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

[nonvenomous]

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.

[acreage]

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.

[nonvenomous]

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.

[acreage]

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?"

[nonvenomous]

Dick does question it.

He allots a full beat for skepticism -- both for sword, and for the comfortable, romance-novel-cover certainty with which Holden wields it. This is hardly the time for him to be sneaking a peek at Jim’s ideas about himself, or heroism, or a sensible response to facing down a towering aberration in an ice cave. And yet.

The larval glob between them humps towards Silas’ boots like an overfed dachshund in the break, and he takes a long pair of steps back, raising his torch high.

“I’ll take the small one.”

[acreage]

Look.

Sometimes, a person develops their entire sense of heroism from reading a lot of Cervantes and knightly tales a child. Jimmy liked to think of himself as a knight, his mother Elise has said, and while he'd deny it in the waking world,

his dreaming mind readily gives him away.

Anyway. He breathes out, head canting just a little, long enough to comment, "Yeah, I thought you'd say that."

And turns back to the larger one, a muscle memory he doesn't actually have centering his weight, balancing the blade in his hands. God, he fucking hates this dream.

[nonvenomous]

“You know me so well.”

A turgid, froggy hand slaps down with all the momentum and weight of a corpse rolled into a grave -- forcefully wet, and the thing begins its advance. Plodding but inexorable, the flash of its many eyes snapping eager at odds with its pace from within the gelatin membrane it’s enshrined in.

Behind Jim’s turned back, Silas raises his free hand and mutters an incantation.

Divine light strikes over Holden’s shoulder to catch the larger beast in its flank, ethereal viper fangs outstretched to fill the thing with a pulsing glow, everything shades of the same unholy green.

In any case, it makes the creature much easier to see, not only from without but from within: pale organs distorted flat around the thick, rolling coil of what must be the digestive system pillowed into its every cavity. Visibility becomes especially important when Dick drops the torch to catch his boot into the stirrup of his crossbow.

The flame flags, and flickers low.

This is what happens when your cleric is a snake.

For the smaller creature, Dick shoulders the bow (Did he have a crossbow, before?) and sends a bolt dead center through the noggin of the maggot-nug coming for him. As if on cue, a second maggot plops down atop the first; Thot croaks at the slap of a third further off in the darkness.

[acreage]

The effect is eerie, especially as the cavern grows darker, though it's undeniably useful.

And speaking of eerie: the dream still has power here. Isn't that clear? A man with a sword, facing down a large beast — and yet what he actually does, what actually happens, is hard to say. Will be impossible later, upon waking. So much static, the knowledge of something happening without clarity on the how. The blade flashes in the low light; the creature rears, dodges. There's a lucky strike: he actually gets the sword buried into the flesh of the thing, muscles, vessels inside of it tearing and bursting as it shrieks shrilly.

But memories flicker flash, and what's a natural motion in one set of them is fully unfamiliar to the others. Instead of being able to free the weapon, he hesitates, and the green-glowing globby thing strikes out, throws him against a wall of ice.

[nonvenomous]

The soft lobe of the proboscis peels back in the flash before impact, and for a fleeting instant, massive pronged mandibles can be seen suspended inside, pedipalps and fangs burrowing through the snoot in anticipation of a taste --

The force of the follow through ejects the sword in a gush of ejected cytoplasm and the beast tents in as it reels back, collapsing in like a punctured parade float as hydrostatic pressure leaves it in waves that sluice sizzling across the cavern floor. There’s a faintly acidic prickle to it all -- not enough to blister, but enough to sizzle at the sinuses. It thrashes as it falls, until the translucent hide is slashed open from the inside, mandibles snagging as the colossal parasitic wyrm within tears itself free. Not guts but tapeworm coils push flopping out of the empty sack of the nug by a thousand motoring legs, and it rises like a cobra over Jim, dozens of eyes twitched into baleful focus.

On a positive note: it is still pulsing with green light.

Thwop, a bolt pierces one of the larger orbs, and the wyrm arches back, its chitanous scream echoed down the chamber from whence they came.

The rake of metal on stone is lost in the clamor -- a sopping wet Thot has the grip of the sword in her teeth, towing it backwards to Holden like a rat dragging a wedge of pizza.

[acreage]

The good thing is that he misses the entire transformation from blobby monster to enormous pale wyrm shucking off a flesh suit. That is, at least, one less nightmare for down the line.

The bad thing is that it's because of how hard he hit the ice, and then the ground. He hits his head hard enough that his ears keep ringing even after his eyes refocus, but worse is the pain when he breathes — ribs bruised, or broken, possibly.

It's not real; nor is the monster; nor is the cold. But the truth is slippery, wily. See — it's been five years since the Gates fell. The water that drips from his hair is freezing. The white wyrm's scream is loud, jarring, enough to pull him up to his knees — there's been worse pain, he remembers, another monster but in the Roci's hold, a protomolecule hybrid streaked with glowing blue — and then taking the sword back from Thot, pausing long enough to brush fingers over the fur of her ears.

When he staggers to his feet, it's to heft the sword as he moves closer to the wyrm, and aim a blow to cut it in half.

(It'd take more than a single stroke in the waking world. Here, he's not sure what to expect.)

[nonvenomous]

Thot’s fur pulls slick with nug fluid after Holden’s fingertips; she winds wormlike herself along his wrist and through his ankles as he staggers to his feet. She’s warm. Alive.

And when he cleaves the sword into the beast, healing warmth flushes from the loop of her tail at his calf, dulling pain, siphoning the ringing from his ears, and lending strength to each swing needed to hatchet the gnashing head from the coil of the abdomen. With each blow, the conibear snap of the jaws is weaker and more efflusive, gouts of steaming stinkwater washing slippery over the ice around them.

A final thwop marks the last of Dick’s bolts stapling a final struggling maggot face-down to the floor across the cavern, with only the sputtering remains of his torch to light the way.

He spits out a mouthful of spatter, and Thot skirts away to rejoin him, pak pak pak pak through translucent viscera all the way into a sliding leap for his shoulder.

“I didn’t take you for a swordsman.”

[acreage]

There's something cathartic to it, truthfully.

He's not the kind of person who spends a lot of time venting frustrations by, you know, beating the shit out of things — but when the thing in question is a man-eating monster, it's hard to feel too bad about it. Besides, it's been a long day, or week, or five years, or night dreaming. But he doesn't dwell on the thought, or any, really, besides gratitude for the assistance from Thot.

And by the end of it, he's pretty well drenched in wyrm goo; and it's while making a pretty fruitless attempt to dry his face that he snorts.

"We both know I'm not one." Where's the sword gone? Don't worry about it. "Normally, anyway."