( open ) let me tell you a secret —

[delphian]

WHO: Tsenka Abendroth & some strangers.
WHAT: Tsenka dreamwalks through the Gallows.
WHEN: Over the course of this month.
WHERE: Asleep in your beds.
NOTES: You do not have to have commented on my OOC post to participate. Details within. Chicken horse not guaranteed.

HOW THIS WORKS.

Under ordinary circumstances, Tsenka is an expert in the delicate, painstaking manipulation of a dreamscape in order to extract the information that she wants—in this case, she is seeking knowledge of Riftwatch, the Inquisition, Kirkwall, the state of things and the safety of mages within the Gallows presently. Unfortunately, in this case, she is also fresh off about two and a half years in captivity during which she was often kept drugged out of her mind and exhausted from sleep deprivation; these are not ordinary circumstances, and she is not at her best. Her attempts to guide dreamers to what parts of their psyche she wants to see may not be as deft as they ordinarily would, and she'll have less patience for dreams embedded in less relevant information.
I will write Marcus's starter, but your character's dreams will begin like any other; set up your dreamscapes below, and await the chicken horse.

Comments

marcus. over the course of a week, at least.

[delphian]

The first night, the dream is a door.

Looked upon directly, it is unremarkable; just a door, like any number of doors through which a man might have walked in his life, or seen open, or seen closed. The sort of ordinary door that separates an office from a hallway or a rented room from the rest of a tavern. A door that a house of someone with sufficient airs to start putting doors in their house might have. Out of the corner of his eye, though, it is familiar; the door that separated Marcus from his brothers and sisters for two full years. Then, perhaps a Gallows door, behind which recalcitrant mages were locked, and others instructed to cast their eyes away. The Senior Enchanter's office door.

Behind it, the tap of fingertips. Tap, tap, tap, tap-tap. Over and over.

On the second night, the same door. The same tapping. A voice:

“Are you there? Are you listening to me?” and the gentle thud of a head resting against the door, her palm gone flat. “Is it safe? Tell me if you're safe.”

The dreams do not stop, even for his waking from them; the door and the tapping and the voice wait for him each night. The questions do not much vary (are you there, is it safe, are you listening, do you hear me, is it safe where you are) except for when, terribly, they do (am I real, Marcus, am I dead?) and when she says,

“If you're afraid, tell me. Tell me, I'll come.”

The last night, he cannot wake. The door opens.

[luaithre]

The air is cold. At least, it is at first. It tastes of snow and stone and nothing else, and there's a gleam of icy light. She's seen this room before, but only in her dreams.

But the man on the other side of the door is older than the boy that lived here. Taller, heavier set around the shoulders, scarred. He wears armors of leather and fur and chain, and his eyes are as bright as a wolf's when he reaches out with a hand with the intent to forcibly grab whatever intends to greet him at the threshold of this room.

This room, austere, with its low bed, the puddle of water that gathers in the corner and ices over in the winter, and that high window, full of sunlight.

Marcus drags her inside, a rush of smoke wreathing them both, full of sparking embers. The door slams behind her, thunderously loud, the tumbling sound of locks from the outside. A trap? No, he wasn't that ready, but there's an opportunity to assert control over whatever it is that's tormenting him so, using the voice of a dead woman.

"Enough," is his demand.

[delphian]

Behind her, gripped in his hands now, the door hangs open, banged against the interior of this austere room—

a dungeon. It is a strange mix of those he dreamed and those she was kept in, but unmistakable for that: a Tevene dungeon, a Venatori dungeon. The acrid smell of bile and stale sweat hangs in impression in the air, and she does not look (the way a spirit might look) as he remembers her, precisely. She had chopped her hair short on the road, tired of tying it out of her way, and it's grown again, pulled loosely back from her face—rawboned, pale, exhausted. Sickly.

“I don't know how much time we have,” she says, instead of acknowledging that, or apologizing, or any of a hundred things she might do. “You must listen to me. I am trying—I am trying to get to you.”

[luaithre]

Marcus looks up and passed her, feeling the unnatural lurch of a setting he doesn't recognise, but does recognise. Back to her face, studying it, looking at those differences, the chop and growth of her hair, her paleness, the shadows sunken into her eyes, and knowing better than to think that they are mistakes. That's not the sort of mistake an enterprising demon makes.

Again, he tries to wrench himself free of the dream, reaching for wakefulness like the surface of a lake above him. Nothing happens. The nothing happening is also familiar.

His hands are still hard on her arms.

"Where are you?" he asks, in a voice barely above a whisper that, anyway, echoes.

[bouchonne]

In Byerly's dream, he's walking without shoes. That's really the meat of it: he's surrounded by a large number of other people, all of them evidently marching somewhere, and he is utterly shoeless. He's suffering over it, too, wincing as he steps on sharper stones, gritting his teeth.

"Hurry up," someone says to him, which causes him to hobble even more precariously.

[delphian]

A man stops beside him; he is carrying shoes, though he does not yet offer them.

“Where are we going?”

[bouchonne]

"The Fade," Byerly responds with a nod. He looks at the shoes, but doesn't ask for them. "Andraste agreed to help us if we could bring her some of her favorite Fereldan stews."

[delphian]

Everyone doubts, Tsenka thinks. Everyone fears. She knows this—knows the secret places of men better than many of them know themselves, the strangeness that a mind can spin up. She tells herself this, but the desperation that it hints at is a cold hand on her shoulder,

no where is safe, no help is coming,

and she cannot quite prevent it from seeping into the landscape, leeching colour.

The man presses a hand to Byerly's shoulder, warm and heavy. “Then we will,” he agrees. “We'll get there faster, this way,” and he slows him, kneeling down to pick out rocks embedded in Byerly's soles, to gently put his shoes on.

[overharrowed]

Even if she has never seen Kinloch Hold, it isn't particularly difficult to determine that the dream is taking place inside a Circle. The uniform choice of robes would be a giveaway, if nothing else. The brazier-lit room is hardly luxurious, but the people in it (most of whom seem to be around age 13 or so) lack the hyper-vigilant air that might suggest a nightmare, or a nightmarish setting drawn from memory.

The dreamer is the tall man at the front of the room, who seems to be in the middle of an intricate lecture over whether there's a magical means for determining whether cats have souls. It seems to involve an unlikely number of equations. He's deeply absorbed in the lesson, and the class is mostly attentive with the exception of one young man in the front row. He is engrossed in drawing a mabari. It's quite good, so much so that at one point, the drawing moves and the mabari scratches its ear. Within the dream, this seems normal enough that no one reacts.

[delphian]

In the front row, a little girl reaches a hand out to pet the mabari, sitting up on the desk now—raises that hand, calling, “Enchanter? Sir?”

[overharrowed]

"Yes." He turns to her. "You have a question." His gaze is sharp, for all the dream is nonsensical at base. Just because the subject he's teaching is absurd doesn't mean Julius isn't going to do his best.

[delphian]

“Sir,” she says, scratching the mabari beneath its heavy jaw, “do rifters have souls?”

[acreage]

He is older here, than he is in real life.

More than that: paler, gaunter, worn down to the bone. More of a sense, maybe, than in real appearance; he doesn't see himself in the dream, of course. He doesn't see yet that it is one. There's only a terrible sense of familiarity, a thrum in the air, a sense of returning.

They're on a broad, grassy stretch, a rift pulsing and casting shadows nearby. or, no: they're in a fortress, a dungeon. It shifts. What's more certain is the man in front of him, a face he'd never recognize in the waking world, but one he's sure he knows now. Clad in the colors of Tevinter, carrying a mage's staff and demanding, in this moment, demanding information about what is both Rifwatch and the resistance, asking in reminder,

Why are you alive, James?

(The earlier flicker is forgotten; this must be some kind of dungeon.)

[delphian]

It is not the same, but it is — familiar. It is too close, and closes her throat, and the walls of the dungeon themselves seem almost to contract around him, the shadows lengthening, the man in front of him improbably tall, and then such an exhale—

they are on a broad, grassy stretch. The dungeon has dissolved, breathed out as if it had never been, and the sickly light of a rift casts strange shadows, Tsenka digging her nails into that flickering glimpse and dragging it back. What is this to him, she wants to know,

who is near him, what does he trust. Not that place. (Who else did they hold? Who has she lost?)

[acreage]

They are on a broad, grassy stretch,

and the wind blows, and pale wisps of cloud flee before it. The sun is bright and buttery, and all would be beautiful if not for the green, green, green.

Somewhere in the valley below them is an unremarkable town that likely resembles a hundred others in Thedas. It flickers, and there's a large house with trees on three sides, and large silver structures that turn in the breeze, and a tended field of wheat, and it flickers, and there's the stonework of the Gallows, and

flickers back, overlays.

Because the rift thunders, and dark tendrils spiderweb through it as it consumes the sky, and he is alone, here, but there

names don't materialize, exactly. Just, just, just: they are there, directly beneath the maelstrom, and he's here (he's always here) and even if he starts to run — and he does — it's too late.

[delphian]

Tsenka has seen rifts, though she has never seen one closed; this, above him, is not one. She knows that, but likewise she knows that a dream follows its own rules, and she is the dreamer setting them, and so:

it is.

Or,

it follows the rules of a rift, the memories of how they might be closed pulled from Jim's own mind (she rifles through it gracelessly, swiftly, with a single-minded focus on what she needs) and the them below raise their hands in concert, sparking green light and nearly being brought to their knees by the force of it. Nearly, nearly, nearly, but not—he runs, but slows, the shudder and the almost gravitational pull of something so immense forced to contract back on itself, to warp and pull closed, and clear the sky.

[exequy]

Kostos doesn't know he's dreaming, but he knows the door is trying to piss him off.

The window behind him is barred, and beyond it there's only blackness. His arm is wrapped around a heavy bundle of papers that he knows are important, that are too heavy, that are digging into his skin. His key turns easily in the lock, in either direction, without making any difference.

He kicks the door, which somehow—without moving or making a sound—smugly purrs. And more than he wants out of his room, he wants to not give this bullshit door the fucking satisfaction, so he doesn't do it again.

[delphian]

The door bursts open, which punctures its satisfaction somewhat—

filling it almost completely, a horse. No; a chicken. No; both, somehow? A chicken of improbable size, in the rough shape of a horse—like someone had seen a chicken, but only heard a horse described, perhaps, with four strange legs and clawed feet, a horse-shaped body, an ordinary chicken torso and bright eyes. The unsteady stillness of a chicken's head, and its tiny-eyed gaze alighting on Kostos.

It has no expressions, truly, but somehow he gets the impression that it's pleased to see him.

“Kostos,” his superior says, obviously this is his superior within the command structure that both is and somehow is also not Riftwatch, simultaneously, “are these your reports on Riftwatch? You're going to have to read some of them to me.”

He doesn't have hands.

“Let's walk and talk.”

He hunkers down, so Kostos might get on his back.

[exequy]

Kostos considers the chicken horse, looking it in one black eye. Next considers the disappointed door, emanating its invisible sense of spoiled fun. And back to the chicken horse, brow furrowing at the absurdity—not of the long feathered legs or griffon-sized chicken face, but of the fact that it's glad to see him. What self-respecting chicken-horse would ever be glad to see him?

But it's his superior. So he hoists the papers, heavy as bricks, higher against his side, and he swings his leg over the chicken-horse's back.

"Right," he says. He dreams himself good at riding, with none of the stiff-backed anxiety he would feel on a real horse, chicken or otherwise. "What should I start with?"

?

[nonvenomous]

Imagine: the weight of a felled building pressing in on the chest, every inch of breath given one that cannot be regained as coils thick as marble columns close onyx black around the shoulders, the ribs, the waist. Scales the size of shovel blades shot through with veins of gold notch slick through the legs where a loop has found give between the knees, bones and cartilage cracking through the spine when iron muscle contracts. Squeezing, twisting, wrenching.

He can taste the copper hot in his mouth, hear the matchstick joints tearing in his ears, feel the piss warming his thigh. No pain.

The face poised before his is human, more or less, if massive: the high-domed bell of her skull, her blind white eyes and pugged nose peeling back from wyrm fangs and a jaw that splits by thirds and not halves. Heavy jewelry weighs wherever there is flesh soft enough to pierce it through: snarled in the thick flare of her cobra hood and in the vestigial flesh of her retreating lips.

Teeth upon teeth line her throat and prickle her tongue: the fork of it slides like an eel around his throat, cold as her breath.

There’s nothing to say, nothing to plead for, courage and terror and resignation one and the same. It’s too late.

[delphian]

No pain. But warmth—pressure—something stiff, and pointed, but not a fang. In one breath and another, a moment of closed eyes, when he opens them again: feathers. Off-white, mostly, and coppery, a huge shoulder beneath his head and a wing slouched soft, gentle over his body. No great force to it. The chicken horse's clawed feet are tucked beneath its great body, Richard tucked in against it,

spooning.

“Hey, man,”

it's unclear how the beak produces such a voice, low and deep and soothing,

“do you want to talk about it?”

[nonvenomous]

He shudders at the warmth, instinct jolting into a panicked start that gives way to awareness of the obvious: he is not dead. This can’t be death. There wouldn't be a giant chicken.

Keeled scales recede like breath from glass where they’d bristled at the nape of his neck; blue bleeds autumn clear into the fishbelly gold of his eyes.

Dick Dickerson, who is ass naked because why wouldn’t he be, relaxes gradually back into the flank of the great feathered beast spooned around him. His brow is creased with confusion. He feels after the scales that should be plated smooth at his belly, probes scarred ribs that expand without splintering into bone shrapnel at their joints. The only injuries there are old.

“Not particularly.”

He breathes again, questing for confirmation before he can begin to fathom the nature of the creature around him.

“I'm not sure we’ve met.”

[kantikoy]

It's nighttime, based on the stars and moons out, but the sun is perpetually stuck just at the edge of the horizon to the east. Adrasteia stands in the griffons' roost, the small elf leaning against the curvature of the wide windows where the beasts fly in and out, but while there are the sounds and smells of the griffons, none of them appear to be actually present.

Beyond her, Kirkwall shifts between a city glittering in the last vestiges of the night and one that is attempting to rebuild from what is apparently a firebombing via dragon. Adrasteia takes a breath, wrapping her arms tightly around herself.

This dream is poised between unsettling and nightmarish in tone. With the rising of the sun there will either be clarity, or Blight; there are no other options.

[delphian]

The sun rises.

It comes up slowly, spilling warm gold light like so much honey over the landscape—lazy, as if the morning herself is just stretching and yawning, and rolling over. No cold light of day to be found here, no, this sunrise is as soft as a caress. Look, it murmurs, sleep-tousled, there was nothing to fear.

Beneath its glow, there are no scorch marks to be found. No bodies, no destruction. The buildings are whole and from her high vantage point Adrasteia can even hear the beginnings of bustle, the early risers preparing for the day, the slugabeds slower to rouse.

There, now. That's better.

[kantikoy]

She breathes a little easier, once the sun has broken out across the horizon, and the dream settles into something not wholly terrifying for her. Not that she has a good insight into the fact that she's dreaming, exactly, but the moment before the light began to shine held a lot of anxiety with it.

Now, she can get down to the everyday business.

In her dreams there's no need to deal with the many steps between the rooftops and her office; she turns a corner, opens a door, and she's there, with tea and cookies that she remembers from her childhood on the desk.

The birds are singing. The door stays open. The day begins.