( 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

[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.

[acreage]

Relief blooms.

If this were the real world, he'd be stumbling to a stop; instead it's something more like that he was moving, and now he's not. This is a strange thing, this turn; paths of horror are used to being trod when he sleeps.

(That was not how a gate closes; but when he does wake, if he remembers any tendril of this, he'll only muse how much easier things would be if it were.)

He walks again, now, more slowly; and now the grass dissipates as they make their way into the Gallows (or what he recognizes as such), a salt tang in the air now. He's forgotten something, his dream-self thinks, maybe it's in his room —

[delphian]

The Gallows is strange, as he climbs the stairs—he sees it as he expects to, but the shadows just beyond the edges of his gaze are deeper and darker, the air colder. The sensation in his throat as if he were listening to someone weep, but he hears only the ordinary sounds of the daily bustle of work and life in a keep too large for its complement of inhabitants.

It eases. The sun emerges from behind its cloud, and Tsenka lets him lead her through a familiar place made strange to her, in turn.

[acreage]

If the lapse in tone is noticed —

it's not noticed. In his perception, the Gallows feels warm, and above all safe. She might catch a flicker-flash of spoken memory, if she presses that sense of security, an we would kill them, and the Gallows is a very defensible position. I like our chances. The same grim stone and weeping statues that once kept people in, now keeps those shadowy figures in Tevinter green out,

and he reaches his room faster than he might normally. There's space enough for three, easily, a fireplace with a merry flame, an abundance of books and papers.

[delphian]

A gust of wind from beneath a door or through a window rifles aimlessly through his papers, sending some of them spinning lazily through the air; Tsenka, unseen, plucking one at random out of the air to study it.

The room is warm, and there is a cup of coffee already waiting for him on his desk.

[acreage]

Maybe that's what he'd been looking for, the coffee — it's certainly what he goes to first, taking a drink heedless of his scattering papers.

Of which one comes into Tsenka's hand. The page reflects one on his desk in real life; in a clean, loping script is a series of notes about some kind ground-based weapon, observations about its workings, its potential against, for instance, a dragon.