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.

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?”

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.

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.