faderift | MOD PLOT ↠ The Darkest Realms of Dream, Part II

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MOD PLOT ↠ The Darkest Realms of Dream, Part II

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ brackets or prose, roll w/what you're comfy with ]

The leggy figure that slithers in through the gap first could be anyone: black furs spiked and crusted thick with frost, hat and scarf screwed down tight around dark goggles. Behind them, the wind howls behind pelting snow in the night, the rest of their party lost to obscurity. It's been too long since they've heard even the ghost of a call to regroup through the storm. Time to make their own way.

In here, the air is still, and dark, and quiet.

Glossy ice walls slant over a narrow path, their acute angle rendering this passage far taller than it is wide -- more chasm than cavern. A strobe of lightning sends light pulsing blue through the chamber, thunder along through old cracks.

Something spills oily smooth up from the man’s furs to land on all fours at his feet: a sleek black cat, near impossible for human eyes to follow.

Silas is already stripping a torch from the side of his pack when she trots off into the obscurity ahead: a flash of light from his fingertips sees tar at the club twisting alight with Fade green flame.

Edited 2021-01-25 04:58 (UTC)

The next man who pulls himself through looks underdressed, after the first. He's all boots and gloves and a heavy coat (and no fewer than three people come to mind who would've throw him off the mountain if he hadn't found another), but snow flecks his face, melts into his hair and the coils of his scarf. But he doesn't look too uncomfortable for it. Petrana's magic is true; as promised, the glyphs she'd painstakingly marked onto his skin keep the worst of the cold at bay.

He exhales, breath misting in the air, and raises a hand to shade his eyes when the torch flares with brightness. In this moment, he really goddamn misses flashlights. There's a torch of his own in reach, but without inclination to dig through his supplies for materials to make a fire, or to ask Silas for the help — it's left untouched, for now.

A sense memory, staggeringly strong compared to the watercolor blur of much of the last five years: Ilus, and the alien ruins, and poison infesting the waters, the walls, and parasites living in peoples' eyes, and an ocean spread above them, and a ring of fire burning below them.

There probably aren't any venomous slugs in these caves, at least.

"God, this would be a fucking stupid way to die," he mutters, and it echoes.

Edited 2021-01-25 05:51 (UTC)

“Consistency is key.”

The echo of Silas’ voice murmurs subtle after Holden’s, and he cranes a look back to gauge the scope of the towering crevice they’ve crawled into.

The farther the cave stretches on into the dark, the higher the join of the walls overhead; a steady drip of water could be rippling anywhere ahead or above, with the way the soundwaves bounce and return. All around them, the weight of the mountain shifts in the storm, and the entire cavern shudders. Fresh fractures strike milky scars in through ice that could otherwise pass for seawater: old, and cold, and deep.

Silas hooks his scarf down under his chin and his breath turns out like a poisonous fog, green in the strange light of his torch.

He looks back to Holden as if waiting for a nod, hard to read, goggles glassy black, the ruff of his collar and the fur of his cap frankly ridiculous.

Not everyone has runes.

Instead of answering, he pauses long enough to press a palm to one of the frozen walls — briefly, as the radiating cold bites through his glove, which already starts to stick — and look up, and up, and up. He has a stupid, fleeting thought: this much water could keep Ceres going for months. Once an ice hauler, always one, maybe.

A fresh flash of light, tremble of thunder, and he turns back to Silas. There's nothing for it but to continue through the cave, and hope they find a way out.

"I guess it's too much to hope that you've been to Skyhold before."

As he moves a little deeper into the cavern, though not straying too far from Silas's source of light.

His goggles have already started to fog by the time Holden takes the lead; he unfastens them one-handed, and tucks them away, torchlight wobbly with the effort.

“It is.”

But the stone floor has an incline, and the unholy green of the torch beats back the darkness.

This tunnel feels right.

Silas is inclined to proceed quietly, as he is in most things. He hasn’t hissed or spat about the swamp hovel the resistance forked him into anymore than he’s inquired after the warm fuzziness of reunions with old friends, hope restored, the living dead. Friends are Holden’s business, and the hovel is his, even if he’s gone scruffy with the cold and stress of it.

Ahead, Thot’s eyes glimmer in the dark; she scarpers back to thread through their heels, leggy and lean and shivery in the tail.

“She hasn’t seen anything living.”

The dream wants them to get to Skyhold, even if the weather doesn't. Still: the blind leading the blind, huh.

What do you call it when there's a herd of elephants in the room? They could talk about what happened after they got back to the resistance. They could talk about Wysteria and Tony, who made it to the ruins of Haven despite Silas's actions. They could talk about the fact that none of this is fucking real. Even as Jim walks, his memory flickers into another series of events: no anchor in his hand, Corypheus long gone, Edgard with no recognition of Riftwatch.

He watches Thot return, careful not to step on her, and says, "I hate that I have to ask this. Did she see anything not living that might be a problem?"

Look. There was a necromancer on the way up.

Consider also that they could never acknowledge or speak of any of this again.

“Bones,” says Silas, quietly, hedging the way someone would if they definitely weren’t going to mention them without being asked. “Fresh.

“Nothing humanoid.”

In the off chance that was a concern. It was for him. There was a necromancer. But whatever the cat has seen, it’s not enough to stop him walking. Lightning flashes. Thunder rolls. Pulverized ice skitters through a fissure in the ceiling far above -- too dark to see until it’s driven itself into powder against the stone floor ahead.

The torchlight rattles faintly in Dick’s grip, timed to match a shiver in his breath.

"Fantastic," he sighs, but the news isn't enough to make him break stride, at least.

Like, why wouldn't there be fresh bones in this cavern? If their collective poor luck is bad enough, maybe a demon will jump out at them any minute now, or the floor will abruptly give way beneath them.

— and suddenly, inexplicably, he laughs.

"Do you remember when I asked the crystals about rifts?" Years and years ago; no, a few months ago. "I see now why so many people told me not to fuck with the Fade."

Edited (worDS) 2021-01-28 05:00 (UTC)

Holden laughs suddenly and Silas flinches, brow hooded with reproach.

Humans can be bizarre in a crisis in the worst kind of way.

“Collective dreaming is one of the least dangerous phenomena they believe the Fade may be capable of exerting.” Jimbo hadn’t been there to see great masses of eels throwing themselves onto dry land with human eyes rolling in their skulls. “Meddling Rifters asking about it has a tendency to make them uneasy. And suspicious.”

He is 10% snide -- significant, for a snake in a coat. Rube.

Ahead: there are bones. They are very clean, and white -- a bread crumb trail of vertebrae and ribs and long-snouted skulls scattered wall to wall in a glittering rime of frost, none of them large enough to belong to anything more intimidating than a goat.

Farther still, at the faintest reaches of the torchlight, green light ripples off the reflection of an ice-slick, translucent surface that plugs the way forward wall to wall. Iridescent strands of pink tissue stretched between disembodied bones are frozen seemingly in midair, some two or three feet off the ground.

Just about to crouch to examine a skull, Dick pauses instead. Suspicious.

Thot has likewise gone very still at his side, her nose outstretched for a delicate sniff sniff.

Certain persons have accused (1) James Holden of being weird and chatty under pressure.

"I must've missed that memo," he says, dry as bone. And speaking of bone —

well. There are very many of them. As promised, none of them are humanoid, but that doesn't make the scene before them any the less unsettling. Or, only a little less unsettling. Brows drawing together, Holden treads carefully. Some scuffling of bones against ground is inevitable as he tries to step past, though the noises seem to echo much more than they should. The initial thought had been to examine the ice blocking their way, see how thick it really is, but it seems only a moment apart that he notices the frozen viscera, and then how Silas and Thot have stopped moving.

He turns back to face them, half-expecting to find something looming.

"If you say," he says, voice pitched not to carry, "that you think something's still here after all, I swear to fuck — "

Something cold and wet drips from above, catches the back of his neck, and makes him shiver.

A pulse of wet movement rolls through the blockage at the end of the way forward. It shifts into a waddling, squishing turn at the sound of Holden’s voice: two softball-sized globes roll and flash mirror bright to the fore in the translucent bell of what must be a skull, surrounded by an irregular mottle of smaller eyeballs.

Its exact shape and nature are difficult to make out: massive, amorphous, bones and skin and muscle all glistening with the same glacial clarity as the ice walls sweeping up around it.

A great, goopy snoot gums hungrily at the bone-scattered floor, siphoning up a tibia, a rib. They drift into the invisible sack of its stomach to float with the rest.

“Mm,” says Silas.

A second creature plops down from the ceiling between them, only a tenth the size of the first. It looks like an aardvark crossed with a maggot, the size of a small pig. Long ears lift like tendrils from its slimy cocoon. Thot slithers her way up to climb Richard with quiet urgency, one grasping goblin claw at a time.

“Maybe we can negotiate.”

This would be a better joke if Loxley was here.

The appearance of disgusting fleshy blob monsters does not distract Holden from giving Silas an accusing look. Objectively, the existence of horrible bone-sucking monsters is not Richard Dickerson's fault. It probably would've been a leap to go from there are a lot of bones up ahead to hey look, two murder globs! That does not, however, mean that Holden is feeling charitable.

"You're right," he says, sounding very much like he regrets every life choice that brought him to this moment, "they look like the chatty types."

He reaches backwards, one-handed, finds a sword strapped to his pack. Had it always been there? In the moment, he doesn't question it, nor how much more easily than in the waking world handling it seems to be.

"Which one do you want?"

silas (dick)

traversing the last leg, closed to holden.

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snek doctor, closed to sawbones.

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