MOD PLOT ↠ BEFORE THE GATES | OPEN LOG

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: A race to a Gate, with detours
WHEN: Late August to mid Kingsway
WHERE: Arlathan Forest
NOTES: See also OOC post, puzzle log.

Intel out of Hasmal and the Antivan borderlands suggest the enemy has abruptly changed gears, hurriedly redeploying most of the teams that have been busy combing the southern end of the Hundred Pillars north, to the edge of the Arlathan Forest. The only plausible explanation is that they've got a hot lead on another gate, more urgent than whatever they've been (so far fruitlessly) searching for north of Starkhaven. This provides Riftwatch with an opportunity to finally beat the Venatori to a Gate and prevent them from opening it—but they're going to have to move fast.

Helpfully, previous surveys of the Crossroads located an eluvian only a few hours' walk away that leads into the Arlathan Forest, so the enemy's head start in terms of travel time can be swiftly made up. The fact that the Venatori have brought so many of their search teams up from the south suggests they don't know exactly where in the forest the Gate is, but there's no telling what clues they might be working on and they out-number Riftwatch, so it's all hands on deck to scour the ruins strewn throughout the forest and find it first.

I. HOME BASE

The eluvian Riftwatch is using is located inside an expansive chamber, so cool, dark, and quiet that it might initially be mistaken for a cave. Or not even mistaken, exactly. It is both cavernous and underground. But when torches are held near the cavern walls, they reveal a wall within the wall, smooth dolomite bricks with large, arcing windows that frame nothing but sheets of limestone, both smoothed and in some places receding in rivulets where water has been seeping through for hundreds of years. Young limestone stalactites are beginning to creep in through the windows.

In summary: a room within a cave, scattered with ancient stone benches in various states of crumbling and more recent additions made of wood, cloth, and vine, all partially rotten. One of its two expansive doorways opens on a stone corridor, perfectly straight, between three smaller rooms. The smallest looks like a shrine, walls adorned with a crumbling mosaic of the elven pantheon. Another room was not always a bathroom, but in the past century or two someone has fashioned it into one, harnessing a rivulet that's streaming and seeping from somewhere beyond the cavern walls to build a stone bath reminiscent of a fountain, overflowing into smaller pools before the water is swept out of the room altogether by the stream's disappearance through the wall. The water tastes of limestone, but it's fresh and safe to drink.

This is where Riftwatch sets up its temporary base of operations for the search of the forest. Carting supplies across the Crossroads and replenishing them from time to time is simple enough. Someone even thinks to bring hay to spread beneath the bedrolls in one of the smaller rooms. The central chamber is lit by the glow of the eluvian, torches, and lyrium glowlights, ultimately bright enough to do paperwork. Some people make a routine out of doing their normal ("normal") work here, for the time being, to be on hand if there's an emergency or to save themselves the walk back through the Crossroads between stints in the woods. A map of Arlathan Forest—a bad one, at least at first—is spread over a wooden table that's gone soft and spongy with age and moisture; it wouldn't support a man's weight anymore, but it can hold a map and the markers used to keep track of which areas have been searched, where Corypheus' people have been spotted, and which landmarks seem promising.

The second doorway in the chamber opens to stairs. Stairs down. This structure was once above, not below. But two stories deeper into the earth, the stairs give way to a natural cavern, no sign of elven construction in sight, with a draft that guides visitors through a narrow passage and out into the forest.

II. CITYWIDE GREEN INITIATIVE

Arlathan Forest is not as tropical as the Donarks that Riftwatch found themselves stranded in a few years ago, but it is far enough north to be warm, humid, dense, and deeply green, home to a constant symphony of buzzing and chirping and squeaking and the occasional (hopefully) distant snarl or growl. Of particular note are the presence of alligators, jaguars, and small elephants, along with the usual collection of smaller wildlife and the elusive halla.

Wild as it is, the forest doesn't allow anyone to forget that it was once a city. In the heart of the forest the terrain is cliffy and jagged in a way that suggests that, rather than the city only sinking into the earth, the earth might have risen to meet it halfway: there are towering, sheer-faced rock formations that evoke the image of buildings several stories tall, now encased in stone and plant life. Sometimes a vine-covered fragment of roof- or tower-top emerges from the top of one of these rock formations, or an expanse of brick wall from the sides. They're all in an ancient elven style familiar from, if nothing else, the Crossroads everyone walked through to get here. The lower, marshy land between them–in some places occupied with streams or wider rivers–have occasional patches of tiled stone where roads once ran instead.

There are signs, too, of more recent occupation since the ancient city of Arlathan was swallowed by the earth. Forest-dwellers from within the last age have built walkways and bridges among the cliffs and rock formations that occasionally still hold up. They've left behind tools, collapsing huts, signs of occupation in caves, and occasionally a more recent skeleton or three. And there are rarer signs of the Dalish who still occupy the forest: arrows embedded in tree trunks, statues of wolves or other symbols of the pantheon, a few old abandoned camps, a damaged aravel.

III. MORE MAGIC MORE PROBLEMS

Of course, this is not a normal ancient city swallowed by the earth and left to become a wild forest over the course of more than a thousand years. It's a magical one.

Alongside the bugs and birds and creatures occupying the forest are spirits, in more abundance than most people have ever seen them. There are small swarms of wisps drifting like butterflies around objects of interest to them, and more humanoid, ghostly, temperamental wraiths drifting over marshlands. A very rare wraith will have a voice, a name, and perhaps an errand to ask or a bargain to make. Shades wait in caves, and demons of any kind might be discovered waiting for victims in the nooks and crannies of the woods–but in particular the sylvans for which the forest is known, which any traveler passing nearby is warned to watch for.

Less common are the Forest Guardians. Easily missed among the rocky, viney landscape until they begin to move, they're massive constructions of wood and stone, tall as golems, with vine-covered stone bodies, walking on four wooden legs bound to stone feet covered in runes and moss. They remain immobile until attacks on the forest (or someone drawing enough magical power to disturb the Veil) rouse them. Then they wake to hunt the perpetrators with two wooden arms that end in thick metal blades imbued with lyrium. The arms swing in predictable patterns–they're enchanted, not thinking. And with sufficient force, they can be "killed."

Between all of this and the unfamiliarity of the landscape, it may take time to notice the biggest problem of all, which is: time is fucked.

At its mildest, traversing the same ground might take an hour going one way but two or three hours going the other, as if it's stretched out somehow, despite no clear changes to the landscape to justify the added time. If there is added time? They may burn through rations and tire as if a whole day has passed, while the sun hangs unmoving in the sky or it stays dark for just as long, and return to the base camp to find they've been gone only a few days instead of the weeks they thought. And even a confident navigator may march confidently north for several hours before realizing they've been going south the whole time (or have they).

The effects become more severe the closer to the center of the ancient city one goes. At some point a team might find themselves going in circles no matter what they do to avoid it. And that's not the worst of it. If someone is inventive enough to begin marking a passed landmark with tally marks, they'll find the count flickering back and forth each time they pass it, requiring them to put the marks down out of order: their second time past the stone, then their seventh, then their fourth.

Their sending crystals work—erratically. Sometimes not at all. Sometimes with long waits between answering messages. Sometimes with responses to the five questions they asked in silence arriving out of order. To those on the other end–or those waiting for them when they arrive back at Riftwatch's underground base—nothing unusual will seem to be happening, and their trips back and forth no longer than expected.

And it gets worse!

Through all of this, visitors to the forest may begin to see themselves and others in their traveling party, some distance ahead or behind them–mirroring their actions, having conversations, before or after the real ones do or did or might have done the same. While you're not oblivious to them, they are oblivious to you–the best way to tell the real from the mirage. Except they are not exactly mirages. They affect the world around them. A bridge that breaks beneath their feet ahead of you will still be broken when you reach it; should you break the bridge, the copies behind you will stop at the destruction to plan another way around.

No one is bound to the fates of these forwards- and backwards-echoes: should a double fall off a cliff ahead of you, you can choose to be more careful or avoid the area altogether to prevent the same mishap. Attacking animals, demons, and enemies will see them, as well as you, and may be convinced to go after them instead. Or they may pick them off ahead of you, giving you some forewarning of what you're about to step into.

Despite their apparent solidity in these moments, they don't last. The branches they have bent will remain bent, their footprints will remain printed, and the debris that tumbles over a cliff's edge with them will remain piled at the bottom, but they themselves inevitably disappear when no one is looking. They're only people who might have been.

IV. THE AMAZING RACE

Anyway, Riftwatch didn't come here to hang out with possessed trees and walk in endless circles for fun. Teams are sent into the woods in specific directions or in pursuit of particular landmarks, combing the forest for signs of a Gate or the Gate itself. They may travel three or four days in one direction—three or four real days, however brief or long they feel to those doing the traveling—before reaching their destinations. Along the way they'll have to make and break camp in the safest places they can find, forage and hunt to supplement their rations, and keep their eyes peeled for the forest's other intruders.

Corypheus' people are here too. Venatori, Red Templar, or corrupted Wardens and various lackeys have fanned out within the forest, searching for the same things Riftwatch is. Intelligence indicates they don't know for certain that a Gate is nearby. Riftwatch would like to keep it that way, so the rules are a little different this time. They can't know that Riftwatch is here. Everyone who ventures into the forest will be required to dress like they could be hunters, bandits, or recluses. And anyone who could report that Riftwatch is there can't leave the forest alive, and they need to look like they've been killed by something or someone other than Riftwatch.

This could mean ambushes and traps, herding them into angry wildlife or forest monsters (or vice versa), arranging for mysterious accidents, anything that maintains the Venatori's illusion that they are in a one horse race to the Gate. And in the meantime, the enemy search parties need to be tracked, misled, and thwarted whenever possible, and any information they have—clues they're following, records of areas already searched, maps—stolen or, if that's not possible, destroyed.

Sometimes these plans will be complicated by the presence of time-rippling doppelgangers. Your team might agree to sneak up on an enemy camp in silence, only for copies of you who came to some other agreement, apparently, to launch a coordinated fire-raining attack in the background. Or they might be ahead of you when you sneak in, oblivious to your presence while they beat you to slitting throats or stealing notes. During firefights it may not be possible to tell whether the person you've just watched die is your friend or only one of their echoes. And Corypheus' people are suffering the same effects: a man you ambush on the trail might only be a double of the real man, arriving on the scene a minute later to see himself already dead on the ground, suddenly very on guard.

Comments

[cozen]

"A parlor," Bastien echoes, with an eyebrow raise that adds, how fancy, "pour parler. Peut-être. Perhaps."

Having exhausted his present capacity for alliteration, he hums, and he tosses his round stone from hand to hand on his wet, rock-wobbly way back to the bank. At the edge he stops for a cupped palm of water, which he dumps helpfully onto the back of Ellis' neck.

"You would have to promise to talk at least a quarter of the time we were in it."

[heorte]

The outcome (Sodden collar, rivulets of lukewarm water snaking down his back to leave a haphazard assortment of wet patches) prompts only a jerky push upwards, back to his feet. More defensive maneuver, preparation in the event Bastien might dump a second palmful over Ellis' head.

"Aye," is agreement, followed by, "But now that I've agreed, you neglected to set an amount of time."

A loophole which cuts both ways, surely, but Ellis is choosing to highlight the positive: a quarter of time can be very limited if he arranges it properly.

"What do you intend to do with the stone?" may well be a bid to change the topic. Delay the arrival at an inevitable subject.

[cozen]

Bastien's quiet laughter at these evasive maneuvers—both physical and legal—takes a few seconds to taper off, ending with a sharp inhale to make up for the breaths he hasn't been taking in the meantime. He's still grinning while he considers the rock in his hand.

"Put it with the one you gave to me, unless I find a better one before we leave. This one, it is on probation." On a probationary basis, however, it is going into one of the open outer pockets on his pack. While he's crouched above it, rifling around, he says, "It has always been leaves. Flowers. Scraps of cloth and string. Paper. They are easy to tuck into books, hide places. Eventually they fray or crumble. There was a time I thought that was a benefit. That it was the way it ought to be. Nothing lasts. Et cetera. I could be an obnoxious young man."

He stands with his water skin in hand and grins broadly, aware he can also be an obnoxious middle-aged man, present moment perhaps included.

"But it helps, you know. It—memory is so fallible. It is so easy to convince someone that they know you, or that they don't. You can give them half of a story about the time you met, and they will finish it for you. Introduce you that way to their other friends. And they believe it. They see it like it happened. Sometimes I wonder—"

He shrugs, perfectly cheerful about this reluctance to fully trust his own mind, and takes a drink.

"It is nice to have some evidence."

[heorte]

Memory is so fallible.

Bastien is talking about a far more natural occurrence, about the way memory warps and crumbles away over time. But it is an observation that lands heavily in the wake of their emergence from the ruins.

Ellis has spent that time examining the ragged edges of what was excised from him. What he gave away by choice, yes, but how much of a choice was it really? Two things he wouldn't have offered, if he'd been given any choice in it. (Easier, always, to give up his life rather than the rest.) And now, he worries at the absence the way a man might tongue at the gap left by a knocked-out tooth.

"I hadn't thought of it that way."

But then, he is not a bard.

"What will that remind you of? Other than that I've promised you a parlor."

[cozen]

"A place time stretches and contracts like a muscle, rocks rouse themselves to defend the trees, spirits demand pieces of you as a toll. Fantastic," Bastien says. "Terrible and fantastic."

The river moves. The sun has not. He wonders, idly, if they're aging.

"But mostly the parlor."

Where Ellis will have to speak a quarter of the time he can be trapped there. Bastien thinks he's done plenty of talking, himself, to cash in:

"Assume I care about you," he says, as if for argument's sake. As if he has not already irrevocably made the horrible mistake of caring about a Grey Warden and his wellbeing. He lifts his chin to tap his finger to his own neck, where Ellis has a new scar. "If that is the case, should I be worried about this?"

[heorte]

The elven gods hadn't wanted this memory from him, Ellis considers bitterly.

But it comes when called, flashing in livid pieces across his mind: the fall of a heavy sword. Choking. The world fracturing around him as Abby and Richard speak over his head.

Ellis shakes the water from his hands. Scrapes fingers through his hair to disperse some of Bastien's handiwork. Bastien has left a space in which Ellis can address only the physical thing, and so he does.

"It's healing well," is only glancingly an answer to the question. "You needn't worry that it's in danger of opening itself as we speak."

It's an ugly thing, made worse for it's newness. It's twin has the advantage of age, long years between it's acquisition and present, unremarkable status. Ellis hasn't pretended that this new acquisition is easily missed, but he has hoped it is easy to ignore. Eventually, Wysteria will return home. Eventually she will put this similar question to him, and perhaps so will Tony. It will be harder to step around them. (It is perhaps foolish to think he can so easily step around Bastien.)

[cozen]

"Small blessings," Bastien says, with a smile and searching eyes.

It isn't what he wants to know. But—

"You are a problem for me, do you know that?"

His tone implies it is as much a compliment as a complaint. He wanders steps his feet back into the river, waterskin in hand, but he keeps looking at Ellis. He is not off the hook.

"Most people, I ask them about themselves, it is like giving them a gift. They're thrilled. Even if it is something miserable to talk about, they're thrilled. It's a fundamental desire, to be seen and heard and understood. But you," with a gesture. "Asking you to talk about anything feels like doing you an injury. Which I am not," he's quick to add, "asking you to be sorry for. I mean problem like a puzzle, not an annoyance."

[heorte]

It's just as well Bastien specifies: the first instinct Ellis has was apology, uncertain of what else he might offer. And even so, he is not so sure what to say in the wake of Bastien's summation.

"What do you intend to do about solving it?" has the same cadence in which Ellis had asked about the parlor. A hypothetical, rather than something much more incisive.

He imagines it to be akin to a rock in Bastien's boot, in spite of his assurances. Surely he doesn't intend to take Ellis in stride forever.

[cozen]

"Aside from the parlor pour parler?" Bastien asks with an arch glance. "Plan A was the patience of a saint," give or take some petulant reading of his post-mortem mail, "but I think that underestimated your resolve and my saintliness."

Not to mention the limits of Ellis' likely lifespan—and Bastien's, for that matter—if the war keeps on this way.

"Plan B is uncomfortable frankness." Like so, adds his gesture to himself, here, at the moment. "Plan C—well, I am open to suggestions."

[heorte]

"I don't have any."

Predictably. Whether because nothing comes to mind, because it is not Ellis' talent to discern ways to part people from their secrets, or because he is not in the habit of parting with his is up for a guess.

"Only an assurance that it is not much to speak of," is easy dismissal, practiced to the point of polished smoothness in Ellis' mouth. It is not much to speak of to the tune of it is not your burden to bear.

"Can you live with the curiosity?" is the better question, perhaps. Perhaps Bastien will keep trying. Tony did. Wysteria has. Ellis cannot say whether he would find success in whatever approach he chose though it is, as ever, beyond Ellis that someone would want to pry after the things he carries.

[cozen]

Bastien's eyes narrow in thoughtful examination. The pause is not silent; it's full of the murmuring river, bird song, wind in the tall trees. After a few seconds he breaks the non-silence with, "No."

Slow, mild, but a little challenging, like: will that spring the lock?

[heorte]

No.

"Then it is a problem."

A little uncertain, as Ellis looks back at him. He hadn't anticipated this conversation. It comes on the heels of all that business in the temple, which had flayed him raw in a different way. The combination is a great deal to bear up under.

"Does it need to be resolved today?" might be mistaken as a stall. Maybe it is.

[cozen]

Regardless: "No," Bastien says again, this time with none of the challenge. "It will be a slow death. And you will have the choice to save me right up to the end."

He sits on the river bank within reach of his boots, legs bent and feet still in the water, to begin the careful process of shaking his feet dry and getting them shoed again without tracking them through the dirt.

The problem is that it's not only curiosity. It's affection. He showers friends with interest—in their lives, in what they think—the way others might shower with gifts. He's not sure how else to go about caring for people.

But unless Ellis dies (again, Bastien cannot think, without knowing), it'll keep.

feels like bow territory

[heorte]

What a terrible thing it is, to have a choice. Ellis has so rarely made the right ones in his life.

And in this, Bastien must know that Ellis is terribly predictable. The choice feels like a foregone conclusion, even if Ellis would like to entertain the idea that maybe he might offer something freely, without being cornered into the conversation.

But then again, Tony hasn't spent so much time doing just that for no reason.

It is unlikely Ellis would get the drop on Bastien, so while his approach is quiet, it is not meant with any particular intent other than to occupy the space beside him as Bastien attends to his boots.

"You're a good man," Ellis tells him, with all the authority of someone who is familiar with the alternatives. No qualifiers attached. Simply this: Bastien is a good man, too patient with him by far.

"I'll do my best," may not inspire any particular hope for the future, but is the best Ellis can offer in the moment.

bow!!

[cozen]

Good man. Bastien's bemused look is aimed mostly at the river, as he wiggles his feet back into place, but the tail end of it is shot up at Ellis directly. But it's a friendly, flattered, if you say so type of skepticism, and he has no interest in starting an argument about the death and ruin and missing jewelry he has left in his wake.

"I will take it," is for the second thing, as well.

He's up on his feet shortly, shouldering his bag. Any mile now, time will unstick. But he will still spend the rest of the walk talking Ellis' ear off about the other forty-nine rooms in their forest house.