westwhere | arc iii: house of ravens

arc iii: house of ravens | arrival

Hi, everyone! Our Arc III arrival event covers 20 Feb-11 March and doubles as a test drive. Participants don’t need an invite to apply by 11 March. Reserves live here. Try to label if you’re a test drive tourist or an old timer — and have fun!

COTTAGEVORE

TDM TOURISTS | OLD TIMERS | COMMON PROMPTS | NOTES

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TDM TOURISTS: THE SCENIC ROUTE

You flinch awake, hand weighed by a sharp stick, stone, or makeshift torch. Your clothes sit stiff, splattered with dried dirt and dusted leaves. Here and there, scratches and shallow wounds litter your limbs, the marks of days of dazed survival alone that you mistily remember. Your strength and supernatural powers are currently largely depleted, but should recover within two to three days.

As they journey, characters discover stretches of the eerily silent forests briefly transform into woodlands or recognisable spots of nature from their home worlds — perhaps they’re now seeing the meadows outside their home towns, their backyard orchard, or a fondly remembered lake pier. These images are short-lived illusions that other characters can also see.

Mind your steps: the mirages try to lure characters deep into the forest, where unfriendly animals and hidden pits wait.

A. THE MORE, THE MERRIER

Trailing through the labyrinthine woods, you stumble upon a group of heavily armed bandits who are already herding several captives. Depending on how agitated you are, expect shackles, leashes and tusk pendants that allow characters to speak and glean local tongues — including the thugs' barked instructions. The outlaws are on a three-day voyage to cursed village Ke-Waihu, where they intend to sell their prisoners to the Hok-Shinn criminal clan.

■ Ensure fellow captives survive the trek, avoiding leg-hold traps, snares and hunting nets.

■ Beatings continue, but morale never improves: help mouthy prisoners with their tasks or wounds.

■ Capture or forage food — and stop naïve captives from going deeper into the forest to follow glimpses of beautiful (wo)men or cries for help. There’s nobody there.

■ At night, prisoners are locked in stitched-shut tents — get friendly quickly.

B. JUST CRUISING

The bandits never saw you coming — but you’ve been watching them collect their prey. Perhaps you’ve even found others like you — also spared enslavement, but condemned to trail after the thugs towards Ke-Waihu. Characters can pick up discarded translation and communication tusk pendants, scraps of food and frail weapons.

■ Beware: superstitious thieves frequently patrol at night, while woodland predators are emboldened by the absence of fires.

■ Leave messages or instructions to the bandits’ captives (tree husk carvings, anyone?) and maybe try to rescue them.

■ ...or leave them for dead and trot on to Ke-Waihu. You savage.

» GO CAMPING, THEY SAID

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OLD TIMERS: CURSES FOR ONE, CURSES FOR ALL

After a bumpy ride aboard the Salamera II, the party arrive at idyllic village Ke-Waihu.

They are greeted by Hok-Shinn Weisi, the slippery mayor who officially helms Ke-Waihu, while his brother Sairen leads the clan’s heavy underground ventures. Weisi’s flippant and spoiled son Taksui is the Merchant’s local liaison. The botanist Enam and his apprentices set out to explore, taking the group's baggage along.

■ Weisi was told the party members are families of Taravast refugees, seeking finer fates in Ke-Waihu. Each family has been assigned a humble but serviceable dwelling — see what luck has in store for you.

■ Weisi officially welcomes the newcomers in Ke-Waihu’s main bustling marketplace. Every merchant, fishmonger and beggar stops to watch as foreigners are briefly stripped of their ostentatious jewels, clothes or weapons, soaked in iced water and told to embrace the village by accepting its old, its new, its ugliness and its truths.

■ To join the community, characters must absorb and redeem the wrongdoings of a deceased ancestor. They are served flasks of a thick, bitter brew that slides down mildly corrosive and cold.

■ The brew’s effects vary: some drinkers feel only a sudden, electric awareness of the story behind the curse they inherited. Others feel scalded from the inside, agonising for hours. The ancestral curse effects start to take hold that night.

■ Characters are sent off to their new homes in Ke-Waihu — but are contacted within hours by one of Enam’s anguished apprentices. His master and his peers were captured by bandits while inspecting the elusive forests for plant specimens. These wicked men took everything: your goods, your Ellethian high fashion, your extra weapons, even your Sleeping Zenobius. Go get’em — but beware the deadly illusions of Ke-Waihu’s forest.

» DUDE, WHERE’S MY COMATOSE SLEEPER?

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ALL TOGETHER NOW

The thugs, the old timers, the test drive prisoners and their creepy watchers collide in the mist-drowned forests of Ke-Waihu.

A. BANDIT BANE

■ Infiltrate the thug group in, kick some outlaws’ teeth on the way out.

■ Release and escort roughened-up newcomers to Ke-Waihu, picking up strays along the way.

■ One of the thugs snitches that the remaining stolen loot is hoarded in a nearby secluded cave, drowned under foliage. The entrance is watched by large, agitated boars with startlingly hard, but not impervious skin. With gold, gems, guns within reach, anyone for pork dinner?

■ After speaking with the new arrivals, party botanist and guide Enam confirms they have been summoned to serve as weapons in this world’s ongoing conflict between warring undead factions. The Merchant, Enam’s collaborator and the party’s patron, is leading otherworlders east, where forgotten beacons might return them home.

■ The villagers Ke-Waihu, Ke-Waiar and Ke-Waicai reportedly know the location of such a beacon. They will unveil it if the party breaks the curse of the House of Ravens.

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B. THE BLUSHING BRIDE

When the group returns, Ke-Waihu is celebrating the joyous procession of dozens of lavish 'weddings.' The (false) rites are carried out to commemorate the marriage of a huntsman and his fox bride...

■ The roads are awash with flower petals and rice, houses extend their hospitality freely, and the rich give away coin. Even Hok-Shinn clansmen don their finest garments and hand out gifts and favours, while lawmen grant pardons to captives held for minor offences.

■ Villagers pose as 'brides' and 'grooms' to play act public weddings. Characters are asked to participate as brides and grooms, or to join the wedding retinue of a NPC villager. Characters can unknowingly marry, but not become foxes.

■ The evening culminates in a grand market fete, with stalls offering sickly sweets and strong alcohols. Poets recite love songs, professional weepers wail to strangers that they lost their children to insidious in-laws, and petty clashes erupt among merrymakers.

■ Some of the NPC fox 'brides' seem to grow wide-eyed and alert, suspicious of the many hunting dogs that watchmen walk around the marketplace.

■ Come nightfall, 'wedded' pairs are escorted to suites in a large and extravagant inn. For each 'couple,' accommodations comprise one room for the retinue and a linked conjugal bedroom.

IF CHARACTERS MARRY A (FOX) 'SPOUSE':

■ They are handed three pieces of parchment before they are locked into the marital suite with their consort and their retinue.

■ Once alone in their 'marital quarter,' characters first enjoy polite conversation with their spouse, whose eyes start to glimmer golden, while their teeth and claws lengthen, their mouths distort to snouts and their hair reddens. The fox brides do not seem aware they are, in fact, foxes, but try to scratch, bite or maim their partners. Viciously quick, strong and prone to thralling their victims into spells of lethargy, these foxes could get the best of you — happily, the little parchment papers you received can share some survival tips.

■ Fool the fox spouse into thinking you are already married or pledged to someone in your retinue. Affronted, the fox bride will exile you out of the wedding room. Refresh the salt lines that surround the conjugal room, and gently steer the fox back if it flees overnight.

■ Your retinue and you should impersonate a hunting hound, down to howling, running on all-fours and sniffling. The fox will hurriedly isolate itself in the conjugal room, but will actively try to escape at night. Keep every inn door and window closed.

■ Become a widow(er). Call your retinue and make the best of your fists and a butter knife. You will need to kill the spouse a few times before they stay fully dead, each time reviving more and more fox-like in appearance.

AS A WEDDING RETINUE MEMBER:

■ Awkwardly hold watch outside the conjugal bedroom of the dashing NPC ~~cannon fodder~~ groom and his fox bride.

■ The NPC groom might request help as above — or might fall deathly silent. If that happens, villagers instruct, character must loudly ask if the wine pleases the couple. The flushed, visibly fox-like bride will then open the door to complain their new consort — clawed dead in the marital bed — won’t even share a wine cup with them. The fox does not seem to grasp they have killed their groom.

■ Defeat the fox at drinking — the fox bride can hold its cups, but slipping in some of the relaxing opiates on hand will help the cause. Sneak the NPC groom's corpse out with a buddy when the fox drops asleep.

■ Or prove you are a fairer marital prospect by verbally wooing the fox or doing battle with your retinue companion, to prove your worth. Your wingman may wish to throw the fight, feed lines, or generally smoulder. The fox bride will offer the NPC corpse as a betrothal gift.

Come morning, the villagers open the now-delapidated inn. Those who survive fox weddings receive braided bracelets of red, golden and tangerine rope, earning good will in the village. The murderous fox brides have disappeared — in their place, yellowed and dust-drenched bones 'sleep' in the marital beds, covered by withered and torn wedding clothes.

Villagers share the whole story: a huntsman encountered a fox goddess in the forest, when she had taken the shape of a beautiful woman. Lovestruck, he brought her back to Ke-Waihu as his wife — but the horrified villager slaughtered her and her husband on their wedding night. The fox god cursed the village to relieve yearly 'fox weddings,' during which the bones of those murdered during the previous 'conjugal' festivities rise as brides to terrorise new spouses.

Skipping the fox wedding rites, villagers say, shrivels their crops and depletes their food stocks for several seasons.

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C. A-HUNTING WE WILL GO

It’s all fun and wedding games, until one of the victims of the recent nuptials is the son of influential wine merchant Saguk Chaomin. He vengefully sponsors a a hunt to finally lift the foxes’ curse.

■ Saguk Chaomin assigns weapons — from knives, spears and sharpened sticks to bows, arrows and rifles operating on gun powder — alongside lanterns and climbing rope to the brave adventurers. The contingent splinters into smaller groups to avoid detection.

■ The forests now aggressively conspire to lead characters to their deaths: whether it’s through fostering illusions that trip them into gullies, or decrepit bridges that crumble, sending travellers into whirling river waters. Animals (excluding wolves) attack travellers fiercely. Keep a hunting hound close.

■ Characters with unusual physical features or suspicious behaviours — from supernatural powers to a fear of dogs — are accused of being shape-shifting foxes.

■ Fox spirits assume a mortal but resilient shape the day after the wedding — strong, large, feral and willy. They’re quick to bite, and their presence dulls the senses of hunters.

■ To exorcise the foxes, kill their mortal bodies or obliterate or repair their small, decaying forest altars. These are stone rings the size of one’s hand, often hidden at the root of ancient trees. Cleanse the altars of filth, vermin and predatory creatures, and replenish the stones with fresh river pieces. Beware rare fox spirits that come to protect altars or hide their young.

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D. WELL, WELL, WELL

In the wake of the weddings, characters head to their abodes, while test drivers are garrisoned in communal temporary shelters. Over the next few days, everyone may notice:

■ Villagers have a marrow-deep fear of the Hok-Shinn clan, whose members behave as if they are immune from repercussions.

■ Villagers tell eerie tales of strange encounters in their locked stables, abandoned houses or wells — they have seen a creature with the head of a beautiful woman, whose hair braids to form her snake-like body. 'She' slithers away once discovered.

■ Word spreads across the marketplace that dark waters have returned. A farmer’s well has dried, leaving only a thickened, tar-like liquid at the bottom. Another villager shamefully admits his well also dried a month ago, clogged by dark filth — the fount was old, and he assumed it had naturally depleted.

■ Horrified villagers speak no more of this, but superstitiously volunteer flower and food tributes for the Ka-Sanwon volcano. Mayor Hok-Shinn Weisi intercedes to reserve the resources for the upcoming return of the patron lord of the volcano’s three villages — the undead Beastmaster.

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QUESTIONS

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( Do not harm her. Stench of her chasm, her yawning, fang-glistened mouth, and how she clings to her prey, clash of her jaws snapped on the man's bone.

Do not harm her, and Lan Wangji — who visits this wedding party en route to locate wherever fortune's scattered Wei Ying like bone dice &dmash; blitzes close, and his sword's silvered grace and a taut line, interjected between the red-furred bride and her groom prize.

Do not harm her, and drip of acrid sweat down the curve of her throat, Bichen's blade sings with the slide down, until Lan Wangji steers it up again, balances it — )

Shutter your eyes. ( — and the sword screeches a wound, red bled from the bride in violent spatterings. She does not scream with it. Later, hands slicked with her wet, he will remember. Now, reedy: ) Apologies. She would have severed the arm.

( There is a tension to her slackening jaw, yet unyielding. He means to assist, fingers slipping down the snout, peeling the mouth open — only to slide and find the wound of her neck, already closing shut. )

[ He knew. Yet knowing makes nothing easier. A blade's shimmering intonation precedes its wielder's command, and Subaru listens, its motion carving synchronic into his instinct and his bride. Eyes flinched shut, he feels the fevered spatter across arm and face, the forced shed of a life stoked to fruition by vengeance. He looks briefly pale, the scent and sound of so much blood still too near to his mind's eye — the one robbed of its sight. ]

It's not your fault.

[ Yet merciful fingers interject on jaw where it rends, and Subaru spares one of the few talismans still accrued in his pocket. An intent to be sparing only goes so far. It whispers to life in his fingertips where he gently affixes it to her face. Be still.

And she is, save the pry of teeth, the closing wound, the wild set of her vulpine eyes. ]

She'll return. But just to run to slaughter —

[ It's cruel. ]

( She will return.

The tight-mouthed, steeled certainty of the pronouncement, like a curse cannibalising contrary impossibilities. His teeth grit-grind, Do not poison her with prophecy.

But the bride's flesh already bloats and bursts with the acrid cunning of life ill-purposed. She stirs, and Lan Wangji watches her discover herself in tender increments, from hairs that ride her skin in stiff peaks to the gravitational pull of blood, seeping.

Active power returns even in the cold absence of movement. He does not welcome it — only teases the blade turned and considers another slash, before understanding, all at once, that execution may not prove superior to torture. That the whole can revive easier than the parts.

That he must speak this, unwavering, for all he flinches. )

Butchery could outlast execution.

( Severe her hands, her legs. She can resurrect, but not stitch herself together, surely. He must — prepare the groom. )

[ There is no curse he could deliver to her that would be worse than the one she currently bears. He does not ordain it, as it has already been ordained. Beaten, to this ill end. At the lacerated intersection of mangled arm, resolute blade, and snarling throat, Subaru near breathes the offered word in, the unpalatable sting of it settling in his throat. Butchery.

Palms coated by slick red rise to cradle her head as it continues its slow labor of metamorphosis — seams of course fur, snout seething, bursting with new teeth. Pressurized by magic, her eyes bulge and pupils rage to dilated slits.

She fights against his shackle, heaving towards tender hand and blade. ]

Neither will outlast her. Is there another way?

[ His sluggish mind and powers sharpened by adrenaline wish to wrap themselves around this tragedy, but the fit is still too new, too poor.

A wish only goes so far. ]

( He thinks, There is no third path unwalked, no recourse tamer.

Thinks, You mean her stripped of dignity, to preserve her flesh.

Thinks, There are men who are monsters, thinking themselves martyrs.

Drip and drip and the waters of his hesitations spill over. His cupped hands cannot bear their weight, must claps his sword the stronger for it. The second gash never comes, not like sleet, not like wind screeching.

The bride's eyes roll and convulse, feverish-bright, but she does not scream. They are all, at times — here, now, today — the victims of their inertia. )

Fire. ( Her fats melted, her bones charred, her waters drained, her skins brittle and peeling. Over the fox's crumbling shoulder, he locks gaze with a (hunts)man. ) She will not thank you.

[ The slow ache of vicious certainty as written by ash and ember, or the severance of flesh, dropped as if already dead. An equally slow and unknowable sum of parts stitched by coagulated rage. It wells and then empties as if in drought: his own flesh and bone are useless to him if they would serve her better. But these are not his curses. There is only death, dawned. ]

No, she won't.

[ Cradling still, a sigil etched by trembling fingertip against growing fur in the brightness of two spilled bloods. To soothe in this moment, to press the evils she is reflecting down. This is not by fire, but by cool, placid drowning. ]

I'm sorry. I don't mean to make your method sound ineffective.

[ It isn't. But he had to ask. ]

Only unnecessary.

( Hissed, as if by happenstance the venom of the hour has coiled and curdled in Lan Wangji's belly and commands expulsion. And what had this child asked? Is there alternative to slaughter? A naive investigation, hoped to produce a conclusion of kindness. As if Lan Wangji might have chosen to severe bone and scrape meats and witness the slow, sword-kissed bleed-out of a woman's shape in his arms — for sport.

And she does not die well, this second time. Gravelly, breath leaves her in heaves, and Lan Wangji might, but does not pronounce that a slit throat requires her to compensate the depth of inhalations with an open, hungering mouth — and it is the stranger's wit and his parchment that stitches her lips shut and bides her obedience. Unwittingly, he accelerates her death. Is this, then, your alternative?

Inert, her feet slip in candle oils Lan Wangji had not known downturned. She slides, he captures her, lifts her once more — withers, when her claws graze his sleeves in pure lethargy. Mere heartbeats until her next stirring, but not yet, not yet. Seas live and ebb and tide in the pulse that beats his temples. Volcanoes erupt. A world ends.

It is unnecessary to feed it innumerable casualties. )

Flee the room.

( If this young man can, as worms do, untangle himself and slither loose. If he can recover his wits long enough to achieve his escape. )

[ Unnecessary. Hope with its wings pinned, torn open for curious investigation. Unnecessary was what he had hoped, yes. Now two lay entrapped at the crux of time and how it exercises cruelty upon those who are forced to endure it. He had sought those few moments blindly, and she suffers the consequence of his cling to life that isn't his. Her glamours fade to gore, life ghosting through enacted violence that stays her to this wedding chamber. Once before, once now. The end result remains, now bereft of any hope for mercy.

He does as instructed. That had always been the easiest and caused less conflagration. Its scratch against wretched, bloody dampness reminds him of why that is — why the sole pursuit of strength and leaving everything else to auxiliary vice, kindness, was what he had chosen some odd lifetime ago.

Sluggishly, arms unwind, heels slip back into the mess. His slick fingers inch along ornate moulding until they reach the latch to the door, and with a soft click-and-heave, he emerges into the hall of the inn which he is certain does not look how it should. But his perception of it swims as the door snaps behind him, the scent of fur and steel and unborn fire dappled against the back of his throat. He tastes it.

Blood suffocates magic, releasing her. ]

( Time mourns itself, drip by drip of tearing. He hears the wet of the bride's waters, her spittle, her blood, her pleura danced on his blade like quicksilver, singeing. Hears Bichen's damp kiss, like a mother's night greeting to a fevered child.

Sees her slip before him, parts remembering the whole through the negative space that surrounds them. Reading its print like fortunes in tea leaves.

He does not ask himself when the killing is mercy or butchery or murder, when words wrench from his mouth like powders from a field cannon. When he is cruel, or he is godly, or he licks with her red the cloying oil sheen from his sword.

Behind him, the body saturates the floor, first with her flooding, then with her claws, when she rises again, then her fangs, when he learns to cut her hands at each occasion, her her head — and she still wakes for all of it, seeks herself out amid her particles, and he kills, how he kills, he was made for this, white and sky-blued and a scholar.

When he crawls, candid and pale-eyed and a little lost in the way of dazed children after their first taste of watered wine, he does not ask the stranger if he wears the better part of the bride's blood, or if it is his sweat that curls his silk hems, white like the tinnitus that rings in his ear.

He has done much here. The door rings shut behind him. He has achieved nothing at all. )

It is done. You may... ( Whatever she was, this man's bride, his intended. Lan Wangji's exhaustion wears him like a parchment skin. ) It is done.

[ It would be easy to let these death tolls live on the peripherals of his mind like the meager rake of claw over silk, breath serrated by corporeal imprisonment. But where that was a curse to her, it would be a kindness to him. His perception intuits what it means to deserve and his senses sharpen in the draw of minutes counted by a sword's whisper. The sound of individual raindrops in a howling storm. This man kills and its joylessness permeates like her undone body does. Subaru cannot kill, and it feels a punishment delivered to the wedding chamber.

Like that, he listens through the charmed walls of the inn, the gaps in the door that do not present as gaps. To collisions bearing all the violence of the cosmos and none of the beauty, no shimmering fragments lush with virulent stardust. There is only the last exhale before desolation, a sensation that wrings his nerves of warmth.

Before the final separating of the whole. It takes so long. Where his arm would have severed in an instant, her severing lasts a time.

When the other man emerges from the chamber, a plume of somber, heated metallics, Subaru does not immediately move to the doorway with footsteps as soft and wet as the continued plips of blood that fall from his fingers. Finally, there is stillness. ]

Your blade sang a rite.

[ There is no thanking this. There is no apologizing for it. She is cursed, but her curse does not lie here in this inn. He has realized that much. ]

( A rite, an epiphany. An awakening. She was drips of shape and clusters of ambiguity, and she has ragged herself into chasms and decay on the blade Lan Wangji fosters, faint-pale, in her fetters partway.

There is shift beside him, electric. The groom. And did he wed in name, or in truth, or in expectation? All men played their game, but some footings faltered, some fortified — and he looks ill at ease by a door barely whispered open. Lost and wandered. Lan Wangji aches for the absence of words in him, like coins gleefully danced free of his purse, that he cannot alleviate hurts his skin cauterised against in his youngest years.

What is it, to regret slaughter? What is it to look upon butchery and attach sickly, yellowed values of emotion? )

For them, she is mercy. ( Look at him. Hear him. See the root of his sword, hilt and handle. See how he slides her in her cradle, for those last few fingers' breadths. How she sleeps. ) Apologies. You hand not slain before.

( And this is the toil of twinned two, for all only one hand bore blade. Murder is method; guilt is life's strong sip. Boy, have your first drink.

It stays with a man, the first killing: wrought or conspired. Lan Wangji can eradicate harm and hurt, but not awareness. Lies and deception befit the diplomatic. His tongue stays laden, at cost. )

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arc iii: house of ravens | arrival

iii. sorry, bro

but are you really

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