Illarion Albireo (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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deercountry2022-05-16 04:23 pm
unsheathedfromreality) wrote in deercountry2022-05-16 04:23 pm
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.
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 ]]
no subject
He tilts his head curiously, though he doesn't need to see or hear him better. His eyes grow hungry and round. He leans forward slightly, scarred hands curling on his helmet--faceless for now, those plates retracted into it.
"Lucky I had my gear," he reminds him of the only caveat that concerns him. It would be a shame if Ize showed up in his sleeping clothes without anything he'd crafted himself. He can't move something that isn't his.
"Careful, promises are root things--if I'm lucky enough to live that long." He doesn't say Please continue, because a Prince will anyway.
no subject
The body is a vessel. The body is a sheath to a blade. He inhabits it, but it does not inhabit him. When he draws back, he feels no afterimage of touch, and his smile is only a small thing. (Was it different, once? It must have been.)
"Lucky," Atreus repeats, something private to his inflection, before he sweeps that aside as well, "As I'm lucky you're here. Who else would help me retrieve a long-lost soldier?"
The Old Man is more than that, but there are listening ears close, and discretion is a habit not readily abandoned: "Someone whose final obliteration seems to have been overstated. An old ally of the family."
"And I have no intention of spending your life carelessly," he adds, much more quietly, half of the words collapsed to battle-sign gestures he's taught Ize in the flurry of clandestine missions he's dragged the wood elf into.
no subject
Atreus makes good on his promise of an interestingly educational adventure and underscores the danger of it in the same breath, but this double-edged sword is enough to sate Ize's hungry curiosity.
He has to lean in again to hear him, the layered scales of his armor shifting smoothly like wide leaves. His large eyes (but not so large as they used to be, once) flick back towards him with a firm, steady look. He forms sign he doesn't dare speak aloud for a variety of reasons, some of which are obfuscated even to himself:
And your life?
Ize never had much, yet somehow he's gathered so many things he's unwilling to lose. Atreus is one of them.
no subject
Another preoccupation Atreus has divested himself of, with so many others eager to take it up for him. He grins at Ize, a closed mouth slash under darkened green (or are they blue? and why does that seem important to know?) eyes that glow like the unseeable heart of witchfire.
Death would have to catch me first, he tells Ize, And she hasn't found me yet.
He punctuates this with the slighest gloved flick of finger to his follower-friend's forehead, the edges of his terrible smile melting like cracked ice under the sun, and he's young again, bright and vital.
"Such a worrier," he teases, in the sheathed-talon way of companions, "What would I do without you?"
no subject
He very nearly smiles with him.
He needlessly winces one eye closed, in the gently exaggerated way close people do, and he briefly considers flicking Atreus back. Ostensibly put back at ease, his hand finds the cords of Atreus's arm again with the corner of his mouth rising wryly.
Showoff. They say Death likes a long hunt. If you come on too strong, you'll disappoint her, unfolds from his free hand. "Is your long-lost soldier anything like you?" One who flirts with death. "What happened?"
no subject
"He died," Atreus says aloud, as his fingers twist into betrayed (failed, abandoned, lost stretch out long talons over the hollow in his chest), "So not so much like me."
War invites certain brutalities into the soul, this seemingly callous humor being one of them. Death is a woman to be flirted with, a fickle hunter on the trail, a wingspan passing over the lucky and descending on the less so, and so it is not an end - or, now, in the shattered pillars of the world, so often a different kind of beginning.
"He was one of my teachers, if that tells you anything." It will. Atreus was raised to be what he has become, the fulfillment of an ancient promise of perfected violence. His teachers were all souls like bared blades and bloody knuckles, whatever skins of society they pulled over themselves. "If the world bent to bring us here, it bent along that line. There is a reason this is happening now."
He's prone to pronouncements like this, things that would be unserious pomp from anyone else, but fall from his lips with undeniably gravity.
"A reason you're here." He shakes his arm lightly, for emphasis. "Let that be your lesson."
no subject
He can almost see the line Atreus describes, but not by mystic means. Ize just seeks to understand what moves others. His empathy stretches out like a cloak of stars on a warm night, endless enough to drown. Atreus and his teacher are two bright motes among others. Ize could lose himself in it if he's not careful. He could sit for hours in the intermingled web of symbiotic mycorrhizae and root structures that make up the fabric of reality and almost see its shape.
Such is the lot of someone with an overactive imagination who was raised on dying hopes and dreams--and is told he must live a very long time.
The focus in his eyes alights on pragmatic earth again, and he feels he must remind Atreus it exists for a moment, in the solid ground beneath them and the circuit their arms make. Atreus will know what's coming from the lopsided grin.
"Careful, or I might learn you a thing or two when you least expect it--my Prince." He is at his most crass (and grammatically incorrect) when he is most fond, and he likes to place that next to niceties for contrast.
Because he does take Atreus seriously, in the end, Ize puzzles over it, "More of a reason than a missing teacher... What makes you so sure? The world doesn't care how precious he is, only what makes its cogs turn." The simplicity of the question says he's not doubting Atreus, but putting one foot in front of the other in near-darkness.