MOD PLOT ↠ The Darkest Realms of Dream, Part II

[faderifting]

WHO: Open
WHAT: A dreamy conclusion.
WHEN: Wintermarch 20, 9:47
WHERE: The Fade, Kirkwall
NOTES: Please use content warnings in your comment subject lines as appropriate.

THE JOURNEY

The pull to Skyhold becomes undeniable. Whatever justification is necessary to get people onto the road the dream makes real, whether that's planting an idea in their head or having a message arrive drawing them to the area or having them wake up and find themselves in an onion cart halfway up the mountain. The dream will do its best to smooth over the gaps between conflicting stories and the strangeness of everyone heading that way at once until they're all well underway.

At first, the journey seems normal (in the context of the dreamworld they're in), with the sort of mundane dangers faced by all travelers: wild animals, bad weather, brigands, and in the future where Corypheus has won, enemy patrols. But as they get nearer to the mountains, the trip grows more dangerous. More wild animals—and perhaps now they're infected with red lyrium or Fade-touched. More bad weather, perhaps almost supernaturally so. More enemy forces hunting them, ambushing them, barring the way up into the Frostbacks.

As they get into the mountains the opposition to their journey will become increasingly improbable. Hordes of beasts, entire enemy brigades that have no reason to be where they are, a necromancer coincidentally located atop an ancient cemetery hidden beneath the ice, a rift spontaneously opening to spew demons in their path, darkspawn clawing up out of the ground, a random Qun attack thousands of miles from their front, a dragon appearing out of nowhere. More and more, it will become obvious that things are not what they seem, and that something—some larger force—is trying to prevent them from reaching Skyhold.

HAVEN

No matter where people came from or when they left, they will all arrive on the road into the mountains at roughly the same time. Not precisely, but near enough that they'll begin to encounter others making the same journey. And whether they are attempting to reach Skyhold from the East or the West, they'll find themselves in the ruins of Haven first, converging with the entire group. In the world where the Inquisitor defeated Corypheus, the village is home to a monument to those who were lost when Corypheus' forces first attacked, with evidence of a steady stream of recent pilgrimages—though presently no pilgrims—to pay their respects. In the world where Corypheus dominates, a lifesize dragon has been constructed from bones, some of them human, to stand triumphant over the ruins.

Once they press past this point, taking much the same route once used to lead Haven's refugees to Skyhold, the dreams will begin to unravel. The two dreamworlds may begin to overlap and merge in confusing ways that fuel awareness that the dreams are dreams. People from one dream may step into the woods to forage and encounter people from the other dream there to do the same thing. A person who has experienced both dreams may find that they begin to bleed together, leaving them certain of one history in one moment and of another the next, and increasingly unsure about which of their conflicting sets of memories—if either—is real.* The gaps in memories will also become increasingly apparent, as will the strange coincidence of all of them heading to Skyhold at once for very different reasons.

As people gain awareness that they are in a dream, they may find that they gain more control over the dreamworld. Non-mages may find themselves capable of impossible feats, like willing a storm into being to push enemies back, or speaking to animals to learn the enemy's movements. Mages may find that the normal boundaries on magic have been stretched, and spells that might once have been beyond their power no longer are. Their newfound capabilities do have limits, though: their enemies grow in strength to match them and cannot simply be wished away, and the major threats that more and more clog their path are still too strong to be beaten by any one person alone.

The last leg of the journey up to Skyhold will be the most difficult yet, as difficult as it has ever been. The paths are even steeper and rockier than anyone remembers, in places appearing as if they've been deliberately heaved about and strewn with boulders in an attempt to narrow the way. Surely so much of the road wasn't treacherous goat paths along the edge of precipitous drops before? And if that wasn't enough, while the enemy forces have receded here there comes in their wake a blizzard of tremendous strength, clouds blotting out the sun, the way lit only by the occasional crack of lightning. Snow lashes the rocks and wind screams through the passes, ice slicking every stone, as if nature itself is trying to throw them from the mountain. While it might normally be wisest to hunker down, they will all somehow know that this is not a storm that can be waited out and the only course is to press onward through it to the top.

OOC | * Characters from one dreamworld won't meet the other version of themselves face to face. There's only one consciousness in the dream per person, in one 'body'. They may switch back and forth between dream versions, or lose one version entirely, or begin to muddle their memories and personalities together, or drop them both when they become fully aware of the fact that they're dreaming, but the two versions will never coexist as separate entities at the same moment.

SKYHOLD

They will know when they've reached their destination because just as suddenly as it began, the storm ceases. The tranquility is as abrupt as walking through a door: one moment they are in the howling heart of the blizzard, and in the next step they are beyond it. The air is cold but still, the sky clouded but calm, the path across the great bridge to the main gate clear of snow.

Skyhold would be a striking sight at any time, perched atop its peak against a backdrop of stark white mountaintops, but in these dreams, it's ethereal. The stones have a faint luminescence, like a smooth pond bathed in moonlight, that makes it stand out clearly against the night sky. No windows or braziers are lit, and the valley around it is still. The walls are unguarded and the portcullis open in an invitation they can't bring themselves to refuse.

As they approach, they'll find themselves able to call on memories from both dreamworlds at once—while the gaps in their memories of the years prior to the last month grow. And memories of the true world, one where it's Wintermarch 9:47, may begin to reemerge and solidify, no longer a future that will never arise nor a past that's been left far behind them. By the time they reach the Great Hall, yesterday may feel like as many as three different days, each memory as clear and vivid as the others.

Once inside the walls, the castle grows still more dreamlike. A great tree grows out of the far corner where the War Room ought to be, its massive trunk somehow coexisting with the walls around it, its canopy broad enough to stretch into the Great Hall. The building's form doesn't seem wholly fixed in time—one moment it will appear to be the Skyhold of the Inquisition, in another, one might instead see a glimpse of the ruin it was before the Inquisition arrived, or a bare mountain peak with only a few foundation stones laid, or even an ancient elven temple built around that great tree. There are remnants too of those who have lived and work here in ages past: a flicker of movement in the corner of an eye might be the ghostly shape of an ancient elf or a dwarf lord or a Fereldan mason, or even someone in Inquisition uniform. Attempts to interact with these apparitions will fail, as they continue on about their routines, incorporeal and unaware, vanishing again as soon as they're out of sight.

The only exception is a spirit in the Great Hall, waiting for them.

AFTERMATH

When they wake in the Gallows, it is Wintermarch 21, 9:47, and nothing in the world—outside their own heads—has fundamentally changed from when they went to sleep.

OOC | It will feel like a month has passed at most, similar to how rifters wake up from their canon updates. They will only remember that month-long span of the dream itself, not the years of history that led up to that point. Essentially, they may wake up from the dream and remember "so back when the Inquisition fell I turned assassin and killed a bunch of people," but they'll only be remembering that in the dream this fact was true; they won't remember a years-long period in which they became an assassin, the assassin skills they supposedly learned, or the act of killing those people.

As is the manner of dreams, memories may be fuzzy or disjointed, and some things may stick in the mind more clearly and vividly than others. Anyone who interacts with the Herald spirit (or witnesses others doing so) will find these memories particularly clear and strong.

Comments

[propulsion]

Tony takes a breath to say something, but it's let go of as Ellis reaches over to help with the boot situation. The first time, Tony had let it spite-happen.

And this time, he doesn't kick, but he does jerk his foot back in a small expression of irritation that seems not too specifically directed at Ellis himself. Especially as Tony looks away, studies the shape of shadows on the wall from the firelight, sitting with his hands and arms locked straight keeping him upright. The strain of that alone makes him think his great get away would have been two steps out the door and no further, so—

Maybe they've all been spared some embarrassment. Not all of it, but some.

"This is a shitshow," he says, looking back at them, and to be very clear, he gestures at himself. "And I'm not making it up any mountains any time soon."

[heirring]

No, he isn't.

"Don't be ridiculous," she cuts back, brisk despite the hour, and his mood, and Ellis' deliberate quiet like the level beneath them.

There is an inherent creeping dark lurking at the edge of this, drawn to the dark shadows in Tony's face and the poisonous lines reaching out from under his collar, that she can't stand. It's that hushed whispering tone one adopts in a house with sickness. She refuses to fall prey to that particular cadence.

"Do they not have litters on Earth? You are in no fit condition to go hiking up a mountain, I grant. But that hardly rules out fetching you along by other means. De Foncé has a dracolisk. I will talk him into lending it."

[heorte]

The weight of implication in Tony's words catches Ellis like a crossbow bolt. His hands still on the buckles of the boot, halfway done up, as he looks up at Tony. The ceased movement is as clear a response as anything Ellis could have said. They're talking about something else entirely now. His shoulders bow as he lets out a quiet breath, jaw tightening around the urge to simply say No in the face of all of this, of the blight-dark veins and the drawn, pained expression on Tony's face.

It's not a matter of logistics. Ellis understands that. It brings all of Ellis into focus, the last clinging soft edges of sleep ebbing away as Wysteria presses on with a solution that alleviates a symptom but not the problem. His gaze holds very steady on Tony's face.

[propulsion]

Now that no one's going anywhere in the immediate future, Tony shifts to lean his back against the stone wall of the Chantry ruins. He is carefully not looking at Ellis, until he does look at Ellis, and his attention slides from him to Wysteria. Unclear which is worse to look at, really.

"There's something on top of a mountain," he says. "We don't know what. It'll probably be totally worth the journey, but I figure you both oughta be there at the finish line."

He can probably count on one hand the amount of time's he's won an argument with Wysteria Poppell—like, outright, not just the wins he privately clocks himself—and this seems like just the worst time to try, especially with the knowledge that he's going to. Unless she forcibly lashed him to the back of De Fonce's dracolisk.

It is more directly to her he says, "We got us this far, kiddo. Not interested in holding you back."

[heirring]

There is basic math involved here. It isn't difficult, and she understands that he's decided he's worked out all the important bits already. But surely they are all based on a foundation entirely of conjecture - fundamentals made fundamentally unstable as the whole world folds over on itself. You don't know that, would be a fine retort. Because he can't know that. Maybe at the top of the mountain they will just find the top of the mountain. Or maybe there will be some great archdemon in need of killing, or a great tear in the Veil which every anchor must mend. Or maybe when they pass through the gate of Skyhold it will be as a doorway from the Fade, and they will walk into a waking world of five years ago as if they'd never passed this way to begin with.

(And if that one is true, what happens if someone fails to get there? And what happens if that someone is a Rifter, who is already inexplicably linked to the pull of the Fade? Does that person go back too, slipping through the crack opened for them, or do they just wander forever? Maybe this is what the Void is.)

--Are thoughts for later, to formulate while traipsing up some narrow footpath with the whipping wind threatening to throw the whole remaining company off the side of the mountain. In the moment, it is just a hum in the back of her head that she is cognizant of because it matches the heat threatening to sting behind her eyes.

The frown she gives him in reply is very fierce.

"That's not fair. You're saying that we should leave you alone here when there are perfectly fit options otherwise. What a monstrous thing to do. We have gotten this far, and I see no reason why it shouldn't—" There is a full argument here. She knows the exact shape of it because it is sticking so hard.

Wysteria clamps her teeth tightly together and glares hard at the wall behind him, willing either for the knot to untangle or for Ellis to find something to say in her stead. He's very good at being rational.

[heorte]

The rising, combative lilt of Wysteria's voice breaks through the low, buzzing hum in the back of Ellis' head that threatens to blot out everything else. She is so good, Wysteria. The bright-hot burn of her anger is something to be admired, though it comes to him from far off as if through an ice-cold fog. Ellis doesn't know how to summon that kind of stubborn fury anymore. Every part of him is leaden, weighted down with the understanding of what grief is forthcoming. It is a struggle to draw breath in the face of it.

There is some wretched, restless thing moving in his body, breaking out in tremors in his hands. They open and close over the undone buckles of Tony's boot, lift to rub unsteadily at his face. The urge towards movement has nowhere to go. This isn't something he can repair with his hands.

In that beat of strangled silence, Ellis' eyes fall from Tony's face to his own useless hands curling into fists as if he can grasp something, some miraculous turn of phrase that will make any part of this right.

"Please don't ask us to leave you," is all he finds, words scraped raw. (What are the odds the Joining would kill Tony all the faster rather than save him? How could Ellis ask him to endure it?) "We couldn't."

It is not a solution. It is the promise of a vigil.

[heirring]

Something in that makes the heat in her face flare, the point of her attention narrowing to needle sharpness.

"The record might indicate otherwise," is very curt, stabbing out at Ellis without looking at him.

That conquers the tightness in her throat. The fixture of her gaze slides from the wall back to Tony, the furrow of her brow consistently severe.

[propulsion]

"Hey, I'd prefer it if you guys could be a unified front right now," Tony says, hand lifting, hand dropping. "Kind of. This wasn't—"

Not what he had in mind.

Inasmuch as the alternative seems inefficient. God, he wants them to make it out of here so bad, whatever 'here' is, whatever this prolonged nightmare is gonna turn out being. Tony sighs out a breath, steam curling thick and fast, disappearing, and he shifts enough so he can reach out and take one of Ellis' grasping hands, anchoring it into a hold.

To Wysteria, sitting across the fire— "C'mere."

[heirring]

For a moment, it seems like Wysteria might remain anchored where she is sitting under the wrapped shape of her wool blanket. Something is beginning to set, concrete and closed, in her expression. Under the blanket, where her hands have it cinched tight beneath her skin, she can feel the thud of her pulse in her neck.

She's still wearing her shoes. They're visible just there under the blanket's edge as she gets to her feet and mechanically comes around the fire. Rather than sit down again, Wysteria merely makes to re-wrap the blanket about her into some more flattering shape.

[heorte]

The accusation catches, sparks some dull, tinny ring in his ears. (It isn't an accusation. It is a truth.) He slips, receding to watch their tableau at a distance: Wysteria's expression setting into a deep frown, Tony's labored breath frosting in the air, the restless motion of his own body half-rising without any clear sense of direction, the muted trip of words from Tony. The numb observation of it blunts every aspect of the moment, right up until Tony's grip on his hand shocks him back to his body, turns the cold from severing cushion to something bracing, anchoring him as surely as the clammy clutch of Tony's hand.

The flex of his hand in Tony's grasp settles. Whatever instinctive notion towards standing, fleeing, turning from the truth in Tony's face, eases into stillness. His eyes drop, and he absently chafes Tony's hand between his own as he waits for whatever is to be said, Wysteria's further objections, the bickering rhythm of bargaining the pair of them have fallen into more and more often these past days.

[propulsion]

Tony has his hand up, palm open, expectantly hovering.

When Wysteria does not do the thing, it drops down on his knee. He didn't completely plan to just be sitting here holding hands with Ellis but that's, like, okay, some part of him extremely cognizant to the fact he almost lost him there for a second.

"You gonna sit?" he asks, watching her. "I was gonna do like a low-key kumbaya moment."

[heirring]

"I don't know what that is," she says, direct and crisp like a cold snap of air. And she can hear him perfectly well from here, standing exactly as she is. And there is no reason at all to sit there when she will only have to stand up again to return to her own side of the fire once he has finished telling them how he is better served by lying in a ditch. The soft scuffing sound of Ellis' hands about Tony's underpins the pop of the fire and—

She tucks her hands under the edges of the blanket. She locks her knees where she stands. It is practice.

[heorte]

“Wysteria,” comes softly, perhaps at the risk of drawing some further bludgeoning truth from her. “Please.”

He has no further persuasion than that.

Maybe the better thing is for Tony to be under the bear skin rather than trying to brazen his way through this conversation. (Or maybe Ellis just doesn’t want to have this conversation.) But they’re in the midst of it now. Rearranging themselves to sleep isn’t exactly an option.

[propulsion]

Tony sighs.

And hey, upside, he can curl his free hand into the edge of his fur too and draw it close around himself. "It's okay," he mutters in Ellis' direction.

Or: no it's not, but let's choose our battles, shall we. Tony shuffles to slouch further back against the wall. A slight wince at both the feeling of that pressing against muscles that just seem hellbent on being sore all over and the chill of it seeping through the pelt, but it'll warm in a second.

"It doesn't make any sense," he says, finally. "That you gophered out of the goddamn ground when you did. That we wound up in that farmhouse when we did. That we're here at all. It's stupid and nonsense and I'm real glad it happened out that way. And I'm not gonna make either of you do anything, so..."

He lifts Ellis' hand. Back down again.

"Fine," sounds flippant, so he tries again, "it's fine, if you wanna stay. But then you better go."

[heirring]

There is a crack in the wall behind him. It runs up at an angle from Tony's shoulder, jagging up and out toward the dark which lies beyond the circle of light cast by the fire. It cuts through her shadow which stretches up and out of sight - projected high and long enough that it has no shoulders or head. It is a fractured dark shape which looms alongside Tony, and over the bent shadow that Ellis makes. Wysteria studies its outline. The clipped portion warped by the wall's imperfection. The whole arrangement looks nothing like them, which includes Tony at the center who is so pale and mottled that the firelight turns him shades of orange.

He says things. Later, when she has unlocked her knees and has stopped drilling holes into old plaster with her eyes and has unlocked her knees and her jaw, she may mark them.

[heorte]

There is nothing Ellis can do in the face of this.

It's familiar. It is unyielding. Ellis' tightening grip around Tony's hand won't keep him from slipping away. (It's a kinder death than most Ellis has seen.) All that he wants to say comes to nothing. Pleading and bartering doesn't stave off death.

Tony's hands are chapped from cold, nicked from what Ellis presumes was their escape attempt, or the work that came before it. They are good hands. Ellis remembers them fidgeting with silverware, turning cups of beer, drumming on tables, gesturing emphatically in the course of conversation. His jaw works, ragged breath drawn in while Ellis tries to dredge words up from the beneath the tinny rattle ringing in his head.

"Tony," Ellis begins, and then stops, jaw tightening around some raw, agonized sentiment. This isn't necessarily his silence to fill. He'd expected Wysteria, and the uncertain pause in the wake of his haphazard attempt hangs before he turns to look at her, study the wound-tight column of her framed by the fire.

[propulsion]

"Sorry," comes out abrupt, jarring, kind of like it's parrying the silence, Ellis' haltingly saying his name. Like it just occurs to him he should be and so is released without further thought.

It's for both of them, really, but only Ellis at this angle gets a look cut across to him along with it. Characteristically a little wild eyed. Not scared, really, save that this, right here, is a lot. "Let's not—" Now he shakes his hand free of Ellis', fingers stretching. Palm sweaty, mom's spaghetti. "Let's not, right now, it's late, and.

"We knew this was gonna happen," is most certainly to Poppell. He addresses the peek of her shoe under her blanket. "If we didn't go where we were going."

[heirring]

The cut of her attention to him is very abrupt. It jabs like a pin's sharp end or a heated poker, all pointed and unpleasant as if she is fending off the urge to kick the both of them.

Her turn away is very abrupt and paired with a stride which looks to propel her out of their orbit. But either she thinks better of it, or their pull is stronger than she'd anticipated, or she has found something at last to say, for Wysteria has hardly made her escape attempt before she revolves back again.

"Then the solution is obvious," is loud at this late hour. She reduces herself to a furious little hiss. "I don't see why I have to be the one to say it, but very well. I will go consult with de Foncé regarding the use of his dracolisk and see to provisioning. Mister Ellis, be so kind as to see to our things here. And in the morning when the sun is up and the weather has cleared, we will simply make our way down the mountain.

"There can hardly be any risk that the Venatori's scouts will expect such a move now that we've fallen in with such a large parry, so we may be away to Orzammar before they so much as realize what has happened. I warn you however, that I cannot imagine we will get anywhere without Valentine demanding to accompany us to see to the safe keeping of his Anne-Laure. And that may very well kill us all."

[heorte]

Dredging up words is an effort, but what is the alternative? Let Wysteria continue this plan, when it will come to nothing? When they should be focusing their attention on making Tony comfortable here?

"Wysteria, we can't do that," Ellis says, knowing full well how both Wysteria and Tony have responded to the idea of being told something is impossible. "It wouldn't be a kindness."

[propulsion]

Tony winces. A response that is more on the scale of being confronted with a bowl of brussels sprouts than his mortality. Kindness.

But there is a relief, when Ellis speaks up. Saves him from having to make a case to what, do nothing. Still, he braces a little for whatever the hell response that's going to incite, leaning his head back against the wall and sinking a little further into the fur he's gathered back around him.

[heirring]

Her nostrils flare. In the fire light and all its surrounding darkness, she goes flush and then pale in turn—all hallmarks of mounting temper as Wysteria draws the draped blanket more tightly about herself. She looks from Ellis to Tony, and then back again.

The bitter creep of the cold lingers even in this sheltered place, and her ear is aware of the wind guttering through the cracks of the night even if the rest of her isn't. It is the unfeeling kind of weather unlikely to be tempered by daybreak, says a harshly reasonable person that sounds nothing like her in the back of her head. Which is stupid. Under these circumstances, why should anyone be convinced of anything? What won't happen, what they can't do. What a ridiculous series of certainties to be tangled in when so many things that are true shouldn't be.

She starts to say it—how unlikely all these other pieces have been, so why not this too?—but her jaw clamps shut again after the first argumentative syllable. Ellis will not. Tony cannot. And when has she ever managed to do something alone?

With a blank heat burning in her face or between her ears or behind her eyes, Wysteria resumes her turn. She flees from the circle of fire light and from the pair of them. It's easy to do. She's still wearing her shoes.