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

[brennvin]

“Hm. Alright then.”

Asta had been similarly annoying as a child, whenever her uncle Pike was telling stories; she was too restless, too antsy to get moving and stay moving and active. It had only been after her mother, frustrated, handed the girl some of her yarnwork that Astrid was finally able to sit down and keep her hands busy and stay put while she listened to the tales.

Curled in bed with Talin, she has to remind herself again to be patient. How to be lazy, languorous and sedate. His teeth drag against her ear. If you squint, the tattoo on her face oddly makes her look more Dalish than he; his face remains bare. Sometimes she laughingly smears chalky paint on his cheek before a hunt, Avvar-white.

“Go on, sorry, won’t interrupt again,” she says.

[dirthsal]

Astrid needs something to keep occupied with, and the dream provides; Faron grumbles around the yarn ball stuck in his teeth, lips curled back from it and tongue smacking in frustration. When she pulls it from his mouth, it looks less like a yarn ball than a yarn tangle, in desperate need of someone to set it right.

As she begins her work, Talin runs his fingers through her hair, and hums quietly, picking up the thread of the story.

"That night, as Andruil readied herself for Fen'Harel, the pretender god Anaris came to her camp with a decree.

For centuries we Forgotten Ones have
borne the humiliation of
the Dread Wolf's schemes and transgressions against us—

No longer! Today I end his
disrespect and claim his life in
the name of righteous vengeance: give him to me!

Andruil, incensed by the Forgotten One's daring, responded with her bow drawn.

I bested the Wolf on my own
lands, shameless cur! Claim him if you dare!

Neither willing to renounce their claim to the Wolf, they came to blows, and met each other in fierce combat. Blood and force came against the forgotten of Elvhenan that night, and nearly guttered it: Andruil was stronger, and no matter how he tried, the Forgotten One's strikes could find no purchase on the Lady of Fortune's armor. In this, Fen'Harel recognized his opportunity, and, when all seemed lost for Anaris, he called out:

Brother, she is too powerful
for you but for one flaw: a strike
above her hip can undo her. See, a gap!

Anaris looked, and it was as Fen'Harel said: a gap in the hip of the Huntress's armor baring her skin. The Creator screamed her fury and aimed her bow, but it was too late: there Anaris struck, and her cry was cut short as she fell. The Forgotten stood above her, gloating in his triumph, and raised his sword for the final blow. Before he could end the Huntress's life, Fen'Harel called to him once more.

I have saved you, brother, he said,
and so you now owe me a boon:
spare my life, and free me from Andruil's ropes!

The audacity of the demand stayed Anaris's blade and turned him from his quarry, affronted pride driving him from her side. As he hurled insults at the Wolf, he did not see Andruil, injured but alive, rise behind him. She loosed one final shot to end the duel, striking Anaris in the back with a golden arrow. He fell, as did she, and while the gods succumbed to deep slumber to heal their wounds, Fen'Harel chewed through his ropes, and escaped.

Let that be a lesson, da'len."

Talin settles back against Faron and licks his lips, clears his throat. Hahren always made talking for that long seem so easy.

[brennvin]

Astrid works on untangling the yarn while she listens, fingers now-patiently weaving into the skein and chasing each thread and wriggling it loose, automatic movement for her hands while she cocks her head and listens and lets the story sink in. It’s like poetry, that cadence of it; it really does sound so much like the tales from the skalds. They’re better-trained than her; she doesn’t always bother with remembering the exact inflection or exact word-choice, sometimes abridging a story, sometimes paraphrasing.

But as Talin finishes, she exhales in contentment, satisfied with a good tale well-told. And then wonders what the lesson might be, exactly. Be cunning like the Dread Wolf? Be cunning like Imhar?

“He’s clever,” she says, after a moment. “Talked his way out of those ropes.”

[dirthsal]

"He is," Talin agrees, preening almost as though it's his own cleverness Astrid is commenting on. The Wolf is clever, and Talin is clever for following him, for seeing through the Creators' lies and casting off the chains of their worship—

It's only when he opens his mouth to keep singing Fen'Harel's praises that he realizes the position he's put himself in. He hasn't told Astrid much about the Creators, not as anything more than bygone myths, long disconnected from the world—if they were ever really a part of it at all. It's easy to talk around the fact of them. Talin hasn't met them.

"That's probably not the intended lesson, though," he muses. "My people aren't as fond of the Dread Wolf as yours are of Imhar. Fen'Harel is the only one of our gods left to walk the earth after he locked the rest away in the Beyond."

Outside their cabin, a frigid wind batters the sails of the aravel, and inside, their fire burns a little lower. The air feels colder. Talin's skin prickles with some sense he can't name—foreboding, maybe. This is closer to truth than he's been in a long time, but he hasn't said anything he shouldn't, yet. He looks down at Astrid, watches her pluck at the yarn, pushes her hair away from her ear—rounded, as it always has been. His stories are myths to her, fairytales. No more real to her than shemlen stories of the Maker. He can let it mean whatever she wants it to.

"Never underestimate the Dread Wolf, da'fen." He skims his thumb along the shell of her ear. Behind him, Faron huffs a warning. "If you have him trapped with no way out, know that's exactly what he wants you to think."

[brennvin]

Astrid doesn’t speak Dalish, but her understanding of the words comes automatically, out of nowhere, the knowledge simply blossoming in her sleeping mind: da’fen, little wolf. The diminutive makes her smile broaden, charmed. The room smells like warm skin and warm fur and burning fragrant wood.

“Y’know, you can call me Asta,” she says. Few here have.

(Where’s here?)

“So the lesson’s a warning? Don’t underestimate your…” She tries to sort through it, trying to pinpoint exactly what this Fen’Harel means, what those bright-eyed sharp-eared children clustered around the Keeper are supposed to think of him. “Enemy?”

🎀

[dirthsal]

Asta. Talin smiles, pleased as a fox in the chicken's aravel, and slips a hand up to cup Astrid's chin, tilting her head up and back for a deep, unhurried kiss. When he pulls away, he doesn't go far, nudging their noses together.

"Betrayer, technically," he defines in a murmur, "or..."

The dream shudders threateningly. Faron rumbles below him, a warning grumble beneath his back, and even as Talin's mind glides over the sensations, explains them away—it all gives him the feeling that he needs to stop talking. He swallows, sighs, leans back and averts his eyes from Astrid's.

"Elvhen is difficult to translate into Trade, it could mean a few things. Enemy works, though."

Though not as well as Rebel, Liberator, Protector—

The cabin-aravel settles. The wolves huff around them, and close their eyes. Talin is so tired, suddenly.

"The storm will pass by morning," he shimmies lower into the puppy pile, getting more comfortable, "we should sleep."