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

[interroga]

“I’m not too experienced with them yet.” It’s a practical and pragmatic admission: strengths and weaknesses, what he does and doesn’t know how to wrangle. “I’ve heard they can be manipulative.”

Which is really underselling the point, as that sound seems to perpetually shift around them, the noise darting around and behind, splitting their attention through the shadows of the ancestor trees. (Because that’s what they are, of course. The bark isn’t supposed to warp and show the faces of the dead inside them, but Kassa had always pictured it as such, with a child’s superstition.)

As he’s staring out into the darkness, letting his eyesight try to adjust and see what’s stalking them, there’s that flicker of movement again —

And. Without seeing her actually appear, there’s a young girl standing between the trees as if she’s always been there, carrying a swaddled bundle. Five, maybe six years old; she’ll always be six years old to him. Dark tanned skin, dark watchful eyes and tangled hair, wearing colourful patchwork Dalish clothing, her expression small and sad.

There’s some echoes of physical resemblance between the two of them, if you’re looking.

Cassian’s gone absolutely still and motionless. (Prey, being hunted.) “Do you see her too?” he asks Talin through a mouth gone dry. He needs to be sure that he’s not hallucinating on his own, not swatting at ghosts and memories.

[dirthsal]

Manipulative, indeed—there is nothing in front of them and then there is a child, and Talin softens despite himself. He's had such a weakness for children, for girls with dark hair and wide eyes. She looks lost—but of course she would. He has to remember where they are, he has to remember how they got here.

"I see a child, which is even more impossible than the trees," he says, firm, as much for Cassian as himself, "Don't let it—"

A small, chubby fist escapes the swaddling in the girl's arms, and Talin's voice catches in his throat. It waves something around in the air, something wooden, something that should be packed safely among Talin's things in the Gallows.

"Where did you get that?" He steps forward and the girl matches him, stepping back. His feet move to follow her, unthinking, further down the path.

[interroga]

“Don’t—” Cassian starts, a hand reaching out for Talin’s sleeve and grasping and catching nothing but air, forcing him to stir into movement to go after him.

Don’t. Don’t chase the rabbit down the rabbithole, don’t get lost, don’t follow, except that he can’t stop looking at that ghost of Kerri either, drinking in all of the details he hasn’t seen in so long. She’s always so faded and blurry in dreams, a vague smudged impression that he knows is supposed to be her, but he can never see quite clearly. He’s afraid he’s forgotten what her face looks like. But here it’s rendered in sharp heartbreaking detail, and he can’t get enough of taking it in.

Because it is her face, he’s certain of it, exactly the way she looked.

Kerri spins on her heel and she goes scurrying away with the child in her arms, and like there’s a fish-hook lodged in them, the two men find themselves hurrying after.

[dirthsal]

This is stupid, Talin thinks to himself, feet flying thoughtless beneath him. This is so stupid.

The spirit is fast. A child carrying a baby should not, could not, outrun two grown men—and yet no matter how fast they hurry, they can't catch up to her. She leads them down dark paths, through narrow passages, takes turn after turn that should lead them in a circle except for how no wall looks the same twice. Once, Talin nearly comes close enough to catch her, touches the tail of her blanket before she darts forward, faster than she should be; once, Cassian catches up enough to smell halla-milk soap before she takes a sharp turn, and by the time he's adjusted to follow her she's already little more than a smudge, far ahead in the darkness.

The spirit is clever. If it stays out of reach forever, they will eventually stop chasing. She leads them to a dead end: a cave whose back wall has cracked straight through to the other side, with barely enough space for a nug to pass through at its narrowest point. Through the crack, there is firelight. There is elvhen, indistinct but unmistakeable, in voices pitched as childrens'.

Talin skids to a stop at the mouth of the cave, and shoves his arm out to block Cassian from barreling past him. The girl watches them, unblinking. The bundle in her arms shifts, a chubby hand fighting free of the swaddling to reach out.

"Da'len," Talin barks, breathless, "come here. You can't fit through there. Come here. Bring that to me."

The spirit is winning.

A smile spreads over the girl's face and glints in her eyes, and she turns her back to them, and she ducks into the crack in the wall,

and she runs.

🎀

[interroga]

She shouldn’t be able to fit through there, except that perhaps the topography of this place is more malleable than one thinks. When you blink, the crack is wider than it looked at first. The carrot is dangled ever so slightly out of reach. She vanishes, and there’s still the sound of chattering elvhen just beyond that cave wall, voices gathered around a campfire at night, and when Talin in front takes another step and another, he finds that he can pass through,

and Cassian’s shoulders catch on the walls of that narrow passage when he tries to follow, unable to fit.

Elves are smaller and narrower than men.

And so in the end, Cassian is left staring at a blank cracked wall and he can no longer see the firelight or hear the voices. Come back, he cries out in elvhen — it’s unclear who he’s directing it to, Talin or Kerri, and in fact unclear if he ever actually said anything at all — and his colleague is certainly long gone, and cannot hear him.

He slams a fist against the stone. Deep breaths. He’ll have to work his way around, work his way upward, and hopefully the other man will be able to find his way out on his own.