#you know i'm a dreamer but my hearts of gold ; musings | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fadekhat-blog · 7 years

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Prompt for you! While out in the Hissing Wastes, our band (non-mage Lavellan, Solas, and any two others of your choosing) tangles with the Venatori. The Inquisitor gets separated from the rest and spirited away. While captured, she's forced asleep and a Venatori dreamer goes about trying to break her mind in the Fade (in whatever way you choose). Unpleasantness ensues. There's a daring rescue. Then recovery. Or something. I'm never sure if I'm doing prompts right! Cheers!

That prompt is incredible, thank you! I’ve never written a non-mage Lavellan, so I’ll use my original Inquisitor Revanelan (Elana) sans magic as a stand in - let’s say she’s an archer. Not having magic definitely adds something to the scenario… This might be more than you signed up for, but I got pretty into it XD @dadrunkwriting

“Such a pity. To think, the elven empire was once impenetrable. Your people possessed magic beyond our wildest imaginations, immortality they say, and you are reduced to this. Sticks and stones will not save you,” the woman said, gesturing to my quiver of arrows with disdain.

She didn’t have to introduce herself. It was Mythal, I simply knew. Whatever doubts I once had fled my mind in an instant. My vallaslin, her vallaslin, seemed to dance upon my skin.

The all mother was beautiful - not in a covetous way, though every mother has a sensuous side, but in a way that was love given form. Her face was the face of everyone who had ever touched my heart, a shifting, flickering mirage of familiarity.

Every part of me wanted to please her, to make her sacrifice worthwhile.

“They can do more than you would think,” I said into my chest, explaining myself.

“And yet what do you have, really? Who are you, really? An elf from the wilds who mouths the words of the Chantry’s god. Your lies are written on your face. Do you think you’re human? A person rather?”

“I, what? No.” I said, my tongue unsure which question to answer. “I’m just trying to help them. The breach endangers us all. Mythal’enaste.”

I bowed my head, moving my hands in a clumsy sign of reverence as my keeper once taught me, but Mythal struck out at me, shattering my gesture of piety with a single blow.

“You will get no such thing,” she said with a sneer. “Not when you serve shemlen gods. Wear their colors, live in their halls.”

The slur sounded wrong on her tongue, but I couldn’t say why. My cheeks burned beneath the gnarled scar across my brow and my mouth moved wordlessly.

Suddenly every piece of my red and gold armor felt like an accusation.

“I don’t serve their Maker! I’m only trying to help,” I cried out, anger at myself and at them sparking in my chest.

“But you don’t serve me either,” she said, swooping in so that her perfect nose nearly brushed mine. “You don’t even believe in me.”

“That - that’s not true.”

“I don’t deserve it,’ you think. ‘What goddess would let her people suffer like this,’ you think. ‘One that is either impotent or indifferent.”

Her fingers traced the curve of my jaw as she spoke, and it seemed as if my thoughts echoed around us.

Well aren’t you?

How do I even know this is real? You’ve never bothered speaking to us before now.

I gasped, as if to inhale my words, but I couldn’t stop them. They came not from my lips but from my mind itself.

“Ah, but you forget you were gifted the freedom with which to fail yourselves. It is you that has failed me, child.”

Suddenly I was on my knees. She loomed over me, at once a goddess and a horror, a parent and an executioner.

“I haven’t…” I said. Part of me strained to turn away, to run, but I found myself enveloped in the sticky slowness of dreams. My will was not enough for my body, and I couldn’t bare to look at her any longer.

“Where is your clan?”

“In the Free Marches.”

“Where in the Free Marches?”

“Wy-Wycombe.”

“Why?”

“Because we sent them there. To protect the people - and the city elves. They would’ve been slaughtered without our intervention.”

Her slap rang out like a thunderclap, and suddenly I was thrown up against the ruins of a wall. The remains of an old temple hung around us, the leafless tree of Mythal depicted in colored glass at its center.

“The tree of your people is dying. You are but a lifeless leaf, an arcane warrior born without magic. A single spasm in the death throes of your kind. But you may still serve me.”

I stared into the broken stones that littered the ground, unable to focus on even a single blade of grass, but my mind answered for me.

How?

“Set. Them. Free.”

Her voice was all around me, formless.

“Rip the breach open, let the Fade rain from the sky. Allow Thedas to be realm of true magic once again. There, even you will not be worthless.”

I struggled to speak, to breath. My logic was slow, otherwordly. Her words wound through my mind like muck through a dead river.

“Slave,” she hissed.

There was a flash of pain and light, and then I was running. Roots and branches flew past me, all that was beyond consumed with shadows as my feet carried me forward.

I fled not by moving my legs, but my wishing they’d move. It was small difference, but it was there.

Then I was in a clearing. I was small, and Arlathae was pinned beneath a bear of a man, her left leg crushed into a mass of bone and meat.

“Leave her alone,” I stuttered, but my bow fine longbow was gone. In its place was a silly thing of twisted wood and string, practically a child’s toy.

He didn’t hear me, or simply laughed, and yet the scene didn’t seem to move.

I had a single arrow, I realized in an instant. I grabbed it at the hilt, like a dagger, and plunged it into his neck. Then he was on me, and Arlathae was screaming with rage and pain and I stabbed him over and over again. My hands moved by their own will, a memory of what was already done.

A blade tore across my face, maiming me once, and then again. The moment seemed to skip and pass over itself - at once we were fighting him, but also we were slipping away from camp, and then we were looking down at a corpse, unable to put a name to what we had done.

We won’t return to camp until we have our first kill, we’d promised ourselves. We’d meant a deer.

I saw the arrow in his eyes, once, twice. The blood trailing down his cheek as he finally died beneath me.

“The Fade will fall on them,” a voice whispered from on high.

I rose to speak and the painful light flashed again.

I was on a battlefield, or what I once considered one. The charred corpse of a human militia simmered around me. I’d pushed her - it was Arlathae’s magic, and yet we had both watched them die. Willed it.

If anything, my only regret then was that I had not been able to flay them myself. That my clan had to flee yet again.

“But you will.”

“You will be something.”

“Not a puppet, not a tool.”

“A weapon, a messiah of your people.”

“They will burn, or you will.”

The voices came as if from within me, filling my head as a final flash of blistering light engulfed my vision, bathing me in fire.

And then I was fire. Without and within me, all I could see is flame. My companions stood around me in a circle, and beyond them the masses watched me burn.

“You’ve done all you could,” Cassandra said, “But heathens must be cleansed from this world.”

I screamed and screamed and felt my skin strip away until there was only anchor and bone.

“It will make a nice relic, I think,” Dorian said.

Their every word felt like a dagger beneath my nails. Not in a metaphorical sense - every syllable was punctuated by visceral pain. I wasn’t a person then, but a gaping wound. An unwanted feeling.

“It would be helping to end it,” Cole mused beneath his hat.

“Creatures like her do not deserve compassion, Cole,” Solas said, stepping into the circle with an air of cool certainly. “They know nothing of this world, or what came before.”

When he touched me, the world was at once made of ice.

“You are nothing,” he said into my lips.

Not you.

And then he was smoke, and a second Solas stepped through him.

We were in a windowless cell, somewhere deep underground. I sat up on a wooden bench and my feet brushed the body of a masked Venatori mage.

“Are you okay, ma vhenan?” He moved to touch my arm and I flinched away, the bright pain flashing in my mind.

He said something else, but I didn’t hear him. It was all coming back.

There hadn’t been many of them - just enough Venatori to take out our party with the element of surprise. I had been left standing amidst a circle of my fallen allies wishing, hardly for the first time, that I possessed the barest spark of magic necessary to heal another’s wounds.

Then there was darkness, and light, and darkness again as they pulled me in and out of consciousness, transporting me. There was pain, both real and imagined, and I was covered in scars I didn’t recognize.

Battered, but alive then.

“Are they gone?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

“For now, yes,” Solas said, his eyes pained. “Did they say what they wanted?”

My hands shook, and I kept my distance, shifting over on the bench so he could join me.

“Well, the anchor, of course. He, they, whoever, said I should bring the sky down…”

“For the good of our people,” Solas finished, shifting closer.

“I, yes. But how did you know that?” I asked, a chill kissing my bones.

“It is no small thing to hold such power,” he mused. “I suppose you have never considered what else you might do with the anchor?”

“What else? There is nothing else. We close the breach.”

He laughed softly, shaking his head as he took my hand.

“That is one option. Imagine what we could do together, Elana. With the anchor, we are equals.”

Almost, hung in the air, an unspoken truth.

“You’ve never talked this before. Why is the fate of the elves suddenly so important to you?”

We’re not your people, remember?

He teeth glittered in the darkness as lazy haze of magic rose from his fingertips as he stroked my skin around the anchor. Once again, I was curiously unable, or unwilling, to move.

“Say you’ll do it, for me?”

“For you?” I repeated, in a trance.

“Say it.” His fingers dug into my palm, forcing their way into the strange in-between of the anchor. It flared, turning my arm into a shrieking claw.

“I…”

Was in a cave.

Cole was hunched before me, his form faint, quivering.

“I found you,” he said weakly. “I ran ahead. I felt you crying. Your mother dead, a bear in the woods… only it’s not really a bear, is it?”

“Cole,” I exhaled his name as I fell into him. “Cole, please, just get me out here.”

His arms encircled me, always cooler than you’d expect, as he spoke into my neck.

“But I need help now,” he said, voice hushed.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I’m unraveling, unbeing before your eyes. Can’t you see it? Will you help me? If the Fade is now, we will always be together. There will be someone who understands.”

“Say it.” His hands closed around my neck.

Blackwall in a tunnel.

Cassandra in a field.

The Iron Bull on a ship, Dorian by his side.

Sera in a back alley.

Varric in a forgotten bookshop.

Vivienne in an attic.

“Say it, dear.”

I tore into the next moment like a woman possessed. Perhaps I was.

The stars hung above us, distant and utterly imperious in every direction. A shadow stepped toward me, but I knew what was coming.

“I won’t say it. I won’t say it. I don’t care who you are. I won’t bring the sky down.”

The words flew from my lips like bile as I pressed my hands over my ears, blocking out their pleas. I felt them close in on me, a touch on my shoulder sending a lance of pain, or a memory of pain, coursing through me.

“Don’t touch me,” I barked, the spiky lip of a battlement pressing against my back. A fallen sword glittered in the periphery of my vision and I dove toward it, putting the blade between me and my attackers. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

There were three, Cassandra taking point with Solas and Dorian on either side. I was breathing wildly, so fast I could hardly think. The bursts of air through my nostrils nearly drowned out their words, but I could see their faces. Looks of worry masked with attempts at comforting concern.

“It is okay, Inquisitor,” Cassandra said, doing her best to sound soothing. “We’ve removed the Venatori. They can’t hurt you anymore.”

I scoffed, my eyes skittering away from their own.

“That’s what happened before, and that wasn’t real. Not ever,” Running my free hand through my short clipped hair. “Do whatever you want. I won’t say it.”

“Say what?” Dorian asked quietly, stepping closer.

“Nothing, shut up!” I shouted, swinging the sword to underline my point. He stumbled backward, eyes wide with fear layered with the seeds of pity.

“I - of course. It’s okay Elana, you don’t have to tell us anything. Let’s just go home, hm?”

Home, and suddenly I was reminded that they could hear my thoughts.

If I said it, I was theirs’. I could feel it in me, the power behind those words. But what if I only thought what they wanted? Was that enough? Could the Venatori possess me the way they had all those tranquil?

As I thought, I stepped back until my free arm was hooked over the wall. We were on a tower. I looked down onto the cliffs below, the sword always between us.

Could I make the jump?

Did it matter?

“Elana,” Solas said, his voice ever soft.

“You don’t call me that,” I snapped. “And don’t give me any of that shit about ‘our people,’ I know you don’t care. Not about ‘wildings’ anyway.”

“Inquisitor, then,” Solas said, his voice even despite my barrage of insults. “You are correct, what you saw before wasn’t real. The Venatori trapped you in your dreams, but they are not in control now. You’re free.”

“Free. You mean free until the next time I wake up,” I muttered.

“Pay attention to your body. To the way you move - not by will, but by action. That is distinction is unique to the physical world. You are not dreaming any longer, Inquisitor,” he said, as if it were any other conversation in his rotunda.

“Mm,” I said, loosening my grip on the sword. It fell to the ground, clattering harshly against the stone. “This is… real.”

“Exactly,” he said, guiding me forward with an arm that never quite touched my body. He seemed to understand that this was beyond me.

“Come Inquisitor, let us leave this vile place,” Cassandra said, leading us out of the tower.

I saw the corpse of the Venatori mage as we passed. I tried not to think how familiar it looked as we rode for the nearest Inquisition camp.

Instead, I focused on the majesty of the stars above and on the friends close at hand.

“I won’t say it,” I whispered into the wind.

Inspired by my very real and intense fear anytime someone pulls that “Wake up, Fakekhat, just wake up!” style prank - how can you know you’re not a brain in a jar (or a dreamer stuck in the Fade)? You can’t!

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