⇨ A SONG IN THE SILENCE

[ringleaders]

Who: The Harbingers
When: Just after midnight, Day 13
Where: ????
What: The new Harbingers have an out of body experience.
Warnings: Ego death. Some generally upsetting content, most likely.

ONE WAY OUT↴ You don't fall unconscious so much as you find yourself completely slipping out of this reality, the meaning of everything you left behind becoming increasingly abstract and hard to hold on to. You're lost in a void, surrounded by whispers that fall just out of range of hearing, in the presence of something so vast that you feel crushed by its presence. On, in this case, lack of presence. Like they say: the abyss stares back. It isn't someone, it is an emptiness, and everything about you feels like it bleeds away in the face of it. A hole that has no bottom. Every attempt to pull yourself together makes this vertigo feel worse, until existence itself feels terrifying or reprehensible. How precisely this existential crisis manifests will depends on the individual, tailored to your own unfulfilled desires, disappointments, frustrations. You find yourself faced with all of the things about reality that fill you with despair and disgust, and while you can attempt to fight it with thoughts of the things you hold dear, it feels unrelenting. Eventually you will break under the weight of it. It's only then, when you find yourself desperate for any kind of escape, that you are finally given the opportunity. The void speaks to you without words, but instead with a simple understanding. It can give you what you need to take control of this despair, of this heartbreaking necessity. Of every lost soul in this world, you are the one that has been given the chance to be the one to end it, to take control in the universe's final days. You will be creation's judge and executioner - and having witnessed this evidence, you know what you must do. This can't go on. This can't be fixed. The only hope left is for the end, but it will be an end at your hand. For once, the power is yours. Only when you are willing to accept this gift will you awaken. You find yourself in your body again, your senses painfully acute, as if you've been reborn. Is this the first time you've truly lived? Every pain, every worry you had prior to this moment seems so small in comparison. The path ahead is clear and unburdened by complication. You are in a dark space, surrounding by the specters of creatures you can't quite make out, like things just barely forgotten. You find that you aren't alone, as others have awoken in the same space. In front of you, floating above your chest, you will find a black light, like a small inverted sun. You know it's a part of you, but that it wasn't like this before. Though fear and a distant sense of disquiet may linger, you can't bring yourself to distrust your new location, or the change in your Spark. You have reassurance, now. It will all be over soon.

Comments

Lavellan | OTA

[dirthena]

She holds out longer than most, for Lavellan hasn't gone through what she has for nothing -- she hasn't remained standing after losing everything because she'll fall to her knees at the first sign of pressure. She is a mage, her willpower is her weapon against possession, and she has never in her life been considered at risk for it. She bares her teeth at the Void and invites it to try harder.

It does.

It shows her a world that she has failed to save, a lover she could not turn from his path, a clan that couldn't understand and survive without its First. A world where giving up the Inquisition only drove it further to the edge, where all her decisions did nothing she thought they would -- the elves suffer because of her, Thedas's forgotten and overlooked fail to matter, and her legacy is twisted beyond recognition. She lasts as long as she can, attempting to cling to it with desperate fingers while thinking over and over again -- no, I won't let that happen, I won't until the Void reminds her that she has given up her power. She is nothing, she can do nothing.

And it's there that the despair sinks in through the cracks, and the Void finds an opening in her insecurities. And when it it is too much, when the despair of all she's done and failed to do, it offers her an out.

It cannot be fixed. She cannot save the world, she cannot save save Solas, she cannot save the people she cares for; wouldn't it be easier to bring them the end herself? It will at least be better than any other fate waiting for them. Yes, she thinks, at last, and then she awakes with a gasp.

There are others around her -- good. Working alone had been so isolating, and one of her fingers reaches out to brush the black light hanging in front of her, a strange thing that she can't name. What was it Strange had said? It had more to do with souls than anything else.

So for the moment she simply stares at it, before getting to her feet -- one hand gently brushing her Spark as if she can't imagine it existing at all. "Well," she says with a small smile to whoever might be near her, "it seems like our work is almost done."

Instead of never done. And wouldn't that be a relief?