WHO: Adalia, Alistair, Freddie, Herian, Loghain, Medicine Seller, Melys, Nathaniel, Notas, Teren. WHAT: Rescuing a king, maybe. WHEN: Early Wintermarch WHERE: An island off Seheron, the Fade NOTES: Violence, disturbing imagery.
Traveling to Seheron is no daytrip. There are mountains to cross, then forest, then plains, then desert, then desert mountains, then journey on a slow fishing boat across a choppy sea. Plenty of time for team bonding exercises and road games and campfire songs along the way.
[ ooc | Make your own adventure/small talk, if you want. ]
"So it's a game, see?" The donkey snorts for punctuation. They're somewhere between interminable plains, and interminable mountains, and if anyone actually uses the word interminable it'll only make it that much worse — "How long can you only talk in questions?"
Herian, traditionally, communicates best with statements and severe looks. That would depend, is her automatic mental response, and she immediately realises how much of a problem this game is going to be.
Loghain may be in the minority of preferring a rough sea voyage to a calm one, if only because it gives him plenty of opportunities to make himself useful. He moves with purpose around the deck seeing to various tasks that need doing, careful never to give any instruction or suggestion that may give the appearance of contravening the authority of the ship's captain.
Now it's late afternoon, and he's standing near the prow of the boat watching the horizon. To call his expression inscrutable would be an understatement.
It's impossible to forget how the last voyage went, and Teren has been making herself as useful as possible while also trying not to panic every time the boat pitches or she spots a disturbance in the water. She's kept it under wraps for the most part, but it's a stressed Senior Warden who appears at Loghain's side while he stands at the prow, her arms clasped tightly over each other to ward off the cold and overall misery.
"Mac Tir," she greets in a low voice, almost as though she's ashamed to.
Teren has never been a hoverer, but the time to hover has, perhaps, come. Wherever Alistair is at whatever point, she's nearby, if not interacting with him directly then keeping him in her periphery, scouting out possible problems, noting his mood. She's known him long enough to understand the importance of this mission, and how, even with him being ten years older and all the wiser (which she'll never admit to him), he can still fall victim to his own sensitivity. He's almost died for her, and she for him, and she'd do it again. But she won't smother him. He has much to think about.
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Prickly and serious as ever, Teren is nonetheless not entirely unfriendly and can be engaged while making camp, cooking, and so forth. She's nice to have along on journeys like this for her capable survival skills, and though not much of a conversationalist, she does her best to make everyone comfortable.
Whatever he has or doesn't have to think about it, Alistair seems fairly determined not to think about it. Instead he thinks about making sure everyone has somewhere sort of comfortable to sleep, or tending to the fire so it doesn't burn out prematurely, or checking the horses' hooves. Important work. Way more important than trying to decide what to say to Maric, if they find him alive, or wondering whether or not he's going to get any of these people killed in pursuit of a monarch who should have died twenty years ago.
"Hey Teren," he says one night, putting a bowl of mushy stew into her hands—"an Orlesian, a Marcher, and a Fereldan walk into a bar."
"So, hey," Adalia says, both entirely out of the blue and as if she's carrying on a conversation which has been going on this entire time, "Just how scared of magic are the common people here?"
She knows the answer is somewhere between "very" and "destroy all magic users with fire, oh god, oh god," but where in that between they fall is very important — for reasons which will become apparent in a second.
"Because I have this thing I can do that will either get me killed or get us a discount on our boat trip, and I don't know whether to play the odds or not."
Herian is not a great conversationalist the vast majority of the time. In this trip that has been particularly true, though compared to others on this trip she doesn't necessarily get to claim the tall part of tall, dark and brooding. Perhaps her brooding is sufficient to make up for it, a sort of emotional stiletto. (No.)
"Better we do not chance with the fate of finding Alistair's father for the sake of saving coins," Herian cautions, the corner of her mouth tugging slightly with a frown that is not fully realised. "The people of Thedas have more reason to be afraid of magic than ever, and we cannot afford to make spectacles of ourselves or place targets on our fellows."
Her voice is low, and soft, cautioning without falling into judgment. "Save your skills for more dire circumstances."
Edited (fiddles with words) 2018-01-20 09:27 (UTC)
Sneaking around isn't Alistair's usual style, but he's not a king, he doesn't have a fleet of ships or small army of Qunari at his disposal, and he would prefer not to get anyone else killed. (Except maybe Loghain.) (No, not really.)(Not today.) So today, they're sneaking in—and for once, it isn't actually that difficult.
The fortress is poorly guarded, relying on its view of the open sea ahead and the protection of rocky island cliffs at the rear for security rather than a full staff. Whoever is there isn't worried about fishing boats slipping in unseen or a small party coming through the grates at the fortress' base, and the Tevinter cultists who do patrol the hallways do it in no more than pairs that are easily taken out by such a large invading force.
After the first two cultists have been killed (or incapacitated, that's fine too, whatever), Alistair whispers, helpfully, "I don't actually know what we're looking for or where it is."
[ ooc | One thread! No tag order but please don't tag more than twice a day, to make sure nobody is left out because they aren't boomeranging. ]
I must help Alistair, she had said to herself, because he is dear to Sabine. She counts Sabine as one of her best friends, and Alistair stood at her side against a dragon, and because family is important.
In this moment, however, Herian would be hard pressed to deny that the look she fixes Alistair with could be compared to something withering.
"What?"
Quiet, but she manages to hold back the better part of her incredulity. She actually is struggling with how to verbally proceed which won't be potentially harsh, or deeply unhelpful. "Better we move quickly, then."
"Probably either a laboratory or a dungeon," a voice replies, whisper incapable of disguising the Orlesian accent. Yes, Freddie is here, complete with shining rapier unsheathed in one hand.
It takes a liberal dose of elbowing for her to make her way from the center of the group to pop her head into view around Herian's shoulder, but when she does she smiles helpfully at Alistair. "Magisters are hardly known for their subtlety, after all. We should look for stairs down, or perhaps a large space at the top of a tower, something like that, no? Or, an alternative approach, perhaps we simply go wherever the most guards can be seen to go. Surely there can be no prize here more precious?"
How you got where you are now is not important—or it won't feel important—but if you must know, there was a magister with fire pouring from his eyes; there was the Magrallen, a massive ring with a withered old man at its center and an orb of blood beneath it; then there was some sort of explosion, and now—
Now you're somewhere else. It might be somewhere pleasant. It might be somewhere horrific. If you're a mage, it's clearly the Fade; if you're not, you may be able to figure it out, or you may have to wait for assistance breaking out of the spirits' grasps. In the meantime the world around you shifts and alters, making it all too easy to take a wrong turn, walk through the wrong door, and find yourself isolated again, perhaps even convinced anew that you've found your way out of the dream and into your childhood home or your personal hell.
[ ooc | Make your own Fade comments, tag around at will. I was going to make us go in an established order but there are too many people and too many crisscrossing wishes for specific witnesses, so it's a free-for-all. Have fun. ]
Blood, and flame, and — there'd been something in her hand, hadn't there? A glance down finds them both whole, unblemished. She flexes one experimentally, regards the wide old table around her, scarred by the work of idle knives and years.
It's a simple home, sparse in a manner that speaks to lack (time, money) rather than much true preference. The spread before them is out of place within: A rich feast, plates heaped high with meat, with delicacies; fine glass decanters slowly tumbling a glossy red.
The faces of most guests are indistinct, though in flashes of clarity a few bear passing resemblance to Melys. Others, clearly dwarven, else clearly,
Something else, and very still.
She turns to you: "You gonna eat that?" The jerk of an impossible pinky to your plate.
There's food in front of him, the faces of strangers around him, and now the face of a woman who should hate him, who should lack that arm, asking him--
"No," he says slowly, voice hoarse from emotion, but he can't place where, or why, he feels it. What has he seen? What has he witnessed?
"Take it," he adds, pushing the plate towards her, "I've no appetite."
A: forests and mazes. Far enough away from Herian, the forest that she stands in is made up not of trees, but marble pillars. Some are straight and upright, others twisted and gnarled as the oldest parts of the forest. Draw closer to her, though, and it becomes wholly forest.
Her staff and sword and armour are gone; more accurate to say they never were, here, not in this memory warped into a dream. She is instead standing with just a ragged shirt of coarse cloth. Her legs are bound up in leather leggings, nails driven in through the leather, and her hands are bound. Around her neck hangs a rope, she can remember the coarseness of it on her skin more than she can feel it, and two severed elven ears hang from it.
In one moment she's bloody, grass and dirt marking her skin, shirt soaked with sweat and mud, and in the next the scene is pristine. The Fade is so unreliable, in how it shifts and shudders. The forest is oppressive and mazelike, and in the distance there are shouts distorted by dreaming. Sometimes close, sometimes far.
She has dreamed this dream many times, countless repetitions and countless little changes; she inhales slowly, pushing herself up to her feet. It doesn't hurt, this time. More an itch, the memory of past aches, though she looks down at her feet and cautiously wiggles her toes. This is a symbol of what was done, not the event itself.
"It's not happening again," she tells herself, very calmly. "This is an echo. They aren't here."
She knows it, but speaking it aloud makes it more real, for a given value of real when it's the Fade. Even being a mage, knowing what this all is, she cannot shape it all, and the ropes around her wrists don't fall away, and the clothes do not simply replace themselves with something to her preference. Herian leans against a tree, and starts to pull at the rope with her teeth. Sure, she has magic, but also she doesn't want to accidentally set herself on fire in the Fade. That doesn't seem fun.
B: the White Spire. It is strange, in dreams, how things warp. The forest has changed to marble pillars, labyrinthine, until eventually it changed to polished hallways.
She knows what she is walking through; she knows it is not real. The smell of smoke and blood (and piss and panic) do not hang in the air as they did, that day. She is in an enchanter's robes, or maybe she is back in those leather leggings and ragged shirt - it seems to shudder between them, at times, the way things can change inexplicably in dreams. What it lacks in smell, the scene has in haunting echoes, splintered doorways.
Herian exhales, as a woman comes into view. She's in her seventies, perhaps, a human women with an air that could be condescending or distinguished or grandmotherly, depending on how well one responds to old ladies. In this moment, the older enchanter smiles, folding her hands against her lap.
"Ah, bonjour, Enchanter. You are looking a little grim, today. What is making you so glum?"
It is not Modestine, she knows, and the sight of her is painful, even if Herian had found her insufferable when they were in the Spire together. She deserved better than this.
C: for Concerning Honour There is garden, or a meadow, too well kept to look entirely natural. The wonders of the Fade, it seems. Ivy spills across the floor, but it is in all strange colours - autumnal seeming at first, but then some leaves seem gold and others purple. Piles of rocks rise from the ground, but some also are arranged in gravity defying spirals, and some are stacked sideways and equally improbably.
"Honour is the meeting place of justice, truth, and compassion. What is morally right and what is legally right are not one and the same. Mortal law alone cannot be trusted to be right."
As it notices someone approaching, the spirit continues to move around Herian. The spirit shimmers a little, and leans closer to Herian, inspecting.
"You know this, just as you know that necessity and the greater good and what is right are not always the same, or clearly divided."
She prods at a rocks — it drifts from place and back again, bumps against its neighbour. The shiver spirals up in delicate chain, one against another against another,
The voice is not Nathaniel's, which feels just wrong to Nathaniel himself, that it's the young man in his arms begging his forgiveness instead of vice versa. He clings tightly, and all that's visible is short black hair, pale skin, and an athletic build.
"It doesn't matter," Nathaniel tells him. "None of it matters. Nothing we said to each other, none of the fighting. All that matters is you're alive, and we can start over."
Here's the terrible thing about the Fade - it can be so temptingly real. So alluring, so... full of promise. They were dreams that could break your heart upon waking, because so much that you had longed for had been restored to you, and then it was lost all over again in the starkness of reality.
Herian stands, watches, and doesn't want to disrupt the Warden's relief, this reconciliation, even though she knows it must be done. It feels unkind to do it, but the worse thing would surely be to allow him to become endangered.
"Warden Howe," she says, speaking softly. She is, herself, looking less together than she might normally, wearing an Enchanter's robes. She feels that she is intruding on an important moment. "Consider the situation carefully."
The Medicine Seller | No CWs yet beyond the trippiness that is MS's psyche
The Medicine Seller was not a stranger to the workings of the Fade. He was familiar with its twists and turns, and he was at ease in its peculiar geometries and unsettling absence of physics.
His own dreamscape is a burst of colour. It's so bright that nothing feels quite real even if one were to disregard the strangeness that was the Fade. The sky is a soft hue of pastel oranges and yellows. Plum trees are in full bloom in too-bright shades of pink and blue and red and green and lavender. Petals fall, turning into a flurry of metallic confetti, disappearing into a floor that is like a mirror.
Or perhaps some reflective pool. Water from it rains upwards, the droplets changing into spinning purple flowers.
His reflection is strange. It moves at the same time and all the same ways he does, but it looks like another man. Same height, same build, but the clothes are different - still colourful but somehow more muted. The other's skin is dark, and hair almost white, and he wears a yellow mask of some kind of canine. Maybe a dog, maybe a wolf, maybe a fox - whatever it is, its teeth are bared, and its eyes are like hot coals set in black pits.
Beyond the reflection of the orchard, where the yellow and orange sky should have been, was a bird's eye view of the scene they left behind. Maric, strung up like a pig to roast, the great bubble of blood below him.
The Medicine Seller took a drag of his pipe, as did his strange reflection, and exhaled a plume of smoke.
"Goodness," he said, halfway between exasperated and amused, "what a predicament."
There appears with no warning a haggard-looking woman standing some ways off, wearing tattered leathers that bear the Warden insignia, her hair half falling out of its usually-immaculate bun. She's startled by this new place, but entranced as well, and doesn't seem to know how to react as she looks around, taking it in.
At first there's anger, frustration, but it dies away within seconds as Teren becomes aware of her surroundings. Everything was a fantasy; the life she's made, the friends she's come to trust, all of it an elaborate ruse devised to torture her while she serves her time. A cruel mindgame. She's wearing a filthy muslin shift and reclining on a filthier stone floor, the only light provided by the weak flame of a wall sconce in the hall. She can see it filtering through the bars up at the top of the door, but not the sconce itself, and only knows it to be fire because of how it flickers.
Her long, long hair is lank and knotted, crusted blood on her scalp and on her fingertips, her knees and elbows, her cheekbone. Periodically she receives a visitor, but all the information she could have given them was already spilled years ago. Now she's just rotting, languishing, waiting for an execution that won't come unless someone remembers that she's here. Alone.
It's cruel how real the memories feel: a strong, reassuring hand on her shoulder in a warm tavern; the velvet of a druffalo's muzzle; a childlike giggle from a grown man, a woman with wheeled shoes, a mage with a kind face easing the pain in her joints. But it wasn't real. She never left. She curls her knees into herself and covers her face with her arms, becoming a bony scrap of stillness in the corner, too desolate to even weep.
It's a dream. Adalia knows it's a dream — or at least she thinks it is. She's pretty sure.
But it's lifelike enough that the reality of the setting doesn't matter. This moment haunts Adalia, both in dreaming and in waking moments, and it does not matter that now as she dreams she knows she's dreaming, she's always sucked in. She can tell herself over and over that this has already happened, the deed is done... but it never matters.
She walks through overgrown ruins, stone walls and towers crumbling, the scent of woodrot and nature heavy in the air. There's a book clutched close to her chest as though it holds the answers to everything, and four people walking around her. One tall and gold and shining, a massive sword strapped to his back; one human with a sword and shield in hand, walking closer to her than the rest; one woman cloaked in finery, even in the dirt, a raven perched on her shoulder; one elf skulking ahead, hood pulled low over her eyes as she shies away from the midday sun. Two men in armor walk with them further back. They hunt a dragon, but they aren't afraid, not really. They've made it this far.
Adalia can map out everything that happens next to the minute.
Their quarry, unnoticed, slinks to the top of a crumbling tower. Lia, up front, makes some stupid comment about how easy this will be. No one laughs, but they don't really feel it either. What a stupid mistake they're making.
The dragon lands behind them with a crash, and they each turn around just in time to see one of their armored compatriots torn in half in the dragon's jaws.
Akrasiel and Mat run forward, weapons drawn. She doesn't want to watch this part, but she watched when it happened. The dream won't release her.
It wasn't even that big of a dragon. Barely out of childhood. They really could have taken it, if they'd been the ones to catch it by surprise instead of the other way around.
Acid pours from its mouth down onto Akrasiel and Mat, and Adalia watches as the skin sloughs from their flesh and they writhe in agony.
ii. you are part of a machine, you are not a human being
She's been waiting for him to reappear in her life for months now, and it feels too easy to consider that she has escaped his influence entirely. That his mind cannot stretch across these particular planes to touch hers, when he's mucked about in her dreams before. She's wondered if the thread between them was cut, or just so lax she couldn't feel it tugging between them, and what that might mean for the deal she's struck —
If it's a dream, it's a very life-like one. She can't afford to act counter to its trappings, just yet.
Adalia sits in a throne next to massive black dragon, looking small and fragile next to the mass of black scales and claws and teeth at her side. The room they're in is huge, unquestionably a throne room, full of courtiers standing away from Adalia and the dragon. Its tail makes a soft grinding sound as it sweeps lazily across the marble flooring, a sound which turns to something not unlike nails on a chalkboard when the dragon gets agitated and the sweeps of his tail become more forceful — as they are now.
"I begin to tire of this," he says, his voice a low, menacing boom. "If you cannot come to an agreement on your own about something as simple as property disputes, perhaps you should not have your property... Or your lives."
The two supplicants standing in front of the dragon who had been arguing moments before suddenly go silent, staring up at him in shock and fear. Their eyes dart between him and Adalia, pleading, but Adalia says and does nothing.
"You waste my time. You waste the time of everyone assembled here. You clearly don't know how to manage your property. My verdict —"
The dragon's eyes glow green, and acid begins to drip from between its teeth to land on the marble floor, pocking the smooth stone where it sizzles and pops. Adalia, heedless of the acid, reaches over and places her hand on the dragon's massive flank. He blinks, turns his head to her, and growls. She just stares up at him.
iii. do you feel like a young god?
Adalia is screaming, when she's found this time. It's a dream, but that doesn't mean she can't really feel in it, and her bones are distorting, breaking and reshaping, trying to become something new. Her skin shimmers as black scales crawl up her neck, her shoulder blades protrude grotesquely from her back and she claws at them with fingers turning into talons.
At the center of the maze the Fade constructs around its visitors, there's a palace—or, at least, there are stone corridors large and long enough to imply a building of significant size, and tapestries and statues (primarily of mabari) to suggest it's also a building of significant grandeur, by Fereldan standards. Outside the windows are the brown roofs of Denerim, blurred and greyed by rain, and by the age of the memory, and by the lack of attention being paid to detail by the man who's shaping the Fade here.
That man is Maric. Not the skin and bones version anyone here would have last seen strung up inside the enormous rings of the Magrallen, but one that's broad-shouldered and clean-shaven and maybe younger, in a way that's hard to get a handle on. Maybe his face is lineless. Maybe it's only the softness of the torchlight.
For some time—a few minutes, ten years, who can tell here—he's been talking to his companion about wanting to go hunting. Camping. Rain or no rain. Anything but another day indoors.
"We could leave behind the guards," he suggests, looking now, too, to make sure there aren't any in the corridor. There aren't, because he hasn't willed any to be there. He puts a hand on Loghain's shoulder, then after a second's thought moves it to the front of his shirt instead, holding him by a single clasp. "Like old times, except..."
The face that looks back to his king is, likewise, younger--or simply the torchlight is especially kind to his weathered, aged face, the haunted darkness in his eyes. There's a feeling that hounds the back of Loghain's mind, a soft whisper that this isn't right, a brief glimpse of years spent at sea searching for the blue eyes that search his face now. The hand that touches his shoulder, then moves like a caress to his shirt.
"Like old times, except..."
Oh. Oh, this was always there, wasn't it, always between them, something old and worn and comfortable and shared, but never called what it was--
"You would be putting yourself at such risk," comes his slow, soft response. Gently, he lifts his hand to touch the underside of Maric's strong forearm, then his wrist. Inside his chest his heart lurches to feel his skin; the sudden surge of longing for--something, for this to be real?--is unbearable.
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I. GETTING THERE
while travelling | threadjack away
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"You are an enthusiast of games, then?"
Congration, Herian.
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WRONG ACCOUNT
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they're on a boat
Now it's late afternoon, and he's standing near the prow of the boat watching the horizon. To call his expression inscrutable would be an understatement.
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"Mac Tir," she greets in a low voice, almost as though she's ashamed to.
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Teren has never been a hoverer, but the time to hover has, perhaps, come. Wherever Alistair is at whatever point, she's nearby, if not interacting with him directly then keeping him in her periphery, scouting out possible problems, noting his mood. She's known him long enough to understand the importance of this mission, and how, even with him being ten years older and all the wiser (which she'll never admit to him), he can still fall victim to his own sensitivity.
He's almost died for her, and she for him, and she'd do it again. But she won't smother him. He has much to think about.
open
Prickly and serious as ever, Teren is nonetheless not entirely unfriendly and can be engaged while making camp, cooking, and so forth. She's nice to have along on journeys like this for her capable survival skills, and though not much of a conversationalist, she does her best to make everyone comfortable.
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"Hey Teren," he says one night, putting a bowl of mushy stew into her hands—"an Orlesian, a Marcher, and a Fereldan walk into a bar."
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pre-boat
She knows the answer is somewhere between "very" and "destroy all magic users with fire, oh god, oh god," but where in that between they fall is very important — for reasons which will become apparent in a second.
"Because I have this thing I can do that will either get me killed or get us a discount on our boat trip, and I don't know whether to play the odds or not."
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"Better we do not chance with the fate of finding Alistair's father for the sake of saving coins," Herian cautions, the corner of her mouth tugging slightly with a frown that is not fully realised. "The people of Thedas have more reason to be afraid of magic than ever, and we cannot afford to make spectacles of ourselves or place targets on our fellows."
Her voice is low, and soft, cautioning without falling into judgment. "Save your skills for more dire circumstances."
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II. INFILTRATION
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In this moment, however, Herian would be hard pressed to deny that the look she fixes Alistair with could be compared to something withering.
"What?"
Quiet, but she manages to hold back the better part of her incredulity. She actually is struggling with how to verbally proceed which won't be potentially harsh, or deeply unhelpful. "Better we move quickly, then."
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It takes a liberal dose of elbowing for her to make her way from the center of the group to pop her head into view around Herian's shoulder, but when she does she smiles helpfully at Alistair. "Magisters are hardly known for their subtlety, after all. We should look for stairs down, or perhaps a large space at the top of a tower, something like that, no? Or, an alternative approach, perhaps we simply go wherever the most guards can be seen to go. Surely there can be no prize here more precious?"
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III. THE FADE
melys | spooky dinner stuff/woods motif
Blood, and flame, and — there'd been something in her hand, hadn't there? A glance down finds them both whole, unblemished. She flexes one experimentally, regards the wide old table around her, scarred by the work of idle knives and years.
It's a simple home, sparse in a manner that speaks to lack (time, money) rather than much true preference. The spread before them is out of place within: A rich feast, plates heaped high with meat, with delicacies; fine glass decanters slowly tumbling a glossy red.
The faces of most guests are indistinct, though in flashes of clarity a few bear passing resemblance to Melys. Others, clearly dwarven, else clearly,
Something else, and very still.
She turns to you: "You gonna eat that?" The jerk of an impossible pinky to your plate.
hello friend
"No," he says slowly, voice hoarse from emotion, but he can't place where, or why, he feels it. What has he seen? What has he witnessed?
"Take it," he adds, pushing the plate towards her, "I've no appetite."
herian | cw for (past) murder/torture
Far enough away from Herian, the forest that she stands in is made up not of trees, but marble pillars. Some are straight and upright, others twisted and gnarled as the oldest parts of the forest. Draw closer to her, though, and it becomes wholly forest.
Her staff and sword and armour are gone; more accurate to say they never were, here, not in this memory warped into a dream. She is instead standing with just a ragged shirt of coarse cloth. Her legs are bound up in leather leggings, nails driven in through the leather, and her hands are bound. Around her neck hangs a rope, she can remember the coarseness of it on her skin more than she can feel it, and two severed elven ears hang from it.
In one moment she's bloody, grass and dirt marking her skin, shirt soaked with sweat and mud, and in the next the scene is pristine. The Fade is so unreliable, in how it shifts and shudders. The forest is oppressive and mazelike, and in the distance there are shouts distorted by dreaming. Sometimes close, sometimes far.
She has dreamed this dream many times, countless repetitions and countless little changes; she inhales slowly, pushing herself up to her feet. It doesn't hurt, this time. More an itch, the memory of past aches, though she looks down at her feet and cautiously wiggles her toes. This is a symbol of what was done, not the event itself.
"It's not happening again," she tells herself, very calmly. "This is an echo. They aren't here."
She knows it, but speaking it aloud makes it more real, for a given value of real when it's the Fade. Even being a mage, knowing what this all is, she cannot shape it all, and the ropes around her wrists don't fall away, and the clothes do not simply replace themselves with something to her preference. Herian leans against a tree, and starts to pull at the rope with her teeth. Sure, she has magic, but also she doesn't want to accidentally set herself on fire in the Fade. That doesn't seem fun.
B: the White Spire.
It is strange, in dreams, how things warp. The forest has changed to marble pillars, labyrinthine, until eventually it changed to polished hallways.
She knows what she is walking through; she knows it is not real. The smell of smoke and blood (and piss and panic) do not hang in the air as they did, that day. She is in an enchanter's robes, or maybe she is back in those leather leggings and ragged shirt - it seems to shudder between them, at times, the way things can change inexplicably in dreams. What it lacks in smell, the scene has in haunting echoes, splintered doorways.
Herian exhales, as a woman comes into view. She's in her seventies, perhaps, a human women with an air that could be condescending or distinguished or grandmotherly, depending on how well one responds to old ladies. In this moment, the older enchanter smiles, folding her hands against her lap.
"Ah, bonjour, Enchanter. You are looking a little grim, today. What is making you so glum?"
It is not Modestine, she knows, and the sight of her is painful, even if Herian had found her insufferable when they were in the Spire together. She deserved better than this.
C: for Concerning Honour
There is garden, or a meadow, too well kept to look entirely natural. The wonders of the Fade, it seems. Ivy spills across the floor, but it is in all strange colours - autumnal seeming at first, but then some leaves seem gold and others purple. Piles of rocks rise from the ground, but some also are arranged in gravity defying spirals, and some are stacked sideways and equally improbably.
"Honour is the meeting place of justice, truth, and compassion. What is morally right and what is legally right are not one and the same. Mortal law alone cannot be trusted to be right."
As it notices someone approaching, the spirit continues to move around Herian. The spirit shimmers a little, and leans closer to Herian, inspecting.
"You know this, just as you know that necessity and the greater good and what is right are not always the same, or clearly divided."
D: or wildcard me.
c. sorry in advance
She prods at a rocks — it drifts from place and back again, bumps against its neighbour. The shiver spirals up in delicate chain, one against another against another,
"You two seen this?"
She sounds delighted.
no this is delightful
Nathaniel | no tw yet
The voice is not Nathaniel's, which feels just wrong to Nathaniel himself, that it's the young man in his arms begging his forgiveness instead of vice versa. He clings tightly, and all that's visible is short black hair, pale skin, and an athletic build.
"It doesn't matter," Nathaniel tells him. "None of it matters. Nothing we said to each other, none of the fighting. All that matters is you're alive, and we can start over."
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Herian stands, watches, and doesn't want to disrupt the Warden's relief, this reconciliation, even though she knows it must be done. It feels unkind to do it, but the worse thing would surely be to allow him to become endangered.
"Warden Howe," she says, speaking softly. She is, herself, looking less together than she might normally, wearing an Enchanter's robes. She feels that she is intruding on an important moment. "Consider the situation carefully."
The Medicine Seller | No CWs yet beyond the trippiness that is MS's psyche
His own dreamscape is a burst of colour. It's so bright that nothing feels quite real even if one were to disregard the strangeness that was the Fade. The sky is a soft hue of pastel oranges and yellows. Plum trees are in full bloom in too-bright shades of pink and blue and red and green and lavender. Petals fall, turning into a flurry of metallic confetti, disappearing into a floor that is like a mirror.
Or perhaps some reflective pool. Water from it rains upwards, the droplets changing into spinning purple flowers.
His reflection is strange. It moves at the same time and all the same ways he does, but it looks like another man. Same height, same build, but the clothes are different - still colourful but somehow more muted. The other's skin is dark, and hair almost white, and he wears a yellow mask of some kind of canine. Maybe a dog, maybe a wolf, maybe a fox - whatever it is, its teeth are bared, and its eyes are like hot coals set in black pits.
Beyond the reflection of the orchard, where the yellow and orange sky should have been, was a bird's eye view of the scene they left behind. Maric, strung up like a pig to roast, the great bubble of blood below him.
The Medicine Seller took a drag of his pipe, as did his strange reflection, and exhaled a plume of smoke.
"Goodness," he said, halfway between exasperated and amused, "what a predicament."
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Teren | torture kinda
At first there's anger, frustration, but it dies away within seconds as Teren becomes aware of her surroundings. Everything was a fantasy; the life she's made, the friends she's come to trust, all of it an elaborate ruse devised to torture her while she serves her time. A cruel mindgame.
She's wearing a filthy muslin shift and reclining on a filthier stone floor, the only light provided by the weak flame of a wall sconce in the hall. She can see it filtering through the bars up at the top of the door, but not the sconce itself, and only knows it to be fire because of how it flickers.
Her long, long hair is lank and knotted, crusted blood on her scalp and on her fingertips, her knees and elbows, her cheekbone. Periodically she receives a visitor, but all the information she could have given them was already spilled years ago. Now she's just rotting, languishing, waiting for an execution that won't come unless someone remembers that she's here.
Alone.
It's cruel how real the memories feel: a strong, reassuring hand on her shoulder in a warm tavern; the velvet of a druffalo's muzzle; a childlike giggle from a grown man, a woman with wheeled shoes, a mage with a kind face easing the pain in her joints.
But it wasn't real. She never left.
She curls her knees into herself and covers her face with her arms, becoming a bony scrap of stillness in the corner, too desolate to even weep.
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adalia | acid... wounds....., body horror, evil dragon gods from the beginning of time???
ii. you are part of a machine, you are not a human being
iii. do you feel like a young god?
iii
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IV. THE KING
it's been 84 years..........
"Like old times, except..."
Oh. Oh, this was always there, wasn't it, always between them, something old and worn and comfortable and shared, but never called what it was--
"You would be putting yourself at such risk," comes his slow, soft response. Gently, he lifts his hand to touch the underside of Maric's strong forearm, then his wrist. Inside his chest his heart lurches to feel his skin; the sudden surge of longing for--something, for this to be real?--is unbearable.
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