sand in your eyes

[groundrules]

And onwards, through the cursed desert. The mini-journey Arc covers 6-21 January and doubles as a test drive meme. Participants do not need an invite to apply this round. Have fun!

SAND IN YOUR EYES

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TEST DRIVE TOURISTS | ONE SAND WASHES THE OTHER
A HOUSE UNITED WILL SAND | SOILMATES | A PYRAMID SCHEME

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A SANDING OVATION

Sand in your eyes, down your throat, stifling. You wake half-buried in high dunes, crawling towards helping hands. Thirst vanquishes you.

You are quickly offered a translation and communication pendant and introduced to the leader of the caravan that saved you — good Mazyar, who thanks the stars for your most incredible luck to be rescued by his generous and humble self. For he is not a man for idle praise, but he has sold salt to salt makers, he was courted by seven of the five great trade guilds and brought peace to the Stairs of Sighs…

Mazyar reveals you are in Akhuras, where undead lieges seek to weaponise you in their war for dominion. Mazyar’s good but less successful friend, the elusive Merchant ferries otherworlders east, where ancient beacons can transport them home.

Retire for now and regain your strength. Come morning, further otherworlders will arrive from Serthica — and your journey may begin.

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ONE SAND WASHES THE OTHER

The veteran party reunites with newcomers in the desert, and with the merchant Mazyar — who once guided them through the Stairs of Sighs. His caravan is protected by the Scavengers —deathly a tribe of hardened desert raiders. They bring water flasks, supplies, cooling suits and tents to share. Their snail-like carriage mounts can transport the weak.

You are bound for the seized citadel of Alem, swarmed on each side by undead battalions. To access it, you must obtain one of the enormous sand worms that trawl the deserts, which can be deployed to create underground passageways.

The Scavengers will lead the caravan through haunted dunes, the worms’ traditional hunting grounds and temple-fortress Uruksithar.

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A HOUSE UNITED WILL SAND

The group first reaches the Valley of Unchaining, bordered by high cliffs and fang-like stones. Here and there, discover bloodied footprints, half-buried shackles and red chains. You might even stumble upon an eroded tombstone inscribed, H R SL EP THE UNCH IN D. At its feet are dulled dagger blades and rough calcar stone.

COULD DIE FROM LAUGHTER

You fool, never eat alone. Happen by the camp’s outskirts with your dinner, and you might glimpse the silhouettes of starved desert hyenas, their eyes glistening green. They will come close if you bear raw meat or bleeding wounds.

■ Scavengers say, if you see the hyenas, throw them food or a cloth drenched in fresh blood, then run without looking back until you no longer hear their cruel cries.

■ Some hyenas mimic rasped human voices, begging help or calling your name. One feeble hyena wears a chain of red shackles around its neck.

■ If you look back while chased, you find the green stare of the hyenas fixed upon you. You are gradually overcome by starvation, violence and the urge to dismember prey and feast on raw flesh. Player’s choice on whether characters can resist this compulsion, which disappears at dawns, or if they taste blood.

■ Scavengers will deny you entrance into the camp if you appear possessed in this way.

SANDIMENTAL VALUE

You walk the Valley, Scavengers say, and Mother Death walks with you. A once handsome crone might appear beside you, bare-footed and dressed in clean linens. She remains silent unless spoken to and flinches if you move suddenly, as if she fears being struck.

■ Treat the Crone kindly, and she entrusts you with a small pouch holding a fraction of her ashes, which she wants scattered from the hills.

■ Use rope and climbing hooks and take cover behind stone formations. Beware the violent sand whirlwinds that batter the cliffs, threatening to plunge you down or choke you with sand.

■ If you succeed, the Crone appears to watch her scattering ashes and bless you with good luck for the rest of your journey. Your kindness, she says, reminds her of her daughter.

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SOILMATES

The three-day walk to Uruksithar traverses the sand worms’ hunting grounds, where dunes shift periodically in sharp, tectonic waves. Watch your step and don’t be surprised if your tent sinks at night.

■ The Scavengers organise daily reconnaissance parties in the desert hills. Stay with them to unbury dune treasures.

■ The brave & brazen can try to catch sand worms. The massive creatures erupt overground periodically, catching prey in their large mouths, or crushing it beneath their heft as they plunge in the depths — creating large sinkholes in the process.

■ On its back, each sand worm has a few darker scales that draw the shape of a rune. To tame a sand worm, you must find its rune, then write the symbol on the worm’s back using blood from your hands. Report your catch by 23:59 on 17 January!

■ The sand worm bonds with you for three weeks until the next full moonrise, or until you draw the same rune on your cut hand.

■ Those who secure a sand worm find it grudgingly follows them underground for the rest of the journey. The creature can only be steered or ridden.

■ Some sand worms are vicious, old and sufficiently magical to retaliate by taking the link over and forcing their bonded humans to experience their lives — briefly sensitive to light and strong sounds, or unable to speak. Some might experience mild fevers. All symptoms disappear when the bond breaks.

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A PYRAMID SCHEME

At last, welcome to Uruksithar, former jewel of the desert — now reduced to rusted gates and tattered walls of wind-lashed stone.

The abandoned palace-fortress features a row of minor temples and barren gardens that surround a great, ruinous pit. The state of residential furnishings suggests the grounds were lived mere years prior. Walk north to find a a large pool of thickened black water that exudes a cold, unsettling presence. Veteran party members know what to expect.

Nail scratches on some temple walls read, we, who did not sleep or i ask the wind to grieve our chains. By the pit, a stone plate helpfully says, drop by drop, even base water turns to poison.

The Scavengers disperse to raid the temples, advising you to carry water everywhere. One raider mentions that the local Temple of Ra’esh stores silver waters that can woo sand worms.

OCTOPUS PRIME

Uruksithar’s great gong strikes every two hours, to groans and shudders from the abyssal pit. Scavengers immediately take cover behind walls, bind themselves to columns or rush into crumbling residences.

■ For five minutes, as the gong sounds a pathetic dirge, a bouquet of tentacles erupts from the pit, sweeping nearby streets to capture living things.

■ Throwing water on the tentacles forces them to retreat, while black liquid from the northern pool burns them down. Further tendrils emerge until the gong quiets.

■ Should you fall into the pit, use your climbing hooks to latch onto the walls and don’t look down. A grotesque, sharp-toothed mouth awaits below to devour you, amid the squelching sounds of the tissue and material it has been masticating for decades. It won’t give up its lunch easily.

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TOMB AND GLOOM

Ra’esh the Bright-maker, he who saw but peace beneath the skies. His humble temple is anonymous among numerous worship grounds. Scavengers say, four years ago, a wanderer sculpted an eye with a sun for a pupil on the entrance door. Take a torch and head in.

■ Long-stripped of its glory, the maze-like Temple of Ra’esh is now cold stone, stale window-less corridors and heavy doors that snap down from the ceiling.

■ Distant susurrations of water point you towards your destination.

■ As you walk in, pay attention to the engravings near the entryway of each temple room. Some depict arrows, forecasting spikes will burst up from floors tiles. Sculpted drops hint pouring water in this spot will open a door. Open a door with an engraving of large serpents, and… well. The engravings can help characters navigate the maze and completely avoid its traps. Feel free to make up your own engravings & traps, if you want!

■ The altar room contains a pool with pearlescent waters that surround a woman fully bandaged in gauze, her sight obscured. She is bound to a column with chains and shackles akin to those found in the desert. Rare peeks of her skin show it rotting or sickly pale.

■ She asks either if you are her mother, come for her at last. Do you engage?

■ Take water from the pool, and you can lure a sand worm to you once you have exited Uruksithar. Hazed, but sweet-tempered, it will follow you underground and allow you to ride it for the three weeks until the next full moonrise. These sand worms won’t give you a hard time during the bond period. Report your worm too by 23:59 on 17 January!

NOTES

■ Test driving & in-game characters can top level logs here — test driving characters can also put up network posts in this space c:

■ Feel free to investigate the mystery of the chains and shackles, but no pressure — it’s not critical to Arc V.

■ Hit up NPCs!

■ Navigation top.

QUESTIONS

Comments

[downswing]

Wei Ying is qin wire, rippling under touch, alive with tender tremors. He breathes, and the corridors liven with him, swell and contract like beating hearts, to the crescendo of his wild steps. He glides, dances. And Lan Wangi, faithless silhouette, pours his path behind him, silks snags on spikes that puncture and break the floor tiles, soles wetted on licks of startling fire, slipped on the viscous, sap-thick spillage of poison. Unctuous, the sheen. Possessed of shine.

He does not ask whether the traps seek harm purposefully, for malice; defensively, to protect the sleeping within; or merely make the selection of those worthy to pierce the heart of the maze, and uninspired visitors of grey thoughts and slate ambitions and empty, shallow purpose. It does not matter. The carvings spell dangers they survive against odds thinner than the snow that grazed the inn's roofs and sills.

It is still not what squeezes his heart lead-like and small, crumbled.

"Wei Ying." Soft, trickled, as if speaking to a child. An infant turned restless by avid bites of sugar, spun. "Wei Ying, cast your binding talisman between us."

String, but strong, an umbilical chord to spawn toothless reassurance. Moth to this flame, Wei Ying's fire only stokes. Like a planet, he loves himself, the great groaning gravity of his laughter. The more he enjoys this incursion, the more negligent its progress.

Hot spurt of air, like a slap, teeth-rattling. He senses the low humming of water, serpentine and sibilant and weak, of power stretching out its limbs yonder. They dance close to the heresy of the moment, death between fingertips. Wei Ying drags his torch close —

And Lan Wangji's hand comes, to stay it, shield against lighting the room. A moment. "Something waits within."

He knows, as he knows Wei Ying will proceed all the same for it. Shudders, and lets his certainty eclipse his doubts.

[weifinder]

His head turns, senses alive here in a way they were dampened, fettered, choked in Serthica for so long. The last month in the castle resort had given him room to stretch, to unwind back into a calmed version of the death-touched master he'd become, lifetimes ago. Here, with the musty scent of death in the sands, baked and corroded, with metal on the back of his tongue and poison cloying in acrid sweet gusts in rooms left behind, he's reminded that death comes from the cessation of life, but isn't it's end, isn't the necessity of lingering.

His husband asks for binds, and ties, and each step taken as if afraid still that Wei Wuxian will dissolve into foam at a moment's hesitant gasp. He smiles, moves closer on hunter quiet feet, reaches out and snags his husband's sleeve between his fingertips.

"Lean down," he asks, voice velvet soft over a promise made hours, days, weeks, twenty years ago. "If binding pleases."

The opportunity to skim fingers over his husband's forehead ribbon, to reach around and deftly undo the knot at the back of his head, to tease it out of his hair, all for the sake, the want, the consideration of it against his wrist, covering his pulse for each heartbeat.

Allowed, he works swift, fingers deft and familiar after enough times of Lan Zhan's attempted snares set on the pathways of turbulent emotion. Stripped bare, it's certainties and promises of steadiness, to not shift as the sands do, to not consume as the pit outside did, toothed and unending in its simplistic hungers.

"I know," he says, answer to the rest, to the handing off torch to his husband's shielding hands, freeing himself to more easily tend to his own actions when invited, or simply to have free hands for the actions to follow. "If it speaks, we should speak with it before we seek further action. Unless?"

A prompting, for his husband's thoughts, for the question of violence as instinct versus violence as the failure of negotiations, the prising of one life over another, one set of goals before the set of someone destined to countermand.

[downswing]

Lean down, Wei Ying instructs, and strips the stretch and noose and lead of that which condemns clan Lan to the heresy of helpless, lifelong devotion. The ribbon drifts down, repurposed to binding. At the last moment, Lan Wangji settles a delinquent sailor's knot and captures his own wrist, until they are birds of a feather, captives together.

Then, the rooms, a turbulence of spirits unsettled, the brutality of their syncopated steps at odds with the glistened, gleaming smoothness of stale air. The temple is lived in, breathes with its empress bound. Lan Wangji's first instinct is to approach; his second, to defend, to release, to protect.

His third, to run. Take Wei Ying, flee the room. Danger sleeps here, head dipped and the clang of her chains hitting the pillar she rests against, creaking. It is as if even suffering has become a routine, foregone conclusion. As if it can no longer awe and mesmerise in the face of an audience so profoundly jaded. They have seen the tricks of tragedy. They expect more than blood, gristle and bone.

"She," he corrects, beam of his gaze limpid and dark when it cuts through to the woman's curves, the melodious undertone of her carefully orchestrated sighs. There is a scarcity, he thinks, of animal instinct, of sincerity. An experience of pain should not be so thespian.

"We intend you no harm," he calls out jagged, like flood waters roaring, breaking the dam of the room's silence. And there is wet here, also, silent. Gathered at her feet, seeping from her many wound bandages.

She begs for release, for water. Helpless, Lan Wangji surrenders to Wei Ying's counsel.

[weifinder]

The room feels, to him, of quiet. Small deaths, the ones of a natural course of isolation and locked doors, but not hers—around her swirls the resentful energies he knows too well, just off tempo, just off in sound to a musician's ear. He cants his head, studying her with an expression bereft of emotion, two beats of his heart. Where his husband's words are the bridge, where the quiet Lan Zhan is the force of life unmitigated and unchallenged between the two of them.

He breathes, and he lives again, a smile and the meeting of his husband's lapse to quiet, the question within it, with a nod of his head.

"Miss, I don't know about what I might do to set you free, but water, certainly, every creature deserves water." He reaches for one of Lan Zhan's water flasks, eyes seeking the depths of his. A small shake of his head: no death, not immediately, for that which is dead. No striking of chains, of binds, as theirs yet holds too.

Water, an offering. Offerings they are allowed, are demanded of them, and so he moves them forward, toward her, to the damp of staunched decay and spoiling damp. Uncapping the flask, he holds it out, to meet her lips.

"Here, I'll pour it slowly. Indicate when you're done, miss, and maybe we can speak after?" Not quite a cajoling, but an offering of a different kind. In the flickering torchlight, in the stuffy air that seems set to burn in spite of the water that flows from flask to woman, to what may spill down her cheeks, over tongue, the column of her throat.

She swallows, convulsive, and he keeps the sips small, the pour slow, wary of the dead having shrunken stomachs, of the wretched nature of a stomach cramping, wondering if pain register, if it matters, but it does. The thinning silence around them breathes in, holds the air, and waits with greater anticipation with every swallow.

[downswing]

She is as Wei Ying: husked, all yellowed bone, gaunt. Skin stretched and thinned into a sun-streaked sheen, vellum and gossamer. He watches the wet of her waters retreat, silver to its seed, to marrow.

Wei Ying sits too close to her, the energies of her body dispersing, then thickening, taking fresh shape. He cannot read her in the way Wei Ying has mastered, as if the fate and status of a man are but brushstrokes. Cannot presume, yet knows, he knows. She is better, in the art of her body. Rejuvenated.

The shapes of her write convulsions, breath snagged. It must ache, each inhalation like sandpaper, in fricative friction. When the fit of a body's parts wages war against the whole. And he fights Wei Ying's hold for command of the water flask, careful to deflect spillage until balance is won.

"Take the waters." Callous, perhaps, the fault of the lesser man. They came here with duty, and though this woman of strange circumstance — such that she should not have survived, and he knows, then, the whim and trick of it and the likely entrapment — bears no sword, Wei Ying already bares his belly to throw himself at tip's end.

"I shall unchain her once the deed is done." And perhaps it's unworthy to condition, to extend a woman's suffering — and yet. He has learned the ways of this world, how it folds and contorts.

[weifinder]

"Which deed?" he asks, voice light, eyes dark. Moves with Lan Zhan as she drinks, ignoring the flow down below her, for the sake of his calculated observation of flesh filling, cheeks growing less gaunt. A dried mushroom soaked in water, expanding back to its original, true size.

No life born without testing; no death held without temerity in these lands.

"Patience," he says, to his husband, to this woman, who gulps and gasps and fills in as a wash of colour across a blank scroll. What form does she take, what does she fill in, what details become her destination, her truth? Not kind ones, he suspects, even when she finds moment to ask of them questions in turn.

"You must," she says, "You must release me, I must know—" A gasp, a shudder, and the rock stillness of Wei Wuxian's form even as his lips form the proper moue of concern, of understanding. He admires performance, he does, as he admires aim. "Where are my people?"

A delicate shudder, given sudden gravity, and he is concern and a warning glance at his husband. Soulmate. Vinegar swigging heart's mirror. He shudders in sympathy, his voice the weight of inevitabilities spoken.

"No people remain, yours or others. We're but travelers, moving through, hearing word of odd waters. If you know anything about them?" Not the dark ones, but silver, and he doubts they reflect anything of kindness within them, anymore than the tar.

She drinks more, her lips once thin now gaining plumpness, such that water beads and falls, drip and drop. As sorrow drips, no displayed eyes to reflect the tears forming in her voice or any lie there-in.

"Then they followed their madness to the desert, they did... no, no, no!"

[downswing]

She drinks.

She drinks, and she drinks, and the waters yet fill her, blood to her flesh, wash to her bones. Greed greases the gears of the mechanism, her body — nurtures it back awake, into a rapid convalescence that Lan Wangji, for all he sits deprived of Wen Qing's education, cannot help but attribute to the supernatural.

"Wei Yi —" The waters, before this is done, take them, retrieve their objective, prepare for withdrawal. It will be harsh, inevitable, expedient. He senses it in the rise of the hairs on his nape, in the scent of dust motes burning that permeates the chamber, heat, friction and toil. And yet, he knows the risk: to steal the waters born suspiciously of a body is no different than to thieve her blood, and they cannot partake of this, cannot desecrate her remains.

It cannot be that she lives. And yet it cannot be, their hearts thunderous in beating, that she is anything but alive.

She steals the choice from his wavering hands, ripping herself free from the chains, as they facilitate her release — he cannot say who achieves it first, if she wrenches herself from their hold, or if they author her departure. For heartbeats of silence, he knows nothing. Then, struck in her range — only the ringing, tinny quality of his temples near bursting, as he's thrust down to hard ground, his flank long numb from the shock of absorbing the momentum of his landing. His jaw locks or cracks or paralyses. Fingers scratch the floor with futile, blunt-nailed purchase. He remembers, on instinct, to look for Wei Ying, gaze wild and feverish, barely prevailing to catch the arc of him in Lan Wangji's periphery.

The woman thuds a door — a wall? — a surface behind her rapid exit. The screech of the room, desperately hollow. Dimmed, now their door has closed. He thinks, he was thrown down. That she fled. That Wei Ying — he fumbles up, limbs scattered beneath himself. Rises, in the fresh dark.

"...Wei —" Blood in his mouth. He spits to the side. "Wei Ying?"

[weifinder]

One of them knocked back, directly hit. To Wei Wuxian, the blow comes glancing, and the binding of wrist a jolt and sudden flight caught unexpected from the fleeing woman brought from death to a greater parody of living. The flame held in hands sputtered, guttered to dry death in sands before he hits, a shallow splash, sends droplets of waters and the fluid of her cursed nature flying, to his startled near inhalation.

Not the first time, he notes, that he's been brought low in shallow waters, bound to Lan Zhan, flirting with that which was not living, but which persisted nonetheless. Not even the first dark place, he considers, and laughter burbles within, finding no exit but the startled, drawn out hah, the pull of his wrist to Lan Zhan's a tight tug, the sloshing as robes and robes borrowed drip and drop and he stands—to slip, wheeling backward in arms and legs, with a yelp pulling his downed husband downslope, roll with him, into the shallow pool once more.

[downswing]

They drench in her waters, spoil their silks, breathe the drudgery of her ashes, matted. Hot wet, jagged sting of fresh bruise, flesh opened. The wet, slick thickened with grime, biting his cheek with gravel.

Wei Ying, stubborn weight on his leg, vine-bound and deadened. He chokes, spits out. Breathes, raises elbows beneath himself, fragments of motion battling fissures of recollection of how they came to be, here, crushed on cavernous stone.

The swell of his temple grieves and gloats and pulses alive. He does not flinch from Wei Ying, rapid drip-drop and seething of waters disturbed rippling against them. But his grip could be kinder, raising himself, then — heaving, arm to Wei Ying's arm or shoulder or wrist, when the circumference thins — his husband.

"We need not speak of this." They have only so many dregs of dignity between them. Too few to squander. But then, water trickles down his mouth, lines the smear of his lips. He hesitates, before, "This is no death's no blood. No mortal water."

No puss, no infection, no bodily fluid he would detest with even greater certainty.

[weifinder]

Blood and water and whatever it was that leeched from the dead woman's emaciated body slide past his lips, coat his tongue, thick and unpleasant. He spits, scrubs uselessly at his face with his unbound hand, held upward in faster procession through his husband's seeking hands.

Blood, water, grit, the slime of all three mixing, and a creeping disgust that the first dousing defining his self comes here, in darkness, in fluids that leave him dirtier than he arrived. Small creeping salve to his crippled, aching ego that his husband stands as sullied, and he agrees, "We need not," with a thickness almost like laughter on his tongue.

"Lan Zhan," he says in following, leaning against him, letting the moment meet with his closed eyes and no particular worry over their shifted situation, their abandonment. They stand unchained. They stand untamed. All will be will.

"Lan Zhan, I think it's probably just cursed."

Reaching up, smearing likely cursed waters off his husband's face, patting his shoulder with every reassurance that reminds him of his sheer physicality. Once, in darkness, he heard so many voices, calling so many things. Some of them were his husband's voice. Sometimes, he plead not to speak. Sometimes, he plead to give up, lie down. Sometimes he plead to fight.

"May as well work toward leaving." His pause that follows holds pregnant weight, before birthing in a tide of laughter, belly-born and tear inducing in its longevity, its birthing pains. "Ah, ah, Lan Zhan," he says, now clinging to his husband, using him to stand lest he kneel back in the waters, lest the cleansing tears that find his eyes drip, drip, drop onto stone floors and dusty memories, "Lan Zhan, we can squeeze the waters from our robes."

Why that strikes him hysterical in the moment, where memories of times past collide and coil around him in warmth, is another man's guess. He simply accepts it, lets it breathe through him. Laughs until he wheezes from its pain.