Chapter Text
It starts as it always does.
An earthling, so far from home, waking up in a place they thought to be mere myth, mere story, mere fantasy. But this time it is not fiction of fiction, to be perused, read, and then placed away when other matters called, or when the story became too violent or frightening. It wasn’t a tab in her internet browser, or a chapter in a paper novel that she could simply close.
It is waking up to rough, calloused hands hauling her to her feet. She is shackled, cold and aching in places she forgot she could ache. They pull her into the center of a dimly lit stone room and shove her down onto her knees. The sound it makes is a dull thud as bone and fabric smack into rock.
The girl loves stories like these.
Loves reading the romances and the tragedies and smooth political power plays. To read and to picture the metaphorical wheels in a character’s head turning as they thought, as plans are laid and the day eventually won in such a way that can only be achieved in such glorious detail within those fictions, those fantasies. It isn’t that glorious now. It’s reality, no matter how she does not wish it to be, rough, grimy, and smelling festering mildew and rot. It’s surreal.
The brutal smack of her body as it collides with stone cellar floors, the echoing screech of live steel drawn from dirtied sheaths. The flash of light from sword points that heavily imply harm to her should she move. Through it all, not a word is spoken.
She can feel the beginnings of tears as they cluster in her eyes, the wetness of them as they slip unburdened upon her face. She doesn’t whimper, nor plead, nor beg. She sniffles and tries to keep calm and decides upon denial. She denies all of it.
Denies-
Denies-
Denies-
-Believing that she is really here. It’s just a dream, a dank and dismal sort of dream conjured by a sleeping and lonely mind.
The crackle and flare of electric pain yells back at her that this is very real. It arches and branches about her green as the leaves in summer, and blue as the sea at first light of dawn. She is stubborn, she denies it anyway. She bends over and gasps as the nerves from her palm to her elbow light up in a sort of fiery agony that makes her so very aware of what exactly she has stumbled into.
She, regrettably, was awake.
No, no. It’s a dream. It’s not real and it is just a dream.
She was awake and in a decrepit dungeon, shackled and forcibly awaiting the presence of a woman she adores. A woman she now has a rising fear towards, because the girl knew that there was hole in the sky, and it would fall upon her to fix it.
Just a fanciful dream, it has no real consequences.
If she ever gets back home, she is going to make sure she never reads another Thedas style isekai ever, ever again.
This is all a strange dream, and it’s not real.
Damn the consequences, damn this dream.
---*---
Things play out much like the prologue.
Angry, righteous, and frightening Cassandra looming over her, grasping at her so tightly. Grief that radiates from the fearsome warrior in waves. She’s playing bad cop, her fury a swell in the sea that threatens to drown the girl on the stone floor.
“Tell me why we shouldn’t kill you now. The Conclave is destroyed.” The Seeker steps into striking clarity, her face both far too real and far too imperfect. “Everyone who attended is dead, except for you.”
This is a dream.
“You think that I did it, that I’m the one who is responsible.” The girl can’t hide the disbelief in her voice, even as she speaks pre-written lines. Following a path already laid bare is far easier than forging anew. At least for now.
“Explain this!” Cassandra lunges, a blur of gleaming armor and glittering eyes. She grasps the hand that has the Anchor.
It’s just a dream. This isn’t real.
“I can’t!”
“What do you mean that you can’t?” The Seeker tightens her grip, and the girl let’s out a soft cry of pain. It feels like her wrist might crack under pressure.
But it isn’t real, it’s just a dream.
And she is safe, physically, in her dreams.
“We need her Cassandra.” Leliana steps from the shadows like liquid smoke taking form. She pulls them apart, gentle but firm. Her voice is soft, cool, and distant. Leliana who isn’t good cop per say but stern and critical. She is furious and exhausted, deep dark circles beneath her blue eyes and a gauntness to her cheeks that makes her seem like a vengeful spirit. The girl thinks that if this is meant to match the game, the story that she knows, then the Breach has been open for three days. Anyone who survives such an ordeal would be rightfully exhausted.
“Do you remember what happened?” Leliana crouches to be at the girl’s eye level. “How this began?”
It’s not as easy a question to answer as she once thought because the girl knows the broad strokes, but it’s been a while since she played Inquisition. Six years to be exact, the most recent knowledge of anything Thedas relevant was entangled in the revelations of Vielguard and the true implications of everything that had happened there. So that means she has to decide, to lie and hope the tale she spins is believable or speak the truth as she remembers it.
She has never been a convincing liar.
“It’s in pieces. I don’t remember how I ended up at the Conclave,” her voice waivers as she starts. “I remember someone calling for help, they sounded in pain. I remember opening a door, and reaching to pick up something as it rolled to my feet. Whatever I picked up burned me. A woman shouted for me to run.”
“A woman?”
“Yes. Older, in robes that were red and white, kind eyes in a weathered face.”
Leliana’s eyes narrowed. The girl barreled on, “There was a blast that knocked be back. I fell weightless in a sky colored green. It might’ve been the fade. Another woman who glowed saved me, and shoved me out of a hole.”
“Did she say anything? Who was harming the old woman?”
The girl shakes her head in a negative answer, “That’s all I can remember. It feels like something has ripped holes into my memories. I’m missing time.”
Leliana nods. The girl knows she has changed the story, but it’s just a dream so it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter-
It doesn’t matter-
It doesn’t matter-
“Go to the forward camp Leliana. I will take the prisoner to the rift.”
And that was that. The girl has survived her encounter with the Nightingale and the Seeker. She shambles along after Cassandra, distantly watching everything around her as if through a hazy soap bubble. She lives out the cutscenes she knows so well. She lets the speaker ask her questions she knows a wheel’s worth of answers for. The girl picks the softer of her options, acting through a predetermined path. Albeit weepier and weaker than any inquisitor would sound.
The girl can’t remember when she started to cry. Her eyes are blurring beneath tears, seeing the differences sprawl before her as she walks.
Angry townspeople as far as the eye can see. She is spit upon as she passes, shoulder checked and sneered at. Her throat is tight with fear, and she shoves a yelled slur of ‘knife-ear’ into a box deep in her mind to worry about later while resisting the urge to tug upon her earlobes, so very afraid of what she might find.
They cross a small bridge, into mucky piles of snow as smoking debris. Cassandra turns around and pulls out a short dagger. The seeker with a practiced ease cuts through the ropes holding the girls wrists in place. They speak of what is to come and she promises to seal the breach, if she is able.
“There will be a trial-“
“And you can promise no more. I know.”
“I wish-“
The girl interrupts the Seeker again, “Back home we believe in innocence until proven guilty, but that does not mean we let the accused wander about freely. I do not like these circumstances, but I know I am not above a fair trial, nor above the law.”
It is spoken with shaking words, and there are fat tears rolling down her cheeks. “Thank you though, for your candor Seeker Pentaghast.”
Cassandra nods stiffly, uncomfortable at the emotions or the words spoken, the girl isn’t sure. The seeker turns to set a quick walking pace, leaving the accused to struggle along behind between bouts of pain. All that surrounds her is electric green nerve pain, and the slosh of her shoes in the snow and muck.
It's only a dream.
It isn’t real.
It’s not real, because this is just a dream.
The story stays the same. Following the Seeker about the mountain crags, huffing and puffing along like a little steam train in the frigid air. They stumbled through the explosion of the bridge, which the girl had honestly forgotten until she was slamming down harshly onto her side upon a frozen ravine bed.
This dream, which isn’t real, is very painful.
Maybe she fell out of bed just now. Maybe she will wake in the morning a tangled heap of bedsheets and throw blankets and her limbs akimbo. The terrifying visages of demons and shades trying to maul her as she skitters about the ice like frightened prey are certainly things she would qualify as bits of nightmares.
There are no weapons amongst the broken remnants of the crates from the bridge. Just splintered wood and shattered rock.
Because she is dreaming, and this isn’t real, and she has no need for them.
It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t real-
Oh, but what if it is.
And I must be the fool who found her way here.