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.
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,
Honour is watching Herian, but slowly turns as she does to face Melys. It is a strange thing, interacting with people in the Fade. Equally strange is talking to a Spirit in the Fade, and this particular combination of personalities is one that, on an ideal day, Herian would avoid for the sake of all parties.
"I'd not given it much notice," Herian admits. Not this time.
Honour does not speak, for now, and so Herian continues. "The Fade operates differently from the waking world. Even walking and falling are not consistent - better to be cautious, I think."
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.
She's alone until she isn't. Her visitor, standing outside the bars of her cell, is a flash of familiarity in a foreign landscape.
Confusion wrought plainly across his face, Loghain comes towards the bars and kneels beside them, settling his fingers on the iron. "Teren," he whispers, then fumbles at his hip for his lockpicks. (They're there, a gift to him from another life he doesn't lead anymore.) "Teren, can you walk?"
However they both came to be here, they need to break out together, somehow.
Teren is afraid of mages, and magic, and anyone who doesn't know why could look at her now and instantly understand. She has no defenses against it, no way of parsing the Fade from the waking world when she's here, drawn so completely into the illusion that even Loghain appears to her as a shape from the dream and not as a person she knows. When he says her name, she shudders and curls up a little tighter. He's a guard and he's here to take her somewhere, which never means anything good.
The name echoes around him, deep with a sympathy which is, in her experience, totally alien to this voice.
"Teren, you're safe. You're wanted." There's something in it that he knows, something he has experienced both as victim and as observant. He knows why he says it. He's stricken by the fact that he relates those words to her, given little other reason for it.
There is something so staggeringly wrong, but also correct, about Nathaniel's appearance here. Loghain turns to look at him wonderingly, and then from him to Teren again. Perhaps--
"You are safe," he agrees softly. "Teren, look at me."
She won't. They've played games like this before, or at least she thinks they have: luring her in with the promise of comfort, turning it into a mockery. There is so much to mock, she didn't even have the decency to be pretty when committing such crimes, all the more an affront to those who keep her. Just an ugly old horse to beat until it dies, or to be ignored until the time comes to make glue.
"No," she whimpers into her skeletal hands, tightly clasped over her face, "please." Don't do this, not this. She's more than paid.
He thinks he's going to throw up. He has to turn away and gulp deep breaths, but each one is full of the stench of the dream. He has to remember this isn't real, not anymore. Slowly, his back straightens, his nausea passing as he steels himself.
"Senior Warden," he says in a tone she's much more likely to recognize--strict, and slightly irritated. "Report."
She hates the title. She hates the rank, she hates him, she hates everything to do with this. If he can get her to fight him, he can get her to fight this.
The look Loghain shoots Nathaniel is baffling--what is he doing?--and yet at the same time he's quick to return his attention to Teren in her cell, to stare with growing dread and horror as the full picture of her tortuous experiences settle over him. He swallows and remembers the lockpicks in his grasp, hanging there uselessly.
Get it together, Mac Tir.
He leave Nathaniel to speak to her, and instead puts his old rogue's skills to work by working at the lock to the cell door. They must get her out.
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.
He does not understand how he came to be here, but there is something viscerally wrong with the sight of a young girl suffering.
But he has visited enough other dreams to know that this isn't real--and if he can only convince her of that, if he can break through her pain--
"Adalia--!" He finds he knows her name, knows her face, but from where he cannot tell, cannot place it. Loghain comes quickly to her side and tries to steady the shaking, thrashing of her limbs as they transform under his touch from human skin to--to scales.
"Oh, Maker's mercy, child, look at me," the words are rough, pleading, and he reaches up a hand to frame her face, to try to turn her eyes to his to give her a fixed point to focus on. "Adalia, you're dreaming--this is the Fade, this isn't real. Do you hear me?"
Her voice cuts off mid-scream when she hears Loghain's voice, and even as it feels every bone in her body is splitting and knitting itself back together, she leans toward the familiarity of a friendly face. What he says, though — it sounds familiar, too, like she's had to realize this before, like it's something she's always known.
How can it hurt so much if it's just a dream?
When she looks up at him, one eye is her normal, natural storm blue. The other is shading reptilian, her pupil narrowing to a slit as the iris and deepens to a sickly green.
"It hurts," she whimpers, like that should be all she needs to say — it's too real, too potent to be a dream.
"It hurts," she says, and for a moment he sees another little blonde-haired girl, in pig-tails with skinned knees, looking up at her father in angry reproach for his inability to make the pain just stop, just make it stop hurting--
But Anora is a grown woman now, he knows. Grown and well able to look after herself, and not weeping in front of him in agony as her body betrays her.
And Loghain, powerless to do anything to stop it, to do more than take her hand and cradle her head, staring down in anguish at her face. "I know," he answers her in a rush, looking swiftly around, searching for something, anything, that he might be able to leverage to ease her suffering. "I know, my girl, but it's a dream, it's only a dream."
Such shallow comfort those words provide. But they are all he has.
This — this is familiar. Not just the hazy setting around her — it had never mattered before, but now that she's paying attention, there's really no mistaking the way the world around her shimmers back and forth between distinct and indistinct, a real place and not — or even the terror of being something she never wanted to be. Being held, though, comforted as she cries and whimpers... That's the stuff of her dreams. How many times has she dreamt of having a father to hold her through pain, to reassure her that this too shall pass?
She should have known as soon as Loghain appeared. Of course this isn't real.
The dream won't leave her without a fight. There's one last stab of pain and Adalia screams, digging taloned fingers into Loghain's hand as her shoulder blades grow outward and split her skin open, reaching for the sky like wings —
and then it's over, and Adalia collapses, no evidence of her horrible transformation left.
He catches her in his arms, though she falls from no discernible height--this young woman who has suffered, who still suffers, who so carefully hid that pain during their brief conversation by the fireside when he found her newly expelled from the rift. He would never have known, he realizes, staring at her face now.
There's blood on his hands from where the talons of her fingers dug into his skin, but he pays it no mind, ignores the ache; it will leave him in time. Instead he sinks down onto whatever it is that must pass for a chair in his place and holds Adalia against his chest. "Shh," he whispers, eyes gone distant, watching another child run beyond the hedge of her mother's rose garden, "shh, I'm here."
What good that had ever done them. What good his presence had ever done anyone who had relied upon him. Tell those words to Cailan's corpse, fetid and lost to the darkspawn long before he could be found and burned.
For long, long moments, all Adalia can do is curl into Loghain's chest and take deep, shaky breaths, trying to chase the ache from her limbs. The last time this had happened, it hadn't hurt — then again, Alacruun was manipulating her dreams then. Maybe if he hadn't meant it as a gift it would have.
Eventually, she sits up, inspecting her hands and neck for scales and talons and anything else that isn't supposed to be there. Satisfied on that count, she reaches back to feel at her shoulder blades — there isn't even so much as a rip in her dress to suggest the trauma that had just occurred. Now she reaches for Loghain's hand, meaning to inspect where she had pierced the skin with her talons.
"I hurt you," she says, her voice soft and slightly raspy from screaming. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I can fix it, if you — I mean, it'd be magic, but I can —"
Better to babble and avert her eyes than deal with whatever awkwardness must be coming. He didn't ask to have her dumped in his lap like this.
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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
"I'd not given it much notice," Herian admits. Not this time.
Honour does not speak, for now, and so Herian continues. "The Fade operates differently from the waking world. Even walking and falling are not consistent - better to be cautious, I think."
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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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Confusion wrought plainly across his face, Loghain comes towards the bars and kneels beside them, settling his fingers on the iron. "Teren," he whispers, then fumbles at his hip for his lockpicks. (They're there, a gift to him from another life he doesn't lead anymore.) "Teren, can you walk?"
However they both came to be here, they need to break out together, somehow.
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When he says her name, she shudders and curls up a little tighter. He's a guard and he's here to take her somewhere, which never means anything good.
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The name echoes around him, deep with a sympathy which is, in her experience, totally alien to this voice.
"Teren, you're safe. You're wanted." There's something in it that he knows, something he has experienced both as victim and as observant. He knows why he says it. He's stricken by the fact that he relates those words to her, given little other reason for it.
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"You are safe," he agrees softly. "Teren, look at me."
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"No," she whimpers into her skeletal hands, tightly clasped over her face, "please." Don't do this, not this. She's more than paid.
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"Senior Warden," he says in a tone she's much more likely to recognize--strict, and slightly irritated. "Report."
She hates the title. She hates the rank, she hates him, she hates everything to do with this. If he can get her to fight him, he can get her to fight this.
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Get it together, Mac Tir.
He leave Nathaniel to speak to her, and instead puts his old rogue's skills to work by working at the lock to the cell door. They must get her out.
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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
But he has visited enough other dreams to know that this isn't real--and if he can only convince her of that, if he can break through her pain--
"Adalia--!" He finds he knows her name, knows her face, but from where he cannot tell, cannot place it. Loghain comes quickly to her side and tries to steady the shaking, thrashing of her limbs as they transform under his touch from human skin to--to scales.
"Oh, Maker's mercy, child, look at me," the words are rough, pleading, and he reaches up a hand to frame her face, to try to turn her eyes to his to give her a fixed point to focus on. "Adalia, you're dreaming--this is the Fade, this isn't real. Do you hear me?"
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How can it hurt so much if it's just a dream?
When she looks up at him, one eye is her normal, natural storm blue. The other is shading reptilian, her pupil narrowing to a slit as the iris and deepens to a sickly green.
"It hurts," she whimpers, like that should be all she needs to say — it's too real, too potent to be a dream.
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But Anora is a grown woman now, he knows. Grown and well able to look after herself, and not weeping in front of him in agony as her body betrays her.
And Loghain, powerless to do anything to stop it, to do more than take her hand and cradle her head, staring down in anguish at her face. "I know," he answers her in a rush, looking swiftly around, searching for something, anything, that he might be able to leverage to ease her suffering. "I know, my girl, but it's a dream, it's only a dream."
Such shallow comfort those words provide. But they are all he has.
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She should have known as soon as Loghain appeared. Of course this isn't real.
The dream won't leave her without a fight. There's one last stab of pain and Adalia screams, digging taloned fingers into Loghain's hand as her shoulder blades grow outward and split her skin open, reaching for the sky like wings —
and then it's over, and Adalia collapses, no evidence of her horrible transformation left.
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There's blood on his hands from where the talons of her fingers dug into his skin, but he pays it no mind, ignores the ache; it will leave him in time. Instead he sinks down onto whatever it is that must pass for a chair in his place and holds Adalia against his chest. "Shh," he whispers, eyes gone distant, watching another child run beyond the hedge of her mother's rose garden, "shh, I'm here."
What good that had ever done them. What good his presence had ever done anyone who had relied upon him. Tell those words to Cailan's corpse, fetid and lost to the darkspawn long before he could be found and burned.
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Eventually, she sits up, inspecting her hands and neck for scales and talons and anything else that isn't supposed to be there. Satisfied on that count, she reaches back to feel at her shoulder blades — there isn't even so much as a rip in her dress to suggest the trauma that had just occurred. Now she reaches for Loghain's hand, meaning to inspect where she had pierced the skin with her talons.
"I hurt you," she says, her voice soft and slightly raspy from screaming. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I can fix it, if you — I mean, it'd be magic, but I can —"
Better to babble and avert her eyes than deal with whatever awkwardness must be coming. He didn't ask to have her dumped in his lap like this.
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