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temple of leaves | to be perfect is to be hollow
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
no subject
He knows of Abby. She was the first person he’d met when he came in from the cold to join Riftwatch. The woman’s huge, bigger than both of them; it’d be beyond apparent if she were clawing her way out of the ground nearby.
Still. Unlike before, there’s nothing to be lost from trying a rescue for a little while, just in case. So he hunkers down beside Benedict, dislodging a stone here and there to make room for the other man, helping to sweep the dirt out of the way as they dig with their hands; but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. There’s nothing to see besides empty dirt and a growing hole of nothing.
“Artemaeus, there isn’t anything there,” he says, but the other man isn’t listening to him; just digging more, like a dog thinking it’s on the verge of finding a bone.
“You need to stop—”
“She’s not—”
More digging, ignoring him. Bloodied nailbeds, sweat slicking his hair to his forehead, wearing himself down in a hysterical panic over nothing.
Cassian weighs it over for a second, considering— and then, making a decision, he suddenly flings himself forward until his shoulder rams into Benedict’s, knocking him over and away from the hole. An arm goes around the other man’s chest, locked in place and hauling him backward, the pair of them an ungainly scrabble of limbs in the dirt, kicking and thrashing. “She’s not there,” he hisses into Benedict’s ear. “She might be coming up somewhere else—”
no subject
"You fuck," he rails, "you traitor, bastard--" And begins to lose steam as his adrenaline drains, becoming increasingly aware of the arm around his chest and how it holds him there. The horrible pointlessness of it, the unfairness of this person being here instead of Abby, holding him in a way that Benedict would never willingly admit he's longed for-- it overloads his already fraught emotions and he relents with a shuddering sob.
It's not exactly the picture of dignity, but at least he's stopped fighting.
no subject
So he keeps dragging him backwards and away from their makeshift hole in the ground — there’s a moment when a flailing elbow catches him in the stomach and the breath is driven out of him with a gasp, fingers curling into the neck of Benedict’s shirt — until he can hear and feel the exact moment that the mage gives up, with what sounds like a sob caught behind his teeth, and Cassian sags backward into the dirt.
Is the other man crying? He’s glad, for a moment, that he can’t see Benedict’s facial expression. They’re a sprawl of disorganised arms and legs, Benedict half on top of him and Cassian’s knee probably digging into his side, but at least he’s not fighting back anymore.
“What exactly am I betraying?” he asks, dryly. Humour, or at least something which looks like it if you squint; he can be an asshole when he wants to be.
no subject
"Fuck you," he gives in place of a rational answer, still scanning the horizon for movement that isn't coming. A gasping breath, and he ducks his head, inadvertently pressing back into Cassian, deciding for the moment to ignore him in his grief.
"She was right there," he breathes shakily into his enclosed hands.
no subject
A thing he’s fine doing with his friends and loved ones, except that they’re not friends, far from it, and so Cassian finally shoves the other man off him and starts to crawl back to his feet. They’re both covered in chalky dirt, the crumbled stone of the Necropolis, Benedict looking the worse since he came crawling out more recently, like the shambling undead so common around here.
“She’ll make it out,” Cassian says. The reassurance sounds more brusque and flat and factual than consoling. “If your noodle arms could claw your way up here, hers will for sure.”
no subject
"Reassuring," he says dully, and straightens. Pointlessly, he combs at his hair with his fingers, bothered by the sensation of the caked-on dust and without any of his fancy hair oils to mitigate the problem.
🎀
Were they friends, there would be space here for some genuinely reassuring conversation: words of comfort, solace, some camaraderie and togetherness on the heels of a properly harrowing experience underground.
But instead, there’s a stilted, uncomfortable silence as they wait to see who else survived. Cassian isn’t sure how to fill it, and not sure he wants to — laboured small-talk when they’re this annoyed with each other is unlikely to go well — but he’s not going to abandon his vigil, either. Because others are probably on their way up, and they might need help clawing their way out of the ground. Both of them are too stubborn to be the first to give up and leave, and so:
They wait.