I dreamed I was working with Fox Mulder on a case that looked like possession. Ordinary people would suddenly form a pack to do horrible things to others, then eventually turn on each other, and even themselves. In a trance I watched from within one of the possessed. I couldn't feel an additional presence, only the man's own horror at what he was doing as he helped his pack tear a woman limb from limb with their bare hands, and finally his utter terror as against his will he broke the window of the office building they were in and leaped out from the 34th floor. I was with him as he fell to his death.
Mulder and I located the office building and went to investigate the scene. The conference room we investigated was full of light and had an amazing view, but was in chaos, littered with overturned furniture and broken glass, and spattered with blood. Mulder went to the window to look out, then shouted to me to follow him, and we ran out of the room. As he had looked down, he had witnessed an attack. He said it had something to do with a young woman picking up a necklace.
By the time we got to the new crime scene, everyone had scattered, but Mulder traced the girl to a local university. We caught up with her and four other students in a dorm room. They were deciding how best to destroy the building. They turned to attack us, but Mulder tore a necklace off the neck of the blonde girl he'd seen downtown, and threw it out the window. Suddenly, the five students came to themselves, afraid and confused.
It turned out the necklace itself was possessed and cursed. It would infect people and take over their wills in a very specific way. It was perfectly safe to handle, until the person holding it was in a room with or within arm's reach of exactly four other people. If the person with the necklace touched one of those people, the magic in the necklace would be triggered, and the five people would become possessed.
Mulder and I collected the necklace from the bushes outside the dorm, and set off to transport it to a vault in the FBI buildings. We decided to walk, since that would give us the most control over our surroundings. I stayed behind him, out of arm's reach, and scanned the walkways ahead of and around us, making sure we avoided clusters of three or four people. Eventually this drove us to the edge of a river, with cold, slate-gray water roiling on one side, and the silver ghosts of a dead forest on the other, under a dreary sky of clouds.
Up ahead, I caught sight of a group of travelers in dark cloaks. There were a man, an elf, and four hobbits. This gave me an idea. I called out to them, and they paused, waiting for us to catch them up. I explained our situation, and how traveling close to their group would help keep things safe, and they allowed us to join them.
As we trekked down river, they refused to tell us where they were going, or why they were traveling together, but they spoke of a powerful king whom they expected to join them soon. They thought maybe he would know how to nullify the evil magic of the necklace. They warned us that he was watching over their party from far away, until he was free to join them, so if we did them any harm, he would see and punish us.
We had many adventures, and became friends in a week or so. I decided that once Mulder had the necklace secure, I would join their company and help them on their secret quest, even if they never told me what it was. Then, one day, as we were deciding if we should set up camp early, arrows came at us from all directions out of the forest. Mulder and the four hobbits were driven off to one side, and Mulder was about to stumble right into the nearest hobbit. I could see the fear on his face at the knowledge that the evil magic was about to overtake him, when a tall, strong man with long dark hair streaked with silver appeared out of nowhere, reached out, and prevented Mulder's fall. The hail of arrows ceased, and we could hear the sound of our hidden foes scuttling away through the dry undergrowth.
Our fellow travelers all fell to their knees as the newcomer lead Mulder and the hobbits back to our group. This was their king, of course, and his magic had stricken our enemies with fear and cloaked us from their sight as soon as he'd arrived. The other man in the party turned to Mulder and I with distrust, and voiced his suspicions that we had let the enemy know where the party was, somehow. But the king assured them all that we weren't spies or traitors. As he stood with us, the forest filled with golden sunlight, and began to leaf and bloom. He plucked a brilliant orange bud from a flowering vine, caught a hummingbird out of the air, and fashioned them into a living ring, which he placed on my finger as a token of his friendship with us. He took the evil necklace, glistening richly with fine gold chain and subtle gems in the glimmering light. He crushed it in his hand, and the light went out of it. The necklace crumbled to dust beneath our feet.
The king then reminded me that it was time I got back home, because the school year would be starting up again in a few days. I hurried home after that, and found my friends and my little sister looking for the official calendars for our school start times, and trying to make pies by flattening the crust in a pasta roller. They had enough crust for the three pies, but one guy had taken some of it to build steps for his gingerbread replica of our school, and another had tried to line three pie dishes with uneven strips, running them in circles around the edges of the pie plate, then trying to cover the centers of the pans with more scraps. It was a mess.
I gathered all the scattered bits of pie crust, kneaded them all back into a ball, divided that into three balls, and began to roll them out. We were almost ready to put pie crusts into three pie pans when I woke up.
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