"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Those who chose to take the path along the cliff soon found themselves surrounded. There are monsters of every shape and size, and they are torn to pieces, each moment seeming an eternity of excruciating pain.
Then there is blackness. It turns to grey.
Slowly, very slowly, they will feel themselves coming back together in the endless nothing. Well, almost back together. Some part of them is missing, some part they hadn’t ever really been aware they had. They will wake, at last, on the Beach - perhaps seeing some of the ghostlike visages of those who had tried to rescue the entities. They
Those who chose the river will find the others waiting there: Firion, Leilan, Flower, and Volos. But there are monsters here as well, and during the long battle that follows, the four of them are injured and all are eventually pushed back into the river.
The water is deep, so incredibly deep that as they sink the pale light of the afterworld above them fades, and then vanishes entirely. The sinking turns to falling, and the blackness to light, and then they are standing in front of the same multi-eyed fae that had led them to the Afterlife.
But it is not quite the same, for something about it has changed, becoming inexplicably more. When it speaks, its voice is both barely audible and painfully loud, heard as much in their minds as their ears.
The distraction they have provided given the fae time to create a solution. It is not a flawless solution, and it is one that will have reverberating effects on every sentient creature. But it is the only solution. The entities are lost beyond hope, but Beqanna is not.
Beqanna has always given each of her children a part of her magic, but for this feat to work, they must take a bit of it back. Beqanna has never done this before, and they do not know the consequences, only that the end result will be successful.
Are you willing to take the risk?
Some notes:
- horses who chose the cliff have been eliminated; further details about what happened to your characters and what the consequences are will in the final quest post
- remaining characters must describe fighting the monsters, falling into the river, and finding Beqanna
- post must end with a clear answer as to whether your character is willing to help Beqanna despite unknown consequences. There is no wrong answer
- posts must be no more than 1000 words
- Entries are due by 11:59 PM CST on Sunday, April 4th (aka Sunday night just before midnight)
- Message us here or on Discord if you have any other questions!
I’m not the only one to choose this path, I notice. We’re a collection of gold, black, and red (and a vague touch of blue). There’s a fragile looking girl among us, but I doubt she is as breakable as she looks. Even if she is, does it matter? The state we are in is tangible but not by much, and I feel like we’re already done for. What is dead can’t die again, and this goes as much for me as for the ones around me. The ones on top of the cliffs, as well.
When I reach the deafening river, every sort of greeting that is not visible is lost to me. Thus, I just nod some sort of greeting; however, it is not long after the fourth arrives that the shadows start to move. In a land of grey, shadow, mist and water, we are completely surrounded - and I hadn’t even noticed.
I grimace, but it’s replaced with determination and (honestly nobody from back home being here is a lucky coincidence because I’m) satisfied. I get what I came for, after all - a chance for some sort of revenge, a chance to bite and scratch and finally take away that itch, the urge to fight the monsters.
Shifting, I find, is not all the same in the land of the dead - change is a magic of the living. I brought it with me, but I lack the amount of magic that it’d need to make the full shift. Instead, I focus on what I deem most important - tooth, claw, and tail.
I am a monster, and now I look like one.
I forget everything around me; forget that these monsters were once souls, because an ice cold dragon has little compassion at all when he’s hunting. I forget most of the others, though I am aware that they’re roughly on my side of this battle, if one could call this skirmish a battle at all. I know there’s cliffs on one side and a river at my back, and I know there’s no way to avoid a fate of suffering and death.
I am a monster, and I’ll take as many of them with me as I can.
I was never the rescuing type, never the martyr that some seem to think I am. Of course I’ll die heroically - for those who weren’t there. The ones who are, know the ugly truth. I am not a good man. Never have been; I’ve been haunting girls, annoying leaders, and stepped on every toe that ever stuck out in some way. I’ve challenged dragon and king alike, and I became one myself. I am a walking example of irony and hypocrisy.
I am a monster, and I want my territory back.
I like to think I bring down more of them than the rest, but honestly I haven’t kept track. I like to think it takes the monsters long enough to drive us back for someone to sneak by, if they want to - that we’re a good enough distraction. I have no way of knowing, however; I only snarl and drag and rip and slash. When the river is first at my lizard-like tail and then at my hocks, I dig hoof and claw (the shifting after all, isn’t perfect) into the mud, and toss as many monsters over my head into the dark water.
That is all I can do. My scales do not protect me from them, because they’re in their element. Icy blasts are not enough to stop the monsters when the world they come from is cold on a wholly different level. I can rip apart one monster, but their separate parts seem to still live, to fuse into something new every time I do.
I go down like the rest of them, and together we sink deeper and deeper, until I can’t hear, can’t see, can’t feel. The pain is endless, forever, and then lost.
I am a monster, but I’m no different from the rest.
Or am I? Are we? Pain returns first, then sight; the world is grey again and then light; and then the feeling of falling ends with standing in a different place. I’ve arrived… somewhere. It seems to be the heart of everything, and where before there was noise and violence and everything that called out the worst in me, now there is nothing. There is calm and if I didn’t know any better - if the others hadn’t arrived with me, if there wasn’t a fairy coming to meet us, if I didn’t remember why I was here - if I hadn’t known any better I’d say this is what death feels like.
The dread I feel, makes me realize that I’m not dead. Yet.
I feel naked in the presence of the fairy’s magic. Perhaps Beqanna’s magic negates all of my own, because it was all hers, just given to me, lent to me, in the first place. Now when she speaks I can hardly hear her, but it is my mind that hurts a little when she does. I wonder if this is how I sound in other’s heads, but when she tells us the entities are lost, I feel her sadness about this fact, as well as the hope.
She needs something from us, this time. I do not know what, just that whatever it is will probably be a lot, in some sense. But hasn’t Beqanna already given me all that I am, and isn’t all that I care to preserve a part of the world that we left behind?
It is not a choice, not for me. I don’t think it ever was. I just hope that the one thought I am able to send back up to the Afterlife we left behind, makes it to its blue-eyed recipient. Go home. Now. One last request. Or command.
It makes my answer easier. ”Whatever you need.”
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
He does not expect the battle—and how could he?
He had chosen to distract, not to fight, although were his mind more clear, perhaps he would have seen the clear line leading from one to the other. Perhaps he would have realized that was exactly what he had chosen all along—and, were he free of this curse, perhaps he would have been able to turn the tide during the skirmish. In the sun, he was made for this. A child of a warmongering general and King, Firion had been molded into a thing of battle. All sharp teeth and speed and muscle. He would have gloried in the fight against the monsters as his father did. Would have torn their throats out with little remorse.
But he was not such a thing now.
He was a shadow of himself—just a fractured piece of the whole.
Sharpened teeth dulled. Muscles ripped. The young, healthy body reduced to this lumbering excuse of it. So he does not glory in the fight that comes, but he finds he is not entirely wasted either. He is conscious enough to note the others with him—especially the young girl of glass—and when he sees her amongst the darkness, his pulse begins to race in his decrepit veins, sluggish as it is. His veiled eyes roll in his head as he does his best to stumble forward, to pull the monsters—his kin, he cannot stop thinking—away from her. To do as he has first promised: to distract. To become the invitation for them to feast on his pain.
To become prey when he was born to be predator.
And his efforts are enough. He is injured, but it is difficult for him to discern what is an injury from this fight and what is simply the cumulative destruction of so many months trapped beneath the heavy weight of this curse. It is like a death rattle, a final sigh, when his body gives out and when he falls into the currents of the river. When the water rushes over him and pulls him down. When it fills sunken lungs.
He is not certain that he scrambles against it.
Is not certain that he knows how to anymore—how to swim toward the light.
In the end, it doesn’t matter, because the light finds him instead. Curls around him and draws him down, down, down, and then up, until he is before that fae once more. He coughs up saltwater and brine and feels it leak from the parts of him that have rotted over time, the flesh peeling slowly. His shoulders sag as he tries to look for that creature of glass, as he tries to concentrate enough to make sure that she is okay, but his focus is slippery and evasive and he can only look back to the multi-eyed creature before him.
He listens, again, and, again—does his best to try and focus. To understand. The voice booms and he doesn’t cringe away from the pain that is much a part of his existence as it always has been. He just watches with the eyes that barely see, the weight of the curse pressing heavier and heavier upon his spine.
When they have finished speaking, he is quiet for a while.
Too long, perhaps.
His shattered brain trying to piece it all together. Trying to remember the shards of his memories that still litter his mind, the pieces of them sharp enough to sting when he grabs for them. His parents. The look of his mother when she finally saw what he was—a victim of his evasion. Iridian, trapped in a world of dreams and hidden from the truth of him—a victim of his lies. Mazikeen, so clear-eyed and vicious. The look of betrayal and hate she had given him the last time they had spoke—a victim of his desperation.
The girl he had seen with the marks of his teeth on her—a victim of the curse, but also of him.
He swallows and tastes acid.
Feels an impossible tear on his cheek as he looks toward the fae.
“Take it,” his thick tongue manages, the words barely comprehensible.
Whatever of me is worth having anymore, his broken brain thinks. Take it all.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
It is as though the simple gratitude of being alone in her pain is enough to summon those that still remain, because out of the mist come the silhouettes of others like her, too solid and too broken to be anyone truly dead. They are ghosts only in the weary hollowness of their eyes, but even in their shared brokenness she can see a ragged purpose that brings them all together now. She wants to learn their names and memorize these faces, to know them even in death should this task come to that. But there are only a handful of seconds and her golden eyes find these faces for only as long as it takes to pick out one thing. A stallion who seems covered in ice, whose color is framed in a thousand perfect frozen scales. Another who looks so much like these beasts with his death and rot that she instinctively wants to recoil - but that isn’t what she wants to remember, and so she finds his face and is surprised to see that the color of his gold eyes are indiscernible from the color of her own. The third is more plain than the first two, but then she notices the almost iridescence of blue that dances across his skin. She wonders if any of them have memorized her in the same way.
But when the slavering monsters do find them and the riverside erupts like some kind of nightmarish war, these new companions are all stolen away from her. She does not see where they go or when they fall, if they fall, because there is only enough time to try and survive long enough to create some kind of difference in this war. Do the living have any idea that their fate rests on the shoulders of four strangers? That one of them is small and glass and born too broken to do anything but die? She had chosen to be a distraction to avoid the waste of what it would be if she tried to fight, yet it seemed that the choice had never been hers to make, that in fact she was the choice. She was who war wanted. She could not understand why or for what purpose fate had led her here, but when the first monster found her (smaller than the rest, sluggish in a way that would later make her wonder if her companions had tried to shield her) she hesitated only long enough to find her stride before she threw herself into battle.
This was not something she understood, not something that came easily. But love did, and it was enough to hear the struggle of her companions, to be reminded of what they all stood to lose if this wasn’t enough. She fights and she holds nothing back, crying out as her delicate glass body is reduced to spiderwebs and then to larger fissures, as pieces chip away until there are pockmarks scattered throughout her body like a hundred desperate constellations. Pain is a wedge in her chest, a weight on her shoulders that slows her, and each misshapen thing that throws itself against her body leaves her feeling broken inside in ways that no one will ever see. It opens a chasm inside her, makes her forget why she’s fighting so hard until she is once more beside the boy with those golden eyes and she is reminded how easy it is to love a stranger, to want to keep him safe, to keep all of them safe.
But it isn’t enough, and when she has given everything she has to fight the monsters, she finds herself being pushed back until the river is at her heels, her hocks, and then over her head. She screams at the sensation of falling away, at a world turned upside and unfamiliar, at the water that slithers like a snake inside her mouth and down her throat, coiling in the pit of her fractured chest until she cannot breathe. She had closed her eyes at some point, perhaps when the ground disappeared from beneath her, and when she finally remembers to open them again there is only darkness waiting to greet her. This is death, she thinks, and she is sad but not surprised, had always heard the death knell hidden within the summons. But she had not expected death to be like this, to be this falling, drowning foreverness, this dark isolation. There is no ice, no gold, no flash of blue. There is only the cold and the dark and this weightlessness in her fissured stomach that makes it hard not to slip away, to give up and give in.
She isn’t sure when the water ended and the falling began, but perhaps that was the moment. The last moment.
She wonders if there will be a body to find anywhere, something small and so broken, with more fissures than trees have branches, more chips than there are stars in the sky.
But then suddenly she is standing before a fae that is both familiar and not, and it feels like a dream in the way none of this makes sense anymore. There are too many shattered pieces, too much that has been broken, and she is sure that she is not enough to piece it back together. But she tries. The fae speaks and the sound of the voice is like the wind sweeping past her, something too far away to catch, but then it doesn’t seem to matter because Flower realizes the words have already carved out a home in her head with a ferocity that makes her wince and cry out in muted surprise. But the answer is an easy one and like the ones that came before, her decision is a gift she gives freely. “Anything.” She says, quiet despite feeling deafened by the fae’s words. “If there is anything more of me that you need, it is yours.”
At the end of the path near the glassy river, he finds the others. He finds, too, that he is more breathless than he ought to be for his level of exertion travelling down the road of the dead. It is more than his run that leaves him winded; knowing where he is and why makes his knees shake in ways that are new to him. Normally, he would exchange pleasantries in his blunt but polite way. Now, he merely spares the two males and female a quick smile with tightly pressed lips. Volos knows they are comrades now, in a way. If they survive this, if they all make it out alive, he will know them after. He will know the real them, then.
There is little point to making friends now and less time to prepare for what comes next.
The monsters are here and there and everywhere all at once.
They had made themselves into a distraction and it seems to have worked to perfection. The young stallion thinks they have all been brought here, to this one point beside the river. This one place where he wonders if he will truly die. His gold eyes watch the surge of beasts and creatures closing in on the four of them and he knows he will not survive. But as hope for himself wanes, his last thoughts turn to those he left behind. He is confident only in the fact that they have done it, the four of them, have distracted enough to make a difference. The fairies will find a way now, he is sure. He will die, but his family will no longer suffer the darkness. Beqanna – the land of the sunrise – will see the light of morning once more.
It is all he clings to in the next terrible span of time.
Volos squares himself up and rolls his broad shoulders forward as the first few monsters reach him. He braces against contact but it comes anyway in the form of sharp claws and gnashing teeth. He feels the first blood leave his body as the skin across his chest is ribboned. Violence hits him in waves and he hits back, at first with confidence and then desperation. The weak light reveals little. He doesn’t see the others in the mass of bodies all clamoring for their end. He doesn’t see the many wounds that appear like the constellations that come out at night – a few at first and then too many to count in a lifetime – but he feels every one.
He is lashing out at a three-tongued beast that has already taken a bite of flesh from his haunch when his own memory-words sound in his mind. I’m not afraid of monsters. And is that true now? Is it fear or exhaustion that makes his legs quake? Is he being pushed closer to the river or is he backing away from the threat ahead of him? Mother told us hiding is for cowards. How he wishes she was here now, his mother. Not in a childish way but for the firepower, he tells himself, but isn’t sure that is wholly true. He isn’t afraid of pain, there is plenty of it running up and down his nerves to spare. He is afraid of the unknown, admits it as he falls back again and again. I’m not afraid of monsters, the boy had said before with all the bravado of youth. But he hadn’t known what was to come.
He couldn’t know it would end like this.
Volos splashes into the water as a broken thing. It is almost a comfort, to be swallowed by the water, to be cocooned in its embrace as if he will someday emerge and be made whole again. He closes his eyes, ready for the darkness before it closes on him. He has given the light of his own life in the hope that it will restore it elsewhere. The water feels like home, besides. Home, where his family will once again frolic and fight and flourish under the warm, life-giving sun. Home, where all the others will wake up and see the light, see that they will no longer have to scrounge for food and huddle for warmth. He hopes that he has done this, at least, in his short life. Hopes that it has been worth something.
He opens his eyes not knowing what comes next.
Blackness. All-consuming darkness. And then –
Then there is a smattering of light that grows all around him as he falls. He thinks it must be a part of it, dying, thinks that he’s nearly reached the conclusion. He is happy he will not spend an eternity in the darkness even if he had been prepared to do so. It grows brighter like the hours of an Ischian day the further he goes until he suddenly stops.
Volos blinks a few times despite the gradual change in light. He almost can’t believe what he is seeing. The fairy that had led them to their doom stands before him, still speaking as if they could yet do more for the world, as if they hadn’t already died. He feels that same hope building within his tattered chest again. He knows he has come too far to give anything less than his all. Even if he cannot come back from whatever still lies ahead, he knows it will be worth it. The fae asks for help and he responds with a set jaw. “Of course. There is nothing I wouldn’t give.”
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