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

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.

[aberratic]

Ness is, admittedly, not quite as systemic in her approach to the work—she very clearly wants to be, and starts out intending to be, but quite often she ends up getting diverted in the middle of one task because there was something ever more curious over there. It's not the fastest approach to searching the building, but she can hardly be blamed for wanting to make sure they find everything even remotely of interest here, can she? Anyway, that "method" leads to her discovery of the inn's guest book, which got picked up immediately as Ness realized what it was, and has been carted all over the building since.

When Vanya offers her the journal, she hands off the guest book in trade, and tries not to look too giddy.

"This is exactly the kind of thing that Candlekeep exists for," she says, but if Vanya has any questions she doesn't notice, too immediately caught up in reading.

"The first entry's dated 28 Bloomingtide. That's pretty early, isn't it? The entrance would have just opened up, then... Arrived in the Pass with Merv and Quinn today," she narrates,

"The rumours were true. The whole town's a funny mix of smug and terrified about it, and of course not one of them has gone in the damn hole yet. A couple people want to plug it back up and pretend nothing happened. Say their ancestors must have closed it off for a reason, that there are "monsters" down there.

Fools. Monsters means Darkspawn, and I ain't afraid of no Darkspawn. They can be killed, just like anything else—especially if they're between the Lords and our treasure.

Lords," Ness looks to Vanya, eyebrows drawn in confusion, "Lords like... nobility? There wasn't any mention of a missing noble in the briefing."

[wearyallalone]

He wishes, not for the first time, that Ellis was with them. Darkspawn are well outside Vanya's wheelhouse, his limited experience all from Riftwatch itself. (And if he wishes Ellis was here for personal reasons too, well, there's no harm in an unspoken wish.)

"Usually, in my experience, a missing aristocrat would be noted. Perhaps it's not that literal. There were a group of actors in Ferelden who called themselves lords of story, so it could be something like that." Probably not that actual group of actors, but he trusts her to take his point.

He opens the guest book, moving it a bit closer until he can read the writing, and flips back to Bloomingtide. Merv and Quinn aren't such common names, and he expects them to be easy enough to find with a date of arrival.

[aberratic]

Not Literally Lords, got it. Ness nods, accepting this answer, and looks back to the journal, reading under her breath while Vanya looks through the guest book.

Merv and Quinn are in the book, right where they should be, arrived 28 Bloomingtide with another name, "Wendyll". They paid for a single room with two straw beds—not people with money, then, or at least not people willing to pay top dollar at an inn for a nicer bed, or a room each. They don't sign out the next night, nor the next, but the day after, they leave the inn, all paid up.

So why is Wendyll's journal still here?

"Oh—Messere Orlov, listen to this:

10 Solace. The Farenti crew's gone missing. They were acting all squirrely the other day, snickering at each other and then going all quiet when anyone looked at them funny about it. They've got a secret, plain as, but no one'd decided what to do about it—heard Cathy Gold-Eye muttering about beating it out of them, but she never had the chance. They disappeared a week ago this morning, and no one's seen hide nor hair of any of them since.

We all know the risks, and the rules. Whatever you find, it ain't worth your life. Not much fortune to find if you're dead, is there?

More for us who's smart enough to come back to civilization once in a while, anyway.

That's the first mention of a disappearance," Ness says, looking up at Vanya. She has a glint in her eye, like this is all a very interesting puzzle she gets to put together. "10 Solace, that's... two and a half months ago."

Which isn't a lot of time for a whole town to become deserted like this, but maybe that's scarier than if it'd happened slow.

[wearyallalone]

He keeps his place marked with his thumb, ready to show it to her, but the excerpt gives him pause. When she stops, he shakes his head, clearly not to correct her math but in frustration at the journal's vagueness.

"It makes sense that treasure hunters would be competitive, but I fear it's going to make our job more difficult. If none of them were sharing information with one another, we're likely to only get a partial picture from any given source. It's also..." He comes to show her what he'd been looking at. "They were only here for a few days in Bloomingtide. Why the journal entry from more than a month later? Did they go and come back? Was that what he meant by coming back to civilization, maybe?"

He flips forward toward Solace once he's sure she's had a chance to see what he saw.

[aberratic]

"I'm not sure," Ness chews a bit on her bottom lip while she thinks, looking between the journal and the guest book. Wendyll's name doesn't come up again between Bloomingtide and Solace, but plenty of others do. This inn was booming in between Wendyll's first entry and the one from Solace. Lots of entries, not a lot of exits—except...

"Hang on." Ness lays her hand gently over Vanya's before he can turn the page again, pausing him on 3rd Solace. "That's dozens of people checking out. What happened that day?"

It can't be whatever caused the whole town to be deserted, no one would bother to check out of the local inn in a calamity. Whatever it was, people thought the Pass could be salvaged, still.

[wearyallalone]

"You're right; it's a remarkably orderly exit. And not all of these people checked in the same day, I assume, so it's not just one large group departing together." He looks thoughtful. "Not a particular holiday, that I know of, or ... and it was before our journal-writer came back."

A frustrating hole in the narrative. The exodus feels significant, but he's not sure what might have prompted it.

[aberratic]

Ness stares at the guestbook, eyes narrowed and lip between her teeth, but despite the scrutiny, no answers jump off of the pages. She huffs, and turns her attention back to the journal.

"I don't think he meant returning to the inn, he's mentioned 'returning to civilization' in a few entries already, but there are no indications of him in the guest book... Perhaps somewhere in the Deep Roads? Some communal space, to make sure everyone's still alive, or something..."

There must be answers in these books. She looks back to the journal, ready to skim and jump to the next week, but the next entry is so short—

"Oh," she says, voice low, dropped with her stomach into the floor.

"11 Solace. Quinn is dead. We're going back to town. Fuck this place.

"Same day, probably. Idiot should have known better. You hear funny things down here, you ignore them. You don't follow them, not even if they sound like people. Especially not if they sound like people you know. Farenti's team's dead, or as good as down here. They wouldn't be calling for help, leastwise from down some fucking spawn hole.

"13 Solace. Back in the Pass. They say the well's no good, but they'll find new water soon. I asked what "no good" meant and they showed me—whatever that liquid is, it ain't water: grey and foul and stinks of the sea. We're far enough inland I'd thought we'd be well clear of the stench, but Quinn smelled it in the Roads, too. I told him he was full of it."

[wearyallalone]

His expression is grim, which can hardly be a surprise, given the pair of entries she's just highlighted. "Well, I suppose we knew it wasn't going to end well, given the state of the town. And, probably, that the journal was left behind; it suggests a rush to leave."

Or, perhaps, a desire not to remember the details of what took place.

"I've heard of wells going bad, but grey feels unusual. More often orange or brown, from iron or decaying plants. But don't take my word, I'm no expert." It feels odd, more than that he can swear it definitely is.

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.

[sumptus]

It's not uncommon to dream of fire. Rage takes the shape of it, the heat licking through one's veins, the imagined sear of it escaping the body, but the real thing, blistering old skin and charring bones, that's more often the domain of grief. Hardwood smoke, a day's rot beneath the acrid burning of flesh while the fire takes the last of one well loved. Hardly anyone dreams in scents, but that one sticks.

Brine, though -- the flick an eye to her betrays his surprise, and at the word, not the smell. He cannot, in fact, tell shit. "Gotta be miles from the sea."

And that's not water. Circling a puddle on the edge of the pyre, he pulls a kerchief from his pocket and crouches down to scoop the edge of the grey liquid.

"Salt deposit, maybe?" Bringing the cloth near his mouth like he's about to take a taste, but— "The taint is black, right?"

[elegiaque]

“I don't know that salt alone would do it,” she says, doubtfully, thinking: surely that isn't all that makes the sea smell the way the sea smells, what about all the strange life under its surface?

It doesn't seem like there's any life beneath the surface, here, but then again: it is vanishingly unlikely that this just happened without some manner of encounter with something. Villages don't become ghost stories that strange old men warn passing travellers against because of salt deposits,

she's still pondering this when she looks back at his question and balks, immediately: “Don't put that in your fucking mouth,” really seems more pressing a concern than what colour the taint is.

[sumptus]

"Small amounts of caustic substances almost never cause permanent damage," says man about to melt his own face off. Don't be such a baby.

But he does close his mouth, frowning, squishing it between two handkerchief'd fingers instead. Texture alone doesn't tell him much; he'll have to bottle it for proper study.

"Whatever this stuff is, it doesn't seem dangerous enough to do all this. Not so fast you'd need to put half the town to the torch at once."

So what did? (And where's the other half?)

[elegiaque]

The fixed, severe look she gives him is unwavering and unmoved through his argument in favour of taking an irresponsibly geological approach to a clearly fucking horrifying scenario—

but since he takes her point enough not to actually put it in his fucking mouth, “Fast and slow,” she says, instead of research can definitely figure that out with some method other than licking, “fast enough to wipe them out, slow enough they were able to build the pyre. Maybe some funerary rites.”

Did they all die at once? Did the bodies pile up until it made more sense to wait for the dying? Were there funerary rites, or was this a desperate act?

[sumptus]

He nods, considering her point. Not a single Venatori attack, then, or the survivors who built the pyres would be here to answer their questions. He pulls a vial from his pouch, scooping the liquid carefully into it.

"A plague could move like that. Some fast, some slow, but almost everybody in the end. But even that, you'd think would give them time to send for a healer." Or at least a clearer message than something about dwarves. He stands again, continuing in an arc to survey the area.

"Plagues don't dig holes though." A beat. "You faced darkspawn before?"

hashtag foreshadowing

[elegiaque]

“Only the kind infested with red lyrium,” she says, “and from as much a distance as I could manage.”

Bands of them scattered about, after Ghislain, and how much of her life nowadays is defined by that first battlefield? The things that happened before and after Ghislain. Maybe it hadn't really changed anything except for her, she thinks; maybe she had just understood something different, after that.

None of that is useful here. She frowns at the pyre, and says, “In a little cluster like this,” the village, she means, “close quarters would be almost unavoidable.”

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.

[pathlit]

Swallowing down disgust and dismay, Jayce shakes his head in wordless response and lowers his mace a fraction. He glances between the two children and the bloated corpse, then meets Strange's eyes again and jerks his head toward the latter.

You take the corpse, he means.

And not because he's comfortable with the children. Oh, no. Not at all.

"Hey," he offers, quiet and pitying in voice and countenance. The younger stares at him; the older stares at Strange. Tracking movement. Tracking threats. Jayce grimaces, then reluctantly crouches, fingers snug around his weapon, joints ready to spring back at a moment's notice.

He doesn't trust them, either.

But speaking softly, asking questions, physically lowering himself to their level -- none of these efforts disarm. Every shift in position either of the men make prompts a flinch, a narrowing of eyes.

Beneath leather and fabric, the acid in his stomach gurgles.

[portalling]

Strange doesn’t let his guard down either, circling so his back isn’t to the group, and he keeps the others in his field of vision.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the children would still be frightened of them. At least the doctor cuts a less imposing figure than Jayce: a bit shorter, much less broad and muscled, not carrying a visible weapon. (His hands, his mind, are the weapons.) But he steps over to the corpse half-wedged in the wall, and leans in to examine.

He tries to keep half of his attention on Jayce and the children, but professional curiosity soon narrows his full focus, draws it like a hook to the corpse. Yes, judging by the bloat, three to five days; his first estimate was correct. (Have they been with it this whole time?)

It looks like darkspawn. The type they call an ogre, large with densely-packed muscle, curling horns reminiscent of the Qunari. But it looks uncomfortably wrong even for what he expects of darkspawn: lumpy, bulbous, with horn-like growths across its body in places where they shouldn’t be. Strange pulls on a pair of gloves and takes a dissector from his pouch in order to touch the growths, and finds the tissue hard, oddly crystalline. Curious.

He cranes over his shoulder, looking back at the others. His voice comes clipped and businesslike, as if the children are fellow colleagues to be interrogated: “How did it die? Were you involved?”

They don’t answer. He sighs, looks back at the body.

[pathlit]

As Strange surveys, Jayce tries the easy routes: I'm Jayce. He's Dr. Strange. We're here to help you two. Nothing, save the dreary, wary stare upon him. What happened to your guardians? A flicker of recognition, perhaps. Are you hun--

The rustle of fabric and the clink of Strange's instrument command both of the children's attention like an electric current. Just as quickly, the younger child shrinks further into the corner, wide-eyed as they glance between the two men, dirtied knuckles clenched.

Jayce sighs, then shoots an exasperated look at the shadowed corner behind the children. (He isn't willing to take his eyes entirely off of them.) "Look at them. Whatever's outside is worse than that."

There are no visible shackles or stakes. Why else would they stay in the foul company of an inhuman corpse?

[portalling]

In the background, Jayce’s voice remains a low comforting murmur toward the children, each sentence or question meeting another brick wall.

“It looks like it was burrowing in here when it died,” Strange says. “They might’ve been defending the basement from incursion; maybe that’s what happened to the rest of the town. It’s weird that they stayed, though.”

He presses the growths harder. Lifts a heavy dead arm, and finds… another arm growing out of the creature’s side, bent at unnatural angles, and his mouth thins. “I’m admittedly not very familiar with darkspawn; I haven’t encountered them before, and most of my readings on non-human biology has focused on the races I might need to treat in Riftwatch. But ogres are supposed to have the usual number of limbs, don’t they?”

Perhaps he shouldn’t discuss these details so openly, so matter-of-factly, but he needs to pass this information to his colleague. And the children are—

Almost certainly horrifically traumatised, from whatever they’d seen here. Whatever happened. So that ship’s already sailed. The damage has already been done.

[pathlit]

He frowns, further unnerved. What kind of question is that?

After a beat of indecision, Jayce rises to take a step back from the children. He reaches into the pack at his hip, procuring jerky wrapped in waxed cloth, and pulls out a piece. Intentionally, he bites it in front of them, chews, and swallows. Then, he carefully sets the rest of the bundle down onto the floor in front of them.

Still watching the pair, he takes another step back, then turns and approaches Strange's space -- and the corpse.

"The usual, yeah," he says, glancing over his shoulder at the kids before looking at the orge's body. Disgust crosses his expression. "Limited personal experience, but I haven't seen one like this before."

When he turns away, it's both to look at the children and to breathe. They haven't moved, nor have they accepted the offering of food.

[portalling]

“Okay. Yep. Just checking.” Strange lets the arm drop; that mass of limbs flops, the odd horned protrusions more visible now. Cells dividing too quickly, he thinks. Tumorous.

Standing side-by-side with Jayce as they both glance back at the children, he adds, more quietly now, “I wish they’d say something.” Both for the children’s own sake, and more selfishly because he wants information and answers, and they’re not being very forthcoming this way — also, well, it’s a little freaky. The two of them sitting silent and watchful, clinging to each other, mute. Uncharitably: he’s seen the horror movies. It’s always two fucked-up kids luring you to places you shouldn’t be.

“Trauma can make people go non-verbal, though, and…” A helpless gesture of a hand at that tunnel yawning underground, the monster dead in it. Trauma.

[pathlit]

At least one of them wields the knowledge of pop culture.

His attention follows the direction of Strange's gesture. "It could be us," he says, matching the good doctor's volume. "What about... Tavane or Granger?"

A quick mental survey of their little party yields the following conclusion: Ness and Hermione are the only two members who, on first impressions, appear soft and kind and small. Maybe the children might instinctively trust one of them than the rest.