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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[aberratic]

"You would disturb my daughter from her work."

The drow stands, positioned just so between Stephen and the door behind him. He has to tilt his head to meet Stephen's eye, such is the difference between their heights, but unlike many men, it doesn't seem to bother him. He's not bothered by anything, it seems, self-assured and calm in the face of Stephen's frustration. Stephen doesn't bother him. Stephen, in fact, means as little to him as anything that is not his library, his books.

"She is happy doing it. She is worthwhile when she works. You would take that from her? Make her nothing again?"

Vazeiros steps forward. There are no weapons around them, nothing but stacks and stacks of—not-quite-books. The suggestion of books. As Vazeiros moves, they resolve into solid form, taking shape: unending stacks of magical tomes and wizards' spellbooks, volume upon volume of arcane secrets. Some Stephen is familiar with from his own studies, books from Kamar-Taj and the multiverse beyond, and some he has never seen. They spread through the room, an endless trove of knowledge, waiting to be cracked open.

"You would be happy here as well, wouldn't you? We have so much to show you, Doctor. So many secrets to share."

He plucks a book from the top of a stack. It's bound in leather, maybe, or maybe worse, a face caught in a scream raising from the cover as if trying to escape. The air is heavy and chilled with its arcane power, and somewhere in the room, a purple gem pulses invitingly.

Vazeiros holds the book out between them, an offering.

[portalling]

Stephen’s gaze reflexively darts down to glance at the book, to take in the cover and maybe skim a title. But there’s no text written on it, just: that distressingly wrinkled leather cover, the screaming face trapped in the front.

“—Wait. Is that bound with human skin? It looks like human skin. Real Raimi Necronomicon shit here,” he says. This is the pithy sarcasm he levies at anyone, a kneejerk defense mechanism like anything else.

And yet his hand jerks briefly as if to take the book from Vazeiros’ hand, to at least peruse, and find out what it looks like on the inside even if he doesn’t read,

but he can tell at a glance that the vibes are rancid. Not as bad as the Darkhold (another book he technically probably shouldn’t have read). He’s practically itching to take it, just to know more. It’s vibrating and humming with just enough arcane power that he can tell it’s powerfully, intensely magical.

Deep breath. He bites back the curiosity. Smooths his hands down his trousers and shakes them out. (Keeping his fingers free and clear; it means he’s keeping himself ready to do magic if he has to.) And latching onto the drow’s words, Stephen taps into his own anger, that clarifying emotion, hanging onto it to keep himself tethered and not lose sight of the goal, irritated:

“And, FYI, she’s not nothing. She’s worthwhile even when she’s not working, and I can’t believe I have to be the one to point that out to you—”

[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.

[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.

[aberratic]

The creature wearing Vazeiros' face bares its teeth, furious as Stephen escapes its grip, reality shunted a few paces to the left by a meddling gods-damned wizard—

but if the wizard gets to reshape reality at his whim, so does the drow. The room around them stretches, elongating unnaturally, putting the door what appears to be miles out of Stephen's reach. Even if he could reach it, stacks of shelving fall from the ceiling in front of it, boxing him and Vazeiros in together and creating a maze between Stephen and the door. The books at their feet come alive and bite at his ankles, trying to drag him down to the floor.

Vazeiros—or whatever's pretending to be Vazeiros—stalks toward him. Books part to let him pass easily. There's a sword in his hand now; when did that happen? Where did it come from? Ness always said her father came to Candlekeep because he never wanted to pick up a weapon again. Whatever the answers, the important thing is this: as soon as gets close, he swings out for Stephen's head. He's got nothing else to say, at least for now.

[portalling]

And it’s odd, but —

The more otherworldly the scene becomes, the more at home Stephen feels. Magic in bitter mundane Thedas has felt like trudging through molasses, trying to reach for senses gone dull and numb.

But in the dreaming, in the Fade itself? Ah, it’s so much easier: swimming through raw magic, the rules of reality more malleable and permeable than before. It takes sheer concentrated willpower to exert changes on their surroundings, but he has that in spades. He has juggled and reconstructed and moulded the mirror dimension at a whim. He has been here before. White-haired Vazeiros with his one scarred milky-white eye, grey-haired Kaecilius with his eyes burned out from dark magic, both making the hallway spin and spiral dizzingly around him.

A spirit-blade materialises in his hand, sword bright with ethereal fire. Battling a dream-beast is ever so much easier than the mortifying ordeal of being known.

“Alright, so the mask’s off,” Stephen says. “Good.”

The thing calling itself Vazeiros might not have anything else to say, but the Sorcerer Supreme came up through quips. The hallway grows longer, coils in on itself like an Escher landscape, and their swords rise to clash against each other, metal ringing on Fadestuff.

[aberratic]

Vazeiros leaves no time for further banter: their blades meet, and a dagger materializes in his off hand. He immediately uses it to lash out at Stephen's stomach, driving him back with a series of quick jabs. They're a match for skill and power even though Vazeiros is the stronger, better adept with a blade: Stephen is the more gifted at magic, and warps the Fade with an ease of will Vazeiros can't match. Ness only ever knew her father to be capable of a drow's inherent tricks; whatever arcane, opaque rules the dream-drow is governed by, the creature wearing his face now is beholden to the same limitation.

Stephen parries another thrust and Vazeiros retreats, considering, still like a spider waiting for its web to tremble with prey. Killing Stephen won't be as easy as he had hoped, it appears... but he's not giving up quite that easily.

He hisses something in Undercommon, and opaque, jet-black smoke spills around the elf like an overturned inkwell. It creeps forward to obscure Vazeiros, and then the stacks, and then Stephen's flaming sword, and finally Stephen himself.

From somewhere within the cloud, he hisses again, and violet motes of sparkling light fall into the darkness, sticking to Stephen like fiberglass. He shines, a pinky-purple beacon in an ink-black cloud, while Vazeiros is lost to the darkness, and the dream goes silent around them.

[portalling]

The darkness sinks in around him, thick and inky, the pink-purple making the sorcerer stick out like a sore thumb. Something could come lashing out of that darkness and he won’t even see it coming; caught off-guard, unable to defend himself. He hears Vazeiros hiss like a cat, like a lizard, an animal. He thinks, fleetingly, of Sinister.

Thedas is strict rules and limitations. One hand tied behind his back, mouth muzzled, operating with so much less than he’s used to. But in a dream…

Think outside the box, Stephen, he reminds himself, and with his spare hand snatches one of the books and lets it fall open. The words melt off the page, sentences scrawling into the air and moulding themselves into a floating shield, a flexible wall of text which stands between himself and an attack. This is no familiar spell on Earth or in Thedas; it doesn’t exist, it’s not something he’d ordinarily be able to do, but this is a dream.

Vazeiros’ blade swings. The inky words block the brunt of the attack while it sends vowels and letters scattering, but Stephen is put on the defensive, moving backwards. The dagger eventually slips around the shield, rips through fabric, digs into Stephen’s thigh, a shallow slash rather than a killing blow to hi sstomach. It might be a dream, but it hurts like it’s real.

(For the first time, a thought: What happens if he dies in the dream, properly? Is he Freddy Krueger’d? Best not let it happen—)

He’s bleeding into his robes. A different tack: “Ennaris,” Stephen calls out into the darkness, into those winding library stacks, teeth gritting on the pain, still not using her nickname. He never uses her nickname. “Ennaris. He’s yours. So I know you’re here, somewhere.”

[aberratic]

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!"

[portalling]

“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.