Doctor, every night I have the strangest dreams

[mythalenaste]

WHO: River Tam and Pel Ashara
WHAT: One of the somniari encounters en elf in her dreams
WHEN: Night
WHERE: Skyhold/the Fade
NOTES: Nightmare, possible gore. Nothing too terrible. Mostly psychological crap.

She's spinning. There's always something for the hands to do, and those who sit idly have no excuse. So she spins. But in this dream, she's spinning and walking. Back and forth, forth and back, trailing string as she goes. She has no idea where all the roving is coming from. Maybe someone is feeding it as she goes, because they need all the string to build a trap. The weblike trap forms, but the demons are coming faster than she can spin. If the trap isn't strong enough, she'll have to block them with her own body.

The demons are approaching, and she is out of roving. She starts spinning her own hair into the trap, shaking, tearing off her clothes to add them to the obstruction. The hunters stand with arms folded, unaware, inattentive to the approaching threat. Even she can't see the faces of the demons. She can only imagine them.

Comments

[girlinthebox]

But she has an audience, albeit a passive one. She watches the proceedings with dark eyes, half-shaded by her long hair. It might seem nonsensical from the outside to any observer, but here she understands, following the stream of thought better when it's singular.

"You'll run out."

Her voice is quiet, just another aspect of the dream. Better that way. She doesn't belong here, no more than she belongs anywhere, but she found her way here just the same. In and out and everywhere until something drew her, that sense of desperation that seems all too familiar.

River cocks her head. "Cut too many pieces to fit what's missing and there's nothing left..."

[mythalenaste]

"It has to be enough," Pel mutters, more to herself than River. "Otherwise what use am I?"

The skin of her hands is taken up with the roving, and her own blood.

[girlinthebox]

Use. Use. People are of value for their use, but that's so small-minded. Cogs and wheels that break and get replaced. Is that all they have to aspire to be?

But she can't interfere. Pel did this to herself, is doing. Unraveling like a sweater caught on a hobnail, and each droplet of blood seems the thrum of a distant drum. Footsteps? Perhaps. Demons roam the Fade, everyone knows that.

Blood draws them. That was why that particular brand of magic was so feared, forbidden.

"Sand in a sieve, they'll slip through the holes. The trap's too rigid," she murmurs after a moment, and in the next blinking of an eye she has her hands on the bloody thing, examining it. "Brittle when it breaks. The shards will cut everyone."

ugh I lost this tag for a while, sorry

[mythalenaste]

"And what would you suggest?" Who even is this shem?