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

CW GORE

[nonvenomous]

The horse rolls upright first, an abominable landslide of muscle and packed snow thundering away into blind escape. Purely by chance, he catches one of the other beasts blind in his hooves, and leaves the thing a mangle of bloody feather and smashed bone in his wake. It steams faintly as it ragdolls downhill, pursued at a hop, skip and flap by a second phoenix more concerned with free entrails than it is the standoff happening over Dick.

Presently: the painful hitch and complaint of a squashed man struggling to find air signals life from the mire of snow beneath the remaining animal’s breast.

The stink of it is stifling: freezer rot, musty old meat gone off grey in the undershot jaw, clotted in the gaps between craggy fangs. Feathers puff at the neck as it sizes up the competition, bristling along the back, a glimmer of intelligence in its tiny eyes. It chuffs at her, flexes its claws, locomotive steam curling up through the flue of the jaw. Ghostly white mist glimmers faintly blue at its end; frost crawls fuzzy over the gore in its teeth. Warning.

It draws itself up, and the maw splits open wide, black against all the white, the tunnel of its gullet sucking air in air like a billows to back the icy glow of magic charging cold in its craw.

[heirring]

Well, Wysteria thinks. It's one of those useless placeholder thoughts - a break between paragraphs, or the hovering of a pen over an unappealing line which has already been written while debating whether it is more guache to cross the thing out or to simpy soldier on from one's mistakes. And then the magical bolt jags free of beast's jaws.

The impact of it cracks across the face the anti-magic barrier projected from the flimsy buckler-sized disk at her forearm in a burst of magelight and a shock of ozone scented mana burn. In reply, undisturbed by the spellwork but ruffled in the way someone concerned about sharp teeth naturally should be, Wysteria lobs her second rock out from behind the barrier. It travels at a respectable but unremarkable rock throwing speed (if one had the means by which to make measurement), but does fly with alarmingly true accuracy.

The sound the stone makes as it finds its way directly to the sprawled open gullet of the ravenous beast is a disturbingly sharp POP!

CW GORE AGAiN

[nonvenomous]

The jaws chop shut. The jaws snap open.

Shut.

Open.

It is difficult to affect surprise without benefit of eyebrows, or lips. It’s impressive, then, that this creature does such an effective job, the open maw whipping silently over the muscular slinky of the neck, talons tearing grey ichor from its own throat. Mana leaks blue through the mess, leaving tracks of cracked, frozen hide, snapping brittle claws.

A cat ferrets out of the snow around its staggering feet, green eyes wide with alarm.

Wuack, wuack, wuack, she croaks for help, stirring fresh red in with all the white. The quacks take on a more accusatory tone when she spots Wysteria, even as she dodges dinosaur death throes. WuACK!!

gore 2: the gore-ening

[heirring]

Wysteria's first step forward is a tentative thing--as if she hasn't fully calculated exactly what is happening yet, or sorted exactly what the great lizard's thrashing implies until it plows face first and writing into the snowbank. And then she is moving, quickly now, at the best of those crackling little noises from the dark little creature poking up in its wake. She darts forward, thinking very hard about where she wants to be which is down in that groove of battered, blood splattered now. She will need to duck down under the flailing limbs and racking talons, and she is thinking so hard about the particulars of that, of avoiding them, that at first she doesn't recognize how to the world bends to accommodate her.

It is something like a piece of paper being folded to transfer a spot of ink from one corner to the next. She doesn't recall bobbing or weaving past the thrashing dinosaur, she only realizes how abruptly the staring green-eyed cat and it's mangled master come within her reach. She dropped her armful of collected firewood some time ago; it is no trouble at all to reach down and catch them both by the scruff of their necks or coats or whatever you like.

With a short decisive jerk, Richard Dickerson and his squawking companion travel an unlikely distance across the snow bank and away from twisting predator. The paper unfolds again, only there is only one spot of ink and it remains exactly where it began: twenty or so paces removed from where he'd moments ago been on the receiving end of a shredding.

Wysteria, pale and blue eyes fear bright, looks down at them. The alarm is clear in her face.

"That's not meant to happen," is the first thing she says.

[nonvenomous]

The quacking ceases abruptly at Wysteria’s proximity -- Thot stiffens in walleyed confusion, and is easily snatched, all four leggies spoked ramrod straight as she’s plucked from the snow.

Silas is heavier, any give choked off short into struggling tension past the fur at his ruff --

The world turns over, and he strikes a dizzy, desperate figure on his side in the snow, fighting to suck in freezing air and to make sense of the sight of Wysteria standing over him with limited processing power for any one task, nevermind two at once. Not now but later, the distinction between surprise and horror might slot more clearly into place: the flash in his eyes isn’t relief or gratitude -- it’s one of animal fear.

He looks as if he’s seeing a ghost.

Also, he is bleeding, dousing fresh powder a bright arterial red.

Order of operations: he shivers into a hissing incantation, a gloved hand clasped across his side to stem the flow while he assess Wysteria’s -- mortality. And mood. She’s not angry. And this is probably real. It’s certainly painful.

“There are three of them.”

[heirring]

For a long beat, it is as if he's said something in another language entirely. Three? Three what? What does the number three have to do with the very pressing issue of his insides working their way onto his outsides, or the mortified look on his face, or the troubling question of why exactly a sixth rate magician is bending space?

And then presumably the dying lizard thrashing around in the snowbank recalls her attention to the slightly less existential present. "Oh," Wysteria says. That shocked look in her face grows more ashen. "Then we had best be on our way, as I've run out of rocks to throw. Can you stand?"

--Would qualify as a reasonable question, were it not followed by the sudden eruption of icy magic from the shifting white landscape on their left. It crashes over them, cold and bitter but otherwise miraculously inconsequential as the flimsy buckler at Wysteria's forearm rebuffs or negate the most damaging of the arcane effects as if they are standing behind a sturdy barrier rather than simply in possession of a single flat disk of metal between them.

Squawking at some undignified decibel, Wysteria ducks down out of instinct. As if in sympathy to the movement, something in the air stirs. Shifts. Solidifies just enough so that when the great lizard leaps out of the camouflaging landscape toward them, it strikes the invisible barrier with a sizzle of energy which flexes and pulls, net-like, about it. Bizarre filaments, once imperceptible, burn like bright woven threads at the point where the creature makes contact. They ripple like a flag in the wind or like the surface of water--threatening to break apart under the applied pressure.

gore + no pressure

[nonvenomous]

Up to one knee, his hand still clamped at his side, Silas flinches from the break of frost bursting across the barrier around them, a great gasp of hot air let off like white ink through the still air beneath it. In the slow of time adrenaline allows for, he veers a more incredulous look to Wysteria in the bubble with him.

The pulse of blood between his fingers has slowed to a steady drip -- he reaches for her instead, to haul her dizzily up with him in the crackling light of filaments rippling under pressure.

He’s on his feet. They should run.

A streak of black plunges around barrier’s base behind them, goblin claws outstretched to fishhook into the lizard’s thrashing ankle. Electricity flashbulbs from contact with an ozone pop, crawling Fade green through the net to crack muscle against bone, blackening hide, burning feathers. Talons seize and squeeze where Thot is caught underfoot; she vanishes in a puff of dark vapor.

Elsewhere, one of the others is still kicking snow skyward in its death throes.