temple of leaves | to be perfect is to be hollow

[sumptus]

WHO: Everybooooody (yeeeeah)
WHAT: A group of Riftwatch agents take a field trip back into the Temple of Zazikel, to do a more thorough examination of the Gate now that they're not distracted by half the team disappearing. OOC post here.
WHEN: Right now
WHERE: Temple of Zazikel, in the Grand Necropolis, Nevarra
NOTES: CW: fire, implied drowning in ESCAPE, non-descriptive mention of a baby crying in ENTERING. Please use content warnings in your subject lines, especially for child and animal-related stuff.

1. ENTERING THE TEMPLE
They've been here before. Some of them, anyway. Through the towering stone halls of the Grand Necropolis and winding canyon paths beyond, down, down to something more ancient beneath. An elven site that serves as entrance to an Old God structure between the two.

Their Mortalitasi guides lead them to the entrance to the Temple of Zazikel, and those who have been there before might remember the way forward, though known, is not simple. A labyrinth of narrow hallways roll out before them, mirrored black onyx walls that slice their torchlight into a thousand wrong turns. The sound of their own footsteps bounces behind them, in front, around this corner or that, their own voices echoing and distorting as if taking on new shapes.

—is that a baby crying? It can't be. This far underground? Must be an animal. It doesn't sound like an animal. It brightens around a bend and fades before you can reach it.

A low hum drones out around them to replace it, the further they go, constant and unshakable as if it's coming from inside their own heads, or perhaps radiating from the stone ceiling above them. Not a song, but— bees? Lightning bees? (Some Rifters may know it.)

The deeper they go, the more they find that isn't quite what they remember. Loose rocks and broken pottery underfoot are abruptly interrupted by a bone— no, a tree root the size of Barrow's forearm that catches someone's boot. Stumbling past it causes a snick-crack of glass beneath someone's foot, and on the rough-hewn wall beyond is a steel shelf, screwed directly into the rock and filled with neatly-arranged bottles, baring clean little labels and a sharp, antiseptic smell.

And then there's an aravel. One minute, they're walking through a tunnel narrow enough to touch both sides at once, and the next veilfire torchlight is bouncing off wooden planks as long as a house. Sails stretch up fifteen feet to flat stone ceilings that seem to swallow masts and fabric alike. The chamber is barely wide enough to contain it, and at its other end the passage narrows back down so far they'll need to turn sideways to get through. A ship in a bottle.

If it's a remnant of the elvhen structure, why are its boards so fresh? If it isn't, how did it get here? Why is it here?

They've been here before, haven't they? How could they have missed this? What else have they missed?


2. THE GATE
Eventually, they do find the Gate. It takes longer than it should, but not quite long enough for anyone to reconsider the mission. There's important work to be done, after all, and a few strange occurrences don't amount to much in the face of what happens if Corypheus succeeds.

Maybe the whole world looks like this room. An open, lifeless expanse below a pulsing void. Blight twists in a perfect circle around the Gate. The channels in the floor have dried brown with old blood.

They know something about how the other Gate behave, and the time Riftwatch had spent on this Gate last time weren't wasted -- but they had other priorities, like half the team disappearing. This time, the equipment is set up, the notebooks come out, and it's down to business. 


3. ESCAPE
Supplies packed, notebooks stowed, they're well into the tunnels again before they see anything odd. Which is, in itself, odd. They'd discovered the aravel not long before the tunnels widened out into their main chamber, but on the way back, it's nowhere near as close. Neither is anything else. They walk for thirty minutes, an hour, in hallways so dark they seem to suck the light from their torches, passing nothing but cold black stone and oppressive silence.

Then there's a crackle. A soft pop, fizzle. Metal clanks heavy against metal in the distance, the jostling of armor and heavy boots rushing at them, and when the party rounds the corner to face the oncoming noise they find the aravel ablaze.

Flames engulf the room. Heat buffets the group, smoke billowing across the ceiling and descending lower every moment, forcing Riftwatch to run along a wall that suddenly contains not one exit, but infinite.

Fleeing down one leads to a smooth tunnel that slips beneath your feet, the ground freezing despite the blistering wind at your back. An icy lake spools out in front of you, and underneath there's something moving — someone still alive under there.

Down another hole, gnarled roots bend up to tangle feet. Their sturdy trunks stretch impossibly tall into the dark, and where their limbs split it almost looks like human arms, hands, fingers — faces locked in the bark, their jaws twisting wide in silent screams.

Tunnels seal up to split groups. Walls close in. Floors fall out from underfoot. Riftwatch is scattered, and as their fears begin to sculpt the walls around them, time stretches. Do they have enough water? Enough food? How long have they been down here? Do the hours pass with no sun to mark them? If you fall asleep, who's to say it isn't forever?


4. AFTERMATH
Whether it feels like hours, days, or years, eventually the temple releases them. Those who threw off the shackles of their inner demons may find themselves crawling up through fistfuls of sand and gravel, beaching themselves on the open ground beneath a bright blue sky.

Those who didn't free themselves from anything in particular may not find so easy an exit, but exit they do. A wall gives way into the bottom of a crevice, and while there's no easy path to freedom, there is a sliver of daylight, and walls close together enough to shimmy up. Thankfully, neither exit is far from the other, and those too exhausted to climb may get help from those who escaped first.

The Mortalitasi will need to be notified. Something will need to be done about the spirit who caused this. But first, everyone finally has a moment to breathe.

Comments

Benedict OTA

[altusimperius]

i. le roi des lâches (Entering and Gate)

There's a reason Benedict doesn't often come on missions with a high likelihood of violence, and this ought to be exceedingly clear to anyone who catches sight of him in the early hours of the expedition. He's a good taker of notes, producer of flames and barriers, interfacer with the Mourn Watch in as much as he's a representative from Riftwatch's diplomacy division; he's also absolutely terrified, a tall but ghostly pale addition to the party who keeps to the back of the group and the edges of passageways when he isn't immediately needed.

It's for the better that he doesn't speak much-- what would he say anyway, except I hate it here, his face in its fixed grimace communicating better than his mouth could. By the time they reach the gate, his hands are shaking too hard to write anything, the flame on his writing board wobbling about and casting frenetic shadows around the chamber.

ii. escape?

a. The swiftness with which this young man can generate a barrier ought to win him some kind of award, if for no other reason than it's able to block the fire from himself and the two or three people in his closest vicinity until they're able to collect themselves properly and run. He recasts it as they go, buying them a little extra time to see where they're headed, and it almost looks like they might be making some progress over the frozen lake, when

b. the ice shatters beneath him. He falls through with barely enough time to yelp, dissipating the barrier and leaving any companions behind to fend for themselves. Where he stood, the hole in the ice strangely gives way to a vertical stone tunnel rather than water.

c. for Abby

The tunnel is damp and mildewed with a steady dripping of water from above. Far in the distance, the faint flickering of light from a torch, or brazier perhaps, interrupts the pitch blackness that yawns in front of Benedict. He conjures a flame in his hand, but its light is all but useless, forming a corona only around his person and giving him little indication of what lies ahead.

It's under these circumstances that he inches forward, the sound of his shuddering breath and wet footsteps announcing his presence to the darkness. The far away light never seems to come any closer, and he walks for what feels like hours, growing steadily more desolate in spirit the longer it seems like he's here to stay.
On his right, a mound of Something rises up out of the darkness, and he pauses to inspect it uneasily.

(ii b) ice

[interroga]

The polite, heroic thing to do is to lunge for your falling comrade as they plummet through the ice. Go sliding forward on your stomach, reach out with all derring-do, capture Benedict by the wrist, and work on hauling him back up. Applause all around.

Cassian does not do any of these things.

There’s a brief moment of his gaze meeting Benedict’s panicked eyes, and then he hesitates a little too long, not making a move, and the other man vanishes down into the swallowing ground.



Ah. Well. There he goes.

Cassian squints down the dark vertical tunnel, no trace of the other man’s descent, and considers it for a while — some self-preservation calculus going on behind his eyes — before he keeps walking, a brisk lope to stay ahead of the fire.

wrestling referee slide in, cw big body horror

[armd]

The Something can't see a damn thing but angles instinctively toward the light as it blooms faint and indistinct behind a thin webbing of lichen across her face, taking a single, staggering step forward. Abby has realised long since that she can't make a sound — she can barely breathe. The fungus feels like it's in her throat and lungs, and if she tries to rip it off her face it will have to come back up out of her, pulled out in long, painful strands.

She chokes and reaches out toward the light, calling for help the best she can: the word comes out strangled, choking, garbled babble, barely recognisable as speech.

Now that the light brings her more into focus Benedict will see she's covered from head to foot. She can nearly see out of the crop of a mushroom gill blooming out of her face — the white of her eye that is visible has gone yellow, curdled.

[altusimperius]

He hears the shape breathing, but it isn't attacking, which could mean one of two things: it's not hostile, or it's already dying. Benedict inches closer, extending his hand to cast more light on it, and several revelations reach him at once as he screams shrilly and stumbles back again.

One, that he recognizes the distorted face; two, that it belongs to Abby; three, that she's covered in something horrible; and four, to line up with the previous assessment, that she might be dying. Or dead already, animated by something beyond herself.

"Abby," he keens in a strangled whine, afraid to illuminate her again-- maybe it's a trick, maybe it isn't true.

[armd]

The scream confirms it, really, that it looks bad, that she looks terrifying — Abby wants to scream too and makes a wet sucking noise as she tries to pull in enough air to do anything. What comes back out is more of a groan than a scream.

She grabs his arm to keep him from getting away. Yeah he's scared but can he think about how fucked up this is for her for three seconds—

Get it off of me.

Her yellow eye is staring at him, pleading, and her free hand is already raking at her midriff, peeling wet clumps and trying to slough it off but she can barely keep up with it.

cassian andor | ota

[interroga]

temple.

Arcane mysteries are not, of course, Cassian’s strong suit.

But he’s another set of arms to carry equipment, another pair of hands to help colleagues clamber over obstacles. People struggle to squeeze past the aravel, but finally with a frustrated huff, “Let’s just pass through. Come on,” he hops up into the Dalish carriage, and reaches out to pull the other(s) and their supplies up after him, girding himself to open the door to its interior.

By the time they make it safely to the Gate, however, he has much less to do. So the man winds up sitting on a rock and cleaning and sharpening his sword while he waits. “Are you often in places like this?” he asks, dryly, shooting a look at the foreboding rip in reality, the tar-like darkness stirring beyond. “What a view.”

escape.

Their forces are separated quick, and the winding labyrinth quickly becomes a nightmare. Cassian’s not accustomed to caving — this reminds him too much of the mines — but he moves closer to whoever’s wound up with him. “A hand on each other’s back,” he decides. “So we can keep track of each other in the darkness.”

It does entail some trust, however, with these people he barely knows. Who leads the way?

Eventually, there’s a winding staircase carved into the rock, which certainly wasn’t there before: it meanders in circles climbing higher and higher, stretching seemingly to the sky with each laboured step as they climb. It feels like it’s been hours of walking, endless— they finally have to stop for a meal, simply giving up and sitting down on the steps. The stairwell still leads down and up into the impossible distance. Weird.

On another level of the temple, trees have broken through the ground and are growing into the walls; not just roots but entire tree-trunks, whorls of their bark in unsettling shapes like faces. Cassian can’t shake the feeling that there’s another presence here, too, a fleeting shadow just out of the corner of his eye, behind the trees.

He comes to an abrupt halt in the narrow corridor. “Did you see that?”

benedict.

[interroga]

It isn’t a matter of a headlong rush, with everyone running out of the temple at the same time. No, they come straggling out in ones and twos, an occasional frantic colleague clawing their way out of the earth, the labyrinth seemingly spitting them out.

And so a weary Riftwatch waits to see who makes it out. Perhaps some people head back in to try and rescue their friends, but Cassian waits outside with the others and a canteen of fresh water, patiently measuring time by the Necropolis candles slowly burning down. He’ll wait as long as they tell him to wait.

It takes a while, but then another hand punches through the earth, blindly scrabbling for purchase. Cassian automatically rises to his feet, moves over, and catches it to help haul whatever struggling person’s on the other end —

[altusimperius]

— and it’s a panicked, gasping wet cat of a man, who grips at the offered wrist with both hands and hauls himself out to lie facedown on the ground. Whatever he went through before this, the claustrophobic journey through the scree has Benedict half out of his mind for the first moments in which Cassian will be able to recognize and assess him; it’s only after he can confirm that he is, really, above ground, that Benedict turns to acknowledge his savior.

It’s then that he freezes, breath catching in his throat as he locks eyes with the Shadow Dragon. All things considered, this would be a convenient place to disappear. The man certainly wasn’t in a hurry to prevent it the first time, and Benedict is too exhausted to do much but regard him warily.

[interroga]

Well, this is embarrassing.

“Oh,” Cassian says, dryly. “You made it. Good.”

Sound less enthused challenge, 9:51. But there’s no real animosity in his voice, just a flat statement of fact: the magister’s son made it out alive without any particular interference from him, so it all worked out, didn’t it? He settles down again on a nearby boulder, patient and in no particular rush, while the other man tries to catch his breath and piece himself back together.

Once it seems like Benedict’s recovered enough to not be a scrabbling scrambling mess of panic, Cassian offers the canteen of water, offhand.

trees;

[dirthsal]

They haven't been together the whole time. Talin was stuck in the tunnel with the aravel for—a time. Hours, maybe, or minutes, days; it doesn't matter now that he's left it.

(maybe he hasn't left it. maybe he'll never really leave it.)

The temple had seen fit to cross their paths only minutes ago, and Talin is still gaining his bearings when the trees begin to emerge around them. He walks with an eye to the temple walls more than Cassian's back in front of him; doesn't stumble into Cassian's sudden stillness, but it's a near thing.

"No," he answers, sharp, but he steps to Cassian's shoulder, turns his eyes in the direction of Cassian's gaze. The meagre light in the tunnel reflects in his wide eyes, shining a beacon into the dark, as he searches for any flicker of movement.

[interroga]

Cassian watches, alert as a deer who’s just heard the crack of footsteps in a clearing. His vision’s fucked down here, the torchlight making everything within the circle bright but muddy and flickering, and everything outside of it pitch-dark, night-blind. If there was anything out there, it’s hard to keep track of it in the shadows.

“Trees shouldn’t be growing down here,” he muses, after a moment. But a burning aravel shouldn’t have been down here, either. He pauses, presses a hand to the bark of the nearest trunk growing out of the wall, feels the hard texture beneath his fingers; it doesn’t dissolve beneath his hands like some kind of magical illusion.

(As a child, he had always had nightmares about the mass grave, had thought that planting the bodies would make someone grow again trapped in the tree, just like this—)

“Do you think it’s real? Any of this.”

hover for translation if i did my html right

[dirthsal]

"Trees shouldn't be growing down here," he repeats, because that's answer enough, isn't it? None of this should be possible, not in an immutable world cleaved from the Beyond. Even in places where the Veil is thin, such things must be given form by a mage or spirit, something with a lesson, or a demand, or a hunger.

If it is a spirit—it is a spirit, it must be, nothing else makes sense—well. He knows how to speak to spirits.

"Mirthadra lethallen," Talin calls into the dark, voice soft and steady, "Ma halani. Ma ghilana vi'revas."

If the spirit is friendly, that may be enough to draw it to them, to convince it that they, at least aren't deserving of this maze and terror... But it would be naïve not to consider that the spirit responsible for all of this impossibility is not friendly. Talin hesitates, considering, and looks to Cassian out of the corner of his eye—

He won't understand. How could he? There's no danger trading on the Wolf's name here, with only shemlen and the dead to hear.

"Fen'Harel mir shiral lasa ghilan'sal. Ma halani, Fen'Harel las serannas."

gate;

[anthracite]

"In an aravel?"

They're a half hour past that, but Strand was paying better attention then: The easy way one of their number clambered up and past, knowing just where to grip. It hadn't been the elf.

Reflex to even mention it. Reflex, and foolish to betray that much — the way a hunted man grasps for any edge. He reaches up for what must be the twelfth time, daubing knuckles to nose, as if expecting absent blood.

(The longer he listens, the worse it feels; the worse it feels, the greater the need. Picking a scab. Peeling a wound. If they've his attention, then he has theirs, then listen to me,)

Strand's arm stretches. He catches it, folds instead over lanky knees; crowded on himself like a spider. Flat eyes turn on Cassian.

"The Deep Roads have never shown me the Fade."

If that's what this even is.

but they’re so faMOUSLY blue

[interroga]

“In an aravel, underground, visiting a Gate,” Cassian says, with a breeziness that doesn’t quite reach his eyes as he cranes his head to look at Strand, trying to remember who he is. The name doesn’t come to him. Both of them new enough that he hasn’t marked his identity yet, hasn’t managed to make a mental dossier on the other man. But only one kind of person has such casual familiarity with the Deep Roads —

“You’re a Warden, then?”

Not were. Even above and beyond the allegiances that Cassian’s signed up for, that’s the sort of membership card you don’t get to trade in.

[anthracite]

"Calling me a thief?"

A joke, voice pitching nearer to patter. It settles somewhere between Antivan, Tevene (the Ander he must be trying to bury). Too forced. The Gate festers at the corner of his eye, like so much afterburn. Easy to stand and walk toward it.

He doesn't. He remembers to continue:

"Aye, five years." Or thereabouts. "Anderson hauled you out of the safehouse."

Not a question. He reads the reports.

stephen strange | ota

[portalling]

temple.

The doctor was waylaid last time, unexpectedly whisked into the underground, but this time he’s ready to roll up his sleeves and get involved in the research. So Strange settles into their makeshift field camp to study the Gate, examining thaumoscope readings, getting someone else to jot down notes for him.

They’ve all been deeply warned to not use their anchors around that twisting, hungry darkness, and he’s certainly not going to try— but eventually he does pick up a pebble and weigh it in his hand, eyeing the Gate in that way when you have an intrusive thought and really want to push the big red button.

At one point, he pauses in one of the side-tunnels to investigate the steel shelves which don’t belong here at all. He picks up the bottles, sniffing the liquid, trying to read the faded labels.

When it’s time to take a break, he sits staring at that abyssal maw. Some of the joy in the work has ebbed; he thinks of the incandescent flutter of dragonfly wings.

“Do we just bring the roof down on every fucked-up elven temple we find?” he asks aloud. Just wondering.

escape.

And it all goes tits-up, as always —

They’re lost beneath Zazikel for the second time. Fire cupped in the palm of his hand to see by, Strange frowns at the close winding tunnels, breathing stale air. “I left marks on the walls on the way down,” he grumbles, “but of course the path has changed.”

Their progress is laborious: at one point, the ground below breaks open to swallow him like a tomb, like Yvoire, and he sinks into a combination of living rock and wood. Squirming more makes it tighten further, like a child’s idea of quicksand; even blasting it with magic doesn’t cut him loose. Trapped, he’ll need someone’s help to get free, and he finds himself grudgingly calling out for assistance: “Wait, come back—”

What’s worse, however, is when a later tunnel turns into a frozen lake. One step and it cracks underfoot. He goes still, motionless, trying not to fracture it more with his body weight.

He hasn’t seen the shape beneath the water yet.

lake;

[aberratic]

In the mouth of the tunnel, still on solid ground, Ness stands frozen, as though her own movement may send Stephen tumbling into frigid waters. For a long moment she remains that way, mind racing, searching for solutions and finding none. There is no magic she can offer that would be of any use in this situation, no exit strategy. There's only Stephen and the ice between them.

"This is impossible," she says finally, uselessly indignant, but it is, "this shouldn't be here," and they shouldn't have to deal with it, it's not right—

[portalling]

“That’s readily apparent, yes,” Stephen says, which is an unhelpful bit of snippiness, but the sudden appearance of an icy wintry lake in an underground hallway has been rattling his nerves. (And more than that, there’s a familiar crisp bite to the air: fresh and cold in a way it shouldn’t be down here. Too alike memories of a Nebraskan winter, stinging and fierce.)

He keeps his balance on the ice floe, legs spread, trying not to rock the surface. “Not for the first nor the last time,” he continues, as lightly conversational as if they’re discussing a hypothetical, as if there isn’t water somehow seething beneath his feet, “I find myself missing being able to fly—”

He’d have been able to just glide over this entire obstacle. The Cloak whisking him to safe solid ground, not needing anyone else’s assistance to get him out of this stupid predicament.

break

[altusimperius]

"If only we could guarantee they'd stay buried."
Benedict sits nearby, gazing similarly into the pit, his arms wrapped around his knees.
"It's almost enough to make a person want to... I don't know, retire to Rivain. Find a little shack, live the rest of your life on a sunny beach. Never go underground again."
Chilled wine would be soooo nice right about now.

[portalling]

Some part of Stephen, after this particular spring, finds that he’s starting to yearn for a vacation; it’s not a sentiment the workaholic often experiences at all, if ever, but he can feel it starting to rattle around beneath his skin lately.

“I’m always joking about a Rivain beach trip. Could you make it happen as personnel officer? Call it a company off-site. We can discuss our annual Key Performance Indicators and then have margaritas on the beach,” he says, part-wistful. Har, har. He still throws out these unintelligible modern references sometimes, even though Cosima’s probably the only one who could catch it.

And yet, he can’t help the gloomier, more pragmatic turn as he adds: “The war would catch up to you, though. A rift would probably open up in the sea just off your shack so you’d have to stare at it all day.”

lost

[magike]

No one should have let her out alone. Rowena had been exploring a small section of the temple, a slight passageway, but on her return had taken a wrong turn. She assumed that it was a wrong turn, given that it didn't lead into the open of the cavern that she'd been in, but into other winding corridors.

And then she saw the light bouncing off the walls from his flame, letting it lead her towards him, which was how she'd come to follow him through the next tunnel, both of them trying to escape.

"I assume magic is changing it?" How she couldn't answer, but magic was the only answer she had. The only answer to most things.

"What kind of marks?"

[portalling]

“A combination of chalk and magical glyphs,” Strange says, “in case conditions wore away at one or the other. Instead, they both seem to have vanished, or maybe these aren’t even the same hallways. More fool me for thinking the Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs thing would work. Still, had to try.”

He pauses to check the wall, a thumb brushing at the dirt, but there’s no sign that this is where they’d walked on the way down.

For all that the two of them hadn’t started off on the right foot, his irritation with Rowena MacLeod hadn’t lingered, and he addresses her now like any other colleague; his temper was usually a mercurial thing, quick to flare but then quick to subside as the moment passed. No one’s at their best when they’re still recovering from a stab wound.

“The last time we investigated this temple, half of our number vanished and seemed to be transported elsewhere in a winding labyrinth. Magic’s certainly involved. We’re not literally in the Fade, not like Yvoire,” he knew she’d been there too, had seen the woman’s red hair in the distance (although it’d also made him double-take, thinking her to be Wanda for a moment), “but conditions remain… odd, down here.”

cosima niehaus | ota (cw for blood in the escape thread, other warnings to be added if necessary)

[youwonscience]

gate

Every time she uses a thaumascope, there's a prick of regret for the people who aren't here to use it. Maybe a bit sharper in a place under the Necropolis, designed to make the viewer think of those who've gone, for all she doesn't share Nevarran religious beliefs. (Tony Stark didn't leave any bones in Thedas anyway.)

Still, she expects that reaction, and so it's easy to lay aside in favor of taking readings and making observations. She's better with effects plants and animals, yes, but she's been looking at disturbances in the Fade for years. So when something catches her eye, she's inclined to trust her intuition. Even so, a second pair of eyes never hurts. She turns to the person nearest: "Does that pulse look like it's speeding up at all to you?" she asks, as she indicates the measure of the energy's ebb and flow.

escape

There's a level of of course when their attempt to leave goes sideways. She'd been with the group trapped inside a Titan; why would exiting a Gate be normal? But in the chaos of the initial scramble, she ends up in a tunnel by herself, which is admittedly more alarming.

By the time your tunnel intersects with hers, she's stopped moving. In part, her initial efforts to retrace her steps failed, and she's worried that she's inadvertently moving deeper into the caves. In part, though, she's been unable to stop coughing since the fire's smoke initially triggered the reaction. It's not constant, but it is frequent. Her left hand is pressed to the wall of the cave, whether for support or orientation. Her right hand, at her side when she's not covering her mouth, is speckled with red liquid.

When she looks up at the sound of someone approaching, the motion catches and echos in dozens of tiny reflective shards embedded in the walls. The mirror fragments are small enough it's easy to ignore them, but an especially observant person would notice that every reflection is different. Cosima with different hair, with different piercings, with no piercings, without glasses. All of the mirrors, though, reflect her troubled facial expression exactly, the same vertical line between her eyebrows.

escape

[portalling]

Is there a doctor in the house, Stephen thinks once they cross paths, with a strangled near-laugh.

There’s something almost eerily familiar in all those shards, like shattering slivers of the multiverse, different fractal selves folding in on themselves. There are flashes in the mirrors of women he’d seen in passing in another world what feels like a lifetime ago; he catches a glimpse of one which is certainly Alison, but he’s not paying much close attention to it when Cosima’s almost doubled over hacking and coughing. He speeds to his friend’s side and reaches out a hand to help steady her, to lean her weight on him instead of the cave wall.

“What happened?” he asks, looking at her red hand and what seems like blood.

He’s perhaps a little more nervous about that thready cough than others might be, knowing her history and fearing: relapse.

[youwonscience]

The genuine relief she feels at seeing Stephen is easy to catch on her face. Anyone from Riftwatch would have been welcome, but he's one of the people she trusts most — when did that happen? A question for another time. Relatedly, he's one of the people she'll have to do the least background explanation for, which is handy. She takes his support gratefully, transferring her weight from the wall to him.

(Oh yeah, that definitely does appear to be blood on the hand not pressed to his arm.)

"Range of options," she says, mustering an admittedly shaky smile as she manages to catch her breath. "Best-case scenario, some magic effect is mimicking the symptoms of the disease I had the first time I was in Thedas. Worst-case scenario, some magic effect actually re-triggered the disease I had the first time I was in Thedas somehow. I cured it back home, but I don't have the ... It's a gene therapy, we haven't even managed penicillin yet." She takes a deep breath to calm herself, trying to stop the mental anxiety cycle that she's clearly been battling for a bit before he arrived. Mixed success, since the deep breath triggers another coughing fit.

"It's congenital," she manages after a moment, "so at least you can't contract the disease either way." Yay?