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."

[Sagequeen]

Erissa furrowed her brows in thought as she turned the metal pages of the book.

“Water,” she mumbled, looking up and out into the night sky. “This would explain the waterfalls that flowed from the branches.” The pieces all began falling into place. “So, according to this people's history, they were led here by a powerful being, a god even, who created this tree and the swamp around it from arid land. The size of the tree suggests the roots are very deep, probably tapping into a natural aquifer. But why would the people destroy their source of life?” She picked up the next book and flipped through its weathered pages, and she found her answer. Nodding, Erissa showed it to Inwuhou.

“Yes, I see,” the nun said softly. “They wanted to expand the swamp.” The engraved image showed a rough map of the land, with the border clearly marked. Beyond it was a dotted line, the area in between shaded.

“They needed more water.” Erissa shook her head, peering down into the murky darkness below them. “You were right, Inwuhou. The tree was hollow to begin with. It drew the water from the aquifer and let it spill from its mighty branches.” The elf’s dainty finger traced along the etching in the copper. “They thought they could make the tree produce more water by making the hole down the center larger.” She shook her head sadly. “Let us go further down.”

Erissa summoned an orb of crackling energy, white and prismatic at its edges, and it drifted slowly before the elf as she continued down the stairs. The pair only had to navigate a few rough places where the wood had given way to time, but for the most part, the stairs were solid. Erissa peered down, her ball of energy darted down to the base, and the elf, with her superior sight, saw a sight that made her stomach clench.

“Look,” she whispered to Inwuhou, who nodded knowingly. “The alter. There is a book...” Erissa jogged haphazardly down the final few stairs to the stone that had been carried down to the pit ages ago. The wide, flat expanse of the bottom of the tree was littered with bones, the glowing orb revealed as it hovered through the air. The elf picked her way carefully through the remains and to the alter.

The nun’s face twitched slightly, and she seemed not to hear Erissa’s words as she watched the history of the people who lay dead. The sound of parchment whispered ancient secrets and the arcanist flipped through the pages. Erissa provided commentary for Inwuhou with every turn, though it was unnecessary. With her odd sight, she watched the men and women working, at first, merry and determined with their task. The vision morphed to another time, later, when the people were weary, arguing inside the lip of the water-filled trunk. There was no sound of rain, nor of waterfalls.

“...and here,” Erissa said softly, her orb hovering gently over the pages of the book, “the illustrations seem to indicate the water flow stopped completely, and there were two groups, arguing against one another.”

Inwuhou could smell the blood as freshly as when it was spilled; the body tumbled down through the shaft in the tree and landed in a heap not far from where she stood. The muffled sound of shouting and clanging metal echoed from above, and to the nun’s right stood a group of men and women, bound in shackles and frightened within the depths of the tree, which had become their prison.

“It was war,” Erissa said sadly. With the turn of another page, the elf was horrified at what she saw. “It would seem the clergy were victorious.” She regarded the drawings of men and women draped in robes and finery, hands uplifted in thankgiving as the alter was lowered down into the base of the tree. “And the losers...”

“Were sacrificed in an attempt to appease the deity,” Inwuhou finished, watching a young man strapped to the cold, hard stone, and an older man standing over him with dagger in hand. The blood flowed freely, mingling with the smell of freshly cut wood, filling the nun’s nostrils.

“Yes,” Erissa said absently, engrossed in the book. She did not notice the sallow, decrepit bodies quietly scaling the stairs. The turn of another page, and another scene was replayed upon the parchment. The elf’s hand went to her mouth as she saw what was recorded. She flipped through the remaining pages, only to find them all blank, and went back to the last image again. “Oh, by the Thaynes,” she mumbled.

There was light, as if the very sun descended from the skies, and it filled the chamber in Inwuhou’s vision. The winged deity burned in its wrath, and its very voice caused everything to shake as it screamed. The clergy huddled in a nook, terrified. The burning light of the deity fell upon the dead body of the young man on the altar.

“The winged figure... cursed them.” Erissa said in disbelief. One by one, the pale corpses left the stairs, and Inwuhou turned in horror to see them, wondering if her sight was malfunctioning again. “These drawings, Inwuhou, it looks as though the dead ones who attacked us before were like those in the book.”

“Erissa,” Inwuhou whispered harshly. “Turn around.” The elf slowly complied, her eyes not leaving the tome until she saw a row of cold, dead feet above the top of her book. The undead leered at the intruders, and in her surprise and fear, Erissa’s orb flickered and faded.

There was only the shrill sound of two voices screaming for a few brief moments, and the elf neither saw nor hear any more.

Conlusion

[Revenant]

-2 to Wildcard due to tournament posting rules.

Plot: (24)

Storytelling (8) – A very unique story, with a definite flair that neither made your characters seem helpless nor too competent. The questioning nature of your character gave it a very subtle, building horror and the ending was the perfect way to cap it off, with a sharp rise of horror before the off-screen visceral finish.

Setting (8) – You made very good use of the setting, varying the tree enough that it felt like more than simply a tree. The dead nature of the swamp and the moldering village was complimented quite well by the atmosphere that you built up, building a pallor of ancient decay that really brought the thread to life.

Pacing (8) – The bunnying that you two did with one another’s characters really made this thread flow very well. There were a couple of parts where putting the other’s characters bunnied actions in disrupted the general pace that you had built up, and this was something that you both did on occasion, but even those were minor and never really pulled me out of the flow of the thread’s writing.

Character: (20)

Communication (7) – What really gave you the boost here was the creep of Inwuhou’s mental degradation. The way you both described her problem and Erissa’s reaction to it really built up your character’s personalities. The hints of lightheartedness that I got, such as when Erissa woke and questioned Inwuhou’s consciousness, made a good relief from the action and horror of the previous scene without completely removing the reader from the flow of your thread.

Action (6) – To be honest, your fight with the undead on the tree limb was probably the weakest area of this thread. Things in that scene happened a bit too quickly to really get a good feel for it. Aside from that the only other thing in the thread that was jarring was how often Inwuhou’s closed eyes were mentioned. I think only confronting the issue once or twice would have made it a better story point.

Persona (7) – This character that this thread really focused on was Inwuhou, and you did that well. Not that Erissa’s character wasn’t developed, but I certainly didn’t get as strong a feel for who she was character-wise as the mentally time-travelling nun.

Prose: (22)

Mechanics (7) – I noticed one misspell and one wrong word as I was reading, generally not too bad but it did pull me out of the flow of the thread.

Clarity (7) – You did a good job of explaining the concept of Inwuhou sort of losing her grasp on reality was well-done. You did a good job of communicating the concept of the tree without losing me as a reader, especially with the exposition at the end to really tie it all together. In Inwuhou’s last post however, there was a bit of confusion on my part as to the nature of the stairs inside the tree and their relationship to what was going on. After finishing the last post I understood the creepy foreshadowing that was going on there, but in my initial read-through I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on.

Technique (8) – Good horror doesn’t constantly bombard the reader with the atmosphere and you pulled that off here. Each time you did something horrible to your characters there was a moment of lightness following it to lull the reader into a sense of security. The ending came at me completely unexpectedly since I was assuming, given your characters’ interactions after the first undead attack, that the battle on the tree limb was the action climax and that all that was left was exposition. The final lines really clinched the entire feeling of this thread.

Wildcard: (5)

Total: 71

Sagequeen receives 746 exp and 100 gp.
Inwuhou receives 355 exp and 60 gp.