Myrobalan Shivana (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
faithlikeaseed) wrote2017-07-29 06:54 pm
faithlikeaseed) wrote2017-07-29 06:54 pm
[IC/OOC] Fade Rift Inbox & Contact
(( Need to get a hold of Myr? Drop him a line. Notes, in-person visits, sending crystals, spooky Fade dream shenanigans, you name it. Just specify the type of contact in the first comment of the thread and away we go.
Need to get a hold of the player? Plagueheart#0051 @ Discord or a DW PM is the easiest! ))
Need to get a hold of the player? Plagueheart#0051 @ Discord or a DW PM is the easiest! ))
Timeframe: the night after Myr's visit to the dungeon.
Not in the traditional sense of a guest to his door, invited or otherwise. This visitor comes quietly into the periphery of his sleeping mind, more a silhouette of a shadow than the easily discernible shape of a man, and there he stays; a leaf on the surface of a still pond.
This dream is one of brightness and light, soft at its edges with nostalgia; there are few shadows here for a visitor to hide within,
but Atticus creates one to suit his purposes, disappearing into the shelter of an arched doorway that surely was always a part of this dream's architecture. Wasn't it? Shrouded, his identity obscured, he can nevertheless feel the dry heat of a Hasmal summer against his skin, smell sweet desert flowers on the air, can hear the distant call of a bird of paradise somewhere within the boughs of the trees that shade the courtyard of Hasmal's Circle of Magi. And there, seated on one of the benches at its center, surrounded by high stacks of parchment paper and sentimental tokens from a life he no longer lives, is Myrobalan. His head bent in concentration, he's writing something furiously--and he isn't alone.
Lounging nearby, a demon has taken some pains to guise itself as a human--but to Atticus' discerning eye, it's easy to mark the creature for what it is: a Pride demon.
For now, Atticus is still; he watches, and waits.
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He always has, since earliest childhood; where many of the alienage's children could pick up something from simple instructions, he had to be walked through the motions. It went with him into the Circle, where he struggled with the easiest spells until they tried teaching him the gestures first. And where there weren't gestures, he had to make them up; and when he had to memorize new information, it had to be written down, because that teaches him the shape the memory should take.
For all his blindness, none of that has changed; though he's learned different ways to commit things to memory--and there's so much now he needs to memorize about the world because he can't see it any longer--the best and surest way is still to write things down.
And he can still write, in his dreams.
He keeps the demon in front of him: When looked at straight on, it takes the semblance of a man; but out of the corner of the eye it drips with golden radiance, with flaring wings and eyes to adorn them like a peacock rendered in gilt and sunlight. It is terrible to gaze upon as the Golden City must once have been, magnificent as Andraste's army with banners, and it basks there like a dragon. "She was a Lady of miracles," it says conversationally, in the least conversational voice imaginable: A fear-thou-not voice, a voice like thunder and wildfires. "Who through Her Husband's divine power made the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, the blind to see.
"That power exists still, for the righteous to take hold of."
Finishing the page he's working on, Myr looks it over once, then transfers it to a short pile with the dragon and serpent of Tevinter locked together in deadly embrace upon it. He looks up then, past the demon that fans a half-seen wing languidly in the breeze, through another archway that--with the impossible architecture of dreams--opens on the wide sun-drenched expanse of the desert. There's an unguarded fondness about the elf's expression, in his dark eyes (not quite so wide and doll-like as another elf of Atticus' acquaintance but the genetic similarity is there, the line of heredity from a grandmother through a son and a daughter to a pair of cousins) as he gazes across the playa toward the horizon.
With all this beauty around him, he can't not stop and appreciate the scenery, just for a little while.
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Atticus has yet to draw a thread of connection between Vandelin and Myr beyond their similar propensity for attracting the attention of pride demons. This one doesn't look to be an imminent danger to the mage it has chosen to fixate upon; Myr's eyes have wandered past it towards a desert horizon that spills out into the forever of the Fade around them.
What an idyllic prison he has conjured into existence for himself.
"That power exists still, for the righteous to take hold of." Yes, that thought is in keeping with Atticus' limited exposure to this young man; righteous and secure in his belief that magic could best serve mankind when tethered like a well bred coursing hound.
Well. If he would choose to spend his dreams in a prison, then let the surroundings better reflect the reality.
Atticus slides one hand across the smooth stone walls of the interior courtyard; spreading outward from his touch, the stone itself changes in a way that is almost imperceptible at first--but so does the air, growing heavy and hot and damp, as though in anticipation of a heavy storm. Overhead, thunderclouds roll in, black with rain. When it begins to fall, the sand dunes grow dark from it, seeming to undulate as the wind picks up. Then a foamy cap forms atop one before it crashes into another.
It isn't a desert anymore; it's a raging sea.
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The memories they represent are safely locked away, but it's the principle of the thing that has him scowling. "This is petty," he says, knowing his disapproval to be less than worthless. Don't look at it, don't talk to it, don't give it ideas. He wrenches his gaze away from the creature's ineffable smile, from its tempest-voiced murmuring:
"'Though the darkness comes upon me,
I shall embrace the Light. I shall weather the storm.
I shall endure.'"
Better to act, to bury himself Where he can place his lesser glyphs with a gesture, casting the greater is nearly like a dance, a set sequence of steps as he sweeps out points cardinal and ordinal for a glyph of repulsion. Here and there he works in an extra line, an extra sigil, defining the shape he wants the magic to take so that when at last he completes the design and energizes it, it repels raindrops and retains windblown pages--and forces the demon back.
Unperturbed, it spreads its intangible wings to catch the wind, drifting to the last remaining tree in the courtyard--leafless, snarled, sky-clawing--and roosting there like a puff of thistledown. In the way of things oneiric, the rest of the world's begun to melt away in the rain, the upraised square of flagstones with tree and barrier and mage and pages reduced to an island in the gray-black dimness of the churning, angry sea.
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Atticus stands on the ledge created by the platform and the churning sea, the backs of his heels inches from the water, but it doesn't touch him. Some unseen wind, some powerful current, forces it back away from him, so that waves that should crash into him instead collide with an invisible barrier, and instead rush upwards towards the sky. It doesn't recede again; instead, the platform itself almost seems to sink into the depths of the sea as dark, murky black water rises and rises around them on all sides, only the force of the barrier holding it at bay. When lightning crackles through the atmosphere, it illuminates dark, ghostly shapes drifting and groaning in the deep.
The water that has already spilled onto the platform parts in front of Atticus as he walks towards Myr--but though it stays clear of the shrouded magister, Myr is offered no such protection.
When Atticus speaks, his voice is at once soft; far above them, the roar of the storm is muted by the towering sea waves that bracket them in. "Sometimes, I believe you Southern mages got what you deserved."
Then he reaches out a hand towards the distant surface of the waves, and the sea begins to crash in around them.
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That he has no idea what to make of his visitor is written clear in the widening of his eyes, the sharp way he draws breath. Demon or spirit or something else he can't know, only that it has unprecedented power to warp the Fade around it--and he does not.
"Sometimes, I believe you Southern mages got what you deserved."
No time to understand what that might mean beyond a veiled provocation, no time to interpret this nightmarish vision, the walls are coming down and he can't swim-- He charges Atticus without thinking, knowing he's outmatched, knowing he's as good as dead but he won't go down without a fight, not this time and never again. He gets three steps before the sea pours in between them in a black liquid rush, shattering his glyph and smashing him against the platform with stunning force. Gone are his spirit blade and staff, ripped from his fingers as the eager currents drag him under.
He has drowned in his dreams often enough to know what happens now and how little there is he can do about it. Give up breathe in let it go let it end, better one quick inhalation and it's over than being torn apart by the malevolent shadows circling closer and closer through the crushing darkness. And yet he still fights, disoriented and holding his breath, struggling and clawing the wrong way through the water--blind to the silvery bubbles that spill upward from his lips as the painful band of panic and hypoxia tightens around his chest.
Maker, save me--!
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Maybe two feet away from him in that prison of ocean current, Myr thrashes and struggles like a fish caught on a line, his every effort and propelling himself towards the surface rendered futile as the sea clutches at him and holds him fast; the sea is greedy to keep its victim for itself, to share what it has found with the shadows that prowl ever closer, their low groaning and growling resonating with hunger. Much more of this, Atticus knows, and he will drown; a death from a somniari in the Fade means death in the physical world as well.
The mage's body contorts in painful spasms as the the instinct to breathe finally triumphs over his mind's knowledge that doing so will kill him. Atticus watches. Waits.
There. That's long enough.
Wake up.
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He comes up sobbing for breath, soaked in fear-sweat and clutching at his chest as if that could drive away the phantom pain of drowning. Blankets tangle around his limbs, constricting--too much in that instant like the feel of the merciless hungry sea all around him and he struggles out of them, throws them off the bed entirely in momentary panic.
Then sits for a long silent time with a fist pressed against his lips, shivering in the cold of a southern night and waiting for the nauseating aftermath of the nightmare to subside. Soon enough the blood's no longer singing in his ears; his heart's no longer pounding and the agony of the ocean in his lungs is little more than a memory.
It's too damn bad the blackout darkness of impending death is with him to stay.
At length, he drags himself out of bed to begin his day.