deercountry | I don't wish to evade the world

Entry tags:

I don't wish to evade the world | OTA

Who: Illarion, Ives, and anyone else sucked into the chaos vortex
What: A yurtwarming party + memories and misadventures (in comments)
When: Whenever
Where: Wherever
Shakira: Shakira

Content Warnings: Will warn per prompt!

November had been a cruel month for all Trench, mired in corruption and sacrifice; December had opened no better with its piercing chill and Sleepers pit one against the other by an ancient and echoing folly. Darkbloods in particular had been afflicted with the compounding feeling of control slipping through their fingers, and even Illarion--whose dead heart was beyond most emotions (so he thought)--couldn't escape the sense that everything was about to go horribly, irrevocably wrong if he didn't rein it in.

So he'd vanished into Trenchwood to get control of his ~~life~~ existence and somehow ended up building a couple of yurts with Ives. Funny, how that worked out.

Forever my home (OTA-ish, with Ives, early January, Trenchwood)
With the start of the year and the advent of the Egg Moon, life (and undeath) is suddenly looking a lot more positive. Once they'd finished their house-building, Illarion noted (and Ives agreed) that there were certain forms to be upheld: They should invite other Sleepers over to visit. Invitations trickled out over Omni and Omen to people they know, informing them of a new Lamp location and offering an opportunity for food, camaraderie, and conversation away from the heated and busy confines of the Snake Den.

The square for their odd little village of two (sometimes three) is where all the action's at, for any who come looking in response to the invitation. The fire pit is the center of attention: Large enough to contain a bonfire, lined with hand-laid stone, and often host to a simmering stewpot with food enough to share. Several logs surround it at a comfortable distance from the heat, allowing ease and conversation. Ives' yurt stands nearby, just large enough to give the Giant a sheltered place to sleep, and a small covered well with attendant pail offers fresh water. The Lamp, and its Lamp Friends (decorated with ribbon for the season), are opposite the fire from the yurt and a little ways into the trees. Discreet incense burners ring the clearing in a faint pall of smoke, with scents of pine and wet moss that pleasantly smooth Trenchwood's harsher odors--and more importantly, keep the beasts away.

A path leads away from the fire, off toward the distant mirror of the Salt Lake, permanently red this month thanks to Moon Presence's... presence. Sleepers with very sharp eyes might make out the mounded shadow of another yurt in that direction.

One or both of the Giant and the shrike might be found hanging around the place if expecting guests. Ives may be tending to a fine vegetable stew, attending to various little maintenance tasks, or simply sitting at his ease by the fire. He's also acquired a pan flute at some point and is looking for any excuse to play it. Illarion's often keeping incense lit, mending gear and cleaning weapons, or when he's in the mood--and that's often, this month--holding forth in story or song to anyone around to listen.

((OOC: Let us know if you want one ~~furry~~, the other, or both on your tag in!))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[As a dutiful Disciple, Illarion's created his own Winter Mournings for the season. Then he'd secured them in his house in the woods, away from where all but a very few could find them (and the antlers wouldn't bother Ives).

He hadn't counted on Pthumerian caprice, or something else, that made his memories reachable even by those who hadn't touched the bones.

Those who find their way into one of the shrike's memories might find it disorienting to start. The world he remembers is richer in color and deeper in dimension than the one most other Sleepers see; the higher realities may impose themselves strangely on sight used to three dimensions alone.]

i. How's the one drowning in the mire? (cw: familicide, implied dismemberment)
[This is an office as might suit many a military leader with sybaritic tastes. Its silk-draped walls boast many detailed and lovely maps studded with troop markers and embellished with notes; the heavy carven desk (skulls and flowers, bones and birds) at the center is stacked with parchment and paper in tidy piles. Illarion--younger, bright-eyed, alive and visibly stricken with worry--leans over a spray of letters fanned out on its surface. His outfit's a barbarian warlord's: A mantle of sable and bones worn over a high-collared felted coat worked ornately in silver; loose pants tucked into soft boots; a hood and veil to obscure much of his face.

Aleksandr, line Piautos, reported missing on patrol by his lance-captain today, stands out a sentence in one dense and cramped parchment. --no word of your son's whereabouts, in another, and, our deepest condolences, Margrave.

There's a knock and a muffled announcement. Illarion looks up from his letters. A small and round person enters the office on six legs, carrying a scrollworked wooden box nearly as large as their chest with both caped arms. They look up at Illarion with careful scrutiny; he is distracted a moment by how he can't see through the box to its contents. Then he shakes his head, visibly assuming the whole of his authority. "You are the Swan Sorceress's messenger, yes? What is this she sends?"

"Yes, Margrave. She said to announce it as 'a gift from Domnika Cor Hydrae to her estranged son, Ill--'"

"Neither you nor she have rights to this name. Do not speak it," he cuts the messenger off cold. "Give me what she has sent and go."

Paling, the messenger swallows. "My commission was to remain until you'd opened it, Margrave. No payment and worse than that if I depart early."

He considers this, visibly wrestling with some emotion behind his heavy veil, before conceding. "If you will; I would not have her punish you."

The messenger's odd face contorts in what might be relief at that. They hand the box over to Illarion's keeping. He frowns at its weight and the faint whispering that comes from it before setting it gingerly on his desk to undo the clasps dogging the lid. One uneasy breath passes his painted lips before he throws it open.

 The box is empty. The box is not empty: It is full of feathers, white on black, with dead staring eyes as gold as his, and severed talons still drenched with blood.

Staring, stammering at what they see in his face, the messenger begins, "It was as empty as that when she gave it to me, Margrave--"

"G̴̯͋͝E̵̤̦̤͆̈́̃T̵͈͔̤̆ ̸̮͎͌͝O̴̫̱̊̈́U̵̲̝̹̿T̵̥͓̒̍͠.̶̮̊̚͝"

The door's scarcely shut behind the fleeing messenger when Illarion collapses over the box, a high and awful keen caught in his throat.]

ii. A child of light, another tale
["Another one here, Dusya--Swallowtail's Rout and the Massacre of the Innocents. King and Throne, the colors she's used for them..."

Memory places the viewer before a ruined, soot-grimed wall in a ruined, soot-grimed city cloaked in the hush of recent violence that's left buildings flattened and streets emptied. Three figures cluster at the far end of the wall, bright in the dust and smoke in their high-collared embroidered felt coats and skins of shifting, whispering feathers. One of them might be familiar, magpied white-and-black with golden eyes and dark red stripes on his face. He's the shortest of the three, not helped by how he's sitting on his heels to stare up at wall like he could look beneath the soot from that angle. Whatever he's looking at (overlay: a mural, dark and elegiac, of lissome feathered warriors dying in their dozens beneath a crush of human cavalry), it's upset him nearly to the point of tears. The man beside him in grays and oily starling-starred iridescence--his clothing far more nondescript, his face undecorated--rests a hand on the shorter man's snowy hair in a comforting gesture.

The third member of their party, duller of feather and dark of hair, stands head-and-shoulders over the taller man. They--no, she, undeniably female though no more curved than either man--takes shorthand notes in a leather-bound volume tucked into the crook of one arm. She looks up once at the distress in her companion's voice, intent expression softening in a moment of fondness, before returning to her writing. "One we never had an agent in to see before the siege," she mutters. "A good candidate, Dusya; she knew St. Halusion before he died there. We don't know his face and have wanted proper icons of him."

(Some thread of knowledge woven into the memory's weft suggests these three seek their people's history, shattered by war and the deep ideological schisms that cleave brother from brother. Whoever she is, the unknown muralist, she's memorialized parts of it they've lost.)

"And," The woman punctuates the sentence she's working on decisively, looks up once more, "if you keep La--"]

You do not belong here.

[An older, wearier, dead version of the smallest shrike interjects on the name, suddenly there in his own memory at the intruder's side. He doesn't seem upset.

He doesn't seem much of anything.

No matter who he's intercepted.]

Though you may witness on my sufferance, if you will not speak of what you have seen.

iii. Dull the blade and dance some more (cw: undeath, mind control, depersonalization, emesis, gore, cannibalism)
[More than a single memory tumbles over the unfortunates who find this--it's a torrent, an overwhelming deluge of impressions rendered icy and detached by the emotion that's been riven from them. They threaten to drown the unprepared in their grey and thoughtless crush:

Illarion is dead. Illarion is still walking despite his death, raised to the service of a grinning human madwoman with unquenchable violence in her eyes and an axe wet in the blood of nations. He joins her Court without protest or consent; he kills at her direction or at her generals'. He is given three weeks of free rein to murder any elf he sees and demonstrate the utility of his pillar corruption before he is remanded for further training.

Illarion is dead. Illarion has been tasked to become a necromancer, wresting the magecraft native to the undead. He spends days at a time in one place, still as a corpse, lips working soundlessly and eyes glazed as he repeats, repeats, repeats the subtle internal motions that further detach his poorly moored soul from his body. The separation and sucking pressure of the grasping Void should be horrifying; he cannot feel horror. He cannot feel triumph when a year into the unending process he lures another soul up, across the Veil, and through him into the waiting rotted corpse laid out for it; he cannot feel anything as he collapses from the strain and his body, confused momentarily into a paroxysm of life, vomits old bile. The corpse reeks of saltwater and screams as the threads binding it to Illarion are drawn out of him and reanchored to something Larger.

Illarion is dead; Illarion is dying. Whatever they did to him to keep a shrike's uncanny nature attached to one of the undead is destroying him. His outself warps a little more whenever he steps through a wall or removes a beating heart with his bare hands. Eating flesh helps. Eating flesh that once could think helps more. Illarion is dead and sitting at the bottom of a mud-filled trench, dividing a dead human soldier between himself and a patient hungry ghoul.

Something laughs in the back of his head whenever he's particularly cruel and his cruelty particularly funny.

Illarion is dead. Illarion steps right through the locked gates of a ramshackle outpost, slipping past the exhausted orcish soldier guarding it in shadow and parts outward. He bypasses the walls as well with ghost-like ease, before dropping back inward and stifling a wracking cough in his elbow with absent habit. Blackened blood and worse spot his uniform sleeve; he pays it no mind--he's already moving again, head on a swivel. Cinderblock and cheap pinewood alike are no hindrance to his sight. Even if he didn't know already which office held his target, he could see her from here, bent over the keys of her encryption machine and her face a mask of furious concentration. The feathers on her ears have all been plucked out from stress. He steps through the last wall between them and something

s n a p s

behind his eyes and color floods the world. He lurches to a stop.

Everything goes black.

Illarion is dead and Illarion is blind and Illarion is screaming for his target to run before his backup arrives.

Illarion--Trench's Illarion--grabs his living witness by the shoulders and hauls them out of memory's current with a violence born of awful worry.]

iv. Here I am to share the fear
[Or perhaps you're not in Illarion's memories; perhaps there's a chalk-pale specter standing in one of yours, watching (watching) everything with thoughtful golden eyes and a dispassionate expression.

The temptation of witnessing what lay hidden in his fellow Sleepers had been too much to resist, though he won't be intrusive about it, if he's not noticed right off.]

Edited 2022-01-06 07:30 (UTC)

[He's always there.

He's always there, some strange tall male that is both terribly out of place and precisely where he's meant to be, standing out of the way with sharp clawed hands behind his back, posture upright and steady. He blends in, he's supposed to be there (he's not supposed to be there, who is he), he's always been there. Eyes like banked glowing coals, feathers tinged with the barest hints of orange-red fire, clothing severe and dark and somehow improbably not out of place.

He watches and he says nothing, only the faintest tugs of air currents ruffling a feather now and again. Watches a pale messenger flee in terror, watches a man not unlike Illarion give voice to some unknown agony.

He does nothing; ember bright eyes gleam in the dull burnt-out shadows.

Things distort, things change and he's still there, amongst the ruins of some broken city.

He always has been.

And when he has company, he only turns his head slightly to regard Illarion directly, the intensity of that stare terribly old, and terribly alert. It's familiar. It's completely out of place.

No shadows flicker in the light of this place, not cast by him anyway. His head tilts, a brief sharp gesture. You do not belong here.]

I have always been here.

[It's not one voice, it's two. It's a dozen. It's countless voices stretched across eons, it fades to one single pleasant sounding tone. It is not the sound of these strange elezen birdfolk. He doesn't belong. He does.]

Watch. Listen, and remember.

[The flood of memory rises and snatches them away.

The glitter of fire in the shadows where none should burn is always there. Illarion struggles with death-still-moving and he's there, watching, listening. Death, the parody of life, the stink of blood and bile and sickly sweet rot of corpse, countless lives snatched by reaching claws and terrible magic.

It is an ongoing relentless parade of suffering and misery, of release denied and peace drowned in horrors so familiar they stagnate into mundanity. Never once does the dark shape observing so much as twitch, never mind move to interfere, the regard dispassionate and detatched, and always, always there is no shadow where there should be.

Never once does he blink.

As hands grab shoulders and pull, it's not fire-lit eyes or ember tinged feathers but ordinary brown and terribly human eyes, ordinary white hair, ordinary skin and warmth and there is a shadow and he is not what has been there always been there throughout countless disjointed memories. This is a man Illarion had fetched from the water, warmed and aided as best he could.

This is not the too-watchful shadow bidding Illarion listen, remember, watch ... is it? Certainly he seems normal enough the way his teeth click as he's shaken under a grip fierce with concern, the way a large equine omen with wings fanned wide in avian threat display rushes close, sharp teeth bared, never quite snapping, never quite stomping but certainly making a good show of trying to be intimidating.]

H-hey! Hey, it's alright, it's alright!

[After the first stumbling Sleeper intrusion into one of his memories, Illarion'd prepared for visitors with an unworried practicality. Realistically, the notion of someone walking through his memories and learning his secrets should have evoked concern, even anxiety--if not for himself then for his people--but he doesn't have a pattern for guarding his own memories.

So he was prepared for visitors.

He is not prepared for an intrusion with the quality of the hallucinations he didn't experience anymore, a seamless insertion of someone he doesn't recognize, that was impossible, that nevertheless felt familiar as Esfir or Dusya when it stands beside him and bids him watch, listen, remember. The creature's constant present evokes a different set of memories entirely--a bloody period he has, praise Generation and all the stars following after, not yet seen echoed in the Winter Mournings--when every new-minted shrike fell to the madness that would stalk them, and rose from it, and fell again.

It is enough to wake something that's damn near panic in him by the time the memories draw to their close, and he knows it's the specter he had grabbed for, knows it with that horrible also-knowledge that his knowing could be wrong. Because whoever he's pulled up was someone his mind labeled too fragile for what they're both submerged in, who couldn't be allowed to drown in it,

and the apparition was solid enough to give the lie to the very concept of fragility.

What was that?

He stares through Thancred, literally not seeing him--though he ((feels)) the shape before him--before jerking his head with avian abruptness toward the onrushing Omen. The sound and ((feel)) of the onrushing Omen, who's doing a good enough threat display that Iskierka bursts into existence above her Sleeper and carols a challenge to this beast a thousand times her weight.

Everything's gone black around them, but the sounds of a disturbed military outpost scrambling like a kicked-over ants' nest persist. They're still in the memory even if this part isn't as awful.]

Is it? [All right. It doesn't feel all right. But after that first reflex outburst--the shrike clears his throat.] Are you, I am meaning. [He lets the other man go, stepping back and holding up his hands so Thancred's Omen can see them.]

You have taken no hurt from this?

[Was that normal? Was any of it? There had been warnings, and he a newly awakened Sleeper, had paid close attention to those warnings, and this wasn't the first time he seemed to have fallen sideways into someone else's mind.

Don't interfere. Nothing can be changed anyway.

But now, now with everything very much waking and sounds and smells reverting themselves to what they should be for a foul little mortal town in the dead of winter, Lahabrea has an act to keep rolling and as soon as he's freed he makes an immediate grab for the pegasus, who seems thoroughly intent on latching sharp teeth onto the mothbird OR Illarion, whichever is closer, and yanking the equine's head to the side so teeth snap closed on air and nothing else.]

Stop that! It's fine! Everything's fine, see, nobody's bleeding at all, nobody's hurt, just.. ...stop.

[How much is to reassure the ruffled, stamping Omen and how much is to reassure Illarion? Maybe it's one and the same, though it's the horse that buries his head against Lahabrea's chest with a low sound disturbingly like a human moan.

The Ascian reorients himself neatly, though he keeps a hold on the pegasus, fingers knotting slowly in sooty black forelock.]

I think it is. I don't.. feel hurt, maybe a bit disoriented and fuzzy about the last few minutes but.. [Was that normal? Was that how a hyur should be reacting to that situation? Should it have torn at his mind, or his spirit, left wounds in thought and soul? Should he be hurt? Should he pretend being hurt?

Would it help?]

Was.. that not supposed to happen?

[This last is ventured quietly, uncertainly, like he's missed something terribly vital in his act of humanity and wasn't sure how to mend it now.]

[The shrike keeps still throughout Thancred's reassurances, trusting the man can wrestle his own Omen into submission. That it needs to be wrestled at all is very interesting... And an observation he's not making consciously right now, with much of his focus on managing twin concerns of how much did he see, and what else might be in here? Right now, the winged stallion's fractious anger could well be a product of his Sleeper's disturbance, kept from ruffling the steady surface Thancred presents to the world.

It's a dim relief the other Sleeper's at least something like calm, after what he'd witnessed. Illarion's not much used to being disturbed anymore, not in a felt way (stirrings of corruption, then), and having someone else project relative stability makes it easier to recoup his usual dispassion.

Though the uncertainty, oh--that evokes a ragged shred of sympathy.]

I do not know. I cannot say, [he replies, wrestling some gentleness into his voice.

The blackness around them doesn't relent at the sounds of footsteps drawing near, though there's a sudden sense of presence that's vaguely human-shaped. It's followed by another, and another, all whispering in terrible unease. "Shoot it!" "It isn't doing anything. I don't know if it's even alive--" "Shoot it, for the love of Sacrifice! They're not alive to begin with!"]

I have known Sleepers to take wounds of the body, in these memories, but I did not know whether it might wound your mind to take in so much at once.

["Shoot it where? Throne and powers, it doesn't even look like it's got a head..."

Illarion's expression twitches; he turns his head toward the invisible speaker like he's hearing a familiar voice.]

...What did you see?

How is that heart, underneath the silence (Winter Mournings, OTA)

Everything.

i am estimating the weight of a pegasus here and getting it wrong 100%

'bigger than mothbird'

reasonable measurement; she's roughly breadbox-sized (please give her bread)

IV. cw: physical and mental child abuse

sorry for the late reply! also baby maul......

Not just a baby....one could even say he's a SMAUL one.....I'll see myself out now.

no stay here, i appreciate u & smaul

Forever my home; Illarion

this went through six revisions and a truly execrable bird pun before i was happy with it

well now i have to know the bird pun

absolutely involved calling illarion both a strange bird and an odd duck

Belly of the beast, act 3, but it's just them eating good food; Illarion

honestly the best act 3 possible

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a visit for the old man

welcome home, son boy!!

TSUNS ABOUT IT

deres right back; also stares at embarrassing typo in last tag. o well!!

Forever Home - Hope it's not too late! - Ives, Illarion or both! Just let me know if I should wait.

gleefully bodyslams this!! like so hard i accidentally post the comment way early, oops.

Whups!

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