⇨ 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

[atouts]

"Not really," Childermass says with a shrug. It's not that games can't be played with them but in his particular case... "You use them to tell fortunes more often than anything else."

But as for if the rest are from the carnival, he only has to take a look around -- avoiding looking at any of the strange, distorted figures in the darkness, something disconcerting about them that he can't quite put his finger on -- to tell for himself.

"And it would seem they are. How odd, when the concert was more the local populace than the carnival."

[dirthena]

Fortune. As if they'd tell anyone anything that isn't death and the destruction of all things. Lavellan knows that that's her purpose, that that's what she should do -- better her than anyone else. She is more capable, more willing, has already lost so much that what was one thing left to do before it was all over? "It seems pointless to ask you to read mine," she says, half shrugging.

"Perhaps we are better suited for the task ahead of us than anyone else." They'd tried to help, too, and failed. Another thing to add to her growing list.

[atouts]

"It would likely just tell me how you're going to die," he says oh so matter-of-factly. "Which makes it a pointless reading altogether at this point."

If the multiverse is ending, isn't it obvious?

[dirthena]

"Cheery, do they do that for everyone?" If so, she can't imagine there's much demand for it. But it suits his demeanor, Lavellan thinks, from their previous interactions. The reminder of her fate makes her lips twitch upwards into a small smile. "Dying with everything else. I think if you tried doing a reading before all this, it would have told you the same. Just on a smaller scale."

For she knows that her fate is to stop Solas or die trying. Was. And while she wished, once, that she might have found a different way, she knows that he's at least partly right now. Only it isn't just Thedas that needs to burn, and she won't have the elves return. Just... nothing.

[atouts]

"Not everyone," Childermass admits. "I get other answers, other fortunes often enough, but I already had a feeling about you."

Or that's just the emptiness of the Void talking, where he can't really hope for a better outcome even if he's fine with that.

[dirthena]

Even if it is the emptiness of the Void talking, it is something Lavellan wouldn't argue with. "Grim fatalism wasn't a look I thought would work well for me, not like others I knew." But she flexes her hand, and wraps it around her Spark -- it forms a wicked looking double ended glaive, and she smiles at it, running a finger along the edge of one of the blades. "But I'm finding it has its advantages."

A pause, and then: "What other questions do you ask of it?" He said other answers, and therefore it must be used for something else beyond fortune telling.

[atouts]

Childermass will give the glaive a curious look but he won't step back or otherwise move because of it. Sure, that looks intimidating, but he really doubts Lavellan plans on stabbing him with it, so--

"I ask about people, what they're up to, where they are," he answers, gaze flicking away from her Spark-turned-scythe and back to her. "What may come to pass, what is happening at present. While the cards are not always clear nor do they always have an answer, they are certainly a part of getting me to where I am."

[dirthena]

For now, at least. Instead she simply uses it as one would a staff -- casually ignoring the fact that perhaps one should treat something with a bit of a blade to it better when that's the point of it, instead of presuming the blade at the bottom is just there for decoration. But who really knows when it comes to staves in Thedas.

Humming slightly, Lavellan peers more intently at the card. "And they.... are magic, yes?" Not the one that he turned his Spark into, but the ones he's more familiar with; how else is one supposed to gain answers from them if not for that? It was so unusual from what was common in her world she can't help but be curious. Even now. "I was unaware you had a card for 'endless void', or that it was responsible for this."

A small grin, lips flashing up at her attempt at a joke.

[atouts]

"They are magic because I will them to be," Childermass answers, but only after a moment of thought, frowning for that time as he considered how to answer. It's a good question. He knew his readings were usually correct, even early in life when he first started messing around with them. Those cards had been... well, rubbish, but rubbish he held dearly close to his heart.

Were they magic? Were they made magic because he made them? Did they become magic because he used them? Or was it always just himself and it didn't matter what cards he used? It's not as though he hasn't substituted a lesser card to foretell danger before.

Ultimately, he settled on the answer he gave Lavellan because it made the most sense. As for her joke, he raises his eyebrows and takes up his card again. Running his other hand over it, hiding it from view briefly, when it's revealed again it's gone from one tarot card to the whole deck of them.

"The cards can be anything so long as you know how to read them." She may have been joking but Childermass, he's much more serious about this. He fans out the cards, all face down, and offers them to her. "Here. Pick a card. I am certain you will find your endless void."

let me know if this works, i say weeks later

[dirthena]

At his first statement she frowns, thinking of what she learned of magic from his world from him and Strange. "If one's will is vital to your magic, I don't think our two worlds function much differently at the heart of things." It didn't matter, of course, but even now she can't simply shed her curiosity.

"It's that simple?" Raising a brow at him, Lavellan plucks a card from the deck. There's no magical force at work in the choosing, as far as she can tell, which means he's either not using them in that way or it's too subtle for her to notice. Flipping it over, she's almost disappointed at the card on the other side -- a man lying down on the ground with ten swords piercing him. It seems a little... too on the nose, all things considered. But if one must 'read' it, then there surely has to be some hidden message in it, right?

Wordlessly, Lavellan presents it to Childermass.

[atouts]

"They're certainly not a spell you'd find in a book," Childermass replies with a shrug. His cards aren't something most would accept. Norrell didn't. Strange only does because, honestly, he's quite mad. It's something he could explain in depth, provided Lavellan was interested enough and he cared to, but that's neither here or now, so he just carries on as she picks, adding, "And no. Normally I would do a full spread but for this purpose, it shall give me insight regardless."

Less so a deeper context, however, which is fine. He doesn't need to read her entire life when everything is set to end. So when she picks and shows the Ten of Swords, he just raises an eyebrow and reaches out to take the card back, to look at it curiously. He considers it a moment, then says gravely, "You've sacrificed quite a lot, haven't you?"

His gaze immediately flits over to where she is most definitely missing a hand, a portion of her arm.

"And not only your hand, I suspect."

[dirthena]

As if she learned magic from books. Still, she doesn't press the point further, and nods at his explanation. It would do for now -- and she's interested in seeing how it works. Magic is magic, after all. So the more cards one had, the better one's ability to gain insight would be. It's only after Lavellan hands the card over that she realizes she might not like whatever it tells Childermass. Not that she doubts his ability to be discrete, but she's never had the chance to play her cards close to her chest (as it were) since becoming Inquisitor.

So when he speaks she feels as if she's being pinned to some board to be examined, and something in her face hardens reflexively. Childermass isn't wrong. What hasn't she given up to save Thedas? There is no future for her now, she cannot return to her clan. The Inquisition is disbanded, her lover gone off to destroy the world and she must kill him if she cannot save him. She has lost who she is to the Inquisition, for Thedas, and what has it gotten her?

Lavellan tries to swallow down the emotions that cross her face, but fails. So she settles on a thin, flat smile and a nod. "A great many things." Not that they matter now, of course.

[atouts]

"Then be glad. There's nothing else left for you to lose," he tells her outright. Ten of Swords, she's hit the very rock bottom of her life, and now it's all over and she won't have to suffer anymore (or, more likely, things can only go up from hereon out, but that's too cheery for Childermass and doesn't quite fit their obvious future now).

That said, he returns the card to his deck.

"You might look at the Ten of Swords and assume many different things, but it ultimately a card of loss and the beginning of something new from that loss."

[dirthena]

That, at much, was true. It was not a strange sort of comfort to know that she was losing nothing else by destroying all of creation; the corner of her mouth twitches upwards as she inclines her head towards him. What would a full reading tell him? She doesn't know, and it hardly matters now.

"This is certainly a new beginning." The carnival, the power she has now within her grasp. The Void. All and all, it isn't something Lavellan feels counters his reading from a single card. "For however long it lasts."

After all, it wouldn't be forever. Not now.