stage iii

[groundrules]

THE ASHES

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Rathakku’s forces deepen their siege, with sharp-clawed harpies, fire-bearing catapults and archers raining hell upon Alem. The last two watch towers collapse, along with half the roof of the Keep. Several structural pillars dissolve and most windows shatter.

The Lord Who Waits has tired of patience.

HIGH CASTLE

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■ Attack is vicious and perpetual: Rathakku’s creatures descend from above, harpies make lairs in dark corners, and the fallen rise as undead enemies. Rathakku now necromances even the recently deceased, who retain a sense of personhood. Characters with mind control and necromantic abilities can take over these units. The recently resurrected have yet to decay substantially and hide they perished in order to infiltrate.

■ The dragon Irenia dips in to breathe frost onto Rathakku’s forces, but never lingers long. She disappears on March 20 but will return post-Arc.

■ Aware of his native Ellethia’s implicit role in raising Rathakku, Zenobius offers to teach you how to use the rare metals and saltpetre of Alem to create generous explosives — a set that triggers a very high blast, and a smaller shipment that can annihilate any magic — including death and summoning sorcery — in a 20-metre radius for two hours. Zenobius is a hard, curmudgeony taskmaster: expect to be worked and criticised to the bone.

■ Expect frequent quakes in the fortress, as catapults strike and the roof and pillars wobble. A hard winter is no longer contained by shattered doors and windows. Fire kindle and other supplies run scarce. Huddle together.

■ Paladins fall into zealotry, calling to sacrifice young princess Cle-Florens to ensure their success in battle. Deimar does not dissuade them, but lowers the number of guards protecting Cle-Florens’ quarters.

■ The voices that haunted Alem now multiply, increasingly likely to drag you into a dream-like state to descend into the glacier lakes underground. Spy thereabout at night, and you spot demonic fire sirens of golden scales, who gather in the fourth glacier lake’s cave to urgently complete their task before Alem falls. Their leader produces a purse of dark glass shards. A siren painfully transforms her tail into human legs by consuming such glass — she intends to infiltrate the fortress as a refugee. Sign up for a RNG thread to interrogate this mermaid.

■ With a few more shard crumbs, the sirens summon a ‘Jatharin’ — a fast dispersing silhouette that floats ethereally. They give it a white-silver string punish Prince Haiva for wronging a sister.

■ The Jatharin survives only two hours in the human realm. It lacks human consciousness and memory, remembering little of its target’s description and pursuing what ‘young men (with pale hair)’ it finds in the Wards. It is invisible to all who did not witness its birth — so keep your companions out of its way. It approaches a target and chains itself to them with a shadowy ‘umbilical chord,’ before sucking dry their life force. It can also deplete energy through... mouth-on-mouth action. Clean executions: Victims make no sound and barely shudder throughout their entrapment. Some say, these are painless deaths.

■ Sirens summon a Jatharin for three nights.

	HARPIES Fast, perpetually furious, prone to consuming human flesh. Deterred by loud noise and vibrations. Imbue their claws with poisons that prevent blood coagulation, extending bleed-outs.
	CATAPULTS Deliver projectiles of stone, fire and minor explosives. Rathakku’s most ferocious instrument, taking down Alem’s foundations. Manned by four undead apiece. Sturdy but slow, best targeted aerially.
	FIRE SIRENS Native to Hell. Deeply bound to ‘sisters’ and ‘family.’ Possess golden scales and shards of the previously encountered dark water mirrors. Their song is tinny but compelling. Their speaking voices are crackling and gravelly. Survive the glacier lakes’ cold by exuding flame. Skin burns to touch.
	JATHARIN Smokey, dispersing silhouette. Invisible to those who did not witness its birth. Kills by consuming life energy. Descended from the Motherless of Hell. Cannot be outright stopped, only avoided, enslaved or consumed. Can be distracted if you take an aspect similar to Haiva. Leaves a golden string on unintended victims.

THE DEPARTING

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■ King Deimar orders caravans to urgently evacuate, carrying refugees and provisions through mountain routes into a new settlement. Able men, guards, healers and merchants make preparations around the clock and will gladly accept, command or guilt your assistance. Help them.

■ Courtesy of Jimmy and Nacho, merchants Batthour and Eles provide some last-minute wagons and resources. An Alison-coached Deimar strikes a tenuous agreement for supplies.

■ Having received ‘healing’ flowers, Prince Haiva seems entirely recovered — far more confident, he menaces guards to assist the caravans. Deimar watches uneasily. Haiva asks the party to lead the refugees through the icy mountain passageways, where Rathakku’s immense bat demons loom.

■ The caravans journey to a well-warded settlement near the base of the mountain — former paladin monastery Hassir. Those who wish to avoid conflict can remain here. Prepare to kill any wandering pursuers, before they may alert Rathakku of the settlement's location.

	MOUNTAIN BATS Monstrous, blood-thirsting. To the size of 1.5-3 metres. Bulky, quicker to use their brawns than their speed. Stalk together, but compete for food and want to drag their prey to some great distance before consuming it, for privacy. Use that time to escape.
	HUNTSMEN Undead forces, typically old resurrections of Rathakku. Once human natives of Alem. Excellent knowledge of hiding spots and the mountain. Hostile, take perverse pleasure in the game. Will prolong a chase for sport and give their hungering hounds the chance to catch you. Unusual kinship with local animals, who sometimes obey them. Some scent blood.

COME HELL, THEN DARK WATER

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Hell is ruthless, but pragmatic — and must be sealed, before Rathakku controls Alem and weaponises it.

The growing cracks in Alem’s underground Room of Seals widen to reveal full-fledged stairs. More and more demons emerge as the rifts broaden. You have mere days to close Hell, ICly starting on 18 March.

■ Back/forward date your posts and logs as needed. Network access is spottier in Hell. Deimar’s paladins accompany the group.

■ To prevent the outpour of Hell, you must reach Level III and record disrupting at least three Motherless.

■ Each level of Hell shows shallow stains or streams of the familiar ‘dark water.’

LEVEL I

■ The Room of Seal leads into an underground stone passageway. Demons and skeletons are chained to stones or pillars, begging water. The dead are fickle: some offer directions, others answers to your questions. Most lie for their own gain.

■ The stairwell to Level II is behind locked gates, on a stone dais framed by a wall of flames. To reach it, cross a threadbare walkway of bones in a large hall room that has largely submerged into lava.

■ If the bridge ruptures, jump onto the nearby talking floating skeleton heads. Skeletal hands reach out to destabilise or drag you into the fire waters, as do demonic lava mermaids.

■ As you near the dais, the wall of flames might depict either the time when Thyvault’s people slaughtered the lava sirens, or your worst memory of betraying or failing someone. That same person is found shackled with long chains on the dais. If you never wronged anyone, this is someone to whom you are dearly indebted. At times plaintive, at others incensed, they appeal to your guilt or goodwill, bartering the gate key for their release. Their chains will only open if someone agrees to take their place in imprisonment.

■ You can steal their key, kill them — at which point, they return to their true form as a reptilian shapeshifter, or offer to take their place. Do so, and your character is stuck in Hell, suffering the intense heat and occasional clawing of mermaids, until Hell closes.

■ Up to you if anyone else can see your character’s memory in the flame wall. Please trigger warn adequately if you are describing sensitive memories.

LEVEL II

You descend deeper, into an underground urbanscape infested with flesh-like structures. Some stretches of land and stone are covered in membranous, dense, thick surfaces, letting you feel the faint, distant heartbeat of Hell. Other landmarks — lairs, adornments — are made of the remains of fallen demons.

■ Step lightly and rapidly. Flesh-eating demons roam these lands, as do hungering hell hounds and golems that chase you for parts to patch their limbs.

■ The next stairwell is guarded by a deathly groom or bride, their tentacles barring your path.

■ To proceed, you must gain the ring they are safe-keeping for a future ‘intended.’ You’ll need to persuade a local demon, assemble a passing corpse bride, sell a companion or offer yourself to betroth them — and negotiate a dowry.

■ The groom is crafty, cunning, eager to manipulate you into offering your soul as a dowry; the bride is cruel but irresistible, stirring you and your companion to violently compete for her hand.

LEVEL III

Behold true hell, an endless wasteland, its horizon fathomless and grey. Your mouth tastes of perpetual ash, bone dust scattered at your feet. You walk aimlessly for hours in fields of gravel, haunted by stone snakes and shapeless bone creations.

■ Demonic creatures rally as armies, fighting each other for crumbling territory or for overground dominion, as they prepare to invade Alem. Some drag rows of sullen, depressed or bellicose dead men behind them, whose souls you can liberate furtively when the demons make camp, or are assaulted by Deimar’s paladins. These captives did not all originate from Alem.

■ Some of the lesser demons may part with information, if you give them memories, important trinkets or a taste of your soul.

■ Most paladins are on this level and will shield you. You hear from them or from passing demons that Hell is now able to seep into Alem because of the Motherless — dark and flickering silhouettes, two-three times the size of a man, who float high above ground. They send down thick ropes like umbilical cords that consume the energy of whatever they attach to. They redeliver this energy as tectonic blows against Alem above.

■ Beyond a hatred of the Room of Seals, the Motherless lack conscience, speech or allegiance. They are drawn to the warmth of living things, or the purity of their spirit. Their ropes are broken easily — but the presence of a Motherless can quickly drain you.

■ The Motherless are briefly visible when they fling their ropes down, but otherwise roam invisibly and can only be recognised by the trails of barren land and aridity in their wake. You know a Motherless has stopped above you when you are suddenly paralysed by chilling fear — run, at all costs.

■ The Motherless swarm when endangered. They cannot be killed.

■ Deimar’s paladins share that, hundreds of years ago, their brethren committed ritual suicide, so their spirits could perpetually hunt the Motherless in Hell. You find ghostly paladins walking listlessly in lakes of dark water, seeming to remember nothing of their mission or their former selves. Try to remind them of their duties without entering the water and stranding yourself.

NOTES

■ Hell demons can recognise if your character is canonically connected to hell. Up to you if that’s a (dis)advantage!

■ Everyone should eventually make their way to the Hassir monastery.

■ Sign up for a RNG thread with an unexpected travel companion on the trek to Hassir.

NPC THREADS

QUESTIONS

Comments

[rehandle]

[ You cannot beat a river into submission creeps out of memory and plays around in his head, but if it's their ground they're standing, so be it.

That thing will need a neck for the noose before the rope is taught enough to cut. If they're not moving, there are only two necks on offer. Perhaps what he can do will prove less relevant than what he can be. ]

That way.

[ The direction he's facing, raising a hand to make it more certain as he too sinks in, settling himself with hands raised in readiness to cast. ]

I don't know how fast it comes. Watch the earth.

[ This much they know by now, the way everything in the wake of the towering creatures is left impossibly more arid, but there's the clue of the feasted-on demon too. Is it still in clutches? Fighting the urge to open again his one unnatural eye, stilled by the possibility that they may only have one pursuant on their hands, that the other is not yet lured by what may well have been the call of being seen, he squints out for that caught demon, wills it to bring them some clarity. ]

The prey. Can you see?

[ Does it still wither?

It's about now that a pouch attached to the belt at his waist starts to wriggle and leap. Before Stephen can so much as glance down at it, the drawstring shortens as gloop forces its way through, stretching out until gravity (even here, still the inevitability of physics) pulls it all in one mass down toward the earth. It's taken shape before it even lands, a familiar little figure that glances back up at them both for a merry couple of seconds before something seems to catch in a throat it doesn't have. And just like that, the little creature gasps for little breaths, attention narrowed out on an empty horizon and a not-quite-hand patting rhythmically against Stephen's leg.

Not frantic, not yet. Just a steady press for his attention. ]

[downswing]

I see. ( Land, arid, stripped of humidity, of plumpness, of joy. What lingers is this: the grotesque consumption that follows plague and locusts, a gauntness so exaggerated it is a violence more than a sum of lines. Ecology tortured.

Wangji watches the grounds, the tremors and reconfigurations of his footing trailing bright, stark shadows under an absent, pale sun. What they know, he knows: that the Motherless leave their gift of decay in passing, but they cannot say if the effect is staggered or immediate, that they assume the speed of the creature's advance. In truth, they have no notion; the Motherless may yet pivot suddenly, or plunge.

They assume it will hold true to the patterns of its progress already observed. Wiser men than Lan Wangji have shed their life's last red on more sensible soothsaying. And why surrender their advantage? )

Gaze upon it. Direct me.

( Cut of Lan Wangji's glance is a fresh, biting black blade, stabbing where Stephen Strange is soft, where the Motherless might seek to noose him: watching Stephen's throat, his belly, his thi —

...his thighs, as a strange dolloping mass trickles down, leaving its shimmied trail. Lan Wangji does not intend to stare (stares). Does not mean to cast judgement on the natural response of a man facing horror. Then calmly, in the manner of any father who once raised a young son, he murmurs: )

You have wetted yourself. ( Control yourself, man. This threat too shall pass. And unflinching: ) Wanda need not know.

( Comrades in arms do not unstitch the belly of each other's secrets and lay them bare before the bitter, fawn heavens. )

[rehandle]

[ Gaze upon it Lan Wangji says, and Stephen grits his teeth against the sharpness of argument (explanation, were this a conversation with perhaps any other man) when the measured beat of something against his leg draws his attention down.

There's a reaction to be had here. But once again, Lan Wangji's words are the thing that throws him off course. It takes him seconds for them to sink in, a couple more to play them back in his head and confirm that, yes, he had heard correctly. After that it's a matter of figuring out how the hell (badum tsh) to react to an accusation of temporary incontinence while in the middle of waiting to be attacked by a consumer of life.

In the end, instead of speak, he stares. Indignation rich in the loose gape of his jaw, the crunch of his brow.

And he steps back, moving his closer leg out of the way so it's easier to see the little translucent shape still patting away at his calf, panting in breaths that get steadily more ragged.

Did he piss that out, Wangji? Jesus. ]

[downswing]

( ...there are supplements of nutrition a man may appeal to, to temper the fruits of his body's daily labour. Perhaps, to avoid such immediate coagulation of his waters, Stephen Strange should consider... infusions of chamomile?

Wen Qing may press a more sophisticated recommendation. Stephen procured him Wanda's assistance, towards Wei Ying's care. This... unpleasantness is the least that Lan Wangji may help resolve.

Why, the wet even flusters, trembles — and all at once, Lan Wangi remembers it, the little friend of the sands, Strange's acolyte. Perhaps not a biological betrayal but an indentured slave.

...and perhaps that will never sound the better. )

Cease playing with fluid secretions. ( Your own, or visited upon you by the Heavens. They've a different sordid creature to answer with carnage. Lan Wangji's footing shifts, balance on the back, sword ready. He peers: )

It comes — ( A moment, peering, assessing the footprint of aridity, the shifts in air and energy. Then, at an estimate: ) From northwest? Twenty-five paces?

( Give or take. )

[rehandle]

[ Another sentence he hates, but fine, they have more important things to be doing than spatting over what is or isn't happening with his blobby little hanger-on. If it's sight Lan Wangji wants, then fine. He'll be eyes and bait in one.

Raising his attention away from the man and the blob, Stephen opens his Eye again, looking to where he last left the Motherless and - nodding, at the sight of it closer now. The direction is right, but— ]

Twenty.

[ It's coming, and well and truly locked on now, no hesitation in the way it lumbers over. They're a target, no doubt about it.

Hands clap together and then he's pulling a long, taut string of sparking orange power between his two hands, starting to coil it in one until it hangs there like loose rope. ]

Can you get airborn?

[ There's the outline of a plan forming in mind, but he'll need to adjust it for their capabilities. ]

[downswing]

( Get airborne. As if he is a plaything, a blade for sale, an acrobat — defined by theatrics. Cheap, garish artifice. Visible, obvious feats.

The troubling thing is, hand waved and his sword released, called to float in horizontal patterns — he can ascend, though the act of stepping on a blade that chains a spirit so faithful, so closely bound, cuts and bruises him. He steps on the sword's length, left foot trembled, the right uncertain as he brokers his footing — and rights himself, balance a cautious negotiation.

Flicked extension of his body is his sword, discipline the root of direction. He was educated for this, but may still spare Stephen Strange a sullen, grudging glare. Well, then. He is 'airborne' now, hands emptied until growled crackling breaks the horizon to summon his zither Musical instruments are no weapons of violence here. He knows enough to murmur, before his decision is called into doubt: )

You have command of me. ( Spoken with the kind of disdain that might attach, Deeper than your continence. ) Instruct — with precision and care. This weapon lacks moderation.

[rehandle]

[ Is that man standing on his sword? Is he riding his sword like a flying skateboard?

Anybody gives him any kind of shit for having a flying cloak in the future, he's pointing them this way. But there's no hesitation from Stephen, only wasting valuable thoughts on echoed derision for the sake of that look he gets. Of late, he's not from a world where what he's seeing now is anywhere close to impossible.

So it's time to focus. The thing continues its trawl through the air, and Stephen readies his own bright cord in turn. ]

Higher. Go up, twice your own height.

[ Precision and care. Perhaps an elaboration, then, to make it clear what their respective positioning will mean for the angle of attack. ]

When it throws the tether down, I'll catch the line with this and pull it taut. You'll be able to see my rope even if you can't see the one it's holding.

[ Which will give him the whereabouts of the Motherless' cord, one long line from from Stephen upwards at the angle of the string of vibrant magic clasped in his hands.

Does this put Lan Wangji at risk of having to trust that he'll catch this as he says he will? Yes. But they have a little under a minute for a new plan if they want to make one, so he issues a sharp - ]

Understood?

[ His eyes never leave the thing that approaches, save to glance quickly Lan Wangji's way for confirmation. At his feet, the creature of spit and bone breathes in a flurry of strung-together gasps, now patting at Stephen's leg with such rapid insistence it finally reads as frantic. ]

[downswing]

( Twice his own height — an easier feat, when sat on ground, possessed of vantage. He calls Bichen up, sliding, to a careful approximation, until he gazes into a brisk, slate horizon, at hail of ash and ground gravel, and a rising, swollen storm of pebbles and cloth tatters and — he grimaces — particles of meats from other demons, downed. )

You spoke in common tongue.

( He has, in other words, understood — and he brings up the zither, clmly, readied, the air that surrounds it crackling with the static electricity of sorcery coalescing, watching and waiting and biding its tenuous time, when its nature is to plunge.

Below, panting draws his eye — he does not think to say, Your fluids are dying.

It would be an unseemly thing, unkindly, deranged and wrong. The creature is — tormented, for once not by the great suffering and misfortune of having slid down Stephen Strange's trousers. There are worse fates on this world, Lan Wangji would share, were he a better man and not consigned to watching the sorcerer's cord for the telltale sign. There are worse fates, you might have dropped when his furried legs were bare.

But the creature serves its purpose as a bellweather of proximity. Teeth gritting — )

Now?

[rehandle]

[ Closer and closer and closer it comes, and up Lan Wangji rises, and the charge at his feet gasps and gasps and gasps, and Stephen waits. Hold. Hold...

Now?

... Now.

His arm whips out in a flash, strip of burning amber extending out as he casts his coiled whip to grab for the Motherless' freshly-dropped cord. It catches, wraps around, and with that Stephen hisses something to the cloak and extends a spell down to lift the blob at his feet up into the crook of his arm and then he's in the air himself, laying backwards as far as he needs to to pull that cord at taut as he can.

As he goes: ]

Now.

[downswing]

( Now.

Later, he will know, a hand's span — he should have floated higher. Now, given his sign, tempted to move, he sharpens the zither's sound, tainted with sorcery, until the spell and the strength of the song's vibration combine into a deep, jagging cut —

And it springs out, severing where the two cords are bound, missing by a margin, nearly hitting the sorcerer's wire alone, but for the surprising convenience of the Motherless, trembling, and sinking down.

He thinks it screams, when its cord is slashed. Feels it, deep in himself — that, or the grotesque rumble of the grounds quaked and thundered by the zither's energy in a wall-wave of magic, all-consuming. So little he makes use of his guqin of late, that he forgets, at times, that this is no weapon of precision, of small and gentle shavings, of tender cuts.

It severs everything it encounters, in a clean line, for li.

He does not beckon it again, breathlessly stumbling off his sword and taking the knee, as he lands beside Stephen Strange and his... fluid.

Now has passed between them. )

Is it done?

( In the distance, the mutation of the earth, wrought by the Motherless' presence, recedes. But he cannot be certain. )

[rehandle]

[ The cord, severed by a chord, swings uselessly back through the air as his whip of raw magic, loosed of tension, slaps down to the ground.

He releases it from existence with a break of the spell, attention turning to Lan Wangji (who catches himself, fine) then back to the Motherless to watch it crease with a howling he can't hear. It straightens again, twisting away to nurse a wound that won't be so easily healed, and only once he's seen it far enough gone that he can confidently say it isn't coming back in any amount of time they can't rally in does he close that spare eye once more and confirm - ]

It's done.

[ Not well done, necessarily, not executed with the kind of specificity that was going to guarantee them freedom from a second try... but done. Given the two men involved in this particular bout of teamwork, he might almost consider it a best case scenario. ]

You're alright?

[ Safe to ask now that the answer has any bearing on whether or not Stephen could do anything about it. His charge, calmed in the absence of immediate doom, now only tremors its way through a swift recovery in the crook of his elbow. ]

[downswing]

We are in hell.

( For once, Lan Wangji has discovered a lengthier substitute for the efficient no. He coaxes himself up like a starveling bird reaching for the slithered, jutting worm in the mother's distant beak — no elegance to it, only a virulent practicality in how his bones mend and right, how he assumes natural position to occupy the negative space at Stephen Strange's left, where his non-dominant hand names him weaker.

A cord. A tremulous fluid companion that Lan Wangji rewards with the lift of a brow and the calm extension of his finger in the general vicinity of Strange's elbow, should the blob wish to greet him.

And worse — )

You hide the growth of a third eye. ( A clever, if sinister deformity. He need not speak these words, drifting and known. ) Gift or curse?

( Will they suffer for it? Pay the cost of its assistance, the Motherless now repelled? Can they call on the gaze's service, to push the demons back further? )

[rehandle]

[ Wow. It's a fair point, but not one that doesn't make Stephen want to roll his eyes so hard he goes temporarily blind. Still - it's an answer. He's fine. They're fundamentally in the worst place they could be and have just narrowly avoided complete annihilation, but he's standing up. It'll do for now.

The little critter in Strange's arms, though, has no such propensity to generate frustration from any act of Lan Wangji's it reasonably can. Instead it reaches out to catch his finger, nudge it with the damp glob of its own.

Then the question of the eye, and Stephen's bravado briefly drops as he throws him a sideways glance. ]

Truthfully? No idea. [ But, importantly: ] If there are any consequences to face, they'll be mine. But I won't be opening it again down here unless we run into another one of those things and need it. It lured the last one.

[ So... about those consequences only being yours to face, Stephen? ]