AC: Round 2 - Group 5

[Revenant]

This thread is reserved for members of Group 5. The thread will open at noon on September 7th (Pacific time) and will be closed after two weeks.

Good Luck!

Group 5
Sagequeen
Inwuhou

[Sagequeen]

Bunnies approved for Erissa. Let me know if your bunnies are okay.

Erissa Caedron's eyes popped open in the weak starlight, the scent of rot and decay saturating her acute sense of smell. She lay very still for a few moments, flat on her back and staring through a putrefied haze up into the boughs of dead trees, draped with trailing beards of lichen. The high elf's body was cold and clammy, and she sensed water on all sides.

How charming, the elf thought to herself. By the looks of it, she had been dropped in the center of a swamp, and by the lack of sound, it was not teeming with life as it should have been. Erissa slowly turned her head to each side, with little to take in except more trees, the dilapidated remains of old, wooden buildings and a woman, eyes still closed, near her. With slow, measured movements, the elf sat up.

“Oh, my word,” Erissa whispered as she rose, bracing her upper body's incline with her elbows. She rolled on her side toward the woman and nudged her shoulder gently.

“I am awake,” the woman said softly, her young face serene and unlined with care or worry.

“I believe I have located our objective already,” Erissa whispered. “It is a giant, dead-”

“Tree,” the woman said. “I see it.”

Erissa cocked her head at her companion, who, as far as the elf could tell, had not yet opened her eyes. With a shrug, Erissa turned her gaze back to the monolithic ruin that soared through a break in the umbrage, as wide as any mansion she had seen in Corone, and far taller. The high elf sighed as she rose, her tight leathers flexing and creaking. As she surveyed the land immediately around them, Erissa realized the two had been ported to a somewhat precarious place; they rested atop the remains of a giant limb, whose ancient bark was worn nearly smooth through time and decay. As she walked the length of it, searching for a way to descend to the mucky swamp below, she heard the young woman behind her rise.

“People once lived here, on the firmer parts of the ground and in platforms they built in the trees,” Erissa commented, squinting into the murky shadows. The faltering moonlight barely penetrated the swaths of fog, but where it did, the bones of houses and walkways shone palely. “I wonder what happened to them.”

[Inwuhou]

That was the question that Inwuhou had been working on when she was politely interrupted by her new companion. She had cast her senses deep into the abyssal sea of history to observe the faint echoes.

She first encountered their own arrival. They were laid down, peacefully asleep, onto the bough by people visible only by their wavering shadows in the weak morning sunlight. The temptation to follow these porters back had been suppressed with some effort; there were other, more important things to be curious about.

Inwuhou plunged through the echo shells of the previous two centuries, skimming along from moment to moment. Trees stood up and shrank down to seeds. The waters lost a little of their wine-dark color and the stench abated a little. Twigs and small branches leapt out of the swamp and back onto their decaying stumps on the great, dead tree. The moments became increasingly fragmented as she delved further back. Three hundred years. Four hundred.

Suddenly, things changed. The bough underfoot was covered in thick bark. A veritable wall of leaves sprouted from the myriad branches, which were no longer drooping. A black-haired boy hopped onto the branch from above, ran laughing towards the trunk, and was pursued by two more laughing boys. Then a migraine slapped Inwuhou in the brain; the echoes went out of focus and smeared into incoherence.

She moved a little back in time and revisited that fragment again. There were three boys, each perhaps eight or nine years old, in costumes of leathers and bark. The branches were laden with thick, knotted ropes and rope-ladders by the dozens, many of which had climbers. A house of planks, sited on a platform of planks, sat in the nearest wye of her local branch. It was uninhabited, rotted through, and falling slowly to the black swamp-waters below in pieces.

Inwuhou frowned inwardly at recognizing temporal dissociation. The image of the house must be from centuries later; she could see that the patch of black water below transitioned to green waters further away without passing through any discernable boundary or transition. She needed to come back to the present for a rest.

The nun reeled herself through history and came to a split second in the past of the present. Her companion was silently looking away into the early dawn shadows, but some subconscious part of Inwuhou insisted that there was a conversation going on. Inwuhou's hands, folded inside each other's sleeves, twitched slightly.

A few second's foray into the near past caught her up to the non-conversation, "I don't know, yet. The answer lies at the top."

Centuries of accumulated dirt had hidden the small handholds and footholds carved into the trunk of the tree, but their surface still felt very different from the time-ravaged wood around them. Inwuhou reached out and unerringly placed her hand in one of these pockets and started scraping.

"An old way."

[Sagequeen]

Erissa peered up at the looming tree, wondering how tall it might have been in life. She found it exceedingly odd that a branch would be level with the ground, unless, of course, over the eons the mighty tree had sunk into the swamp under its own weight. Above them, many of the other branches had long since broken and fallen to the bog, undone by their own massive weight. All that remained of them were nubs, and a sad, broken crown, robbed of its jaggedness.

“I am Erissa Caedron, of the Ixian Knights,” the elf said confidently. She inspected the young woman's busy fingers as they dug the caked layers of muck and decay from what appeared to be a means to scale the tree. The woman's modest attire did not strike Erissa as fit for an adventurer, though she remembered with some amusement that she had completed the first round of the tournament in her nightgown.

“Inwuhou,” she replied, less interested in friendly chatter than moving forward. Erissa nodded, and with a regrettably deep breath of the putrid air, she removed her small dagger. As her companion cleared the first few right side holds, the elf worked to clear the left, her dagger proving very efficient. She had soon stood cleared all she could reach, and standing an inch taller than her companion, Erissa had to struggle to reach the next hold. The moist dirt rained down on her from above, and Erissa squinted as she dug into the foothold with the thin, mythril blade.

“Surely there is a better way,” the elf said reluctantly. “We could spend the entire tournament clearing these footholds and still never see the top, or be assured they will lead all the way up there.” Erissa bent down and mussed her silver hair thoroughly, trying to loose the dirt. The nun spoke with her actions, working diligently at the task of reaching the furthest foothold she could and prying the dirt from it with her fingernails. “I will go first, then,” Erissa sighed, “with the dagger. It will be quicker.”

The arcanist tucked the dagger in its little, oiled leather sheath, and with a nod, secured her hands in the two highest holds. She tucked the toe of her boot into the first hold, and, raising herself from the ground, she secured her other foot. Erissa brought herself higher and removed the dagger, chipping away at the dirt in all the holes she could reach. Every few steps she had to repeat the process; the drudgery went on until Erissa's arms ached and sharp pains shot through her chest. The elf glanced down at Inwuhou, who was shielding her face from the falling debris. They had come but a quarter way up the tree.

“I suppose if this is all we have to face...” The elf checked herself. She knew better than to invite calamity with such a brazen declaration, even in jest. A half smile found its way onto her refined features, and a sparkle twinkled in the corners of her eyes. The amusement disappeared immediately when she noticed the bleached bones of a hand, fingers emerging from the dirt. She pulled her hand back immediately, and her body quaked, almost throwing her from the tree, but Erissa quickly realized that hand had not moved in ages.

The high elf shuddered, but she swallowed and continued on, attempting to pry the bones loose. However, the further she dug, the further the hold seemed to grow. The morning light began to break over the trees, and though it fought to pierce a pregnant dawn cloud cover, it was enough for Erissa to see that they had reached something much more than a simple foothold. To the left and right, old metal spikes protruded from the great trunk of the tree. Erissa knew immediately they had been placed as the support for a platform, the wood or woven rope long since disintegrated.

“Look out below,” Erissa called down to Inwuhou. With some effort, the elf telekenetically assaulted the widening hole, removing man-sized hunks of the dirt and sending them crashing to the land below them. She pulled herself up and over the lip of the small cave, and soon, her companion's head peaked up and she joined the elf. Erissa continued clearing the cave haphazardly, as a dog would uncover a bone. She gasped and covered her mouth when, in a spray of dirt and debris, a lone skeleton pirouetted macabrely, uncovered by the final heaving of dirt.

[Inwuhou]

The skeleton's bones were a dark, dirty brown from its long burial in the tannin-saturated earth. Like morta, many of its features were excellently preserved: scraps of naturally tanned skin was drawn and tight, a tightly-squeezed eyelid remained of its face, one emanciated hand tightly clutched something thin and long, and tattered remnants of a coarse-woven robe stuck to him wetly.

When the whole mass struck the cavern ground with a sad thump, it came apart. The fingers bent and dangled loosely off of the hand, connected by just a thin strip of leather. The rusted-through knife turned into so much brown dust. The mandible cartwheeled across the ground and came to rest against Inwuhou's foot. The nun stared in her eyes-closed idiom, but it was not at the gapped arc of blackened teeth. She was watching a brown-haired man, his cheeks sunken and his arm like skin wrapped around bones, advance on her while tightly grasping a knife - the same knife. The desperate, hungry, deranged look in his eyes caused her to take a step back, then another. Inwuhou's fingers came out of her wide sleeves holding a few small, brassy-yellow needles.

"Erissa...?" Where had the elf gone to? She was right there just a few seconds ago.

Erissa turned in time to see her companion take a third step back from the corpse. The elf's ears picked up the faint sound of many tiny things hissing through the air followed by a spat of quiet thuds against the mold-covered cave wall nearby. Half a dozen little needles quivered there half-buried, their vibrating tails still humming the tones of struck metal.

"What are you ...?" Erissa began.

Inwuhou wasn't listening. The man advancing on her had ignored her needles entirely and was raising his knife for a strike. Her ears faintly registered the sound of someone begging in an alien tongue. The thought of ghosts shivered at the back at her head, but her training seized her body by the spine. Erissa watched the nun smoothly grab the air, kick at the knee of nothing, and advance to slam her elbow in a painful-looking way into the solid cave wall.

With the sudden pain, the attacker vanished. Erissa reappeared, bearing an expression of concern, suspicion, and confusion. Inwuhou clutched at her stricken elbow, air hissing in through her clenched teeth, and fought to find her center of calm.

"Where did he go?" She asked, ten seconds later.

"Where did who go?"

"The man with the knife. The one attacking me." Inwuhou's education had never touched upon the phrase 'duh'. There were too many instances of obvious things not being what they seem; the Wuji nunnery had excised that expression from their grounds.

"The... skeleton?" Erissa wasn't quite sure whether her companion was insane or seeing ghosts.

Inwuhou went stock still for a long minute, "Let's... let's move on. It might have been a ghost."

[Sagequeen]

“Ghost,” Erissa repeated hollowly, the sound falling dead against the dirt and humus in the shallow cave. The elf sighed heavily; she had seen nothing to suggest such a thing, only a young woman fending off an attack Erissa herself could not see. She cast a sideways glance at Inwuhou, gauging the woman's sanity. To the Ixian's knowledge, she had yet to even open her eyes, though she had navigated each step and foothold as though her vision were perfect. With a deep breath, Erissa looked more closely at the scattered pieces of the corpse, the skin decorated with inky black markings that were barely visible.

The deadly needles Inwuhou had thrown were half-buried in the back of the hollow, and the violently loosened dirt around one of them gave way. Likewise, another of the embedded weapons fell with a thud to the floor below, revealing an even surface where it had been. Her curiosity piqued, Erissa gently pried away more of the thin layer of dirt, collecting the needles as she loosed them. She returned them to Inwuhou's extended hand and peered intently at the porous surface. She detected a convex surface.

The elf worked quickly to uncover what appeared to be a baked clay vase, complete with a chipped lid. On either side of the vessel she removed, Erissa could see another, though by the cracked sides, it seemed as though the lids had given and they were filled with dirt. Her fingers twitched as she carried the pot to the lip of the cave for better light, and she lifted the lid. The inner part of the pottery still retained some of its glaze, though the parchment inside threatened to crumble with the slightest touch. With the most delicate concentration, Erissa telekenetically lifted the rolled stack through the neck of the pottery. The paper retained some of its moisture, and while parts of it flaked away, she was able to unroll it enough to look at what was written upon it.

She marveled at the depiction of a lofty tree, from whose mighty branches cascaded a myriad waterfalls to a thriving wetland below. Time had leeched much of the color from it, but a hint of green and blue remained. With the precision of a master, Erissa separated the first page, and without touching it, guided it gently to rest upon a mound of dirt. The next page contained a title in another language, and enough script to reach the bottom of the parchment.

“I cannot say for certain,” the elf said studiously, “but it looks like a journal of sorts. Perhaps a set of records... these appear to be dates. I cannot read the language; I have never seen anything like it.”

“Nor have I,” Inwuhou replied, seeming to have regained her composure. After shuffling through several pages, the handwriting noticeably changed, and the entries became shorter through several pages.

“Look,” Erissa said. “The handwriting has changed again. It would seem these are records.” Page after page slipped to the ground, the act of shuffling through them revealing not words, but mood and intensity. Where once the writing was prim and straight, the odd characters were hastily scribbled, flowing in uncoordinated waves across the parchment.

The final page sent a shudder through Erissa's being. Three words were etched, in places ripping the paper, with a deliberate though shaking hand. Three words, and splattered ink more sienna in color than the writing. She glanced at Inwuhou questioningly, wondering if the young woman also believed it to be blood. With another shiver up her spine, Erissa was inclined to agree with her companion that it would be best to continue their ascent.

“I will see where the next set of footholds are,” Erissa said. She let the final page flutter from the mouth of the cave, drifting like a leaf that had fallen from the tree. The elf leaned carefully outward, surveying the weathered bark of the tree, but she could not find the next set of carved footholds. However, what she did see gave her pause for hope.

Level as they were with the metal spikes that once supported a walkway, Erissa could clearly see an angle cut into the bark where the planks would have been secured. It would be a perfect toehold, and likely would continue upward in its spiral to the apex. The size and channeling nature of it had prevented it from being caked with the same grime they had fought on their first climb.

Erissa stepped out, her fingers finding grooves in the worn bark and the balls of her feet resting comfortably in the groove. She felt an odd comfort leaving the hollow, and soon Inwuhou shimmied onto the side of the tree. It was quicker going than digging out footholds, but just as treacherous. Several times the bark had come loose from the tree as Erissa tested it, and once she had almost fallen. Inwuhou's steadying hand, quicker than the elf could have imagined, saved her from a fall.

Several yards behind them, a cold wind ruffled the pages in the cave and sent them fluttering into the empty air.

[Sagequeen]

The going was treacherous, and the sun sailed high overhead, a softly glowing orb struggling against unnatural, sulking clouds. Erissa looked around warily, expecting anything that would break the calm and steady progress, and yet, nothing happened, and it made the high elf more nervous than if there truly had been a ghost.

“Nothing lives here,” Erissa sighed, the expanse of the swamp below a forlorn diorama in testament to the fact. Not even the chirruping of crickets salted the air. The mournful voice of the breeze whispered things to the elf, told a story in wordless breaths and sighs as the pair inched along. They had already passed a number of the dirt-packed caves that dotted the incline of the path, and had left them undisturbed, despite Erissa's burning desire to know more of what happened. Her mind spun as she wondered at the great tree, once strong and alive.

She peered ahead, the curve of the tree slight because of its size, and her eye was drawn to something green, which was out of place in the dead land. The high elf slid her feet along the channel more quickly, her hands searching for cracks and holds in the bark, and several minutes later, Erissa looked in wonder at the series of plaques, each at tall as she was, that were secured to the tree.

“Inwuhou,” Erissa said, stunned. “This is incredible!” The elf's fingers traced along the beautiful relief, the corroded copper like sandpaper to the touch. It had been beaten and formed, and though it once must have shone brilliantly, time had painted it with a protective layer of verdigris. Erissa shuffled forward, shifting her body to look back at the plaque in its entirety.

The land depicted was dry and barren, and a group of people looked lovingly upon a winged being, who cradled a large seed in its hands. Erissa hastily moved forward to the next plaque her eyes wide with wonder. The relief showed the winged being above a flourishing tree, and streams of water from its branches creating pools around its base. The people carried tools, and they were in various stages of building. Erissa excitedly chatted to Inwuhou, not even aware of what she was saying, nor that the young woman was not listening.

As Erissa moved forward to the next plaque, she never realized her companion had not moved, instead gripping the bark as the world shifted around her. In the nun's odd vision, men with tools walked the pathway behind her. A caretaker led a group of frolicking children and paused in front of each copper relief, instructing them in a tongue Inwuhou could not understand.

Ahead Erissa shuffled to the next plaque, and in it the swamp was alive with trees and vines, people and wildlife. The winged being was still above the tree, which had grown so tall it dwarfed all the other trees. The people far below seemed happy and content in the fullness of their little city. Erissa all but stumbled to get to the next relief, leaving Inwuhou further behind. A man was depicted, dressed in robes and finery, and he pointed to the top of the tree as a group of workers bored the very footholds Erissa and Inwuhou had used before. The elf sighed with frustration; each successive plaque in the series had been destroyed. Something, or some one, had dented them beyond any recognition. Several of the plaques had been knocked from the tree entirely.

“Erissa! Where are you?” Inwuhou yelled, reaching out with a free arm. Around her the world was shifting, the phantom pathway behind her dilapidated. Elderly people shuffled up it, their arms raised and weak voices lifted in song. Their robes were torn and dirty, and the one who led them seemed to beg to the sky for something, the grief cracking his voice.

Erissa's head snapped from the plaque to Inwuhou, and she all but cursed herself as she quickly shuffled back down the incline where the young woman called for her. The elf lay a gentle hand on the woman's shoulder.

“Here, Inwuhou,” she urged. “What is happening to you?”

[Inwuhou]

Inwuhou fought the surge of metaphysical nausea that came with working up Paradox. It had been a close thing, the fall. She had crossed four cubby-holes in the twinkle of an eye to get to Erissa by slicing time thin; the elf had fallen all of three inches and the lifting hand to the back was simplicity itself. Now, the backlash struck.

The nun was almost hidden around the broad curve of the tree. She was slowed because it is very hard to climb using holes that all observation insisted was, in fact, filled with very solid pieces of metal. There was solid wooden stairs laid upon those metal supports, spiralling all the way around the tree. In the green-tinted shadows cast by the bountiful leaves overhead, a dozen people went about their unconcerned lives. Hanging from the rails every two feet, zig-zag waxpaper tassels blew in a warm, pleasant wind. Two young people leaned against the rail and one another, apparently discussing a future together. A bare-chested man bearing three skewers of roast fish whistled foreign melodies as he came up the stairs. He shouted a greeting to three elders, who broke from their congregation to inquire about something. Inwuhou didn't understand a single word, but she did understand the good-natured laughter at the answer.

It was an uncommon injury among history nuns; a detached retina in the History Sight left all of one's senses drifting haphazardly through history. She could not see or feel her hands or any other part of her; they didn't exist then. Each attempt to focus back to the present simply settled the scene on a different time and worsened the injury.

The tree was dead, higher from the waters from now. She felt a cold rain, but the sun was shining clearly through the blackened, denuded branches above.

The tree was flowering, its white petals drifting like a light snow through the air. Laughing children made necklaces of the flowers. The waters below were covered with little, floating white boats.

It was night and there was singing. The lanterns below illuminated individual boats. The occupants were casting grains into the water and singing something dirge-like. The tree was dying.

A heavy rain was pouring from the sky. The great streams of water issuing from the branches were even greater torrents now. A flock of miserable-looking ducks took shelter on the walkway, huddled against the trunk.

A scaffold was around the top of the tree, men worked with saws and hammers and other tools to-

Erissa finally finished the climb back down to where Inwuhou clung to the holes with white-knuckled death-grips. The nun was muttering incantations or something of the sort, but the text of it all boiled down to: "Oh no, oh no, calm down, I fear what is happening."

"Hey, what is wrong?" The elf asked. As far as she could tell, there was absolutely nothing in this stretch of the wood that she hadn't climbed through a few minutes ago. There was no reaction.

After trying a few more times with words, Erissa finally tired and applied something a little more physical. Inwuhou snapped back long enough to mutter, "I observe them all. Everything, everytime, is here. They all here. There was so much wailing but the sun was shining and there was no rain. The waterfalls. It was the waterfalls? The people... and the waterfalls."

"What are-" Erissa began, but saw the slight tilt of the head that indicated Inwuhou slipping away again. She applied the physical methods again.

"-ey are dew-drops, or flashes of lightning. Like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows. Contemplate them thus. All phenomena are dew-drops-" Inwuhou stopped the mantra and turned her head towards Erissa, "Erissa."

"What are you going on about?"

"I see everything. Everything." There was a terror in her voice equal to that of a child who had suddenly gone blind. Seeing everything is like seeing nothing. "There are as many snow-covered Wuji as there are flakes of snow on Wuji. There are as many past thoughts retained as present thoughts lost. All innumerable. There are as many-"

Something clicked together in Erissa's mind, "Use your own eyes!"

They were sea-green and watered in the first light in decades. They blinked.

"It- it hurts..." They squinted mightily

"It hurts more if you hang there until your arms give in and fall. Come on."

When the sun was most of the way up the sky, the two came to another wide branch crossing the path of the spiral steps. The top of the tree seemed not so far away as before, yet seemed an unreacheable distance away through the lens of the rubbery burning of their limbs. The shrine, built of stones that must have been hauled up here with great labors, was sited in a nook carved into the end of the branch. Little copper plates, black-green with age, hung from the blackened silver tree-idol. They had words etched into them, it seemed.

[Sagequeen]

“If only I knew this tongue,” Erissa sighed, rubbing at the tarnish on the old shrine. From the looks of what remained, and the holes bored into the tree along the branch, there had been a structure or gate at one time. “It would seem, if I could venture a guess, that only certain people were allowed past this point. The deity pictured on the copper plaques back there lived above the tree. Perhaps there was a clergy,” The high elf shook her head sadly. “But why did everything, everyone, die? Did their protector forsake them? Did they anger it by ascending the tree?”

Inwuhou blinked repeatedly, her eyes struggling to focus and process the light. It was difficult to determine within the muddling of second-sight visions she had experienced.

“I can't say,” the young woman responded, still shaken. Erissa nodded thoughtfully.

“Well,” the arcanist said lightly, hoping to reassure her companion, “I do have good news.” With a smile, Erissa walked to the forward edge of the limb, surveying the spiraling channel. The elf glanced back at the idol, and with a small amount of effort, snapped several of the copper plates, roughly three feet square each, from the statue. With surprising force, Erissa slammed each one in succession into the channel, embedding them like stairs. “Let us see how long I can allow us a little more ease.”

The high elf stepped lightly onto the first plate, hopped gracefully to the next, and turned to motion for Inwuhou to follow. The young woman quickly followed, and after she had cleared the first platform, Erissa wrenched it from its place and swung it around ahead of herself.

“At this rate,” Inwuhou said with relief, “we well make the top before we lose the light.”

The screeching of metal caught the elf's ears first; Erissa's head whipped around to the branch from which they had just come. To her dread, the shrine had been pulled from its nook and sat facing the intruders.

“How did that happen?” Erissa asked her eyes wide with fear.

“Perhaps you loosened it when you pulled the plaques from it,” Inwuhou suggested, but the elf shook her head. Erissa pressed forward again, more quickly as the trailing plates flew to the front, creating a stable, albeit narrow, walkway for them.

It was then the whispers began, snippits and phrases carried on the breeze, drifting around the two adventurers and on the edges of their awareness. The intensity of the voices increased as they ascended further, traces of malice in the otherworldly utterances.

[Sagequeen]

The assault came with little more warning than a shrill, hollow wail that raised goosebumps on Erissa's arms. The copper plates flew through the air at her command, embedding themselves in the channel, and she and Inwuhou were nearing the top of the great tree.

As the wail trailed away to a gurgling moan, bits of bark pelted them from above, and Erissa screamed as she gazed upward. Descending like spiders along the vertical trunk of the tree were a number of pale, rotting cadavers, belching streams of thick, putrid bile that dripped down the bark.

One among the two scores of them leaped, landing squarely on Erissa's back, and the elf bucked and screamed as the plate below her groaned with the shock of weight. Inwuhou's hands appeared from her sleeves and embedded her needles deep in the corpse's back, but it was unfazed. The thing hissed, and its jaw split open to reveal blackened teeth, and its head snapped forward as it aimed for Erissa's neck. The elf dropped to her knees, using all her telekenetic strength to dislodge the copper plate where she stood, and with a mighty splintering, the two beings and the plate were airborn.

Erissa hung in mid-air, suspended by her own power, and the twirling plate shot upward, slicing through the air like a guillotine. It found its target, chopping another of the closest corpses in half.

“Run!” Erissa cried to Inwuhou as she landed on the foremost plate. “The next branch!” The elf flung plates wildly, tripping several times as she looked back to focus on bringing the next sheet of metal forward. She aimed bolt after bolt of prismatic energy into the approaching hoard, knocking several of them down as they angled their descent toward the intruders. Just as the horrors neared them the women made a dangerous leap, augmented by Erissa's telekenetic power, onto the slippery surface of the branch.

They would make their stand there, protected on three side by air and bottle-necking the undead.

A wave of the re-animated cadavers approached without caution, slathering and maddened at the presence of life, and with several well-placed strikes, Inwuhou sent them flailing to the ground far below. Erissa picked them off as they descended the tree, knocking them away with her bolts of energy and power of mind.

“They keep coming,” Inwuhou yelled, the cries of their enemies drowning her voice.

“Keep fighting!” Erissa screamed, and she dislodged several of the plates in a concerted effort, sending them upward and flat against the tree. The metal ripped through wrists and ankles as it flew up and down again. The rest of the plates arranged themselves in the channel beyond the branch. “And keep moving,” she cried as she led the way, using the bile covered plate as both shield and weapon.

More of the undead spilled from over the broken crown of the tree, many of them careening and bouncing from its trunk, and many more dispatched by the able nun and the young arcanist. The two climbed steadily upward along the remaining plates Erissa manipulated until finally, her attempt to embed one tore a hole clear through the trunk, several yards from the top. As soon as the elf breached the tree, the corpses lost their animation and were corpses again, and a heavy silence followed.

The dwindling light was still strong enough to reveal the inside of the tree, and to her shock, Erissa saw that it was hollow, and not from the process of rotting. Stairs had been carved into the hard wood inside, and with a carefully measured fall, she dropped through the air and landed on them in a crouch. Inwuhou followed shortly after and looked around in wonder as Erissa lay back, spent and exhausted.

[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.