Illarion Albireo (
unsheathedfromreality) wrote in
deercountry2022-05-16 04:23 pm
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Real & Half-Real: Chapter 2 - Nephele-That-Isn't
Who: A brave party of rescuers and their intrepid support staff
What: Pocket dimension shenanigans to save a missing Sleeper
When: Two insane days in May
Where: Nephele-that-isn’t, which isn’t Deer Country either
All at once–one day, in early May–the portal’s finished, and the planning is as near to done as it will ever be. All at once, it’s time to venture into Nephele-that-isn’t, and retrieve not one but two Sleepers who’ve gone astray.
The team assembles in the clearing by Argonaut’s abandoned shrine, in a darkness lit by glowing CRTs and the green, green moon. The portal itself, and the world beyond it, casts a light all its own–and one by one they step over that rune-etched silver threshold, and one by one vanish into another story than Trench’s own.
What does it feel like, to journey to a dead reality?
Like being sieved through strands of glass and fire. Like being picked apart thread by narrative thread as the Words themselves that write the universe flash before stunned eyes in the seconds before they’re erased and something worse substituted. Moments of fleeting alignment between passager and host-creator come in stopped heartbeats and empty lungs, in the memory you’ve been dead for years and the cold slide of steel between ribs.
Then that second-that's-years is over and deposits its captives beneath an alien sky, with sun and ring and stars and moons foreign as any far-flung land. Some travelers wear skins and magic to suit those stranger heavens; some have been changed by the logic of the half-world half-story to better fit its weave.
With a changed nature come changed senses and abilities–and those in the skins of shrikes, with eyes to see, may notice much more if they look.
All can see one grim fact, however, on entering the world: Any clock, any watch, any Omni now displays 48:00:00 or its analogue equivalent... And begins at once to tick down.
[[ Part of the Real & Half-Real player plot! Navigate to other plot posts: [OOC] Interest Check | [IC] Prologue | [IC] Iskierka's Notes | [IC] The Portal & the Plan ]]
What: Pocket dimension shenanigans to save a missing Sleeper
When: Two insane days in May
Where: Nephele-that-isn’t, which isn’t Deer Country either
All at once–one day, in early May–the portal’s finished, and the planning is as near to done as it will ever be. All at once, it’s time to venture into Nephele-that-isn’t, and retrieve not one but two Sleepers who’ve gone astray.
The team assembles in the clearing by Argonaut’s abandoned shrine, in a darkness lit by glowing CRTs and the green, green moon. The portal itself, and the world beyond it, casts a light all its own–and one by one they step over that rune-etched silver threshold, and one by one vanish into another story than Trench’s own.
Like being sieved through strands of glass and fire. Like being picked apart thread by narrative thread as the Words themselves that write the universe flash before stunned eyes in the seconds before they’re erased and something worse substituted. Moments of fleeting alignment between passager and host-creator come in stopped heartbeats and empty lungs, in the memory you’ve been dead for years and the cold slide of steel between ribs.
Then that second-that's-years is over and deposits its captives beneath an alien sky, with sun and ring and stars and moons foreign as any far-flung land. Some travelers wear skins and magic to suit those stranger heavens; some have been changed by the logic of the half-world half-story to better fit its weave.
With a changed nature come changed senses and abilities–and those in the skins of shrikes, with eyes to see, may notice much more if they look.
All can see one grim fact, however, on entering the world: Any clock, any watch, any Omni now displays 48:00:00 or its analogue equivalent... And begins at once to tick down.
[[ Part of the Real & Half-Real player plot! Navigate to other plot posts: [OOC] Interest Check | [IC] Prologue | [IC] Iskierka's Notes | [IC] The Portal & the Plan ]]
OUTSIDE - Those unsung
Act 1: Fimbulwinter
1.1 Arrival
Cities-- For while they share the same throat of a mountain pass and a wall between them, the lower and upper realms were designed, built, and inhabited by vastly different cultural minds. Below, a regular gridwork of low warrens marches steadily toward a distant sea of grass. Its roads–where they are not gouged up by craters nor robbed of stones by hands seeking weapons–are broad and paved; its ruined neighborhoods vast manorial complexes built around parks studded with heroic tusked statuary in smoke-ruined marble. Banners and devices depicting a boar rampant over swords, quills, or mattocks hang ruined on the buildings or defiled in the streets.
Above the wall, mooring towers claw the skies at irregular intervals along the winding, horse-wide streets. Airship rigging and smashed gondolas hang pendant from those towers or lie collapsed over high-roofed houses that even now smolder with slow-burning fires. No common sigil unites the bright rags flapping from every eave and wound around every wrecked ship–no common sigil but the ever-present, ever-twining lines of the wind.
In the cities both above and below, unrotting corpses lie piled high at every corner and street-crossing (and within every domicile). Warbands armed with weapons both ancient and modern stalk each other through city streets and to the top of the wall itself. By the Gates themselves, they throw each other--corpses or not--from the wall-top and howl in brief triumph, only to brace themselves as their revived foes climb to attack them again. Whether there’s any purpose to the endless skirmish is impossible to discern.
This is Soujaseinä--City of the Horizon-Gates, the City Self-Devoured--and it is an active battlefield. There are no uniforms any longer, no objective to the fighting: Only the war itself, endless and devouring.
It is only a matter of time before its celebrants notice the new-come Sleepers in their midst.
1.1 Arrival | Deku/Ize
A wood elf rises from where he was unceremoniously deposited here in a jumble of limbs, backpack, and industrial-grade suitcase. He feels uncannily like an improperly-developed photo, blurry-edged senses stretched through a sieve. He's just a little taller than he was as the human named Izuku "Deku" Midoriya, but still short for an elf. His skin is medium cedarwood and freckled. His forest green plumage is flecked with red and yellow near his ears. Like his human counterpart, he has muscle packed onto whatever an elf's willowy frame will allow. He wears a gray jumpsuit, a black vest, and boots. A grease stain decorates his forehead.
Ize shifts his possessions more securely as he smells the blood in the air. It stokes something feral and wide-eyed in him. With a grace that belongs among trees and not iron-soaked stone, he wordlessly ushers anyone he can to a safe spot to talk, preferably behind some solid brick cover.
What... is your quest? (closed to Paul/Atreus, and those listening in if need be?)
Everyone safely assembled for the moment, Ize's green eyes barely sweep the motley crew before they land on someone he recognizes. Something strange is going on, and he suspects one person of having a hand in it:
"Shy Hood!" he blurts at the shrike in surprise, warm familiarity, and the kind of accusation that can only come from that. Ize, the son of a dying backwater community marches right up to his Prince. "What the hell?! I had class."
What... is your quest?
"Aren't you still learning?" He asks, mildly, patting the ground beside him. "Don't restrict yourself to lessons fed to you, Ize."
One of the things that sets him apart from many other Princes, especially now, is that he strives to make himself accessible to his followers, within reason. He sits back on his heels and pulls down his scarf, revealing a slight and easy smile.
"Besides. Not everything that happens in the world is at my hand - although the accusation flatters me. You don't know how we got here either, then?"
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1.1 Arrival | Oscar/ Sweetroll | OTA
or something) beyond just himself with more difficulty than what was usual for his experience. Picking up information that wasn't strictly his usually happened on the fly, with stories, details, and images emerging from some subconscious collection and spilling into his awareness. Buildings he had never visited and events he had never witnessed were there at his fingertips, with the full sensory and emotional depth that came with lived experiences.This was different. This was More-- and Oscar Pine needed a moment or several to piece through the fractured shards on the edge of his sense of self alongside the wider lense granted by Sight greater than what he was used to.
Rising on two feet in a disheveled pile of smokey colored fluff, hints of orange and green bleeding through the dusky hues, the boy-- no, the young shrike, sought for something, anything that was familiar. The rough hewn work clothes he wore were dusty with dirt and the broken bits of twigs and leaves.
It was a start.
"I-I'm fine," he'd reply softly to anyone who asked, stumbling over the words in a voice that was unfamiliar to him. His gaze was unfocused while he struggled with knowing what to focus on, and not even the well of thousands of lifetimes inside his soul could provide any parallel which he could grasp.
He was lying.
Arrival | Kaworu
But it can't collapse him, there's nothing to reform him into in this world. So he exists on a periphery, something like a Throneborn and something like an angel and something a bit like a human. His outline too sharp, like he's standing in front of the world within it. An extra cel layer on top of already complete frame.
Still, he can feel its pull. Like if it cannot collapse him, it will simply unravel him bit by bit until he's nothing but a pile of string to be made a proper Throneborn.
He sits on the edge of the wall, knees to his chest, looking much more like a bird that's fallen from its nest than anything divine. However, the the halo hovering above his forehead and the faint outline of wings made of light reveal his true nature.
For now, Kaworu just looks out over the land that's real and not and thinks about what he must do.
1.2 Reunion
To those intimately familiar with Nephele(-that-isn't) and the predilections of elves, it would be a natural place to look for one gone to ground. To those without that knowledge but a burning desire to find Illarion--there's help. Iskierka's chief among it; given her head, she'll lead Sleepers straight to the wood (though she sometimes forgets they can't fly or pass through buildings to avoid the fighting in the city). There's also a strange orange-gold butterfly some Sleepers may have encountered before, a creature much better at waiting for those with mortal limitations to catch up to it.
Whether they're led by black wings or gold, Sleepers will eventually find themselves at the wood, then in the wood, on a poor excuse for a path that's overgrown with briars and thorns. It surely has not been used for years--except here and there are undeniable signs of passage, in gold eyes that blink from the trunks of trees and patches of unworldly colors smeared on the undergrowth. At the path's end is a clearing and at the heart of the clearing a tree--a giant of an oak, lightning-scarred and split-crowned.
Around it, in furrows worn deep by hoof and paw and talon, pace a half-dozen skeletal beasts with maddened eyes. They walk endlessly without stopping, predator and prey passing scant inches from each other. The air around them warps and cascades with signifiers of the Throne and one long-departed occupant--the spoor of demons.
The focus of the beasts' ceaseless gyring is indiscernible from afar and indescribable near. It appears, star-shell bright, for anything that comes within a hundred thirteen paces of the scarred tree. White fire and greasy smoke weave its halo; white fire and molten metal form its tongue. Thorns crown and enclose the smear of blood on its altar-heart. No eyes peer out from its flawless, tusked, feathered face.
It is dense to look upon with out-eyes, as a shrike's dense and impenetrable. (As the sad and thousand-fold mutated thing curled around the tree's heart is dense, tucked into his own feathers.) But its voice is singular and without echo as it speaks in tones of klaxon and prayer-bells--as it speaks with a Monarch's voice--
Wait. I will wake him.
The assurance in its tone is belied by its own inaction: It does not move toward the tree. It does not seem to communicate with the dormant Sleeper hidden in it; or if it does, he doesn't respond.
Something else is needed. But first the demons must be dealt with.
Awake and arise (Illarion, OTA)
a. But once you have made it into the tree, Illarion's not hard to find. The hollow's (incongruously) wide enough to fit at least three grown elves, full of dead leaves and bird bones and cached acorns; emaciated, he takes up less than his third of it. He's propped up as if he'd died on watch with his eyes open, unveiled, unseeing; with the rest of his dark and shifting mass gathered around the tree. There are more arms there, than once there were, and more feathers, and appendages more difficult to name, and all those
eyesare shut.He looks and seems entirely, finally dead.
But he revives at a touch, lashing out with all the horrid swiftness of a striking snake to shove his assailant away from him. Then he moves, and moves, becoming all black feathers and wide gold eyes and talons--a column of darkness that mounds itself up like a startled owl and snarls,
<<"̵͈̒P̴͖̒R̵̨͌Ó̷̖V̵̫́E̸̫̊ ̸̻̆Y̴͇̕O̶͇͋Ǔ̷̮'̷͖̓R̵̨̎E̴̮̕ ̴͉̕R̷̰͑E̷͉̋A̵͍̿L̵͍̍.̷̜͑"̶̥͝>>
It's only the risk of possession that keeps him from immediate violence--and that's lucky, perhaps, for all parties in this encounter.
b. Escaping the tree's easier than climbing into it, and Illarion--still half-awake and running on adrenaline's memory--isn't shy about carrying anyone who can't step outward from it with him. (It's disorienting; it feels like falling in an impossible direction the inner ear was never meant for.)
Much of the instant's animation leaves him as he sets foot on the ground and ((feels)) all those present in the clearing. (Some are shaped wrong and yet exactly as he'd expect them to be--their outlines and mass-shadows attaching to names of those he knows and cares for; it is profoundly disorienting.) This is not what he'd expected--he had not allowed himself hope, knowing he's ultimately expendable (and it is right for him to be). Sayo-- Sayo of course would be true to her word, but it had been so long, and Sleepers might return to the ocean at any time--
He blinks and swallows, reflex action of an emotion that doesn't register with his conscious mind. "You are all--" Mad optimists. More true than he deserved. "--here. You are real," almost a question, "you have come back for me."
Then--because laggard as his reason is and fuzzy as his senses are, he's noticed this assembly would be perfectly normal for Nephele but is far from that for Trench-- "What has happened to you? You are so many of you remade."
c. Later--hiking out of the woods, perhaps, or during a brief rest--Illarion takes a moment to seek out those he recognizes, those close to him, who didn't get their chance to greet him at the base of the tree. He manages a semblance of animation enough for a lopsided smile (it doesn't reach his eyes) and a little warmth to his tone (though his feathers are flat with unease and despair).
"I thank you for this." A breath's width of a pause, as he considers meanings that don't carry in Steppescommon, and how the debt he owes is vast enough to bridge a self-imposed distance he's maintained since washing up in Trench, and switches languages: <<"'Thank you' doesn't last long enough. I owe you a debt of gratitude without limit, for coming.">>
a
But a week is a long time to get to know one another, especially when you're the only two sane (or insane, if the rest of the world had truly descended into madness then being semi-sound of mind was likely a worse illness than if they went with the grain) individuals in a broken half-reality, and even moreso when the bond is tempered in terror and survival.
It really had felt like part of Sayo's heart had been ripped out when Illarion hurled her out of Nephele-that-isn't.
Now they're together, once again, and the pang in Sayo's heart when she sees his mangled mind and body only rings louder when she realizes that must've been what her own soul looked like after those thousand/six (thousand, it had to be a thousand for this plan to work) years. So she does what she wishes somebody had done for her, simply because she doesn't know what else to do in the face of such mind-melting terror:
Sayo reaches out and, whole body trembling, says with such deep tenderness that it feels like an open wound:]
...I brought something new for you to read, Forneus.
A tale without pages stained in blood.
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punches writer's block to death
a.
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For Bigby
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C
abecedarium
For those who lag behind in the forest… (Augustine, OTA)
Those who do leave the group--deliberately or not--quickly find themselves being watched. Something else in the wood's been awakened by the noise, and begun to move through the trees; something else stalks after stragglers, detectable only in the faint sigh of leaves or quivering of a disturbed branch. Something else--
Is an elf, pale and tall and grave, in snow-silver and iridescent teal, and he's not shy about being seen staring now that the focus of his attention is so far from the rest of the party.
for Augustine
Ize, Slortus, Chara, Sweetroll
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Not these demons, anyway, and not in Nephele-that-Isn't; and Augustin's experience with demons is
different, and sometimes worse, and sometimes betterthankfully limited, as any sane wood elf would limit his exposure to such creatures — even in a life spanning so many millennia — as much as he can."One last thing," Ize's ancient uncle says absently, over his shoulder, just before he'd definitely have to raise his voice to be heard over the clamor they're approaching. "Whatever you do, don't let them touch you, after you kill them. They'll be every bit as happy to wear your skin as those poor animals' — or more, perhaps."
A faint movement of his shoulders may be meant to indicate a shrug.
"Not that I suppose you'll care much more, if you do."
And with that confidence boost of a pep talk, he pushes on that last little way — leaving them at the edge of chaos, and battle, and mayhem, and doom: and all of these overseen by the eye-searing, impossible form of the angel, phlegmatically observing it all without movement or interference in the slightest detail — even when those demons fall, or falter, to try to trick a foe closer in the fight, that they, too, might be forced to Fall —
"God damn, I hate these things," Augustin might be heard to mutter, sounding resigned and philosophical about it, if anyone's kept up closely enough — perhaps to realize he's the reason no small number of these demonic-beasts falter, foundering on shattering limbs, in some cases just before their blows might land on the arms (or armaments) of the intrepid rescue party's members; perhaps not, as Augustin's gaze sharpens (like a gyrfalcon ready to stoop for its prey) on that Angel.
"You," he hisses, with a fury that brings to mind a snake ready to strike, perhaps, more than something raptorial.
And he stalks across the battle in the clearing, apparently careless of the danger, sending friends and foes alike flying out of his path (although those who are not born of a decaying Court-gift will find, at least, that they can keep their feet underneath them, and whole and attached besides) to stare at it, as face-to-face as could be most charitably defined. "You utter bastard, to think you could claim a bind on him —"
(The angel does not seem inclined to interrupt his tirade, as yet — no more than it was inclined to interrupt the slaughter of the innocent-turned-corrupt animals, at the hand and command of this young Prince and his apparent Court.)
By the time the last demonically-possessed animal falls, Augustin is barely more than an arm's length away from the angel, and the air around them is ice-cold and vibrating with a heat-shimmer, all at the same time.
"You are in my way, you — you freezer-burned, tinfoil-wrapped, mystery-meat nuclear harbinger!" Would it have been, had he chosen any other approach toward that tree? (Too late to say, now.)
Now, at last, he draws his blade — his blades, rather, two swords like brothers, one larger, one smaller — and stands before the Angel, unflinching, a ready threat.
"Open that tree and get him out here, this instant," he orders, in a voice
(but alas, not a Voice)that Will Not brook disobedience. "And don't try to deflect me, either — I have rights!"(no subject)
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Act 2: The Steppes and the Empire
2.1 The Princes of Thundering and Noon
The storms clogging the sky above and the war raging through the grass below it makes the expedition's path to Noon perforce an indirect one. To get to him and his airship, they need to defeat the Prince of Thundering and his Court; to challenge the Court of Thundering, they must cross miles of hostile territory, through slashing rain and driving wind and punishing hail, beset on all sides by furious dryads.
In this first challenge, a curse of the Waking World's Season of Tears proves a blessing instead: Chara, attacked by dryads and livid with hatred, summons a swarm of giant mantids--mantids like enough the dryads' missing symbiotic hama to check the raging plant-folk. The resemblance is sufficient to win the expedition a narrow corridor of safe passage--so long as one of their Darkbloods can keep up a suitable manifestation of insects. Two of the sapient plants (a yew and an ash, scarred in the bark from years of war) even condescend to act as an escort into the deeper Steppes. Their assistance is part-sentimental, largely pragmatic; they lead the expedition on a zig-zagging route between outposts of Thundering's Court and watch any ensuing slaughter with grim and dark and satisfied eyes.
2.1.1 A Rose's Rose
He is a rose's rose, the sort the Empire would immortalize in marble if he were only loyal: Topping seven feet, powerfully muscled, sharp-tusked and keen-eyed. His breasts are bound flat for war, his striking crimson mane left to loose to flow in the wind accompanying him. Yet for all his heroic stature he is a wreck of a man--the plainclothes he effects as a uniform are shredded and bloodstained, the long rifle and great-axe he carries filthy with use. Something inscrutable lurks in his expression as he regards the expedition, an emotion neither hatred nor dismay nor regret but partaking of all of them. His pale eyes sharpen to glass on seeing Illarion among the strange mixed company.
"This is what you bring me, butcher, to end the war forever?" He does not raise his weapons. Neither does he cast them down. He is not blind with battle-fury like his Courtiers, resistant to any persuasion but violence. This is an opportunity to negotiate--to remind him of the ideals he'd once held, and hold out a final end to the Conflagration that consumes Nephele-that-isn't. (Pragmatically, it's an opportunity to use what Thundering knows of the Prince of Noon, and the bond between them, to bring his airship close enough to capture.)
And while the band of negotiators who've volunteered for this are a mixed lot--the fledgling elf Izerge, little Sweetroll, Bigby, and the Prince of Lies himself--and while Thundering looks on them with scorn, he is willing to listen. He--perhaps alone of all those they'll hunt to enact the ritual--is willing to bend.
But he watches the shrikes in the group with suspicion bordering on hatred, the eldest of them most of all.
2.1.2 Be Angry at the Sun for Setting (cw: suicide by fall, threats with firearms)
Thundering leads the expedition back through dreamlike, twisting terrain to an abandoned airship tower at the Steppes' edge. He climbs to the top of the decaying structure, his charges precariously in tow, and uses the signal mirror at its top to summon Noon's circling airship. Hours seem to pass before the ship's arrival, and no time at all; the only objective measure of how many minutes pass is the relentless countdown on the Omnis. (Too many. They are losing precious time, waiting.)
"We'll have to jump," Thundering observes, as the ship draws near. It's an observation rapidly confirmed--whether or not Noon himself intends to parley, his crew refuse to bring the airship close enough for easy boarding. The Court of Noon, driven mad by ceaseless battle and in sight of their greatest foe, will resist to the last.
But the Prince of Thundering, that old foe, has learned very well how to fight these sailors of the air. He organizes the expedition--those who'll listen to him--with brisk tactical grace, keeping those who can't cross the empty yards of air on their own back in reserve before leading their would-be boarders across. They make the jump under a hail of gunfire and burning coherent sunlight--and Thundering roars as he leaps, changing and twisting in midair to an enormous bristling boar. The great temple beast lands with an impact that rocks the deck and bowls through the nearest of Noon's ragged marines, sending shouting men over the sides. It does not linger to confirm its kills, leaving that to Chara and Atreus' clever knives, Izerge's automatons, Ruby's scythe, Michael's strength as it charges for the quarterdeck.
The ship's captain--the Prince of Noon, a tall dark man whose face is a maze of self-inflicted scars--watches the boar's advance with resignation in his eyes. He does not lift a hand to save his sailors. He does not raise his pistols until the boar's upon him, until it's returned to orcish form with crimson mane streaming in the wind. Only then does Noon draw, and press the muzzles of his guns to Thundering's chest. "Your apology needs work, Nash," he snarls, and doesn't fire.
Still doesn't fire, when Thundering lifts one of those guns with odd tenderness to nestle beneath his chin. "That was not the apology," he intones. "But this: My life poured into your hands; my honor / mingled with yours, as blood and wine are mixed / in libation to all gods of roses, / of Civilization's brief flower--"
It is a rose's oath of sworn brotherhood and he offers it with a fervor that silences the other man. Whatever more they say to each other is lost in the swirl of the wind and pitched shouts of battle--but what can be glimpsed of their faces speaks of a reckoning long in coming, and a wound drained that was long in need of lancing.
Below decks, the fight for the engine room is pitched and swift and vicious. Noon's engineers turn quickly from defense to sabotage once it comes clear they're losing, leaving damage that will need quick repairs. By the time the mechanical-minded among the expedition return from that task, the ship is cleared of all but a last few stubborn holdouts--
And the two Princes who stand by watching the mopping-up. Some agreement's been reached between them and their grudge put aside; they look defeated, and relieved by that defeat. They carry their burdens no longer.
"The ship's yours by conquest," Noon shouts, as the last of his blood-mad Court falls.
"Your contract's fulfilled, butcher," Thundering adds, staring hard at Illarion. "The rest of you see she completes it."
Both pronouncements have a fatal finality to them. Neither Prince leaves much time to be argued out of what they've decided--they know they must die, after all, and this death has some slim chance of bringing them final relief if the ritual succeeds--but they do entertain those arguments and anything else said to them, for a little while. A little while, until Thundering gestures all comers to silence, and strides to the fore of the ship with Noon beside him--speaking quietly of small things, as two old friends would talk as they walk a city street.
They mount the ship's railing together, Noon leaning on Thundering's broad shoulder. They clasp hands. There's something clean and final in the handshake, in the last look they give each other. Then Noon gestures widely with his free hand, plucking sunlight from the air to wreathe them in solar fire; and as one, they step out over the void below.
They fall together like a dying star.
2.1.2 you wouldn't want an angel watching over you (they wouldn't wanna watch) [kaworu nagisa]
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2.1.2 Rage against the dying of the light
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Act 3: Shrikes and Swans
by fighting their way through a monstrous house,
embracing madness and a dissolution of their identities,
and employing trickery and brute force by turns. ]
3.1 The Princes of Biding and Sacrifices (cw: corpses, mass death, gore)
The stench is horrific even at the mouth of the cave. Its entrance has been carved in a danse macabre, with dead of all four species holding hands as their frozen sport leads entrants deeper into the cave; the carvings are defiled with blood and filth. The first corpses--elves and shrikes, long-decayed, plumage plucked and scattered--are no more than ten yards inside. The corpses appear inanimate, but they have enough motion left in their hands and arms to grab and pin anything that comes into their reach. Yet they are not so thick on the ground they can't be avoided or kicked away on the journey to the central chamber, another hundred yards down the hall.
A needed breath of air comes as one arrives in that chamber, a vast dome that stretches fifty or sixty feet toward a natural skylight. Trees and flowers grow right beneath that open stretch of sky... or did grow, until two Princes came to rest here. Now the plants are all dead and torn down, except thick thorn-hedges that constrain approach to the vast obscenity at the center of the once-grove: A pile of a hundred (a thousand? More?) corpses stacked atop each other in a gruesome platform.
The two Princes stand waist-deep in the clutching corpse-arms of their followers, twenty feet off the ground; the pile nearly obscures how the contents of their opened bellies are grown together like grafted branches. Biding is pale and shining still even in the gore, his silver hair perfect and talons so fine light can be seen through them. Sacrifices is Biding’s his golden echo, though crimson blood drips constantly from the plumes of his arms and chest.
They murmur mouth-to-mouth, or stare deeply in each other's eyes, uninterested in anyone who enters the chamber until they come in range of the pile. Then they erupt into violence, Sacrifices' unerring bow backing Biding's impossible swordwork and uncanny ability to appear everywhere at once.
Frontal assault is possible, but unwise. Perhaps something can be found in Biding's ancient home, standing only a mile away in a thick patch of transplanted forest.
3.1.1 The House Beyond the Last Cedared Hill (cw: unreality and horror themes)
Old houses--human habitations a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years old--develop their own character. Old houses may, with time, become people.
Ancient houses become monsters.
A house as old as the Prince of Biding's house--a house older than human and orcish civilization--has become a very great monster indeed.
There are no guards about it. There are no fences; its reputation is sufficient protection. The remains of an old-growth forest, alien to the foliage around it, provides a screening wall pierced by a tunnel of woven trees. (The trunks wind around each other in incestuous pairs; the branches, latticed together, have long since grafted each tree to its marriage-partner.)
At the end of the living corridor, the house crouches like a waiting predator. Its doors are also living wood, cunningly interworked and ancient; they are twice as high as a man and half as thick as one. Yet for all their weight, a touch makes the doors swing wide without a sound; without a sound, the house swallows its latest visitors into a long stony throat. The hall is made of a faintly luminescent white-and-ultraviolet marble--elfstone--common to deep elven ruins. Rooms branch from it at strange angles, like the feathery subdividing of a lung. Indented talonmarks line the floors and the walls, emphasized with enamel and gilding--speaking to the strange and precise mind of the house's master, who'd walk the same path every day for the millennia required to wear grooves into solid stone.
A gentle wind blows through the halls, reversing direction now and then as if the house breathes. It brings with it the scent of growing things, and blows stray leaves of written-over parchment before it. Rooms deeper in the house are open to the forest, or gardens, or strange deep pools with stranger creatures in their depths. Wide eyes and
eyesblink from birch trunks and shallow waters, enticing and deadly: For once one goes deep enough in the house, the traps begin. Poisoned needles, deadfalls, starving dragons, airless spaces--all await the unwary who cannot read subtle tells in the environment, or see around the walls to notice them lurking.The concentration of traps grows heaviest at the house's center, where four rooms are arranged along an odd crescent hallway wrapped around a central column--or fifth, much larger, room that must only be accessible through them. Each door is marked with an emblem: book, songbird, Throne, analemma.
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The rooms (cw: unreality, horror themes, gore, dead bodies, potential harm to animals)
A well-lit library fills the bubble of a room beyond the door. Living shelves, espaliered up the walls to the curving ceiling, cradle at least a thousand books in their steady grasp. The shelves extend a little ways outward to provide resting places for more strangely proportioned tomes.
Low tables and perches of metal and stone provide places to sit and read. Thirty or more books of military history are scattered among them, leaving gaps on the shelves; some gaps much wider than others, with books shoved apart by a previous patron. Close examination of the gaps sometimes yields hair-fine traceries of enamel in one of three colors, outlining book-width slots. Here and there, a flash of echoing color can be seen in heraldry on an open page or worked into the spine of a book.
A desiccated elven corpse in livery of steel-gray and blood crimson is crushed between two wall panels at the far end of the room. Its talons clutch with rictus agony a book that has grown through its face. The title on the book's cover is barely discernible: An eyewitness description of Haefiltan's Final Stand, with especial attention to troop disposition, as recounted by Grand Marshall C———.
The door of the songbird
Unlike other rooms in the house, which have the rough-hewn natural shapes of caves, this room is a twelve-foot cube lined on every wall with minuscule, densely etched symbols illuminated in enamel and gold. At the far end of the room lies a door, protected by a three-foot-wide open pit filled with stakes that gleam with a faint sheen of liquid. Subtle lines on the walls around the pit resemble the visible tells of traps encountered before, suggesting that would-be jumpers will be caught by something worse than spikes during their leap.
Shining strings of silk and wool and gut hang from hooks at the beginning and end of each complicated phrase. Some attempt was made to connect strings across the room between different phrases--but to what end? The last elf tasked with that lies dead and crushed into the pit, appearing as if someone used its body as a bridge. It's too decayed for such use now, gray and crimson livery turned to rags.
Looking down deep into the pit shows a slot for a false floor that might cover the spikes, but no trigger mechanism visible.
The door of the Throne
This is a pretty little room with a broad skylight and fresh air blowing through it. A two-inch-wide line is etched deeply into the stone of its walls, encircling the central space and spiraling up toward the ceiling. It has been demarcated at regular intervals with an elven glyph for century at every demarcation. One end of the line, low to the ground, has a gorgeously carved sunburst around it. The far end, near the ceiling, fades into a black blotch so deep the actual line becomes invisible.
A hundred--or more--small sliding cabochons lie at the start of the carved line. It is possible to remove and examine them, if one wishes, or even put them in a new order. Each has a symbol etched and illuminated on its surface: A blade, a rose, a drop of blood, an eye, a locust--they all appear to be heraldic representations of Nephele's Monarchs. Setting two cabochons in the line at a distance from each other somehow causes the space between them to fill with color--most commonly a pale anemic red; sometimes, an eye-stunning blue.
Living branches adorn the walls above and below the timeline, host to thread-thin adders that are much larger than they appear, with many more mouths. They show no interest in the room's new occupants, content to sun themselves beneath the skylight instead... Though a tattered shrike corpse lies in the corner with fang-marks in its throat and great chunks gouged out of its out-self.
When anyone touches one of the cabochons, all the snakes lift their heads and regard that individual. They do not move immediately, but there is a sense they are waiting for a wrong move...and may begin a languid slither toward whoever makes too many mistakes in whatever task is needed to open the far door.
The door of the analemma
Beyond the door of the solar path, one steps into hell.
Reality is visibly corrupt at the edges in the first room, with
eyesand whispers peering from all corners. The walls are patchworks of a thousand materials, living and dead flesh among them. Looking down the hall that extends into the distance induces a sickening, sliding feeling of falling in some nameless direction. Proceeding in that direction results in a swift return to the same room--except the entry door is missing, and there's a corpse in steel-and-red in the corner. Taking a branching hall from that same room leads to an endless succession of same rooms, lit with dim and flickering light. Retreating leads to a different same room, that is not the one first exited.The corpse looks the same in every room. It is in a different position every time. Sometimes it is located by a switch on the wall--a switch marked with a skull, a flower, or a feather. In others of the same room, the corpse lies far from the skulls, flowers, and feathers on the floor. Taking the objects spreads a curse of
eyesand unintelligibility if a corresponding switch hasn't been flipped before they're touched.To one who can see outward, the hideous trick of the maze becomes clear. The rooms are stacked kata-ana of each other, separated somehow in one dimension but overlapping in the others. Nine of nineteen rooms have switches. Nine of nineteen have objects. All have one corpse--or is it the same corpse?--and two have doors. A shrine of offering with nine empty slots lies before the last door.
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Interlude: Admiral Lankhet
It is visible even from afar off through the twilight gloom and massed ranks of trees, a corpse-pale hulk lined in desaturated blues (like bruises, like winter skies). Large as a building, it might be confused for an elfstone ruin--but for its lines, fluid and organic as something grown, something born, something alive.
But it is not moving. It waits on the path with all the patience of a thing dead.
A low and liquid song hangs on the edge of hearing, nearly imperceptible beneath the whisper of leaves in wind.
Iskierka, riding Illarion's shoulders and acting as his eyes, gurgles a low noise between warning and excitement. "The Admiral," her Sleeper interprets, his own echoing voice soft. "She is rational, last I am speaking to her. Perhaps she may still be."
It has been weeks since then, he doesn't say. Nor: That they'd come to a rational agreement with the Prince of Thundering, and it had hardly felt a victory.
"An open approach is best. She will know we are here."
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[The tone is mild, pleasant- but the voice carries, low and strange and musical, an unplaceable accent that doesn't belong to the shape of any humanoid throat. In better times, bygone days, there might have been a tinge of deadpan humor in it.]
[Nowadays, "politely conversational" is about the best she can manage.]
I have been waiting to speak with you, sraati.
[Lankhet remains sitting, still as the grave- letting them come forward at their own pace, or not. It can be difficult to give people a mannerly amount of personal space when the world is built for beings a fifth your size, but she does her best.]
Of course, a bard can only speak- whether you will listen, that choice is always yours.
Act 4: Kingdoms of the Dead
and encounter a revenant determined to escape a story he's been written out of. ]
Finale: Queen and Throne
Epilogue: What's Done In Earnest