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

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?

[portalling]

The way the doctor’s mind seizes on and starts to work the issue, considering problems and solutions, it also tends to catastrophise a little, casting himself into the future and imagining plans of action.

If it’s really back, if her cure’s undone itself and Cosima now has an untreatable terminal illness again (fuck) —

Well. That’s going to be a problem and a proper investigation for later. For now, there’s nothing to be done about the root cause down here, trapped underground as they are, in winding passages and claustrophobic stone and stale air. What they can do in the short-term, maybe, is make her comfortable and stop her from hacking up a lung.

“Tell me about the symptoms,” he says as he takes her weight. They hadn’t needed to cover the specifics before, since it had been a moot point, already cured; when he took over the Head Healer position, there hadn’t been old charts going back that far for him to look up the notes on her illness and treatment. “If we need to, we’ll get you to a spirit healer once we get back above-ground. Is it a pulmonary disease?”

It’s a different side of Stephen that she hasn’t been on the receiving end of, yet. Fewer jokes, more brusque and to-the-point. He’d never particularly cared about his patients as people before, in his older life; it’s a perpetually aggravating point that now he does.

cw from here on for illness and death talk (but not actual death)

[youwonscience]

The code switching would almost be funny under other circumstances. In these, though, she meets him where he is. Even if she suspects the physical body she's in right now has never been sick, she still has memories of all the months of frantic research and experimentation from home. Being able to talk about it like a scientist has been a coping mechanism before now.

"Autoimmune. It attacks epithelial tissue; the original intention was to make my sisters and me infertile so we weren't spreading copyrighted DNA into the general population." Which is horrifying and almost certainly wouldn't have held up in court as a piece of intellectual property protection, but hey, she's a biologist not a lawyer Jim. "I had access to perform an autopsy on one person who died of it, she had tumors on several major organs, though I think the state of her lungs was the most likely immediate cause of death."

A beat, and then: "For me, the symptoms were mainly respiratory, but I also had periods of serious fatigue that left me in bed. Occasionally seizures. It wasn't great. But spirit healing did help, the first time I was here." So at least there's that. It didn't cure her, but it kept her from getting worse.

[portalling]

“Okay. Good. I mean, hopefully this is just some temporary Gate fuckery, but worst case scenario—”

Perhaps some people would try their hardest to avoid even breathing those potentials into existence, but his mind is the kind that latches onto it and starts to plan for it.

“Worst case scenario, we’ve got access to spirit healers. You’re gonna be fine. Can you still walk? And does it feel like how it used to? Which is to say, could it be something else? Toxins, gases, those underground glowing mushrooms, have you eaten or drunk anything which tasted off—”

[youwonscience]

"Legs are OK," she confirms, of being able to walk, though leaning on him is still helpful. "Though about it, other things can make you cough."

(Coughing blood is uniquely alarming, but hey.)

"But it does ... it feels subjectively familiar. And I haven't eaten or drunk anything I didn't bring with me. If it's poison, it's inhaled. Or maybe absorbed through the skin, I had my hand on the wall for support before you got here, but I didn't need to do that until I was already coughing pretty hard." All of this is punctuated with said cough, though she hasn't been fully incapacitated since she started talking to him.

She manages a shaky smile as she adds, "Could be worse. One time when we were still back at Skyhold, Herian had to deadlift me to get me to the infirmary, it probably would have been really romantic if I hadn't been unconscious." She doesn't anticipate he'll need to do the same unless things escalate alarmingly. Still possible, but making light seems to help a little bit.

[portalling]

“Could be worse,” Stephen acknowledges, in an off-beat tone echoing hers. That frigid, stern demeanour of his is relaxing its iron grip a little, now that it seems Cosima isn’t at least immediately dying or in need of CPR or an inhaler they don’t have. He casts her a sideways glance, rueful.

“Besides, I don’t think I’d be able to deadlift you anyway, so you’d be shit out of luck.”

[youwonscience]

Her smile warms, just a fraction. "Yeah, let's save our respective dignities." There's a flicker in the mirror shards, as if some of the reflections are moving out of sync with others. Cosima either doesn't notice or chooses to ignore it. Either way, she keeps moving forward with him.

It's worth trying to move her focus a little bit as they go, however, and she adds, "Have you seen anything in particular since we got separated? Anything weird in a way that particularly suggests how we're fucked, or just general weirdness as per usual?" It's still on topic, but she could do with thinking about something other than her own lungs and how hard it does or doesn't feel to inhale.

[portalling]

“I mean…” he says, slowly, and he’s picking through his words, trying to figure out the best way to describe the bizarre shit they’ve been seeing down here. In the end, Stephen falls back on a crisp and businesslike report; the way he might have passed information to Tony in another time, another world, colleagues dealing with reality fractures and alien invasions and needing to discuss it in the most straightforward way possible.

Those memories had given him a lot of practice for Thedas, in short.

“This area beneath the temple and the Gate seems to be full of strange manifestations. Not illusions, since they’re tangible enough to touch and smell, and others experience them too. But they also seem to be drawn from people’s experiences and psyches, almost like a nightmare. I don’t know if there’s some person or creature here causing it, or perhaps it’s the Gate itself warping things. Part of me wants to say it’s not real, but is there really any difference if Freddy Krueger shanks you in a dream or in real life? It’s real enough.”

And he could skip right over what happened to him earlier in these hallways (allways, always), except that it’s relevant to his argument. “I saw a blonde child trapped under a frozen lake,” he says, his voice tight. “Which felt… targeted. It was from my memories. Much like these reflections,” he tips his head towards the wall, “seem like yours.”

[youwonscience]

"Makes sense." She glances at the wall for the first time. "They're my sisters. You met the Fade's version of a few, that time we were sort of in each other's home worlds." Close enough that it counts. "You never got to meet a couple others I knew, because it was either before or after the time period we were there. That's Beth." In one of the shards, she points out a version of Cosima's features with minimal makeup, hair pulled back messily, worry lines in her forehead that seem like they don't really go away. "She'd died, before the point you saw. Called me up out of the blue, before I knew anything about our origins, and said hey, I think we have each other's face."

Paraphrasing, but not that hard. Cosima sounds like she misses her, but she doesn't dwell on it.

"I think they're you're right, they're from my memory. I recognize them all. Either from real life or from videos I saw of them. There are none I've spotted that I can't clock, and that wouldn't be true if it was actually every Leda clone." Which supports Stephen's theory. "Which is good news for 'getting out of here will probably help' but bad news in that there's worse stuff it can pull out of my head."

[portalling]

“Mm. Yeah. Which brings us back to the Krueger thing: it ultimately doesn’t matter if it’s a dream or a memory, we don’t want it killing us either way.”

Fleetingly, as Stephen helps her shuffle along down the tunnel, he’s hit with the giddily stupid idea that he could probably write a paper for the Orlesian college about this. The Krueger Theory of Fade Dream-Reality Manifestation. Bet he could get that published. A certain segment of rifters might get a kick out of it.

Focus, Stephen.

“Riftwatch has experiences with the Gates. Were there any effects like this, before?”

Prying for information, but it’s also a way to keep Cosima distracted; keep her talking, thinking about anything except her lungs.