the sunken | moonrise

[groundrules]

THE SUNKEN | MOONRISE

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The final Arc VI event lasts three days ICly and until 23 July OOCly. Yancai goes back another two years in time to the Huntress’ visit, Miang-Si’s corruption and the memory-meddling rite of the ladies of the lake.

The party can choose to stay neutral, only heading to the House of Commerce to access its now-active beacon — or they can inevitably get mixed up in the affairs of Yancai and endanger the village’s time loop.

For a quick catch-up: the latest clues | everything about Arc VI.

BOAR’S HEART

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Rattled, on high alert, feeling watched and skin prickling from static electricity, characters wake to find Yancai has gone back another two years in time. It is now nearly dry, barring rare waterways. Mould is absent. The village bustles with activity: a heavy influx of new arrivals comes by sea, and frequent fishermen’s and merchants’ markets set up in the open road — enjoy fresh fish delicacies, discounted pearls, rare cloth textiles and dyes that include the unique Yancai green!

■ No more hauntings take place, and only one moon loiters above the village. Villagers still remember the party under their false identities.

■ Word has spread of the conflict between elder Quanze Tsaymien’s council and a beautiful woman who has taken up in the forests at the village’s outskirts. Gossipmongers say she wastes away in the woods weeping — while ground cracks beneath her feet, grass wilts, waters poison and animals drop dead nearby. Young men are drawn to her and are later forcibly recovered in a state of rambling, feverish exhaustion. Village healers gladly accept your nursing help.

■ Village elders have given the woman — correctly identified by the party as the Huntress — until the following sunrise to leave Yancai on pain of death. You have 24h to encounter her.

■ The forests are livelier than in previous iterations of Yancai, but you feel perpetually… watched, as if sharp eyes follow your progress. These heavy gazes may belong to the young men bewitched to protect the Huntress, or to razor-clawed venom-spitting creatures that hunt her.

■ You may find some of the aforementioned creatures bleeding on the forest path. They possess slightly above canine intelligence, cannot communicate in human tongues, and hesitate to let you approach — but nursing one might reward you.

■ The death-touched (necromancers, those who died or revived, or otherwise marked) may optionally feel compelled to join the Huntress. Physical distance dwindles her pull, as can your own magic or solutions.

■ Luck (?) leads you to a silent and bloodied forest clearing, come sunset. Here, two dozens of Yancai’s recent dead have risen alive and surround the Huntress, some battling the creatures that assail her, while she speaks to 16-year-old village beauty Miang-Si. There is a gaping, if regenerating hole in the Huntress’ chest; in one hand, she holds her yet-beating heart she cuts in several parts she wraps in parchment. She asks Miang-Si to bury these pouches near Yancai to ‘hold her power close,’ in exchange for permanent and ever-blossoming beauty.

■ Wait as the Huntress and her forces retreat — then catch up to Miang-Si, capture her, or find the pouches. The ground where they are buried is desaturated, brittle, nearly pulverised. Hawks and ravens circle above and plunge down to claw at intruders, or attempt to pick up children or feebler adults. To the magically or death-sensitive, the pouches emanate a revolting aura of withering death.

■ Beware if heart pouches were buried beneath aged, thick trees — their roots burst out like nooses and writhing spiders’ legs, looking to either slam you against the tree trunks or entrap you within.

■ Finding at least two heart pouches prevents the dead from rising in Yancai in the years to come! Keep the heart cuts fettered — touching these parts directly can overwhelm you with the need to consume this or other hearts, to compensate for the sudden and unfeeling… coldness in your chest.

WAKE, UNWAKEFULLY

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Sunrise finds the Huntress gone from Yancai — while waves of the dead rise from the sea to attack the village. Some come chained, or dragging pieces from the casket-ships in which they were set for water burial.

This is the first undead attack witnessed by Yancai villagers, who are largely clumsy, slow and petrified. Some sentimentally believe their revived relatives never died and plead not to kill them. Many are caught in undefended areas, such as open port harbours, fishing boats, markets — and need help to travel to their families. The Huntress’ spell starts dissolving by midday, with the dead largely pulling back into sea and lake waters

■ Beware the village waterways: touching the water replenishes the strength of the dead and saps yours. Look closely at the bottom of the waterways, and you find them lined with dozens of resting corpses. Some wake slowly, as they clutch shards of glistening black mirror — best to… use a very long oar… or plunge very quickly to recover shards.

■ Carrying a mirror shard puts the dead around you to blissful sleep. Those who possess a cut of the Huntress’ heart can take control of up to 20 of the risen dead. Necromancers can control up to 10, even without such a token.

MOTHER MOON

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Come midday of Day II, Yancai villagers start to move freely and reunite with loved ones. Waters begin to gently rise and flood the grounds, while the first spores of black mould appear on walls.

The first to help the injured are the washerwomen of Yancai, who favour the young and magically sensitive. You notice they work in perfect synchrony and have developed a hand sign language they can teach you. Keep an ear out, and one might entrust they are hedge witches, the so-called ‘ladies’ of the lake.

■ Join them, either invited or unseen, when they gather at one of Yancai’s three great lakes. Each lady picks up one of the silver coins tossed in the water for luck-bearing. Take one yourself, and you will be able to breathe and speak underwater, following as the ladies dive and swim through thin underwater passageways. Beware countless skeletal remains that line the lakes and sinister fish — both burst out to shackle your limbs, or sound the alarm about intruders.

■ You find the ladies have begun to shelter and ward the dead in lake caves, to avoid their rising up again. The ladies re-emerge in the forest, speaking of a protection rite they agreed with the elders’ council. They are not strong enough to break the Huntress’ lingering spell, but hope to later recruit nascent witch Miang-Si, who teases she has power from the Huntress. For now, the ladies have decided to create a five-year time loop, moving Yancai back and forth in time whenever the dead attack.

■ To achieve their rite, the ladies use large pieces of black mirror confiscated from the Huntress’ dead and the energy of the hunter’s moon that shines down a bloody red tonight. Those with a lunar connection feel the moon aches, disgusted by this violation. Even those unaffiliated with the moon feel irascible and prone to violence while under its gaze.

■ Interrupting the rite rescues the moon, earning you a reward, and breaks villagers from the five-year loop, allowing them to live their true lives. It also exposes Yancai to the dead, unless you remove the heart cuts. Co-ordinate and choose wisely.

■ The ladies conduct their chanting, rune-painting and summons throughout the night of Day III in the forest. You have a wealth of options to break their spell: interfere with the magic flows, disrupt the guarded ash circle of convened witches, summon irate villagers to raid, persuade Miang-Si to intervene, break or steal the rite’s black mirror pieces… You can also reach out to the coven’s strongest witches, who agreed to sacrifice themselves to become overseers in the time flux — the Lumberjack, Red Lady, White Woman, Man in Black and the Milk-Toothed Babes. You can still sign up for a RNG draw to chat.

BAIT & BEACON

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To take attention off the ladies of the lake, Yancai’s council organises a sumptuous masked banquet and charity auction for the victims of the undead attack at the lavish House of Commerce. The House has been thoroughly cleansed by the time of your arrival, with only faint, clumsy traces of blood, decay and debris lingering from the previous offensive.

On site, servants are still jittery from the undead assault, while openly armed guards walk the grounds and answer any small provocation. Be kind to the staff or offer sympathy for their likely recent losses, and they might let you in unnoticed, or offer a hand.

■ Anyone who brings an item for the auction or who can pretend s/he possesses massive wealth can join the banquet. Show up with anything you can brazenly talk up as elite, exquisite or one-of-a-kind — or perhaps auction your services?

■ The House of Commerce contains a locked room with the village’s now fully active beacon. The Master of Commerce has the only key-tokens to access this quarter, somewhere in his study room — pick a lock, sweettalk the staff, or work your magic to get inside the study and grab one of the rune-inscribed tokens. The study room brims with scrolls, globes, letters to and from the Dawn’s Reach Trade Company and maps of… Arc I’s Sa-Hareth in the west, where hand-written news reports say the dead are rising.

■ Back at the banquet, the richest wine and… relaxing herbs and powders are offered freely or sometimes slipped into food to ease spirits. Aiming for levity, participants don comical animal masks or play a local game of ‘bait or hook,’ whereby they approach you with the aforementioned fishing bait or fish hook in closed fists, asking you to pick one. Depending on your choice, you must ‘bait’ the audience with a song or dance, or ‘hook’ them in with a joke or anecdote.

■ Around midnight, attendants are invited to an increasingly competitive auction, punctuated by elbowing, loud voices, crowding and the occasional threat. Beautiful concubines might stick to your arms, asking to be purchased this or that (exorbitant) small nothing as a gift. Participate to keep up your cover, but beware landing in hard debt!

■ Most banquet goers pretend they are indifferent to the undead attack, but some question whether the woman of the forest was to blame — while others mention that the mysterious, far too independent coven of the ladies of the lake is meeting even now, and might be cursing Yancai.

■ However you spend your night, the witch Karsa asks you to infiltrate the House of Commerce by dawns and attempt to leave through the beacon. This will only be possible if at least one person has picked up a key-token…!

QUESTIONS

Comments

[weifinder]

( There's a certain moment of near chidlish glee in being carried like this, in a comfort left in years he doesn't think back on hard, for this reason, for that. He all but huffs a laugh as Lan Zhan leaps to the shoreline, light as feathers, heavy as Mount Tai in Wei Wuxian's heart. )

Playing?

( A glance back at the dead, the boat now more within the water than above. He sighs, and hums, a sound which should not carry as it does, and yet. The dead as a whole cannot be controlled, not to the easy extent that leaves him bound to deep enforced rests and exhaustion for days, but they can be suggested upon, into stillness, stillness, sleep. He feels it as one submits, then another; expends his energy in coaxing strikes that slip between the dead until enough take to knees, to sink back below waters, than the few who have not struggle against the exhaustion of their own outside magic forcing them to serve as the Huntress so bid.

So it is, he thinks to himself, slumping more heavily into Lan Zhan, all of him a dragging gravity latched on to Lan Zhan's person, the orbiting of his... moon. White like moonrise, blue like skies, and that's a lovely thing to be, isn't it? Visible day and night, never fully banished or vanquished to one or the other. )

Lan Zhan...

( A sigh, his face burrowed and burying on Lan Zhan's shoulder. )

This is not the kind of tired I was looking forward to.

( He instead whines. )

[downswing]

Mmmmmmmmmm. ( Firm, agreeable. The quiet thrumming of bees circling nests, rivers starting their susurration. He hears waters alive and their dead weights lessened — disgustingly, but irrevocably, much of the rivulets had been dammed by corpses. He did not anticipate —

But then, they can never truly acclimate to the cloying, desperate reality of cadavers swarming or mounting, to their lives infested by the sickness of stirring silence and endless slaughter. Wei Ying's warmth on his back is distraction, respite. He rolls his shoulder, stretching out worn and dust-ground bones, until he feels alive in his own body, sooner than a tolerated guest. )

Patience brings the sun down swifter than arrows.

( ...says he, smile incandescent and blissfully unseen, to the man who shot down the blaze of Nightless City.

Then again, perhaps there is a — point past which even Wei Ying's gossamer patience can be justified, explicable. He has too long tolerated the whims of a world immune to both kindness generally and his amorous intent specifically.

His appetite for wait will flee. )

Your frustration, not unshared.

[weifinder]

Pretty sure Hou Yi begged to differ.

( Heroes who shot down multitudes of suns with arrows aside, he surrenders to the inevitability of truth: patience has merits. Arrows fly without consideration of their targets. One needs patience to better aim the arrow; the jumble of thoughts that realigns itself into amusement when he does laugh, still resting his head against his husband's neck.

Shared frustration, of an amorous nature? Oh, yes. )

The way you kiss, ( he says, speaking against wet robes and clinging tendrils of hair and the scent of his husband and the waters and the cloying nature of unsettled, slow decay, and the life that rises even so: not one singular scent other than to know it's Lan Zhan, whatever that means. ) They way you kiss me, I've noticed.

( Shared frustration, but ah, tired and wet and bedraggled and carrying shards of mirrors he's no inclination to view his reflection within, he lifts his head. Settles his chin on his own arm where it drapes and folds over Lan Zhan's shoulder. )

Hands in your hair, gripping. You like that, ah?

( Experiments from earlier times, and an awareness that it was not singular, which of them received too much attention from wandering, grasping, dead hands. Only his interest is pointed, curious, and consuming. Living concerns, for the waning patience making progress into its new moon, all but gone. )

[downswing]

( He stills, and it's a sullen thing, the forest's inhalations frozen beside his own. Eyes slanting, gaze haunted and thin and not flinching, not he, not the traitor's flesh that rounds his bones, pebbled. He does not turn to behold Wei Ying, for all he feels the searing print of his body's heat like lichen, spreading, savaging, a tired corruption. Like waters, filling the negative space where Lan Wangji might have thought to sequester his private shames, his burdens.

Hands in his hair, desired, fictive, haunted. Hands on his back, fastened around his flank, honest and true and carnal, stalwart and solid. You like that?

He wants to speak poetry and dreams and all the pretty, playful things and trinkets of illusory affection that grace the thinned parchment paper of marriage books: that he will accept and worship whatever Wei Ying surrenders him, that he has no appetites, only attunement, like string beneath nails of the right softness and curvature, that he sings for whatever alms Wei Ying spares his beggarly soul.

It is not so. He walks, nearly stumbles. It is not so. )

And... if I do? ( Will it shame him? It must, if even shameless Wei Wuxian rips time from his busied day to remark upon Lan Wangji's eccentricity. )

[weifinder]

( The burr on Lan Zhan's back, warmed and warming and no less damp than either of them had been before, waits with a hunter's patience for his husband's answer. His gaze, slanted and considering, matches to the small smile pulling at his lips when Lan Zhan all but stumbles, all but answers, as if it's some strangeness in the navigation of themselves.

Wei Wuxian believes, erroneously or otherwise, he can read people well. Reading Lan Zhan is a skill and a dance, is the healed cuts and the cutting silences and the difference between an inclination of the head in acknowledgement, and the nestling of a head against the side of his neck. The words come slower, come ponderous, come weighted, and more precious than gold under Lan Zhan's knees.

The answer that arrives, questioning with hesitance, elicits a further smile, a flash in dark eyes for less prurient purposes than current conversation indicates. )

Then my hands have ideas on what to do, ( he says, only shifting enough to free one clasping arm and bring dried fingers to damp locks, cutting nails through and working through the temporary tangles their rolling adventures invited under their hands and those of the dead. Scrape against skin, against the curve of skull, and hold, firm, while from the side opposite he nuzzles at Lan Zhan's temple, lazy and loving and cat-like in his exhaustion. ) next time we're pursuing our mutual pleasures.

[downswing]

( It... pleases to be stroked so, like a cat chasing inklings of pleasure from hard heat's licks, thickened and greedy on the fall of her broad back, where she has found her nook and sprawls for sunning. His head tips first in the stroke's direction, then opposite it for the songbird thrill of quiet ache when Wei Ying's pull commands him.

He toys, Wei Ying does. He has found his plaything, and now he marvels at the honeyed, trickling possibility of reducing it to instinct, to perfect harmony in his thorny web of his ill-gained control. And Lan Wangji, step staggered, purr half drowned down a parched, scratchy throat, cannot fault him.

What is it men do when they are overcome with the emotion of being known? They strike first, rasping: )

You wear cruelty well. ( Like brocade and silks, like gossamer. The finery of the diplomatic arts, like a blade turns, biting edge inward. )

[weifinder]

( He tightens his grip, humming in the back of his throat, breathing steady and wishing, idly, he could be a particular kind of crueler still. Curbing in teasing tendencies that fail to have the followthrough he'd wish, he settles for pressing a kiss to Lan Zhan's cheek, hair caught between lips and skin. He settles his chin again, and the grip he has in Lan Zhan's hair returns to a sort of finger combing, where he can find the pathways in Lan Zhan's gathered and tended locks. Coaxing them out of their collection, little by little. )

By request.

( He says, tone pitched toward chipper. Dropping back down, quieter: )

Mostly.

( There are the unwitting cruelties, the ones which are known and acted on. He sighs, softened sound, fingers curling to catch Lan Zhan's hair in their crooked talons. )

No chance we're visiting the hot springs?

[downswing]

( By request, by preference, by grace of this strange, most curious and defenseless dance they've learned the steps of, together. Oil into water, spreading its viscera: this is Wei Ying, styled Wuxian, playing at seduction. He presumes, now, to tempt Lan Wangji, knowing the road trembled and long and his own step hesitant — knowing, too, that Hanguang-Jun will not imperil the most precious of burdens that graces his back on whim, despite the provocation.

So, then, he takes his chances. He flirts, he eases, he drifts his hand's touch through Lan Wangji's hair like a brush collecting pigment from the web of diluted ink.

And Lan Wangji, reduced to instinct and gritted teeth, and the shivered atrocity of his restraint, like dimming candle light — bears with it all, carrying this monster, his husband, further on his back. )

None. ( And rasped: ) I shall keep tally of each of your wrongdoings in this. ( They both know the aspect, the direction. ) One day, you will pay for each in kind.

[weifinder]

( His low chuckle bears no fear at this certainty, at the pulse of want that fizzles through him, aware but lacking a teenage spark to burn green wood in spite of everything. Speaking low by Lan Zhan's ear, he weaves his own promises in return. )

I'm looking forward to it.

( And all the rough edges and fanged moments to go along with those reckonings, knowing Lan Zhan, knowing the nature of his wants does not simply follow the soft and sweet, but is as much a thirsting hunger of want and predatory nature in the invited way of tempering loves, sorted little by little.

For the time being, he settles himself into a sighing rest, not demanding his release anymore than he demands another kind of improbable return to the moment fled and passed with the dead clocked in that disappointment. Or cloaked simply in death. Death was disappointing enough, in certain senses. Sure did little for the libido. )