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

[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.