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Simple Gifts [Closed] - Part 2

WHO: Galadriel, Thranduil, Solas, Myrobalan, Merrill, Kitty, Lakshmi, Teren, Marcoulf, Jang, Obi-Wan, and Anders
WHAT: A trip to a perfectly normal Chantry in the middle of nowhere.
WHEN: Current.
WHERE: The Island of Alamar, Ferelden.
NOTES: Current warnings, to be updated: Mild Gore

The Abbey on the White Cliff

Around noon on the fourth day, Brigette and the other sisters gather up the people of the Abbey. Everyone who can walk, who can stand, is urged to join them in the auditorium--the doors at the end of the main hall are thrown open and the people welcomed in. Today Reverend Mother Alvar will be enacting her final miracle and, in the grand tradition of this Abbey, the people are invited to behold and take joy in the sight of it. They are encouraged to be there for the end of the previous Reverend Mother's life, just as they are encouraged to welcome the new Reverend Mother, Luca, as she assumes her new position.

The auditorium is a wide, stepped chamber that drops downward into an open forum and stage. The roof is high and domed and was once constructed of the same grey stone as everything else on the island. It was caved in at some point, destroyed by a falling tree, but it has been patched over with wood and canvas. The extensive scaffolding speaks volumes of how much effort has gone into restoring this room, but all of it stands still and empty in preparation for the ceremony.

Above the center of the stage, in the very middle of the room, visible from all angles, there is a great green tear in the veil--a massive rift cleaves the room in two. It churns sluggishly, ebbing and twisting, muted under the weight of whatever pall hangs across this Abbey. Around the rift there is a golden arch--the wood is carved into flames and swords and papered over in hammered gold leaf. Behind the rift there is a triptych depicting scenes from the Chant and each is lovingly painted and framed in gold.

The room is filled with chaos, but not of the sort one would expect in the shadow of a rift. The people who meander in, the pilgrims who take up the seats near to the stage at the base of the steps, all of them are smiling, all of them are happy, some are weeping tears of joy or remorse, but all of them are entirely unsurprised by the rift's presence. They take no issue lingering near it. Praise is heaped upon the carpenters for their diligence in finishing the arch, songs are sung softly as everyone gathers, and eventually the room is prompted to recite from the Chant as Alvar comes to the center of the stage. She is frail and those who spoke with her earlier will see how she has aged--twenty years in a day, it seems--and she leans heavily on Luca until she moves apart to stand on her own.

Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls.
From these emerald waters doth life begin anew.
Come to me, child, and I shall embrace you.
In my arms lies Eternity.

When she speaks the Chant, for a moment, her voice sounds youthful again--no older than Luca's--but it is fleeting and before the end she is breathless and thin once more.

OOC:

Hey everyone, this is part 2! I will be posting an initial thread for this scene that will be a free for all, but feel free to start a thread beneath the Ceremony Header if you want. Below I will be reposting the updated areas and people links, same as the previous post.

New Top-levels are welcomed, as always, but if you have questions please hit me up.

This section will contain the rest of this plot, unless we skyrocket to too many tags for me to keep them straight.

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"Yes." Teren advances again, drawing her other large blade from behind her back, one at a warning throat-height for Jang.

"Last chance." She doesn't want the ring, despite feeling intrigued by it; it's simply clear to Teren that the longer it stays on a person, the more dangerous the world around them will be. She's already learned the hard way that touching it herself is a bad idea.

Their argument reaches a fever pitch as the cold of the wraiths vanishes. Solas is ignored, at least partially, as Jang withdraws and Teren advances. They are given a spare moment, standing in the wake of the building, before a shriek resounds around the wall, from the trees.

The sound is sharper near the ring.

It echoes against it, after a fashion, and the walls seem to scream as it does. They have only a few seconds before the wraiths descend.

"Shit! Come on, emergency exit!" Jang turns from Teren, risk assessment shifting to the wraiths and flicks a card towards the stone wall.

"Fire in the hole!" she shouts out as the card detonates, but with a lot more power than before. The wall crashes inwards, scattering a few rows of beds that were on the other side, but a large hole now present.

A lot of things happen at once, but one of those things is Jang ignoring Teren's warning. As she turns to blow the hole in the wall, Teren slashes out with the knife poised near Jang's throat, but is also thrown aside by the blast. She rolls a foot or so, and then lurches back to her feet, tearing after the rifter in a panic. She hates that noise, she hates all of this, and if Jang keeps the ring, she just knows they're even further up shit creek than before.

Solas is beginning to get angry, a frustrating thing born of his desire to bring this ring back to Galadriel. He knows from her the dangers of the ring, what it can do to people, and clearly Jang is already suffering the consequences of it. He has to get it back, has to make sure that it does not fall into the wrong hands, that it is only in his possession long enough for it to go to Galadriel.

"Jang! Stop!" Reaching out, he brings his staff around and summons his Pull of the Abyss, dragging her back by the strength of his magic alone. It should be enough to hold her in place as he moves forward, rushing after her with his eyes focussed entirely on the Rifter, fury starting to colour him.

"Remove the ring or you will perish! It will take you!"

The Pull of the Abyss grabs Jang handily, and it also manages to snare the debris from the wall and Teren. They had only seconds before the wraiths were upon them and those seconds are bitterly spent--the creatures appear around the corners of the walls, moving in near unison, with their blades drawn.

Solas is the easiest found--two move for him while the other two move toward the twisting rift spell and the people trapped inside it. They strike at Solas as he runs, missing narrowly and winding up to strike again and, all too soon, the three are surrounded with only the hole in the wall to provide an escape.

Jang lets out a cry of pain as Teren's knife cuts a long shallow slice down her side, blood beginning to flow from the wound, dripping onto the sizzling ground where it flashes to bitter steam with another scream from the burning rocks. This time though, the scream has notes of joy mixed in, joy at tasting blood again.

She is about to ignore it, and focus solely on running through the hole she punched in the wall when she's gripped by Solas's magic and yaked away from safety.

That, as it were, was the last straw.

"FINE! You want it you lunatic? Come and get it!" And with that, Jang flings burning cards towards the wraiths, the cards crackleing with power as they slam with great force into them.

This has quickly devolved from the simple snatch-and-grab Teren had planned, but the terror of the situation doesn't fully hit her until she is unwillingly dragged back out of the hole by a spell and brought face-to-face with the wraiths. A wordless, frightened yell escapes her, and she dives back for the rent wall without any intention of doing any fighting. She's seen how this ends: people lose arms. And lives.

"Jang," she calls again, helplessly, once inside; Solas, from her point of view, looks doomed. Why are mages like this

Solas does not, at least, seem particularly concerned about the wraiths that are chasing after him. A veilstrike heads towards one and he aims another shot towards another, this time a bolt of ice that should be enough to incapacitate it. His concern is not the wraiths right now; his concern is, instead, on getting the ring back. It is not Jang's to take and, clearly, she does not have the control over it that she should.

The challenge is there - come and take it. He will.

"Jang!" There's no hesitation. He ignores the wraiths, the damage to them done, and follows after her.

Two of the wraiths, those struck by Jang's cards explode in a shower of brackish water, dousing everyone as they are destroyed. The wraith that is struck with the veilstrike only stumbles, the one attacked with a spire of ice does not react at all at the ice pierces it and sticks. A moment later it has grown a hard shell of frozen water around the wound. Ice armor, and it is spreading.

This is a poor forum for argument and becomes poorer still as the wraiths come close enough to swing their blades properly. One brings a blade down on Jang, carving into the stone as it swings, the other copies it, in time, as if by command.

The stones around then steam and scream and, unfortunately for Teren, the interior of the building will be less friendly soon. The dormitory behind her, all rows of beds and furnishings cast into disarray by Jang, is growing darker and colder. Already the shadows deepen and stretch away from the hole in the wall.

"You. Are. Making. Things. WORSE!" Jang screams at Solas, as she rolls to the side, sparks flying from the blade cutting into the Ghost Rock, and it starts to burn. The flames are blueish green, and in the depths of the flame and smoke you can see faces, eyes and mouths screaming in pain. And the flames spread, flowing like syrup up the walls and down to the ground, sparking and hissing and screaming.

She scuttles backwards, trying to get inside, away from the flames and away from the wraiths, but most of all, away from the person who seems so obsessed that he is willing to die to obtain her ring. But she won't let that happen, She has it now, and she can handle it.

Teren can't recall the last time she was this frightened, and it only seems to be getting worse. There's no time.
But Jang can't face every direction at once. She's coming backwards, and Teren, growing desperate, is behind her, with a blade at the ready to punch into Jang's back like a needle into velvet: it's a well-practiced angle intended to sever the victim's spinal cord, leaving them alive but paralyzed from the waist down.
They can drag her if they must. They'll kill her if they must. But that ring has to come off.

"You would repair all this if you would hand the ring over!" Solas knows exactly what is happening. It is what Galadriel had warned him about, what he had been concerned over when he had first realised where the ring might be. Jang cannot control is, has no means of subduing the power, and he has to make sure that the ring is off her body as soon as he can, even if it means removing the finger.

Moving forward, he watches Teren, nods his head, shifts and begins to cast his magic, to make sure no wraiths come. Let Teren handle Jang - he's sure that he can wrangle the ring from her, if necessary. He is the authority on magic and the Rifts here, let him have the ring. He knows the danger, the effects, the problems.

"It must be kept away from anyone who might use it!"

Jang feels the knife enter her back and she cries out in pain, but the pain stops, and she falls to the floor. Her legs won't work, and it takes a great deal of effort to raise herself up. She turns around, seeing Teren standing there, bloody knife in her hand.

"You bitch..." With a wordless cry of anger, she flings a card at Tehren, it flips in the air and landing face down on her upper chest, where it burns. It burns with a green fire and the air is suddenly filled with the smell of burned flesh and cloth. A ace of spaces glows for a moment on Teren before it faces, leaving the scorched flesh.

"Something to remember me by" Jang spits out at Teren from the floor, more cards appearing in her hand. "Good luck without me assholes."

They are focused, almost utterly, on the fallen Jang--the wraiths that swing and move toward them, the flaming walls that scream with the voices of the dead, even the footsteps that approach from within the dormitories, carried by an invisible shape, all are ignored in favor of cutting Jang down to retrieve the ring.

"They won't be entirely without you," a voice speaks from the gaping hole, the one Jang is half collapsed within. A freezing bolt of cold moves through Teren and then closes on the space before her. Alvar forms in the air, bluish and translucent with her dead gaze locked on Jang's face.

Her hand presses down on Jang's chest and then sinks within it. Jang screams and the cards in her hand evaporate into fine mist. The spirit of Alvar smiles again right as she sinks into Jang's body.

Right as she retakes her ring.

It's uncharacteristic for Teren to ever look guilty about something, but as she meets eyes with Jang on the floor, there's almost an apology in hers. It didn't have to be this way, they could have just gone for the docks-- but she doesn't have long to think about it, because suddenly there's a searing heat on her chest, and Teren's resulting scream is of panic as much as it is anguish. She collapses against the far wall, gripping the injury with one skinny hand, looking up just in time to see Alvar finish the job and disappear into the now-dead girl.

Outside there's the elf, and beyond him, a forest of nooses. Backed against the wall of a damp, shadowy room, in pain and terrified, having just killed an ally for what seems to amount to no reason, Teren both laments and drearily welcomes the possibility that she is about to die.

It is unfortunate that it had come to this, Solas thinks, moving forward. He does not quite have the same sympathy for Jang that he might have had otherwise - she had been given many chances and the danger of the ring was too high to risk to her simply being allowed to continue to have it. No, it was an unfortunate result but one that could have been avoided were it not for that power. A shame, but a necessary one, in the end.

Turning his head to look at Jang's body as Alvar sinks into it, his eyes narrowing and his Rift magic growing around him to keep her close. Spirit magic is trickier, dangerous, he has learned that, but the Rift? He knows how to use that. He lifts a Veilstrike, aiming for the hand, aiming for the limb, to twist and break it so that, hopefully, the pain will stun and he can move close.

"Teren," he says cooly, staff in hand, magic surrounding him. "Perhaps you would like to escape."

The veilstrike hits Jang's arm efortlessly. It crushes it into the ground and it bends in several places it was never meant to. Her body is motionless as she is attacked but, once the strike is done, there is a flutter of movement. The fingers on Jang's hand tighten around the ring and, as they begin their jerking movements and form a fist, there is a strange haze that starts to rise. It is light, like the first beginnings of steam or smoke, but it is coming off of the body.

"You can't leave, not before I thank you," Jang says, her tone distant and with a quality of a sheet of vellum being batted about in a gale.

Then, all at once, Jang sits back up, her eyes open, and a cold blue light leaks from them. The macabre figure smiles and, with every motion, some of what remained of Jang seems to start evaporating away.

Teren thinks Jang has already thanked her plenty— her sternum burns painfully where the card hit it— but this doesn’t seem like an argument she can win.
“Get the fucking ring!” she shouts to Solas, picking herself back up to exhaustedly brandish both daggers, prepared to fend the creature off as long as she has to. But she didn’t come this bloody far just to give up on it, and nobody makes Teren von Skraedder do a damn thing she doesn’t want to.

There is no hesitation in Solas. He came for a reason, and that reason is set and clear in front of him - he will have the ring.

He summons another spell, a minor rift to hold the twisting body of Jang in place as he moves forward, magic around him as he goes. Teren is at his side, as exhausted as they both are, and it means they can both reach to try and grasp her. His fingers reach for her wrist, to hold her in a grip that is more like iron than anything else, squeezing hard as his other fingers go for the ring, to tear it off and keep it in his palm.

It must go back to Galadriel. It is the only thought in his mind.

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Simple Gifts [Closed] - Part 2

The Abbey on the White Cliff

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After a long pause, we are back to horror I am so sorry guys.

WELL BYE

o damn