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

[portalling]

“Alright.”

It’s immediate unquestioning agreement, because there’s an edge to Gwenaëlle’s voice that he doesn’t like; and it isn’t just the careful and slightly garbled way she’s having to talk around her facial injury, delicate, suddenly aware of tongue and teeth in a way she hasn’t been before. It’s not that.

It’s something else.

So Stephen moves behind her, and first sweeps Gwenaëlle’s hair out of the way, his movements gentle and tender. Before even unfastening anything, he starts to check the back of that fine armour. It’ll be hard to see any blood against the warm blood-red leather (and oh, how he’d jolted the very first time he saw her in this black-and-scarlet, hauntingly familiar in a way he didn’t want to say aloud), but first he runs his fingers along her back, searching for a small rip or tear. You could quietly bleed for a while without noticing, with all the battlefield shock dampening your senses. Absolute worst case scenario, it could be blighted; something could have gotten into the wound, infected.

But there’s nothing, no breach, no slit where a darkspawn sword could have cut through to her back. That impeccable new armour is intact. But there is— something, perhaps, a faint lumpy weight which isn’t just the knobs of her spine—

“Does it hurt?” he asks.

[elegiaque]

When he moves her braids she twists them in her hands for the sake of something to do with them, tensing when the fastenings start to give and there’s resistance. Not any unnatural kind, except so far as there’s no way whatever’s happened could be described as natural, just: blood and skin and strangeness congealed, thick, tacking fabric to flesh. It doesn’t give way easily, and she hisses through her teeth,

“Now it does,” a grievance that is not actually his doing. Then, clearer: “It’s been hurting. Aching, stinging. When I hit my face, it felt like my whole back was on fire.”

I thought I was dying.

Like Granitefell had reached through that broken reality and struck that same blow all over again—

“The stinging’s lessened but it’s...” The word feels insufficient: “Uncomfortable.”

As her armour gives way, the suggestion of a lumpen shape becomes four between her shoulder-blades and the wet shimmer of ... veins, pressed against the skin that they’d emerged from. Not just veins, but the shape that they begin to form, the gleam where the thing that’s tacked to her skin isn’t just fabric.

[portalling]

As he strips off Gwenaëlle’s armour, clasps and fabric falling away from her now-exposed back (no scars from Granitefell, no sign that that ever happened), his expression takes on a look of absolute intent concentration. Investigation. Diagnosis.

There’s an iridescent shape pressed against her skin, layered like clingfilm, and he reaches out to cautiously trace the edges of it, searching out where the substance connects to her body and doesn’t. As he breaks the seal, the shape comes away disconcertingly wet and a little slimy, before it peels away and opens and flutters in quick buzzing movement, wings unfolding.

Oh fuck is his first kneejerk thought, which is really rich coming from him, considering the shenanigans Stephen had pulled in the tunnels earlier. But rifters’ forms were the malleable ones, the dreams held in shape, the bodies that reacted to raw lyrium. They were the only ones who had reacted to the door earlier. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Uh… Gigi?” he says, surprised out of himself, the rare diminutive falling loose.

[elegiaque]

For the rest of her life,

she’ll always remember how it feels, now, the first time. The relief that mingles with that lingering ache, her wings flaring out — that they still come away wet, a bit, flicking blood and brine and probably her skin in haphazard directions in the process, lamplight streaming through hundreds of iridescent prisms and the veins pumping her blood through them creating shattered shadows on the canvas wall. The sound of it. And when he says Gigi, she doesn’t know what she expects when she looks over her shoulder, but to see him through the stained glass gleam of an extremity she didn’t have twenty-four hours ago,

it’s instinctive, the way she folds them down, suddenly, flatter to her back but not so peel-away close as before, startled.

“I could— I felt it, when you touched...”

The changes wrought on him are sloughing away, strange and temporary; this feels solid, as smoothly a part of her as any other, heart pumping blood through her wings, the agitated flick of them where she can’t relinquish her grip on her distress. Not with her face like this. Not so far from home.

[portalling]

They had been here before, is the thing. He had first undergone his changes in a sterile laboratory environment, tried and proven, Wysteria nearby with her perpetual clipboard. So when it had first started happening to him below, this had at least been done before, it was literally charted territory, and it had faded without proximity,

but they’re too far from that chamber now. The group had pitched their camp as far away as they could get from that shitty, shitty village, only stopping for the night when they were almost collapsing from exhaustion. Most of Stephen’s unearthly appearance had faded away on the road, leaving just that nub of horn-like growth on his temple, now mostly covered by his hair flopping over it anyhow.

But this…

He instinctively reaches out, a fingertip touching the edge of one of the wings, verifying by touch and feel that they’re here, they’re real, they’re solid. They’re pretty, in an abstract sort of way: that prismatic light, the gemstone look of them. But what the fuck.

“When did— I mean, how long—”

He had thought, naïvely, that they had come away from that chamber clean.

[elegiaque]

“I fell in the brine,” she says, her fingers lifting like she might touch her face before she clearly thinks better of it, hovering near and then falling. The touch of his finger to her wing had caused a shiver, not — not unpleasant, but sensitive. Sensitized. Everything feels like a raw nerve, a live wire attached to new parts of her exposed to the air for the first time ever. “I could tell something was...”

Wrong feels insufficient, somehow. And this hadn’t exactly been what she was envisioning, or trying desperately not to envision. She feels—

she feels dully, behind the wall she’s pushed feeling behind, clutching her composure with both hands. They still have to get back to the Gallows; she still has to deal with the mess made of her face. She will have to deal with this, now, too, and it feels too big for the moment that she’s in, she feels— overfull, and unwilling.

The scattered trains of thought, it makes perfect sense to her when she says: “I need to sleep sitting up, I’m going to make my face worse in the night.”

[portalling]

He circles around to her front, and just as Gwenaëlle’s own fingers lift, he starts to reach out to her on kneejerk impulse as well before he stops, hands still wanting to map her cheek, her jaw, her throat, her lips. He wants to kiss her. What an unexpectedly agonising limitation that he can’t do that right now.

And of course she should sleep sitting upright. Practicalities, sensible considerations, pragmatic next steps, this is how his mind always tends to work too, moving on to the next solution and the next and the next,

but as a brief indulgent pause, Stephen reaches out and takes one of her hands instead. Lifts it to his mouth and presses a kiss to her knuckles; vicarious, offering what he can, and what he wishes he could.

“Of course,” he says. “We can probably stack up some bags too, to stop you from rolling over on the opposite side.”

And —

He’s a pessimist, a cynic who always prepares for the worst, but there’s an unaccustomed streak of hopefulness for her sake that he says: “All of these changes, they were temporary. Maybe this won’t last either.”

Nevermind that rifters’ bodies are more permeable and malleable than hers. Nevermind that she’s realer than he is, more existentially solid —

[elegiaque]

The grip she has on his hand holding hers is white-knuckled, even as she holds herself so still, so terribly and uncharacteristically still. Holding herself together with her nails, afraid and afraid of letting herself feel it. The fear or the hope,

“When we get back to the Gallows, if it hasn’t...gone, yet, I’ll send for Isaac,” she says, presuming that she won’t have to say in so many words why she might send for him rather than present herself (and whatever herself has become) to the infirmary. Maybe this isn’t something to have easy record of. Maybe it’s easier to get away with that because she’s fucking the head healer and it’s not as if he’s not going to be au fait with the nature of her body in the event of something going horribly awry with it,

anyway. She clings to the practicalities of a plan (even only this much of one) with pitiful obviousness, and his hand, tight enough to hurt.

🎀

[portalling]

“Good idea. We’ll…” He peters out, unsure how to finish that sentence. How far do Isaac’s abilities go? Can he rip out a pair of wings, then smooth over the scar left behind? It’s worth examining. Not necessarily because the wings are horrible, it could have been so much worse — he’d examined that ogre in the root cellar — but it is still unwanted, un-asked for. A violation.

Another violation of her body, something else done to her by ancient magic.

“We’ll see what we can do.”

Focusing on the practicalities gets them through the rest of the evening. Stephen carefully unclasping the rest of her armour, helping Gwenaëlle slide out of it, wiping the odd ichor clean from her spine. He digs around in his healer’s satchel and gets more elfroot for her, for the pain, for that shattered face.

There is a continual unexpected movement out of the corner of his vision, the furious buzzing of those wings.

Normally, bedding down with Gwenaëlle is a comfort after a harrowing day, but it’s meager this time. They stay mostly-dressed, on edge, ready to get up and run in the middle of the night if necessary. She sits propped up against him, mindful to not lie down, Stephen not wanting to accidentally flail an elbow into her broken cheekbone, both of them stiff and uncomfortable and careful.

They barely sleep.

By the time they get back to the Gallows, the wings are still there.