The Night, The Stars, The ... Banquet Table?

You know those series which end with a terrifying final confrontation somewhere, and the protagonist is led to some location where the conflict will take place - like Agent Cooper going to the location where the entrance of the Black Lodge is in Twin Peaks, the room where Number Six meets Number One in The Prisoner, the frustrating confrontation between Neo and Colonel Sanders in the second Matrix movie and so on?

This was the dream I had this morning. I'd been chasing down someone who'd been responsible for an unspeakable atrocity in the Arndale Centre. I know, it's the Arndale Centre, who'd notice an atrocity in the middle of an atrocity, right? But this was different.

Someone had gone and cloned my grimoire. Plugged in the flash drive, cloned the contents. Every document, every working, all the pied piper files. And they'd played the track I call Pan Pipes over the tannoy. Lust and fear in equal measure. They were still cleaning up the bloody, humping, rutting mess. Last I heard, the tacticals had had to go in with fire extinguishers and tasers because they could not get the water cannons indoors. And of course, nobody had warned them about the Pan Pipes, so it all looked like one ongoing fustercluck.

I'd fought through all the acolytes that the thief had thrown at me - I can do a little digging, and I knew they all had a backdoor behaviour modification trigger, similar to "Eta kuram na smekh!," which sent them all to sleep, so I had used it. And all that remained for me was to walk over their unconscious naked bodies and enter the open doorway, which did not have a door so much as a red velvet curtain, to see what lay beyond. To enter the belly of the beast. To beard the monster in its den at last.

And what I saw inside was this:-

An empty landscape, far from everywhere.

The Milky Way arching overhead.

And before me, a massive banquet table, laid out for a feast.

At the head of the table, where the Boss Villain was supposed to be sitting in a high backed chair or throne, there was ... a full length mirror.

And then the alarm went off.