Real & Half-Real: Iskierka's Notes | OTA

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Who: Illarion's Omen Iskierka and anyone who happens to stumble across her notes.
What: Receiving messages from hell.
When: March 5 onward, after Sayo's full return to the Waking World.
Where: Throughout Trench and the Levels

Content warnings: All of the following are mentioned or discussed obliquely: magical zombies, mind control, emotional manipulation, war-time violence, murder of family members, drug use, cannibalism, suicide, hallucinations/derealization, existential horror, apocalyptic setting, kidnapping, enslavement.



Iskierka has not been idle while her Sleeper is missing from Trench. Somewhere, he's wandering a hell far removed from the Waking World; somewhere, he rehearses to himself the briefing he might give to any would-be rescuers when they arrive, what is necessary to survive and sufficient for Sayo's ritual. When hoping for rescue pales on him, he dictates his thoughts to the air or an animal or a corpse's patient ear, and she hears it.

She hears every word of it, and she cannot respond; she listens faithfully, and the words fill her head to the point of forgetting. When there's no more room for them, she writes. With whatever comes to hand--beg buy borrow or steal--on whatever surface she can find, she writes--scratches out--rewrites. Notes and letters emerge beneath her pen, and she takes them where she thinks they belong. Some she abandons in significant places and others she brings to significant people, urging them to take this fragment of her lost Sleeper.


It may help, when they go to rescue him. If anyone can.

[[ OOC: Real & Half-Real Plot Write-Up and Interest Check, for those just joining us. Even if you haven't left a comment there you're more than welcome to join in on finding notes!

See comments for how to use this post and tasty tasty plot hooks. ]]

Comments

LOCATIONS | A scattering of places one might stumble into, and what may be waiting there

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LOCATION | House Beyond the Last Cedared Hill (Biding's home) - 1A

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Note location: Crenshaw and Lumenwood
Number available: Several
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

When we first fell into this shard of hell, it was malformed. People and times and places crowded in on each other; I walked the ruins of a dozen cities from two continents and a dozen islands, and witnessed people from as many places killing each other in the streets.

It has since settled more into a sensible shape--the Petheryga I remember--but the House Beyond the Last Cedared Hill is still here, just beyond Shroudwood, when it belongs to Nabea and the Surmountine Forest.

There's logic to it. It's Biding's ancestral home and deep elves rarely stray from those. But Biding is here with his doxy his victim Sacrifices to stoke the war of shrike on shrike, so his home must come too. Except it stands abandoned; I sat outside a full day in stupor some hours and no one entered or left.

It is unprepossessing as a manse though that's saying little to the unfamiliar. Instead: it is a vast pile of gleaming colored marble and elfstone cobbles, full of the man's secrets. There are traps (even Asphodel Hall has traps despite its students) and unburned unshriven dead. Whoever enters must tread carefully. I will not go; it is not a place for a shrike, or foreign dead, or a servant of the black gods, and he won't invite me.

I'd spite him if he did.

LOCATION | Isle of Joy - 1A

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Note location: Cellar Door and the Red; the Moss King's home; the Jungle
Number available: Several
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: More likely to award to someone who recently played the Moss King's games

The Prince of Pleasure's demesne is pleasant to look upon and poisonous within. When the rest of elvenkind sought solitude or our oaths to prepare for the end of the world, the swans (the high elves) chose to end their days in debauchery. They would have ended like our cousins the sparrows (ruined, penniless, stripped by mortals of land and wealth through law and conquest and fiat) except they found willing enablers in Sirira--who will do business with anyone, for anything, as long as the money's good.

If there is nothing else good or authentic about the swans, there's at least their money. It was enough to buy them an island.

The Isle of Joy is a study in studied contrasts. There are the forested hills, which we elves don't do well without, and there are the fields of dream-poppies in every color through ultraviolet. Much of it is tamed and managed and manicured as a Clarentish formal garden. It would not be any use if it were not.

The swans keep their manses and dachas and villas and estates and palaces by the waterfront in sight of the channel and Sirira across it. They keep their servants and "servants" further inland.

Here, they keep their shutters drawn against the battles in drowned Sirira, and the vampires that roam their streets by night at the Prince of Pleasure's behest.

LOCATION | Iron Steppes - 1A

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Note location: Mostly in the Jungle; a few in an abandoned airship tower in a remote part of Willful Machine
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

The Steppes are too vast to easily describe. You don't grasp it entirely on foot, standing hip-high in the grass that stretches horizon to horizon. You don't grasp it entirely in the cities of the Fringes, varied and bright-hued as they are, home to a hundred peoples of all the four principles. You don't grasp it entirely in Nirraz, looking down from their mountain as they drive their herds out to roam and forage for the summer. You don't grasp it entirely from above, where the Skilled soar the high vault of the sky above the teeming Verdant Sea.

Though I lose myself in nostalgia and sentiment, here--understanding the Steppes entire would require my Prince's years. Require having seen it all from the beginning. I did not. haven't, couldn't. We sold our years for children. They are worth eternity and now I have no regrets that he would be abandoned by the mayfly Court he had made. He shouldn't have preceded us it upset the order of the world.

The crossing from Tmutarakan to Shroudwood--the shortest way, due north--has two great risks now: the storms and the dryads.

Thundering's Court has turned the whole sky dark and windtorn--unnavigable to to an airship, proved by the half dozen you will find ground -wrecked on your way. Do not approach these, where they appear overgrown; the dryads have taken them, as they have taken most of the Steppes. I do not know why they've spread so far but that Locusts' ascension has maddened them--their only war on Nephele-that-is is with each other, and whatever wheat-field or orchard or garden was placed in their way. They didn't always kill animals who walked through their battlefields (as often tried to coerce them, to eat the other side)--but tore them swiftly apart, when they did kill, fuel for growth.

Here you will die smothered and clambered with vines, saved alive for weeks as they grow through. Better to cut your own throat before that, and lie down in the long grasses to give your blood to the soil. It will not appease them, but it may slow them down to drink and spare those who come after you.

LOCATION | Shroudwood - 1A

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Note location: Trenchwood, Feed, Ache; Illarion's yurt and the Salt Lake; Achelliac and Saphora
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

If you can survive Trench, you can survive Shroudwood.

It is the first thought to mind on returning to my home, after months in the Waking World. Trench is a trial and horror to most Sleepers, the worse to the solitary. Survival requires constant vigilance and exacting performances. Trust in friends, family, and flock are necessary, but the threat of corruption and wilding stretches all those ties to their limits. Trench, at least, still has sun and moon and stars overhead. We lost them, when we sacrificed our Starwood to the pillar and were given Shroudwood in return. (A thought for logistics: We'd need torches. Shrike eyes are made for the gloom. The abominations now haunting it can't need more light than we did.)

Yet, Shroudwood--even here, even in hell--is still more alive than Trench. Pillar corruption is not blood pollution; it doesn't sterilize the soil. (Though Locusts will in time.) There are still stargroves. There are still places the dusk-deer crush the bracken-fern to bed down in it, and reaper-hawks come to hunt them. The apricots are in bud; the sap is rising in the laurels, and by and by they will open their eyes but for now they are demure and lovely.

I wish I could see it. Even knowing I will see the scars of blade and mattock, the gas burns and the torn tracks of tanks. Starflower will grow through them in time. Cyclamens will reclaim it. They always have.

As with Trench, you will survive longest by keeping simple rules in mind: Don't walk alone. Beware of eyes in the dark and never meet them. If you are in a place you don't recognize, speak softly amongst yourselves; if you can't understand each other, retrace your path immediately. If you can see your shadow, retrace your path immediately.

If you see the sun rise above the top of the trees, be still, do not move, close your eyes, wait for rescue.