Sleep-Drinkers
No one wakes from the Lucid Wastes, but a traveller worn out by fear can still sink, for a while, into a dark and dreamless rest inside the dream, where the Wastes have nothing to shape. Sleep-Drinkers feed on that rest. A traveller they have drunk from gets up no calmer than they lay down, and the next fear comes on stronger.
Appearance
A Sleep-Drinker is the height of a tall man when it stands, which it rarely does. It crouches, long arms folded, on legs that bend the wrong way, and its body is the bleached grey of the Wastes' sand, thin as a heron's. Its head is small and smooth, with no eyes, only a wide, soft mouth like a leech's that it lays against the brow of a sleeper. It makes no sound. It does not smell of anything, and travellers learn to fear the moment the Wastes' smell of burnt hair and blood goes faint, because that is when one is near.
Habitat and Range
They wait in the lee of the dunes and in the long shadows of the black spires, wherever a traveller is likely to stop and rest. They are not many, but they gather towards anyone who has been in the Wastes for days.
Behaviour and Temperament
They are patient and wholly without malice, as a leech is. They come only to the resting; a traveller who is awake and moving is never touched. One finds a sleeper, folds itself over them, and drinks until the rest is gone, then slips away before they stir. It does not shape itself to the traveller’s fears, as the Night-Markers do; it seems to be the same for every traveller.
Abilities
It drinks rest. The sleeper does not wake, and nothing is felt but a weight on the brow and, after, an exhaustion that does not lift. A mind drunk from again and again has no respite from the Law of Dread, spirals faster, and joins the Lost Dreamers within days. A Lucid Walker who has mastered fear, and can wake enough to see one, can drive it off by willing the ground beneath it into something it cannot stand on.
Life Cycle
Nothing is known of how they begin. Some travellers say a Sleep-Drinker is the shape a long-dead dreamer’s exhaustion took, but that is a guess.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing. Parties in the Wastes rest by turns, and the one awake keeps a hand on the sleeper and watches the sand for a grey shape that does not move. Those who come home after being drunk from often suffer Dream-Sickness, and some never rest well again.
Lore and Belief
On the Material Plane they have become a nursery fear: children who will not sleep are told the grey thing will come and drink their sleep up. Those who have walked the Wastes say the tale has it backwards, since the Drinker comes only to those who sleep.
Those who come back from the Wastes say the one who fights the Drinker must do it asleep, and they name a dream-guide who did, and won, and never slept well again.