Real & Half-Real: Chapter 2 - Nephele-That-Isn't

[unsheathedfromreality]

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 ]]

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Act 1: Fimbulwinter

[unsheathedfromreality]

[ In which our protagonists step into the story, and many find themselves to be different entirely. They set off to seek, and find, those who've gone missing in a world consumed by the All-War. ]

1.1 Arrival

[unsheathedfromreality]

The portal disgorges the voyagers atop a wide, wide wall that's a hundred feet high if it's a yard. Blood coats its hand-smoothed stones and darkens their mortar; an abattoir stench fills the air where the sun strikes its face. To the west, a vast and rusted iron gate--once a marvel of metalwork and engineering--pierces the wall, closing the sole passage between the cities above and below it.

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

[wannasmash]

OTA but please be kind to my thread load

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?

[terriblepurpose]

The figure crouched by a partially demolished fortification left behind by some earlier motley band is indeed hooded in dull, dusty black, their face muffled in a dun-colored scarf save for the eyes pressed to a pair of brass prism binoculars which they only lower to scratch obscure markings into the brick by their knees - until that nickname is called, and Atreus, the Prince of the Shortest Way, sets down his spyglass.

"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?"

[wannasmash]

It has not been a long time since he's seen him last, but it feels like it. Maybe it's one of those days when time feels funny. Ize moves immediately to his side and offers his arm for a hug--offers, not takes, as is his habit as someone viewed as weird in every mixed company context he's ever found himself. He's a wood elf obsessed with awful machinery, a low-class nobody in a Prince's Court, and most people who manifest effort magic aren't so young.

"I get so hungry though, for things we write on leaves, for things that will be unsung, the low things of sweat and skill--You know how it is." The nerd has the grace to curb one of his ramblings before it grows verdant and glaring in its lack of musical accompaniment. He faces opposite while he unpacks his gear, so he can watch Atreus's back or turn his head to the side to say mildly, "It's just, for some reason, I've missed so much class..." That reason might be a tall Prince wearing hooded blacks and a scarf.

He throws a distrustful look at his surroundings--habit, there is no secret here--and opens his suitcase. Inside are pieces of plain, oft-nicked armor glinting cool and metallic. He sighs at flattery in a routine way as the plates thrum with his magecraft and float to slot themselves onto him. He doesn't flatter. That's for sycophants and people posing as such. He fastens a few straps and crouches again.

"I don't like this. I had no warning, nothing. You? Anything weird?" He slips into the plain staccato of battle-speak that echoes the distant popping sounds of ordnance.

[terriblepurpose]

There are few people that Atreus tolerates touching him, as a matter of course. He's survived too many assassination attempts to be anything but cautious, mapping out the radius of those he trusts in fractional degrees, but Ize lies within that particular circle. He returns the embrace in a firm press of camaraderie, and perhaps Ize will notice the new slim lashings of muscle in his own arms.

He's almost out of his juvenile plumage, the tiniest traces of youthful feathers clustered at the fringes of his face, silky greys giving way to gleaming adult blacks that shine iridescent in better qualities of sunlight than they have here. They rise slightly as he chuckles affably at Ize's insinuation about how much class he's missed.

"No, but since when have you needed a warning?" He watches the drift of armor with the plain interest he always has for them, shifting tone to match as he speaks. "And what if I promised you something more satisfying to chew on than your sweet forest leaves, hm?"

1.1 Arrival | Oscar/ Sweetroll | OTA

[justoscar]

He came to his senses slowly-- piecing through the intangible debris that was the viceral recollections of someone (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

[peripheries]

Unlike everyone else, Kaworu doesn't collapse when he arrives though he feels the sensation that brings everyone to their knees. A twist and a pulling sensation like being collapsed inwards and reformed with your elemental pieces into something new.

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

[unsheathedfromreality]

In the foothills just below Soujaseinä's lowest extent, there is a wood both deep and thick--the natural haunt of elves. Elfstone ruins--bombed, dismantled, overgrown--poke through the thick brush on the forest's verge, though they vanish rapidly beneath encroaching trees deeper into the wood.

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)

[unsheathedfromreality]

Whatever Monarch the demons shed from, they make their animal hosts no more intelligent or powerful than any other animated skeleton. (Though they have a nasty habit of exploding on death.) They are easily dispatched--avoiding possession is harder, but manageable for the careful. Getting into the tree's the real difficult part--it's open at the top and hollow inside, but the first opening's twenty feet up and not wide enough for anything thick as a human (without work).

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 eyes are 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

[forwantofahorse]

[If she was being honest, Sayo barely Illarion before she was dragged into his personal Hell. He'd saved her soul with his words, her life with his claws, and they made a contract forged in blood to save everyone else too on the beach.

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.

[unsheathedfromreality]

[There is a moment, a heartbeat stretched out, when he doesn't recognize her.

She has not changed as much as many who've come here--she is much as she was in that final, fatal instant he'd sacrificed himself to buy her freedom. It is that memory, with its attendant embers of guilt, that stands in recognition's way; if Sayo is truly back, then his debt to her might be repaid and the web of obligation binding them as flock, as unit, might be made whole-- A kind of redemption he'd long ago learned to discard as a foolish hope where he's concerned, and this is--

This could surely not be--

He stares sightlessly at her as the shock of rescue settles on his shoulders. Then he draws himself up, and inward, and steps forward to take a knee before her, his hands over hers and head bowed in supplication.]

<<You give me a gift greater than I have words for, master storyteller.>>

[He lifts his head then like he could look at her, and without his veil the look in his eyes is raw and obvious for all its death-muted subtlety.]

<<You came back for me.>>

[He knew she was as good as her word, after all they'd been through. He trusted.

But he'd also thought himself lost beyond retrieving, by the end of it.]

[forwantofahorse]

["You came back for me."

Those words that Sayo had always longed to utter, to stare soulfully into the eyes of her rescuer and let slip from her lips in acknowledgment that she was free, free, free at long last. There's bitter catharsis in finally hearing them tumble free from the mouth of someone else, all the misery that the promise had been keeping at bay (one way or another) finally released.

Sayo won't stand for being bowed down to, though, not when she took far too long to come back. She clasps Illarion's claw and gently kneels down next to him, giving him a wavering, but radiant, smile in return.]

I'm not the only one who came back. I couldn't have been.

We all worked together to find you.

Now, come on. [She gets to her feet again, gently tugging Illarion along.] We may have miles to go before we sleep, but a little rest and reunion shouldn't set us back.

It's... good to see you again, Forneus.

a.

[peripheries]

He recoils slightly at the mass in the tree, a slight shift in his weight backwards before he steadies once more. Kaworu thinks there might have been more beneath the surface but those emotions suddenly seem distant and out of reach, submerged beneath a surface that he can't break. All he reach down and touch below, distorted and incomplete, is the shame of knowing this is his fault. He could drown in it if he's not careful.

A soft step forward that's so light it almost doesn't make a sound, like his foot never even brushed the grass, as though he fears disturbing the roots of the great tree. Perhaps the old man is dead. Most things that Kaworu is fond of seem to be kept from him by death, either theirs or his own. Before he can say anything, the mass shifts at his presence, a talon catches the soft underside of his palm and flicks blood down his arm and his onto his white sneakers. It spares him having to speak. (It doesn't heal.)

"I don't know." Is the answer he gives. His outline is distorted, strange, like he stands on a layer of the world that is ever so slightly beyond world they stand in. The space that is the edge of his body seems too sharp to be real though sometimes, it slips backwards, as though trying to fade him into the background, into the rest of the world.

"But I came to find you. It doesn't matter to me, right now."

[unsheathedfromreality]

That voice.

That silhouette, that stance, child-small but not child-vulnerable--not physically-- Illarion's horror is instant and deep. Half's at himself and the blood on his talons; half's at this first and fatal evidence his mind is gone, for he'd witnessed Kaworu's death and the hallucinations so often wore the newly dead to torment him with guilt.

And yet. And yet, he is Argonaut's creature through and through, for there's a dim and struggling hope beneath the horror that moves him to ask,

"Little bird?"

He struggles--visibly, he struggles--against that horror, unclenching his bloodied talons, and reach out toward that familiar-and-not presence. It feels Throneborn; it feels like Kaworu. It could be a demon, and he could have just doomed himself by reaching.

Yet how could he not, after all these weeks? How could he not?

For Bigby

[unsheathedfromreality]

So many of those who've come are dear to Illarion--but there is one specific person whose presence tugs strangely at his dead heart, one he didn't give a proper goodbye to before the fight against Leviathan and all its messy fallout. One person in all of Trench he'd trusted to hold his name alongside his other secrets--

"Bigby!"

The numbness serving the shrike in place of reserve breaks as he recognizes the other man. He all-but-leaps across the distance between them to get his friend in an embrace, any thought of propriety fled.

[enblightened]

At last.

It'd been disturbingly difficult since Illarion's disappearance, a matter that he has tried to not examine too deeply, frustrating anxiety twisting him up and spilling out as he could keep himself barely contained.

And finally, there is relief.

Normally, such an eager display of affection would make him shy or uncertain, but right now he grabs Illarion and pulls him close, clutching him furiously. And he feels human for it.

The name in his mouth, the tip of his tongue, but he keeps it hushed. A promise he'd never break.

"My dearest comrade," he says quietly instead, meaning every word.

C

[justoscar]

It was no secret that Oscar was only there at Sayo's behest. Anyone who knew him could see the threads that showed where he was merely 'acting' like the fledgling called Sweetroll, despite currently occupying the bird-like form. Anyone who knew Ozpin could further see the threads of the headmaster's influence in the straight-backed, proper carriage which he kept slipping into when he forgot to himself and fumbled between the threads of identity the had just become more complex.

Oscar Pine wanted to be just himself. Instead he was navigating yet another set of foreign memories on top of the foreign memories he usually navigated, and the moments where he seemed to 'break character' were the easiest way for him to keep his sanity.

He looked up in surprise at Illarion's approach, distracted by his own doeny, fledgling feathers and a tangent of memory from Remnant that his unconsciousness helpfully provided. It wasn't his own-- but it was a scrap of what life in the country of Anima, where the humans with beast-like features called Faunus lived, was like. Truly, the Wizard had taken partners and lifetimes across all cultures of his own world...

Recognition took a moment too long to dawn-- and Oscar-as-Sweetroll laughed awkwardly when he recognized the words in a language he couldn't possibly have known.

<<"It just seemed like the right thing to do,">> he answered in kind, trying not to think too hard about where the words were coming from. <<"No one deserves to live in this kind of prison. Even if we're strangers... I couldn't say 'no' after I learned what happened.">>

abecedarium

[butnotyet]

Lord Augustin the Deathless has already made one scene, today. It's hardly his style; he was never a swan, seeking to join Pleasure's Court, to drown himself in the splashy, flashy hedonistic decay of the dying High Elves, taking and sucking all the life and joy and delight and health out of everything around them, welcoming Death with open arms and a knowing smile — no, there is a reason (there are so many reasons) that he is the Deathless, and only one of them is the way that his knowing smile sends Death running in the opposite direction.

Lord Augustin is far from his rhizophora swamps, his mangled fastness of a home — he is only a solitary elf, far from the trees he knows, far from the skeletal servitors?? he's raised?!, the orchids wtf he might have used to tear open this Klein-bottle tree guarding, or imprisoning, or anyway containing, his husband —

(Somewhere, in the back of his mind, underneath this relentless cascade of centuries' worth of memories, Augustine the First is having a day, and slaughtering all those demons is not enough to make up for it.)

He's not a loudly emotive sort, but that comes with being an ancient wood elf (and not a flash-in-the-pan, mortal human), and it comes with being undead (when emotional acuity is always such a messy area to focus on, when it comes to fixing a soul back into a body). He's already had to raise his voice once today, addressing that useless fucking angel. He's not going to go charging in and demanding that his rights be acknowledged a second time, especially not with such a crowded audience.

He isn't hiding his presence, by any means. This isn't to say that he's sending longing stares across the glade, or making eye contact; that's both resoundingly stupid and wouldn't even work, given that his Beloved is blind, and that he has no interest in being struck by the madness inherent in such an act —

(What fucking madness is this?! demands Augustine, whose mind has been forced to hold far more memories than any human ought, for far too long — who is struggling, really, to remember who he is, in the face of this compelling narrative telling him all about who he's been.)

But there will come a moment — as he remains near the back of their little caravan, chivvying on those who would fall behind again, and brushing away at least some of the signs of their passage (disguising it, and their numbers, if nothing else) to beleaguer those who might seek to track them — when he is as alone as he is likely ever to be, when Illarion Cassowary will have the opportunity to approach, to speak with his Lord-husband.

And maybe apologize for wandering off, losing contact, and getting yourself locked in a tree that wouldn't even relay messages properly back home, while you're at it, you wretched peacock —

For those who lag behind in the forest… (Augustine, OTA)

[unsheathedfromreality]

It's more than possible to get lost in that tangled wood. Neither the butterfly nor Iskierka seem intent on retrieving a straggler or two if the main group advances toward their goal, so it is possible to go astray--or simply leave to explore farther afield.

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

[wannasmash]

ooc: but anyone please feel free to NPC Ize and his automatons for assistance if you need, or ask for threadjacks etc.

After escaping the blood-choked streets of Soujaseinä and descending into the foothills, Ize, the cedar-brown wood elf with green plumage lags behind to pick up stragglers--physically if needed. His magecraft grants him the results of speed and strength via manipulating his armor. He can move anything he's personally crafted. He's an incongruous sort of elf; he deals in war-metal rather than leather, leaves, and the hunt.

He's fanned out a couple little unfolding automatons from his backpack as rear guards. Their soft clinks help to draw attention away from his own soundless moss-soft step. He doesn't know this particular forest, but he knows the signs forests leave and what it means when the leaves breathe a little too much. He makes himself known, though he might have already been.

"It's you, right? I'm Izerge, Inga's son." Ize figures he, a rare young elf, would be better known to this distantly recollected uncle than the other way around.

Ize, Slortus, Chara, Sweetroll

[butnotyet]

The forest has not been silent for a very long time.

No forest is — or at least, no forest should be; no living, healthy forest is silent, except when drowning in the terror of the worst predators, those that are a danger not only to mammals, avians, reptilians, insects and arthropods, but even the trees themselves, the bushes, the flowers and vines —

There's a piece of this forest where the forest is silent; those monstrous forces animating the endless tromping steps of those creatures circling a very specific hollowed-out tree are such a danger —

— over there.

Over here, the profoundly loud chorus announcing the progress of a party that Does Not Know the Ways of the Forest drowns out any attempts at subtlety — for most, at least; it's nice to see that at least one of those members of the party not racing ahead at a breakneck speed toward battle with demons is paying enough attention to know who he sees, and nearly manage a properly polite greeting.

"Hello, young nephew," says... a tree? A bird? Wait, no, that is a person, a wood elf much the same as Ize, his teals related to Ize's greens, so clearly as they stand face to face — and yet there is something unutterably ancient about this man, something that has nothing to do with the avian-predator influence to the cast of his skull, nothing to do with the wealth of feathers growing interspersed with his hair, nothing to do with the way his fingers — as he raises his hand in a brief gesture toward the group, as if collecting all of them together and greeting them at the same time — are tipped with talons, rather than nails; all of these things are equally true of Ize, after all, and he is one of their number, and has been since they appeared in a city besieging itself —

(no, no, since before that)

— there's something about his icy-grey eyes, though, something ancient, something dead, something that has gone far past Death and found Him wanting, and toppled him from his Tthrone on the way back, and then continued — and this world has had rumors for thousands of years, hasn't it, about an elf who made an eternal home in the midst of the most Hellish swamps imaginable, an elf whose neighbors feared him so much they wanted him destroyed, so much they tried to make a contract with the Shrikes, to kill the unkillable, to bring death to the Deathless — an elf who had lived, or at least resided, in those swamps long enough for them to take his name...

Augustin's head tilts to the side, very abruptly, in a way familiar to any who have ever spent time around birds, or elves, or Illarion-by-any-other-name, and he quirks one eyebrow in a way familiar to anyone who has ever been stuck conversing with the Saint of Patience, which is currently...

"Your dwarven friend does not appear to be tolerating the terrain well," he continues, smoothly, before flicking his gaze to the other two: a pair of... shrikes. Well. No doubt busy planning some sort of trouble; an expression suggesting the thought KIDS these days ghosts across his face, but fails to leave a lasting imprint.

"Are you all in such a hurry to tangle with demons?"

[butnotyet]

Nobody likes demons.

Not these demons, anyway, and not in Nephele-that-Isn't; and Augustin's experience with demons is different, and sometimes worse, and sometimes better thankfully 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!"

[justoscar]

Oscar-- and Not-Oscar-- had kept pace with the ancient uncle as best as he could. Even in Nephele-that-isn't, with it's own layers of horrors that the Remnants of his own world couldn't quite compare, the boy that Oscar had inhabited in the manner of a body-hopping wizard was quite like himself in many ways despite the plumage.

That is to say: hardly a physical fighter.

Swatting at the creatures with his staff, it was all that he could do to keep them at bay. Hanging in the wake of the elf whose plumage reminded of snow-capped mountain tops, where the reach of the creatures faltered, was the safest bet. However--

There was no following him when he approached the angel with a fury that was on par with a force of nature.

On instinct, Oscar-as-Sweetroll sought out cover and laid in wait... watching, listening. His role was in information, not in combat.

Something might still be gained from all of this.

[that_isnt]

He steps through the battle like a ship pushing through a storm, and what appeared to be brown brush flies up in high, glittering columns around him. Butterflies plume around his footsteps, towering clouds of flashing orange, gold light, weightless wings.

From a distance, they rise over the treetops like smoke.