The adventure begins

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

Irisa is used to glitches in her life, for she is a glitch herself – a fantasy made flesh and blood, dreamed into existence by a woman tasting madness. She lived in a sort of suspended animation for years, in the dream-world created by her mother. It was a fantastical world, of castles and jewels, where it was always daytime, always sunny. Irisa flew on the backs of birds as large as whales, she drank nectar sweet as honey. And this was real, to her, until one day it was not.
Until things glitched.
Unitl there was another, her twin (her abandoned sister, who did not know the same world, who knew a grim world of shadows and monsters). Only then were the scales knocked from her eyes, and thus came Irisa into this world, a dream walking into reality.
All this to say, at first Irisa was not overly bothered when the horses all around her stilled. It takes her a few minutes to become aware of the silence.
(Silence has a weight, you know. When you are the only one moving, silence can be like weights strapped to your ankles. Shackles.)

“Hello?” she calls out, but there’s no answer, and her words are swallowed by the silence.
“Mother?” she calls out, because this feels like a dream, and her mother is an architect of dreams. But there is still no response. There is still only silence, growing heavier and heavier. She swallows, saliva thick in her throat.
She comes to a river, and the water is unmoving. She can see the disturbance on its surface, but it’s frozen.
Unease builds in her, swells, just as the silence had. She has lived enough in dreams, and she wants nothing more of this strange and stupid world being foisted upon her.

And then things speed up, and the air grows colder, the grass dying beneath her feet. Irisa cries out in fear, begins to run, as if time were a thing that could be outrun.
She comes to a cave, a jut of rocks surrounded by a world where it’s still autumn. At the mouth of the cave things glow and float, like strange teeth, as if it’s not a cave at all but instead some primordial beast that has swallowed time itself.
And from the cave’s mouth comes screams, indiscernible cries. Irisa flinches, but the sound fills her with a queer sort of hope –s he is not alone in this bastardized world.
The cave yaws open and she is divided. She wants to run, flee from that horrible mouth. The cry comes again.

She walks forward, god help her. She was always the curious sort. The air is cooler here, damper, and the screams are longer, louder. The path leading into the cave forks off, three ways – left, center, right. Screams come from all three paths, it seems, and the screams cut into her like knives.
(There was no screaming in the dream-world, but there was plenty of it when they were wrenched out, her mother’s voice made cracked and hoarse, begging her to come back.)
They saw time flows in all directions, but Irisa only moves forward, down the center path. She does not look back, and walks headlong into the belly of the beast.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm

(irisa chooses the center path, and opts for a trait, should it comes to that <3)