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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[brennvin]

“Good idea. Best do a trial run on her own, anyway, before telling onkel about your suspicions — ‘cos then he’d be haunting all her steps and I know that can be scary as fuck,” Astrid says, light and breezy and familiar.

Pike almost rivalled Guilfoyle in terms of similarly skeletally frightening and protective older men. But the augur, in his turn, was always the most animated when working with magic and the spirits; he’d been disappointed in Astrid’s lack of interest, but at least he had Aura Hardie to discuss the matter.

And Astrid and Gwenaëlle are friends; they have been friends for a very long time, and Astrid will very confidently declare I was there for Morgana’s birth, but if pressed to say exactly how long it’s been, she finds herself petering out on specifics. The days and years blur together in a wintry haze. (How old is Gwenaëlle’s daughter, now?)

When she does this walk up the mountain with a sheep’s carcass, she often has to enlist someone else for sheer muscle — sometimes Gwenaëlle’s husband himself, big and broad — but today, Astrid is doing the carrying. She has several dead rabbits tied up by their legs and bouncing at her hip.

“How’re you feeling, Morgana?” she asks, craning her head to flash a grin at the girl.

[elegiaque]

The gap-toothed, beaming smile she gets back fills in some blanks: at least old enough to be replacing her baby teeth, then. Of course. Makes sense: that’s a good age for her mama to be developing some suspicions about the recent complexity of her imaginary friends, curious but not — in this good, quiet world — worried.

“Not scared of onkel Pike,” she says, sort of pertness a half-Gwenaëlle Hardie girl might have, or just the voice of a child who has been riding on Guilfoyle’s shoulders since she could hold her own head up by herself. “And I’m not tired, either,” which certainly means a conversation was had at some point in the morning about the length of the walk — hike — and the sort of behaviour expected from her on it.

It’s a toss up if Gwenaëlle would really hold fast to her firmly delivered (she’s sure) ‘and I won’t be carrying you if you wear yourself out running ahead’, but it doesn’t seem very likely.

[brennvin]

“Uh huh. You say that now, but just you wait. My mum had me trekking all up and down these mountains checking traps, until it felt like my feet would fall right off—”

Astrid’s mother Runa is— around the hold somewhere, certainly, this picture wouldn’t be complete without her. But she’s more of an impression in the background, a pleasant shadow cast over the landscape, maternal warmth in the distance but not having to be reckoned with up close. Tante Astrid in the meantime is bigger and brighter and more vivid, and her boisterous younger brother is constantly making a nuisance of himself around the hold, pinching Morgana’s cheeks. (He’s easier to fill in the blanks, a simpler picture to paint: the half-siblings have had no end of bickering and squabbling and catching each other in a headlock, to reproduce the scene.)

“Anyway, we’ll get to rest once we reach the peak and after we’re done, too,” Astrid says. “Have a drink, eat a snack.”

She’s got a strong stomach; she’s not fussed by the prospect of eating her cheese sandwich right next to a pile of steaming entrails on the rock.

[elegiaque]

If Gwenaëlle is equally unfussed, Morgana’s glance towards the dead rabbits hanging from Astrid’s hip suggests she might not be greeting the prospect with precisely the same equanimity as mother and aunt. On the other hand, her following, swift glances at both of their faces leads to a look of pure resolve: she’s not going to be a baby about it on the day that mama has decided she’s a big enough girl to go up the mountain.

Gwenaëlle manages to keep her amusement mostly to herself, looking ahead to the peak instead of down at Morgana, mischief tugging the corner of her mouth. She feels—

light. In this dream, the only wings that beat are the crows circling in her wake, and Asher is waiting for her below, and she can’t think of a single reason why she would want to be anywhere but with Astrid and Morgana right now.

“Guilfoyle packed it himself,” she adds, of their lunch. The dream assures her that he is as content here as he has ever been anywhere — that he and Astrid’s uncle often sit in companionable silence that looks like friendship, and that Asher finds that deeply and powerfully unsettling in a way that always, always makes her laugh.

It all feels true. The sky is bright and the air is still and this must be all that she loves.

[brennvin]

It must be, it should be all that she loves, and accepting it would be so easy, like letting yourself sink back down into a warm and pleasant bath —

except that as the two women and their plucky little charge go toiling their way up the mountain, along the well-trodden path where the augurs have already marched, there is some movement over the adjacent ridge. There’s a haggard-looking man in simple hide and furs. He’s been trying desperately to follow them, some urgent message to impart, and he’d gotten lost.

This does not look like his idea of a happy ending, and this dream does not exactly know what to do with him. He’s— a visiting augur from another hold, here to study magic with Pike? or a visiting professor, allowed in by special dispensation to interview the Avvar? It’s a square peg in a round hole, a piece that does not fit: this stranger likes civilisation, well-made houses, sophisticated luxuries, and so the dream has been trying to steer him astray and chivvy him out of here as fast as possible. He knows it doesn’t fit. It can’t fit. Try again.

He’s labouring his way up the mountain, slogging through snowdrifts, trying to catch up to the fleet-footed women. It seems he’s finally about to make it, cut them off at the pass,

when there’s the yowl of a mountain lion in the distance, a swift blur of movement, an ignoble yelp-shriek, and it pounces the man off the ridge and they go tumbling back down the snowy slope, out-of-sight.

Astrid and Gwenaëlle and Morgana walk on. They turn a corner, and reach the top of the mountain. 

[elegiaque]

(At the sound, Gwenaëlle half-turns, but Morgana cries look! with such excitement, and she does, and the moment has passed before she’s truly realised there was a moment at all.)

“It’s always so beautiful here,” she’s saying, at the top of the mountain, her hands at her hips as she takes in a horizon that obliges her with what she expects to see of it, fading into distant incomprehensibility. Snow-capped peaks higher in the distance, and the colours of the light, and the sound of crows

(a twinge of pain at her thigh, there’s something about crows, it tugs at her mind the way Morgana tugs at her skirts— Morgana —)

and the air is cold in her lungs but not uncomfortable. The hike is a challenge, of course, but she doesn’t feel as if it was, standing at the top. Morgana is too delighted with how well she’s taken it for that to take hold as a question,

of course it was a challenge. An accomplishment. Good. Yes.

[brennvin]

“It’s a good day. Don’t come up here when there’s a storm, you can’t see for shit. But when there’s a clear sky—” Astrid sighs happily, content, following Gwenaëlle’s gaze out across the view. “Feels like you can see to eternity.”

The Frostbacks, glittering and crystalline and white, dizzying peaks sprawling beneath their feet, water glinting far far below.

(This part isn’t even particularly exaggerated. This is what home looks like.)

And she goes about untying the rabbits from her hip, depositing them on a nearby flat slab of stone, unsheathing a dagger and reflexively wiping it off on her trousers. That stone has been used over and over and over: it’s browned with old blood stains, chipped from the impact of old axes, a few splinters of old gnawed bone still left behind. A faint acrid smell lingering if you get too close, but the cold crisp air banishes most of it; the mountain still feels fresh and clean, a little dizzying from the altitude.

“We’re closest to the Lady of the Skies here,” she says, an explanatory tone for Morgana.

[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.

[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.