faderift | MOD PLOT ↠ SECRET STEEP'D ROOTS

Entry tags:

MOD PLOT ↠ SECRET STEEP'D ROOTS

WHO: Open
WHAT: Trapped! Trapped in a jungle!
WHEN: Bloomingtide 9:46
WHERE: Unknown
NOTES: OOC post! The three starters in the comments can have multiple threads, and feel free to ask us on the OOC post if you have any "what will happen if I x" questions.

When the eluvian shatters, there's a stutter in the flow of the fight. The eight Venatori nearly all freeze in place for a moment when the glass cracks, watching their way out and their plan crumble, and afterwards they never quite manage to get their rhythm back. But they don't quit, either. In the end, they all go down fighting.

Riftwatch takes no casualties, and the four members of Riftwatch who were taken captive are all alive, accounted for, and mostly unharmed.

That's the end of the good news.

The massive, shattered eluvian was set within a ruin carved and built out of a steep embankment, now almost entirely reclaimed by the jungle. All that's left are the remains of walls—some full height, others crumbling where vines have pushed between the stones or spreading tree roots have disrupted the ground. But with daylight fading and several injuries that need attending to before anyone can move, the surviving walls and thick plant growth form the best shelter anyone can hope to find before nightfall.

When the sun rises and better stock can be taken of their position, the jungle in which everyone finds themselves is still not immediately recognizable. It's hot compared to Kirkwall at this time of year, with temperatures hovering around 75-80F and kept relatively consistent between day and night by the high humidity and non-existent breeze. It rains with some frequency—light showers that are little more than mist by the time they reach ground-level or torrential downpours that start with little warning and drop several inches of rain in an hour before disappearing as abruptly as they'd arrived.

Most of the ruins extending up or out from the embankment are little more than chunks of moss-covered stone buried in the undergrowth. Searching around them will find them a stream running through the remains of a carved stone channel, fast enough to be safe to drink, and they can follow that a short ways out of the ruins to where it joins a much larger river. They won't see any traffic along it except for a variety of river creatures that would be happy to eat them. Judging by the position of the sun and moons, the river leads south.

There is one half-sunken portion of the ruin complex that's more intact, but after exploring it confirms there is no back-up eluvian on offer, there's little choice but to set out into the dense growth of the jungle. Huge trees create a canopy far overhead, and the floor is soft and springy with dead matter. Giant ferns, vines of every variety, and flowers of every conceivable color crowd them at every turn, making travel slow and damp. Overhead, and all around, are the sounds of other creatures moving through the same space. Birdsong, monkey screeches, the constant buzz and chitter of insects. The fauna in the jungle is a mix of the usual sorts of beasts one would expect in such a climate: parrots, monkeys, snakes, absurdly large insects, the rare big cat, whatever other weird animals walk around a jungle.

The walk south along the river will be a long and difficult slog through dense jungle with no real respite from the environment along the way—and no real certainty about their destination. They'll have to make a new camp each night as best they can and push on the next morning, hiking through seemingly-endless forest. At first, they will have the benefit of a path, a trail south alongside the river that appears to have been cut less than a month ago. It will lead to a second set of ruins where signs of Venatori presence will be obvious. They will make camp here for a couple days while they explore more thoroughly for clues about where they are and what the Venatori were up to.

Beyond that point it will be necessary to cut their own trail, an exhausting process that means even slower going and tired arms for everyone who takes a shift at the front of the line. The only break will come when the jungle abruptly gives way to a deep gorge, the river taking a hard west-ward turn and dropping down a series of magnificent waterfalls to what looks like a very large lake at the bottom. They can either find a way down the falls and hike west around the lake, or cross the river via a narrow rock bridge over the falls and continue south back into the jungle. They'll stop here and make camp among the rocks for another couple days to try to identify the lake or the falls before they go any further and risk walking miles in the wrong direction.

The journey will take a few weeks in total, with plenty of time and opportunity for a few people scouting ahead or foraging for food to find trouble (or fun) on their own. But the entire group will also encounter a few hazards together, including, in chronological order:

Shortly after leaving the elven ruins where they came through the eluvian, a flash flood will catch the camp one evening, despite its position on the best available high ground, sweeping away some supplies and ruining others. People outside of the camp, for whatever reason, will lack the high ground and might experience a more dangerous rush of water, and everyone will have to go to sleep damp and hungry.
A day after the group leaves the dwarven ruins, a swarm of dragonlings and several drakes will emerge from a mountain cave when the group passes too close, breathing fire and intent on chasing them away. Their high dragon won't appear for the fight, but several days later she will fly overhead, barely visible through the canopy but obviously very, very large.
A few days later, they'll come upon a hot spring that appears crystal-clear and fine for drinking and bathing, but will result in people developing minor, mostly auditory hallucinatory effects an hour or two after their exposure to it. The plants growing nearby will show to have an even stronger effect, if anyone is foolish enough to eat them to find out.
In a few areas, the river will cut gorges through the mountainous terrain, and following it will require either walking along narrow traversable paths on the cliffsides or holding supplies overhead and fording through the water. Watch out for dickfish.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I don't envy you, having so many." By's fingertips dig into Bastien's chest. Lightly, just lightly, but the pressure is unmistakable, some little curl of grief. Eight, and of them, three dead. Maker. Some strange grief, or some strange love, makes him vulnerable enough that he says, "Every person you love is like a piece of your soul carved off of you. And there's no way to draw them back into you, where they'll be safe - they just stay out in the world, vulnerable to hurt."

Even though it's Bastien, he does regret that a little. It's raw and honest. And at the end of the day, Bastien might still be manipulating him. It'd certainly be an astonishingly long game for the Bard, but - you know. Bards.

So, he forces his voice into flippancy. "Assuming you loved them, of course. I'm sure they were proper beasts if they were anything like you as a young man."

“They weren’t,” Bastien says, aspiring to sound swaggering. I’m one of a kind and all of that. But it’s a subdued effort.

First because it isn't true. He believed it before, when he tried to show the little ones how to write their names on the dirty window and they smeared the letters away to draw tits and snicker, when Anis wheezed if you say one more word about your stupid friends I am going to die on purpose, when his older sister wasn't speaking to him because he'd wrested the only book he owned back out of her hands and insisted that he would rather watch everyone freeze than let her tear out a single page for kindling.

But his littler brother's favorite game, once he was old enough to join Bastien in scouring the city for coins, was for Bastien to ask do you know who that was? and follow up with a dozen questions to lead him through inventing outlandish identities for people they passed. The youngest once went so still and gripped his hair so hard, sitting on his shoulders to watch a parade, that he worried she was frightened, but when he pulled her down to ask, she whispered I want a sword and a uniform with red feathers with an intensity of purpose that might have been worrisome if she'd been any bigger than a wet kitten. So they weren't all so dissimilar. He can see it better now.

And second—because he can still feel an echo from the curl of Byerly’s fingers. He can remember him gnashing his teeth at everyone in the wake of Sonia's abduction, and the naked misery on his face at his wedding. Partly because of how thoroughly stabbed he was, perhaps, of course, but he had seemed more worried about his wife than the expanding pool of his own blood. His impatience with Darras and Bastien, more recently. That, too.

Bastien tries to imagine that protective streak amplified for a sister—an only sister, a younger sister beloved from birth. He imagines it deep enough for a man to drown in, and when he starts rubbing the back of Byerly's hand, without much thought, it's with a finger that—splayed, or tapping, or otherwise made prominent across a room—means the coast is clear, or it's safe to progress to the next part of the plan, or that everything will be all right.

“I loved them,” he says, “but I left them behind, and by the time I thought to look back they were gone. I have not known anything about them for a long time. So you must not feel too sorry for me.”

His tone is idle. Threaded through with a little shame, maybe, but he'd rather admit to his failings as a brother than leave Byerly thinking that he's been dancing around Thedas carrying five times the weight Byerly feels on his shoulders. Not when they're being at least 60% honest.

“Do you ever see her now? Or write?”

Edited (:V) 2020-05-20 18:11 (UTC)

"No," he says, and his voice is suddenly very controlled. Very flat.

"I expect you heard the rumors, back when I was in Val Royeaux. Or maybe you didn't - perhaps I wasn't enough of an entity for people to actually gossip about. But back in Ferelden, this story delighted the vicious-minded. Byerly and Nadine, they're awfully close for a brother and a sister, aren't they? That's how it went. You never see them apart. Isn't that just ever so odd? It makes you wonder.

"I do not care for my reputation, as you know. But a girl weds on her good name. The easiest way to make the story implausible was to ensure that we were no longer close."

Everything will be all right. He registers that message, belatedly. He's still not used to watching for the signs. It takes him a moment to pick up on them. But at last: everything will be all right.

Will it?

Some sudden impulse makes his hand twist around to grasp Bastien's. For a moment, his grip is as tight as that of a man clinging to the edge of a cliff. It loosens after a moment, but for a moment there was something rough and soul-desperate. And his levity is forced when he says -

"And now I am in my middle years, and nearly two decades have gone by. I think time is the true villain in all this, no?"

Bastien could disagree, philosophically. Time is like water, it can be destructive but you need it to grow. Obnoxious things like that. But it isn’t the time, with Byerly’s tone so forced, and Bastien isn’t in the mood himself, so he just nods and adjusts his knuckles in Byerly’s grip.

“It is a rare thing, you know—I know,” he says. “If someone a person loves is suffering because of them, no matter how obvious the solution is, they will try everything else before they try letting go. Sometimes even then. Most love is selfish. Like the Nevarrans taking everything they love underground with them when they die.”

Whatever conclusions could be drawn from that, Bastien doesn't offer. It was a selfless thing, unquestionably, and a brave one, but maybe it wasn’t a good thing. Maybe it was an overreaction to a problem that could have been solved another way. Bastien doesn’t know. He just knows not many men would have done it.

And this should be the part where Bastien feels some satisfaction to finally have, if not the full picture, at least enough pieces to form an outline. Like when a piece of the meat of a nut pulls clean from its shell, or a pin sets right in a lock. Instead he feels bruised—and sticky, and sleepy—and he stays very still while the leaves rustle and insects buzz and Byerly breathes under his cheek. He thinks shit, and he refocuses.

“Does she know that is why you left?”

It's odd. Bastien speaks of it in almost admiring terms, like Byerly's done something noble. He doesn't feel like it was noble. No; he feels like it was cowardly. Idiotic. But of course Bastien wouldn't understand - By had prevented understanding, making it sound like his goal was his sister's protection, when in truth it was nothing of the sort, was it? No; his goal had been self-interest, had been the cessation of his pain and shame with no concern for her feeling. And now he's misled Bastien into thinking there's some decent heart beating in his coward's chest.

You, Byerly, are a manipulative piece of shit. You deserve to get buried in a deep hole, before you die, with fucking nothing for company.

"Oh, I ran fully away," he says, mockery returning to his voice. "Father believed it all, after all, and so I told him to fuck himself and fuck his inheritance and fuck his family name. He only disinherited me after I made it very clear I'd never be coming back - wanted to save face, I suppose. So yes, she bore witness to Father and I having our little dick-measuring competition, with her sentiments serving as the burned villages left behind in our warring Exalted Marches." And then, even more harshly - "And so she was left behind, without ally, in that rotting pile, with him, as I traipsed off to Denerim to drink and snort my way into forgetfulness."

He finds that he's gone tense. His hand is too tight on Bastien's, the grip turned into something furious. He forces his fingers to relax.

"Within a year, my cousin Donna came into a house of her own. Got Nadine out of there. Put her into a setting where she could receive suitors without humiliation. It turned out all right, in the end."

While Byerly talks, Bastien is listening with almost all of his attention. A bit of it is diverted to an itch on his neck, and a bit more to how they would look to any of the other involuntary campers scattered across the clearing if someone passed close on their way to piss, and then he forgets the itch to worry mildly about the circulation to his fingers. But most of his mind is on the details. Their unflattering cut. He lets them sit for a moment in the quiet, and then he nods. It turned out all right for her, at least—Nadine.

“People did talk about you in Val Royeaux," he says. He doesn't really want to change the subject. Just to try to make time and space for that anger to wane a bit before he risks stoking more of it. "You may not have been terribly important, but you were terribly good looking.”

He turns his head to offer a little smile with that, winces with one eye, and sits up to stretch his neck. It really pops and everything. He has to slip his hand free of Byerly's to begin readjusting where he's positioned, but he keeps talking the whole time, in a low murmur that's not quite a whisper.

“You know how they are, though. It was all foul winds and rotting fruit. And some allusion, I think, I did not understand. I don’t remember it now. At the time I thought it must be like—there is a rhyme, you know, that well-heeled little Royans learn from their tutors so they know their colors in both languages. I know my colors—“

He pauses, bent as if midway through a sit-up, to count off in silence and check. Just for show.

“—ouais. I know them. But I never learned the rhyme. I thought it must be something like that, and I was touchy, so I did not want to ask anyone to explain it. Finally there was a lady’s maid who knew what her mistress said when her mask was off. She told me there was some misfortune with your sister. But she looked like I was asking her to eat a spoonful of shit, making her talk so, and we were having a nice time," speaking of euphemisms, "so I left it alone.”

Resettled, he's fully on the ground again. Anarchy averted. But he's angled, with his feet wandering off and his head close enough to keep murmuring, and he slides his hand down Byerly's closer arm until he finds his hand in the unlit valley between them.

“Was that his madness? Your father,” he clarifies, and further: "believing things like that."

How carefully Bastien speaks. Those little flatteries, the poetry of his language, the performance - it's all so deliberately selected. It's Bastien's means of speech, as much as the actual content of it, that calms By's agitated spirits. If Bastien is taking such care to soothe him, then By ought to let himself be soothed. That seems only right.

He pulls back his hand from their shared grip, placing it instead on the back of Bastien's neck. With firm fingers, he starts rubbing at the cords of muscle there. If he is going to be suffering through By's miserable history and poor character, he might as well get a bit of a massage from it, no?

"The Chantry Mother found me with my tongue down a Chantry Brother's throat when I was fifteen," By responds, "and with a cock in my mouth just a year later." And then, because Bastien likely does not know - "To love those of your own sex is certainly not prohibited in Ferelden, but it's also not treated as naturally as it is in Orlais. Especially not in provincial little corners like mine. So. My father had a certain picture of me, a precocious little pervert, and perhaps it is not so great a leap from one type of perversion to another."

His fingers gentle, softening their touch. "So I'd like to think it was just madness. But my character certainly didn't help."

"Mm.” It’s a skeptical little noise. He likes Byerly’s character. “You might have been a happier Orlesian,” he says, “but then who knows what else you might have been."

Dead. Monstrous. Frivolous—really frivolous, soul-deep frivolity, not just pretending. Or the sort of player who Bastien would be watching for sudden moves right now, even out in the open in a clearing scattered with people, if they put a hand on his neck. There are plenty of other things to worry about—reputations, asshole birds—but not his life. When he starts turning a little boneless, it isn’t an act.

“I’m sorry,” he adds, “for making light of all of that before.” Quaint, he thinks he’d said, aware that a Fereldan might gawk at two men or two women kissing in the city streets without any shame, but they gawk at all sorts of things. They gawk at perfectly good hats. “And that it happened at all. But, ah—“

His eyes had fallen shut, but he drags them open to smile a little.

“A Chantry Brother? Was it the robes?”

"Maker, don't apologize," By says, flicking his finger against the side of Bastien's neck hard enough to sting. "If Orlesians and Fereldans stop jeering at each other, the world will stop. Birds will fall from the sky. The Maker will return - because Andraste was wrong; He will not return when we are all singing the Chant, but rather when we stop being shitty to one another. So let's not, because I cherish this shitty, awful, horrible world. We need to stave off His return as long as we can."

He rubs that spot with his thumb, smiling just a little to himself. Such an odd thing, to tell this story and be smiling a moment later. He'd like to think that it's because it's less painful than it used to be, but in truth, he suspects it's simply that Bastien is very good at what he does. Making you feel safe, making you open your heart. Dangerous in an enemy. In a friend... Truly, the Bards in his life are the most marvelous, the most beloved monsters he's ever met.

"And it was the eyes, if you must know," he replies, his tone a little prim. "The greenest you've ever seen. I half wondered if the man wasn't elf-blooded, with eyes like that. I wouldn't ever go after someone just because it's a scandal." He lets a little grin cross his face. "It's just a lovely little bonus when it happens."

The flick makes Bastien's eyebrow quirk—not like a wince, more like a silent threat of vengeance, do you really want to start that, etc. But between how charming I cherish this shitty, awful, horrible world is and the follow-up rub, all's forgiven.

"Coquin," he accuses fondly, closing his eyes again. He's still thinking about Byerly's sister, and Byerly's father, and the attention-hungry little ghost in the Crossroads, but what he asks is, "Was it a good kiss? I have always suspected Chantry Brothers of being slobberers."

"It was..." He trails off meaningfully, as if recalling a delicious memory, and holds that silence just long enough before he admits - "Unremarkable. In every way. Neither particularly good nor particularly bad. Which is disappointing, of course - one would wish that a scandalous kiss like that would be either the one or the other. Not just fine."

He moves his hand from Bastien's neck to his head, lightly scratching at his scalp as he talks. A bit meditatively, he confesses, "I never asked after you. I never even thought to. But I suppose that's likely what you were after, no? That it never occur to anyone to ask."

"Mhm. I would not have objected to being fascinating and—"

He's getting mumbly. He doesn't especially want to snap out of it, though, so he doesn't open his eyes, only his mouth, to stretch his jaw and wiggle his tongue a little, like that will help.

"—and having that charisma, you know, where people can be fully aware that someone is trouble and they still just cannot help themselves. But we must all work with what we have."

Another time it he might have been a little bothered, secretly, beneath the shruggy carelessness of his tone. But between Byerly's lulling fingers and the several more important things already making him ache at the base of his throat, there's no room for it.

"Will you be able to sleep? I don't want to make you talk about all of that and then leave you alone with it."

"As I have been alone with it for the past twenty-odd years?" He means for that to come out a little saucy, but it ends up sounding a bit sad, instead. Not because of his tone - just because of the content of the words. So he tries to make up for it by tugging at the ends of Bastien's mustache.

"If my life robbed me of sleep, I'd never be able to sleep at all, now would I? I'll be fine."

And, because he doesn't want Bastien to feel unloved or uninteresting or unworthy -

"And I know now how fascinating you are. Back then, I thought you only fun, but you truly are so much more."

Bastien cracks his eyes open at that first statement and endures the mustache-tugging without a single nose twitch. At another time, in another mood, he might say I warned you about touching my face. Now he just watches, drowsy and impassive, thinking—in that way that feels profound in the dark and stupid come daylight—about Byerly's twenty-odd years, and about how secret shames, like secret loves, can grow their own hearts and legs and follow someone around for so long that losing them is lonely more than it's a relief.

Then he makes a quiet little snorting sound, catches Byerly's hand to hold it to the mossy ground so it can't get up to any more mischief, and closes his eyes again.

"Don't flatter me when I'm too sleepy to defend myself," he murmurs, closing his eyes again. "It's not sporting. Now all my dreams will be about revenge."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

MOD PLOT ↠ SECRET STEEP'D ROOTS

no subject

so many words i'm sorry

holy shit my heart, UGH

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject