faderift | i know you, i walked with you once upon a dream [closed]

WHO: River, Aleron, Simon, Melys, Sina, and Bruce.
WHAT: The Dreamer's going for a walk.
WHEN: Guardian 29
WHERE: The Faaaaaaaaaade
NOTES: CW: Abuse, violence, trauma, etc. Individual starters within.

The Fade is not separate, but intertwined. One half of a woven tapestry, unseen but present and binding. The mages could feel it when they pulled magic through, or walked that plane in sleep. Dreamers? Felt those ties in their bones, the way they tied and plucked at the mundane world of the waking. Their emotions stirred spirits, their memories left imprints that echoed.

Their dreams shaped the abstract around them, without them even knowing. River knew. River had found those paths and wandered them, slipping in and out of one dream and then another, avoiding demons and watching the landscape shift around those who slept in Skyhold.

Here, the bindings were firmer, more secure, but she could see more clearly. Tonight, she made her walk down those paths, following the echoes of sound and emotion like loose strings in different colors. Gather them up and see the picture on the other side.

Carefully, carefully. Here, her touch could alter far too much.

Threaded | Flat

This dream is different, has a sense of belonging. It was a dream in progress when she arrived, slipping into the skin of a ghost of herself.

It was the Circle, but not. The walls and hallways were wider, brighter. Sunlight shone in, in colorful puddles across the stone floor, and a courtyard boasted a garden she knew not to be there in reality. This was the Circle as he might have wished it, without fear and enclosure, the templars almost non-existent and still as statues, far away. A place they would both be happy and safe.

That place had never existed. Simon had to know that. He was a mage too, the Fade couldn't fool him. But she hadn't seen him so untroubled in months.

Darkness is only broken by slivers of light, here. Broken pieces of shivering imagry, wood and floorboards, stained dark in circles. She recognizes blood magic when she sees it, though the dead woman at its center is mercifully turned away. Their eyes are always open, they know what they're being used for.

Words echo, thrumming in the air, a robed figure chanting and pulling at the blood where it lays, hand raised in the direction of a young boy trying his very hardest to sink back into the wall and escape. There's another man nearby, red in the face, but he's not here to help. Why isn't he helping? He's--

Her eyes fall to the boy, but he shivers too. The entire scene trembles, the vibration wrong. She can't reach through, only watch from the shadows as the robed man continues his spell.

Emerald waves slosh up against a shoreline that fades in either direction. To walk the shore is to continue walking, no end in sight, and only the boundless body of water before them. Them. There is a girl, an elf, a Dalish First in her robes, and she lingers here.

Trapped. The waves lap, the sound rolls over them, and the rest of the fade watches, as though a way out for her might be worth pursuing. Their presence is a tingling on her skin, like the water's spray, and she wraps her arms around herself before stepping towards the other woman.

The sand is too fine under her feet, too soft. It could mire you in place, if you let it.

The walls of the castle are crumbled, neglected, much like the halls of Skyhold without any of the warmth or noise.

There are only echoes here, footsteps drawing quickly away, and around each corner only more hallways. They swallow up any sound but that of retreat and pursuit, a string tied in a circle being pulled along endlessly.

Here, there are no shadows to hide in, only the sense that she can't possibly be here. Aleron has his mind on other things, doesn't he?

These were wild woods, far removed from the barren, snowy mountainside of the Frostbacks. Here things hummed, vibrant greens in thick foliage all around them, trees older than men looming overhead and only allowing soft spots of sunlight to dapple through the forest floor.

It was foreign to her, but clear in the woman's mind. She had been here before, whether in dreams or reality.

Here it was easy to hide, to watch, as the girl made her way alongside a shade. To her, he might have seemed real, but the wavering edges were clear enough to River. A memory of a boy.

Curious, she crept after them, nothing more than another rustle in the brush.