Event | Landfall | Dreaming

[ironwood]

Characters: Any and every!
Date: August 10th - 31, 2013
Location: The realm of Dreaming as accessed via Sinbrilee
Situation: Dreaming is but one of the three realms and here characters are subject to their fanciful thoughts.
Warnings/Rating: Please place content warnings in subject headers!

Sinbrilee | Dreaming | Death

Life. Dreaming. Death. Three realms overlaid upon one another and yet each distinctly their own. They dwell in Life and do so live upon the back of the great turtle as those of Sinbrilee did upon the shell of his sister. However, there stand numerous arches of marble throughout the ruined city that are inlaid with runes beyond understanding. Those that live and breathe which step through those whose runes glow with faint, iridescent light tread instead into the realm of Dreaming.

Here, there exists no single defining characteristic beyond the visitor's imagination. The landscape sculpts to their individual thoughts, the events to their dreams. From a drab gray nothing to the most brilliant of displays, the senses perceive all that they wish to perceive for all that nothing here truly exists. This far from Tu Vishan, the ability to shape their surroundings is all they have, for Sinbrilee's Dreaming does not have the energy to sustain powers, only the bodies of those that dwell here.

Should two parties near, then the Mesh begins. Dreams, you see, not only can be shared, but they strive to be. These visions sculpted into reality reach out for one another and blend. They begin an exchange akin to a linking of the minds, within which one visitor can learn the other's deepest thoughts. Their limitation is but compatibility, for two minds that cannot flow upon the same current cannot hold the Mesh.

Happiness or loss, the landscape and events play out memories and fancies with a most convincing air. The mood rises and falls with the tide of the visitor's mind, detached as they are from the soothing influence of a great turtle's mind. Nothing here, however, is real; 'constructs' simply fade if taken through the archways and even the greatest scientific minds or tools will reveal nothing of its source. This is an ancient magic of an ancient realm, long practised in concealing itself from any prying.

Note: Due to the fluid and highly individual nature of Dreaming, no official subheaders will be provided in the comments of this post. Feel free to post and thread however you like, so long as the rules of Dreaming are adhered to.

Comments

Lord Henry | cw: emotional fuckedupness, refs to death, asst'd carnal sins, and ff it's Henry.

[epigrammatical]

[Premade plans in place with Aisha and Dorian, but others can hijack him too.]

Option A:
London, sometime in the 1880s. Lord Henry is strolling through Mayfair. It's a beautiful spring day; the parks are full of daffodils. Familiar faces pass him on the street; is that Oscar, pausing to look in the window of a stationer's?

Option B:
Winter in Algiers; it is temperate, but warmer still at this time of year than the damp little island that Henry calls home. He's left the white-plaster house he shared with Dorian and has ventured out into the market. There are many beautiful things to see here—and beautiful people, dark-eyed boys lingering outside curtained buildings that promise coffee, hookahs, and other pleasures. Henry wears a cream-coloured suit and a straw hat to shade his eyes from the sun.

Option C:
It's like the dream he had with Asti, though he only half-remembers that one. He's sitting in his sister's box at the Royal Opera, and the orchestra begins to play the opening notes of the overture to Tannhäuser. Or—have they already played? Is the interval beginning? In the way of dreams, time collapses and twists; it is as if he has experienced the entire first act in moments.

[depicted]

It is Oscar, Oscar with a beautiful boy who looks only a few years younger than him. Dorian is completely charmed by Oscar, as he always is. The playfulness and warmth of their conversation is obvious even at a distance. In truth, Dorian has let his dream of Oscar have him. It has been so long, and there are few people in the world that Dorian has loved or missed more than Oscar Wilde.

They move to step inside, and then Dorian sees Harry. Something makes him realize: Harry is not just a dream. He smiles at Oscar, tells him to go ahead, and laughs at some quip before Oscar slips inside. Dorian is left outside with a handful of flowers he dreamt of buying from Convent Garden. And with Lord Henry Wotton.

"Hello, Harry." Dorian may be dressed for the Victorian era, but there is no mistaking the age in that voice. "Pleasant dreaming?"

[epigrammatical]

There is a terrible moment when Henry is truly not sure if he is dreaming or in London, and if the Dorian before him is the one he has grown to know in Keeliai or a dream of him, or, more horribly, if he is trapped somehow in that vision Eshai granted him. Something of this turmoil is reflected in the dream, as a cloud passes over the sun and a sharp wind stirs.

"Dorian." Somehow his composure remains. Perhaps it's just habit at this point. He smiles. "Prospero himself could scarce have conjured a better."

[depicted]

Dorian is the calm in the dream. He is old, impassive, unaffected. The wind doesn't touch a hair on his head. "Careful," Dorian notes. "You'll start stirring up a tempest." Behind Henry's back, a few streets begin to shift like they were caught by lapse-time photography. 1900, 1910, 1920 . . . "I'd prefer you not be caught in nightmares."

[epigrammatical]

Henry actually laughs at that. "Would you now? How delightfully generous of you." The wind remains steady: bits of paper and other debris are kicked up into tiny whirlwinds in corners, women's skirts billow, and Henry has to reach up and steady the hat on his head. "But I have been caught in so many nightmares of late, Dorian."

[depicted]

Dorian merely shakes his head. "You could have spared yourself a few of them." He doesn't try to shift Henry's dream, but he remains just outside of its influence, a small space of London entirely controlled by Dorian Gray. "You didn't need to know."

[epigrammatical]

"You speak with such wonderful assurance of what I need," Henry says. The wind dies down, but the sun remains hidden, and the air seems cooler. "Perhaps you are right, however; perhaps you were right all along. What, after all, have I gained from knowing of my future exile and death? A sort of resignation, perhaps? But my dear boy, I have freed you from a certain sort of burden, have I not?"

[depicted]

"It's possible you have." 1950, 1960, 1970 . . . They are speaking at such an unnecessary distance. Dorian closes it with footstep, not thought, to give comfort to Henry. Then he presses a cool palm against Henry's cheek. "But I am far more accustomed to carrying such weights than you, old friend. I only regret that I didn't do a better job keeping it from you."

[epigrammatical]

A motor-car of the fifties passes a hansom, followed by a Lambretta, but Henry doesn't notice. He closes his eyes at the contact of Dorian's hand, and it might seem to Dorian that very briefly, a younger Henry stands before him, with the first ridiculous moustache of youth rather than the pointed beard he came to cultivate later. Then the moment passes and Henry is a man in his forties again, still vigorous, but beginning to fray about the edges.

He opens his eyes. "You do not regret abandoning me to infamy and gossip?"

[depicted]

Dorian laughs softly, his hand trailing away. "When you put it like that, I'd be a villain to say I don't."

[epigrammatical]

"And are you?"

He knows the answer, though. He has known since Dorian's vampire friend arrived in Keeliai.

[depicted]

"I'm no more a villain than I am a hero, Harry." Dorian's hands slide back into his pockets. It hides the blood that begins to stain them. "It was too cruel, yes. But it has never kept me awake at night."

[epigrammatical]

"Does anything keep you awake?" Henry wonders, gaze flicking briefly to Dorian's hands as he hides them away. "Only the greatest horrors, at this point in your life, I must imagine."

[depicted]

"There have been a few such nights," Dorian agrees. He keeps his thoughts in London and forbids them their horrors. He focuses on Lord Henry. "How will your dreams treat you, now that you know the future?"

[epigrammatical]

"I think I shall dream of that which has not happened yet," Henry replies with an odd-sounding sort of laugh. "What a peculiar paradox it is, worthy perhaps of these post-modern writers of yours. I had thought myself a master of paradoxes, but this is one that may yet overmaster me."

[depicted]

"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit," Dorian quotes. "It's been a comfort to me to have you, in a way. For decades now, there has been no one around who knew me when I was still innocent . . ." Softly, he laughs and shakes his head. "I supposed I must have had the opposite effect on you. Most poisonous of me."

Dorian turns on his heel. He walks a few steps away, and the winter of 1912 starts to seep into London. Snow covers streets on Dorian's half of this world. Oscar is no longer in the shop, Dorian knows. Oscar is no longer living. His breath becomes a crystal fog, and the coldness of winter isolates him. "I came back for your funeral, you know. If I'd had warning, I would have come to see you at your death bed."

[epigrammatical]

"A comfort?" That is a surprise to him. "You are perhaps the only person to have said such a thing to me. In truth, Dorian, though it has not always been easy to look on you, I have been glad that you are here. The strangeness of this other-world is more bearable."

His hand goes to adjust a woollen scarf that was not there a moment ago. He doesn't know it, but there is more grey in his beard now. "There will be no warning," he says, without much bitterness. "Not even for me."

[depicted]

Dorian isn't happy, and yet he smiles. "'Hard to look at' isn't one I get often."

His toe marks a half-circle in the snow. He watches the cemetery build up in front of him. "I know. You'd have liked the service. It was high profile, everyone attended. And literature has remembered you—though I don't know how much you'd care for some of the interpretations."

[epigrammatical]

"'A comfort' is not a sobriquet with which I am particularly familiar." He stares at the cemetery, feeling cold. "I suppose it would be ungrateful to speculate that the attendance was prompted by the desire to confirm the finality of it all." He chuckles, mirthlessly. "I expect I am a veritable Mephistopheles in the popular imagination, a century on. There are worse fates—and besides, the Devil has the finest music at his disposal, does he not?"

[depicted]

"Ah, well," Dorian says, "That's what I meant. Far too many of the actors who have portrayed you lack your wonderful voice. I can forgive every misinterpretation of character but an aesthetic one."

It's a light aside, tossed into the air like the crystals of water he exhales. Dorian's feet crunch over the snow. "For at least one person, that was not the motive for attendance."

[epigrammatical]

Henry can't help laughing, a bright sharp sound in the cold air. "As well you should not, my dear Dorian; poor aesthetics are worse than poor philosophy, for even good philosophy is rarely understood, whereas the aesthetic is always most readily apprehended." He shakes his head. "A pity. Elocutionary training must suffer dreadfully, in the future."

He is silent for a moment, considering what Dorian said about the funeral. (He can't think of it as his funeral. Not yet.) "I cannot imagine Gwendolen is pleased to see you."

[depicted]

Dorian clears his throat. "Gwendolen didn't see me. Some members of your family have rather long memories, so I—stayed to the sidelines."

It's another reminder of just how many bridges Dorian has burned.

[epigrammatical]

"I would have advised you to do so, had I been in a position for it," Henry says, dryly, "my brother having a near-encyclopedic memory for slights, and for faces."

He sighs softly, stares off into the distance. Beyond the cemetery and the snow, seen as if through the wrong end of a telescope, there seems to be a vision of Oxford, of two young men in a punt on a warm summer afternoon. He murmurs, half to himself, a fragment of Keats:

"Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

And then, a small grimace. "My mind must be strange indeed now, if it wanders to the Romantics."

option b; cw for war horrors, mentions/implications of slavery/abuse, torture, etc.

[emasculates]

When people think of Afghanistan, they think of her deserts and scorching heat. The heat that crawls into your bones and your brain and your soul like rot, like maggots. But it is the cold in the mountains of the Kush that stays with her, and although this place has echoes of the land she knows, it is not the same.

The smells are different. The sounds. She walks barefoot in the marketplace. Younger. She is sixteen and the war is over, she drinks vodka stolen from Russian boys to spite the Sharia law. Absently, she steals something from a vendor. They do not notice her - it is the province of dreams. She is sixteen and slender, barely a girl, with short hair that falls against her cheekbones, newly grown from where she hacked it off after the last time a man tried to use it to hold her. She has learned to be more vicious, now, and is not concerned with the length of her hair. Let it grow.

This city is clean and proper and rich, and there are boys on the corners that remind her of Fahd, remind her of the slaves her father keeps and sells for people to glut their darker desires. She does not care for the province of warlords or the Mujahideen commanders. She killed, and it was to the rhythm and tune of a battlefield waltz.

She sees the boy again, the one who looks like Fahd (but he only reminded her of him a moment ago--) and she chases him. She will catch him and make him sorry to have ran, she does not care that his uncle is a Commander, she only cares that he slit throats beside her and that they stood in solemn silence as Russian blood matted the sand beneath their feet.

She turns a corner in the alleyway. The boy is gone, and the alley shifts. The marketplace again. There is a foreigner there, a man. Easy prey. It is always the soft white ones that make the most noise. She studies him intently from a distance, without seeming to. British, perhaps? And oh, does she remember the history of the Britons in Afghanistan. She will follow him for a time, discern what she can. Perhaps she can rob him. Perhaps she can kill him. Though killing would be... inadvisable, no doubt. Rich men on vacation have rich and powerful friends.

She bares her teeth in a snarl and dismisses the thought. She will follow him, regardless. The rest can come later.

[epigrammatical]

All unaware of the girl shadowing him, Lord Henry pauses at a stall where an array of beautifully worked silver jewellery is on display. He finds himself drawn to a charm in the shape of a turtle, adorned with agates and tourmalines, a thing to wear on a watch chain, perhaps.

He makes an offer. The jeweller responds. The rituals of bargaining are familiar to him, and he slips into the exchange with ease. There's a nagging awareness of the unreality of the situation, but he's happy not to think on it. He's happy not to think on anything that troubles him.