fadewalk | RP: Open (In the dungeon of Skyhold)

There was a pallet, a bucket, an ewer of water, and Cullen's cloak. Evelea stared at it for an hour after he left. Sitting in silence, Silenced, she felt unsteady, hollow, her hands shaking and her stomach rebelling if she moved her head too fast.

Stars sparkled in the corner of her vision and she finally settled onto the pallet, pulling his coat around her, hunching down until her ears were covered with the fur. Sleep wouldn't come, or if it did it happened in snippets of blankness, head too muddy to tell the difference.

She must have slept at some point because the flavor of the Templar's silence changed. It was less encompassing, frayed and leaking around the edges, inexpert. The drips of mana that it allowed her were less that it would take to manifest a spark, but it made it easier to think.

To worry, really. About Cullen, about his trial, about the twisty nature of this place, and what had happened to her. It would be easier if Envy would speak to her directly as it had done before.

She pulled the journal out from where she'd tucked it in her belt pouch. "If I write in you is it learning? Or have I already lost and this is what is left?" She whispered the words at the book, then with a sudden hiss of frustration, threw it across the cell. The tears were back, vision swimming. She squeezed her eyes shut and started to pray.

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Anders made his way into the dungeons slowly, still unfamiliar with this place, and looking like he was warring with himself.

"This is really a terrible idea, you know," he mumbled to himself, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Ooh, go right down to the dungeon, that'll make it so much easier for them to throw you in there while you're at it. Brilliant plan, Justice." He sighed and looked down at his hands just as they turned blue and his skin cracked with the light of the Fade.

The spirit did not answer him audibly, but he appeared to give Anders some sort of an answer, because by the time Anders' skin was back to normal, the mage nodded wearily in agreement.

"Yes, yes, you're right, of course."

He stopped outside of the cell with the mage in it and peered inside.

"Er...hello?" Anders called cautiously.

The mage in question was a lump on the pallet, wrapped tightly in a surcoat of washed out maroon that's seen better days. The heavy edging, black fur like a mane, shuddered as she sat up.

Evelea's eyes were huge and blue, shadowed and confused as she blinked at Anders. "Still here," she murmured. She sighed and shook her head, bright red-gold hair falling into her face. "Sorry, it's hard to..." The fingers on her left hand dragged through her hair, pushing it away from eyes and then waggled near her temple. "Between the smite and the silence my head is killing me."

She squinted at the stranger on the other side of the bars. "I would ask if I could help you, but I'm not sure how in the world I would do that." Her smile was a pale, wan thing, and she stood unsteadily, but didn't approach the door.

Anders clenched his hands into fists at his side, his skin skittering blue again, but only for a moment. He cleared his throat.

"Ah, I, ah, may be able to help with that," he said, then gestured to his head. "The headache, I mean. I'm a healer." He sat down just outside the door, giving the bars a look of hatred even as he leaned against them. "Anders is my name. Varric's friend? You may have heard of me. I've come to understand I'm somewhat notorious these days. Not that that's unexpected, really, after what I did, but you're all coming from a lot further down the timeline. I just came from 9:37." He closes his eyes. "Right. And I'm babbling. Sorry, I - we - don't much care for cells and dungeons and...closed in spaces. But I can ease your headache, I expect."

It should be impossible for eyes that big to grow any wider but they did. Evelea swayed slightly and shook her head.

"I'm sorry... Anders? The Anders." She rubbed her forehead with the pads of her fingers. Her voice falls to barely more than a whisper, "Why would it show me Anders?"

Louder, words addressed to him again, though she frowned vaguely past him. "Are you sure it's safe down here for you? I can't protect you if someone tries to hurt you." Because that was her first instinct, to keep the notorious mage who lit the match in Kirkwall safe? She took a step or two closer to the bars.

Anders frowned. "Well, probably not, not with Cullen all gung-ho and 'let's lock up the mage till we can prove she's not a threat!' Since we all know what that man thinks about mages." He made a face.

"Mages cannot be treated like people. They are not like you and me. They are weapons. They have the power to light a city on fire in a fit of pique," he put on a particularly haughty face and imitated the templar. It was a shockingly good impression, almost exactly in Cullen's voice.

He waved a hand. "Of course we all know the way he looked at some of his charges back in Fereldan said he thought of them as rather human indeed. Bloody templar. Forgets I was there too. How he ended up in charge of these - Inquisition, was it? - forces, I'll never know. Although I suppose he did pull through and stand against Meredith at the end there. Not that it took any particular strength of character to see she was mad and stand up to her at that point."

Anders took a breath.

"Sorry, rambling again. Nervous habit." He squinted at her. "I don't know what you mean by 'it' showing me to you, but I can tell you I wanted to punch that bloody templar in the face, and Justice wanted to be sure he wasn't mistreating you, so we settled for checking in, and here I am. The danger to our person is slight - I am possessed by a rather powerful Fade spirit, after all, even if he's not exactly himself at the moment."

(ooc: Hi, sorry to interrupt, but Evelea/Anders/Neria for the rp order? Just learned I had to be here, so I'm trying to catch up lol)

(OOC: Fine by me, Neria!)

(OOC: Totally fine. I'll wait on your entrance before I reply again. :) )

(ooc: oh, thank you! ^^)

Neria ran to the dungeons as fast as she could, exasperatingly muttering in elven. Jäger on her heels, she made her way down to the dungeons without worrying about being heard or not. Opening the last wooden door almost storming inside the room, she hesitated for a moment looking at Anders, her mind wondering if he knew her or not.

"I hope I am not late." She approached the cell. "Sir Cullen asked me to watch over you, Lady Trevelyan."

The glint that entered Evelea's eyes could really best be described as dangerous when Anders started mimicing Cullen. "Commander Cullen is no longer a Templar." The words were brittle, and tasted like the papery dust of the Ostwick library, because wasn't she here under guard, accused and Silenced as if he were?

She sighed, opening her mouth to explain further when the patter of feet approaching caused her to frown and fall silent. She looked at the elf and at Anders and then back, and of every damn thing that she could possibly do she chuffed a soft laugh while tears welled in her eyes. "Oh Cullen." Of course the man would have sent mages to judge her, and one of them possessed of all things.

But what if it was, all of it, only Envy? She swallowed and watched them with sudden wariness. "Too late for what, exactly?" Maker her head hurt. She rubbed her temple again.

Anders tilted his head. "So what? I'm no longer a circle mage, but I'm still afraid of cages and small spaces and the dark, and I'm still bitter about the injustices mages face. I'm no longer a Warden, but I can still sense darkspawn within a certain distance. What we were doesn't just go away, no matter how much we wish it to."

At the sound of another's approach, he stood quickly, reaching for the staff he was still carrying and holding it ready, eyes more blue than gold. When he noticed who it was, however, his staff arm lowered and he gaped.

"Neria?" He stumbled back a step, hitting his spine against the bars, then gave a weak laugh that was very nearly a sob. "Maker's breath," he said, dropping his staff to the ground with a clatter and putting his hands over his face. "You have no idea how good it is to see a friendly face. You are you, aren't you?" He dropped his hands and stared at her. "Not some variation of Neria in a world where Hawke was...I don't know, a man, or hated me, or...something?"

"No, no my little flat-ear brother, I am definitely me." she smiled and dropped her shoulders, relieved. "And hello to you too, Justice."

She considered giving Anders a hug, but there were more pressing matters and she squeezed his arm in a warm gesture, before turning to the woman in the cell.

"Too late to check on you. Too late to explain you this whole Fade mess we're inside. Is you comfortable, tended to? In the rare ocasions when I faced Templars and was Silenced I would stay with this terrible, throbbling headache and rub my forehead just like you."

Evelea frowned between them, the way they talked about others worlds and Hawkes and... She forced herself to focus on Neria's words and nodded slowly. "Headache yes. Other than that, I have water and..." She shrugged, suddenly self conscious about Cullen's coat that she'd wrapped herself in like some sentimental fool. The longer this went on, the harder it was to think with this sucking, hollowing void in her where her magic should be, the pulsing pain in her head growing, the more exhausted she grew.

"Can one of you, please, very, very simply, because I am at least four times the idiot I normally am, explain what you mean by... different worlds? Hawkes? I know we're in the Fade, and that isn't the first time that's happened to me, but not since I awoke with this--" She held up her marked hand, eyes pleading. "--with no memories of what it is or how it got there, and I just..." She swallowed her admission of fear. It would be so simple to explain everything, but she couldn't shake the image of Leliana's wooden face, the demon, seeking to know her. She couldn't give so much, not when she was unable to trust her own mind.

"Please."

Edited Date: 2015-08-08 03:25 am (UTC)

Anders gripped Neria's shoulder, and did his best to pretend his hands weren't shaking.

At the repeat mention of Evelea's headache, Anders got a fussy look on his face and frowned, pointing at the ground. "Sit down," he said, in his best no-nonsense healer's voice, "and let me help your head."

He squatted next to the bars again and cast a look over his shoulder at Neria. "You want to explain the whole Fade-not-Fade, alternate histories thing while I do that?"

"Sure, I have been doing this a lot lately."

She smiled and kneeled before the bars, straight spine, catching a breath.

"We are in the Fade, yes, but it seems some sort of powerful magic shattered completely any boundaries between our realities. There are other people here, from different realities and different times as well. We have no clue of what caused this and less clue on how to revert it. By the way, I am Neria Surana, Warden Commander in the same reality as Anders here. There isn't a clear pattern on who is being transported here and from where. I know this is pretty confusing, but there isn't a simple way to put all this mess."

Evelea moved toward the bars and settled down to sit cross-legged within Anders' reach. She listened closely to Neria's explanation, eyes closed tightly as she waited to either be healed or strangled by a suddenly revealed demon.

"Different times?" she asked softly as Anders worked. "As in, I could be myself, and Cullen is... from my future? Months or years later?"

Anders stretched his hands between the bars and held them out on either side of Evelea's head, not quite touching her. He closed his eyes briefly in concentration and summoned a simple healing spell which cast the area between his palms a soft blue. Then he flexed his fingers and pulled back, giving her a concerned look.

"There. How does that feel?"

"Precisely. You and the Commander Cullen you know may share the same reality but not the same time." she glanced at Anders "Does she looks possessed for you?"

The throbbing eased and Evelea sighed in relief. "Better. Still a little fuzzy, but thank you." She took a shaky breath and sat up straighter. Swallowed hard. "If that's true, about my present and his past, I might be. Or I could be... eventually?" She shook her head, rubbing at her marked hand.

"I'm sorry if that doesn't make sense, but, you can't let me out if you can't know for sure."

"Or, you know, different realities entirely. Like there's a version of the elf I love here, but he's not mine." Anders sighed. "It's very confusing."

He stood, looking back at Neria again. "She certainly doesn't seem to be, but I'd have to..." he wriggles his fingers pointedly in a mime of casting magic, and then gestures at Evelea, "to be sure." He looked down at Evelea with another frown. "Provided you consent, of course."

"I hope you understand, lady Trevelyan, this is for your own safety as it is for our own. I'll also place some detection wards to aid you, Anders. We can't never be too cautious."

"I was fighting a demon when I got here. It was inside me, my head. Envy. Incredibly powerful. It was trying to turn me inside out, learn how to be me." Eve's eyes were red and a bit wild when she looked up. "You have to be sure, whatever that takes."

"It will be all right, Evelea," Anders said in a soothing tone, and then his voice deepened, roughened. "We will not allow the demon to harm you anymore."

He looked to Neria and leaned in close to say quietly, "I will need to be in there, with her. You should lock us both in."

"Very well. Be careful"

Neria wiggled her fingers and the cell door opened with a sudden clack. She gave Anders room to enter the and locked the door again, muttering magic wards for contention of demonic energy, to strenghten the cell bars and a barrier to keep magic from leaking from the cell. Once everything was all set she turned her gaze to Anders, nodding for him to proceed.

Evelea shivered at the sensation of Neria's magic when her own was still so far away. She stood in the center of the room, watching Anders bleakly. It was clear enough that at some point she had failed, or would fail, or was failing to fight back Envy and that at least for her and everyone she... cared for, the world was lost. Had Envy even closed the Breach, or had everything simply come slowly apart?

She gave a slight nod, and waited for whatever the other two mages would do.

Anders left his staff where it lay on the ground outside the cell as he moved inside, and when the door clanged behind him again he gave an involuntary shudder.

Then he straightened, and at Evelea's nod, assumed a look of concentration. And suddenly it was easy to see the apostate of hearsay, rather than the healer. Because this man, with quiet deadliness on his face - this man was one who had taken the taint into himself and survived, braved the Deep Roads and survived, joined with a Spirit and survived, and escaped death even after he'd been single-handedly responsible for a massacre that may or may not have been responsible for throwing all of southern Thedas into war.

He spread his fingers, palms up, and lifted one hand to shoulder height while lowering the other, then threw a force spell at her.

Neria stood alert outside the cell, watching then carefully. She never really knew how much Anders had changed in Kirkwall, with Justice, until he casted his spell, his energy completely different from what it used to be.

She shivered, thinking that she should've watched over him more closely, to be there for him as he had been there for her. Neria planned on looking for him after finding the cure, but now it seemed a better ideia to search him before it, heart aching for a moment.

The strength of the spell shocked Evelea, even as prepared as she was for it to be strong. She felt a moment of scrabbling panic because she had no defense, nothing, and she was tossed backwards into a heap with every bit the force that Cullen's smite had cast her down.

But there was nothing else other than her. Just her own wheezing and helplessness.

And just as abruptly the assumed aura of menace was gone. Anders rushed to Evelea's side and knelt next to her.

"Shit, sweetheart, I'm sorry," he said. "Are you all right?" He lifted her head with long, gentle fingers to prod at the back of her skull for injuries, concerned she'd bashed it when she'd fallen. Finding nothing, he settled her head in his lap and closed his eyes, sending a shiver of healing magic down her whole body.

When he opened his eyes again, he said dryly, "Well, I'd say you're as demon-free as that damned pretty excuse for a templar from a few years back." He raised his head to call out to Neria, "She's fine. The demon would have stepped in to protect her body if it was inside her."

"Creators...!"

Neria let out a sigh and re-opened the cell, worried gaze towards Evelea. She handed back Anders' staff and knelt by their side.

"Can't wait to tell Cullen. Oh! You should give him the news, this will certainly be nice." she grinned

It took Evelea a few moments of resting in Anders' lap to draw a steady breath and blink her vision clear. She pushed herself into a sitting position carefully and shook her head a little. "You're sure?" She looked at Anders carefully, then to Neria. "Do you think it is there now, instead of me? That's what it wanted, was to take my place, to do the things that Cullen said I had done."

He'd never forgive her, even if he accepted she wasn't possessed.

Anders took his staff back with a nod and set it on the floor again next to him.

"We are sure," he told Evelea solemnly, the words Justice's even if they came in Anders' normal voice.

He glanced between Neria and Evelea thoughtfully. "Perhaps it would help if you explained exactly why Cullen assumed you were possessed? You were struggling with this Envy demon?"

Then his eyes turned blue, and he reached out with Justice's hands to grip Evelea by the shoulders and stare into her eyes.

"I can sense the hold he almost had on you, his want, his need to have, to become, to overwhelm and consume. He did not succeed, but...he left you not long ago." Justice's lips thinned even as his nostrils flared, and he growled, "Maker damn the selfish corruption of demons."

"Yes, yes, very evil, boo on them, they're terrible," Anders mumbled, flapping his hands at his spirit as he came back to himself.

"Wait a minute. So this Envy demon might be here? Here, where people barely trusts their own shadows? We should warn them."

Neria went pale in a second.

Evelea shuddered as Justice spoke through Anders' mouth and when he released her she swallowed. An abomination the likes of which she'd never heard of.

She swallowed, trying to work up the moisture in her mouth to speak. "I can only tell you what he said to me, which is that I, or the me that existed for him, in the future that he came from had terrorized the world. Broken Orlais, murdered Cassandra Pentaghast, tried to do the same to Cullen, decimated the remaining mages and enslaved the Templar order."

She drew a deep breath. "All of those things are familiar to me, because when I went to Therinfal to speak to the Lord Seeker, to see if the Templars would help us seal the breach, they were in the thrall of an extremely powerful Envy demon. He'd taken over the Lord Seeker, was using him as a puppet, and he tried to do the same to me."

She pressed her fingers to her mouth for a moment, trying to find the words to describe her experience. "It had me by the throat, or Seeker Lucius did, and then we were elsewhere. A place like a reflection of a reflection of the Fade? It murdered the images of my friends in front of me. It showed me a world in which I had become some kind of tyrant prophet, and it kept saying it needed to know me in order to be me. There was a spirit there, a boy, or shaped like a boy, named Cole, who said it was all in my mind and that he'd help, but I never escaped."

She felt her stomach turn, feeling suddenly ill as she said all the words together, in order. "I came here instead. I thought, at first, this was another trap of Envy's... but then I met Cullen and he-- he was tortured by something with my face, whether it was Envy, or I had run mad with power after everything, I don't know..."

She fell silent, eyes shut again, tears on her lashes.

Anders sank back to the ground at Evelea's shudder, and he let out a sigh. He tugged out the tie keeping his blond hair mostly out of his face and raked his fingers through it, then tied the whole mess back again, looking suddenly very, very tired.

As Evelea spoke, his spine straightened, and Anders practically radiated disapproval - an emotion likely not quite his own, judging by the way he seemed to try and swallow it. He pursed his lips and glanced at Neria.

"I hope that means more to you than it does to me, old friend. I still feel like I'm missing a lot of context with the fact that most of this takes place years from my current time. Even so..." he turned his honey-colored eyes back on Evelea thoughtfully. "With all the possible realities we have gathered here...I don't see why such a fate need be yours and your Cullen's. Perhaps it was merely a possible future, not necessarily your actual future?" He frowned. "These distortions of time and reality are beyond me."

After a moment, he reached in a pocket and pulled out a long piece of worn red fabric, not quite a handkerchief but probably efficient enough, which he handed to Evelea.

"You see, if things are how Justice said and the Envy demon left your body not long ago, if this demon is here, I can assure that your friends, with you at Therinfal and from your time, are safe from now. Surely, they'll be worried at your sudden disappearance, but that's all. When we're here, we're not in our realities."

She tried to smile, heart aching again; how long until Velanna and Nathaniel warned Alistair she was missing? What would he do? When would she come back?

"Cullen went through a lot, probably this Envy Demon's doing, but I'm certain he'll forgive you. No one is really safe from a demon and sometimes our will just crumbles, that's only part of the unique set of weaknesses that makes us the imperfect, marvelous beings we are." now she managed to smile, hand resting over Evelea's arm in a comforting gesture "Take your time to rest your mind and think about what is going on here. If you're felling better, we could eat something in the kitchen. And when you're ready to talk to Cullen, we'll stand by your side."

Evelea took the kerchief from Anders, frowned at it, the whiskered cloth, weathered edges. She folded it gently and pressed it back to him, shaking her head. She didn't know what it was, but it felt important, and that was... well, worth holding onto here. She dabbed her eyes with the torn end of Cullen's coat, where he'd ripped the bottom hem away to bind her hands.

"I can't put him through that." She shook her head at Neria. "Even if it isn't real, because it hasn't happened, he remembers it, and that's enough. I can't make him look at the face of the person who tortured him even if it wasn't me." She swallowed the tears that pressed up in her throat and then let out a soft breath. "I can't appear outside the cell he locked himself in to tell him he was wrong."

"Please tell him he isn't to blame?"

Anders blinked as she handed the red cloth back, and he took it reverently, like he hadn't quite realized what it was he'd given to her. He looked at the black of his coat, then back to the red fabric in hands, fingers gently brushing over the edges. He sighed. Then he wrapped the cloth around his left bicep several times and tied it off, ran his fingers over it to smooth it one final time.

Dropping his hands to fold them in his lap, he said quietly, after a pause, "I can talk to him. He - apparently - trusts me somewhat, to send me here, which comes as a surprise given our history, but there you are. You, however..." he turned his eyes back to Evelea. "You should rest. Healer's orders. They've been constantly Silencing you, and Maker knows I know how draining that is. Neria...do you think you could find her somewhere to sleep? And, as you said, perhaps warn the others that this demon may still be about."

Edited Date: 2015-08-08 07:49 am (UTC)

(OOC: I have to head to bed, but this was a great scene. Thanks guys. If you continue, assume that Eve wandered off to find some place to sleep, or Neria can show her to a bedroom. She's a little dull, obviously just wiped, but seems otherwise physically okay.)

"Come, lady Trevelyan. I happen the know a good place for you to rest." she stood up and offered her hand to Evelea, gentle.

And before leaving to help Evelea, she turned to Anders and finally gave him a warm hug, sigh escaping her mouth at the familiar presence. "And you, my dear, don't be a stranger again, yes?"

(ooc: Great scene indeed, wow! Lots of hand waving during it, oh my!)

Anders stood, grasping his staff. He smiled at Neria.

"I'll do my best, Commander."

(OOC: Quite! This was amazing. Thank you both! :D)

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