A Nightmare-Slayer is a lean figure in dark, close-fitting clothes stitched from what it has killed: plates of nightmare hide, a cloak of black web, a necklace of fangs. Its face is calm, the only calm face in the Nexus, and its eyes are very clear. Its weapons are odd and plain, a hooked blade, a staff, a length of chain, and in its hands they bite into nightmare flesh as nothing else does. It moves quickly and quietly, unhurried by the zone’s flickering light. Around it, the whispers of the Nexus fall away.

They are found where the Nexus is thickest with Nightmares. They are rare, and they come and go as the ephemeral zone does.

Nightmare-Slayers are focused, wary, and often grim. They follow fear to where it is strongest, because that is where the prey is, and so they are often near a terrified traveller without being there for the traveller’s sake. Some will guide a dreamer to lucidity; many will not stop to. They speak little and lucidly, which in the Nexus is itself a help.

They hold lucidity where almost no one can, so they can wound and kill what the Nexus makes, and they draw strength from the fear of the Nightmares they slay rather than giving their own.

No one has seen a Nightmare-Slayer come into being; they are simply there wherever a Nexus has formed. Where they go when a Nexus fades is not known.

A frightened traveller who keeps close to a Nightmare-Slayer has a better chance of waking. Those who come into the Nexus on purpose to test their will hope to learn their way. They are dangerous only to Nightmares, and to those who stand between them and their prey.

Townsfolk who have shared one terrible dream tell of a dark hunter who walked through it and killed what chased them, and some leave a blade under the pillow for the hunter to borrow. The Nightmare-Slayers need no one’s blade.

A tale is told of a besieged town where the whole garrison dreamed the same night of the enemy’s sorcerer as a beast, and woke to find the sorcerer dead in his tent with no mark on him.