player plot: the horror of sarrux's pass

[aberratic]

WHO: Caius, Gwen, Hermione, Jayce, Ness, Siorus, Stephen, Vanya (sumptus, elegiaque, reparo, pathlit, aberratic, wildered, portalling, wearyallalone)
WHAT: The Horrors Cometh
WHEN: Beginning of Harvestmere (October)
WHERE: Sarrux's Pass, outside Wycome
NOTES: OOC post here. TWs for body horror, NPC death, ghost town/apocalypse vibes, children in upsetting situations, and general horror stuff.

Characters

CAIUS

GWENAËLLE

HERMIONE

JAYCE

NESS

SIORUS

STEPHEN

VANYA

The residents of Sarrux's Pass, a small village tucked into the mountains of the Free Marches, have long held that their settlement used to be a bustling trade city where dwarves were as plentiful as humans and they had constant contact between the surface and the Deep Roads. These were assumed by the surrounding cities to be nothing more than fanciful legends for decades, but any long-time resident swore it was the truth, lost to time and "monsters in the deep."

Residents were finally vindicated a few months ago when an earthquake caused a landslide in the surrounding mountains, revealing a long-lost outlet from the Deep Roads. At first, residents of the pass were apprehensive, all too aware of the dangers posed by such an opening, but the longer they went without Darkspawn spilling from the entrance, the more eager they became to investigate.

Eventually, the bravest among them began to enter the Roads, in search of ore and artifacts. They were vindicated again, finding both, and Sarrux's Pass quickly became a magnet for treasure hunters, Lords of Fortune, historians, archaeologists, and anyone in search of a quick buck. Even in the face of the Venatori invasion of the Marches, the promise of fame and riches drew handfuls of people seeking their fortunes to the Pass. News from the area was steady, and filled with discoveries and success stories—as well as the brawls, backstabbing, and even the occasional murder that comes with any good gold rush town.

It's been a few months since the reveal of the Deep Roads entrance. News from Sarrux's Pass has slowed to a trickle, then a drip, and now, in the past weeks, nothing. The last message to make it out of the village three weeks ago said simply: "We weren't just right about the dwarves." The parchment was stained with an unidentifiable liquid—not water, not blood—which smelled of the sea.

Riftwatch has been tasked with investigating the village, with three goals: find out what happened to the residents, recover whatever valuables they can from the Deep Roads, and, if necessary, close the entrance again. There may be Venatori in the area, or Darkspawn, or territorial prospectors—without contact with the village, there's no way of knowing what Riftwatch may discover. © tessisamess

Comments

i. making camp

[aberratic]

For downtime threads of any kind, at any time—threads around the campfire, in tents, et cetera, on the way to the pass or the Deep Roads or back. Do what you want, I'm not the boss of you.

for Gwenaelle (and optionally Strange)

[wearyallalone]

Vanya doesn't keep himself apart, exactly. Certainly not the way he would when he first joined Riftwatch, at least. He's quiet by temperament, but he willingly talks with anyone who initiates a conversation on the road, and though he's not chatty, he joins everyone for the meals that they take together without resistance.

That said, it is somewhat unusual when he comes to sit near Gwenaëlle near the fire after dinner, when neither of them is on watch for a while. Perhaps more unusual still when he observes, "Carsus thought I needed a push to say yes to your social invitation, which surprised me." An opening gambit that he might not have made a year ago.

[elegiaque]

The lopsided smile he earns for that is less surprised as she leans sideways to bump her shoulder into his (or, more accurately to their height difference: his arm)—

“I told him you'd come if you thought you were being helpful, you love that,” which is not disagreement with Cedric's premise, exactly. Sure, she's pretty sure Cedric thinks Vanya is both sadder and older than he actually is, but it's not as if he's not a bit sad and old. “Plus, I make your duty schedule.”

As if that settles it. Certainly so far as can Vanya get out of it.

“We're friends because how stoically you take being hit in the balls started to actually make me feel poorly about doing it, Orlov, you don't have a face that says social butterfly. But he underestimates how charming and likable I am because I make him want to throttle me regularly, it's probably me as much as you.”

for caius; technically downtime.

[portalling]

With the briefing they’d gotten, the trip to the eastern coast and Sarrux’s Pass is foreboding: We weren’t just right about the dwarves. An ominous and inauspicious hint of what’s to come, and that mystery even weighs over some of the pleasantries: the easy conversation to pass the time on the road, chatting around the fire, jokes, setting up tents, people bedding down for the night to sleep. They’re still on their way to the town. It seems a normal night.

It is not exactly a normal night.

Somewhere, elsewhere —

( in the Fade )

Stephen Strange’s general sleep deprivation mingles with the way he tosses and turns on the ground (no matter the pleasant company, Gwenaëlle sharing his tent), which mingles with the anxieties of whatever’s waiting for them, the unknown looming large: is it a dead town? a massacre? Venatori? a sprawling magical anomaly which swallowed up the entire settlement?

Those anxieties churn and stew, a hook in his consciousness, and it morphs into a scene.

Somewhere, elsewhere, Stephen Strange sits at a desk in a near-empty classroom at Kamar-Taj (or is it a Circle?), dressed in the white robes of a novice again, reset to square one. They’re in a beautiful monastery with stone floors, recessed skylights flooding the room with daylight, and the robed figure of a monk (or is it an enchanter?) pacing back and forth at the front of the room.

“Name all of the extra-planar dimensions,” she says, and Stephen’s mind goes a panicked blank in a way it never did during his actual training, nor in medical school. He reaches for the knowledge and comes up empty.

Beside him: another student, seated at the next desk.

[sumptus]

Caius is younger here. Always is, in dreams like these, even if the other dreamer isn't a child anymore. Not the quietly confident youth Stephen has been traveling alongside, but a hunched, gangly teen in Circle robes cut too loose, too short at the wrists. Faded blue ink splotches the cuffs, the fabric fraying and the skin of his fingers peeling from where he'd spent a late night worrying at the stain, too-harsh chemicals on too-old fabric. And for what? It's still obvious. The enchanter's eyebrow raises disdainful in his direction. The stone walls buckle slowly inward. Everyone already knows he doesn't belong.

"Name all of the extra-planar dimensions," she says, and Caius—

Doesn't have to be out of control here. A deep breath. The threads of his cuff knit back together as he folds a piece of paper and slides it across the floor to the student next to him.

It's either blank, the right answer, or a mish-mash gibberish of something that looks like Latin but isn't.

ota, i had a tent icon so i feel obliged to use it

[reparo]

a.

From time to time, when rest is inevitably needed, it's possible to find Hermione huddled near the campfire, if one is lit. She's got her Riftwatch-insignia coat on, wrapped around her like a blanket, and is trying to keep warm. The travel, the strange things witnessed in Sarroux pass, the suspicious guides - a number of things have made her weary, to her bones, and this reflects itself in a chill that won't go away. Therefore, huddle by the fire when it's lit, knees to her chest, staring at the flames.

If her magical abilities had stayed the same in Thedas, she would've had a Warming Spell on herself against this chill, and would've transfigured a stone into a teacup to make herself some tea.

"I miss tea," she murmurs, at the thought, in full line of hearing for whoever.

b.

It's impossible to get any sleep, her mind firing information restlessly. She is itching to note it down somewhere, write it in a notepad, keep extensive records of her time here in case she's asked to produce the report. It's strange to be new in a place. Stranger still, to be new and stumbling through it all.

So at night, when everyone's settled to rest, she's catching up. There is a book on the Free Marches that she withdraws from her magically enhanced beaded bag, and with a quick Lumos under her breath, she lights up the tip of her wand, then sticks it behind her ear, aimed forward. She has made herself a magical reading lamp, Ask Her Anything.

aftermath. stephen, on the way back to the gallows.

[elegiaque]

Before, there's no time.

Her leather is soft and clinging and complicated to take on and off; the armoured corset that she'd adapted to the new pieces, the high neck, the wide belt around her waist. Taking it off within that place would have been out of the fucking question, so she doesn't know— there is a slimy, stinging discomfort that has faded but not gone, and every now and again it feels like she or something twitches and it's maddening and they have to make camp, eventually. There's little they can do for her face until they're back to the Gallows, so she's only taken something for the pain, and that...

That has made it all the more abundantly clear that what she is feeling is not all pain.

“I need you to—”

Gwenaëlle breathes out through her nose and lets the tent-flap fall closed behind her. A lamp flickers their shadows onto the canvas.

“I can feel something,” she says, halting, “on my back.”

[portalling]

Stephen had barely been able to pry himself away from her side, as soon as they got her back from the lyrium chamber.

An arm under Gwenaëlle’s shoulder to prop her up against him, a brief examination as soon as they made it back topside: hands at her neck and uninjured cheek, fingertips running along her swollen face, checking the bruises and swelling and that searing pain. There’s little he can do for a facial fracture; he’d gotten one of the mages to enchant an ice-pack to be applied for the swelling, but apart from that, it’s just elfroot tonic for the pain. No one can do reconstructive cheekbone surgery in the field, especially in such a cursed field.

As they finally duck into their shared tent in the camp, he’s beset again with the sheer animal relief of having her here and alive and with him. He’s just hanging up his Fade-silk cloak and tugging off bloodstained gloves, weary-boned, not even changing his clothes or taking off his boots — he wants to be ready to still run and fight if necessary — but Gwenaëlle’s words make him turn and look at her. Concern creases his brow.

“’Something’?” he echoes.

Something can mean a lot of things.

aftermath, for vanya.

[aberratic]

It has been

longer

than she would have liked, between throwing herself into Vanya's mind and coming to actually speak to him about it. They're almost to Kirkwall now, a day or two until they reach the city, and Ness has finally shed the last of her mutations, blue eyes and pale skin and blunt fingernails all returned from whatever safekeeping the Fade kept them in while that sick lyrium had its way with her. Not a moment too soon, since—

a former templar was still a templar, once.

"Messere Orlov," she comes to him at nightfall, elected to take the same shift on watch, hood of her cloak down for the first time in days, and tries, tries not to be afraid. "I would explain myself to you, if you will permit me."

[wearyallalone]

There's been plenty to occupy all of them on the road home. Vanya finds it mildly miraculous that none of them died, though it's clear some of them are going to be changed permanently. He is not among those with mutations, though he took some heavy damage in the fighting. Between his own knowledge and his companions' skills, he's in a shape where he can ride, at least. But his body aches as it heals, and he's quieter than usual in a way that's as much to do with fatigue as it is the implications of what they've been through.

Still, he takes watch seriously, and he's alert but calm when she approaches him. He doesn't flinch, at least. When she speaks, he nods. "If that is what you wish."

There's been a guardedness to him since they left Sarrux's Pass that wasn't there before, though it's not visibly greater when Ness joins him than any other time. Not unkind or curt, no, but the playfulness that they'd started to coax out of him on the road to their mission has seemingly evaporated.

ii. a warning

[aberratic]

On the outskirts of Sarrux's Pass, before any sign of the village, there is what appears to be a derelict cabin. It's easy to miss, but the local guides Riftwatch hired to lead them to the pass—brothers Kittrick and Holden Chapman—point it out as Old Man Mercer's. It and Mercer have been here for as long as anyone can remember, they say, but they can't agree on what that makes Mercer—he's an abomination, says Kitt, while Holden insists he's just a weird old man.



Whatever he is, he's here, and he doesn't want Riftwatch to carry on into the pass. He warns Hermione and Siorus, in no uncertain terms, that there is nothing to gain in the village and no one to save. Once the warning is served, no matter how Riftwatch take it, he disappears, and can't be found again.

[reparo]

It's a bit rude, isn't it? The whole speculation between their guides about who lives in the derelict cabin. Imagine living in a place your whole life, trading and working and maybe even making friends, only for the people of that place to know you as Old Man Mercer.

(She tries to imagine herself, surviving - living until she's that old, even. What would the new recruits call her? Old Riftwitch Hermione has a good ring to it.)

Of course, it stands to reason that as she shakes off that thought, and turns to chide Kitt with you can't just call old people abominations, the door to the cabin opens. (Falls open? Falls?)

Out rushes what could potentially be described as a weird old man, waving his arms in a shoo-ing motion at the group.

"Leave! Leave, there is nothing left - nothing past this pass for you! Leave if you know what's good for you!" he shouts, ominously.

"Told you," Holden Chapman mutters as an aside.

"Not you," Old Man Mercer's quick dismissal, complete with a bony-hand wave-off. He sets his eyes instead on the two dressed like Riftwatch people, addresses them, fingerpoint and all. "You leave. Heed my words, you fools!"

iii. the village

[aberratic]

In town, things look bleak. As far as can be told from the streets, there are no survivors, which means there is no one around to stop you from looting, if you wish—there are supplies of all kinds still left in the general store, and many homes seem to be awaiting their former occupants, still fully stocked and furnished.

Following a stench of burned flesh leads Gwen and Caius to a large group pyre in the middle of the village, which smolders still. The roads are covered in puddles of a strange grey liquid which stinks, incongruously, of the sea. Mounds of displaced earth mark holes in the ground which appear bottomless. The village well has been boarded up, and, if opened, smells faintly of the same brine as the puddles in the road.



In the root cellar of one home, Jayce and Stephen find the first indication of what may have happened here—two siblings, a young teenager and a child, huddle in a corner of the cellar, dirty, emaciated, cowering. In the opposite corner, there is a large hole in the wall, as if something burrowed through, and a large, bloated corpse. An ogre, perhaps, but also not—its large horned form looks wrong somehow, even for a body days deep into decay. Closer inspection reveals more limbs than usual, and horn-like growths all over its body. The children may be convinced to leave the cellar or to stay, depending on what seems most safe, but they don't speak. They won't eat. They just stare at everyone, and cling to each other.



The village inn is almost as poor in answers as everywhere else, save for one item: a journal, which Vanya and Ness find tucked under the pillow of someone's bed, chronicles their arrival to the pass and their search for treasure in the deep roads. The last entries become panicked and almost incoherent, their pages stained with the same grey liquid which pools in the roads: the well is poisoned. Some who go down to the Deep Roads come back wrong, or don't come back at all—and there are sounds, now: sounds from the deep, skittering, scritching, greedy sounds. Someone has to kill what's down there. Someone has to cleanse the well.

In the middle of the night, a rumble of earth shakes the camp. Two screams pierce the silence, and then cut off, sharp. Anyone who investigates will find Kitt and Holden have disappeared. A short distance from camp, a large mound of displaced earth sits beside a hole in the ground—neither of which were there when you made camp.

Inn

[wearyallalone]

If Vanya privately suspected before they even arrived that there were no good answers awaiting them as to "why a town full of treasure hunters seemed to empty overnight," he kept the pessimism to himself on the journey here. Similarly, now that they're searching, he focuses on the task at hand, reserving any opinions if he has them. (Those who know him well or who are especially observant might have seen a small, involuntary flinch when they found the pyre.)

The inn seems a likely avenue, as it's where those drawn here specifically by the lure of the Deep Roads may have stayed. If it's unlikely to offer anything especially upsetting, well, all to the good. As he and Ness start working through the rooms, she can see his calm, systematic approach at work. The fact that it isn't yielding much initially doesn't seem to shake him from his method. Vanya neatly closes the doors of each of the rooms they've been through behind them, marking their progress.

He's checked under the pillows and mattress of every bed before this one, too, and when he withdraws the journal he turns it over, as if to verify it's an actual clue rather than wishful thinking. He looks up to Ness. "I didn't bring my spectacles," he says, offering the journal to her. "Why don't you take a look?" He's not so nearsighted he couldn't manage, but he may as well take advantage of the more youthful set of eyes.

the pyre.

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle knows what burned flesh smells like.

Even before it had been her own sizzling horrifically under the claws of a rage demon newly corporeal, she won't soon forget the smoke that rose over Halamshiral; the terrible knowledge of Magalie's end, choking on smoke within a burning building that Alix hadn't made it inside of. She has been on too many battlefields, and set too many fires of her own since—

probably anyone would have followed a stench like this one, though, with the size of the pyre in front of them. How many of the village had burned in it? How many had survived to do the burning? The quiet around them tells its own story. Not enough. The fact they're following rumours tells it, too; no one to ask, no one to give answers. The brothers Chapman aren't exactly primary sources.

She glances sidelong at Caius. “I can't tell if the brine smell is coming from the pyre as well or not,” is just a statement, more than a question. Seems unlikely he can tell any easier.

root cellar.

[portalling]

It’s a ghost town, eerily abandoned with no signs of life, as if everyone simply up and left: what happened here? The Riftwatch group has to shake off the disquiet of actually opening doors and letting themselves into people’s houses uninvited, unceremoniously calling out, “Hello? Anyone there?” and there’s nothing, and nothing, and nothing. Rifling through homes, they find them empty and untouched.

Unsurprisingly, they decide to utilise a buddy system; nobody walks around Sarrux’s Pass alone.

Descending into the root cellar of the next house, Strange has almost gotten past that dead silence, ready to crack some cheesy joke to try to lighten the oppressive mood, but then he draws up so short that Jayce collides with him on the stairs, and they’re stuck looking at the tableau in front of them. A teenager and a child in one corner, and in the other… 

Autopilot kicks in, clean and medical: Release of cadaverine. Putrefactive changes and bloat, blisters and marbling. Three to five days after death?

“Well, shit,” the sorcerer mutters to himself, and then clears his throat to deliver a bald-faced lie: “Hey. It’s okay.”

The children stare back, wall-eyed, silent. He shoots a worried look to Jayce, a half-whispered “What do we do?”

Strange is typically so quick to seize responsibility, a position of comfortable authority, except —

Take all his discomfort when facing someone traumatised and in need of comfort, and multiply it by a thousand when it’s children. He’s not great with kids. Part of him quails at the very thought of rearranging his face into something reassuring and trying to find the right delicate words. They look emaciated, malnourished, perhaps injured? Those are details he can work with. And he wants to look at whatever that thing is in the corner.

But where the hell do you start.

iv. the descent

[aberratic]

What once may have been a beautiful open archway into the Deep Roads is now nothing more than a jagged wound in the stone, through which a small antechamber and a very steep staircase are dimly visible. The antechamber holds no evidence of recent use, by animals or anything else, owing perhaps in part to the faint but offensive smell of brine and rot emanating from the entrance. Light from outside is enough to see by in the antechamber, but beyond the first few steps the stairs become pitch black. Unlit torches have been anchored to the wall at regular intervals, evidence of the path's recent use.

Descending the stairs takes only minutes, but it feels longer. Siorus' Blight sense alerts him to Darkspawn more and more insistently the deeper the party goes—a fight awaits in the chamber ahead.

The fight is difficult, but not unwinnable—these Darkspawn are few in number, hurlocks and genlocks mostly, with no extra mutations. There is a giant hole in the middle of the chamber which may have been their source, but there are also two open archways leading further into the Deep Roads, down which the smell of brine begins to fade. Rubble has amassed in the corners of the chamber, near which campsites lie abandoned. In one of these abandoned campsites, Jayce finds lyrium charges, explosives dwarves use to clear rubble and open mining paths in the Deep Roads.

It's Vanya who finds the secret door on the south wall, through which the scent of brine grows thicker and more oppressive. There is no sound down this winding, sloping path—none but what the party makes, and some may feel encouraged to lighten the mood with talk but others may think it best not to draw the attention of... whatever lies in wait ahead.

descent; ota

[portalling]

They move deeper and deeper underground, ears popping with the air pressure change and the stale air with the faint occasional whiff of salt, as if they’re going underwater; did the tunnels flood? did everyone go down here and drown? is that what happened?

But it’s just tunnels and darkness and unlit torches, until they emerge into a chamber of darkspawn.

Doctor Strange instantly falls back on old instincts in the battle. There’s a quick efficiency to the sorcerer which might be surprising if you’ve only seen him shuffling paperwork in the infirmary; he’s evidently surprisingly comfortable with combat and violence, moving into fluid motion to cover their younger teammates. He summons up a fiery sword in his right hand, the other still clutching a mage’s staff tipped with unusual green veil-quartz, and he presses the advantage.

Or you might find him afterward, sitting on a pile of rubble to catch his breath, looking over their options. Hole in the floor, two archways, no clear path forward (yet).

“Left, right, down?” he asks, light. “All options look pretty shitty, tell you the truth.”

v. shit gets real

[aberratic]

The path stretches down for what feels like hours before it begins to level out, the brine-and-decay smell growing more and more assertive as the party descends. Carvings, many too ancient and faded to hold much detail, begin to pepper the rock—not of dwarven make, but not human, either. What can be made out depicts a priestess, a supplicant, and a monster, and while the supplicant and the monster change slightly with each iteration, the priestess remains the same. Their eyes all seem to follow you, and no one can quite agree on what they're seeing.

Is the priestess' smile benevolent—or cruel? Is she wearing a crown—or are horns growing from her head? Does her dress flow beautifully around her—or are those tentacles?

Is the supplicant paying respectful deference to the priestess—or pleading for mercy? If they are pleading, who with—the priestess, or the observer?

The creature—does it resemble the supplicant? Is it in pain? Is it even a monster at all?

The party finally come to a set of massive, forbidding doors, left barely open. The vast chamber beyond them is clearly of elven design, held up by finely-carved columns. The horn-like striations worked into them shift and change even with eyes on them, so you look to the walls instead and find massive bas reliefs, running in three horizontal bands. What at first appear to be pigments or paints in the reliefs, on closer inspection, are revealed to be thousands of tiny jewels.

It's difficult to make out, but at the end of the room there appears to be another massive set of doors, though these are tightly shut. It's impossible to know what lays beyond them for sure, but Siorus' Blight sense is buzzing like mad—there's plenty of darkspawn. If any rifters get close to the doors, their bodies react and mutate, as they would in the presence of lyrium. Stepping away from the doors, far away, negates the effects, and the mutations return to normal.

While the party observes the reliefs and searches the rest of the chamber, a deafening scrape heralds the opening of the massive doors at the back. Through them come Kitt and Holden, maddened out of their minds, to abscond with Gwen, Siorus, and Caius. If anyone manages to confront them, they can only babble about how they want to offer the other three in trade to "her", because the children weren't enough. They pull their three captives through the giant doors at the end of the room, which close behind them with a thunderous thud.

There are a few ways to follow after them: forcing the massive doors open with magic, blasting them open with lyrium charges, or, the easiest and most subtle way, a smaller, circumspect door set into a corner. No matter how the party follows, their presence is expected.

bas relief.

[wildered]

He's been experimenting with eyeballs, the last few minutes, looking at the carvings in the rock. To a deepstalker's vision—nothing of note. There's not much vision to speak of in dedicated cave burrowers. But it was worth a try. To a bogfisher's, meant for murky waters, the carvings are unshifting but indistinct. To a bronto's—

That will have to wait. There's not enough room in here.

And to a nightjar, clear and detailed, though he doesn't learn anything from it except that it's the easiest way to see. So it's a nondescript brown and grey bird who's looking at the bas-relief walls, rapid wingbeats holding him (or her, technically; the nightjar he learned was female) aloft before one stretch of wall.

The approach of company has him change back, folding out of the bird as if rolling through a small doorway, a puff of light and feathers before his feet are dropping the two inches left between them and the floor.

"Look," he says.

The scenes on the wall stretch across it in three horizontal bands. At first glance in low light, the top depicts a march into battle, the bottom mountains and a mass of twisted creatures. Between them, where Sirious is touching one of the figures, an elven figure in green is overseeing the poisoning of a village, its occupants and its well.

a bunch of stuff; ota

[portalling]

bas reliefs

Strange is doing a loop around the room as if he’s observing works at a museum, spine straight and hands tucked behind his back, examining the bas reliefs with a thoughtful expression. (Somewhere, he remembers Mount Wundagore: ancient carvings, a conquering witch, a familiar face wrought in stone.)

“I don’t know much about Thedosian art history, but none of the reliefs really look dwarven; not brutalist arc deco enough. But is it actually elven? Or do you think darkspawn do art?”

mutations (cw body horror)

As they investigate that massive door, closed and locked and no visible way to open it, Strange starts pressing his hand against it, searching for some sort of hidden catch or pressure-plate.

And as his palm rests on the door, there’s— a squirming roiling writhing at the contact. He jolts back as if he’s touched a hot stove, looking at his hand, and: it looks back. The skin of his palm has peeled back to expose an eyeball blinking in the middle of his palm. The rest of his arm is starting to feel rippling, slick, boneless.

“Jesus christ,” he says, and closes his hand into a fist to hide the mutation.

the door

Much later, after the chaos and right after the three captives have been snatched and carried away, the group is treated to the uncustomary sight of Stephen Strange— well.

Everything blurs a little. Red around the edges of his vision, blood pounding in his ears, his fists pounding on that stone door until it hurts. He sends a blast of fiery energy against the door, slamming against it, desperate to get through, trying to pry it open with raw brute magic no matter how it exhausts him, trying and failing and failing —

It’s not working. You’ll have to pull him back.

want your bas (relief) romance

[reparo]

It's going to be like this, isn't it? The descent into the Deep Roads, or whatever hides under Sarrux Pass, is more a descent into madness than anything. She's come to terms with it by now, and when the party enters the vast chamber, Hermione lights up her wand again.

Her gaze falls on the first bas relief, and as her eyes adjust to the dim light she notices the pointed ears first. "Elves?" She is surprised - what is elven art doing under a dwarven city?

(Her version of the bas relief above: two regal women, one in red and one in green, approach astride harts, looking...beautiful, kind, peaceful.)

"Do these look familiar at all?" to someone she knows is from Thedas. (Sorry, Stephen, Ness, and Jayce.)

vi. the lyrium chamber

[aberratic]

All hell breaks loose when they make it into the last chamber. Dozens if not hundreds of mutated darkspawn and other creatures swarm the party, many of which look like they may have once been human—though they very much are not, now. It's hard to note anything about the chamber in the chaos, only the obvious immediately able to register:

The room is massively cavernous, with ceilings barely visible; giant hart statues overlook the room from beside an equally giant throne; the stench of brine and rot is overpowering here; the hum of a sickly-green lyrium stalactite drowns out most other noise.

Where the rest of the mutated creatures attack the party, one monstrosity wanders, dazed and weeping. The siblings found in the root cellar have melded together into one fleshy mass, with two heads and a ratking for a fist. They will not attack anyone or anything.

In the middle of the chaos, Kittrick and Holden lead Gwenaëlle, Siorus, and Caius to a large pool in the direct center of the room. They've been force-fed some of the liquid, and as soon as they touch the pool, the lyrium hanging above begins to act on it, mutating them. If they become fully coccooned in the liquid, their mutations will become too severe to ignore.

The rifters, exposed to this strange lyrium, mutate as well, more quickly and extensively than those exposed to lyrium have before.

The crystal must come down. The monsters must be killed. Someone has to be warned of what's happening here. How will the team get out? Do they want to bring back some of the liquid, or a shard of the lyrium? Do they want to leave the chamber intact, to study all this one day?

i have no mouth and i must scream; cw body horror

[aberratic]

It'd been harder than Ness would like to admit to follow everyone into the chamber.

That sounds bad—it's not as though she'd wanted to leave Gwenaëlle and Siorus and Caius behind, or that she wanted to leave everyone to their fate and run away like a coward. At the very least, if they survived, she couldn't have lived with the shame.

No, she didn't want to leave everyone to do the rescuing without her. It just takes a little while to convince yourself you're alright with becoming a mindflayer, if it means you can save someone's life.

She's the last one into the chamber, and immediately Ness can feel the influence of the lyrium, the itch in her eyes that means they've turned black and orange again. Her step stutters, just for a moment—there's no time. She runs into the fray, searching frantically through the chaos for Kittrick and Holden and their captives. Her heart and mind race, panicked. Make this count. She has to make this count, if it might be the last thing she ever does as herself, this can't have been for nothing—

"No!"

The brothers are in the middle of the chamber, beneath the lyrium stalactite, marching the three friends to the pit of briny liquid. Instinctively, desperately, Ness flings a barrage of psychic power at them, demanding submission, demanding they just—listen—to her—

A jagged crown shimmers above a brother's head. His eyes glow with a faint purple light. He drops his captive, and takes a swing at his brother.

"let's get philosophical" - Antivan bard, Olivie Newtosh-Job

[reparo]

She'll be damned if she didn't wish she had a cleansing spell or two at her disposal right now - there is so much blood, and there is so much blood under her nails and - Darkspawn blood is tainted, right? She has to get it out, before it taints her, because she'll also be damned if she goes down with the Blight after spending so many years fighting.

In the midst of all chaos quieting down, Hermione stands in a corner of the chamber, slowly cleaning under each sharp nail (claw) with the sharp end of a blade. It's not an exciting blade, anyone who's ever witnessed someone collect elfroot would know it's that kind of knife. But it does the trick, for now.

Mid-way through her left middle finger, she looks up at whoever is near, as if she's remembered just now: "What's going to happen to this place?"