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!

Comments

give me the boy

[extortionate]

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.

what if bug instead (oblique spoilers for Arcane s2)

[grindset]

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.

bugs rug

[extortionate]

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 —

BUGS RUG

[grindset]

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—

why is herald face so cute

[extortionate]

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.

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

[grindset]

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.

[extortionate]

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."