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. ]]

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MAGIC | Effort-gifts - 1A

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Note location: All throughout Trench, though most are in Gaze, Prufrock, and Lumenwood; inexplicably, one in the Jungle has been pinned to the Hunter's back
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

There are two primary magics on Nephele: The magic of devotion and the magic of effort.

A mage is the product of the second. She immerses herself so completely in her art that--with a decade of practice--her expertise transcends nature. An effort-mage may grow so strong she crushes boulders to powder with her fists, or so sturdy her skin can't be cut by blades, or so skilled a rider her steeds run on water.

It is rare, but possible, to make a mage in much less time. All the avenues are bitter, though some less than others. Children who devote themselves obsessively to study happen in every generation. Children whose parents or minders or leaders devote them obsessively to something are more common. Children whose very survival depends on desperate daily practice of some skill may be mages before their majority, and permanently maimed for it.

We did wonder, at the beginning of the war, how Eyes could field so many mages. Even when he slaughtered Clarent and the Shroudwood, he didn't kill as many as were in his ranks.

The solution to that problem comes clear, if you give it a little thought: We dead need never take time off from practice, and it is a matter of our survival that we obey the necromancer who raised us.

[justoscar]

Gaze had quickly become Oscar's home, despite it's dense libraries being so different from the fields he grew up in, and it was a place where a Oscar felt comfortable spreading the wings he had only found in the Dream. Night flights had become a way to pass his time-- and gliding silently though the towers in the shape of a small owl was a strange comfort to him. He knew most of the nooks and crannies that lurked above eye level and, spotting a paper tucked into a strange spot, he gave into curiosity and retrieved it.

In the blink of an eye he was a teenager settled into the high boughs of a tree, hazel eyes that gleamed in the moonlight squinted while he read the text.

...a chill crept up his spine unbidden at reference to children being maimed.

In some ways, it sounded hauntingly familiar... And it made him uncomfortable.