imeeji_frontstage | Flowers of Heaven II: Star of Bethlehem

Entry tags:

Flowers of Heaven II: Star of Bethlehem

Who: lost(?) idols
Where: ???? a mysterious courtyard
When: day 490

[ You awaken to the feeling of cool stone at your back, and a night sky overhead.

All around is a courtyard—a wide circle of marble tile, alternating black and white, interspersed with stone benches and flowerbeds and ornamental trees, all lit by the lambent gleam of strangely vivid starlight.

It is beautiful. And it is decaying. The stone is cracked; the flowers wild and overflowing between the cracked stone; the trees bent and twisted with age, the ground around them littered with fallen fruit. There is a fountain in the center of this space, but it too is broken-down: the water sits stagnant, and nothing remains of the design except a basin and the shattered base of a once-golden sculpture.

—And surrounding it all are not walls, but dense mounds of kudzu, climbing over itself until it towers as high as any watchtower.

How did you get here?
The last thing you vaguely recall is a sudden fit of drowsiness. There’s no sign of any guide or host around, and your powers don’t currently work either. In fact, if you have any corruptions, whether mental or physical, they too are … gone? No, perhaps that's not quite it; you can still feel them—faint, like a phantom limb. Invisible, and unable to affect you.
But there is one notable exception to the rule: all wings, corruption-induced or not, remain in place, as natural as the starlight.

There are other idols around you, all waking up the same way. Is this meant to be some kind of game…? ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

[ Timeless is indeed still the watchword, here. These wounds (if that is indeed what they are) could have happened a millennia ago, or they might have happened yesterday. You can almost make an optical illusion of it, the impression shifting depending on the angle you study from.

There are no telltale red or rust-brown streaks to be seen that you can tell.
But... does that really mean no blood was shed here? Because there are streaks and splatters of a sort: of iridescent gold. No wonder you missed it at first, with how much it could almost be a luminescent gleam of starlight.

The gold blood(?) is scant at first, but it seems to get thicker and more frequent in the direction of one of the few accessible stone arches—one that seems to lead to the top of a staircase. ]

[Hmmm...

Following the golden blood(?) trail.]

[ the staircase goes... down, like you're at the top of a watchtower, in a spiral. while there's lighting, it's dim and gloomy.

the tower is made of pale stone—it's a little hard to see, but there's more flecks and splotches and streaks of gold. ]

[Not great, but she'll keep going, footsteps becoming cautious.]

[ a little farther in—she can start to make out etchings, carved into the stone in an even font. things like make me thy sword and to everything there is a season and who sets the stars in motion—repeating phrases, that get shorter and shorter, and trail off. ]

[Concerning. But she'll continue anyway!]

[ there's a lot of concerning things here honestly

she comes to a point on the wall where there's a rack of weapons—mostly swords hanging, like defenders might grab one on their way out. (defenders from what? where?) the blades don't catch the light—looking dull compared to the bright gold shine of the handles. ]

[Hmmm. Probably bad to mess around with sharp things laying around, so she'll take note of them in case she needs to come running back for a weapon and proceed.]

[ yeah, not a bad idea. you could get tetanus or something? probably

the further she descends, the dimmer the lights on the walls glow, and the more sprays of gold are visible to the naked eye, for those who look. that, and eventually she comes upon the rusted, broken pieces of a sword, a spray of gold on the wall beside. ]

[Ah she sees that something bad happened here.

Stepping around the broken pieces and proceeding!]

[ a little further ahead, there's more broken weapons—they look more brittle than you'd expect from metal, like they were more fragile than they would have appeared whole.

bits of torn white fabric streaked with gold litter the stair here and there—there's long scratches in the stone, both in walls and steps, and much larger streaks of gold on the floor. the atmosphere becomes... even more oppressive, and the air feels heavy and almost humid, like walking through a swamp. ]

[Oof. But she'll keep walking through it anyway because of sunk cost fallacy, what could possibly be at the end of this!!]

[ true, true. she's come so far.

what about when her limbs start to get heavier with strange fatigue, or when the lights along the stair grow dimmer and dimmer, leaving her in near dark? what about when everything seems to be gradually tinged with futility? ]

[This sucks. This really sucks. But she also didn't get Oak for stubbornness by giving up easily, and she exemplifies that here, plodding onwards even as it grows darker and darker, hope fading with every step.

Even if it's a bad one, she'll see this to the end.]

[ there. there she is, in the dark, and she could mistake it for floating in starless space. all sound, all light, all sensation but the heaviness of being... gone.

why is she here? ]

[Why is she here?]

C'mon... don't tell me this is all there is. That'd just be... super boring.

[She wants answers]

[ why is anyone here. why has anyone ever been here?

there are still words carved in the walls around her, though perhaps calling them "walls" has started to lose some meaning, in the strange void this place has become.

make me thy sword, they say—again and again, overlapping on each other and distorting, each line less like a carving and more like a gash.

who are you, X? who are you, in the dark? ]

[A little scared and a lot over her head, is the most likely answer - but not the one she'd give.]

I'm X. A Reaper, and a member of AlcheME.

[Obviously. She has her doubts about her place as a Reaper, but she is what she is, no doubt about that in and of itself.]

Who - or what - the hell are you?

[ no answer.

no answer, but perhaps she should hold fast to her own. here, in the dark, here, in the depths of the tower beneath, where the last of the light has faded and all is silent, where she is alone.

and then there is a sound like a drop of water—drip, drop, falling into a pool, and sending ripples tinged with light out from a center point somewhere ahead of him, roughly illuminating the shape of a circular body of water. ]

[.........

She grumbles about stupid cryptic walls as she tries to move ahead towards the water without, hopefully, stepping right into it.]

[ standing, moving—suddenly feels strangely light, and almost too light, like she's in a space with no gravity, the space between worlds, except there are no stars.

great gashes like scars are carved into the walls—if they can even be called "walls," still, in this strange void. they no longer bleed gold, but are inlaid with ice that stays frozen. only the path to the pool (again, if it can even be called that) is unmarred. and on the surface of the water—

every time a drop falls, there's a fleeting glimpse of a face, partially obscured by bars of darkness. across the pool is an empty chair—a throne, really—of polished dark horn. ]

[She maybe stumbles a bit thanks to the sudden lightness - which also earns some indignant grumbles - but it stops when she notices the face in the water.

...

Approaching the water first to see if she can get a better look at that ?person?]

[ the water is clean, and pure—even though it looks ink-black, like a mirror surface in the dark. and just for a moment, the face mirrored in the surface seems to turn toward her, looking surprised—

and then tendrils of water wrap around her arm. and pull her under the surface. ]

[ darkness.

—and then, when she finds herself surfacing again, she's at the top of the stairs once more, the courtyard just at her back. ]

[!!]

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

1/2

Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?

1/2