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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The city has changed.

The memorial garden has grown, and grown, become thick with grasses slim and tall or bent beneath seed heads, leaves spreading broad or in fine sprays of green, flowers upon flowers upon flowers. Trees raise twisting branches in praise of the sun. Vines stretch, coil, and cling to weave canopies over walkways. And the building of metal and glass, standing where once stood Kirkwall's Chantry, dominates the skyline with a silhouette of spiralling organic forms.

Within the structure, consuming much of its footprint, is a hole, carved straight down through the city to open its long-neglected depths to filtered light, to air that moves, and life has mustered in village terraces all around its circumference, from Hightown to the lowest of the low. Vent shafts, marked by windmills, pierce the city's crust all around. Darktown's air flows as fresh as that of the clifftops.

Visitors will find the streets clean and lively, its dwellers united by a spirit of progress. All ornament is evolving toward the biotic: ancient stone walls are refined, additions are wrought in iron and steel, round windows form new spirals of coloured glass. Fellowship pervades and technology flourishes. Machines are everywhere: a wagon of alloys pulls itself; sleek-built golems share a heavy load; enormous engines nod, nod, nod their steel beams in ponderous rhythm; others bore through the rock below. All are inscribed with flowing runic sequences and limned in lyrium blue.

Loitering around the greenhouse tower will soon prompt a question from a placid man with iridescent marks, like scars, maybe, across the upper half of his face: Have you come for an audience? It's not a trick—one need only ask, and be led inside.

Or, perhaps one is far below, one of many in a tended garden of gently pulsing vesicles, ready to emerge. The chrysalis stretches, splits for determined fingers. Luminous film sloughs away in strings. Of the body emerging, what was damaged is now whole again; what once was frail is now fortified by a scaffold of some unnamed alloy, branching across the skin to form a shimmering mesh wherever it's needed most. The metal is unyielding to touch, to grasp, but flexes like flesh—alive.

On the face of every emergent soul are ovoid marks, like scars, maybe: five of them, around the brows and eyes, spaced like fingerprints.

All those similarly blessed, their thoughts half-open to one another, to murmur nearby, like the muffled voices of family in another room. Emotions soften toward the pleasant. Heads turn to look, eyes and mouths smile. There are no strangers here; not anymore.

Those who came before, who now dwell here, do so happily—they start families, make lives, enriched by community and all they share. The citizens of Kirkwall share everything, happily, from the food on their plates to the marks on their faces: five, spaced like prints. Some are tasked with bringing unmarked visitors to the towering, twisting, hive-like greenhouse. One simply must be led inside.

The turn begins as a slow erosion of mood. Vitality drains from the streets, though the bodies linger. Gazes persist, smiles lose their warmth. Food spoils in the mouth. Machinery slows, stops. Glass cracks in its frame. Clouds thicken to overcast. The many-hued metals begin to spread, to envelop surfaces indiscriminately with a gleaming, creeping, plasmodial film, sharp-edged where it sets, which mages fall sick to touch. The blue glow dulls to purple, then to a deep red.

Soon, fluid drips from the eyes of citizens and those newly hatched alike—first eyes, then mouths; first pearlescent, then viscous black, as all iridescence decays. They engage in fleeting squabbles among each other, but outright attack visitors on sight, viciously, mindlessly, tooth and nail. It spreads and spreads and spreads, withers the gardens, chokes the air, darkens the sky, gurgles in shrieking throats, rot upon rot upon rot.

Too late to run. The city has changed. The Blight is everywhere.

[be a tourist, live here your whole life, hatch from a magic blister, become darkspawn, present your friends to a twink against their will, etc. will NPC the friendly forehead guy on request, and if anyone enters the greenhouse Viktor will join the thread. catch me on plurk at abyssal or discord at whalesfall if you want V some other way (oh my) or have any questions.]

Edited 2025-01-08 06:06 (UTC)

As always when there is something in the dream to appeal to him, Stephen Strange is successfully caught and snared at first, dropped into it like a fish hauled wriggling over the edge of a boat —

And he lands in a better Kirkwall. There is much to draw him in here: the same simpatico that made Viktor and the doctor first start to compare notes, beautiful glowing runes, magic married to science, societal conveniences, remarkable achievements, pushing the envelope ever further and further and further.

Stephen crawled out of a blister only a couple hours ago, reborn, reforged once again. He has the five-pointed marks on his face. He is here at the greenhouse to seek an audience with the mind behind all this (once a colleague, a patient, a friend), and to marvel at his own improvements.

His hands no longer shake. The prosthetic fingers on both his hands are beautiful, that mysterious living alloy melded to his flesh, the seams indiscernible. His fingers flex and move with all the same crisp delicacy they once did as a surgeon; there is no longer any pain.

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."

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.”

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."

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?”

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.

Edited (i used 'now' like five times) 2025-01-22 07:14 (UTC)

As the greenhouse's iron frame yields to the embrace of mutant vines and the swelling weight of vegetal blisters, it releases its strain in reverberant groans and slow metallic shrieks that scrape the upper limits of perception. Within it, the pit boils with life. Beyond it, the city writhes.

Fabric hangs down, barely drifting in the stillness, barely concealing the body that wears it—a body stretched long, taller even than Lazar, skin twisting in woven strips, brown hair gone lank down the neck, garments draping loose. The ichor of corruption slips down the long feet, drools from the toes in oily black threads, drops silent to stone at pit's edge, where the cups and corals of greyish lichens emerge, their spores impelled to grow.

"Done?" Whispers of a staggered echo drift, overlapping, preceding. The voice—the voice of his friend, layered in voltaic distortion—falls to purling depths: "No."

It turns to see him, eyes like embers in a helm. When it speaks, the face doesn't move.

"Your emergence is at hand," it says, and beckons with arachnoid fingers, Come.

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)

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.

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.

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."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

open | merry & bright

kirkwall: the herald's collective (oblique spoilers for Arcane s2);

hatchling in the greenhouse

slaps myself conscious a century later

no subject

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

zooms

give me the boy

what if bug instead (oblique spoilers for Arcane s2)

bugs rug

BUGS RUG

why is herald face so cute

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

no subject