inquisisters || da:i

prologue - fade away

The first time Isolde Trevelyan entered the Fade it was part of a test - a dream sequence, controlled by those with more experience than her. Nothing real. Nothing more. All a dream.

The first time Isolde Trevelyan really entered the Fade she was certain that she was dead.

There was a rush of green heat and her feet were pulled out from under her. Flagstones fell out from beneath her and she was tumbling. There was a voice – or was she imagining it? – and a face, a familiar face... and a... a ball, metallic and lined with green patterns that Isolde did not recognise. It rolled across the floor, almost idly, to rest at her feet. That was before the floor fell through. It was hard to keep track of time what with everything turning upside down. She could remember leaning down out of instinct to catch it and then the whole world falling from under her.

During her Initiation at the Circle, her Harrowing, her first experience of the Fade, she recalled the being she had met in the Fade offering her her greatest wish. She had passed the test through sheer willpower alone, gritting her teeth and refusing the demon, even as it tempted her further. She would have thought the demon would have offered her riches or glory. It probably would have if those were things that she had actually wanted. What it had offered her was far more tempting.

Freedom. Real freedom.

Isolde had had the most fleeting taste of such freedom before she had been thrown into the Fade once again. She and others had fled the Circle at Ostwick, but, by fleeing, she had only brought herself further containment, further trouble, and back to the Fade again.

This time however was different. It felt different. The ground Isolde hit when she fell felt real enough and the air she breathed, uncomfortably warm, heavy with sulphur, hurt her throat. Choking and spluttering, she raised herself to her feet, squinting up at the only source of light available to her, somewhere high above, a sun set in a murky sky of green.

There was a rustling from somewhere behind her, a sound that only grew. She turned to look: spiders. So many spiders. Multiple legs and eyes came scuttling towards her out of the darkness.

Stumbling forward, Isolde ran. She may as well have been running through wet sand. She fell forward onto her hands, pain jolting up her arms at the collision and her skin breaking at contact with the ground. She knew then for sure that this was no dream, nor could she be dead and a spirit. She felt all too much and all at once.

The spiders at her back were relentless. Clutching her bleeding hands to her chest, Isolde ran up toowards the light; the spiders' shrill cries an ever constant push onwards.

At the peak of the height, Isolde fell a final time. She struggled then to lift herself, pain and exhaustion proving to be a greater counter to fear. The air was just too heavy and her chest burnt, as did her throat. If she was not dead already, she would die here in this strange place; so much like the Fade and yet... far too real to be the Fade.

A figure appeared before her out of the gloom, not so much a shadow against the light, but as a figure made up of the light itself. Its shape was feminine, its presence blinding. Isolde, resigned and on her knees, crawled the last few paces towards it, and raised her hand to it. The being responded in kind.

There was another surge of green then, and light. Isolde felt her entire body being dragged along then, pulled then as if through a narrow tube - squeezed and squeezed until there was no more of her left. Again there was air and again she was falling and again she hit the ground with a thud.

The ground here though was cooler as was the air. There was no green, but flashes of grey and red and then darkness.

Isolde was unconscious when the soldiers found her, unresponsive to their words or to their touch, beyond caring for what insignia that they wore on their chest.