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

[aberratic]

"Of all the things to lose access to," Ness agrees, taking Stephen's snippiness in stride—they neither of them are at their best at the moment, it's to be expected.

Alright. Alright. She takes a deep breath, centers her thoughts. Stephen's taught her to do this: ignore everything else. Work the problem.

"How can I help? None of my spells have any particular utility here—unless you want me to suppress your fear?"

It's not an off-handed offer, necessarily, but it's certainly not one Ness expects Stephen to take her up on. He's very good, better than her, at cutting away the fat, as it were: narrowing his focus down to the problem and its solution. Discarding everything extraneous in order to arrive at the brutal, beautiful calculus of cause and effect, maximum gain for minimum loss. Fear is not the debilitating factor for him that it could be for others.

[portalling]

“No,” Stephen says, flatly. He doesn’t couch it with a defensive I’m not afraid, because— well, he’s been trying to be better in-tune with his own emotions these days and there is something specifically about the sight of this frozen-over water which is already putting him off-balance both literally and figuratively. He doesn’t like it, nor the memories it stirs up like dirty soil in water. “I need you to levitate me over, or firm up the ground beneath my feet.”

But her magic is so specifically oriented around telepathy and others’ minds, weaselling her way into them, charming them. That does nothing for him now. Unless…

“Your tentacles,” he considers; a word which might have sounded shocking anywhere else, but they’re alone down here. “You’ve been training. Could you use them to grab things? Grab me?”

[aberratic]

Given Stephen's particular brand of magic, what he knows to be possible, how he's used it himself—it's not a stupid question, honestly, and Ness has been training. Still, the face she pulls before he's even finished asking likely doesn't inspire confidence.

"I doubt they'd do much more than finish the job on the ice, to be honest."

She can explain in more depth once the danger has passed—it's a gate she can open, not an entity she has control of, destructive but unpredictable—but the upshot is: it doesn't work like that. There is, quite concretely, nothing magical she can do for either of them in this moment. However,

"I can swim if I need to," so if Stephen falls in she's not totally useless—though being less an arm does make the prospect daunting, that's a bridge they'll have to cross when they get there. Work the problem in front of you, then move on to the next.

[portalling]

“No, don’t—”

Stephen’s kneejerk cry rips out of his throat before he’s even realised it. His hand is raised as if he can ward Ness backward; he took an impulsive half-step forward and the ice floe rocks beneath him, creaking ominously. His heart is thundering in his chest. His iron control slips: Not her too, thinking it loud enough that even Ness can hear.

It was a louder reaction, a more visceral reaction than the conversation strictly warranted.

But if his gaze drifts down, and her gaze drifts down, they’ll both now see the blurry shape beneath the ice between them: a small shadow clinging to the frozen surface. Mittens pressed against the ice, bulky winter clothing sodden and heavy. A too-white face with long blonde hair, floating endlessly. The body is not moving.

Stephen’s face is pale, his jaw set, his eyes watery, breath shallow. Ness has never seen him like this before.

“She’s,” he starts, and stops. He doesn’t know how to finish that sentence.

[aberratic]

She's seen Stephen—concerned, before, certainly. Even before the infection, her arm was a difficult thing to manage, and he was not so good at hiding it as he perhaps meant to be. As good as he is at cutting away the fat, seeing the calculus, well. He is still only human, and she is determined.

This isn't concern. This is fear, deeper than logic, deeper than training. She hadn't even stepped forward and Stephen had warded her off, desperate, instinctual. The shock of it is almost enough to prevent Ness from noticing the body beneath him—almost.

"Oh, Binder preserve us," she breathes sharply, dropping to her knees, trying to get closer, to see the figure more clearly. Her eyes flash violet as she reaches through the ice.

"Is that real? I can't, I don't feel anything, how deep is the ice—"

Ness rocks forward on her knees, closer to the ice, closer to the girl.

[portalling]

“Ennaris, be careful,” Stephen snaps, some desperation still laced into the words, practically begging. He is this close to taking a running jump and just trying to leap over to the other side in order to prevent her from getting any closer. Stop. Oh, she has to stop, she can’t press her face against the ice to look so closely, how gruesome is that other young girl’s face going to be, cold and frozen and bloated from the water —

Beneath the ice, Donna Strange is ten years old and she is dead.

He doesn’t want to look. Above everything, beyond all the horrors he’s seen and experienced, this is the specific memory he always recoils from; the anchor and lynchpin and diverging path that set his entire life on the path he is now.

[aberratic]

"I am being careful," she insists, and it could sound so dismissive, so certain that nothing bad could ever happen to them that she's completely ignoring the danger they're really in—but for the way she sits back on her heels, raises her eyes to Stephen's, and stops.

He's not himself, that much is clear—there is something horrifying about this situation to him, something which has rattled him enough that he's not the Sorcerer Supreme anymore, nor even a Doctor. He's Stephen Strange, only, and that puts them both in danger. It's on her, now, to pick up the slack until he can regain himself.

"Look at me, Stephen," Ennaris says, voice firm.

She waits, patient, for him to draw himself far enough out of his own mind to see her, and when he does he finds her eyes clear and blue, and set in a mirror of his own steely determination.

"I need to get closer to her," Ennaris says, "and I need you to trust me enough to let me do it. This is what I can do for you, so let me do it."

She isn't asking permission.

[portalling]

Don’t —

(You always have to be the one who holds the knife.)

He hates this helplessness. Another Stephen Strange could have simply floated across the gap, quick and callous as anything, whisked Ness away and off they’d go toward safety. But the Cloak of Levitation doesn’t work in this universe and the distance between them is too vast, he cannot cross the void, his hands cannot reach far enough to solve it for her, and so he simply has to submit himself to the indignity of Ennaris seeing his worst memory.

Stephen shifts his weight on that floe of ice. Hears the water sloshing beneath their feet, hears his blood rushing in his ears. Tries to calm what he’s already fairly certain is a burgeoning panic attack.

(Breathe, Stephen.)

He looks at the girl (the other one, the living one) and meets her blue eyes (Donna had once had blue eyes, too), and he takes another deep breath. Let her do it, whatever she’s going to do.

“Fine,” he says. His jaw aches from clenching it. He waits.

[aberratic]

She waits for him to continue, to try to bargain, to make a demand of her. When he doesn't, she nods, and turns her attention back to the ice between them. It's difficult to ascertain what might be safe and what might not—Stephen had only been a step ahead of her before reality had shifted and then she was on the other end of a lake-sized tunnel, Stephen stuck on a shattering floe more than a room's length away. Still, there are things she can deduce: she takes her knife from her belt and slams the pommel against the ice in front of her. The ice scuffs but gives no other protest, so she turns the blade down and attempts to stab through it. Again, it's unmoved by her efforts, and the point makes barely a divot in the frigid surface.

Ennaris sheathes the knife and stands. She steps one foot forward, applies her weight—the ice holds. Another step, both feet and all her weight on the ice now, and it doesn't so much as creak beneath her. Solid enough then; she makes a quick catalog of its qualities and color, what safe looks like, and follows a path of blue ice assiduously until finally she approaches the shadowed figure.

It's not real. The shock of it had been enough to forget, to be drawn into the lie, but the slow and careful walk across an impossible lake of ice far beneath the surface of the earth was enough to wake her again: it's not real, and so it must be manufactured, the product of a spirit twisting the world where the Veil is thin, but even knowing that—even still—

"Oh," Ennnaris breathes, going to her knees, "you poor thing."

The girl beneath the ice stares up at her, unseeing. Her eyes are clouded over, lips blue, hair spread out in a gently waving fan around her. She is dead, undoubtedly, beyond the reach of any magic, aberrant or no, but—she doesn't look afraid. She's not bloated to hideousness, nibbled over by cold-water fish eager for a meal in the harsh winter months. She's... peaceful, almost.

[portalling]

Stephen’s still hovering anxiously on the other side, all six-feet height of him craning up and trying to see what Ennaris is seeing, and failing. How singularly aggravating, putting his life in someone else’s hands rather than his own. How maddening, to let someone else find the answers rather than him. He hates being in the dark like this.

“What do you see,” he calls out, voice still strained.

[aberratic]

She opens her mouth to reassure him, she's peaceful, she wasn't afraid, and she's not frightening—and closes it again. This girl, whoever she is to Stephen, can't be real. Their minds have been convinced of an impossible reality, suggestion and illusion planted beside each other and given space to flourish through their own instincts and extrapolation, but there's nothing there.

The lake swims in front of her, vision warping queasy as she tries to throw off the illusion. The girl beneath the ice bloats, loses chunks of flesh to invisible fish, eye sockets empty, visceral and horrifying and insistent. How can it not be real, when she can see it right in front of her?

Ennaris closes her eyes.

Her knees are cold from the ice—but she's not knelt on ice. She focuses on where they are, Nevarra, the Necropolis, and the Temple to Falon'Din beneath it—and pebbles dig uncomfortably into her kneecaps as the cold fades. She places her hand on the ground in front of her, and feels warm, hard-packed earth. She shifts her feet, scraping them noisily beneath her, and the sound of it rebounds off walls too close for a cavernous underground lake.

She opens her mind and reaches out with her magic, searching for anything, anything that isn't Stephen... and finds nothing. There's no one to read, nothing to converse with.

"I see the illusion of a girl you cared for who died," she says calmly, and opens her eyes. The girl beneath the ice claws at it, furious, but Ennaris ignores her, looking to Stephen instead. "I see a spirit manipulating us with a specter of your past, which is playing godsdamn dirty—but it's just magic, Stephen. It's just a spirit. You've denied spirits before, and made the impossible into magical fact, and you're going to do it again, right now," the ice creaks beneath her, but her eyes remain fixed on Stephen's, "because this girl not being real isn't going to stop her from killing me if you don't."

[portalling]

You’ve denied spirits before. And he has. He has. He passed something very close to a Harrowing, only a few months ago. Stephen Strange knows how to look into his own flaws and foibles and reject them.

But this is the gaping exception, the wound that never properly healed. The one which hasn’t been allowed to breathe due to him never talking about it, inadvertently granting it too much power over him. Donna. Donna, the first stepping-stone which drove his entire choice of career. Becoming a doctor in order to somehow control death, the one thing no one can control.

Stephen takes a deep breath and exhales, listening to Ennaris’ reassuring speech, her crisp businesslike recitation (which sounds, in fact, quite similar to whenever he’s talking her down, too).

And what happens next isn’t even a particularly purposeful choice. Just that he’s sick and tired of being on this side of the goddamn chasm, and he wants to be over there, and he’s academically familiar with what it feels like when his Fade-touched cloak warps space to carry him elsewhere. And so Stephen takes a step forward into what should be drowning water, grasps the Fade, and yanks —

There’s a shimmering blur, a folding of reality, the dizzying shortening of distance so very similar to what Earth’s Strange did whenever he sling-stepped through a portal, and then Stephen’s suddenly standing right next to Ennaris. He looks— a little surprised, actually, to find himself having crossed the distance with nothing more than wanting it. He catches her shoulder, instinctively bracing himself in case he loses his balance and tumbles backward into the water.

But there’s no ice, no rocking instability, no frozen water. She’s right. This is just another stone-and-dirt hallway deep underground, the same as they’ve been facing this whole time. The temple, perhaps the Gate, perhaps a nearby spirit, is ripping memories wholesale out of their mind and using it to paint the picture.

He remembers to breathe again.

“Fuck this place,” he says, simply.

[aberratic]

Once again, Stephen Strange accomplishes the impossible. He looks more surprised at his success than Ennaris does, mostly because she's not surprised at all. Frankly, he hasn't done anything she didn't already know he could do once he put his mind to it, so as far as she's concerned there's nothing to be shocked by. She's proud of his cleverness, yes, and no small amount self-satisfied, and it shows—but not surprised. There's barely more than a smile that greets him as she stands, steadying Stephen with her hand on his elbow, and ignores the creaking ice around them.

"Quite" she agrees, dry as the Hissing Wastes. Fuck this place indeed... but they're not done.

"You should look, Stephen."

This time she's gentle, sympathetic, her eyes softening on his. Ennaris won't force him, if he pushes back. But this specter will retain its power over him for as long as he allows it to, and the start of any reclamation is acknowledging what was taken from you in the first place. In a world of magic and spirits, the Sorcerer Supreme can't afford such easily exploited weaknesses.

[portalling]

As much as Stephen is normally more than equipped to look at the awful and the horrific, unflinching— somewhere inside him remains that frightened young boy who had to watch his sister drown. That vision which haunted his memories, his nightmares. The sheer helplessness of it.

So it takes some effort to look down at that floating specter, her face just as he’s always remembered it, blonde hair floating around her in that frigid water, and...

It turns out that he’s mostly angry. A cold fury gripping his heart at this thing manipulating his memories like this, hammering on his weaknesses and using Donna against him.

(even if, at the end of the day and unbeknownst to any of them, the spirit’s trying to help, because he did have to learn to accept help here, didn’t he? he did have to teach himself to look, didn’t he?)

Stephen closes his eyes, silently counts to five while still grasping Ennaris’ shoulder, and then he opens them again. He’s holding onto someone. The floor is dark dry dirt. The frozen lake in Nebraska is far away, an entire universe and decades away, buried back in his memory. There’s no Donna Strange. There never was.

“Thank you,” he says, more tired than anything. “How about we get out of here?”

[aberratic]

"Yes please," Ness says, eager—the ice-that-isn't keeps creaking ominously beneath her, and knowing it's all in her mind doesn't make it any less unsettling.

Before she steps away, though, toward where she remembers the mouth of the cave to be, she reaches up to his hand on her shoulder and squeezes.

"You did well," she says, and if he huffs or rolls his eyes she has no compunction against digging her nails in as an admonishment. Being affected by spirits is not a failure, and even being frightened is nothing to be ashamed of. He convinced Thedas to shunt him across space and he looked at something that stripped him of all his extensive training; he did well.

Now it's time to get the hells out of here.