#no. no it is not cathartic to disappear into the suffering without anything else rn.

[oopsallmabari]

HMMMMM i need some opinions. i am....still...trucking my way through HLTA for the longfic. for context: i am trying to make the fade/nightmare experience still clearly Of The Fade, but also shaped a bit more directly by the characters, their pasts, etc. i have also diverged a bit by making the group split up. arya is experiencing the Horrors of the fearlings and the environments alone until justinia/the spirit of faith finds her and helps guide her to the rest of her crew+out of the nightmare. i know that a major part of this quest is the inquisitor remembering that the divine also got sucked into the breach and was the reason inq escaped (rather than andraste)

i personally like the idea that it's less that this is the Divine Herself but that it's a spirit of faith shaped heavily by the divine's death (+by extension her consciousness) and the inquisitor's conception of the situation (by virtue of the nightmare eating inq's memories). which, for me, i think there's maybe some more room to mess around with perceptions here, although it would make it less ambiguous if it's the divine herself or a spirit.

which brings me to my Pondering. i Do plan to have arya's perception of the DivineSpirit rescuing her from reliving her worst terrors from the Circle manifest as a nod to briony, arya's dead circle bestie/gf. but this brought me to going. what if. i just went ahead and made the DivineSpirit present as an amalgam of briony and justinia. i'm torn!