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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[dissolving]

"It's Last Night," First Day, as soon as the sun shunts free. Cedric shifts forward on his knees, the creak of ropes beneath mattress somehow familiar. Echoed. They're alone here, but you're never alone in the Hold – nearly a dormitory – "You ask a question, and turn it over, and then we know how the year goes."

Someone grunts, from shadows larger than he's thought to measure. Maybe they drew the bits blind from a bag, like a child in some faraway, stone city. Maybe they slit open a belly and went rooting within.

(Rost scratches at the door with a strange urgency. Storms are hard on animals, even the clever ones.)

[brennvin]

“Oh, right,” Astrid says, but she still sounds a little distracted: the scratching at the door is the universal sort of noise to signal distress, she’s been trained to hear it when the hounds need to be let out to piss hot in the snow. She looks over her shoulder, and almost lets go of Cedric’s hands before he manages to pull her back to attention.

The more frantic the other animal’s movements, there’s a matching plaintive whine in the back of Raskmodig’s throat.

(She’s heard it once before, hasn’t she? The wolf had only sounded so unhappy once in her life. When was that— )

What’s her question? What would her question be. The ones she can think of are too complicated to fit into the yes/no parameters of this symbolism: how do you save Fade-touched animals, how do you win the war, no, they’re no longer at war, these aren’t the things she needs to ask. Think simpler. Is Morgana going to shoot her first rabbit in the new year? Is Astrid going to get a kiss at midnight? Is Pike finally going to choose a successor?

Simpler life, easier questions, everyday concerns.

She flips the runestone into the air and then catches it in one palm. The question doesn’t make much sense (the snowstorm is getting heavier), but it slips out, impulsive: “Am I home yet?”

And when she turns over the stone, it’s the symbol that means no, no, no, no.

cw harm to animals

[dissolving]

Whine echoes in a strangled bark: Raw, frustrated. At once a hare, and a dog, and Cedric's brow furrows.

Hard to think against the noise.

He likes noise, the high drums of ritual, the beat of his pulse. A song. You can lose yourself in it. A thought that stretches there and no farther. His hand slips out, to press the surface of her rune, strangeness marking its shape. That isn't right. If this place belongs to anyone, it belongs to Astrid. Her kin in these peaks. Hers, limbs stretched below axe and eagle.

Am I home? Am I home?

"Should we be?" Home is where you bury your people. "Should we be home?"

A shriek from the hare. Blood bubbles around teeth sunk deep in its own leg. The coin in his drops. Rost. The creature spits over teeth, lunges for Raskmodig –

[brennvin]

Rabbits are cute, but hares can be demonic creatures, wild-eyed and muscled and always bigger than you expect —

Rost leaps for Raskmodig in a sudden charged violent spring, teeth digging into the thick fur of the wolf’s neck, and the wolf snarls, black lips drawn back from its jaw. He whirls around and then they’re fighting. Astrid’s let go of Cedric’s hands and risen to her feet, but their familiars are a frenzied whirl of fur and teeth

(this is familiar, too familiar, she remembers trying to get involved, remembers getting hurt trying to stop another animal fight, when was that)

and, unexpectedly, Rost had made the first move. The mild-mannered prey animal gone furious and rabid. Fade-maddened?

“Cedric,” she says, panicked, “stop them, by the Lady, what’s wrong with him—”

She winds her arm in the blankets as a buffer and tries to interject, but there’s an ugly shriek, Rost’s powerfully-clawed hindpaw catching her leg and kicking her away. Fabric rips, more blood wells.

we had snowshoe hares in college and all the drunk boys would wipe out chasing them in the slush

[dissolving]

"Fuck, dunno –"

But he does: Hares are solitary. Night creatures, witch creatures. It's rabbits that den up together, safe for each other's warmth. It's a rabbit that you split for the cookfire. A rabbit between friends.

Something doesn't belong.

Astrid's scared, and that startles him forward, past bloody arm and blankets. Cedric plunges in unprotected. You mustn't touch a mad thing, but his hand curls tight past scruff to soft, pulsing neck. You musn't touch a mad thing. Still someone has to set it right.

Rost wails. There are teeth in him, and teeth in the animals; there's a pressure in his grip. Tight. Tighter, enough to crack limp. To dangle another meal for the wolf. The familiar kicks. Cedric squeezes. Someone has to stop them. Wind pummels the tent, concussive above them. Someone has to stop this,

And he can't. Fingers drop loose. He can't, he won't. The hare rockets for snow.

[brennvin]

There’s a disorienting moment where she hears the sharp sound of impact and thinks that Cedric has actually done it: twisted and snapped his own familiar’s neck in a jagged crack of bone, wrung Rost out like meat for the stewpot, murdered a piece of himself.

But it becomes apparent a moment later, as the door slams open and shudders on its frame and cold air bursts into the cabin, that it’s the wind: the wind blowing the door open, the wooden frame creaking and cracking, not bone. And I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in.

Rost runs out into the night, faster than Raskmodig could chase him down; wolves are endurance animals.

Blood splatters on the snow and along on the hare’s path, a trail winding out into the darkness, where the blizzard disappears everything. The room is suddenly freezing cold, the wind blowing in and peeling warmth from Astrid’s bed-warmed skin; her shoulders hunch and she tries to get at the door to shut it again, shoving against the elements and failing. Is it worth going after the hare? Probably not.

“I thought,” she says, ignoring the sting of pain in her own torn leg, “that spring was coming,” and it really is disorienting, because now that the door’s open, they can see that the mountains seem to be gone, whited-out as if some great hand has swept the slate clean. There’s nowhere to go.

The dream trembles underfoot; it’s about to shiver apart. They’re about to wake up.

[dissolving]

Spring.

His mouth opens, and the storm crashes in. Wind and white and the sky broken for a hundred little shards — choking, coughing, splintering —

Into waking.

He plunges up, topples the body tangled with his embrace. A hand thunks lifeless to a floor spiderwebbed with frost. All of it dead: Boards and bowl and the socket of a slow-rotting eye. Cedric shudders back into wall, and his shoulder finds meat instead, squelches,

"Fuck!"

Hands jump about his throat, searching for blood. For fur. For something he can't name.

[brennvin]

It’s a violent, unpleasant second wakeup, without the cozy warmth of someone else tangled with her in bed. Astrid is curled up on frigid floorboards, the cold having seeped into her muscle and bone, a lingering chill: no blankets, no furs, no fire or body heat. While Cedric’s hands go for his throat, her own goes out instinctively grasping for someone-anyone-him, the way you wriggle closer to another body on a brisk morning. She would have burrowed into his side, would have gone back to sleep.

Instead: rolling away from one of the bodies on the floor and instantly coiling into herself, perched on her haunches, a hand scrabbling for her hunting knife. She is so cold. The blizzard must have made its way through the doors after all —

No.

“What?” she asks, numb, uncomprehending, staring at the corpse, then up to follow the line of Cedric’s leg, his hands, his shoulders pressed against the wall. The disorientation of waking from a dream and finding yourself in an unfamiliar place, but amplified.

[dissolving]

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.

[brennvin]

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?”