allthisshitisweird | TEST DRIVE MEME!

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TEST DRIVE MEME!

TEST DRIVE MEME

Maybe you’ve been around for a while, or maybe you’re new to the Inquisition. Maybe you’re new to Thedas, having recently fallen from a tear in reality and been collected by uniformed rescuers. Whoever you are, you’ve been sent to Kirkwall, to an outpost where many of the Inquisition’s members and allies work on some of the biggest mysteries and problems the organization must solve if it’d like to keep the world from ending, where “ending” means “falling under the power of an ancient powerful corrupted being who wants everyone to bow to him as a god.”

And just to be clear, it would like that. It would like that a lot.

I. THE GALLOWS: The Gallows is an island fortress in Kirkwall’s harbor. It’s been home to, in order: Tevinter slaves, a Circle of Magi, a lot of creepy red lyrium, and now the Inquisition, which has occupied the fortress with the provisional Viscount’s blessing. There are walls that still need rebuilding and corners that still need dusting, but for the most part the Inquisition has gotten down to business. There’s space in the stone-floored courtyards to train or spar; or, if your skills don’t lie in the realm of hitting things, there’s a large library and several offices supporting the Inquisition’s areas of research and diplomatic efforts. If you don’t know what to do with yourself, then by all means, ask; someone will definitely be able to put you to work.

II. KIRKWALL: A quick row across the harbor will take you to Kirkwall proper. The city is built into the cliffs, from exclusive and wealthy Hightown at the top to impoverished Darktown in the abandoned mining tunnels below. In the middle is Lowtown, home to taverns, merchants, and plenty of trouble to keep anyone looking for it happy. You’re welcome to spend your free time and your money here—but try not to annoy the locals too much, please, in case their welcome runs out. It’d be a shame to have to pack again so soon after arriving.

III. QUESTING: Barely had time to make yourself at home, did you, before you were sent away from Kirkwall again—but this time on a mission. There’s a rift outside of Markham, pouring demons into the fields, and the Inquisition has been asked to lend a hand. Maybe literally. If you have an anchor embedded in your palm, you’re needed to close the damn thing. If not, maybe you’re here to fight demons or guard against bandits on the road, or to gather samples and take notes on the rift’s location once its closed, or to speak to Markham’s nobility afterwards to make sure that they fully appreciate the Inquisition’s efforts. Regardless, it’s a long trip, so we hope you like campfire cooking and sharing a tent.

IV. SENDING CRYSTAL: Joining the Inquisition gets you access to the very latest in barely-understood magical communication devices—namely, a crystal, small enough to wear around your neck, that will allow you to communicate verbally with anyone else who has one. Or everyone else who has one. Say hello.

V. WILDCARD: The whole of Thedas is yours to explore, from coast to uncharted wilderness. Choose your own adventure!

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V. KIRKWALL GALLOWS (again)

Imprisonment is tedious.

With his books and other personal possessions confiscated, and no visitors save for the jailers who bring him his rations and scant water for bathing, Atticus has little other than sleep to keep him occupied. He tries not to do it overmuch, lest he be unable to drift off deeply at night, and thoroughly immerse himself in the living memory of the Fade as it has been shaped by this place. Even torture and trauma and bloodshed and grief can, in its specificity, craft a vision of the world that is fundamentally unique due to both place and time.

Atticus doesn't have to sleep to do this--but it looks much less strange when he does so. He may be able to enter the Fade at will, but he hasn't yet mastered the ability to retain awareness of both his physical and incorporeal selves at once.

So he waits until nightfall, when the guards have stopped heckling him and the moon is high, and his mind is exhausted from performing complex alchemical equations and remembering verbatim old school texts from his youth. That is when he lets himself sleep, and in his sleep, reaches out towards the minds of others within Kirkwall as they dream. His touch upon those minds is feather soft, just enough to give him a glimpse into their dreams, but not enough to draw their attention. Not yet, anyway.

Though Sina is no somniari, she is still a mage, and is familiar enough with this particular dream that she is able to recognize when something about it is amiss.
Atticus will find himself on a black beach with an eerie green sky reflecting into the lapping, viscous ocean, which pools around the hips of an elven girl who hardly looks older than twenty. From her chest glows a similar but far more saturated green, cracks-- or tendrils of it-- seeping up through her sternum and down toward her belly, cruelly tracing her modest bust and piercing right through the thin shift she wears.
She turns to look at the invader, her eyes hollow and weary yet backlit by green, her bearing decidedly unfriendly.

"Have you come to watch," she asks coarsely, her thin voice doubling over itself, "it won't be long now."

In the Fade, everything is real, and nothing is real, and all of it is true. Old instinct has him shrouded in a cloak to secret away his identity, his face masked by a helm molded into the image of an obsidian dragon's skull. (Calling it a helm is a bit simplistic; it is as much a part of him here in this place as his soul is, and blends into this projection of his body.) He has no idea what he would look like, here in this place, without it; the Fade doesn't have many mirrors.

The girl in the viscous sea is a vision--or, at the very least, the magic searing and ripping her open from torso to gut is. The power emanating from her has a magnetism that sinks its hooks into the deepest of his visceral needs and pulls at him; there's no air here to breathe, but if he could, it would catch in his throat. Marvellous.

He lifts his hands and moves them as though pushing aside some low-hanging branches, and before him, the thick water parts to offer him up a narrow, black path of sand straight to Sina. He approaches her with caution. "If I knew how, I would relieve you of your burden," he offers to her, and one suspects that this generosity is not borne out of kindness, but dark greed.

Sina's eyes widen in surprise as the water parts, and then they trail back to the masked face, narrowing. There are frequently demons about, circling like vultures over a dying deer, and tonight is no exception; they're everywhere in the two mages' periphery, lurking, waiting.
She recognizes that this person isn't a demon, but never before has someone other than Cole altered her dream in this way. ...Cole might have been a demon.

"Pretty words spoken by many," she says in a hiss, "before they flew away to let me drown." Sina herself could pass for an abomination in this state, so worn down by misery of this uncontrollable magic that she's quite literally falling apart at the seams.
"You're no different, ive'an'virelan," she continues, stepping toward him, fearlessly touching the mask. "No true dragon would speak in a man's voice."

"You're no different, ive'an'virelan. No true dragon would speak in a man's voice."

If she's close enough to touch the obsidian mask that has transformed his face, then she's close enough for Atticus to feel the burn of the magic that is consuming her, leaving her tattered and threadbare like a spool of thread unwinding.

He fixes his eyes on her sunken, furious ones, and smiles. "A true dragon," he replies, "would let you drown."

His smile fuels her anger, and quite unlike her waking counterpart, Sina is blazing with the toxic magic. It spurts and flicks off her like a raging fire, the demons noticeably moving closer as she stands her ground.

"A true dragon would eat me and make no event of it," she snarls, "what is it you want? There is something, I feel it spilling from you like grain from a cut sack."

The violence of her anger seems to fuel the hunger of the magic as it consumes her--but maybe that's just a trick of the Fade, an illusion meant to draw his eye towards the tendrils of magic and away from the demons as they prowl closer. Atticus cuts his eyes towards them and dispels the weaker ones with an easy motion of his hand. This seems to give the others pause, and though they don't flee, they seem to retreat just enough to regroup and consider another tactic.

Atticus turns his eyes back on Sina; her pain is a beacon for demons, and in her idiotic outburst, she could get herself killed before he has a chance to wrest her burden from her. "Whatever it is that is tearing you apart from the inside," he replies, reining in his impatience. "That is what I want, preferably without killing you in the process."

If the fool only knew how long this has been going on, how persistently, perhaps he would not think so little of her. But isn't it just like a shem'len, to assume authority on a situation he's only just entered.

"You do," she asks, and it's followed by a giggle, the sound so many have heard in her waking hours but not like this, mocking, desolate. "Then go to a rift and be graced with one like the rest of us." She looks down, taking a step back, her posture drooping. "It's not coming out," she adds, more distantly, morosely, "it's part of me now." Her hand presses over her chest, but may as well have no flesh at all for how the light continues to shine through it. "I belong to it."

Pathetic. An incredibly cruel and uncharitable thought, considering the young girl in front of him is dying from the magic in her chest. But it's the tone of her voice that sets his teeth on edge; his ear evidently cannot distinguish between simpering self-pity, and the dark nights of the soul brought on by true despair.

Either that, or he can tell the difference, and just doesn't give a shit.

"In that case, perhaps I should leave you as easy prey to these vultures," he all but spits, gesturing wildly with one arm towards the distant, murky shapes that prowl like wolves beyond the water's edge. He glares at her fiercely. "What sort of mage are you to let the Fade destroy you, when you should be its master? I'm offering you your life, but if you'd prefer to wilt like a dying flower rather than accept my intervention, then I'll leave you to rot."

He turns to do just that.

Sina steps back again, and begins to sink to her knees, the water pooling around her as she seems to grow smaller, kneeling in it. And she laughs, the same mirthless, desperate sound as before.
"As if it was yours to offer!" she breathes, "as if you had any say whatsoever! Ma enasalin banal!" Curling forward, she covers her mouth to cough into it, then thrusts her hand outstretched at Atticus.

"Be left here. Harellin. Die in the void, I'll see you again soon." She hauls in a deep breath and plunges down beneath the surface, for all the world looking as though she's drowning herself. But instead, the dream simply ends. Wherever the girl is, she's awake now.

In dreams, Petrana sits upon a throne.

The high, vaulted ceilings of the Archiduc's palace are familiar if night-warped; when she was presented to court, a lifetime ago, there were no bars upon the glittering windows. Sunlight streamed in, then. There is nothing, now, only one single guttering candle casting shadows, the throne room empty but for the whispers.

Witch. Whore. Traitoress. Exile. Did you hear that they--

Yes.

She's heard all of it. She holds her hand out for the decree to which she must sign her name, Petrana l'princesse du vide, and examines it without expression. It says:

Tout brûler.

Blood pools beneath her throne. She thinks, just as well.

He catches glimpses of her memories of what this place looked like before, in another life; like seeing a reflection of something through two mirrors. Her throne, this palace, the windows and the vaulted ceilings, would be a prison even without the bars affixed to the windows.

The dark, cavernous hall provides ample room for Atticus to cloak himself in shadow and remain out of sight, though it does attract the attention of the inquisitive spirits whose whispers reach towards Petrana from the darkness. Some turn their attentions on Atticus, but their offerings to him fall flat; there's nothing a spirit can give him that won't rip him away from what he longs for most: this, the Fade, walking through dreams, and changing them. They are a perfect canvas.

He reaches upwards with one hand and, like ripping aside a curtain, he strips the oppressive darkness away from the windows and lets bright, dazzling light spill into the chamber. It bleeds into the shadows, washing it away in a deluge, and Atticus remains motionless, rapt with anticipation, to see what will be revealed in its place.

Not a palace.

The palace entire comes away when he tears the shadows apart; the bloodied throne crumbling to nothing beneath her, leaving Petrana in her rich violet gown sprawled in the lush grass of the fields of Cedoux, a place never visited in life by the toddling little girl who runs through it now, laughing and running through it on confidently wobbling feet.

Sorrow dogs at Petrana's heels too close and even now a shadow remains in Veda's labored breathing and the sickly sheen of sweat on her smiling face, a little mimic of her mama.

"It isn't real," Petrana says, looking up at Atticus, calm. No one has ever visited her dreams - the demons at their edge are new and strange to her, the somniari entirely alien. Her sleeping mind, absorbed in night-grieving, does not question his presence.

All of this is wrong. Him, too.

"Come to me, Veda," she says, holding her arms out. The little girl stumbles into them and falls terribly, terribly still.

She rocks her, absently. A voice behind them says, "You must let her be, Petra," very softly. She ignores him. It's her dream. He can fuck off.

The stillness of the child in Petrana's arms makes something long dormant lurch unpleasantly in Atticus' gut, and he finds himself taking an involuntary step backward from the scene, as though putting distance between himself and that small body will also put distance between himself and that sensation. But it follows him; just beyond them the Fade gifts him with a glimpse of his own son as a small boy, picking flowers in the grass. Tavi is there just for an instant. When Atticus blinks, he's gone.

"It isn't real," he agrees quietly.

"You must let her be, Petra."

Behind them stands a young man clad in armor, his long brown hair loose around his youthful, sorrowful face. He looks as though he just strode direct from the battlefield into this pastoral paradise; blood is smeared and splattered across his exquisite plate mail, and smoke and ash have stained his cheeks and brow.

All of that is somewhat less attention-grabbing than the sword he carries. It's on fire.

Atticus approaches him slowly, looking over this Fade apparition with curious eyes. He turns to look back at Petrana, and that strange, uncomfortable feeling sinks its fingers into him again. He offers, "If you wish it, I can send him away."

In Vandelin's nightmares, everything towers over him. They are nightmares in part because he can't exert any control over them, any at all, to cut things down to size.

He winds his way among buildings that touch the lowering ink-green sky, houses whose doorknobs are far above his head, statues whose shoe soles alone come up to his waist. His staff and robes are the simple, shoddy uniform of an apprentice, none of the brocade or delicate metalwork he wears in his waking life. He tilts his head back, back, far back, to look a pride demon in the face. They look alike, all of them, but he recognizes this one well.

"It's almost as if you miss me when I'm not here," he tells it.

Atticus ghosts into the periphery of Vandelin's nightmare and studies the uncanny valley created by the towering, familiar objects that pepper the Fade's landscape. He stops by an impressively large door and touches it; it melts, like snow when touched by sunlight.

He follows a narrow, angular path through the strange buildings, following the dream road towards its heart, to where the dreamer is... and stops short of rounding the corner when he glimpses--and recognizes--the back of Vandelin's head and that insufferably smart note in his voice. He also sees the pride demon.

"It's almost as though you miss me when I'm not here."

How determined is this young idiot to court death--or worse, possession?

Atticus begins to shrink back into the shadows, to fadestep away from the dream entirely, then stops. Cautiously, he leans around the corner created by one of the large, towering buildings, and watches.

It wouldn't be a pride demon if it didn't feast on that stubborn, suicidal pride, that impulse to stay and stand his ground solely because he's frightened. He can't let fear win, can't let this terrified little creature be who he is--and so the demon waits for him, often, with a mirror of his own smug, serene smile. The nightmare is his Harrowing all over again, and he never learns.

"We might as well be old friends," the demon agrees, with wry conspiratorial warmth. "You always did put up the fun sort of fight."

You're different, special, exceptional, the kind of praise that 19-year-old Vandelin could so easily fall headlong into and sink below the surface without a trace. 32-year-old Vandelin doesn't trust a compliment anymore.

"Not tonight," he snaps--too quick, too sharp, the kind of emotion he'll be furious at himself for showing when he has time to think--before turning on his heel and hastening back down the path, past Atticus' hiding place, fast enough to leave a chill breeze behind him.

Edited 2017-07-20 03:29 (UTC)

He withdraws further into the shadows as Vandelin strides past him; in his wake, the chill begins to add a layer of cold frost across the wooden doors, stone walls, and glass windows. Light and color begin to fade, drawing substance away from the nightmare. The illusion is dissipating, now that the dreamer has departed.

Atticus steps carefully out of his hiding place and onto the path. Before him, he can see his own breath with each exhalation; like everything else here, it isn't real, but is a placeholder for something else. He follows the path that Vandelin took with his eyes, considering the reckless gamble that he'd just witnessed, then looks back to find the pride demon regarding him appraisingly.

The pair of them need little time to size each other up and come to the same conclusion: ...no, perhaps not.

Atticus draws his cloak further around himself, and fadesteps out of the remnants of Vandelin's nightmare.

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TEST DRIVE MEME!

mr sandman send me any dream but that one oh god

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