( 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.

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[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.

[delphian]

The warmth of relief that spreads through her is a glow, almost—the overlay of two moments, when she smiles up at him and he can see through it the way that she used to, with full cheeks and the low thrum of trouble yet to be made, and the weary truth of her holding him in place. She had meant to do it gentler,

but gentler wasn't working. (And perhaps Marcus might dispute her definition.)

“Close.” She doesn't try to pull herself free, but draws them together—presses her forehead to his, the way she has a hundred times before, how she would butt against him in greeting and clamber over the side of him and demand a share of his blanket. “Close. So are the Venatori. Tell me it's safe where you are.”

[luaithre]

His hands tighten, loosen. They move, map themselves to either side of her head.

"The Gallows," Marcus says. "But it's safe, under the command of Riftwatch. It's safe here."

The cold Starkhaven cell changes. It's a room, the shapes of its windows and stonework being familiar, but there's a warm fire in the hearth and possessions everywhere, like a still steaming cup of tea at a desk, an ashtray by the window, and a nice coat draped over the back of a chair. Candlelight and comfort.

He should still have reservations. It's been long years. But when he believes something impossible, he has a way of believing it completely.

"Where are you?"

[delphian]

Tsenka covers his hands with her own; turns her head, rubbing her cheeks against his palms like an affectionate cat, and slipping from his grip like smoke (there is no interim, precisely, only he is holding her and then he isn't, and she's behind him, walking) to study the things that he shows her. She picks the coat up in her hands, to estimate whether or not it is his—

“I can see the road,” she says, “but so can them as follow.”

So they stay off it, mostly.

“Venatori turncoats. One toward, one away.”

[luaithre]

She walks off behind him, and he moves towards that door. He stands at its threshold and looks into the dungeon, a hand resting on the wooden frame as he peers inside. He thinks about saying it a third time, where are you, grasping for actionable intelligence, but perhaps, even with the knowledge that time is limited, a little patience is necessary.

The coat is his own, a richly embellished thing at a glance and familiar stale tobacco smoke woven into its fabric, but even signs of wear and tear and repair are present in his memory. But there are other signs. Sets of men's boots, too many of them for how well-worn they seem, but also a woman's comb on a dresser, small bottles of perfume.

Marcus is also different, now. The armor traded for trousers, a loose shirt, matching the room.

"South of the Minanter? Or further out?" He turns back to her. "There's an invasion happening."

[delphian]

“Yes,” she says, of the invasion, “I was in a trunk for some of it. We broke from Starkhaven.”

A part of her had wanted to let Myron go his way, then, and stay—a mistake by any measure—and what had Starkhaven for her, now, anyway?—but how fiercely glad she is to have thought better of it when sifting through the sleeping minds of Riftwatch she had found her own brother, smelling of smoke and loss and hope, too.

Too many boots, she thinks. He doesn't need this many boots. This pair, here, they look not his style, and—

she lifts from the edge of the bed what is almost certainly too sheer and too frilly to belong to him, and raises her eyebrow as she pulls the ribbon that gathers it where she supposes a shapely thigh might go. A dainty one, by the look of it.

[luaithre]

"Tsenka."

And that's familiar, the shape of her name, spoken in that way—not the sternly placid warning he might issue to an apprentice misbehaving, but a more tilted exasperation, complaint implicit. A tone reserved for not-so-little sisters.

But he doesn't stride on over there, or try to stop her from rifling through his memories as she does his belongings (or his-adjacent). Both because he is too aware of the way she can simply choose not to let him, and also because—she's not really here. And anything could happen, between where she is, where he is.

"How can I find you?"

[delphian]

Familiar, too, the ostentatiously blank expression that he gets in return; what can he possibly mean, saying her name in that way, she's no notion of it. There is a brief moment, twirling a stranger's knickers around her finger, where he is in real danger of receiving them to the face,

but she sets them down, sits on the edge of the bed. It feels...warm, here. Not physically, something else. It dulls the cold shadow cast from the dungeon beyond, already fading, a hallway? A canopied wood?

“We will come over the Vimmarks,” she says. “Florus turned away. He smuggled me out. We're coming—”

She rises, to the window. When she gazes out, she does not see the Gallows, or Kirkwall, but the trees beneath which she went to sleep, and the path she has taken.

“The other one, the traitor, he said an Inquisition man would help. Vanya Orlov.”

[luaithre]

Marcus follows her to the window, bare feet on stone, and then the rug which protects bare feet from stone. He stands at her shoulder and looks out into the woodlands, seeing what sense can be made from tangled branches beginning to lose their summer's vitality, especially the further south she gets.

He looks to her, then, at that name, a confused silence following. Then, "He's of Riftwatch," a little stilted. "Why should he be of help?"

[delphian]

“I've my doubts,” can come as no surprise, or at least significantly less of a surprise than Vanya Orlov's name in the first place. “He was the Nevarran mage's lover. And the Nevarran mage,” the traitor, the turncoat to the Venatori, “an optimist.”

Imagining that the lover he'd left behind would be thrilled to hear his name, and moved to aid the woman he'd exerted himself to free—that to hear Antosha repeated might not undo whatever trust could be gained.

[luaithre]

Dreams are strange things. There's no shift to the landscape, the room, the air, but that cosy warmth that Tsenka had been attracted to seems to stir. Some black hostility at the mention of a Nevarran mage lover in connection with one Vanya Orlov, although it lacks the specificity of a personal offense.

He has heard of mages laying with Templars, of course. That it's not always drenched in fear when they do. He knows, something, of what Nevarra is like.

Still.

This feeling passes like a gust of smoke, quick to disperse. "Your Nevarran mage friend took a Templar as a lover," Marcus says. "You don't need him. He's not important."

[delphian]

It disperses; something similar coalesces in the space it leaves behind, Tsenka's eyes cold and hard—

“He was not my friend,” doesn't sound like a new decision, actually, because Tsenka has at no point considered Antosha or Myron's contributions to her rescue anything other than the absolute least either of them could do, “and I'm going back to Minrathous to beat the shit out of him.”

A jagged, furious laugh: “The traitor would send me to a fucking Templar, I will kill him, Marcus.”