( 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.

[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]

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.”

[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]

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

“Where are we going?”

[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]

"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]

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.”

[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.

[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.

[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]

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

[overharrowed]

He shouldn't know what rifters are yet, in Kinloch Hold. They shouldn't exist yet. But with the logic that so easily carries one along in a dream, he accepts the question as perfectly natural.

"Well, we have a great advantage with rifters we lack with cats," this gets a small laugh from a few students, "which is that we can speak with them in words. I think, in general, it is always safer to assume a sentient being has a soul until proven otherwise, and we can easily argue that rifters are sentient." He glances at the board he's been writing on. "Now, though, with a hypothesis, I suppose what you're really asking is whether we can prove rifters have souls, which is something of a different question."

[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]

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?)

[delphian]

The little girl (dark-haired and dark-eyed, but with round ears and paler skin, unremarkable) laughs with the rest of the children, and puts her chin in her hands, gazing up at him. The room feels light. She wonders if it felt like when he was in it, if this is real or if he remembers it the way he wishes it had been,

“But spirits are sentient,” she persists, “and demons, within the Fade. Do we assume they have souls, sir?”

[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.”

[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.

[overharrowed]

He doesn't seem put off by her pushing the point; if anything, he's pleased she's so engaged.

"There's a difference between giving the benefit of the doubt while we're ignorant and resolving to remain ignorant forever. If we wish to prove something, we must define our terms properly and create premises that can be supported or falsified. Can you think of something we might prove or disprove, if we tried?" Presumably related to the question at hand, though he leaves it open, as it might be a bit of a leap to expect a 13-year-old to make.

[bouchonne]

Somewhere, Byerly's sleep deepens. It's a sweet gesture, one that causes a swell of gratitude and warmth. The rocks come loose without pain, and the shoes slide on easily, and when the man stands Byerly kisses him on the forehead.

"Who are you?"

[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.

[delphian]

The hand from Byerly's shoulder touches his face, briefly; as a friend might. His face is—

a friend's. He leans on a mage's staff, using it to support both of their weight as he slings his arm under Byerly's, and they fall in step together.

“You know me,” he says, amiable, and in the dream it is true, it is a whole truth. Maybe seeing him is a surprise—but a welcome one, a relief somehow, a gentle thing. “I want to help, too.”