faderift | OPEN ↠ FALSE GODS, GREAT DEMONS (OPEN LOG 1)

OPEN ↠ FALSE GODS, GREAT DEMONS (OPEN LOG 1)

WHO: Living Residents of the Horrible Future
WHAT: Ah ha ha ha stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
WHEN: ALTERNATE FUTURE, 1-15 Cloudreach 9:48
WHERE: Anywhere, but especially Orzammar
NOTES: This is the first open log for False Gods, Great Demons. Anything that happened prior to Cloudreach 9:48 should go on the flashback meme. Most members of the TTT and their friends in Kirkwall will be arriving in Orzammar on approximately Cloudreach 7. In the meantime, feel free to make your own adventures. If you want to blow up an bridge, assassinate an NPC of your own invention, steal supplies, or anything else--it's all yours, go for it!

SOUTHERN THEDAS is a wasteland. The Blight crawling across the Orleian countryside and into Ferelden leaves nothing alive in its wake, scarring the land like an insatiable fire until no birds sing and the only things that grows is the Red Lyrium that speckles cliff sides and crawls up dying trees until they look like rows of jagged bloody teeth. And where it's still green, where people can still survive, the atmosphere is nearly as stifling. Every city and settlement is watched over by a Venatori or trustworthy collaborator. Those who don't keep their heads down and their dissent a whisper may vanish without warning. They may take their whole families with them. There are flashes of hope--an assassinated lordling here, a village rousing itself to brief and doomed rebellion there--but for every man the Imperium loses, they seem to find two to take his place.

NORTHERN THEDAS is at war. The worst of it doesn't reach west into Tevinter or the Anderfels; the line between the Qunari and the Imperium is drawn straight through Antiva, with Nevarra and Rivain on either side quiet and calm as only lands under martial law can be. The Free Marches vary between complacency and rebellion, but the rebellious ones risk ruin--there are murmurs it won't be long before a whole city is made an example. A steady stream of desperate refugees is fleeing north to the Qun, but plenty are picked off and punished as traitors before they can cross into Qunari-controlled territory. Your best best for a clean escape are the pirates who still hold Llomerynn free from both sides of the conflict.

ORZAMMAR is the only kingdom in Thedas that looks much the same--and Kal-Sharok, but they're not accepting outsiders. The heavy doors at Orzammar's entrance are sealed and guarded, as much against the steady flow of refugees asking for help as against the Venatori. The refugees are turned away. There's no way to know who can be trusted, and even if there were, there's not food enough for people who can't fight. Orzammar Thaig is still the dwarves' home--though with stealing shrinking numbers and poor prospects, King Bhelen has been amenable to allowing casteless surfacers some leeway--but the once-abandoned Ortan Thaig is the Inquisition's. Quietly. The only things stopping a full assault on Orzammar is the Venatori's need for dwarf-mined lyrium and the plausible deniability that the Inquisition's remaining rebel bands are using the Deep Roads with Bhelen's consent.

An hour's walk through caves and deepstalker swarms, Ortan is a city in its own right. A crammed city, one where cots and bunk beds crammed into shared housing are the norm no matter how important someone is and you occasionally have to protect your dinner from a restless, swooping griffon, but one where you can still find a pint of ale or a game of cards if you've time to waste on them. It's just that not many people do. There's the watch to keep; the tunnels that creep further into the deep teem with darkspawn who are held back at barricades, while the hidden, narrow tunnels that lead to the surface are watched at all hours so anyone coming or going can be identified. There are weapons to forge and sharpen. Plans to make. Bands to lead. Maybe you weren't a leader five years ago, but these days, there aren't that many people with more than five years' experience still alive to give orders. Fewer every week.

And so we burned. We raised nations, we waged wars,
We dreamed up false gods, great demons
Who could cross the Veil into the waking world,
Turned our devotion upon them, and forgot you.
Threnodies 1:8

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The whole debacle over Nate's situation, and waiting for Anders to get back, is actually not immediately on Teren's mind as she makes her way through the market in search of some decent thread. She's still dealing with some of the emotional fallout from it, of course, but Anders is the last person she expects to see on her errand.
And yet, there he is.
She stops dead, staring at him with a very uncharacteristic air of nervousness. Should she blend back into the crowd, make him believe he's seeing things? No... as surely as she can recognize him, she's certain he'll recognize her. Teren, after all, looks exactly as she did the last time any of them saw her.

She does, at least, go stock still. If he notices her, fine, she'll deal with it. If not... no harm done. Or perhaps lots, but later.

It's the stock-stillness that really catches his attention. People moving around is usual. Someone freezing? Anders looks over and blinks, surprised, before glancing back toward the direction he'd been heading in. He needs to go check on Nate, but at the same time it's literally been years since he's seen Teren. Of course, maybe she doesn't want to talk with him. Things had been a little awkward before the vanishing, and all he knows is that several who had vanished have returned.

Anders frowns in the direction of his house before heading over to Teren. He'll be there shortly. She's freezing, which means if he doesn't say hi now she'll probably bolt and he'll not see her again for five more years.

"Teren." A beat. "I'd say you're back but that's... rather obvious. Hello. You're... Are you doing all right?"

"Yes. Erm. Hello."

Teren has never felt this awkward in her life, but here she is, looking down at Anders, who has no idea, and... she can only pray that somehow this will remain the case, even if he finds out here. Maybe they'll get back to the right time. ...maybe not.
Maker, she hopes so.

"Yourself?" She's trying to be cool and gruff, the way she generally is, but even she can't entirely keep a handle on things as they are right now. Not when Anders supposedly hasn't seen her for five years, and is about to discover this particular piece of news.

She seems a little uncomfortable, which... Well. Before her errand and getting stabbed, he would have called that unusual aside from when he was trying to heal her, but now? Maybe this was just her natural state when she doesn't have a wall up.

"I'm..." stressed, tired, worried, guilty, weak, but those are always true, "managing. It's been a trying time, of late. Would you like to walk to where I'm staying with me? I need to, to check in on Nate." And Maker, how she's going to look down on him when she finds out what's going on there. It's not like he can do any differently, though.

On the one hand, no, she absolutely does not. She has never wanted to do anything less than she wants to walk with Anders to his now Nateless domicile.
But on the other hand, she has been slowly developing some kind of horrible affliction that makes her uneasy at the thought of people she likes being upset. He'll probably yell and cry, and she can either be there with him to field it, or make him do it alone and go on to whatever dramatics might follow.
She couldn't stand Nate, and this whole situation has shaken her to the core: she just helped dispose of the decrepit body of a man who shouted her down only a few days ago.
And this isn't the real Anders. But he's real enough, and currently the only one she has.

"...all right," she concedes, trying at coolness. Teren is good at pretending everything is fine, or at least typical; which is to say, she excels at lying, but even deception requires a baseline of truth. She has no idea what that is right now, so even her smallest misdirections are off-kilter.

He gives her a slightly stressed, rather shamed smile. She's not going to approve of what she sees. No one does, and if he had the strength he'd not... but that's a path of thought he's trod over and over and it doesn't need to be repeated more. Anders leads the way up the path, silent until they're nearly there.

"He's... He's not that well," he says quietly. "That's why the house is apart from the others. He's been hearing the Calling." The look he gives her is guilty and pained. He knows how weak he is, knows he's put it on display, and can't find the desire or strength to do differently.

"Nate?" He calls it out as he opens the door. The smell... It's not as bad as he'd feared. Maybe Nate hasn't gotten worse. He feels a moment of relief until he realizes there's no response. And he doesn't see anyone. At all. His skin suddenly feels too tight as he strides in, looking around, checking the other side of the bed. Nate's not here. Nate isn't...

Anders' breathing speeds up as he looks around again, as if Nate was somehow good at hiding in the corners of their one-room house.

"The-the walls. Sometimes he, if he's..." His gaze darts toward Teren and then he's rushing, pushing past her as he tries to find any explanation, no matter how ridiculous, that isn't what he fears every single time he comes home. The babbling words rush out of him as quickly as his thoughts whirl, as quick as he sets the pace. "He could be on the walls, there are Wardens there, they know, he, he could be there. They're good, they're not with civilians, so they're good. Good for him. Because it's good." Nate will be there. Nate's always been there.

And thus it begins.
Teren just weathers it at first, allowing Anders to push past her, holding her tongue-- but then he becomes more worked up, starts talking about walls, and she knows there's only one way this is going to go.
"Anders," she says levelly, hoping to still him, or at least get his attention.

Teren's voice startles him. He'd not forgotten she was there, not exactly, but he'd been getting into his own head. Now he looks at her like an apostate just found by a squad of Templars, afraid and at a loss.

"I'm sorry. I just need, I need to find him. He can't have gone far." But if he has, if he's turned and he's hurt people because Anders hadn't been able to part from Nate, Anders has as good as hurt them with his own hands, and hurt Nate too. "You don't have to... It's my mess. I'll find him."

The last is more prayer than anything else, and it's one of the first he's said in so very long.

"Anders," Teren says again, more urgently, and she puts her hand on his shoulder. He shouldn't go bolting off looking for his husband.
"He's gone," she says, her tone at least somewhat more gentle than usual. "He's dead."

The hand on his shoulder stops his feet; the words stop his mind. Anders stares at Teren blankly, not processing what he's heard. Not wanting to process what he's heard.

But then it clicks and it feels like an ogre's slammed him in the chest.

"No," he says, as if she might be joking, or if it might be able to turn it around if he denies it. "No, no, you're..." But no one would joke about that. He'd been gone when Nate passed. In his last minutes, Anders hadn't been there for him. Nate had stayed for so long and Anders had abandoned him, failed him yet again. He sinks down to the ground because his knees aren't strong enough and he can't get enough air, can't even see. Everyone. Everyone who he's loved he's betrayed and failed, and Nate is gone.

"I didn't, I didn't get to say goodbye." He looks up at Teren as if that can change things somehow, bring Nate back, anything.

Teren frowns, and stands there watching in dismay as Anders sinks to the floor. She's no good at this sort of thing, at comforting people; she'll tell them how things are, but has no panache about it.
Still, slowly, she lowers to a crouch beside him, watching him with a wariness most people reserve for an animal that might bite. "...there there," she says faintly, and reaches to rest her hand on his shoulder again. "He was already gone, Anders. He wanted to die."

He feels lost, and not just when it comes to what Teren's saying. Already gone? Wanted to die? But he'd died.

"I don't..." It's like she's saying he didn't simply succumb, and Anders frowns as he tries to figure that out despite the pain that's making his head a muddled mess. "What happened? What happened to Nate, Teren?"

That is, in essence, exactly what she's saying. And now Teren has reached a point where she has to either implicate Alistair, who isn't here to defend himself, or lie, or... find... something in between. Lying to someone who's grieving is about as low as one can go, especially when she has nothing to gain from withholding the truth.

"He was suffering," she says, a note of uncertainty creeping into her voice, "we helped him die." She wasn't actually present when he died, so it's half a fib, but pitting Anders against Alistair seems the worst possible approach in an already shit situation. She has a good enough idea of how it was done, and she knows where the body is, which is all that matters at the moment.
Hopefully.

"Helped him--" He breaks off as it all becomes crystal clear, and Anders jerks away from Teren's touch, fury blending in with the grief.

"You killed him. You killed him, murdered him, because you what? You deemed it was his time? You thought you'd help? You come back after being gone for this long and think it's fine to judge matters? You killed my husband." And she did it while he was gone. When he couldn't protect Nate, when he'd trusted the Wardens. His hands ball into fists; he can barely breathe.

"You've betrayed me for the last time." It's the most hurtful thing he can think of to say. "You came back and you took his life. I can't... And then you let me search my house! You knew, you killed him, and you let me look and..." He can't finish the thought, getting too angry for even words to work. Nate is gone, because Teren decided he was suffering too much. He wishes she'd died instead of simply vanishing.

She winces, even hunching her shoulders a little, getting smaller; Teren had expected that he would react badly, though that doesn't make this any easier. For all intents and purposes, it appears that she returned to his life after vanishing for five years explicitly to kill his husband, with whom she was known to have a tenuous relationship at best.
But what can she do? Throw Alistair in front of her while the sword falls?
Instead Teren just crouches there next to Anders, watching him with a stiff frown, enduring the barrage. If her conscience weren't already so guilty from the mission that only she recalls as ending less than a week ago, perhaps she could find a measure of strength. Perhaps she could find the right words. Instead, she just looks down, avoiding his eyes.
She's betrayed him for the last time. What that means, she isn't certain, other than hearing it hurts a lot more than she ever imagined it would.

Alistair hears the shouting before he comes inside, and for a moment he stops, turns back to look at the rest of the thaig—all the places he could be that aren't here. He'd only been returning to make another pass over the house, broom and burnable rags in hand, to quiet the recurring fear that Anders would find something of Nathaniel—peeled skin, a smudge of blood. He wasn't planning on a confrontation. He could go have lunch first and work up his nerve.

But no. He is better than that.

He turns back and pushes through the door, right into the room where Anders and Teren are both on the floor, and looks between them. He doesn't know what Anders has been told, exactly, but he assumes it's the truth, because that's what he would have told him. He doesn't say anything, only gives Anders a look of wary pity while he sets the broom aside against the wall.

Edited 2017-03-09 17:43 (UTC)

He's stopped yelling by the time Alistair is inside, each panting breath feeling like a knife in his lungs. A broom. Alistair brought a broom to clean, which likely means that more people know. More people didn't see a problem with this.

"She comes back, and kills him, and you're fine with it, you're here to clean up after her, and of course you're fine with it because you've been wanting him dead for weeks." He has nothing left to lose. He has nothing left, period.

Teren shoots Alistair a meaningful look; it's no accident that Anders is saying 'she' instead of 'you', though obviously she's not going to stop Alistair if he wants his share of the blame. Or... all of it, considering he did the killing, but Teren knows what being an accomplice is and is more than prepared to own it.
She stays silent for now, allowing him to make his own decision, looking as though she's on the tail end of having all her energy sucked out over the course of the day. Just let the nightmare end.

Alistair meets Teren's meaningful look with one of his own, one that slides from confusion to—something close to gratitude, albeit a weary, resigned kind. It's been a long time since he's needed anyone to protect him. Longer than five years, even. At least ten. But he appreciates the thought.

Back to Anders. Alistair isn't going to argue with most of that. Not that he thinks it's fair or accurate. But it isn't Anders' job to be fair or accurate at the moment. It's fine.

"She didn't have anything to do with it," he says. "He asked for help, and I helped him." A beat. "He said to tell you he loved you."

His mouth goes dry as Alistair speaks, and he can't find his thoughts. 'He wanted to die,' Teren had said. Now Alistair is confirming it, but making the picture so much more clear. It hadn't been a generic anyone-in-that-state-would-want-to-die thing. Nate had asked.

Anders looks away. He's still angry, still hurting, and a little ashamed. Teren had let him accuse her. She'd taken the angry barrage without firing back and all he can do is still ache. Nate said to tell him he loved him. Nate is gone. Anders can't even argue that Alistair should have waited, should have let him say goodbye, because if Nate asked, he was suffering too much to wait.

"Where?" he finally croaks out. Not where did Alistair kill him, that much is easy to know. Where the body is, because he desperately hopes they haven't burned it yet.

"The barricade. The mages—"

—are keeping him cold. That seems like too much information, probably. Alistair cuts himself off, takes another moment to take in the scene, Anders on the floor, Teren on the floor. Their bed. The blankets are missing, taken to bundle Nathaniel out of everyone's prying sight.

He holds a hand down in case Anders wants it.

"We can walk you there."

Alistair offers out a hand and Anders can only give it a dead stare at first. Is that the hand that he used to kill Nate? Would it end his if he asked? But he can't. He has too much responsibility to too many people, which is the only reason he'd not gone with Nate into the Deep Roads.

Anders looks down, closing his eyes for a moment before opening them and exhaustedly taking that hand. His light, his strength, his reason for hope is gone, but his reason for still living isn't. He has friends who need a healer.

"I... I need his ring."

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OPEN ↠ FALSE GODS, GREAT DEMONS (OPEN LOG 1)

1. DIVES IN AND TAKES IT

YAY

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