had to take turns being the "parent" for the other, depending on which of them needed taking care of more at any given time. They were each others’ lifeline.

They tried their best. Each of them were all the other had.

☆The Apple Incident in this happens a little bit differently.

Each year the village has a harvest festival toward the end of autumn. Their crop is extremely important to them as they need it to make sure they don't starve throughout the winter. The harvest festival is held every year in celebration of the harvest's completion and the completion of a full years' work and is very important both culturally and physically (they literally need it to survive) to the village.

Except in the autumn before the twins' 13th birthday, the plants became diseased. A sickness and famine fell over the village. Crops withered up and died and livestock fell extremely sick; those with weaker immune systems, like the elderly (side note: the whole “average age of death in the middle ages is 25” thing is a myth and it makes me so mad LOL) or very young children, got sick too. The village fell into a state of panic as people began to die.

Naturally, the villagers blamed Nightmare, like they'd been doing for years, and the Priest actively encouraged this. The village's hatred and fear of him had been building up for a long time and this perceived sin against them was their final straw, especially since there was a high chance many of the village's people would starve and die. Hatred mixed with the fear for one's survival mixed with the fact that they have practically nothing left to lose is a dangerous thing. Things rapidly spiraled out of control, the tree was cut down, and Nightmare (along with the silver apples and most of the tree's bark) was sentenced to be burnt at the stake.

…which, of course, went as well as you'd expect.

☆and uh. Yea. That's the first half of this AU (au? rewrite?? reboot…. thing). There's more (there's SO much more) but I obviously cannot put all the fine little worldbuilding details I've got in my head in the intro post, or we'd be here all day (the original version of this was MUCH longer—i had to start trimming because i was worried people wouldn’t read just a huge block of text LOL).

There is a main storyline (there is SO much more to the apple incident especially) and a few side stories i’ve got planned out, but the main focus I have is worldbuilding—to make Dreamtale feel like a real place that people lived in (even though obviously magic skeletons and trees are impossible—that's not the point!! The point is that places feel so much more immersible when you put a lot of thought into them and expand on things and figure out tiny little details. There is an entire world inside my head that has been here for three years and counting now. I am not exaggerating). (That's not even mentioning the second post-incident half of this AU, which I have ALSO thought a lot about, which is the typical Star Sanses vs Nightmare's companions thing ft the omega timeline and the rest of the multiverse except Mara Edition. That will come later, I promise.)

(also! if you're thinking “hey, this sounds weirdly similar to another AU i saw a while back, just with a couple changes and more elaboration and a different name,” that's because I originally released this on my old account a long time ago. There's been a lot of polishing and several changes made since then.)

☆feel free to send me asks about this! I'll do my best to answer em :] i love talking about this au so much ahaha

☆also, i have a discord server (i'm more active there than on tumblr)! join for exclusive secret Lore, camaraderie, and The Horrors (please be at least 16 before joining though! thank you!)

☆and uhhhh yea the apuldor psalter aka dreamtale: mara edition 👍

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