faderift | war table: one giant leap.

The ruins they stand in are as though a temple of stone were simply crumbled in half, opening out to the hazy opal-brightness of the Crossroads. Some form of nature has reclaimed this patch of floating building, and the broken tile of the ground is swamped in a few inches of ceaselessly running water. It ripples, pools, and flows off the jagged edge with no sign of stopping. It wets ankles, griffon paws, makes for treacherous footing.

So Marcus is careful when he approaches the edge, water flowing around his boots, as he leans enough to watch the water flow down into nothingness. Most of it seems to disperse into a mist, which disperses into nothing, but some rivers of water wind away like snakes, following invisible pathways in the air until vanishing at a point.

He stoops to pick up a piece of rubble, and drops it over the side, watching it fall, then watching it seem to tumble as though caught in the wind, spiralling off and out of sight.

Somewhere behind him within the shelter of this ruin, his griffon of choice, L.W.M, has found a raised piece of stone to perch on, up and out of the water, feathers and fur hackled in irritation at the strangeness of the Crossroads in general.

Further off, and up, the twisting, pulsing, inky-black spot of the distant corrupted Rift is within clearer sight, surrounded by patchwork temple pieces. There is no sign of an Eluvian that allows them immediate access, and details are impossible to make out in the strange twisting light of this pocket dimension. Various floating islands dot the space between where they stand and their goal, as small as a hunk of rock and earth with a tree growing out it, to more elaborate structures of stone staircases, stable looking platforms.

The closest seems to be the other half of the ruin they are in, some hundred feet away, situated slightly lower in space. It is also upside down.

Getting to the location is its own mission. The path has already been forged thanks to the efforts of a scouting forward team a day or so back, but with the scarcity of entry points, it takes some dedicated hours to get from point A to point B. Crumbling, narrow bridges over oblivion, winding tunnels with minor spirits whispering fear and doubt into whatever ear will listen, and a stomach-dropping journey between floating islands by griffon back.

But eventually, the group touches down on the immense island suspended in all the nothing.

Much of the island is dominated by crumbled ruin, of the same persuasion to the ancient architecture and features that define the Crossroads: grey stone and glistening waterfalls, the occasional skinny tree pushing through the stone to reach leafless branches for the open sky. Walls only stand as tall as a man, at most, and some improbable, floating patches of worked stone ceiling are fixed in place as if in memory of a building half-eaten by the deterioration of this realm.

And then there is the rift. Suspended in the air, the ever-twisting split in reality is familiar in shape and size and movement, but rather than its vibrant, Fade-green, the split is of a lightless blackness, unmistakably corrupted.

Much like the first of the Crossroads Gates, this one too is contaminating its surrounding with veins of Blight, but for a distinct difference: where the stone tile beneath it is bubbling with taintedness, its characteristic magical necrosis stops before it reaches much further than a few feet, contained within a perfect circle. Further out from the Gate, the Crossroad ruins have also taken on new features similar to that of the Dumat temple, including a doorway of draconic design seeming to form nearby, along with arches, walls, and ceiling of distinctly different architecture intruding upon the usual ancient ruins. These too are Blight-free.

Which makes closer study possible for those who are not inoculated against the Blight, and the next several hours are dedicated to study.

As time wears on, however, our intrepid heroes begin to hear voices, or notice brief shadows lurking out the corner of their eyes. Mutterings, out of earshot, seemingly making no attempt to manipulate or disturb those studying the Gate, but occasionally, some clearer information comes through. It's a little like eavesdropping at any public space, with talk of what a person is thinking about having for dinner, or the complaints of another person who talks of their spouse being upset with them.

And then, sharper, clearer moments, a voice murmuring just behind you, did you see that? And another, should we get Volaris?

It's lucky that this is all so intriguingly strange. It helps to push away years of experience suggesting that field work is a bad idea, actually, and that she's best used in a lab. Sometimes field work is fine, actually. Besides, the readings they're getting are unexpected and interesting. When they arrive, she's occupied for a bit just taking extensive notes and measurements.

Eventually, after recording a fair amount of them, she glances up at the nearest Riftwatch agent. "So, I hate to suggest it, but do you think someone should try to. You know." She makes a small gesture with the hand bearing her anchor shard, suggesting interaction with the rift, but too small a movement to actually trigger said interaction.

Every single thing about this mission has been designed to put Ellis miserably on edge.

Beating in the back of his head, endlessly, over and over and over, is the tune as familiar to him as the beat of his own heart. The Calling reached out in greeting the moment his boot touched down on Blight-drenched stone, and it rises and falls as he moves through the ruins where he's bidden and called for.

The Temple itself is on his mind. That lower room, the grotesque tableau they'd found there, what it had shown them. It makes the dragon-shaped doorway all the more unsettling.

Between all of those elements and the sneaking, needling suspicion of observation, Ellis has retained a tight grip on his mace while seeking to keep every single member of their party within his eyeline while they deliberately begin prodding at the poisoned rift. Right up to the point where he considers a stretch of crumbling wall, resigned to doing some prodding of his own.

And so, to whoever is closest at hand—

"Will you stand by a moment? And hold this?"

In which this is his mace, which should not be in his hand while he makes this attempt.

"Aye," is absolutely filled with apprehension.

Someone, sooner or later, was going to make this suggestion. But Ellis doesn't find any relief in hearing it spoken aloud.

"If we try that from this side, will we attract demons, or draw something else from it?"

What comes through a rift in reverse?

Nevermind that their present position is miserably indefensible, and there are plenty of people around who will need protecting if something vicious makes an appearance. Ellis doesn't expect these to be deterrents, but he would like to put some thought into planning for trouble.

Far enough away for Mouse's wingspan not to be a problem, Kostos watches Marcus from atop his griffon, which he's been riding like a horse for most of the time they've been in the Crossroads.

It's not his preferred mode of travel, personally. A grounded griffon is a bumpy enough ride without the swirling sky of the Crossroads giving him a headache. But upon first entering through the eluvian, Mouse panicked and made a break for it, nearly wrenching Kostos' arm free of its socket in the process and leaving him with a very clear vision of Mouse flying, tumbling, and vanishing into the endless distance of the Crossroads, more panicked every second, impossible to recover.

So he lives here now. On his back, holding reins. His weight seems to be comforting, at least, even if he can still feel Mouse trembling like a frightened cat.

"Alright," Kostos says, more to the griffon than anyone else. If someone in particular is in charge, or thinks they are, he is choosing not to acknowledge that. "Glide, roll halfway, don't lose your shit. Easy."

He hopes, because—spurred in part by a desire to prove to all the other griffons that Mouse is not a fuck-up, so they won't laugh at him in the eyrie later—he's urging Mouse over the edge and they're going for it.

Dick Dickerson is closer to the threshold than is wise, poised watchful where the circle crosses a branch of waist-high wall. He’s stood there with his clipboard as if he expects that if he is still and quiet and persistent enough he will register something: a shimmer of light, an ozone prickle in the air. Anything.

“Are there documented instances of Blight being contained by spellwork?”

He asks whoever’s come to join (or fetch) him without turning to face them, the snag in his ear twitched to the scuff of sole on stone behind him.

The hawk perched on his shoulder does turn, all ebony feathers and wide green eyes agog.

Later he can be found lifting a drugged nug wrinkly pink from the throat of his pack to begin the grim work of buckling it into a little harness while it’s still snoring. The stink of burning elfroot makes him easier to track amidst the ruins than he might like; Thot the hawk stalks the masonry around him while he works, keeping watch.

She's close at hand when she whistles to alert him of a colleague’s approach, the sound muffled slightly by the clip of Dick's lit joint sideways in her beak.

The colleague in question is an expected one, the tall and grim form of Teren all decked out in her Warden regalia. The sour look on her face differs only slightly from the usual by the rhythmic flinching as the Calling pounds in her mind, but she nonetheless stands patiently by Dick as he prepares the nug.

"Don't much like the look of this," she says, of everything and nothing, to no one in particular.

Helping??

With very little combat to be done, at least in this step of the process, Teren is doing a lot of milling around, placing instruments and collecting samples for the researchers, a process as foreign to her as courtly love or childrearing. But if the instructions are clear and the tone isn't too demanding, she'll do as she's asked.

Spacing

It's not unusual for Teren's expression to be pinched and sour, but there's an intensity to it now, and all it takes is for one to look at the other Wardens to note that it is likely from what only they can hear. Periodically, she'll stop moving altogether, staring off into the middle distance with a glazed-over look, mouth taut with worry.

[Helping?? part II: Nug Edition will be in a separate thread]

the arrival.

This is one of those times when Adrasteia is glad she's a griffon-rider; she is able to take herself and one to two others on Potato, but anyone that's spent more than five minutes with the Grey Warden can tell she's on edge. She doesn't quip or joke, keeping very still and white-knuckling the reigns for the griffon even when there aren't any clear and present dangers afoot.

The Crossroads is a beautiful place, in her experience, full of rich color and blooming trees, but she knows that humans and Rifters, elven or no, experience the area as dark and disorienting. The trees don't bloom, in their vision.

And there's the Calling to mind, as well.

the perils.

The ground beneath someone's feet begins to crumble, and Adrasteia reaches out lightning-quick in order to steady them once again. Once everyone is settled on more or less solid stone floating, moored in place, she lets go with a small pat to the arm.

Her knuckles are white. She hasn't looked directly at the gate yet. She hasn't had to.

the gate.

Adrasteia has one hand on her staff, the other is working her gloves off. There's a green shard in her left palm, and she closes her eyes in a way recognizable, perhaps, as someone saying a short prayer in their mind. If they're blessed, a combination of shard and tainted blood will help close this gate.

She has very little reason to believe they are blessed, but the possibility remains, and after a moment of collecting herself, she raises her eyes, and her left palm, to the gate.

The rift begins to expand and appears 'bubbly', causing Adrasteia to curse under her breath, but she keeps at it.

It helps that griffons are just as comfortable in flight as they are on the ground, or rather, in this case, as uncomfortable. At least it makes no difference.

Big wings flap, propelling Kostos and Mouse forwards after this initial springing off of the edge with a scrape of clawed feet. They hit a midpoint, and Mouse obeys the roll, giving off an echoed screech of discomfort. For a moment, terrible gravity hauls against Kostos in the saddle—and then, a few stressful feet later, gravity shifts around him.

Entering the other half of the temple is an easy enough touchdown.

Marcus watches all of this, after initially whistling for L.W.M to step nearer. He reaches back to grip the reins, and lets out a breath when Kostos appears to reach the other side safely. He looks back to the two others, says, "I'll go last," simply.

But not idly, stepping backwards to climb into the saddle of his griffon.

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS;

There's a lot of time dedicated, on Tony's end, to only moderately inexplicable things. It could be worse.

He'd started with setting up the brass tuning rods, delicate tripods of bright metal engraved in runes it's not possible for him to have placed there himself, placed in a wide semi-circle around the rift. "Hey," at some point, to someone across the way who happens to be standing nearby one, pointing. "Can you move that guy there, like, two inches left? No, my left."

And then for prolonged periods of time taking down readings from a handheld device that he instead has placed on the temple floor in front of him, while he sits criss-cross apple sauce and bent over loose pieces of parchment, writing some figures down.

He says, "Huh," and then takes a few of these pieces of paper and raises them above his head, blindly, while looking at something else. "I need, uh, a peer. For review." He wiggles the pages, as if to tempt anyone into taking them, although hopefully it is a scientist who does.

NUMBERS OF CRUNCHES;

It's late into this exercise that Tony wanders towards the Gate after having disappeared into the ruins a ways with a pocketful of beef jerky. He still has a shred of it in his hand, gnawing on a mouthful as he stops and simply looks at the big floating corrupted gash in the air. He's done a lot of measuring, conjecturing, analysing, but he hasn't really taken a second to just

look at the thing, at least not since they first landed. Now he does, squinting into that slice of churning void, and then he walks a few paces back. Squints closed one eye. Tips his head. Asks whoever,

"Does it look bigger now, to you?"

And then every hair on the back of his neck raises at the sound of a near-whispered, Tevene voice drifting too close to his ear, causing him to spin around fast.

"As far as I've seen, only in the sense that a mage might use magic to burn what's been afflicted by it." Fire is a kind of containment, right? Ellis' grips shift on his mace, looking past Silas towards the topic of their discussion as he continues, "And I've read of cleansing, but not of something like this."

Maybe if they were in another place, Ellis might have proposed experimenting with the latter, but—

"The normal rules don't always apply here."

Not an untrue observation either, but it's loaded with tetchy anxiety not solely about the Crossroads. Plate armor masks the most of it, but Ellis' entire body is strung through with tension. Not just for Silas, who is standing too close, but for every aspect of this venture, all the people who have accompanied them on it. The necessity of the work anchors him against it, but it doesn't quite curb the strain of operating on such high alert.

Here's the thing: Ellis hates this.

Yes, he is well-aware of how much time he's spent adjacent to rifts. But the difference between those and this is that nothing he, Tony and Wysteria have prodded at were Blight-infected, capable of spewing out a very different kind of danger. The second Adrasteia lifts her palm and initiates that concussive crack of connection, Ellis' knuckles go white around the grip of his mace.

He is hovering, only a few steps behind. All other parties are in his peripheral vision; Ellis has kept fretful awareness of everyone's movements as much as possible, more so in this moment.

"Adrasteia," Ellis says, pitched beneath the crackling roar of the rift. She sees the effect. He knows she does, but—

Is this a sign that something's working? It seems unlikely, even to Ellis' untrained eye.

Whoever turns out to be Ellis, who latches a hand onto Tony's elbow as he whirls. It's all instinct, though Ellis doesn't see anything in their immediate vicinity, he registers Tony's alarm and the hissing murmur, and both inspire an urge to do—

Something.

The sort of something that hasn't proven very useful thus far.

"Yes," is an answer to the earlier question, perfunctory, before, "You hear that?"

Because Ellis is hearing far too much to trust his own assessments.

“You don’t have to like it.”

The harness is little more than a modified bridle, gaps padded out with cloth and leather to curtail wriggling escape. It has the look of a device that’s several iterations deep -- specifically commissioned. This is likely not the first time a nug has been taken for a walk in Dick’s care.

He glances to Teren as he plucks the joint from Thot’s beak back to his mouth, already red around the eyes. His own gear is dramatic for the work at hand: steel plate polished where it’s strapped on to reinforce mage armor, gauntlets cast aside for nug juggling.

“Frankly it would be more informative to have one of you cross the threshold.”

She snorts in dry amusement at Dick's pragmatism, and even more so at how the joint is being passed back and forth. What a company they are.

"Don't threaten me with a good time," she remarks, watching him work, "will you be long?"

“The rules applied at the other scar just down the road.” So to speak.

Thot stretches the cruel hook of her beak out to Ellis in silent plea, feathers bristled rough along the crest of her skull.

Silas ignores the shift in her weight across his own armor. He’s locked in focus, fingertips tapped once in steel staccato down the back of his clipboard where his gauntlet meets the wood.

“It could be an effect emanating from the other side. If they're being opened with assistance from untainted Venatori they would need protection.”

Yes, Ellis reaches up to Thot. This is not the first time she's sharpened her beak on his fingers, and it likely won't be the last.

"They might be making use of darkspawn," Ellis says slowly. "But I don't know enough of magic to know if it's possible."

Ellis knows more than he lets on. He knows how blood magic work. He knows there is something like blood pumping in a darkspawn's body. Perhaps that is what it takes. A rift and a little blood and a darkspawn's throat opened in an abandoned temple.

"The Temple wanted blood," is probably not comforting, but it doesn't feel coincidental. A place like that, it had been marked by something.

“It would seem at odds with any desire to reach an untainted paradise but they have access to the taint in a variety of forms.” Darkspawn, Red Templars, Corypheus himself. Loyal Wardens. A dry sniff confirms no trace of a smell, apart from the musty skunk that clings to his leathers and -- to a lesser degree -- in his familiar’s feathers. It’s a stink he’s long-past registering. “I’ve never read anything about a barrier like this.”

He turns at the hip just so, enough to size Ellis down over his shoulder as he hooks an armored-thickened finger after a slot at his belt. It takes him a few tries to pry out a piece of chalk.

“Why would you,” isn’t a question. “Will you place markings on the stone at the circle’s perimeter? Directly along the transition and perhaps six inches outside of it.”

Thot snips after whichever of Ellis’s fingers is most available to her at any break in contact.

“Three or four points of reference should suffice.”

Edited (when you confuse urself with what youre writing and stop mid sentence bc what do the venatori even want anyway) 2022-04-05 22:11 (UTC)

“No.”

One last strap tightened around the middle and Richard rolls the beast over like a finished hoagie to slip a rope deft through a loop between the shoulders. Thot helps, or at least “helps,” nipping at the threaded end to pull it through for him to tie the knot. And so on.

“Fortuitous timing for your return.”

"What a fascinating thought, Mister Ellis."

This from Wysteria a few paces away, her head still bowed over the notes she's scribbling into the small booklet open literally strapped to her prosthetic arm. It makes for the somewhat comical impression that she might be writing all her notes on her sleeve.

"I believe the records show that attempting to interact with the gate uncovered in Orlais caused it to, ah, grow? But you're right, Miss Niehaus. There's only one way to find out if that holds true from here too—"

Here, Wysteria pauses abruptly. When she looks up, glancing between the pair of them, there's something like shock in her expression.

"I've just realized something very silly. I don't have any idea how the Crossroads and the Fade interact. Do either of you?"

Just getting to the island where the Gate is waiting for them is studious, nervy work that entails a great deal of watching one's feet to make sure neither wanders off narrow crumbling bridges or dizzying stairwells. And it's hardly as if there's any shortage of things to poke and prod and look at once more or less secure among the crumbling ruins. One might be forgiven for overlooking certain discrepancies until this point; maybe she's spent much of the expedition standing beside the Wardens. Wysteria herself certainly hasn't noticed the drab, unaltered quality of her person compared to the other Rifters of their party gleaming away in the crossroads.

One handed, she hefts the brass tripod up and over to the left. —And then, no, to the other left.

"Once this is all arranged, I'm going to take one of the Wardens into the ruins with me. I would like to map them and see if there's any pattern to how they've been altered by the Gate. Here?"

She flicks a little bead of rubble out of the way and reorients the tuning rod by a half degree to avoid some slant in the floor.

Also a few steps behind, and to the side, stands Teren with daggers in both hands, her gaze pinioned to the strange and horrible sight before them; to Adrasteia, the only one among their number who can do what she's doing, and see how she does it so readily.

Teren says nothing, only waits, knees bent and prepared to spring into action should anything emerge from the rift.

Debate on Venatori motivations can wait. (Ellis has some unique insight, doesn't he, into what the Venatori want and what they might do to achieve it? But that's not a conversation for this moment.) Ellis flinches away from the direct invocation of Dumat this close to that door, to a rift that brings the Calling around to bear down on his mind.

Silas will ask again. Maybe Ellis will tell him then.

"Any marking?" is an easier thing to say, as Ellis accepts the chalk. His opposite hand is presently occupied, held up to Thot without even a flinch at the application of her beak. "Or does it need to be particular?"

In all the time they've known each other, Ellis has yet to see Silas use glyphs. But that doesn't mean they aren't necessary. And better to ask now, before he makes his way to the designated area.

war table: one giant leap.

FORWARD TEAM: Ellie, Thranduil, Kostos, Marcus

STUDY GROUP

Cosima | OTA

ellis / ota.

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17

dick - ota

birds?? doing drugs???

Teren OTA

adrasteia / open to all

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tony. ota.

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the gate.

crunches

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crashes through the window let me know if you'd prefer no threadjacking

crunching

hops in

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