faderift | open | merry & bright

Entry tags:

open | merry & bright

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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The placid man with the marks like Stephen's, he offers a shallow bow of head and shoulders, an open-handed gesture to proceed. No introduction need be spoken aloud, no intent made clear—just as Stephen may feel likewise the authenticity of his smile in return, soft as a draft beneath the door.

He'll feel no such trace from the one who comes to meet him.

Barefoot and simply clothed is his colleague-patient-friend, and different from the neck down, a miracle distinct from augmented fingers: seams of metal follow tendon and vein, form plates or nodes where bones would surface, weave between woven flesh. No longer propped up by his crutch, he carries a staff that twists like it was grown rather than carved. Familiar colours linger: brass, red.

His approach carries a sense of appraisal that, while unsmiling, is not unfriendly—more a pleasant detachment. His gaze is tracking Stephen's hands as he greets him:

"Doctor."

Fingers close about bar.

Reassurance — even as he feels the squelch of rot on iron, muscle pulped overripe. The thing that ate Viktor can say what it wants, but this is done, they've both been dead a while. Everything that black touches is gone.

(Strange, how leaves still stretch and root, turn their faces to something brighter; drink the boiling glare of those eyes.)

Lazar drags himself ahead. A step closer, two; shambling under the weight of so much meat gone bad. One step. Two. Just gotta repeat the pattern, just gotta keep it going 'til he's close. Close enough to lift the bar and swing —

Edited 2025-03-24 04:52 (UTC)

Fire smokes. Water rises. She watches him cower, and tries to put name to feeling —

(Everything has a name, a purpose: Disgust, pity; the vicious tilt of pleasure. She holds them at arm's length. Considers. What serves this moment?)

"Stand," Sharp. She steps before him, crouching to put face in eyeline. A finger reaches under chin, tips it up. Look at me. "If we are here, we are here together."

And she refuses a cage. Sennara reaches for the brazier, heat blazing across her fingers. Skin blisters. Pain again, like the blood along the wall, but now teeth dig into her lips. Sennara pulls a sleeve over fingertips. A token solution. The fabric shouldn't be thick enough. Still, sensation recedes. Here and now, the effort is enough.

"So we go."

The slight delay with which he responds to the command can be credited to the overall disorientation of the moment: how did they get here, where even is 'here', but Benedict does shakily stand and looks her in the eyes.

"I don't want you here," he says weakly, and the dream shimmers around them. This isn't how it's supposed to be going; too much darkness, too much conflict. The illusion is trickling away, but only for Sennara.

The brass and red is an unintended echo; Stephen’s new hands are the same gleaming gold of his sling ring, the Staff of the Living Tribunal, the Eye of Agamotto, all cast in geometric angular shapes.

“Viktor,” Stephen says in welcome. He doesn’t need the bright beaming smiles; the friendly collegial warmth between the two men has always been subtle enough, painted mostly in the way they would perk up in conversation, heads bent over an intriguing problem, voices animated in intellectual patter, hands gesturing.

Today, the sorcerer cocks his head and surveys the greenhouse around them. Remembering twining vines, florid greenery. Another life.

“Or is there something else I should be calling you? The man at the door knew who I was referring to, but he simply said an audience.”

Ouais, she nearly says, impatiently, of course I—

except that she’s still gazing back at him hovering in that uncertainty. Of course she does, but — it feels tantalizingly out of reach, the sudden slam of a window somewhere else in the house beneath the kicked up onslaught of wind and snow jolting her nearly out of her skin. The shadows in the house stretch, and she says, “You’re going to freeze to fucking death out there,” which is not an answer at all, reaching to grasp his elbow to pull him in out of the elements.

He feels so much realer than anything else. She hadn’t thought that it didn’t until this moment.

Her expression twists quickly as it had come, lip peeled back over teeth. Her hand burns to hold the light. And he quails.

She falls forward —

Burning. Her fingers are burning, the inn's frigid with winter. Her breath catches on the first corpse, exhales by the second, the third; the fifth. What serves this moment?

Riftwatch slumbers amid bodies. Over the next hour, she works to rouse them all: By sound, by touch; the call of a name or tug of limb. It doesn't work. None of it works. So at length she drapes blankets, drags the rot away. If they are here, they are here together.

Not once does she stray near Benedict. When he wakes, it will be curled in a nest of the dead.

Edited 2025-03-28 06:36 (UTC)

"He is," Talin agrees, preening almost as though it's his own cleverness Astrid is commenting on. The Wolf is clever, and Talin is clever for following him, for seeing through the Creators' lies and casting off the chains of their worship—

It's only when he opens his mouth to keep singing Fen'Harel's praises that he realizes the position he's put himself in. He hasn't told Astrid much about the Creators, not as anything more than bygone myths, long disconnected from the world—if they were ever really a part of it at all. It's easy to talk around the fact of them. Talin hasn't met them.

"That's probably not the intended lesson, though," he muses. "My people aren't as fond of the Dread Wolf as yours are of Imhar. Fen'Harel is the only one of our gods left to walk the earth after he locked the rest away in the Beyond."

Outside their cabin, a frigid wind batters the sails of the aravel, and inside, their fire burns a little lower. The air feels colder. Talin's skin prickles with some sense he can't name—foreboding, maybe. This is closer to truth than he's been in a long time, but he hasn't said anything he shouldn't, yet. He looks down at Astrid, watches her pluck at the yarn, pushes her hair away from her ear—rounded, as it always has been. His stories are myths to her, fairytales. No more real to her than shemlen stories of the Maker. He can let it mean whatever she wants it to.

"Never underestimate the Dread Wolf, da'fen." He skims his thumb along the shell of her ear. Behind him, Faron huffs a warning. "If you have him trapped with no way out, know that's exactly what he wants you to think."

He says, keep going, and too audibly, she mutters, “Hells, you’d love that,” not anything like sufficiently beneath her breath. A burst of energy at her back raises her up and she knees over the top of the shelves, squinting —

“Nothing,” she reports, a moment later. “Less than nothing. Fucking books as far as the eye can see.”

Ennaris.

Somewhere across the Fade, Ness's ear twitches, and she stops, listening. She's—working, maybe, or resting, her surroundings rippling as the dream attempts to find a shape that will hold her attention. There's no reason to listen so carefully, there's nothing that could be more important than what she's already doing. She doesn't need to worry. Slowly, she relaxes, sinking back into the dream—

Ennaris!

The soft edges of the dream around her shatter. There's nothing that could be more important to her than this, nothing that could distract her. Like a surgeon stood in front of a body, the rest of the world falls away, until there is only Ness and the problem: Stephen is in pain, and he's calling out for her.

The dream resolves around her, taking shape and following her expectations. She's in the Quartermaster's office, sat at her desk; Stephen's voice echoes around the walls, as though he's called her from another room in the tower. Ness stands, sweeping out from behind her desk to run to the office door. The heavy wood sticks on its hinges and she frowns, and tries again with more force. The dream outside the office resists her influence, wants to remain a confusing labyrinth of stacks and carnivorous books—but Ness shoves, insists on reality, and the door opens to a familiar hallway.

In the Archive, the dream ripples, meets an iron-clad sense of reality and falls to its insistent press, and the stacks between Stephen and the door recede into the floor. Books stop biting his ankles. The inky darkness around him billows, but holds, and Vazeiros growls, ripping the dagger from Stephen's thigh. He dissolves into the darkness again, though not for long—a leg sweeps at Stephen's ankles, and Vazeiros falls on him as soon as his back is on the ground, dagger aimed straight for Stephen's heart.

"Stephen? Where are you?" Ness's voices rings through the Archive, clarion and clear, and the dream shudders as though from an earthquake. "Call my name again, I can't find you!"

Fingers to his face, way they splay when he's thinking hard, when it's too late at night and the words want to spill out of him —

But there's thinking hard, and thinking slow, and right now there's no thought at all but the slick-paper press of rotten flesh. Of sitting in a room alone, unwatched but for the dead. Alone,

He isn't. Astrid is breathing, Astrid can still breathe. His own comes too fast. Cedric's chin tips up, the back of his skull thunking against board. A patch of his knuckles discolours where someone's skin has stuck a little, frozen to his own and peeled off like a tongue from pole.

He should reach for his knife (Astrid has a knife). He should sweep the room (he needs to help Astrid). He can't do that. If he reaches for his knife, he won't let go again. If he frees his hands they'll only find a fist. If he speaks,

"It's okay," His voice cracks for a day without water. It's okay, he means to say. They're already dead. "It's only."

More. It's only more, and more again. Palms press at his temple, squeezing for a shape he can't find. And he can't help anyone right now.

The thing that ate Viktor—

Viktor himself, in unrelenting appetite for the immaculate—

sees the pattern, and is so enamoured of it, so proud, that he overlooks the message hidden within. Its imminent delivery triggers late, only half a head's turn before the swing connects. Something cracks. The bar resonates off the impact in a vicious pulse. The leg is knocked in, loose; knees collide; the long body twists, lurches sideways in the air, ungainly, staff at a sudden tilt, the silhouette defaced to weakness. It looks down its own leg in seeming disbelief, to the way the foot turns in, to the split carapace weeping fluid, then to Lazar.

No expression in the pinpoint eyes. The face unchanged.

Then it moves. The Herald's big hand comes at a swipe, grasping for the prybar to tear it free—

The thing caves onto its staff, and he lifts the rod again, ready to do in the other knee. Wasn't long ago — maybe hours, maybe years — would've been quick as one-two-three.

Wasn't long, but ages gone. Lazar heaves. Almost comic, the way he pauses on the upswing, all the breath torn out of him; and then it's on the bar and he's straining up after. Arms jerk out to the socket, pulling for the muscle they can't no longer call. Joints pop. Fingers distend, tear,

And when the Herald has it in hand, a pinky comes with. Lazar howls over the grey slime of his hand, smashes himself against that wounded leg; to hold himself up or take them both down. Couldn't say which no more.

Her stomach twists and churns and lurches with a queasy rumble. She has a strong stomach, iron-clad, it had always been such a point of pride that she could practically eat anything, so what the hell has she been eating? Partly it must be the smell turning everything over inside her. The dead bodies. The rot. Have they all been poisoned? How long have they been here —

Homesickness presses down hard on her chest like a weighted anchor. Her memories of Rifthold are already starting to vanish, ebbing away and turning hazy, thin around the edges. A dream. A dream. She isn’t home, or even an amalgamation of her two homes. This isn’t it.

Astrid is clingy when she lets herself be; so she reaches out for his arm, the line of Cedric’s wrist, cold chilled fingers reaching for his warmth.

“Only what?”

Astrid doesn’t speak Dalish, but her understanding of the words comes automatically, out of nowhere, the knowledge simply blossoming in her sleeping mind: da’fen, little wolf. The diminutive makes her smile broaden, charmed. The room smells like warm skin and warm fur and burning fragrant wood.

“Y’know, you can call me Asta,” she says. Few here have.

(Where’s here?)

“So the lesson’s a warning? Don’t underestimate your…” She tries to sort through it, trying to pinpoint exactly what this Fen’Harel means, what those bright-eyed sharp-eared children clustered around the Keeper are supposed to think of him. “Enemy?”

She pulls Stephen through and he hustles in, the door slamming behind them with ringing finality.

Some part of him is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. His shoulders have hunched, braced for the next blow to rip him away from her: a rolling boulder, mountain lion attack, some avalanche crashing through his half of the cabin and sending him spinning down the mountain. But then he follows Gwenaëlle deeper into the cabin and he lets himself look around the interior at last.

All the accoutrements and debris of a life, a cozy contented domestic life, one without Stephen Strange. One with a husband and a daughter. A tall, strapping, handsome warrior of a husband. A smart, coltish precocious daughter. A life without room for him in it.

(A persistent, irritating voice, small and self-doubting: What selfish right does he have to take her from this?)

Something tightens in his jaw, looking around. Stephen kicks his boots against his ankle, knocking off the snow at the entryway, still a neat and tidy habit.

“You live on a houseboat,” he says, blurting out, “in Kirkwall harbour. Not… here, not like this. I know that makes me sound insane, but this is my first chance to tell you. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

For longer than he can express.

“Ennaris!“

He wasn’t wearing the Cloak of Levitation a moment ago — Doctor Strange doesn’t have the real Cloak of Levitation in Thedas, it’s inert and dead like a corpse hanging on a dress-form in the houseboat — but now it’s suddenly there as his back hits the stone floor, aching. It spins and twirls around him, tangling Vazeiros’ dagger-stab in thick folds of fabric, and then bundles up Stephen and yanks him further out of the way: his old friend, here, dreamed up, helping and protecting him as it always does.

As Stephen calls for Ennaris and gets out of the way, he doesn’t strictly fight back, doesn’t try to hurt or kill this dream version of Vazeiros; the sorcerer’s always been a slippery combatant, usually tries to get some distance, distract and delay and feint, use the surroundings on his side. Unlike other superheroes he could name, he doesn’t go blow-to-blow and trade punches in a fistfight. He prefers the single strategic cut, the elegant solution. Get some space. Think it out.

He’s already realised that he can’t go toe-to-toe here; whether it’s the drow’s innate capabilities or Ness’ inflated starry-eyed opinion of her father, this isn’t a fight that Stephen can win one-on-one. And even if he put Vazeiros down, the rules are unclear: the other man might just sit back up and come after him again and again.

So. Go for the head, go for the source. Cut off the dream. Ness is technically the one steering this hallucination. He just needs to reach her.

Something about the way she repeats, “Kirkwall,” incredulously is so perfectly, flawlessly Gwenaëlle— her train of thought nearly visible on her face as she dismisses it as a place for criminals and vagrants and then considers the degree to which he appears to fall into the latter category.

He looks like shit, tidy habits notwithstanding.

Another thought tugs at the hem of her sleeve; Yngvi is from Kirkwall. Had gone back to… he hadn’t left, exactly, but that can’t be right, because he had returned to the Carta, in … Kirkwall. So he must have gone much further, surely, but,

her frown deepens, though it still sort of looks like she’s finding his hygiene wanting. The question she asks is more to herself than to him—

“Why would Yngvi have left us?”

How can she know that Asher is here and equally that Yngvi is not? She would remember a reason for him not to be. She would know. Maybe it makes sense if she allows that he might be telling the truth, but not— enough, not quite enough. Astrid was here when she had her daughter, she knows it; how could Yngvi have not been?

The man from the snowstorm takes a deep breath; a slow exhale. There’s truly no way he can deliver any of this information without sounding like a lunatic, without delivering pain and literally ripping her world apart at the seams, but there’s no alternative. Not if he wants to see her again as anything more than a distant wisp, out-of-reach, untouchable, dreaming of other worlds and other lives.

“I don’t know exactly why he’s not around; one of the many things I now regret not having asked you. I do know that you named a small ratty kitten after him, though. Small Yngvi. The one he gave you; the cat’s my favourite of all your massive menagerie since he happens to be partial to me. The dog prefers you.”

He’s grasping at straws, any piece of Gwenaëlle he can dredge up, waiting for something to echo and feel true. His neck is tight, shoulders strained; he doesn’t look over her shoulder to deeper into the cabin where there might or might not be an Avvar in the bedroom. Schrödinger’s husband.

“But I imagine Yngvi might have left because— Asher Hardie died of an infected wound. Years ago now. I’m sorry. Gwenaëlle, none of this is real.”

While Viktor's scrutiny relaxes away from those fresh augmentations, it persists; the doctor's curiosity, his interest, is noted with private approval.

With a gait kept slow for want of urgency, not ability, he moves near. There's a fluidity to it. A sense of ease in limbs wrought anew, sculpted in flexing strips of some alloy yet unnamed in this world. Here and there, in the gaps between sinews, a dim glow. The faintest distortion, like a buzzing echo barely offset, as he says,

"My name will suffice."

He now lifts his gaze, shares in the survey of the structure surrounding them with eyes gone strange: pale, opaline. No trace left of that warm gold.

"Your emergence is timely—many changes are underway, and we have need of your skillset."

The bar, Lazar's disbanded finger, a streak of whatever fluid has elected to result from the wound: all flung aside to experience the pit's full depth in silent descent. An almost relaxed cadence to the long arm's re-engagement, its grace imposed upon by the awkward angle as Lazar moves much more intentionally, and much closer, than expected.

They go slanting aside together, askew but still upright. Moss comes away slick under the scrape of one distended foot, sticking to the toes. The great staff goes clattering. Both long hands come in, grasping, prying, while a very human sound rasps through the throat in layers of gasp and growl.

Ugh, it sounds like, and gross, if not in so many words.

For the first time in years, the chronic pain in his hands isn’t just a low hum in the background, but it’s gone, fully gone as if it never was, and his fingers move with the same grace and fluidity that brings Viktor striding over. (No longer hobbling, no longer looking like he’s on the verge of being knocked off by a stiff breeze; it’s a marvel.)

And so Stephen’s distracted. The comment, too, catches on on his pampered ego, a man who likes to be involved, to be essential, isn’t that how all these super-teams worked anyway —

“Of course,” he says, his new fingers curling into a fist, admiring the solidity of it, before he raises his gaze to the other man. “What do you need?”

He throws a glance at the dig — mouth opening for a rebuttal that doesn't come quick enough. Books. Far as the eye can see.

"Haven't tried burning them," Half-mumbled, ashamed of itself. Knowledge is precious, pages are; but knowledge doesn't live only in libraries. Ness always hated to see the things hurt. Maybe a distress call's just what they need. "Got a light?"

Claws picking at him, pushing, as he scrabbles for his own purchase. If Lazar's going in the pit, he's not doing it alone. The edge scrapes underfoot. The staff clangs away, brain too sluggish to track, and he hauls, heavy,

"Can't be you're scared of it," His tongue is heavy, too. Won't lift it much longer. "Your own goddamn mess."

Her denial is immediate, “No,” even as her mind fills in: disappointment, because Asher can’t train her dog, but why not? and she hasn’t even got a dog (because Hardie is a thread to pull—), and

she turns on her heel, brisk and determined, “No, that’s not true, Asher—”

Stephen doesn’t see, immediately, what she sees when she jerks open the door further into the house. He smells it, instead, the scent of rot and sickness, stale as the deathbed that Asher long since left behind, as Gwenaëlle reels back and stumbles into the wall behind her, gagging, and something in that room moves that cannot be a man so long dead her dream could not survive looking at him.

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Page 7 of 8

open | merry & bright

slaps myself conscious a century later

bugs rug

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BUGS RUG

why is herald face so cute

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i promise my next tag will come less than two months later

https://grindset.dreamwidth.org/file/28531.png

zooms

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