Spinners draw webs from the air to entrap it, and embroiderers stab it with silver spell-blades. A herald shouts with the voice of an angel's trumpet, and strength surges through Helis' limbs as the wyrm staggers.

The horrifying twisting thing does succeed in making Helis afraid, in a way melee and pain never has - but they're surrounded and supported by people they trust and admire, even though they don't know most of them, because they've built a community that lets them rely on strangers. (One that has flaws and conflicts and pettiness and the occasional evil, of course it does, but this is not the time to think about those things.) This battle is what their kingdom is for, and they will not fail it.

And violent intent comes easily to Helis, in any case. It always has. Some part of Helis has always wanted something real to fight, and now it has that, and they're not going to stop until it's over.

After maybe a minute, or five minutes, or thirty seconds, the dreamwyrm loses cohesion with itself and collapses into fully inanimate muck, swirling away into the general substrate of the dreamrealm like a drop of ink being lost in a bathtub and then sucked away down the drain.

"And there's your first fight won!" says the King, battle-glee burning in his face. 

"May we have many more!" comes the instinctive answer, the sort of thing Helis can say sometimes, when everything feels too right for overthinking. They will remember this moment forever.

They were half expecting to collapse in shaky exhaustion after the battle, but the King's words are enough to ensure they don't, and they're not even sure there's any magic involved.

With fierce grins all around, their little band marches on. The pelican from earlier falls into step beside Helis and says, "Good job back there. Want to start learning how to find fast ground?"

"Thank you!" Helis grins. "I'm guessing this wasn't a bad one, but I think I can keep doing this." And the fact that this apparently counts as a good night's sleep will help.

"And yes, please. Also, ah, I know we've met before, but remind me of your name and title? I'm all right at stabbing things, but my memory is terrible."

"You're right, that wasn't a bad one, but most of them aren't. I'm Mistress Elvira, and don't worry about it. You'd think interacting as disembodied souls would help us all learn each other's faces but I'm afraid not." She makes the tossing-aside forget-about-it gesture.

"So, fast ground. It's basically what it sounds like; places to put your feet that let you get farther with each step. The only real way to learn is through practice, but it helps to know what to look for--and to have someone stopping you from getting lost while you focus on it. Link arms with me?"

"Not getting lost sounds great, thank you." They link arms and start looking more closely at the not-ground, in case it has some features they could figure out on their own. It probably doesn't.

It has colors and the colors move! Different bits of colour are different sizes and have different densities of swirlyness and intermix more or less with the bits to either side! 

"You want to look for the bits where the edge between two bits is soft and blurry instead of crisp, and sort of slide your foot through the blurriness into the next section and let the momentum build up. It's a bit like ice skating or rollerblading, if you've done that, except instead of pushing off with the back foot you let the front foot get pulled along. Eventually you'll be able to do it without thinking."

The colors are very pretty and fascinating to look at, Helis just does not trust this place to have a correspondence between color behaviors and other features that is at all intuitive.

Honestly it would be really fun to spend a week trying to figure out all the unintuitive dreamworld movement mechanics on their own, but unfortunately this would absolutely get them eaten by dreamwyrms, so instead they will have to attempt dream-skating with instructions. Which still sounds pretty fun, luckily!

Their first instinct is to try sliding their foot along a blurry edge between colors, and they only realize a second later that what Mistress Elvira said probably meant the other direction. Does this turn out to work anyway, or just not do anything, or cause some interesting third result?

Sliding along the blurry boundary rather than perpendicular to it results in: traction problems!

Exciting! Helis is physically coordinated enough not to fall over, but trying to do all this while holding on to another person sure results in some flailing. "Right, not this, the other thing, sorry. This place continues to work differently than my brain thinks it should."

"Mind if we hold hands or something instead? It'll be easier to figure out weird new movement options if I'm less, uh, attached." They're one of those people who hate having someone else help them keep their balance while doing a tricky thing, because that just adds more complications to the motion. And possibly because even despite the SCA they're still bad at trusting people on some basic level. "Not holding hands at all would be even better, if you think a couple minutes of that won't get me lost and eaten."

Elvira is, at least in the dreamrealm, one of those tiny old ladies it's impossible to unbalance either physically or emotionally. "Holding hands is fine, but you really do need someone preventing you from getting separated so you can focus on your feet."

It's a little unpleasant, feeling so tethered to someone they barely know, but Helis calls back the memory of the battle, of everyone being in this together, and manages to stop feeling uncomfortable about it. Mistress Elvira is being genuinely helpful, and knows what she's doing, and this is a good thing. (They can complain to Malcolm later about how much this feels like some sort of exercise about relying on people. Their therapist would have so much to say about it, if they could tell him.)

Holding hands does feel better. Helis locates another blurry edge, and slides their foot into-and-across it, and wow that's a weird feeling! They were prepared enough for something strange in that general direction that they don't end up off-balance much, but they don't know what to do with the extra momentum either. The second time they have better luck, and the third time they try multiple steps in a row, which makes the entire motion work much more naturally. (Wow, Elvira really is magically good at not getting in the way of all this sliding around. They mentally apologize to her for their slightly uncharitable attitude earlier.)

They stop and look around to see if anyone else is still visible or if the dreamrealm has disappeared them.

Elvira has kept her eyes on the royals the whole time while also keeping pace with Helis' variable speed without getting ahead or behind enough to tug on their hand, so everyone is right where they ought to be.

Elvira is so good at multitasking! Helis is not sure they'll ever be any good at that part, but they suppose stranger things have happened.

Having looked around, they pick a point at the far edge of the group, and try to slide in that specific direction instead of in a random walk, alternating looking at their goal and the dream-ground colors. Does this basically work? Are there enough blurry lines on the right path, or are they going to have to pick out a meandering route, and will they get entirely turned around if they try that? They're half-decent at sliding and not very good at keeping their eyes on things, but they manage not to have breaks longer than two or three seconds.

On second thought, possibly keeping their eyes on people doesn't matter because Elvira is doing it anyway? But the practice at moving in a specific direction still seems useful.

There aren't enough blurry lines to use them all the time; sometimes it's better to go out of their way a bit and sometimes it's better to take a non-accelerated step. They can get to the place they're going eventually and without much in the way of false starts, though it's slower than a similar maneuver would be in the waking world.

Except before they quite get to the spot in the formation they're aiming for, the whole left flank is attacked by a swarm of smaller dreamwyrms ranging from the size of leeches to the size of rattlesnakes.

The Queen impales three in a single flash of her rapier.

The space around the swarm shivers and splits; some dreamwyrms fall to pieces and others are slowed down as they navigate the rifts.

Some of Helis's battle instincts are very good - a wriggly thing shows up at the edge of their vision and they're swinging at it before they have time to think, the blade appearing in their hand as if it didn't need to be drawn. But these small dreamwyrms are hard to hit, for someone used to human opponents twice their size, and the thing Helis's battle instincts do about this is to use their half-practiced new movement skill to chase into the thick of the swarm, where there's enough of the horrible little creatures that every slash cuts a few in half. This is perhaps less good, when they were separated from the formation to begin with.