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

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.”

battle.

[elegiaque]

Old instincts and newer ones, too: Gwenaëlle might have done it a hundred times, the way it seems so natural to pivot so that Stephen covers her blind side, flicking the lenses on her focus to narrow the force of her fade blast, drawing her cleansing blade from the garter holster on her thigh to grip it in the other hand. Her eyes narrow, strategy in split seconds, before she takes aim to break a darkspawn's knee with a targeted blast, sending it careening into the path of its own fellows—

it is not the first time she's tried to bowl the undead.

“I hate the idea of there being a way darkspawn should look, but at least these ones don't look differently horrifying—”

[portalling]

For all that they’re in a war, these two aren’t often in frontline battle at the same time (someone has to stay home to feed the cat, Stephen had once joked). But luck brought them both along this time: Stephen in case the issue with the village is medical in nature, a plague, an illness, like Cledwyn again with the grain gone foul.

And Gwenaëlle brought along because, well, she’s very very good at killing things.

Case in point: the bite of her dagger cutting through tendon, that blast from her anchor rearranging the darkspawn, clustering them so Stephen’s next blast of fire hits a larger group.

They haven’t fought fight-by-side since Starkhaven, an entire year-and-a-half past, and yet falling back on this is easy. They know each other: Stephen compensates for Gwenaëlle’s missing eye, and he knows the exact height and the length of Gwenaëlle’s step that’ll bring her back into range, the weight of her by his side.

“Is this normal?” Stephen asks, frowning at one of the genlocks ahead of them. Pale, sun-starved, warped and sickly. But his tone of voice remains flippant, in the way that this is almost comfortingly familiar; the way this used to be his normal life, once upon a time, fighting demons and monsters and aberrations out of other planes.

“This is my first time fighting darkspawn, believe it or not—”

[elegiaque]

A fade shield bursts from her hand to surround them, a green-gold shimmer in the air, buying elbow-room and enough room to say, “That's what Grey Wardens are for,” with a jut of her chin toward Siorus, “ordinarily.”

(What's ordinary? Grown adults fighting these battles now who barely remember the status quo that was when they were children; maybe Vanya's right, maybe the revolution will be boring and inevitable, the result of no one in their prime remembering the world that got broken in half exactly the way it was before the break—)

Since they've only the one Warden and everyone is going to have to pull their own weight, Gwenaëlle pivots when a genlock gets a little too close for comfort, kicking into the back of its knee and bouncing one foot up the thigh of the thing to launch herself onto its shoulders, flipping her blades in her hands to bring them down into the softest, most convenient route into the skull.

vignette 🎀

[portalling]

Oh, she has been paying attention to the medical textbooks.

Stephen can’t help the proud grin that spreads across his face as he spares a single indulgent moment to watch her, admiring. Gwenaëlle’s blades stab into the genlock’s head and she drives it to the ground, smoothly leaping off again like the gymnast she is. He can trust Gwenaëlle to take his eyes off her, however, to know she knows what the hell she’s doing and she can handle herself. So he lets his attention deviate, ducking low for his flaming spectral sword to cut through a hurlock’s ankle, crucial muscle-tissue severed. The hulking beast’s leg can’t hold it anymore and it goes stumbling, crashing into the wall of the cavern; there’s the rumbling shake of the ceiling, some earth and small rocks pattering loose, ricocheting off some of their party.

Stephen glances over just as Gwenaëlle carves through another and he calls out with a jolt of concern, “Mind the blood—”. His own fade-crafted shield springs into view between her and the enemy, glimmering and golden. Black ichor from another injured genlock splatters across that invisible barrier, dripping black droplets hanging in midair.

She’s good at dodging arterial spray; he knows this already. But it can’t hurt to be too careful here: not when the risk of a drop of ichor in your eye is the blight, the taint, a slow rotting death from the inside.

They continue to move in unison as they help to hold the line: a finely-tuned instrument, carefully-synchronised like they are in the infirmary or on the sparring range (and elsewhere—). By the end, with the latest wave of darkspawn broken on Riftwatch’s shores, he pauses only long enough to wait for Gwenaëlle to wipe the sweat and worse off her face, and then presses a quick kiss to her forehead before he moves on.

battle; open to a group thread

[sumptus]

The first time they'd spoken, he'd told Gwenaëlle, quite confidently, that if the Gallows were ever under attack again, he wouldn't need a rescue. A fair interpretation of that statement might be that he's a mage; he can bend the Fade to his every impulse, of course he can defend himself.

What he'd meant was, Don't write Caius Porthmeus can't fight shit on your duty roster.

But it might be worth making a note, now. As the band of genlocks close in, as Strange's flaming sword cuts an arc through the air in front of them, Caius watches one rotting hurlock in stinking, blood-spattered armor and dripping axe, stand to its full, towering height.

And just— keeps watching. Doesn't move, or even breathe.

[aberratic]

Ness has only been in battle the once, so far, in the Grand Necropolis in Nevarra. She learned some things while she was there, to wit:

She is not going to be gods-damned useless while other people are killing things.

For her, that means less being in the middle of the fray and more strategically keeping to the edges. She's got an eye on Stephen, ably swinging his fiery sword around, one on Gwenaëlle at his side, and—oh, Binder's knots, Caius.

Lack of a staff (or any other weapon, really) means that Ness moves more quickly through the battlefield than she otherwise might, and she darts to Caius' side, grabbing him at the elbow and shaking. While he decides if he wants to join the rest of them in dealing with the task at hand, she focuses on the hurlock. There's no sound when she opens her mouth—none that anyone in the party could hear, anyway, but the hurlock stops abruptly in its tracks and clutches at its head, screeching in pain. It turns completely around and runs in the opposite direction—

Straight toward Vanya. Whoops?

[wearyallalone]

He is not a Warden, but Vanya is not a man to freeze in battle. Even without his former Templar abilities, his sword functions as an extension of his arm. He fights with a calm concentration that seems of a piece with his usual demeanor, heightened and focused.

Hurlocks are large, skilled with swords and fundamentally unsettling, but they also tend to fight with a carelessness for defense that creates exactly the sort of opening Vanya favors. The distraction helps further. Vanya pivots toward the oncoming figure soon enough that it won't take him by surprise. From his stance, he seems ready to go for a blow to the torso but feints at the last moment with a punishing downward slash to the knee that sends the frightened Darkspawn sprawling. The hurlock tries to slash at Vanya's leg instead of rising, and this turns out to be a mistake. The blow glances off Vanya's greave, and Vanya is able to drive his sword down through the thing's head while it's still prone. The hurlock twitches and stills.

Of course, the problem with Darkspawn (at least for a seasoned fighter) is not defeating one of them. They're trying to drive the Riftwatch party apart, whether instinctively or consciously. Though Vanya took care of the particular hurlock, he's going to have to keep fighting to stay near the others and risks being overrun if he doesn't succeed.

[portalling]

Strange spares a quick glance behind them, Ness trying to shake Caius into motion, and the boy has frozen.

No amount of tame practice on the training ground will get you properly accustomed to the split-second decisions, to the raw violence of seeing Vanya Orlov’s sword driven through a skull, spilling bone and brain matter and unsettling black ichor on the ground. But. No time like the present for the youths to learn.

Strange doesn’t fight with a templar’s shield, but as a genlock leaps over its now-dead comrade and tries to stab at their party —

A shimmering golden shield flares into view in front of Caius and Ness, blocking the blow, sending it skittering off an ethereal intangible wall of protection. The light glimmers, and the Fade hums even louder as it dissolves in favour of a blast of energy sending the genlock flying back into the rubble, a single sharp crack as its head collides with rock. These enemies have the advantage of numbers, but the smaller ones are also relatively weak.

“Get moving,” the sorcerer snaps, to-the-point.

[sumptus]

Caius flinches from the touch, looking sharp toward Ness but not at her, seeing through to some older and more deeply ingrained instinct that says his own six feet of height is too small, too weak to fight. You'll only make it worse if you run. Doesn't she know that?

But the hurlock turns, and Vanya's sword squelches through its knees, through its skull. Men don't bleed black. Men don't launch themselves with a simian swing over their fellows' corpses, and the sizzle of golden shield, the hum of the Fade in front of him pulls him back to the reality where he, too, can feel those threads singing between his fingers.

Get moving. Ness pulls him back and he finally takes stock of the situation, the chaos, the number of them who aren't wielding swords of flame or otherwise. Backing toward the nearest cover, he raises a hand out into the air, and a circle of symbols alight on the stone floor out in front of where the others are fighting.

"Don't step on it." The glyph. The first genlock that does drops like a sack of potatoes the moment his foot touches the ground — eyes wide open, breathing, alive, but a pitifully easy target.

[aberratic]

Part of not being useless while everyone else does the fighting is knowing where she's most useful, and in that regard, Ness is under no illusions: she does not belong in the middle of a battlefield. Caius back to himself, Stephen snapping at them to Get moving, she spins on her heel and begins to dart away from the fray.

It's harder to hug the edges of a fight when you've been identified as A Problem, though, and she only gets a few feet before a hurlock takes notice of her and launches itself in her direction with an inhuman snarl. Ness yelps, high and terrified, backpedaling quickly to avoid the 'spawn—too quickly.

She trips, and lands on her ass, with a hurlock standing over her and her mind blank from shock.

[reparo]

It's not that she's a fearsome, violent soldier - this is nothing like the fight atop the falling city of Alem, harpies and dragons sweeping down to kill, but it is also everything like that fight; a switch is flipped in Hermione's mind, from hesitation to survival.

Facts first: the hurlocks, the darkspawn - they are not good. They may be humanoid, but there is nothing humane left in them, and they always, always strike to kill. Thedas is a place where she could die, and she knows that she doesn't want to, doesn't plan to, doesn't take it lightly.

This contingent of Darkspawn is not hard to dispatch, but it feels like a bottleneck - the lot of them are the ones trickling into the chamber one at a time, as they can.

Wherever she was previously, on the outskirts of the melee battle, flinging incendio after incendio, it all comes to a grinding halt when she sees Ness fall -

- and springs into action, her regular Apparition manifesting her between Ennaris' fallen form and the hurlock as the monster raises a claw to strike, her wand slashing an arc in the air to say: "Protego!" It creates enough of a shield that the claw bounces off it - striking neither Hermione nor Ness, a lucky break. There's little time for triumph, and even littler time for tempering herself, so she follows it with "Incendio," the way someone less tempered would shout you fucking bastard - and fire bursts from the tip of her wand into the hurlock's face, making it reel backwards with a screech of pain.

"Ennaris - get up."

[wearyallalone]

Vanya is already moving for Caius's glyph; he recognizes what it is, knows how it can be useful even before the genlock goes over. He can make the most of that, with years of drills in his brain, but Ness's yelp catches his attention.

It's all too fast, and his brain does the math before he can consciously catch up: She's too far, the Darkspawn is right over her, even if he changes course he won't make it, and then — someone else has it.

It's all done in a split second, but it's enough time for him to lose the opening and he's fighting off a genlock that hasn't fallen prey to a well-placed glyph. It's fast, brutish work, the way Vanya fights; no flash, all utility. Still, it's going to take another few moments to get over to the advantage he'd been handed (if he can make it there before it fades).

[portalling]

Strange has been working with glyphs lately, learning the shape and feel of them from the local mages and watching how they’re made, so he, too, recognises that glow in the floor. It’s a lot to follow, but even in all this chaos and hubbub, it’s a smaller field than previous wars he’d fought. There are only eight of them, against this tidal wave. He can count the number of their party on his hands.

(Are they too few? Don’t think about it.)

Vanya’s carving his way across the chamber, trying to get to the glyph, and so Strange automatically, implicitly repositions himself: there’s the precise, minuscule movement of his fingers, redirecting the energy through his staff, and a wave of flame roils forward to keep their left flank clear. It distracts the enemies and prevents them from getting closer on that side, helping clear the space toward that trapped, glyphed spot on the right.