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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[reparo]

The ballroom is an outdoors garden party, all of a sudden, and the dream (okay, fine, whatever - have your bloody changes, probably grumbles some demon somewhere) changes to accommodate the scenario.

So Hermione looks up, and forgets all about the drink she was going to read, in favour of a. a gloriously beautiful horse, and b. Cedric who is also there and holding his hand out.

"What?" His shoulders ripple - are shoulders meant to do that? She holds out her free hand, and takes Cedric's. "How good of you to bring an escape route."

[reparo]

"It hadn't occurred to me that rudeness might be more efficient," she murmurs, looking for all intents and purposes as if the lesson might stick. There's probably a dream author frustrated about this development, somewhere.

"Let me at least return the favour, Gwenaëlle. I'll watch your back while you get a drink, how's that?"

[reparo]

The offended man - not calling him a gentleman, for the scowl he directs at Astrid alone - flounces off muttering some form of protest, but Hermione doesn't pay him much mind.

"My hero," she says, undeniably amused, and pats Astrid's arm. (Nice.) "You look very dashing." Credit where it's due, and the credit is very much due here - Astrid looks lovely, and still very much like herself despite the fancy clothes. (Maybe in this iteration of the dream, whatever is causing it to happen - spirit, demon, pixie - has learned a lesson and not made Hermione forget who her Riftwatchers are.)

"Ah, here," she murmurs, reaching up to tuck one such stray strand back into place in the updo, gently. "Must've come loose in the kerfuffle."

(Somewhere in the background, the orchestra plays Teenage Dream by Katherine de la Perrie.)

[altusimperius]

He grins, and takes a graceful pull from a fancy cigarette holder-- was he holding that before? it doesn't matter-- with an evasive shrug.

"He told me."

[reparo]

"Dramatic." And whether that's directed at the two men trying to figure out how they're going to duel at a ball, or the cigarette holder, is anyone's guess - but guessing is interrupted when the two men toss aside their swords and start to wrestle.

"Well, then." A long and silent moment. "That's...oddly suggestive."

[altusimperius]

A pleased little gasp, and Benedict leans forward-- all he's missing is opera glasses, but the intent is there.

The challenger, overpowered, tumbles breathlessly to the ground. In doing so, however, he manages to catch the first man's sleeve, and though the former attempts to tug it away, his efforts are thwarted when the latter clambers onto one knee.

The crowd gasps: a second ring has appeared.

[aberratic]

In the moment that it appears Stephen has been drawn back into the dream, Vazeiros smiles, pleased and indulgent. His carnivore-sharp teeth flash as he moves closer, bringing the book nearer to Stephen's eager hands.

The smile falls when Stephen pulls himself out again, vexingly adroit in a place he should be scrambling to understand, much less manipulate. Frustration prickles through him, through the dream, a fuzzy, buzzing static radiating almost palpably off of the environment.

Still, Vazeiros regards Stephen with an unconcerned impassivity.

"You speak on a relationship you do not, cannot understand, Stephen Strange," he explains, patient, as though to a child. "You are incapable of the selflessness fatherhood asks of men.

"Besides," he shifts now, eyes hardening, tone icing over, suddenly dangerous, "Have you been any gentler with the young women in your care?"

The drow leans in, moving more quickly than any real person ought to, and pins Stephen in place with the red glare of his one good eye.

"Did you think to use my daughter to make good your mistakes, wizard? To mold another young witch, but to get it right, this time?"

If Stephen has an answer to the question, Vazeiros doesn't wait for it. He throws the book at Stephen's face, then snatches the sorcerer's hands when he brings them up to fend it off, circling each hand in a vice grip. The tome drops heavily between them, forgotten. Vazeiros drags Stephen forward by his implacable grip on his fists, putting them nose to nose.

"How long," he hisses now, somehow looming over Stephen, dream-logic drawing him taller than he's ever been, "before you leave her buried under a mountain?"

He closes his hands around Stephen's, crushing, and the library fills with the sound of cracking bone.

[boeric]

"He does not dine with you?"

The mother had been there. Difficult to say who else is, in portraits that slip and blur for detail. Too many fingers, strange mergers of skin and hair.

(A bad idea to look at the teeth.)

[dissolving]

It's easy to swing onto the horse. Of course it's easy: Horses are like bicycles, motor cars – concepts that arise new and strange from some shared mind. They slide off again, unexamined. Smooth as the unblemished skin of her arm.

"Couldn't leave the team behind," The stallion whickers knowingly. Did it always have a horn? "Y'figure out the code?"

What code? The book's code. Of course, the code, the reason the enemy must want it.

[extortionate]

She reaches, and for a second she's got it –

"Funny thing about it," He palms the flower. "Never sleep easy without one."

Lazar leans into the space between them, presses the daisy back to her hand. Heavy fingers close over her own, briefly; his touch lighter than it's got any right. A single petal cleaves from stem: He loves me,

Hooves. A rider, coming fast, and that's odd. Vanya oughta be gone all afternoon.

cw harm to animals

[dissolving]

Whine echoes in a strangled bark: Raw, frustrated. At once a hare, and a dog, and Cedric's brow furrows.

Hard to think against the noise.

He likes noise, the high drums of ritual, the beat of his pulse. A song. You can lose yourself in it. A thought that stretches there and no farther. His hand slips out, to press the surface of her rune, strangeness marking its shape. That isn't right. If this place belongs to anyone, it belongs to Astrid. Her kin in these peaks. Hers, limbs stretched below axe and eagle.

Am I home? Am I home?

"Should we be?" Home is where you bury your people. "Should we be home?"

A shriek from the hare. Blood bubbles around teeth sunk deep in its own leg. The coin in his drops. Rost. The creature spits over teeth, lunges for Raskmodig –

[altusimperius]

"Mother prefers that he doesn't," Benedict sniffs, pausing only briefly to question himself at that assessment-- is that true? it seems true-- and continues forward as the bell rings again.

The dining room is lost behind them in a labyrinth of hallways, at the end of which but always out of sight is the bell.

[reparo]

Horses are like horses, and in a different time (period) and a different place (not a ball), Clarisse gave her a choice between griffons and horses and Hermione picked horses. Unicorns on the other hand...

"I thought these are only friendly towards virgins." That's right, just two smooth-skinned virgins on a unicorn, nothing too scandalous.

"Err, yes - you let me worry about that part and ride." It feels right - though she'll have to hold onto something.

[elegiaque]

“Better not to risk it given the number of people that are here to fuck,” she says, casting a glance around the party— “I hate to think what’s in that.”

An experienced drinker is not the same as one with great tolerance; it’s entirely possible that it being only alcohol would still be fundamentally ill-advised, although it’s safe to say that certainly doesn’t always stop her.

“I’ll grant you it’s an efficient way of securing the money, though. How have you been passing the time?”

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle is halfway up a shelf, partially to see if there’s a way over the top — her wings buzz behind her, moving too quickly to hold her up to be seen as more than a shimmering blur — which is where she’d been caught by a particularly tempting tome,

Cedric’s voice startles her out of it and she opens her hands, letting the book fall hard to the floor below, landing open face-down: last words, unknown speakers.

“I think we can get over the top,” she says, not dignifying his extremely good question with an answer, “if you start climbing now.”

[dirthsal]

The curse startles a laugh out of Talin—that's not how the da'len of the clan ever responded, but now he can practically hear a tiny chorus of voices yelling oh shit! and he wishes they had—and he has to take a moment to chuckle and regain his composure.

"The foolish Wolf thought Andruil wouldn't know if he took just one of her halla, not realizing that the Huntress sees everything that happens in her woods—and so he was unprepared when Blood and Force descended upon him in the middle of his hunt. She overtook him easily, as a lone wolf is no match for a great hunter, and, tying him to a nearby tree, she proclaimed:

You steal lives my wife created
for me alone, and defile my
forest with your arrogance, Fen'Harel, thief!

I demand satisfaction, Wolf,
Rebel, and will have you thus bound:
to serve in my bed for a year and a day."

He hesitates here, just slightly—he began this story because it was one he remembered liking when he was younger, but now... He knows Fen'Harel. Fen'Harel is a man, an elf, flesh and blood like him, not some myth or divine being. This story, this legend, may have truly happened, in some fragmented fashion, to a man Talin knows and respects above all others. It seems wrong not to acknowledge the horror of it—but none of the stories ever did, and he has no framework for changing it now.

"The Wolf did not desire Andruil," he begins, no longer affecting his hahren voice, "and would refuse her if he could, but her ropes bound him tight, and he was no match for her strength. He had no choice but to bide his time, and wait for his moment to set himself free."

[boeric]

The halls wind. Twist, over and on themselves. Instinct drags a hand along wall. Something prickles back, papered rough as sharkskin –

Hostile. She presses harder, and blood smears. Wayfinding.

"Left," She suggests. If you take only lefts, you can exit any maze, "Maybe he does not like this. Maybe he leaves."

Leaves Mother, leaves this house. A maze of came-and-lefts. The blood repeats: Ahead of Benedict, behind her, no matter where they turn.

[dissolving]

Virgins. Brow furrows into squiggle. That can't be right, hasn't been since he was –

Something jolts. There isn't a man before her, but a youth. Short for his age and stippled by acne, by the scrape of a clumsy razor. Purple bruise swells one eye. The unicorn surges ahead (now less bike than breathing animal) and Cedric shifts to keep his seat. He's always been a good rider, but this body is uncomfortable. Too small. Like the cast of something buried.

"You're the expert," His voice is higher: "Hang on. It's gonna get bumpy."

Moreso, for the doubt that wiggles under hoof. Something of this isn't right.

[altusimperius]

"Maybe--" Benedict mutters, dismissively, taking one of infinite left turns that yawn before them.

"Wait," he says after a long silence, brow furrowed, and stops in his tracks, turning to look at Sennara, "what are you doing here?"

[portalling]

If ever he still had some doubts about the veracity of the illusion, this cinches it: Vazeiros reaching deep into Stephen’s mind to pull out a memory he’s only ever told Gwenaëlle about, hammering on his past failures like plucking the string of a harp. Wanda Maximoff is still a raw wound and so it surprises him enough that his hands are caught and he’s yanked closer, suddenly in the drow’s grip.

That brittle exterior of cool, implacable confidence shatters and he starts to feel that old animal panic: the sound of Mount Wundagore collapsing, the ancient grind of stone-on-stone rhyming with bone-on-bone, inexorable grinding pressure and agonising pain lancing through him, so much worse for his old broken hands that never healed quite right, stuck in it like an animal caught in a trap,

“You have no idea what you’re talking about—” Stephen hisses.

Vazeiros’ grip is less like a clutching man and more like a vise. Stephen struggles and bucks but his hands are still helplessly pinned, christ, he needs his hands in order to do anything magical—


Or. Does he?

The thought comes to him like a drop of cold water on his feverish exhausted sleepless brain, sounding so much like the Ancient One: her questioning assumptions and pressing him to think further, beyond the constraints of what he assumes to be true. The crisp finger gestures do help him cast his spells, it’s true. But he’d seen another sorcerer cast them while missing a hand entirely. And if, as he suspects, this isn’t the real world at all —

Stephen Strange flickers and vanishes.

As if someone’s yanked the entire scene a few feet to the left, the rug pulled out from under the creature who looks like Vazeiros: the library blurs as the sorcerer yanks hard on the picture and then re-emerges free of the drow’s grasp, slippery, like a Fade-step.

[wearyallalone]

"Nothing worth mentioning," is the truth. Vanya Orlov's home is neat but not bloodless; it is very clearly a place where people live, even beyond the gardening that he'd been doing when she arrived. There are some sheets drying on a line out behind the house and a saddle resting on a sawhorse near the barn, probably in need of some minor repair. There is, one imagines, never any absence of things to do.

Elaborating on his initial answer as he leads them toward the house, he adds, "We might go in, all three of us, this time. Sometimes it's just business, but it's been a while since we made a day of it properly." A while is no more specific than she can be about her arrival, but it doesn't catch at him. (This time.)

The inside of the house is much like the rest of the ranch; tidy but not a showplace, some knitting left on a chair by the fireplace in the main room, appetizing smells coming from what is certainly the kitchen further in.

[wearyallalone]

Vanya had, in fact, planned to be gone all afternoon. He'd ridden faster than he'd noticed, though, attempting to clear his head and not doing an especially good job at it. At least he'll be tired enough to sleep that night, he thinks idly as he approaches home. He's sure he'll find something else to do with the afternoon.

When Madame Orlova hears the rider too, she straightens, though not abruptly. Her tone is still warmly amused as she observes, "Well since you miss my husband so often, if there's anything you have to say to him, it seems to be your lucky day." Certainly there's no reason Lazar shouldn't want to see Vanya Orlov, her framing suggests, though the amusement in her eyes betray that guilelessness is deliberate.

[wearyallalone]

"My apologies," is softer, his contrition quite real. "It is not you I mistrust, but your point is fair. I should not have tried to hide behind a half-truth."

That said, he stretches, his own height enough to retrieve the volume without the aforementioned step ladder. The way he holds himself in reserve in company, it's easy to forget that he has long arms to go with his height.

"If you'd like, I can say this: If I find evidence in favor of my strange theory, I will share it with you. And if I don't, you will do me the honor of letting me pretend I never made such an unusual request. I suspect it will be the latter, truly."

[brennvin]

Astrid is ordinarily confident enough, and blasé enough about physical contact, that a simple touch like that wouldn’t and shouldn’t fluster her— but there are rules to this place, to the de la Perrie music playing in the background, and so there’s a flutter of butterflies in her heart and chest, suddenly turning her stomach over. Huh.

“Seems you’re very popular tonight,” she continues, and this is the place where she’d always say Hermione but the name unexpectedly catches on her tongue; it feels suddenly too close and too intimate to use for some reason, a liberty that she shouldn’t be allowed.

There’s a faint crease in Astrid’s brow as she finishes, “Miss Granger.”

[brennvin]

Rabbits are cute, but hares can be demonic creatures, wild-eyed and muscled and always bigger than you expect —

Rost leaps for Raskmodig in a sudden charged violent spring, teeth digging into the thick fur of the wolf’s neck, and the wolf snarls, black lips drawn back from its jaw. He whirls around and then they’re fighting. Astrid’s let go of Cedric’s hands and risen to her feet, but their familiars are a frenzied whirl of fur and teeth

(this is familiar, too familiar, she remembers trying to get involved, remembers getting hurt trying to stop another animal fight, when was that)

and, unexpectedly, Rost had made the first move. The mild-mannered prey animal gone furious and rabid. Fade-maddened?

“Cedric,” she says, panicked, “stop them, by the Lady, what’s wrong with him—”

She winds her arm in the blankets as a buffer and tries to interject, but there’s an ugly shriek, Rost’s powerfully-clawed hindpaw catching her leg and kicking her away. Fabric rips, more blood wells.