( 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.

[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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

?

[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.

[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.