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

[unsheathedfromreality]

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

cw: self-harm

[terriblepurpose]

There was a time when Paul believed in coincidences.

The note flutters in a stray breeze, motion on the motionless impassivity of what passes for a god in this poisoned world, and Paul plucks the pin that holds it to stone with a face to match the carved marble blankness of the Doorway.

He reads it twice. Folds it and slips it under the band of his wrist-knife's sheath, into one of the niches set for exactly that purpose, and walks on as if what he saw was as unremarkable as one of the lists pinned to the fridge in the place that feels less and less like someone else's home.

It's good, he thinks, as imperfectly folded paper itches at the fragile skin of his wrist until its edges are as pink as orchid-petals, as the inner curve of shells. It's good that he found this one, of anyone, and so he leaves a juice-heavy plum at an untended altar on his way back to the First House.

In a room that isn't his, Paul writes out a new note on a clean slip of paper.

Eska - Critical point. Vulnerable to physical injury. Vulnerable to nostalgia. Isolate from subject before elimination.

He pins it to a board scattered with other notes with the same pin he's carried since the Doorway, pried out of his numb palm.