interlude: ellethia

[groundrules]

ELLETHIA

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En route to their next destination, the Merchant detours the party through his home citadel of Ellethia — the first, haunted casualty of the undead, now divided into Ellethia-Allayar and Ellethia-Hamsour.

Feel free to tag into this log or make your own posts!

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ONE FOR THE ROAD

Macaluso Spina’s plans to escort the group out of Taravast are overturned by the Merchant’s transmission:

”It appears many of you remain indifferent to the stakes of our endeavour. So, you will see them. You go to Ellethia, jewel of innovation, the first cradle of the dead. My home.”

With the sorceress Karsa now gone, the party is entrusted to journey master and kindly-mannered biologist Enam.

Characters retain their bare essentials and what little can be carried on their backs. Magical storage is minimal. Everyone receives bags containing: three raw candles, a bundle of red clothes, a light blanket, two flasks of fresh water, a dagger, two bandage strips, two needles, strong thread, four textile patches, dried food, a pouch with two fistfuls of kiln-dried broken firewood and some flint. Supplies are replenished periodically.

Enam and his six assistants carry larger loads — with two aides transporting heavily bound humanoid forms. They’ve got you, Kaneki.

Ellethia requires delicate travel. The group first travels communally by ship, reaching the East Arakuthia Seas at sunset, meeting 25 small boats that can home between one and three passengers.

The group only travels at sea by night, when the depths are safest. The 3-17 January period covers two nights of seaborne travel, broken by journey on land across the two segments of Ellethia. Sea shipment will take characters from East Arakuthia to Ellethia-Allayar. A second voyage will later deliver them from Ellethia-Allayar to Ellethia-Hamsour. They spend roughly seven days at each land location.

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TROUBLE AT SEA

The small boats have been thralled to slowly progress through mist and water to their destination. Enam quickly discloses the rules of seaborne engagement:

■ Keep the light. Enam offers each traveller a lit candle brazier to wave periodically around the boat and “ward away evil.”

■ If your candle blows out, rush to it light back with help from your boat-mate or other vessels.

■ If all of a boat’s candle lights have been died, travellers have three minutes to light fresh candle flames. The vessel begins to sink, seized by hands of rotting flesh and shadow. Undead mermaids attempt to drown those who fall in.

■ Sunken characters can be rescued by other vessels but remain “marked,” experiencing a bitter, unrelenting cold that no fire can tame. The saviours’ ship are intensely targeted by mermaids that seek to capsize it and collect their lost prize. You are rattled but safe as long as your lights hold.

■ Perhaps you dozed off, or briefly looked away — no matter your distraction, a newcomer (?) has now climbed into your boat, teeth chattering and terrified. These undead visitors are unaware of their condition and beg to be delivered to shore. They are not violent, unless ignored and often spark conversations. Over time, they become paranoid that they will not be rescued.

■ Those who share their names with these creatures feel compelled to take them to ground, where they trigger immediate medium-scale explosions. Other boat-mates or vessels can stop this.

■ Forcibly push your stowaway into water, trick them in, or pose a riddle they cannot solve.

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AHOY, LAND

Ellethia has been cleaved into two — Allayar and Hamsour — by the Huntress, whose extended presence crumbled stone, decayed organic matter and eventually sunk districts and passageways. Crude bridges connect sectors of the citadel that have been partly submerged.

Although the tragedy of Ellethia occurred within the last decade, its ruins have been completely overrun by lush vegetation.

The following applies to both Ellethia-Allayar and Ellethia-Hamsour:

■ Characters must don their fashionable red gear once they reach land. Over 15 minutes of direct exposure to the crisp Ellethia air leads unprotected skin to erupt in a rash, then into gashes and tissue-deep decay. The wound fully regenerates within the hour.

■ Patch your party suit immediately, if it is torn.

■ Science-prone characters can notice no sign of radiation. Sorcerers feel no magic. Necromancers sense a complete absence of death.

■ There is no other human presence on land. Plants develop abundantly. Animals live an entire cycle of birth, growth, maturity and decay in the period between sunrise and sundown, reaching their prime around midday. Corpse remains patch back together into the creature’s new-born form at sunrise.

■ There are no human corpses anywhere.

TASKS

■ Forage or hunt. Replenish resources. Water from Ellethia’s canals is potable.

■ Help Enam find samples of the Widow’s Yearning. The plants grow in small fields whose scent woos travellers into a restful sleep they struggle to wake back from on their own. Widow’s Yearning can be ground into a potent hallucinogen.

■ Explore the pastoral surroundings.

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ELLETHIA-ALLAYAR

The party first reaches Ellethia-Allayar, which hosts the ruins of the citadel’s seats of banking, commerce and governance. Ellethia-Allayar has been deeply flooded, with many streets partly overcome by water.

■ Amid torn-down halls of rhetoric and administration, characters can find bright flags on public office buildings, and glitter debris and street cups on the ground.

■ Several decaying pamphlets remain in the main piazza, whose halls have been submerged 1 meter underwater. If recovered, the pamphlets bemoan: Toss a Bone to Your Taxman: He’s Already Got the Meat, Gristle and Fat, Dowries: Sense or Sentiment? Join Tonight’s March for Free Wedlock, Who Watches through Your Mirrors?, Selling: Minor Palace with Main Street View and Cat, 90 Days Since Conscription: Where Are Your Sons?, Taravast Was Our Fathers’ Question, We Are the Answer.

■ Fresher pamphlets littered on public streets announce extended burial grounds in the botanical garden.

■ Roads and buildings show signs of clawing and trampling, along with spattering of long-dried blood.

■ The carriages, streetlights and infrastructure of Ellethia suggest a technology level near the 1800s.

THE SILENCE GAME

Ellethia-Allayar’s impromptu “canals” have made it a prime target for mermaids, who only infiltrate at midday — the peak of the accelerated animal life cycle.

■ Enam urges retreating to the high ground of the peripheral residential areas, as midday draws near.

■ Between noon and 13:00 each day, swathes of vicious mermaids storm the Allayar canals, working in packs to draw unsuspecting animals or humans into water. Some mermaids are dead, some living. While they always circle Ellethia during the day, they only proactively hunt in this period.

■ The thick fogs of Ellethia throw a boon: if they are very silent and very still, characters can hide even on low ground. Beware: the mermaids’ hearing has evolved to compensate their weaker sight, helping them locate close-by characters who speak or heave.

■ Mermaids imitate the animal calls and human voices they have heard to lure out prey.

■ Most central and public buildings are on low land.

Enam directs characters to their boats again to head to Ellethia-Hamsour within the week.

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ELLETHIA-HAMSOUR

Unlike Allayar, Ellethia-Hamsour is a completely demolished territory, bordering a wasteland. Water infiltrations have been minimal.

The fog runs thicker than in Allayar, compounding the dangers of the collapsing, decayed roads and bridges.

The strong, vibrant greenery only breaks in coastal regions. Beneath the plant beds, you can find signs of the academic, science or technological districts. In some manicured gardens, flowers have overtaken hundreds of newer stone plates bearing local names and the marker, Truth Bows Only to the Sun.

Any remaining stone edifices display intense clawing and blood residue.

Characters are tasked to head to a distant lighthouse, lone in the horizon.

■ Characters become increasingly obsessed with reaching the lighthouse, often neglecting food, safety and sleep.

■ The single-minded focus leaves some vulnerable to being lured into steep pits or down cliff edges, into the sea.

■ Some characters become possessive of the lighthouse and plot to prevent their fellow travellers from reaching it. The lighthouse is not safe, if others get near it. It does not want them. Only you.

PLOTTING POST

QUESTIONS

Comments

[enucleation]

[ ghouls care so little about blades. They do not cute skin like they do humans and they are ultimately useless to fight one. And in his state, kaneki cares even less to bother with something that is neither a threat nor food.

In fact, his hand reaches for the blade. His intention is not to break it, but to simply display how useless it will be facing Kaneki, and he tilts his had back to look at Wangji next. An uncharacteristic smile forms and the ghoul eye reacts. Even with the lack of sunlight, the candle flame still allows for it to be seen ]

Do you wish to take his place?

[downswing]

( Death is intimacy, the act of entrusting steel to a man's flesh and receiving his life's blood. To touch a man's sword uninvited —

Hair on his nape bristled, he flinches, holds Kaneki's gaze for a moment, gelid — and yields first, not in withdrawing the blade, but in tipping it perpendicular, flat thick of it parallel to the inviting line of Kankei's cheek, denying the chance of injury.

See here. No excuses. Only reason, barter, Lan Wangji's whispers scratching air like their boat cuts through waves. Distance. They are crossing it. Soon, the shore, and they have been told...

He has no time. )

You shed your mouth's waters. Your eye has... ( Darkened, to the core. Decayed. Turned flimsy and scarce. He swallows, and bile bubbles thick in his belly. ) Hollowed. You are sick.

( And sickened children cannot account for themselves. )

Allow me to address him.

[enucleation]

No, I'm crazy.

And it hurts. [ everything hurts. The more Kaneki gives in to the madness inside his head, more it all hurts. The hunger spreads through his body like flame and gasoline, and it burns from within, leaving him in a worse state by the second. Ghoul hunger is hell, worst hell than any human can physically feel and that is what curses him.

Bichen goes ignored, Wangji does not. Neither does his smell. He smells so inciting, so good. Like the only thing that can truly stop the hell that spreads through kaneki's body and mangles it from within, the only thing that can stop that loud screaming inside Kaneki's head.

He should eat him.

How intimate would that be?

He begins to turn to the man, now set on a new course of action, set on tasting his skin and his muscle and his blood, set on chewing on his bones. No words are formed anymore for kaneki can no longer speak and all that pain takes over and drives him now. The thing that will save him from turning on a human is the small brittle undead who decides to move again and gently mentions "The shore is close". That was the last straw and Kaneki loses his mind right there, suddenly turning at a speed entirely inhuman, and jumping on the dead man with all of his body weight.

A bite is taken from its face and all the rotting flesh and muscle is pulled along by the teeth, and Kaneki's feast begins. Even if the undead fights back, there is little he can do against a ghoul's strength and little he can do against teeth sinking into his body.

Enjoy your new trauma, Wangji ]

[downswing]

( A blink of the eyes. The second.

And they erupt, together, in the thick, cloying wet of animal fats, of sweat, of skin slicked: Kaneki, a chaos of limbs, and the dead man squirming, screeching, until his throat crumbles useless or torn, and his eyes are empty sky, and moonlight washes his wounds dark. Red is not for midnight. Bloodshed abides no time.

Lan Wangji knows, the dead man could not reach the shore.

Knows, stench comes, and it goes, and the boy — Kaneki leaves behind so precious little.

Knows too, Lan Wangji cannot slay the boy. None of them can perish here. This is spoken, oft repeated. To terminate him is to scatter his flesh and its considerable strength in the hands of the death lords who but wait to seize them.

Slaughter comes. Slaughter passes. Interruption or indignation would make a mockery of the execution. Once, Lan Wangji was reproached the curse of silence, the art of absent compromise. Look where negotiations led him. The waste of time.

It ends with blank frankness, efficiently. A part of Lan Wangji remembers, an animal turned feral can bite his master's own hand. Then, instinct: to throw the talisman, nearly bereft of stoked qi — and to activate it, so a protective ward encircles Kaneki and his prey, yet offering them five steps' movement each way. So that he might — feast, but not cross into Lan Wangji's domain of their shared boat.

He waits. Rests outside the boundaries of the protective ward, arrogant and too certain in his safety. And rasped-slow, when Kaneki appears to have — completed his dining experience: )

What are you?

( No. He knows this. Sees the signs, as they are worn by Wen Ning, less in physicality than the predatory undertones of Kaneki's movements, how he possesses his body as if it were a well-learned, but foreign tongue. Before, he deceived the eye. Now, between shakes of his head, Lan Wangji cannot pretend that ignorance. )

You are as the dead. You are... ( Unnatural, in some way Lan Wangji cannot sense or decipher. Convulsions brittle his body, like wind clutches an autumn leaf. He turns to the side, wood splinters nailing the hard spread of his hands when he grasps it and heaves, for all filth lingers in his belly. Only acid, the suggestion of nausea.

Sweat trickles cold down his brow between darted breath. At his feet, his candle flame nearly eats of his skin. He thinks, kick it. Silence its fire. Condemn them both to the long sink, and who would yet blame him? What would there be to mourn? This — creature, a sum of nature's cruelties and instincts that offend his human form. And Lan Wangji, the man who allowed him the opportunity to feed.

No matter. There is something in him, nameless and small, like a livened creature, buried and chasing a lair. Something that senses a chance for safety, even in this moment: )

...if we perish. If I — ...you could do this.

[enucleation]

[ Kaneki eats all of him - all of it - and leaves little behind. Flesh and also bone are eaten away, crushed by the strong teeth with loud cracks that almost makes it sound like the corpse is made out of frail material rather than actual human bone.

At least he eats fast, as if he never had any food in his life. kaneki is not an elegant eater, and leaves gore and blood against his own skin and hair, a tragic contracts with how pale he is. And at the end he finally comes to his senses, the silent of the night chills his body and shame sinks into him.

he has lost control many times before, but never in front of a human. He didn't expect himself to have so little self-control, but then again, he has not been around humans long enough for a situation like this to come up. ]

I'm a monster. [ a simple answer to a simple question. kaneki does not turn to look at Wangji, neither he attempts to move from his current spot. He watches his hands, covered in blood and guts, and watches the leftovers of what was once an undead ]

I said it couldn't be here. [ but Wangji refused to listen, babbling about kindness. Was this kind? perhaps, that existence is no longer. But to Wangji, this is most likely awful. It is to Kaneki as well; awful, disgusting, monstrous. He knows what he is. ]

Do you really want to perish here, though? [ Kaneki looks back at the frightened man, finally. ] The Merchant said we are more dangerous dead than alive. But then again, he does not know how monstrous I truly am. [ Kaneki turns his head away again, watching the ocean. The shore is indeed close

there is a pause again, and Kaneki sighs, head heavy and tired. His fits are hard to handle and harder to process, and now he has to glue back his mind slowly yet again and try to recall exactly what he did. ] Did I hurt you? [ there is a fog inside his head that makes it hard to process everything, but he does remember that he did look at Wangji and desired to bite him. ]

[downswing]

( He said it could not be there. And that reason alone sufficed for the boy, gave him leave, stimulation. Damp plaster and dulled nails. No body sleeps between them. Remains, as if the boy were a raven finished with his feasting, and Wangji dreads the slip of his foot, the next waves' tumble — how they might rock and tip the boat, and throw the innards upon him, for all he trusts the wards to keep him safe.

Pristine. Untouchable. As if the stain of failure will wash off him, will leave this boy-creature. Another monster. Perhaps every young innocent who joins this group a quiet bird is destined to betray it through the obscenity of his natural perversion. First, Five. Now — )

You made ruin of a man's flesh. Denied him reincarnation.

( The rightful cycle, the kindly path. His mouth is tight as he speaks words like coiling wind, muttered. This was the harm done, burning. Bright and brisk, and white like the flare of light by his feet. He should kill them, he's thought so before, he should —

He drifts, the boy drifts. He cannot breathe. There is burn in his lungs and burn by his calves, and this might be what it means to die, to be at once within and outside oneself. )

What have you done? Do you know — what have you done?

[enucleation]

[ Kaneki does not regret eating the undead; he needs to feed, and it's much better to feed on things rather than actual living people such as Wangji. he may be tremendously worried about the man and how his flesh was ruined and whatever spiritual belief he holds, but in the end none of that matters to kaneki, as long he has not attacked a human person.

And he hasn't. So that's good.

Naturally he never wanted to do this in front of another, but it's still better than attacking his travelling companion ]

I've eaten a dead man. Not the one alive. [ he says that softly, and regardless of Wangji realizing Kaneki means him when he says "not the one alive", Ken still sighs again ] Such is the way we live.

Although it's regrettable you had to witness that. Although it probably means little to you I do apologize.

[downswing]

You dishonoured a man.

( Trampled his fate and his dignity and reduced him to his skins and his fats and the trickles of his flesh, to gore red and darkening, already flaking. To stain, absent memory, or the chance for burial once more. No peace can find a man twice divorced through violence of his body. The spirit can survive only so much brutality, so much sundering.

And the boy, his whispered excuses. How he looks at Wangji as if he were no better than a dog, fangs revealed, regretting nothing. The weaker perished. And, I but obeyed my nature.

There is a sickness in Lan Wangji that boils and bubbles, bile accruing. Kaneki is — stable now, for whatever value the word yet contrives in small hypocrisies of diplomacy. It suits them both to call his state — balanced. Reliable. Controlled. For how else can they negotiate cooperation thereafter?

When Lan Wangji releases the talisman, it is as if thread is severed after hours spent taut: the entirety of the barrier structure collapses, Kaneki free to roam. Slow-breathing, temples rocked by a viper-fast pulse, Lan Wangji remains on his end of the boat. They can coordinate for the remainder of their travel without fraternising. )

I release you. ( A point callous, like blade's tip, like cuts and stabs. ) I do not forgive you.

[enucleation]

[ there was no honor in being an undead, crawling the world without realizing what they are, to be controlled by those who most likely destroyed everything that was once in this place. Death is death, in kaneki's eyes, although he won't fight a different belief. If Wangji insists on holding an undead's honor above his own safety and life, so be it.

But then this journey is probably being (unnecessarily so, in Kaneki's mind) harder for him.

Ultimately Ken does not care about being forgiven. ] Forgive? No, you do not.

No one does. [ it's not their choice to, either, even if one would think it is. Kaneki is not the kind of thing one should forgive, not after everything he has done. Wangji may not know this, but he is awfully aware of his own circumstances, what they mean, and how they made Kaneki. He is also awfully aware of all the things he has done, far more terrible than eating a dead man that had been revived by magic; this weights little on him, considering all that he already carries.

But no one is to forgive him. Only one thing would allow Kaneki to be forgiven, but such can not happen in this world otherwise he'd just become what the creature he ate was. He can't die here, even if death should be the one thing that could possibly allow kaneki some redemption. It's unfair.

But the world is unfair. ]