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

[weifinder]

( There is in that moment, a shift, a quiet heaviness that slides into his playing. The music changes as the purpose does, and the call then, the one to send on, to cleanse, is one he knows Lan Zhan understands as well as he does. Better, even, for years more in the pursuit of its application.

There's a difference between the resentful energies which resist, which shriek, which sob, before this peace contrasting the chaos, the heartbreak, the horrors below. This is not a song for them: it is a song for the bodies trapped with some awareness, some memory. Some knowledge of who they were, and who they aren't, not anymore.

Those are the spirits, the souls, to send onward, to command beyond the grasp of greedy mouths and clawed hands, while Rikkitikkitaktu is distracted by his slow creeping hunger, patience worn to the burnt nubs of the destroyed ground underneath his unbreathing army.

Sing them home, to bodies left bereft of any spark, and to them, oh, to them, bring fire. Bring the flames. Bring the call to those with the means for it, the hearts for it, and let them burn. )

[downswing]

( He wilts, he weakens, like every flower comes the turn of seasons — like a sketched silhouette of himself, dissolving. Wei Ying was ever this, the fleeting, frail memory of his flight. Here, then gone. Dispersed.

The dead roil and crest like turbulent seas, breaking. He watches them, more claws and breaking bones than men, hears the hawkish creaks of their bodies rattling in the unnatural jolts and contortions they stir to perform. They move faster than they should, in ways that defy the comfort of their necromanced flesh to prioritise efficiency. It is no pretty sight, no heartfelt sound.

Fire starts without Lan Wangji needing to call it. Later, when Wei Ying's song begins to die, when flames lick the ledge of his sword, when he brings them down — he finds the arson was partly the work of catapults, a whirlwind of arrows, and a simple, graceless misfortune of saltpetre and explosive salts. Their dead meats burn.

He lands them on hard ground, trailing Wei Ying after him, one hand under his husband's arm, over his back, holding him steadied. It's a slow drag, too often interrupted by legions who burst out to attack, by refugees seeking sanctuary. Inside, where the fortress is quaking, inside, uprooting Wei Ying in the belly of its halls, where Hell sleeps. Inside, where there is warmth, and he stays them briefly in the Wards, lips cold to wash Wei Ying's hard temple. )

You have done well. This is no Nightless City, you have done well.

( He must know this, if nothing else. He must not doubt. )

[weifinder]

( He doesn't think, by this point. By the time he's been brought to ground, when the chaos rings in his ears as memory more than the incessant press of it, near. The pressure at his back, the hand under his arm, the warmth and direction Lan Zhan provides is the anchor that keeps his wandering exhaustion from simpler collapse. Is what summons a smile, hah, smiles, and stumbles, and walks again with the deliberate reminder to himself: lift foot. set foot down. lift, ah, yes, lean.

He stands still when prompted, blinks at the touch at his temple. Focuses, the effort of his eyes dilating and oh, he smiles beatifically, eyes red from effort, from loss, and from emotion.

He feels them. All those dead twice and dying, and Nightless City, he knows this too. )

I won't leave. ( Not acknowledgement, because doing well is the ache in his chest that Yanli had spoken to him once, that Lan Zhan exists the only other living person to do the same, and oh. Oh, how he leans into his husband then, forehead lowered, seeking to rest on Lan Zhan's shoulder. ) This is no Nightless City. I won't go.

( Confronted with greed, the avarice of the dead, but not the heartbreak, the gutting, of every precious thing he fought for. Sizhui lives. Lan Zhan lives. The members of their chaotic company persist.

Wei Wuxian speaks into Lan Zhan's shoulder. Mumbles, eyes closed, fingers clutching. Squeezing. He's not sure what he's holding, but it must be, it is, something of Lan Zhan. )

I'm here. I won't go.

( Don't let go of me, and this time, I won't let go of you. )

[downswing]

( The moment feels somehow fraught, fragile, as if the thousand-fragment porcelain of Wei Ying's veneer threatens, at any moment, to break. More fool he, between breaths of earth that quivers: Lan Wangji had not anticipated that Wei Ying could yet be sundered, could slip-slide-fall. )

You will not go. ( Mantra, reassurance. Once step and, skidding on viscera, the next. You will not go. ) Not down a cliff's lip. Not into the mouth of hell.

( And has Wei Ying not done so, before? He remembers in whole what lives with Wei Ying only in part, the fissure of a heartbeat that marked the unbinding, when Wei Ying peeled himself free of his husband's hand and descended, crashed like stormed waves, into the belly of Nightless City.

They hold on to each other, to that distant flicker of remembrance. He drags Wei Ying and lets him lie and sits him down where the clutter of the Wards has thinned and there are bandages discarded to spare like the silks of a ghost — and he knows it is because no doubt they were intended for a victim of war who failed, who fell, who never woke again.

No matter. Knelt beside Wei Ying, he dips them in stale water and cleansing salts and passes the bandage, soaked, to rim Wei Ying's temples and forehead with wet, to stir him. )

Mo Xuanyu did not perish so that you might follow in his steps. Of the man you were, only memory lingers.

[weifinder]

( His laugh is sparse, then low, a rumble that flows from his throat and turns into rasps as he leans in to the press of the cool bandage to his forehead, his temples, Lan Zhan's ministrations both foreign and not. Welcome in a way he's not used to welcoming, even knowing how he's been tended to by Lan Zhan over the years. Layers, peeled back as their robes are, and so it goes. )

Mo Xuanyu didn't perish, is the worst of it. Lan Zhan, no curse holds without a living presence. Mine held. He lived for long enough to see it through.

( Or longer, but that's nothing he wants to grapple with, the darkness and a space that was not a space, a place that was in and out of time, where grief stretched endless, and exhaustion consumed him, and numbness, eventually, settled in. He will never remember much of that time, of sleep that gave no rest, of time that passed without moving, of awareness, and the lack thereof.

It's not the point. It's exhaustion speaking, it's improbabilities spilling off his tongue, it's the pain of a time dulled to him now where it had been still so different, two years ago, two and a half? Time flows and flows, a river that feeds itself in a grand loop that stretches far beyond what he can see on the horizon. )

Memory is strong. We're stronger. We are.

( No matter that he's weakened in this moment, hollowed out, played thin. His forehead, hot, feels cooler for Lan Zhan's touch, tepid water his post-battle ablutions. )

Memory fades. We won't.

( Startling, a touch, a flinch as he realises he's been sitting, and can't remember when Lan Zhan led him to sit. The Wards he recognises, bleariness stealing clarity of vision, of thought. He has something to ask, or thinks he does, and he whispers: )

If my vision dims, I'll wake. No worrying. No guilt.

( From Doctor Wuxian, in his poor trappings of uneasy medic over the month and more they've been here. His husband may not heed this, but he must say it anyway. )

[downswing]

No guilt.

( He murmurs back, like trading coin, his silver scarce. Mouth dry when it lands on Wei Ying's forehead, when he nudges his husband to wilt, back straight and stiff against the wall, and rest like a boneless kitten.

The is sorcery to whisper, words to ground. Sleep, a command that qi could implement through drainage. He does not insult his soulmate with that strike.

Instead, long slide of his back, like dripping lichens, he collapses down on hard ground — one leg folded beneath him in seiza, the other before him, grounding Bichen where she anchors in rubble.

Wei Ying must sleep. Wangji will hold vigil.

It is done. It must be done. )