( 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

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[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.”

[delphian]

Too many legs for an ordinary chicken, even one of such comparatively immense size—the beast is easily as big as a clydesdale, comically spindly claw-feet rendered a much more significant threat, hypothetically, if they weren't tucked up safe beneath layers of soft, clean feathers. (Few chicken coops smell as pleasant as the chicken horse does.) The front half seems more or less correct, if unlikely, but then the fact that there is a back half—

“I'm the Senior Enchanter,” it says. “It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Zseiless.”

Given the improbability of a chicken's beak making any of these sounds, the correct pronunciation of his name is almost a non-issue. Of course, if it can say all of these other words, somehow, that should give it no trouble at all. It adjusts its great wing around him as he moves, comfortably. Patient.

Do demons fear death? That wasn't fear, precisely. But they do not dream, the things that populate the dreams of the sleeping and waking.

“Are they worried for you?” Should it hurry him back to the Gallows, and some pants?

[nonvenomous]

“It will take them days to notice I’m missing.”

He is not in a hurry to stand and jog all the way back to Kirkwall, this naked, balding man under the chicken horse’s wing. His heart is still kicking at the back of his sternum, displaced unease feathery on his breath when he exhales.

Where are they?

A barn? It hardly matters. It’s not the toothy craw of an anathema. After a glance down, it seems to occur to him that he is not wearing pants. There is a protracted silence.

“Which circle did you say you were from?”

[delphian]

The great feathers ruffle and resettle, tucking him close beneath them if they aren't going to stand. It is...maybe a barn. A sort of chicken coop, a sort of stable; there is hay beneath them, incongruously comfortable considering the present percentage of fabric (zero), and to leave does not seem urgent.

“Kirkwall,” it says. The Gallows looms large in Tsenka's own memory, but the Senior Enchanter says it in a very ordinary way, as if it is a very ordinary thing. The Gallows was a circle. It had senior enchanters. Maybe one of them was big and feathery. Why shouldn't that be so.

It says, “It has been some time, though, since last I was there.”

[nonvenomous]

The corners of his eyes show white at the Senior Enchanter’s answer, a fresh tickle of unease in his sidelong tilt to gauge insinuation, implication, ire in the underside of the beak or the folds of its wattle. A chicken’s face is difficult to read, it turns out, even if the feathers are warm and the voice is soothing -- a zen rake combing through existential anxiety.

This is probably just a coincidence.

“I was under the impression there weren’t many survivors.”

He organizes his nerves to steel them with a discreet shift at his shoulders, the angle of his hip. The hay beneath him gives without scratching.

“Are you thinking of returning?”

[delphian]

“There aren't many survivors of a lot of places in Thedas. Many of those, Circles.”

Tsenka had not spent long at the Gallows, all those years now past; she had not needed to spend long there for its shadow to loom large, for her not to feel its weight behind her as she ran forward. Runs, now, inexplicably toward the place.

The chicken horse, her representative, remains placid. Companionable, even, saying: “Is it worth seeing, these days?”

[nonvenomous]

“I suppose it depends on what you’re looking for.”

Thankless toil? The illusion of purpose in the twilight years of free will on Thedas? The tang of dislike plucked through his delivery rings deeply bitter without force to its inflection. He certainly doesn’t have any better plans for himself.

“There are people worth meeting.”

[delphian]

“That makes all the difference.”

In any direction.

It seems right that he should be bitter; fleeing to the shelter of those old, awful walls for safety tastes the same way, somewhere between salvation and resignation. Reconciling to the inevitable that she would not allow is.

The chicken horse tilts its head. It isn't any more expressive than any of its other gestures, except that now its beady eyes are regarding him sideways.

“Friends of yours?”

[nonvenomous]

Both eyes tilt into view and he looks to the twitching pupils for a read, only to come away empty-handed for the second time. Kind and warm though the chicken horse may be -- it’s also a stranger, powerful, independent, externally motivated. Perhaps by its prior connection to the Gallows.

“Some of them.”

He thinks of Loxley, Ellis -- the Warden, Madame Fitcher, James Holden, Jone of Denerim. No true mages among them.

The mages they do have are disparate, or other rifters.

“It won’t be worse for you there than it is anywhere else.”