open | merry & bright

[exequy]

WHO: Anyone!
WHAT: Everyone lives happily ever after, forever, for real, wait don't look behind that curtain—
WHEN: Late Haring
WHERE: The mountains
NOTES: No one is late to this. Feel free to get around to it in January. Or February! And if you have questions you can ask me here, but for any question that's "can I do this within my character's dream?" the answer will be yes! You can do anything.

The snowstorm that blows up around them in the mountains isn't unexpected and isn't a disaster. It only dashes some thin hopes that it might not come on so strong or so swiftly. But they've almost reached what they're aiming for — a cave along the cliffy coastal road that's associated with the disappearances of several caravans and now said to be home to a rift — and there's a village up ahead, glowing warmly through the snowfall once they're near enough.

They're not the first waylaid travelers here. The one little inn is full to bursting, with just enough room for Riftwatch's contingent to squeeze in at tables if they get creative about the seating, the lower floor so packed that body heat and the little fire combined make things outright toasty. The beds are all spoken for, but the innkeeper, a warm, upbeat woman with frizzy hair escaping a bun, says not to worry. She's not turning anyone out into the cold. Blankets on the floor is better than that. If anyone finds it too uncomfortable to sleep curled with old blankets on a creaking wooden floor surrounded by the snores of colleagues and strangers — no, they don't. It's comfortable. It's warm. The sniffles and rough coughs from the other side of the room have the rhythm of a lullaby, and the snow-covered roads and the rift and the missing are all problems for a tomorrow that does not immediately come.

They wake, each of them, in a world where there is nothing of significance left for them to worry about. Not the road or the rift or the missing. Not the war; that's over now. Not poverty or obligation or illness. Between them and the life they've always wanted, the way has been cleared of obstacles, and there is nothing left to do but enjoy the comforts of a well-earned easy life — and if something is a little off, no it isn't. Shh. If the victories feel hollow, or the details blur, or the seams begin to show, the world will tighten around them like hands around a wounded bird who needs to be kept from thrashing, whispering that they don't need to worry. Everything will be fine. Just hold still and let it take care of you.

The first to pull free of the delusion on their own will find themselves in the twisting grasp of a lucid dream that's trying very hard to snare them again, stumbling out of their happy endings into the worlds of others'. They might be pulled beneath the surface for a time: the entity saying, all right, if that didn't work for you, maybe this? But the more of them who congregate together, with their incompatible wishes, the more the fabric will begin to fray, until at last it rots away altogether and they find themselves waking on the floor of a cold, abandoned inn, covered in moldering blankets and lingeringly queasy from half-rotted food eaten at least a day earlier, surrounded by the bodies of the inn's other occupants in various early states of decay.

And after, because rest for the weary really is just a dream, they do have to go find that rift.

ooc | Final confrontation with the spirit that allows breaking out into the real world will happen via a log in here I will link when it's happening. But you're also welcome to say your character wasn't involved in that part and went straight to waking up!

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[wearyallalone]

He looks up and his face clears momentarily. The something bothering him about this life is a toothache of a feeling that's hard to ignore, but one of the few things that can pull his full attention away is the herd. "Oh, wonderful, we thought we'd lost her altogether," he calls back.

He sticks the trowel in the earth and comes out to meet Astrid, her figure familiar enough to seem in place but not well-known. His smile is small, but unusually, it does reach his eyes this time. "My thanks. Can I offer you a meal in gratitude? Do you have time to linger for a moment?" Once he gets close enough, his hand goes to the mare's neck, absently checking that she's well for all the animal clearly seems to be unhurt at a glance.

[portalling]

“See, the thing is,” Stephen starts, “is that I don’t think it is.”

The sorcerer was holding a cocktail. He turns his palm in a complicated gesture, and— suddenly his hands are empty, like a stage magician doing flashy sleight-of-hand except he somehow pocketed an entire glass full of liquid. It’s gone.

He feels a little better, a little more in control of himself; grasping at the threads of the dream even as the dream itself, or whoever’s behind it, or whatever’s behind it, pushes back. He examines the details as he remembers them, as they’ve been subtly fed to him, and considers the picture it presents and which he’s supposed to buy. (He wishes he could buy it.) If the Venatori here were never really a thing…

“How’d you get that scar on your neck?” Stephen asks, offhand, deceptively casual.

If Benedict’s throat was pristine and unharmed a moment ago and it seemed like he didn’t have that gnarly scar anymore: well, he does now.

[portalling]

Stephen’s gaze reflexively darts down to glance at the book, to take in the cover and maybe skim a title. But there’s no text written on it, just: that distressingly wrinkled leather cover, the screaming face trapped in the front.

“—Wait. Is that bound with human skin? It looks like human skin. Real Raimi Necronomicon shit here,” he says. This is the pithy sarcasm he levies at anyone, a kneejerk defense mechanism like anything else.

And yet his hand jerks briefly as if to take the book from Vazeiros’ hand, to at least peruse, and find out what it looks like on the inside even if he doesn’t read,

but he can tell at a glance that the vibes are rancid. Not as bad as the Darkhold (another book he technically probably shouldn’t have read). He’s practically itching to take it, just to know more. It’s vibrating and humming with just enough arcane power that he can tell it’s powerfully, intensely magical.

Deep breath. He bites back the curiosity. Smooths his hands down his trousers and shakes them out. (Keeping his fingers free and clear; it means he’s keeping himself ready to do magic if he has to.) And latching onto the drow’s words, Stephen taps into his own anger, that clarifying emotion, hanging onto it to keep himself tethered and not lose sight of the goal, irritated:

“And, FYI, she’s not nothing. She’s worthwhile even when she’s not working, and I can’t believe I have to be the one to point that out to you—”

[elegiaque]

For a moment, the beauty of that view is disorienting.

She recognises the Gallows in her memories of Rifthold, but unlike many who wear Riftwatch sigils (still? do they? no—) Gwenaëlle hadn’t gone first to Kirkwall. No, it had been Skyhold she’d been sent to — wailing at the injustice of it — and she had had her own room, with her own beautiful view of the Frostbacks, and gazing out at the stunning view of Astrid’s happily avvar after—

for the first time, something feels wrong. All of these things don’t make sense together, and there is something about Skyhold, something that tugs at her memory, something uneasy and urgent that she should know…

Why didn’t Asher come with them? She holds him in her mind’s eye (pale and drawn, a sheen of sweat on his brow, weary, no, this isn’t right,) and tells herself: of course it’s just for her and Morgana and Astrid. What sort of child would she be to need him by her side always,

“She watches over you always, but it’s certainly easier when you’re this close,”

but this is important for Morgana, wouldn’t he want to be here? She has always seen crows, since she left Skyhold,

what is it that the Lady keeps for her. Something. It’s on the tip of her tongue, frowning, her gaze caught on the horizon as Morgana tugs at her hand.

[elegiaque]

“Tolerably,” Gwenaëlle says, her critical gaze softening (slightly) when Hermione draws her attention back. “Better than what the sort of scum you find at these things deserves, certainly.”

If anything, she thinks her language represents marked restraint due to not being actual violence.

It is at this point that the shadows nearest her in this dream begin to lengthen. Now, that doesn’t sound like accepting the premise of this happy dream at all.

[dissolving]

"It's Last Night," First Day, as soon as the sun shunts free. Cedric shifts forward on his knees, the creak of ropes beneath mattress somehow familiar. Echoed. They're alone here, but you're never alone in the Hold – nearly a dormitory – "You ask a question, and turn it over, and then we know how the year goes."

Someone grunts, from shadows larger than he's thought to measure. Maybe they drew the bits blind from a bag, like a child in some faraway, stone city. Maybe they slit open a belly and went rooting within.

(Rost scratches at the door with a strange urgency. Storms are hard on animals, even the clever ones.)

[altusimperius]

Benedict's hand flies to his throat, and the building gives a lurch, sculptures tipping to shatter on the floor and hanging art beginning to tumble fatally from the walls. The gathered crowd is silent, shadowy, going out of focus.

"I," he stammers, and tears his eye contact from Stephen's as he begins to acknowledge the state of the room. A draft blows through; water begins to drip from the ceiling, and to seep over the floor, which has somehow turned from fine and seamless marble to dirty flagstone.

"Why are you doing this," he asks, in a despairing whine, "don't do this. Please don't do this."

[boeric]

"When you pick orange," A memory she can seize: High groves and rind. "You twist to break stem."

Sennara reaches for one now, speared bizarre and whole on the end of that golden fork (was it a spoon?). The bowl of fruit is new.

"To pull tears hole," She squints at navel-end. Searching, "Air gets in, goes bad. You must be gentle not to bruise it. You must wear gloves, not to burn."

Juice and skin and the winter sun, the first reaction the chemist taught them. She wore gloves, and the others didn't; arms plunged to the elbow in thick, white vitaar.

(When has she ever picked an orange? There must be machines for that,)

Rot dribbles over brocade. Beyond the dining room, a tinny bell begins to ring alarm.

[altusimperius]

Benedict squints, at Sennara and then at the orange, his mind working slowly to match what she's saying. He begins to grow indignant, without really knowing why; she's being difficult, his unconscious tells him, and this is his house.

"All right," he says haughtily, dismissing her, his head turning quickly to focus on the sound of the bell.
"I'd better see about that." It's an excuse to leave the conversation-- where is the bell, anyway? He'll follow it.

sennara | qunandar sandbox

[boeric]

Welcome to Par Vollen.

Or something like it. This dream better resembles pictures in books than living terrain, and where the details bloom it's into misty jungle. You have a job. A life. Expectations, and duties, friends and neighbours; in vast, honeycombed ziggurats. Children congregate in distant packs. The buzz of industry is constant, alive: Everywhere, someone is building, sowing, planning,

But there are soft places. Patches where something goes a little grey and vague. There are no saarebaas here, there are no mages at all. If you recall your powers, it is as a strange dream.

It's different, here. Better. Safe. There's no hunger, no disease. The elderly are tended. The infirm and wounded still have roles to fill – and there are few wounded, any more, for the war is won. All the wars are won.

There are soft places, ideas and notions where the dream's fabric struggles for shape. Tug at its threads, and you may find the whole thing unravels. Without structure comes intensity. Magic grows abruptly, briefly, stronger; but twisted from control. Even non-mages might wield it.

There are eyes in the streets, now. They aren't all friendly. A fond touch might linger, or drag a bag over your head. There are eyes in the jungle, too, old ones. To run is to be hunted.

She'll be doing the hunting. Nameless and aimless. Without magic, there are no Isskari. Without meaning, men are as beasts.

give me the boy

[extortionate]

Been a lost cause for a while.

Every kid knows the signs of taint. Fever. Pale skin. Black snot, black spit, black blood — when he starts coughing now, he doesn't stop. He doesn't look too close at what comes up.

His forehead peels, where he started to scratch out the itch in his skull. Couldn't stop that neither. It gets a little better, a little nearer the others, the changed ones. They're slower to alarm. They're starting to recognize him.

Lost cause.

"Get it over with," A hand smears the back of his mouth. Skin goes with it. Held out in the warrens a while, but when he starts coughing now, he doesn't stop. Too loud. Luck was always gonna run out. "I'm done."

His fingers scrape the edge of fallen prybar.

[dissolving]

There are days, entire weeks, that Cedric doesn't tense for some off-hand display: The casual gleam of a warming glyph, the creep of spell-grown skin. There are even moments, rarer still, that some piece of him forgets to be afraid.

That piece is all of them, now; never burned, and so never shy. Scars smooth over soft as putty. His ears are whole. His beard is grown. And yet — evidently dishuman. That ought to be a problem. Maybe somewhere, in distant Tevinter, it still is. There's a reason he's here, after all, that Riftwatch is fighting (winning) this war.

There’s a reason. If he doesn’t look too closely, it can’t slip away.

"Got a letter," Mail call. He slides it onto her desk, sealed in thick wax; the shape worked such that only Ness' mind can name. "Think 's from your ma."

gwen

[dissolving]

"Fuck," Death's chosen should probably pick more inventive invective. "Won't budge."

Fists planted against a bookshelf that's gone the weight of stone. They've been closing in, obstructing doors, flinging their contents into desperate view. Cedric hasn't stopped to look too close, or he would've spied his father's journal; else the secrets to being taken seriously, or that song he heard once and never again, and an illustrated account of everyone he's ever thought about naked –

Different, of course, for Gwen.

"Y'really reading right now?"

[brennvin]

Astrid doesn’t know the exact call-and-response of this specific story, and so she’s lost for a moment as Talin pauses and looks at her and waits— but from what she knows so far, Andruil is her favourite of that elven pantheon, may her arrow fly swift, so:

“Oh shit,” she says on instinct, a mischievous smile at the corner of her mouth. You gotta ask permission from the Huntress first, c’mon.

There’s a comfortable ebb-and-flow to this storytelling, so similar to her own childhood: firelight flickering on stone walls, the Avvar clustered in a group, their skalds memorising and retelling their collective stories over and over, their own pantheon big and brash and larger-than-life. Korth Mountainfather, Hakkon Wintersbreath, Imhar the Clever with his tricks and mockery and running the rest of them in merry circles perhaps just as the Dread Wolf had done.

(Andrastianism always felt so— small to her. The Maker and his prophet and no one else? You needed more; you needed a family.)

[brennvin]

“Wasn’t a big hubbub or anything, just found her wandering,” Astrid says easily. And perhaps some people might politely wave it aside and say the meal itself wasn’t necessary, not wanting to be an imposition, or avoiding taking a meal with an almost-stranger, but Astrid brightens at the offer.

Food is community; a stranger might become a friend yet. Also, she is peckish and the wallet of a traveling tradeswoman isn’t exactly heavily-loaded, although something in this countryside means she never quite starves, either: the stakes are always low, a cozy predictable routine driving you onward but not to the extent you fear for your life. Her thin ribcage still remembers hunger, but it doesn’t seem a problem here, lately.

“That’d be great though, yeah,” she says, “if you’ve got another seat at your table. If it ain’t too big a hassle for the wife, like.”

[wearyallalone]

Vanya Orlov's smile is a quiet thing, but not a disingenuous one. "Not at all. She cooks as if we have seven children, instead of just the one. And she's always glad for company." Satisfied that the mare is in good order and that Astrid is staying, he adds, "I'll get her back where she belongs, and then we can go in. Your timing was good, I was about to stop regardless."

Assuming no objections, he gets the horse back in her enclosure and cleans up his gardening tools brisky but without rushing. Worth doing a thing right, if he's doing it at all, it seems. Still, he doesn't leave Astrid cooling her heels too long.

As he rejoins her, he asks, "When did you get back to town?"

[boeric]

She bites deep from the orange. The rind pushes whole beneath her teeth, rubbery and strange, and tears free onto grey spiderweb. A ruin of pulp and string. She spits it out, wipes her mouth on a fistful of tablecloth,

And follows. Benedict, the bell. He's nearly too quick to catch, steps longer than even a tall man's stride, and she should heed that. Let him go, sink back to that strange table, and its stranger feast.

Still some compulsion chivvies her along.

"Does this ring before?"

[altusimperius]

"It's probably just Father," he mutters offhand, turning the corner into a hallway that wasn't there before, its walls lined with important-looking portraits.

"Calling for more wine." His pace is quick and frustrated, the bell echoing in the distance, ever out of reach.

[brennvin]

It weighs a little more uncomfortably on Gwenaëlle’s shoulders. There are more factors in her equation to add together, more incongruous pieces of the whole to fit together, trying to make the edges line up.

For Astrid, who called all of this home until only very recently, it melds more easily. If the Gallows tower stairs wind in circles and then inexplicably become a mountain, what of it? Sometimes you carve a staircase into a mountainside. If the everyday details get a little hazy on the specifics of her uncle’s work because she’s not a magic-user herself, then what of it? She’s not paying especial attention to that when there’s so much else to occupy her: the pleasant burn of hiking up to the peak at dawn, pleasant liquor to share with friends, pleasant men to warm her bed.

(It presents a distraction, and she is distracted.)

And when Gwenaëlle’s frown deepens and her focus drifts, then Morgana pulls harder, a sharp and almost vindictive yank to haul her attention back to heel, but when her mother turns to look then the girl is all smiles again. “Can you do it? I want to see you do it. So I can copy.”

Astrid gamely flips her hunting knife. Holds it out to the other woman hilt-first.

[brennvin]

“Oh, right,” Astrid says, but she still sounds a little distracted: the scratching at the door is the universal sort of noise to signal distress, she’s been trained to hear it when the hounds need to be let out to piss hot in the snow. She looks over her shoulder, and almost lets go of Cedric’s hands before he manages to pull her back to attention.

The more frantic the other animal’s movements, there’s a matching plaintive whine in the back of Raskmodig’s throat.

(She’s heard it once before, hasn’t she? The wolf had only sounded so unhappy once in her life. When was that— )

What’s her question? What would her question be. The ones she can think of are too complicated to fit into the yes/no parameters of this symbolism: how do you save Fade-touched animals, how do you win the war, no, they’re no longer at war, these aren’t the things she needs to ask. Think simpler. Is Morgana going to shoot her first rabbit in the new year? Is Astrid going to get a kiss at midnight? Is Pike finally going to choose a successor?

Simpler life, easier questions, everyday concerns.

She flips the runestone into the air and then catches it in one palm. The question doesn’t make much sense (the snowstorm is getting heavier), but it slips out, impulsive: “Am I home yet?”

And when she turns over the stone, it’s the symbol that means no, no, no, no.

[brennvin]

Astrid drifts along in Vanya’s wake, stealing the opportunity to apprise the animals and the garden and the thatched roof and the stone walls of this cottage; usually they conduct their business at market and in town itself, there’s not much call to make house calls, and so she hasn’t gotten this up-close look at the ranch before. She finds herself fascinated. It’s not what her own home is like, but there’s something toothlessly unobjectionably cozy about it.

“Just recently,” she says, vaguely, and tries to remember specifically how long it’s been. After a moment, delivered with more confidence: “Getting ready for next week’s market day. You got any plans for it?”

[aberratic]

There's something in the hesitation that catches her ear, a quality to his voice when he does answer that's not quite right. Vanya is... lying? No, he's not a liar, and he does have that mage friend he writes frequently. (Why does she know that?) But he's not telling the whole truth, either. Ness frowns to herself over it, eyes still on the bookshelves even though she's not really thinking of them anymore.

In an ideal world, she's not quite so careful about speaking her mind. She doesn't have to be; no one's going to toss her out on her ass for being the slightest bit inconvenient.

"I said if you don't mind me asking, Messere," she says gently, because she's more straightforward but no more unkind, "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. There."

She points to the top row of the bookshelf, just barely reaching the lip of the shelf with her fingertip, and smiles at him over her shoulder. If he's concerned that he's offended her, he needn't be. Some part of her still understands keeping things close to the chest.

"The book you want is up there, top shelf. I have a step ladder around here somewhere, I keep misplacing it..."

[aberratic]

"My mother?"

She reaches for the letter automatically, but her face wrinkles, confused—then smoothes out again, just as soon as her fingers touch the wax.

Why shouldn't her mother be here, after all? Everyone else Ness has wanted to care about her is.

"You're worth coming back for now, it seems," says Vazeiros from where he's sat at his own desk. His voice is low, deep and uninflected, with something almost like a Nevarran accent, save for its emphasis on sibilants. There's real affection in the way he smiles at Ness when she turns back in her seat to face him, his scarred face wrinkling in genuine joy at his daughter's answering grin.

"I wonder what she'll think of me now! I hardly even remember her," she directs to Cedric, twisting herself around to look at him while still facing Vazeiros. The letter remains clutched in her hand, unopened. "She left me in Candlekeep with father when I was four and we never heard from her again. All I remember about her is her hair, it was so soft and long. I used to braid it for her after she did mine."

[portalling]

The plea cuts him to the quick — he’s never actually had to see Benedict like this before — but the sorcerer’s faced begging teenagers with very effective puppy-dog eyes. So his expression isn’t callous, just: grimly bitterly resigned. A little sympathetic, but stubborn and digging in his heels nonetheless.

“The truth can be ugly, Benedict,” Stephen says,

and as if in sync, there’s an awful throb in his hands and lancing through his palms, a remembrance of the nerve damage which hadn’t been noticeable until now. It had been a nice party. He’d genuinely liked the party. His hands hadn’t been hurting him and the magic had come easily and there had been nothing to worry about. It would be so much easier to lie down and accept the illusion. But—

“But in the end it is, still, the truth. We ought to face it.”

[reparo]

That draws a surprised laugh out of her, which she has to cough to disguise. "How can you tell?"