+ Let's go for a dreamwalk! + [OPEN PLOT CATCH-ALL]

[mviw]

Who: Everyone who wants to participate!
Where: The Mindscape (and elsewhere in reality, if specified)
When: September 6th through September 8th
Rating: PG-13 to R for potentially disturbing, violent, or dark subjects.
Summary: Thanks to an explosion on the third floor, every time a person falls asleep, they enter the Mindscape...

The Story:
Plot information is here!

Comments

[deathlessness]

[The door itself is incredibly soft to the touch, almost as though the petals themselves are resting beneath her fingers, but the points of each of them are sharper than they appear, edges slicing against her skin - depending how much pressure she applies, it's likely not more than a paper cut, but an offering still needs to be made to see what's beyond the door.

She can turn back, walk away and explore somewhere else. But while the door demands payment, it isn't locked either, so it does give slightly at the pressure, the invitation still there for her to take.

And if she does take it, she'll find herself in the snow in ancient Norway, because a wicked witch stealing a little girl is usually where all good fairy tales begin.]

[nascensibility]

[Evelyn nudges it open, in spite of the slick sharpness she feels digging into her fingertips. Just as quickly the pain abates and red wells to the surface. Looking at it feels even stranger – as though there is a draw to the blood itself, perhaps not born of this place, but of its contents – and Evelyn sucks her index clean as the painting swings wide, into the wall.]

Oh.

[Oh.

It is cold here, colder than some of the harshest winters she has seen in Wonderland, with primitive lean-tos and shelters, fires and swirling winds and a woman in black screaming obscenity down upon another. A curse and a promise and a child crying and being pulled away and a name-

Elijah.]

Oh, God.

[A girl torn from her mother. Evelyn steps closer.]

Freya.

[deathlessness]

[The older witch doesn't acknowledge Evelyn as she storms from the camp, but the little girl does, a small head turning at the sound of her name. She sees the other woman, and there's an awareness that indicates that while Dahlia and the other specters are simply a part of the memory, perhaps Freya, herself, is not.

Eventually they make their way back to a hovel, where Freya proceeds to wait. She refuses to eat what's given to her, childish logic telling her that she'll be able to eat when her father comes to rescue her. Her father was one of the fiercest warriors and she knew that when he learned she was gone, taken, he would come to her rescue and end Dahlia.

Her mother said she would tell him. And her mother wouldn't abandon her.

But her father never comes. She sits and she waits, watching all the hopes of escape slipping away until they were taken from her entirely as Dahlia bound their power permanently.]

[nascensibility]

[The girl sees her and Evelyn is afforded a glimpse at lucidity in this place, a world that does not belong to her, and even as her curiosity grows she knows that she should not be here without permission. Turning, Evelyn intends to leave through the door from whence she came and is horrified to see it is no longer there - another holdover from her time in Dan's mind, exploring Dan's memories.

She'll have to find another way out.

Evelyn follows the path of the woman in black and the child who looks so much like her siblings, offered flickers into young petulance and a refusal to acknowledge the reality of the situation. Of course she would not know, of course she could not understand, and Evelyn desperately tries to ignore the cruel lies of a woman keeping an innocent captive as she feels around an enclosure for an exit.

She bumps against a knotted length of wood and is next in a snowy forest. These memories are disoriented, flickering. Over a thousand years old and in that way, they are similar to some of her own. The woman is chanting and it is all of Evelyn's considerable self-restraint not to step in and drag the child from the circle even knowing it would do no good - knowing that her hand might go through them - then the trees still, the energy crackling in the air dissipates, and the little girl looks fearful.

Knowing how vulnerable she has felt in many periods of her own life, Evelyn is of no mind to wish this helplessness upon her worst enemy.]

cw: suicide, abortion, murder

[deathlessness]

[The little girl grows. Dahlia is brutal in the way she raises her, isolating her to keep her from wanting something other than Dahlia, teaching her and tempering her power as Freya comes into her own, with too much power to wield for a young witch, but no way to dispel it. Through it all Freya never loses her fire, using the memories of the family she was taken from to center her, her father, her brother, and while Dahlia tries to control her, more and more, Freya fights back, both to her benefit and her detriment.

Bursts of anger end in raging fires and flocks of dead birds and while Dahlia manages to talk her down, toeing the line between mother and captor, but Freya never forgets the latter. Dahlia tells her how much she needs her, but Freya always refuses to believe it. But that was of no matter - eventually Esther's other children would have more children, and there would be more power to add to her own, and there would be an unlimited source of power.

That is, until Esther turned her children into vampires, robbing them of their ability to have a family, at least to her knowledge, and Freya became the only option. Dahlia insisted that Freya would bear her a child, but Freya refused, vowed to herself that she would never give Dahlia what she wanted. Especially after her great curse came, and Freya found herself restricted to one year of life every hundred years - a burden that she certainly didn't want.

The problem with love, however, is that as much as you may try, it isn't something you can control.

She slept through four centuries before she met Matthias. He had gentle hands and kind eyes, and Freya loved him, more than she had ever loved anyone. He made her feel like a person, rather than a prize, and while she only had a year to love him, that year was enough to have Freya break her vow and conceive a child. Matthias, however, being a good man, agreed with her in saying that this child shouldn't live as she had lived. They had no way of breaking Freya's curse, they would lose her at the end of the year, but she hoped, if she was careful enough, Dahlia wouldn't be able to lay claim to her son, and force him into the life she was currently leading.

He could live a good life, with a good father, and he would be safe.

Dahlia wouldn't allow that. She only allowed Freya to love so long as it suited her own ends. When she caught wind of their plotting, she was sure to punish them both for ever thinking that they could outwit her - Matthias with his life, and Freya with watching him lose it.

It was in that moment that something inside her snaps. All the years of suffering at Dahlia's side, hoping that she would find another way to break free came into sharp relief and in her grief she couldn't see a way out of this life that she had found herself bound to. The only thing she knew for certain is that she would not allow her child to be raised this way. She would not allow them to be denied his father's love of the warmth of family.

So she ran back to the hovel, as much as she could in the state she was in, and somehow managed to get there ahead of Dahlia. She went straight to the woman's workbench, finding the vial she knew contained her strongest poison. Before anyone could stop her, the liquid poured down her throat like acid, burning through her body, and clouding her vision.

Perhaps, in this moment, she would finally be free. Perhaps, this was the answer all along.

It doesn't take long for Freya Mikaelson to die.

Unfortunately, it also doesn't take that long for her to wake up again, childless and alone again, just her and Dahlia.]

[nascensibility]

[It is more information than she ever desired to know about a group of people but the timeline is laid out so plainly, though the months flicker by with fragments of blurred people, rash arguments with an unwanted keeper, a family turning itself to monstrous creatures to prevent an accumulation of power.

At the cost of innocence, and humanity. To live as a parasite is not living at all, evidenced further by Dahlia's fetid, stolen existence utilising another as a host and employing fail-safes to prevent escape. It gives Evelyn an uncomfortable reminder of the visions she has had of her own distant past, a life that both does and does not belong to her. A person entrenched in the disappointing betrayal of her circumstances, watching helplessly as others are led astray and she remains.

Voiceless, after a fashion. It is not so dissimilar.

Hundreds of years of captivity and Evelyn knows that breaking a promise to oneself is heart-wrenching, but possible, unsurprised that Freya reaches out only to be burned and forced back into the box she tried to quit herself of this place. Having had her own child taken from her Evelyn feels the same agony keenly, desperation and anguish writ into every bone, and without thinking she feels her fingers close around an athamé from a nearby table as though it would help her rid this memory of the woman telling Freya she can never leave.]

[deathlessness]

Do you really think that would work?

[The voice comes from Dahlia, though not the one currently in the scene with Freya, but her demeanor and dress is different. Dressed in a way that normally falls in line with the normal twenty-first century style, she steps up behind Evelyn, hands clasped behind her back as she tips her head to the side.]

Do you think that you can truly save the princess from herself?

[nascensibility]

[Evelyn would be a liar if she stated that she wasn't incredibly startled by the appearance of someone - something - that recognises her presence as alien, foreign. Abnormal in the sense that it should not belong here. She wonders whether or not this is a defence mechanism manifesting itself as the primary perpetrator of Freya's pain, and turns quickly to face the offender.

She still grips the knife. It is a futile, small thing, but a part of her that is three-thousand years old and embittered gnashes its teeth at the thought of giving it up.]

Call it an impulse, rather than intent.

[deathlessness]

[There's a hum at that, more of an affirmation than anything else, but as she paces behind Evelyn the world fades again, and is replaced with the sounds of footsteps and a cold voice.]

Don't worry. As with every fairy tale, the Wicked Witch got her just desserts in the end.

[As the scene continues to play, the story naturally comes to an end, with the Mikaelson siblings standing triumphantly, together, and the two villains of their story turned to stone.]

But what they fail to tell you, in those precious little stories, is that the Wicked Witch never truly goes away.

[The apparition stalks forward to where the siblings stand, standing in front of Freya who looks past her as though she isn't even there.]

She always plants the seeds for a successor to come and take her place.

[nascensibility]

[That evil returns comes as no shock to Evelyn, who nine years ago was convinced that she had put Imhotep back in his grave for good. The stars had aligned, as it were, to bring him back from the prison that was the Duat, had awakened dreams in herself and in another, brought them together to tear them down again. To take her son.

She has no doubt that the stony visages before Freya's family are not the last word.]

Death is only the beginning,

[she says through grit teeth, fist tightening around the knife and then tightening around nothing, as it disappears from her grasp.]

[deathlessness]

Indeed it is.

[Dahlia turns to face her after a moment, her hands clasped behind her back. She tips her head to the side, regarding the other woman for a moment.]

As much as she tries to claim otherwise, Freya is my daughter, raised in my image. Try as she may to learn otherwise, you don't forget your instincts.