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

[altusimperius]

Benedict shakes his head.

"Not apart from our work here." He shrugs. "The Fifth Blight never made it far enough north for us to be too bothered by it." and also he was a child when it happened

"So probably about as familiar as you are. Sensible people stay away from it." He glares at the gate.

[portalling]

“No fun work stories about it?” Stephen asks ruefully, knowing full well that the Blight isn’t a fun topic by any means, but he’s got a morbid fascination for wild Riftwatch stories —

And they’re killing time besides. Might as well.

[altusimperius]

"About the Blight?" Benedict shoots him an incredulous look, half a smile-- you can't be serious-- but the mood is lightened all the same.

"Not off the top of my head, but I'll let you know if we all turn into darkspawn." He pauses for a beat, then adds, "you know, I'm probably related to some of the first ones."

[portalling]

“What a pedigree namedrop,” Stephen says, dry, but with half a smile of his own. “All my family were farmers.”

[altusimperius]

Benedict actually laughs, caught out, but it fades quickly as another thought occurs to him.

"What if Corypheus is my great great great great great uncle," he muses, his face taking on a telltale dissociative pallor as he descends the mental rabbit hole.
"...maybe he'd let me inherit."

[portalling]

Stephen chokes on a laugh. This hypothetical, for some reason, really gets him, even surrounded by these bleak underground warped surroundings as they are, with a sort-of-hellmouth buzzing just on the other side of the room. And it’s more fun to dip into the thought experiment, for shits and giggles:

“What do you think you’d even inherit? A stack of really, really horrible ancient empire artifacts? I call dibs on helping you catalogue them. You’d need an arcane librarian.”

[altusimperius]

The laugh returns, and Benedict seems a little more at ease here in the dark damp.

"Thralls?" he wonders, "the Wardens? I could set them to work cleaning out our files." Lifting his eyebrows at Stephen, he nods agreeably. "You're in charge of the artifacts. Unless they're pretty."

[portalling]

“Define ‘pretty’ artifacts. I’ll need to know which ones to shunt over into your personal collection, of course. The rest can go to Research.”

Although if he stops to consider, he already has a bit of an idea. Stephen’s got a few at home to begin with: rainbow lamps scattered throughout the houseboat, Tevene-made, lovely craftsmanship. That runic cuff to deaden sensation, so helpful in the infirmary. The wrought-iron magical heater in his bedroom on cold winter nights. Say this for the country, it knows its enchanted objects.

[altusimperius]

“Well,” Benedict muses, thinking it over deeply, then decides: “I’ll have to vet them, clearly.” Pretty can mean a lot of things, and it’s important to get it right, obviously.

“If I’m Corypheus’ heir I’m probably immune to some of the more insane things,” he muses, “right?” Now seems like the moment to study his shard, and he squints judgmentally at his palm.

[portalling]

“Mm. Let’s hope so.”

Stephen watches Benedict examine his shard so dubiously. And some dormant consideration turns in circles in the back of his mind, some disconnected thread he couldn’t consciously outline if you asked: shards, the barrier at Yvoire, the rash of people wanting to lop off their shard-arms this year, Petrana de Cedoux’s insistence that her anchor would be of no use in the field, Benedict’s own allergy to combat in general…

“Have you closed any rifts with that?”

[altusimperius]

Twitching a glance back to Stephen, Benedict flexes his hand and scowls at it.

"I've helped," he supplies, "...it hurts." Like other shardbearers don't know that, but it's stupider on him for the mere fact that he acquired it on purpose.

[portalling]

“Rather comes with the territory,” Stephen says, dryly.

If the shard weren’t already a pinprick of pain driven deep into his palm, those rickety fingers and old scars already spoke to an existing pain. He can’t remember what it feels like to have his hands not hurt.

[altusimperius]

"Yes, well." A deep breath and sigh through his nose, and Benedict doesn't say the thing he thinks about the territory and how he could have avoided it, because Strange has no doubt already had his fill of the Artemaeus heir's lurid history.

He continues to stare at it, giving it the stinkeye, then rolls his eyes with a scoff and stares grumpily at the gate. Here they are.
"All we can do is make the best of it," he opines, nobly-- and then pauses, something occurring to him.

"...you know," he begins, with uncharacteristic timidity, like he's about to say something out of line.

[portalling]

Making the best of it is another potential route for a tangent, part of Stephen’s mind already starting to tick down to-do lists and tasks and how to make oneself useful if they’re going to be sitting around in front of the Gate —

But that thought process is interrupted by Benedict’s hedging, and the sorcerer glances over, curious. “Yes?”

[altusimperius]

"If there ever," Benedict begins, then hesitates in the manner of one unsure of how to proceed with his phrasing. "...if gates ever opened up again, like the ones. That let us go to..." He motions to Strange. "Other worlds. I wonder if,"

and here he pauses again, ashamed-- is it too much to admit, perhaps, that he was given the taste of a life where so much less tiptoeing was required around politics, his lineage, all the complications that come from magic existing and being important? Where he could disappear into the night life, where there were others like him, who liked what he likes and love how he loves?

"...if we could stay," he murmurs, "somehow." He keeps his gaze fixed downward.

[portalling]

Something twinges in Stephen’s chest, an unexpected ache. It’s a question he had asked himself so often at the beginning, when he still had some hope of going home again, a stubborn internal insistence that surely it was only a short multiversal jump away, he knew such things were possible, and that impossible interlude of New York had only dangled the prospect closer —

Then time had passed.

“You liked my Earth that much?” he asks, quiet and sympathetic. He gets it. Like, he does keep going on about how much he misses the Sanctum Sanctorum and its sprawling comfort; his full magical capabilities; the smartphones, the technology, the music, the hygiene.

[altusimperius]

(What better way to start one's supervillain era? Though let's be real, he'd be a henchman at best.)

Benedict nods in a sheepish, weary way; it's hard to admit that he felt more at home somewhere so unobtainable.

[portalling]

“This probably won’t make you feel any better,” Stephen starts, slowly, “but one of the prevailing working theories in my world is that if someone were to cross over from another universe and stay too long, it could lead to an inevitable unraveling of reality and that world eventually collapsing on itself and killing everyone there. Multiversal fracturing. We call it an incursion.”

He can be such a buzzkill sometimes, and he knows it. Perpetual rationality to the detriment of whimsy.

“I miss what I know of it, though. So if there were a way for me to safely go there, and stay alive outside of Thedas, and bring Gwenaëlle with me without reality collapsing, and if there wasn’t already another Doctor Strange there to complicate matters…” He gestures helplessly. “But that’s so many existential caveats. I’ve had to make do. We can try to make this world into what we want to see from it, instead.”

Because at the end of the day, he’s simply too sensible, and doesn’t want to waste time sitting and wishing for a thing that can’t be —

“But I do understand, and relate.”

[altusimperius]

Benedict listens in earnest, and by the look on his face it does not make him feel better. He seems almost offended, like he can't quite comprehend why Strange would say this to him-- especially when one considers that there are already people from another universe crossing over, and one of them is sitting right here, telling him this.

Benedict takes a breath, pauses and purses his lips; opens his mouth, closes it again. hang on. hang on

[portalling]

To Stephen’s credit, it’s at least been a while since he accidentally freaked someone else out like this while trying to say something somewhat comforting. He’s gotten better at moderating his perpetual foot-in-mouth problem, but sometimes it still pops back up.

He watches Benedict struggle with it, and the sorcerer doesn’t even really know which part struck the wrong chord. He opens his own mouth, trying to reflexively fill the silence, but then he forces himself to stop and wait instead. He hangs on.

🎀?

[altusimperius]

It's just one more thing piling onto the dour hopelessness of this place, and abruptly Benedict wishes they could simply leave. If only it were ever that easy.

"Never mind then," he says, his mouth twitching into a hesitant, perhaps apologetic smirk-- he brought it up, after all.