There were expectations, just as there were hopes, one could anticipate when they closed their eyes for the night and were ushered off to sleep. They expected, if not hoped, to get a peaceful night sleep when there might have been any number of outside factors to change it. They expected, if not hoped, everything would be in its place when they awoke, no ghosts or rodents or other natural vermin stowing away in the night to ransack the pantry or make a general mess of the garbage; and expected, and certainly hoped, that they would open their eyes to the same surroundings they had fallen asleep in. All were reasonable and customary with their variance here and there depending on the circumstances - not everyone had rodents after all and some people could fall asleep standing up if permitting - but even though he knew he had fallen asleep to the dim lighting of the guesthouse, rented accommodations for the time he was spending in Seoul over the holiday weekend, the old world build of the household wasn’t what he had woken up to.

With a pillow of grass behind his head, lush foliage providing the duvet he had covered himself up with, walls had ceased to exist around him as the landscape stretched far beyond the horizon with an untold, unconfirmed, familiarity that rested somewhere in the deep pockets of his mind. The soil underneath his body was rich, well-tended by the ecosystem it lied within, providing life to the very wilderness that seemed an amalgam of genera as far as his eye could see. It was peculiar, he had to admit - not only the expansive array of fauna and flora that shared this would-be paradise, but how he had found himself there in the first place with such little familiarity. His hand brushed over the grasses for a second, senses playing an observational take for the moment, until something seemed to slipstream across the wind and into his ears, punctuated with the rumble of something within the soil beneath him.

Idyllic as it seemed, there was something foul afoot, carried in the flecks of ash on the wind that only grew in frequency, towering plumes of smoke rising above the tree line as creatures of uncertain origins - certainly not of the Earth he knew - fled from such striking disaster. Their cries of panic mixed with those from afar, voices heard through the wake of the wind as it blew heavy across the open expanse and beckoned forth curiosity that, in this supposed dreamscape, Henry found difficult to ignore. They pulled at him like memories from afar, drawing him in like a moth to the flames of destruction that weighed heavily enough in emotion to destroy anything that stood in its way; and when he had cleared the brush of foliage that stood between him and the inner reaches of this foreign place, Henry’s eyes widened with the scene that was quick to unfold in front of him.

It was a variable menagerie of nightmares dotting a landscape pockmarked by flame, a symphony of destruction unfolding in a choir of screaming and shouting, the low bass of roaring fires and percussion found in the rumbling of an Earth who found no pleasure in those which drilled beneath it’s skin. The high tap of arachnid feet was met with the sharp rasp of their spinnerets, ever-churning and ever-twisting, wrapping up those victims who thought foolishly that the law of large numbers wouldn’t apply when they attempted to step up against the swarm. Crescendo was found in the crash of a large tree affixed to the center, collapsing within itself as an aria made itself heard in the center of such madness, one voice that seemed to silence the landscape completely though Henry could see it still the chaos unfold with his own two eyes.

“How unfortunate for you to find yourself in this place again… though I suppose that is no fault of your own…” There seemed no source for the disembodied voices that spoke to him even as Henry south it out in one direction then another, listening for any indication of where it might have been coming from amiss the bedlam. When it seemed to formulate a direction, growing louder he took that path with care to avoid everything that was going on around him, jumping out of the way of the scourge of creatures on the assault, evading the crushing blow of someone’s fist that wasn’t aimed at him so much as he found himself in the way.

“Everyone has a dark place,” the voice continued, an intrusive scratch like a nail against the back of his head, drawing along the neurological paths of his brain from the crown of his skull. It was an itch that couldn’t be scratched, an itch that he expected to rip and tear as it continued, Henry stopping now and then to try and stretch the feeling out of his neck and shoulders.

“And what you fill it with is your own nightmare…” As if on cue, the rumbling of the earth beneath his feet ceased to be and the soft soil of the landscape turned rigid, cast in a hard stone that shone dark against the red contrast of the crystalline walls around him that jutted towards the sky. A cold air settled in this place where once the warmth of the sun outside had once been, settling into his skin with a sense of unfamiliarity. It hadn’t been the same as that dark dimension wherein Henry had found some twisted means of quiet comfort, foreboding as if there was something right around the corner that he knew to fear - perhaps for good reason; but through the twisting and winding of the crystal corridors Henry continued, listening to the voice - a guide, he supposed, on this journey through parts unknown - on the other end as it grew louder and louder, all but reverberating off the corridors around him.

But to where?

A hallway of doors was nothing he was unfamiliar with, a trite but true element of horror that beckoned curiosity as much as it did bore suspense, Henry spying each of them as the corridor opened up before him. From the vintage art deco design of the elevator doors he recognized easily enough as Sir Reginald Hargreeve’s Televator to the front door of Arcana, the magic shop he had taken up employment at, there were plenty that stuck out to Henry as he passed them. They were memories, facets of his mind that had stored away those things he felt he needed to hold into, if not compartmentalize: A door wearing a creep of black, flies of an ungodly source taking flight from within; one well worn and dried, an arid wind of dust and death gusting from the gap beneath; and a third, charred and embered, cracks burning red with the fires of Limbo as the wood continued to ember with no end in sight. Opening any one of them in this dream could have unleashed a nightmare, but none of them contained that voice he had been attempting to find.

None except the dark and dismal one at the end, nothing of any substantial recognition present except for the fount of darkness it seemed to be made from.

“Know this…” The voice whispered, ushering him close against the darkness that could have just as well been a void just as it could have been another in a long line of doors. Curiosity enticed enough, he did just that, leaning in and turning his ear to the supposed panel.

"Everything is Sinister!” Loudly, the words boomed, Henry throwing himself back away from the door with a scream as it seemed to reach out to him with a malleable black tar and, in turn, launched himself up from the tatami mat that had made up the bed in the guesthouse room, his voice carrying until he recognize the surrounds as those he expected: A quiet guesthouse room, the dark of night outside in the city, and a housekeeper knocking almost furiously on the door within moments of the rude interruption to a quiet evening.