Illarion Albireo (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
unsheathedfromreality) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2022-03-13 01:59 am
unsheathedfromreality) wrote in deercountry2022-03-13 01:59 am
Entry tags:
Real & Half-Real: Iskierka's Notes | OTA
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. ]]
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. ]]
TARGET | Prince of Preservation (Evdokim) - 2O
Number available: Few
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Most likely to award to anyone Illarion's discussed his past with
I think we--my Prince and his inner Court--all felt we were failing each other, after those first nightmarish hectic years. We rebuilt ourselves to survive what the pillar did to us and to survive how the world saw us. We enacted our great plan to eradicate war through making it unthinkable to wage; we perfected our contracts and spy networks and the veil of secrecy--and our justifications and dissimulations and diversions. We accomplished so much and did so much and couldn't make up for the great moral wound we tore in ourselves.
We knew something was wrong. We still sent our sons and daughters off to war but now there were enough of them it wasn't grinding us to extinction. We said if there were any other way aloud and looked at each other with eyes pleading for the other way we all knew must be there and none of us could voice it.
It was easy, having lived it, to believe the propaganda: That something in us had broken past repairing, that we were monsters past redeeming or reasoning with.
My Prince never believed that. He never gave up on us. He would have outlived us all and never given up though his heart broke.
But I think he still felt he'd failed us even up to his death. He could not solve the flaw in our natures any more than we could solve the flaw in the world that led to all war.