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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dinnertime

[boeric]

The small fork is in her hand. It scrapes a steady circle through meals that never seem to diminish: Fresh and vivid with the green color of bounty.

Sennara blinks. Presses harder, experimental, and watches a gold tine bend against shimmering plate. The embossing ripples out into new pattern.

(Who made this? How would you make that?)

"Spot," The name tastes strange. Must be fond, for the indulgent smile of a woman who looks very much like him. Sennara knows her from description alone, "What do we eat?"

[altusimperius]

"Roasted duck," Benedict answers easily, straightening-- that Sennara is seated beside him suggests a great honor, and the warmth in the way he regards her doesn't contest it.

"Medium-rare, as it should be, with a glaze of oranges from Par Vollen. Did you enjoy the soup?"

He seems to shimmer right alongside the magnificent dining room and its contents, its guests strangely blurry and difficult to hold in one's gaze.

https://i.etsystatic.com/20116867/r/il/cd35c4/3214625358/il_1588xN.3214625358_s5e0.jpg

[boeric]

"No,"

Impulsive. Contrary. A lie: She must have enjoyed the soup, it's impossible to imagine any less. That she can't recall details,

Doesn't last. Taste blooms across tongue, a memory, but at once foreign; new. Of course she enjoyed the soup. Of course she lifted spoon from bowl. And why be so reflexively stubborn, here of all places? This is a place of honour.

(Why?)

"In Par Vollen," Her stomach lurches. There must have been something off in the dish, oily. Wrong. "Who picked them?"

[altusimperius]

"Hm?"

He's not offended by her rebuff, or has just decided not to show it, but the following question manages to catch him fully off-guard.

"What?" Who picked what? Do people need to pick things?

[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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[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?"

[boeric]

It's a good question. Why is she here?

"I am an honoured guest."

The dream insists. Why? Why should Tevinter honour her? She has burned their soldiers. Finger finds temple, streaks blood over white, where spell once sucked the life from skin; where Yann tore the man off her with his hands. Yann. Yann is in Seheron, and Seheron is —

Pain swells, the old pressure before a storm. The hall sways a little. Shivers.

"This is how you say prisoner."

Unimaginable, to one of them. The dream thins before her step.

[altusimperius]

"What--?"

He stumbles, a distant dripping sound echoing in the hall before or behind them. "No, we don't, we wouldn't,"

The building groans, and the light around them diminishes, as though they're abruptly underground.

[boeric]

She nearly plunges through, then and there –

Foot rocks back onto black. Darkness grows solid under her feet, shadow sucking at her soles. The dream no longer threatens to shred, but sink. Her eyes glint silver in the gloom, make out arch of stone; the bars of a cell.

"Maybe you as well."

It looks a lot like the Gallows.

[altusimperius]

His breath catches in a gasp of horror followed by a thinly vocalized whine as Benedict grips his own arms: his fine clothing in tatters, feet bare and up to his ankles in dark, murky floodwater.

"No," he cries brokenly, his desperate gaze landing on Sennara-- perhaps she has an explanation, perhaps it's her fault-- "no, I left, I left...!"

The dream-within-dream revelation, perhaps I've been here the whole time, perhaps what I imagined as my life after was the dream and now I've woken up, it's all enough to cripple the resolve Benedict has held onto throughout the illusion's turning. He sinks to his knees with a broken sob.

Water laps at a brazier, its coals smoking and threatening to go out.

[boeric]

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."

[altusimperius]

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.

[boeric]

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.