Truly Existing

A/N: I've been playing around with stories with this same basis (un-published) for both the fandoms I write for, and I think I've narrowed down what I want to do enough to write this! It's a self-insert into DA:O events, but not with my real name (have to follow some of the site's rules).

I wake up screaming and crying – the crying has happened a few times before, but not the screaming. I'm deafening myself with just how ear-piercing those screams are, but that's not what has my attention, rather it is the pain. Pain unlike anything I've felt before, and I've dislocated my jaw a few times, is positively surging through by body enough to blind and numb me to my entire surroundings. I can't pinpoint the source of this burning, frazzling sensation, nor can I make sense of it all. I was just asleep in my bed, but now... now there's only this, this pain, and I cannot even think coherently through the blanketing, suffocating sensation. Why is becoming a prevalent thought though – why is this happening, why is it still happening? It is dark when I open my eyes, but there's a subtle shimmer to it. Something I can't quite explain, and something I'm unsure if it's really there. Am I hallucinating all of this? Am I stuck in a nightmare again? Have I slept walked and hurt myself by accident? The sleep walking and the chronic nightmares haven't happened since I was small, but what else am I supposed to think? The pain, it's still there – it's letting up, or I'm burning out, but it's still there.

I don't know how long that finite point of barely thinking, barely comprehending, yet surging with terrible sensation lasts for, but eventually there's nothing my body's focused on other than that darkness with the shimmer. What is it? Why is it there? The shimmer, it seems to be... adhering itself to my very flesh, making it shimmer in turn. It's red, the shimmer, redness in black... like webs. Tendrils of inky red snake up and bind to my skin, tattooing it in a barely discernible shine in this darkness. A glimmer here and there is all I see of this redness time and time again, but it's growing, spreading, covering all I can see of the parts of my body not covered by my pajama pants and t-shirt, and further beyond. I'm covered, I know I am, I can see that much and I wonder if this was my saving grace from that horrible, horrible pain. Did this redness take it away? Or perhaps it's what caused it in the first place, and I can longer feel it as it embeds into my body.

It stops – it stops being just in the line of my sight, and is now completely on me, and with that the darkness fades. The redness on my body brings about the light – sound, touch, smell, it all returns to me jarringly. Suddenly, so suddenly it's a shock to the system, I can see and have all my faculties returned to me in what seems an impossibly fast and consuming moment in time. I'm laying on something hard, cold, and sticky. The smell reminds me of the formaldehyde and slight decay from my old biology labs, and the rankness of stale, foetid water after a flood. My fingers and limbs are stretched straight in a position I'm unaccustomed to be in while I'm supposed to be resting, and my head is positively swimming. And what I see doesn't make any damned sense.

There's three people hovering over me, looking down on me with steely faces that are completely unrecognizable. I have not a fucking clue who these guys are. And they look strange – they have that unstable, off their rocker, look about them. A slight facial tic here and there, too glossy and large of eyes, skin stretched too thin over foreheads, and noses and chins too large for faces. One man is completely bald with his wide, thin lips pulled into a harsh line. Another man's face is covered in something – dark mud or paint drawn in something that looks vaguely like many elaborate Celtic symbols. The last man has a tangle of knots for a beard and hair, and eyes that I swear flash red for a fleeting moment. My mind stutters to a halt, and I haven't the faintest idea how to make sense out of everything I'm seeing – everything that my body is processing.

"It is done," the man with knots for hair breathes in a solemn, raspy, heavily accented voice. He lifts a... shit is that a hole in his hand? The blood, it looks like it's glowing, but that doesn't make any damned sense. There's so much of it though. How can he possibly be bleeding that much and is still standing? And then that hand is pressed against my forehead quicker than I can blink and the world becomes no more than a muted, boundless, painless black.

I wake up though, and wish that I hadn't. The pain is never quite like it was when I had first awoken from sleep, but it is draining and exhausting all the same. Each man, I haven't the faintest idea who they are, mutter the same thing, 'Protect us from Urthemiel,' before touching an impossibly glowing bloody hand to one of my extremities – and then the pain starts anew. It's not like the first time, when the knotty haired man touched me and oblivion overwhelmed me, but it's more like that time when the red shimmering webs adhered themselves to me. The webs are already there though, just faintly visible beneath my skin, and they ache and burn every time one of those men touch me with their disgusting hands. I don't know how long I've been like this, and I don't know how much more of this agony, this torture, I can handle. Why am I not home? Why am I here? What the hell happened to me?

Time... I'm loosing time, all sense of it, and all logical thought. I don't know how many times they mutter those four words to me in their accented, strained voices, but I remember – I remember what, or rather who Urthemiel is, and it doesn't, isn't, possible. Urthemiel is from a fucking video game. Have I gone insane? Insanity seems the most reasonable explanation for everything I've experienced so far, and everything I don't have an explanation for.

Convinced that I am that I'm insane, and can't do a single thing about it but idly allow myself to be subject to what surely has to be a psychotic episode, I can't even remotely comprehend the sight and sound of those three men dying in a blaze of flaming medieval-like weapons and arrows. I hear words that aren't those four, words like 'blood mages', 'damnation', and 'prisoner'. My brain sputters at the new information, and my eyes waver from the sight of so much blood and gore. Body parts that I've only seen replicas or pictures of are suddenly splayed before me from those three men's cavities... and their blood, but it no longer glows red.

That impossible, impossible sight is blocked when a stranger's face replaces it – a clean-shaven, olive-tanned man with dark ruddy, sweat stained hair poking out from beneath a leather cap, the strap beneath his chin, and ruby red blood finely splattered across his brow above his honeyed hazel eyes. I'm fixated on the details of his face, as if I've never seen someone with concern in their eyes or kindness in their features before. He's not those men. He's different. Why?

"You're safe," I watch his lips say. "We're Grey Wardens, and we can help you."

Another A/N: These chapters will be fairly short, so as not to put too much pressure on myself for chapter length. I'm writing this for fun, and not too seriously. ;) But quality still matters to me, so if you notice any glaring mistakes please let me know! :) If you were reading my OMH:R DAII story, I'm sorry but I have severe writer's block on it. :/ This here story though, that I'll be referring to as TE, is mostly written! I'm about 4/5 of the way done with it, and already have a sequel planned. I'll be updating TE twice a week, on random days that my schedule allows for me to edit what I have written. lol. Thanks for reading! And feel free to drop a review or a PM! :D Anyone who reads this is totally awesome!