PLAYER PLOT: Enfenim

[mythalenaste]

WHO: Pel, Sina, Cyril, Beleth, Sorrel, Myr, Saoirse, side of Anders and Alistair
WHAT: A demon has trapped Pel in the Fade.
WHEN: Forward-Dated to 25 Firstfall
WHERE: The Gallows, the Fade
NOTES: Trigger warning bonanza for insects, body horror, corpses, dismemberment/maiming, death, illness, drowning, blood + will update if any more happen.

What am I to do with all of these dolls?
They've covered the floors, they've covered the walls.
They're stacked up chin-high all over the floor,
But my greedy child is screaming for more...

Comments

Quest Get | No tag order, start with Anders

[mythalenaste]

There is no warning. She just hasn't woken up.

Pel is not one to sleep in, and in fact hasn't had the luxury of doing so since Sina was born. Now, the baby is wailing and Pel is still asleep. Every so often, she squirms or tosses as if trying to wake from a nightmare, but always she goes back to sleep, and nothing will wake her.

[justice_is_blond]

It's not the first time he's seen someone caught in the Fade, though it's the first time someone he cares about has been. That doesn't make any difference in what needs to be done. It just means he's more stressed as people who are willing to help make themselves known.

"She's trapped in the Fade," he says, point blank, baby Sina in one arm and Purrelden in the other so at least the baby is entertained tapping the familiar kitty. "And someone gets trapped in there by a demon who doesn't want to let them go. To get them out, people have to go in and kill the demon. Or demons. So. We'll need lyrium, we'll need willing volunteers, and we'll need to do this quickly. Any questions?"

[arlathvhen]

"I'll go." Beleth doesn't hesitate, arms crossed and a scowl on her face. As...complicated as her relationship with Pel has been for the past few months (years) (her entire life), that doesn't mean she's going to stand idly by while Pel is at risk. Not if there's something she can do about it. "I'm not a mage, but. I've faced down demons in the Fade before."

She pauses, as she tries to think of any questions. "Will it be different than doing it when I was physically in the Fade?"

Beleth | TW: blood

[mythalenaste]

Beleth stands in the woods at night. Clan Ashara stands around her in a semicircle, the faces of her loved ones illuminated by torches. All of them are stringing their bows or unsheathing their daggers, and all of them are looking at her. They don't look angry. They don't look sad. They look like they're preparing for a joint exercise, perhaps, or a mildly annoying chore.

You have until the count of five, Deheune says lightly. A grin flashes across her face. Five.

Run, whispers a disembodied voice. RUN. And yet Beleth's feet do not move. They cannot move.

Too scared, laughs Sorrel. She can't even be good prey.

She has crossed the line into complete pointlessness, agrees Merrick. We should kill her now.

Four, Deheune intones.

Run! Run! whispers the voice. And suddenly, Beleth's feet unstick from the ground, and she can move. RUN!

And whether she is willing or not, the ground begins to move under Beleth. No matter where she turns, she cannot escape the sight of Deheune, who always seems to be monitoring her progress up ahead, making notes of whether or not her only daughter is a good target for her hunters' arrows.

[arlathvhen]

She doesn't understand.

Or maybe she does. Maybe deep down, it's always been there, that quiet voice that always has hateful words to whisper to her. Not good enough, never good enough, annoying and a burden, they just pity you, they don't really care. Whispers that she ignores. But in the end, she's always known.

She tries to call out to them. Merrick, Sorrel, people that she's loved, as long as she knew how to. It doesn't matter. It's never mattered.

There's a brief moment where she contemplates not running. Pettily deny them their chase, while giving in to the desire for her death. Why not? But she's not given a choice (and really, when has she ever?) and the next thing Beleth knows, she's dashing through the forest. Where is she going--where can she go? The Inquisition? Would she be safe there? If she can even get there.

She's overthinking. Right now, she has to run.

Cyril | TW: body horror

[mythalenaste]

See-ril, calls a singsong voice, distorted and distant. Seeeerrrrrrillll? it tries again, like it has never spoken before and is testing out the sounds without quite knowing what they mean. The world is pitch black, with only the echoing voice. If Cyril tries to move, he will not know which direction he is going, or whether his feet are carrying him anywhere at all.

Suddenly the ground opens beneath him and he drops far, far, at a speed he can only feel but not see. When he jostles to a halt, he has been caught in the arms of...himself.

This version of Cyril grins back at him, lips stitched back so it bares all teeth and gums in doing so, one corner higher than the other giving it a familiar but distorted come-hither look. Its eyes are glassy and dead, with no soul behind them. Its chest cavity is hollowed out, and instead of lungs and a heart, there is a hand inside, and the hand belongs to a shadowy demon who puppets him from behind. Two fingers are crammed into the other-Cyril's arms in place of bones, while one controls the head.

Have you come to fill me up real nice? asks the puppet.

[samahl]

Cyril feels disoriented enough over the lack of direction and a creepy voice calling out that when the thing touches him all he can really do is yelp and jump back, scrambling in a hurry to get away.

It was perhaps not the bravest action to take, but at the sight of this hideous puppet all he feels is a threat of panic that leaps into his throat and threatens to overtake his senses.

The only thing that fully stops him from giving into it is that he can't abandon his cousin to the demon that would conjure such horror.

"Stay away from me, demon!" he says, his voice wavers just a bit though, still affected by the terror in his throat.

Myr | TW: bees and drowning

[mythalenaste]

As soon as he touches the Fade pedestal in the waking world, Myr crashes into an ocean. But this isn't water. It hums around him, it moves without eddies or tides, it fills his mouth and his nose and his lungs and everywhere it touches, it stings viciously. The thrum of tiny wings can be felt against him, inside him, the crawl of millions of legs, as he swims and drowns in an ocean of bees.

If he kicks enough, he might be able to find purchase on a patch of ground, squashing the bees under his foot, but the rest only lift him up again, spinning him so there is no telling which was is up or down as his skin swells from the stings and he chokes on the creatures that used to be his wards.

Tear out your eyes and I'll make them stop, says a voice above the din.

let's add some TW for potential death by fire

[faithlikeaseed]

There's a certain sound a furious hive has to it--an awful throbbing buzz that every beekeeper learns early to ignore at his peril.

It's been a long time since Myr's heard that noise, a long time since he learned the subtle art of soothing a fractious colony with magic instead of smoke-- A long time since he's been stung, though it's a pain one doesn't soon forget. (He has heard of men stung to death by feral swarms, how they swelled and blackened and died in agony as their organs shut down--but they died. In a dream under the thumb of a demon seeking to feed from his fear, he knows--dimly--he won't get such a mercy.)

I'll make them stop, the demon promises, and Myr snarls soundlessly as he struggles for footing. Fuck you, he thinks, forcing rage past his own terror (drowning again, too disoriented and voiceless to cast and this ocean won't respond to his magic anyway, no more than one of water would, he knows with the awful certainty of dreams-- a mage without control is a danger to himself) and (it could work, it's in control of this, it could work--except if he gives up his eyes in the Fade will he ever again be able to see in his dreams?)

No swimmer, he, but a sea of insects is a different beast from one of water and for one brief blessed moment he makes contact with solid ground--a second of stillness in the pain and tumult is all he needs to cast. Grease is a fast spell, one he can force without words if he doesn't have to think to target or reduce it, wrenching gallons of the slippery stuff from the raw Fade around him to drench himself and the nearest bees alike. Then he's swept from his feet in a press of tiny bodies now gluey and wingbound with oil--now flammable.

I won't give you the satisfaction-- Half-threat, half-madness; don't die, Anders had said, and he's got to win through this and find Pel, and burning's a hell of a way to go, but if he can somehow call the demon's bluff enough to force it into the open--

Saoirse | TW: blood and corpses

[mythalenaste]

The wind in the Starkhaven alienage shrieks hollowly, an almost mechanical sound. It is unnatural, that it should be so steady and uninterrupted. The sky is grey but rainless, and the weather feels oddly dry and warm. There is no sign nor sound of elf or animal. In the center of the alienage, the vhenadahl is leafless as in winter, wind screaming through its branches. Ashes are scattered across the ground. Inside her father's house, there is no one. Inside her neighbor's house, there is no one. Not a soul lives in this ghost town.

Coming outside again, it begins to rain. First a massive drop hits her shoulder, large enough to hurt, then another hits her head. Looking up at the sky, the clouds have become the corpses of the alienage residents, and it is they who are raining blood.

[sulena]

Her Harrowing is ingrained deep inside her heart. Of all her memories it is one of the most vivid and detailed of her long list of memories from her time in this world. It had been a fight then, and it'll be a fight now as she takes a deep breath and fights the urge to feels herself shudder as the wind whips around through the houses that make up her home.

This isn't real, she repeats in her head. It has become something of a mantra as it repeats over and over again as Saoirse makes her way through the empty streets. It was such an unnatural sound for everything to be so... dead. No chatter of the people going about their day, no children playing and no songs being sung.

She peeks into houses as she passes, finding each empty until she comes to her home and almost expects to find her father waiting for at his desk surrounded by papers and books of elven history. Instead there is an unnatural silence here as well and an emptiness that seems to scream at her...

Returning the streets, she is briefly stunned by the pain of something hitting her. When another sharp pain erupts on her shoulder, she stumbles back under the safety of her home's roof when it becomes clear just what is falling from the sky.

This isn't real, this isn't real, this isn't...

Over and over, she had to remind herself of this.

Sorrel | TW: dismemberment

[mythalenaste]

Clan Ashara's camp appears on an ordinary day, albeit with dark clouds overhead. There is no rain, and everyone goes about their daily chores. They talk to each other, they wash, mend, dry, whet, darn, knit, cure, tan, dye, butcher, and cook like on any other day. No one pays Sorrel any mind.

From thin air comes the whistle of a swinging sword. Pain explodes across hand and wrist as both are severed, the attacker and weapon nowhere to be seen. Nobody in the camp notices. The louder Sorrel screams, the less they hear him. The sound of the blade slashes again, this time severing the same arm just below the elbow.

No one hears. No one sees. No one bothers.

[writteninblood]

He is bleeding.

Somehow, that seems the most important detail. Not the pain, which is terrible, but the blood, the strange coldness of it-- oughtn't it to be warm, where he's clutching there, the broken stump? Knees in new mud, agony crawling over him like a stormcloud, and the intense peace of the clan encampment around him like a slap in the face. They don't need him. They don't care if he lives or dies, utterly unconcerned so long as the role he played was worth the cost of living with his existence. He stares, caught for the moment in the terror of realizing a truth half-known and deliberately unacknowledged. No, it's better this way; what does he have to offer, to begin with? Look at me, he wants to scream, and also, don't look at me!

And yet, the blood is what he focuses on, coloring him like a second skin, red paint, too cold and too slow and utterly surreal. Unreal.

I'm dreaming, he remembers, watching as Beleth-- a vision of Beleth that is no more real than the wetness between his fingers, laughs at something, glances idly in his direction, but without interest, and then away. It's wrong, so wrong that it twists, almost physically painful, and then more: it's insulting.

Give in, he knows, panic, accept the fear and the safety from that fear; that is the offer. Give over, and lose everything, but also be freed from this nightmare.

"Fuck. You." Sorrel enunciates slowly, anger curdling in the twist of lips and bared teeth, the savagery of a wounded animal, "Bel' would never."

He isn't quite so sure of that, though, is he? She had left. She had gone off to have her own life. There's no hiding that secret horror here, not from a demon already this far into mind and memory. All he can do is kneel in the mud, bleeding through his pain, and refute the demon with what they both know-- what Sorrel fears is a lie.

Alistair and Anders | Throughout

[mythalenaste]

By the time the party going into the Fade is asleep, the six-month-old is screaming louder than ever. She will, when prompted, eat mashed-up solid food with a spoon, but only if it is shoveled swiftly from the bowl directly into her mouth, at which point she inhales it messily. She sleeps often and eats a lot, while the sleeping party appears not to stir.

[justice_is_blond]

"Have you spoken with Sabine about kids? Adoption, obviously. And after the war." It's not the best topic, but as far as he knows Alistair is still involved with the woman and they have a hungry child on their hands, available to teach advanced lessons in babycare.

It also keeps him from sitting down and poking at people for the umpteenth time when he can already feel that they're stable.

Wave Two: Beleth | tw: illness and death

[mythalenaste]

The first thing Beleth hears through the darkness is hysterical screaming. Vision comes back in a blur at first, then clarifies.
A child is in the arms of a younger but recognizable Keeper Deheune. The child is in the throes of some uncontrolled terror or rage, struggling and clawing at Deheune.

"LET ME GOOOOOO!" screams young Pel. "LET ME STOOOOOOP!" And she breaks down into sobs, burying her face against Deheune's chest, unable to break free of her and so giving in.

Deheune wraps her arms around Pel, lips tight, and says, "They are shells, Pel. When a poisonous snake sheds its skin, do you fear the skin?"

Pel shakes her head.

"There is nothing to fear in a shell."

"Don't make me go back," Pel sobs, exhaustion slowly leading into quietude. "Don't make me do this."

Deheune releases a long, quiet breath. "I must remind you, Pel, that you are no apprentice right now. You are a Keeper, like me. And Keepers do what must be done, whatever it is. Even if we can't do it, we must do it. Even if we have no strength to do it, we must do it."

She takes Pel's hand and starts to take her outside the tent. Pel shakes.

"Think of them as dolls, Pel," Deheune says quietly, releasing Pel like a hunting hawk.

As Pel breaks away from Deheune, she stumbles, weary and shaking almost too hard to walk. There is a line of people lying on blankets, unmoving. Corpses, the casualties of a plague that struck Clan Ashara many years ago. Pel kneels beside a very beautiful woman with white hair, whose pale eyes are still open.
Tears are cooling on her face.

"What...what am I to do," she stammers to herself, as though she is poorly acting the part of an exasperated mother in a play, "with all of these dolls?"

Suddenly she is strikingly calm. Eerily calm. She begins to undress the woman, the first part of the burial ritual.

[arlathvhen]

Once again, she's at her clan. It isn't, she supposes, surprising, really. With Pel at the center, and multiple clanmates helping her, of course the clan proper is at the center of it all.

But it's different. Pel is different. Beleth still recognizes her, as well as her own mother, but--Pel is so small, now. When last Beleth knew her at that age, she'd seemed infinitely older than Beleth herself. It's...odd, to realize just how young Pel really was, then. This entire scene unfolding, the dead on the blankets, it was so different to an uncomprehending toddler.

Somehow, it's worse, now that she's older. Now that she can look at that small, pale girl kneeling over a corpse, and understand. Truly understand jus how horrible it had been to Pel, who had been, Beleth now truly sees for the first time, just a child.

Creators forgive her.

Beleth strides across the clearing, and sits down next to Pel. She's still not sure what the best course of action is, but for now...she's no toddler, this time. She can do something to help her now.

"Pel, you're so brave to do this. And kind. I bet the spirits of the departed are thankful for such a brave, kind girl helping them. Can I help you?"

Wave Two: Sorrel and Saoirse | tw: suicide, blood, and dismemberment

[mythalenaste]

"Stay down there! Just stay down there, Merrick!"

The voice belongs to a man who stands high up in a tree, trying a hemp cord around a branch. A young boy is trying to climb up the tree. Behind him, Pel is trying to pull him down.

"Merrick," says Pel, who can be no older than fourteen or fifteen, "obey your father. Come down. Lethallin!" That call is directed at the man up in the tree. "Do you need help?"

The man does not respond. When he is finished tying the rope around the branch, he loops the other end, tied into a noose, around his own neck and tightens it. His lips move, though his words are too soft to be heard. Pel yanks Merrick back from the tree as far as she can.

"Papa? Papa!"

The man steps off the branch. At first, there is no sound. Then, the rope tightens, making a peculiar twang at the same moment as there is a sickening snap of bone, sinew, and flesh, and the man's body keeps falling while, for a moment, his head remains caught in the noose. The headless body hits the ground, followed a second later by the head, which rolls down a slope to Merrick's feet. There is blood everywhere.

Merrick is silent for a moment. Then, his jaw unhinges. His eyes roll back into his head. And he starts screaming.

His scream makes the Fade around them warp. The forest melts and drips upward toward the rippling sky. The air distorts outward from Merrick's voice, like heat waves. The earth rumbles. A massive shadowy hand descends, reaching toward the boy as if to claim him as well as his father. Pel snatches Merrick up in her arms and flees, sheer terror lending her preternatural strength. The hand chases after her.

[writteninblood]

Sorrel approaches the scene, almost curious. It seems, for a moment, peaceful enough; the children arguing, the tree. And then... and then...

Creators.

The scream would have woken him, were waking an option. It seems to strike the world like a physical blow, upending reality around them all in a tumbling, horrifying wave. Sorrel, along with all else, has no choice but to ride out the shrill, piercing terror, and to struggle against the nauseous feeling of a shifting ground beneath them. Sorrel glances to the left, and finds himself no longer alone-- Saoirse?

"Saoirse! We have to follow them!"

Wave Two: Cyril and Myrobalan | tw: death and dismemberment

[mythalenaste]

In the Gallows, it is hot but peculiarly dim, as if the sun is only half-alive. Bodies are piled up, stacked one on top of another. Pel sits on a step amidst them, cradling one in her arms. As Cy and Myr navigate through the grim labyrinth and Pel gets closer, it becomes clearer what she is doing.

She is sewing Merrick's head back onto his neck. All the other corpses around her bear signs of being stitched back together after mutilation. Some have limbs stitched back on, some have holes in their skin from rot that have been closed by her threads. Her hands shake, tears stream down her face, and far up in the heavens, a faint but high-pitched full-voiced scream can be heard, bearing her voice. Pel, however, is muttering. No, singing. She never sings but to two people: Merrick, and Sina, but now, her voice can be heard, breathy and trembling.

"The doll-maker came in a cart with a bell
He cried, 'The most lifelike dolls do I sell!
The porcelain's Orlesian, silk are the threads
And fine elven hair on top of their heads...'"

[samahl]

Cyril is still shaken from his own personal nightmare and everything else he's encountered here, but as he and Myr make their way through bodies his jaw is set with determination. Honestly, he's furious that something this evil thinks it can prey on Pel and wants to find a way to save and protect his family. If he focuses on that, he thinks, he can get through this.

But then as they get closer he sees the person in Pel's arms and it feels like, yet again, the world is falling apart around him. It's as if someone has punched him so hard in his stomach that he can't breathe. The only thing that stops him from crying out and rushing forward is the reminder that it's not real.

None of this is real. It's not real. That's not really Merrick. Now they need to figure out if it's really Pel.

Pel, he reminds himself. Strong, beautiful, and so dedicated to everyone else around her. It's his turn to help her and he's not going to fail because the demon happened to pick illusions that get under his skin.

"Cousin?" he asks, and despite how desperately he wants to steel himself his voice trembles.

The End

[eolasemah]

By whatever dream logic was able to deliver them from one area to another, everyone has found themselves in the Fade's best impression of Pel's room. She's safe and sound, flanked by Cyril and Myr as the enter, and behind them trails Sina.
She seems a bit confused but otherwise happy, looking very much herself before the shard, before the Inquisition or any of this. There's actual flesh on her bones, for one, and she's dressed back in her gardening clothes, dirt smudges on her knees and bare toes and gloveless hands, a little even on her smiling face.
She casually holds a staff that clicks against the floor as she enters, looking pleasantly around at everyone. "Oh, good," she sighs, relief in her breath, "you're all safe."

[mythalenaste]

Sina looks completely different like this, but still as absolutely Sina as she can be. Pel turns and wraps her arms around her, knowing she can finally squeeze as tight as she wants. Everyone else will definitely get hugs, but this is a hug she cannot give in the waking world.

"I knew it was you," she says tearfully. "Thank you."

Epilogue | Open to All

[mythalenaste]

Everything is loud. It takes Pel a moment to realize that the cacophony is a mere two voices, at which point she opens her eyes. Since she was not sent into the Fade with lyrium, she was the least lucid in dreaming, and it takes her a moment to remember what she dreamed. She sits up suddenly, eyes darting about to each dreamer as they all wake at once, and to Anders and Alistair and her beautiful, perfect daughter they are watching.

For her.

"You all came," she gasps. "You really came for me!"

[writteninblood]

Sorrel loves Pel like a sister. Exactly like a sister, in fact-- like his own sister. Well, perhaps not exactly like Beleth, of course, but in this moment, his response to Pel bears an uncanny similarity to his response had their places been exchanged and it was his actual twin they were all gathered to rescue, rather than Pel. He rolls to his feet, takes the three long strides to Pel's side, and reaches out--

Sorrel slaps the back of Pel's head hard enough to muss her hair, "You dumb-ass. You complete, utter idiot! What are you thinking? You had all of us worried sick, and of course we came for you; we love you, for some reason, Mythal only knows what!"