Fade Rift Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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faderift2025-05-18 07:08 pm
faderifting) wrote in faderift2025-05-18 07:08 pm
MOD PLOT: A Night Without Moon and Stars
WHO: Anyone/Everyone
WHAT: Riftwatch investigates a strange occurrence in Western Orlais.
WHEN: Bloomingtide 9:51.
WHERE: Yvoire, on the edge of the Tirashan Forest.
NOTES: OOC post with reward claims. Body horror CW for the main post.
WHAT: Riftwatch investigates a strange occurrence in Western Orlais.
WHEN: Bloomingtide 9:51.
WHERE: Yvoire, on the edge of the Tirashan Forest.
NOTES: OOC post with reward claims. Body horror CW for the main post.
I. YVOIRE
It should have been a straightforward mission. Not a simple one—attempting to help mediate some sort of disagreement between the people of Yvoire and some local elves isn't simple—but straightforward. The sort of thing Riftwatch's diplomacy division has done plenty of times before. From the Hunterhorns base they ride southeast, through the late spring mud to a town on the edge of the Tirashan. Instead of a bit tense, edging toward violence, maybe a little strange in the way remote villages can be, they find the entire town encased in a nearly-translucent, impermeable magical dome. This calls for reinforcements.
II. THE BUBBLE
By the time Riftwatch has arrived en masse, it's been determined that anchors (it will take at least two, working together) can open and close a passage through the barrier the same way they might a rift, allowing teams to enter and explore the area. Inside, they find themselves in the Fade—the sky an unnatural green with no sign of sun or moon, jagged black rocks jutting up from the ground, the air teeming with spirits and demons—but also not. Among the boulders are houses, shops, torn apart by the Fade stone. A barn roof is pierced by a spire of dark stone, a bakery all but flattened. The residents haven't been spared. Some have been crushed by the arriving landscape, others encased within it. Arms reach out from more than one block of dark stone, the crown of a head just visible in an edge, a corpse frozen mid-stride as if charging out of the rock, but caught just too slow to outrun their fate.
The merging landscapes have rearranged some parts of town even more strangely. More than one building has been sliced in pieces, one remaining in place, the others and its contents relocated or vanished. Every book in a library has been severed from its contents, covers slumped in a bookshelf in a bisected library, pages now suspended in a cloud above a pigsty. A pocket of pond water fills an intersection, two drowned bodies floating trapped within it along with the contents of a wheelbarrow and a couple of now-well-fed fish. A copse of trees, uprooted, grow down from a patch of earth that hovers beside the town's small chantry.
As they investigate the fate of Yvoire, Riftwatch will encounter:
- Demons, primarily of the less-powerful varieties but in unusual numbers. They don't manifest in the way demons often do and don't appear to be tied to any particular object or location. They're just here, similar to areas where a rift has been open for a time and demons are already roaming free.
- Possessed corpses of the townspeople, some aggressive and violent, others just curiously wandering about the town going through the motions of life.
- Spirits, of many different types and degrees of curiosity, communication, and helpfulness
- Evidence of explosive magical violence, like a body burned by a flame that seems to originate where they stood, or a person crushed under a bookshelf toppled by the tell-tale blast of Stonefist.
- A handful of survivors who have survived by hiding in cellars or other out-of-the-way spots who will report that whatever happened happened the morning before Riftwatch's initial arrival, when suddenly there was a strange sense of pressure and static in the air, as if a storm was arriving, and then everything suddenly flew apart or was crushed and a cloud of spirits and demons appeared everywhere.
- At least one survivor will report that some of the elves who have been "stalking" (their word) the village lately were seen sneaking into town before first light, lurking around the chapel as usual.
- Some survivors will report family members or neighbors who they had never suspected to be mages suddenly doing magic, often with deadly consequences for themselves and those around them.
- And among them, a few people possessed by demons who will present themselves as survivors and do their best to get Riftwatch to help them exit the bubble and be free.
- One elf who has been trapped half-inside a tree, his entire right side from ear to toes encased in the thick trunk of a flowering oak that wasn't in this spot yesterday. He is alive, for now.
Fully exploring the area takes time, not only because of the demons but because Riftwatch will find that staying in the bubble indefinitely is unpleasant. Humans and Qunari are affected first, then dwarves, then rifters who have amputated their anchors, and finally elves, but over time anyone may begin to experience headaches, nausea, blurring vision, and feelings of either strange pressure or the equally strange absence of pressure. The exception is anyone with an anchor — they and those in their immediate vicinity will feel fine, and once that becomes apparent, Riftwatch can begin organizing so exploration teams never need to stray very far from someone with an anchor. Even the presence of an anchor, though, won't stop some people from exhibiting the strangest effect of all: the spontaneous development of Fade-touched magic that, unlike the headaches, does not go away when they leave the area.
III. THE ARTIFACT
Yvoire's Chantry is small, the sort of village chapel typically staffed by a single Sister, or maybe a Mother if she's a local. It was a Sister, here—she'll be found dead in a closet along with a number of her parishioners, the apparent victims of a hunger demon. Despite the limited presence of people, the Chantry is a hive of spirit and demon activity, which Riftwatch will have to make its way through in order to investigate.
Once they do, in addition to the deceased inside, Riftwatch will discover another closet that instead of remains contains a patch of stone floor that looks older than the rest, and yet also as if its mortar has been recently loosened. Levering up the large stone tile will reveal a passage into an old basement crypt, shelves of vestments and liturgical supplies covered in cobwebs, niches containing grace goods and dedicatory plaques to prominent members of the chantry past. A path has been tracked through the heavy dust, leading to the far wall, which has been demolished to reveal a different stone wall, this one elven in design. This has been opened like a door, though neither seam nor lock nor hinge is visible, one portion of the wall simply rotated on a non-existent axis to create a passageway.
Inside is a chamber not so very different in design from the chantry crypt: the walls lined with shelves and niches, all of them bare. A strange absence of dust in the room makes it difficult to tell how many were previously full, but several contain stands or racks seemingly designed for display, many in unusual shapes. In the center of the room is a plinth of black marble, the stand in its center still gleaming. There's no ambiguity about the shape it's meant to hold, the spidering fingers plainly designed to contain a sphere.
Set into the wall opposite the door is a frame in the familiar shape of an eluvian mirror, its glass dark and impassable.
no subject
A fragment of purpose. It's all more theoretical than he'd bother with another, but Strange is batty for magic — there's more than one reason not to let Mme. Melisende splat — and that makes a good sounding board. When Isaac writes Emile and Verain of this, there will be arguments to anticipate. Proof to gather.
Better done here and now.
"It could stand a precedent. If an Anchor may be induced, then so might broader talent."
He yanks.
no subject
A couple dead fish also follow suit, slip-sliding right off the shield itself to bounce off Stephen’s shoulder — eurgh, christ — but he stays focused, slowly lowering the shield to the ground, depositing its gruesome burden before dissipating.
The partially-swollen body lies there, looking very ordinary. Ordinary for a corpse that’s been hanging around in a floating pond in the Fade for an undetermined amount of time, at least.
“What’s your plan?” Stephen asks, trying to wipe off his collar with the edge of a sleeve.
cw self harm - ugh sorry i had to restart my net and it posted before i edited
"I know of one way to prove a mage after death," It isn't kind. "They prefer our bodies, you know. Demons. Allows them to cast through us."
With the right spirit, and the right conditions. Maker willing, the Fade eases that much: They must be risking possession already, every second that she goes unburnt. Teeth clench. His stomach crawls at the thought, the way that it hadn't for her sloughed skin, or a festering stump.
(How he'd hated to see Ilias work. Grisly, frightful, conspicuous.)
He brushes what's left of her eyelids up, squelching over a pocket of raw tissue. It clings black to his fingertips. This was someone's friend, someone's grandmother; a survivor of war, and disaster, and the grand neglect of empire.
Probably she'd have seen him hanged.
"A wisp won't do," He understands that much. Isaac sounds as though he's convincing the both of them: "And I've spent a lifetime avoiding this, so fuck knows if it will even work."
The knife is a funny thing, wrought a little like a scalpel, engraved in wriggling shapes. Isaac has made clear his wishes, to not to be associated with surgery,
But now he slashes the blade across a palm. Blood wells, and he digs a finger deeper into the wound, expression grit tight. Crude bait, without the symbols or spells to shape it. An invitation written in crayon.
Shadows stir.
no subject
The shadows stir and he watches, keen.
He still remembers a memory he’d come by illicitly about the previous Head Healer, too, hands steeped in red, and he vaguely wonders what the over-under is on Riftwatch being alarmingly chill about blood magic.
“I never considered setting out mage’s blood like cheese in a mousetrap, but I suppose whatever works,” Stephen says, but he takes a few steps away to give Isaac space to operate. The Fade tightens like a string. He can feel it around them, reacting: the pressure here has been humming in his own blood, but at least that splinter in his hand protects him and the other man from whatever’s been fucking with people’s heads.
“Our own presence might be skewing it,” he points out after a moment. “Weight on the scales. Biasing the data.”
The demons might come sniffing around for them, moreso than poor Mme Melisende.
no subject
Mingled as it is with lyrium (with something altogether less tangible). If resurrected, Melisende will cast, or she won't. The two of them can't gift her that much. If Strange fears he won't withstand temptation —
Rifters have never been harrowed. But most apprentices don't galavant about the Crossroads, either.
"Make it hurt."
The fear, the pain is necessary as the blood. The Imperium hardly relies on volunteers. Already, his hand is near whole.
no subject
But Isaac clearly has a plan of some sort — Stephen’s starting to see the shape of it — and the bloodstained knife is now in his own hand. And he does, always, prefer to hold the knife.
Albeit with a lip-curl of professional distaste, he crooks his fingers and summons up some magical flame first to scour the blade clean, burning off the blood, sanitising it. And then he starts to tidily roll up his sleeve.
“Everyone in the stories,” he says, pedantic as he concentrates, as if standing at a lecture podium, “always dramatically cuts their palm for blood rituals. But strictly speaking, it’s not the most strategic location. Unless you have a very useful magical healing factor like certain people present, of course.”
He cuts the back of his forearm, into the skin and away from any veins. Just safe meat and blood, welling up on the blade. He flicks some of it on the ground, a splatter on ethereal stone: more bait in the trap.
no subject
Frustrating, the way they need grasp at this. Thedas hides so much behind church doors, and an excess of caution; clips its own wings like some neurotic bird. Progress is slow. Knowledge is piecemeal, and power is wasted on men like Isaac, who they lecture him of it only to abandon those scruples the second it's convenient —
Or maybe that's not it. Maybe it whispers something else altogether. But however the ill feeling spirals on itself, its line traces back somewhere true. Hasn't he swallowed his pride so often of late?
Strange bleeds. Melisende doesn't stir. And Isaac's head cocks, listening to something that isn't there.
(Of course it's not the most strategic location. Maker, as though his expertise isn't constantly dismissed,)
Stephen's right. It would prefer one or the other of them.
no subject
Hearing about Thedosian demonic taxonomy, Stephen’s put enough thought into his own hypothetical temptations, catalogued his sins, that he knows which one strikes a chord. And while he’s fought demons on the battlefield in open conflict, simple and uncomplicated flinging magic at each other in combat— he hasn’t stood up to a Harrowing yet.
It’s not kicking in the door; it’s knocking politely, a whisper at the keyhole, and with the way he originally had to crack his mind open and learn sorcery, he’s accustomed to listening. The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
His broken hands curl into fists. The Fade bends, a weight like someone’s pressed a thumb to the topography where they’re standing. Air pressure thickening, a storm brewing. It should be black tar slipping through all the cracks in his psyche until his body warps and he opens his eyes and something else looks out,
except that dreamwalking once meant forcing himself into and taking over another body, and his own sinister self has done it so many times, and so Doctor Strange had had to learn to ward himself against possession from something which looks very much like his own prideful self,
and this is the first time it’s properly put to the test. Stephen feels the metaphorical door rattling in its frame and he sets his shoulder against it, digging in his heels.
He’s gone very still and silent, standing motionless beside Isaac, near-catatonic and blind as all of his senses narrow and focus on his own internal landscape. He’s not lost the battle, hasn’t turned into an abomination where they stand, but all of his energy is being spent on holding it back. Piling up brick after brick to build a wall, before Pride can knock them down and take him over.
no subject
Not with practice like that, walls like these. The human ear is intricately trained to pick pattern from noise and he's guarded himself against stronger minds — Ennaris, Wanda, his own damn self. What reason to fear an invader, when he knows the sound of a knock?
Isaac looks up, counting seconds: When he stands, it's slow, hand stretching for the knife.
Knock knock. Insistent, in the way that visitors can be, that solicitors can be; that children are at Halloween, dressed up with the faces of doctors, and witches, and builders, and wolves. Eager to play pretend. To fake that they've done this before — and baby, is this your first time, are you all grown-up now? Harrowed and free, and knock little thing, knock knock, or I’ll blow your house in.
Static leaps from Stephen's skin, and between snatches of billowing cloak Isaac spies it: A coiled branch of energy. Lightning ready to touch down.
But you have to let it in. You have to answer the door. Didn't his mother teach him to answer the door? There are rules out here, in tornado country. You give shelter. That's what a good samaritan would do. Open the door, it's only polite, and it's clearer with every shuddering knock how little the way; how vast the knock thing beyond. One body could never hold it all. To let it in you'd have to rip the frame apart, extreme home makeover, change it knock like this world needs changing knock now on TLC knock like the soiled dressing of an arm knock like the dyes she burned red for him knock like he's going to change this red knock like you can fix the red red world if you just act to change it knock like just you can act to change it knock like just you can OPEN THE DOOR.
Isaac tears the knife free.
no subject
But at the end of the day, what Stephen remembers is the hard knock-knock-knock on his pride until he was on his knees in the snow, bruised and exhausted, hearing that warm wry voice of his mentor: Arrogance and fear still keep you from learning the simplest and most significant lesson of all: it’s not about you.
You must make yourself smaller. Close that door, brick up the ego, seal up the cracks where something else might slither in.
His hand is bleeding: his palm slid across the blade after all when Isaac ripped it away from him.
When Stephen finally shakes it off and looks up (his mind still his own, not an abomination, not today), he has the impression of great bulk above them, a watchful presence with too many eyes. The center of his forehead aches; the door still wants to open.
“I think,” he says through chattering teeth, “you snagged something.” He’s freezing all of a sudden, as if he’s just come back from that cold snowy mountain after all. Another test, successfully passed.
no subject
"I suppose I imagined," That you'd done this before? There's red in Stephen's eye. He swallows a pulse. Faint, "Well. It hardly matters now."
Something to speak of (or shy from) another time. The light's gone out of his cloak, vanished into still air. It won't try him again: For an imperious creature, Isaac can crawl. Which leaves —
The corpse stirs at their feet.
no subject
But then there’s another flailing movement, a bloated ugly limb rising, fingers scrabbling in the wet mud, and he catches a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye.
“Oh, jesus christ,” Stephen mutters and scrambles backward, pushing himself back up (when had he fallen to his knees? somewhere within the past few seconds, remembering another fall). He moves out of the corpse’s grasping range, just in case it has a mind to go chomping, and returns to Isaac’s side.
Breathing out in a rush: “Perhaps you can ask your questions after all—”
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(They prefer our bodies, you know. Allows them to cast through us.)
Electricity pops and sizzles. The puppet jerks against its own limbs, muscle twitching wild along scorched signals. The last stores of dead cells spasm and spend, and something else slips between them; a stranger sort of animation.
Pride drags its hand up, to slit a hole through fused lips. Wide, wider. Enough to grin. The pressure of magic collects about its swiveling neck. A dead mage. A dead, possessed mage. L'horreur arcanique.
"Have you anything left in there?"
Under his breath. He suspects the answer — the bone-weariness of Harrowing — but Isaac's never had a knack for barriers.
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“Not enough for two. You’d have to stay close.”
He’s honestly not even sure if he has that much in him. But the exhaustion and pain is fizzing in his skull, prickling the edge of his nerves. If he manages to muster one last barrier, hopefully Isaac could handle the offensive magic; the doctor’s mantra of first do no harm ties his hands in more ways than one, he’s spread his own knack thin into protection and utility.
He draws on his last shreds of magic, wearily summoning a glowing orange shield-barrier into existence. It’s more hand-held than he’d like, small and difficult to safely cover the two of them at once, but— it’s something. He shifts slightly to stand between Isaac and the arcane horror, wavering on his feet, but still ready to try to block any blows and buy Isaac the space to do his thing.