daylight will swallow me whole [open to multiple]

[lonelyghost]

There is something he's forgotten, isn't there. Isn't there? Darkness where there used to be light, nothing where there was something, but now who's to say what it was. The sky is scarred but healed and quiet, and everyone is glad they are safe and you helped and you should be happy, but there is that itch of forgetting, like before, when you forgot yourself.

Can't keep the thread of that now, slipping through your fingers like fine sands, like a dream. The Inquisitor is here. Your friend.

"There've been some reports of Fade rifts in the Hissing Wastes," he says. "Would you like to go with us?"

"I've never been to the Hissing Wastes," says Cole. "Do they actually hiss?"

"I don't know about that," says the Inquisitor with a little smile. Cole likes his smile. It's friendly, and isn't forced. "Harding called it the worst place in the world, but I don't know if I agree with her on that. It's all quiet desert. I thought it was rather nice, myself. You might like it."

He asks when he doesn't have to. He is the Inquisitor, he can make anyone go with him at a word, but he always asks. He is a good friend. Cole hopes he never forgets.

The Hissing Wastes do hiss a little, wind whistling woefully over the sand. Cole does like it there, dark and cool and mostly quiet, traveling with Varric and The Iron Bull, neither of whom call him 'it' or 'thing', or seem to mind what he is. When they come upon the Fade rift The Iron Bull laughs and Varric says something funny, in the wrong order, and Cole's mind is mired elsewhere because this one does not feel right. The others don't notice, can't feel it, but this rift is two rifts, one inside the other, something else beyond, reaching and grasping.

He shouldn't, knows he shouldn't. Nobody should. But Cole reaches back.

It's what he does; he helps people. The others can't sense it, don't see that this rift wants more than to let demons out. It wants to pull them in. He can't let that happen to his friends. He won't. There is no time to warn them and no time to stop it so Cole pushes forward and offers himself, gives up himself gladly, to save them all.

"Cole!" the Inquisitor cries out, startled, confused, why is he going, why is he doing this, but Cole can't answer him now, can't turn back; if he were more like a spirit he could fight it, but he's not, and so he can't. He lets it swallow him up, and he is afraid: he doesn't want to go to the Fade, he doesn't want to be alone.

It is over very quickly. But it is not the Fade where he finds himself. This place is real. Whole. But it is not the world he knows. It is something different.

He is sitting in grass, real grass but different grass, feels different, remembers hundreds of different years, and millions of lives, nothing Cole's ever felt before. This is somewhere new. Not Thedas and not the Fade.

He does not move, sitting in the middle of the grass, surrounded by people who ignore him, even though he is wearing his hat and he just appeared, no one sees him, nobody sees. He's like he was.

Afraid and alone, adrift, absent. Cole curls inward and tells himself to wake up. It will not work. It never works. This is no dream.

Wake up, please.



[OOC: Please note Cole's permissions page and the abilities section of his app. It is possible that your character can meet him and then forget the encounter afterward, if you like. This means there could be multiple encounters. Feel free to tag in setting your character up as minding their own business, and Cole can approach them, as he is not easily noticed (not by the average person, anyway). Hit me up if you wanna run something by me.]

I never want to see a day that's over forty degrees [closed]

[spiritofwinter]

It's been a few days since Jack was suddenly transported from Queenstown to Manhattan without an explanation. He knows people who can do that kind of stuff, but he didn't see any magic portals when it happened. More worryingly, the season is all wrong, autumn when the northern hemisphere should be in the throes of late spring.

Most worryingly, he can't leave. As in the wind won't work with him when he tries to fly away from the island of Manhattan, buffeting him back in instead of carrying him where he wants to go. As in not knowing how he can get back to anyone who might have answers for him -- the Man in the Moon isn't any more talkative than he's ever been, and Jack doesn't have any way of contacting the guardians when he can't fly to the North Pole...and when Sandy doesn't show up at bedtime. That's the part that came as the worst blow: he'd sat up through the entire first night waiting to see the dream sand, sure he could go to his friend and find out what was happening and why he's suddenly here instead of back in New Zealand, and whether he really did lose a year when it happened (the newspapers say it's 2013, and while he's pretty sure it was 2012 the last time he checked, once a couple centuries go by the years all blur together).

He's lonely here without anyone who can see him, and he's a little scared all the time from not knowing what brought him here or what's keeping him in and the other guardians out. Lonely isn't new, but it still hurts after things had been so good for a little while. Now that it's been a few days without any hint of what he should be doing to fix whatever happened, he's coping with it the same way he always has, if with less joyful abandon than before. It's cold enough for a little snow, which means it's cold enough to send people slipping on the ice -- and cold enough for a game of Snowballs From Nowhere. If there's one good thing about being unseen, it's the look on people's faces when he beans someone with a snowball and they can't figure out where it came from. He's been at it a while, and it's actually working to take his mind off of things, for now, to judge by his laughter when he lands a snowball right on the back of a random woman's neck.

[OOC: While this post is for introducing Jack to Greta, please feel free to assume he's lobbed snowballs at any characters who can't see him yet.]

[cw references to character death in comments]