AC: Round 2 - Group 5

[Inwuhou]

Inwuhou worked at her stinging eyes and tried to rub the splatterings of bile out of them. She had forgotten about how her eyelids worked. Only after the noxious stuff had actually hit did raw animal reflexes blink her eyes, but it was far too late. Everything had a sort of brownish-yellowish-greenish sheen to it, tinged with the red of sudden pain in the eyes. Pain she was disciplined to suppress, but the color shift was very annoying.

The offending cadaver had fallen right over the side of the tree a moment later, its animus cut by a plate through the treetop. The vomitus had its own ontological inertia. By the time that Inwuhou eased herself into the internal stairs in the tree, she came to the realization that her immense difficulty in finding out where to put her foot stemmed not just from the darkness within but from the way that her corneas were slowly dissolving.

Eyes were so annoyingly fragile.

"What were they?" Inwuhou's voice had a gritted-teeth tone to it, as the touch of her own fingers brought a fresh, cold pain. Everything brightened and went blurry.

"Undead, reanimated cadavers. I guess they were the last inhabitants of this place." Erissa spoke from her horizontal position on the landing. The stenches of the swamp were not so strong here. There was mainly the smell of damp wood and a hint of stones. The hollow core was like a member of some giant's pipe organ and thrummed with a deep subsonic note that gently vibrated Erissa's lungs.

"Wh-What?" Inwuhou stopped rubbing. There was a lot more thick, sticky wetness on her hands than she thought could come from the splatter. Bearing the raw pain in her eyes was straining the best of her training. The whole scene had merged together into a dark gray.

Erissa sighed, "Sometimes, after someone is dead, they don't stay dead. But they don't come alive, either. Their body moves about without doing any of those things that living things do. Eat, drink, sleep. I think these attacked us because they died in some kind of emotional anguish. They acted with the single-mindedness of a soul twisted to desperate anger."

The elf looked over, her eyes adjusted to the light inside, and froze. Her partner was looking back at her with hemorrhages where her eyes used to be, her face a reddened splash of burns, and her formerly serene expression tense with the effort of suppressing pain.

"I... see." Inwuhou fell back to mantra, blanking her mind protectively.

Color does not differ from void. Void does not differ from color.

"Are you... what happened?" Erissa laboriously climbed to her feet.

Color is void. Void is color.

"No. Yes. I... can't find it." Inwuhou slowly ground out. She was trying to trace back to the moment of the splash so that something could be done about it, but could not concentrate. Not that concentrating would have helped much, since her History Sense was flapping around like a stringless kite in a typhoon.

Without eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body, still with color, sound, scent, taste, and touch.

"You can't find what? And... uh..." Erissa reached for a strip of cloth for a bandage.

Color does not differ-

An epiphany struck Inwuhou. The mantra meant that she should not observe the world with fleshly senses, because that would fundamentally tie her spirit to the flesh. It also meant that the fleshly senses and the History Senses are the same thing. What her body sensed and what it remembered sensing is as much a part of history as anything else.

Erissa approached the stock-still nun and reached forward with the bandage, "Don't move, I'm going to stop the bleeding first. Hold-"

Inwuhou traced, deleted, and stitched. Her injury unhappened.

"- still?" There was suddenly nothing to wrap. Erissa peered at the serene, unmarred face looking back at her. "That's a nice trick."

"I understood something. Thank you, for opening my eyes." Inwuhou smiled at Erissa. Simultaneously, she smiled at the carpenter carving a sculpture into the side of a step of the tree. The carpenter was a light-framed, dark-haired man who wore an expression of ecstatic determination on his drawn face. Little curls of wood drifted from the substrate under his chisel. The carving was an idealized face, its mouth open to speak words that had already been cut into the space to its right.

She could see now and then together.

Erissa put away the bandage, rather more curious than confused and more tired than curious. "Well, let's rest here, then. That fight took it out of me."

Inwuhou watched Erissa settle back into the landing at the top. She watched the mottled green-and-white snake wind its way slowly across the abandoned step, years ago, towards an unsuspecting tree frog. "Sleep well. I will watch over us all."

Erissa woke to moonlight slanting from the top. Her muscles had lost their burning sensation, but she was sure that she'll be feeling the delayed complaints in a day or two. She stretched, blinked, and heard the nun's soft breathing. It was buried underneath the undirected chorus of insects from outside and the steady thrumming of the tree-pipe.

"Did you just sit there the whole time?"

There was no response. Erissa leaned closer and waved her hand across Inwuhou's face. There was no response.

"If you've gone catatonic, I'm not about to carry you over stairs."

"That won't be necessary." Without the slightest change in posture or breathing, Inwuhou exited her meditation.

"Well, let's go. We're burning moonlight." The stairs downwards was covered in shadows broken only by the occasional, faintly luminescent shelf fungus. That proved a mild challenge to Erissa's elvish eyes, but she had to consider the load of a partner.

"Keep to the wall and feel out your step. I'll warn you if there's gaps. Going to scout ahead." The elf set off at a steady pace.

"It will not be necessary." Inwuhou's voice came from not so far behind. She, too, was navigating the steps with relative ease. "These steps have always been here. Did you know that this... tube had once been full of water?"

"Water? Whatever for?"

"I don't know. I don't understand their tongue. It was good, clean water. I tasted it. They carved these steps, then the water stopped flowing."

"After?" Erissa swung over two broken steps by hanging onto an empty torch bracket driven into the wall, "You mean the tree was hollow to begin with?"

"Yes, I think so. The water flowed up, then it didn't. There were times when it was flowing and had steps. There were times when it was not flowing and had steps. When they were on the steps when the water was not flowing, they were all sickly. Ill-fed. They wanted to go down."

"We want to go down. What's down?"

"I don't know."

Time was difficult to track in the darkness, even the angle of the moon's light was difficult to discern so far away. After what felt like hours of Inwuhou telling random little stories about what she was seeing of the extinct people, the nun suddenly told Erissa, "Come back."

It was easy, only five or six steps and a hop over half a pick-head to get back to Inwuhou. Erissa asked, "What? Saw someone making a secret door?"

Inwuhou shook her head, "Not exactly. Can you please pass me a knife?"

She slipped the knife into an almost invisible seam in the wood, "I see a group of people making this and filling it. They look disappointed and resigned." Then she pried.

A veneer of wood fell out, bounced off of the step, and tumbled off into the darkness. The revealed cubbyhole had three books in it, each two hand-spans long and the same wide. Most curiously, the cover and the pages were colored with the patina of ages. The binding was made of three copper rings. A thin layer of dried mud was caked on the bottom of the cubby-hole.

"Books." Erissa accepted the knife back and reached in for the topmost book. It was locked at the other edge with some kind of clasp.

"Manuals." Inwuhou reached over and undid the clasp with apparently experienced ease, struggling only a little in the places where the joints had cold-welded together.

The pages were the black hues of weathered copper. The drawings etched into the heavy pages depicted the tree, the words were in small blocks and pointed at various parts.

"I think these are schematics and work instructions." Erissa breathed.

"They were put in after the water had stopped."