usir | Event #2: The Long Night

Entry tags:

🜙 Event Post #2: The Long Night, December 28th to January 5th Warning: Death and violence

	Nervous, frightened whispers spread across Idan. By word of mouth and courier, warnings that the Long Night has nearly arrived are sent out. Anasta's Shadow, the planet whose orbit lies between this one and its sun, will share a path with this planet for one week before they go their separate ways once more. During that time the far larger planet obscures the light and warmth the sun provides this world. This is nothing new to you. It has happened every year at this time since your birth and although the cold is treacherous and the dark inconvenient, in your time those were likely the only major threats you faced during the Long Night. The great dragon bonfires had always been kept lit by the trio of dragon guardians, their light and warmth keeping away the deadly freeze and the other horrors rumored to come with the darkness. Perhaps you remember the tales from your childhood, stories meant to scare children away from venturing too far on their own in the treacherous heart of winter. The long, cold week of darkness was likely filled with stories of people whisked away in the black cold, either never to be seen again or to be found mangled and frozen with looks of terror and agony forever etched on their lifeless faces. With the dragons ever present in your lifetime, you had never experienced the true horrors of the Long Night for yourself, even if you had witnessed a taste out in the world beyond the safety of the kingdom cities and villages. The true terror of the Long Night had not been experienced in full since the formation of the Elf-Dragon Alliance, many generations before your birth. The massive bonfires kept ever burning by the guardian dragons kept the towns and cities across all three kingdoms protected from the sheer dark and the deadly deep freeze of the week-long total eclipse. Now that the dragons are gone there is simply not enough magic to create the powerful, lasting bonfires that once sheltered the three kingdoms and kept out the dark and the worst of the cold. From the warmth and safety of a hearth, it is easy to dismiss the frightened whispers of Idan's current population as superstition, at least until the sun 'sets' on the night of the 27th, swallowed behind the looming shadow of the larger planet. As night approaches on the 27th, the world goes red. Only slivers of sunlight escape around the far edge of Anasta's Shadow, bathing the world in an eerie crimson until the planet's massive shape in the sky blocks out the sun entirely, plunging Idan into near complete shadow. With the light consumed, the shrieks and howls begin. Starting up like the roar of an angry wind, they grow louder and more twisted the closer they come. Within hours the howls and shrieks are mixed with a sound like metal grinding across glass. Windows are covered in sheets of cracked and spidered ice. Chimneys without lit fires begin to fill with screeching, clawing noises and an unsettling and unfamiliar clicking noise that rises and falls like an unknown language. The sounds outside begin to shift and change, as more human shrieks join the unsettlingly monstrous ones, and the crying sob of a young child, hiccuping in fear, breaks up the brief moments of silence. It's just beyond the door, or just out of sight beside the window, then silence, and the howling and scraping start anew. Now and then an eerie red glow shines through ever more solid ice caking the windows, and they briefly steam up as something living exhales a heated breath against the pane. Citizens within earshot or courier distance warn those who seek answers to stay away and avoid seeking out the source of the sounds. They caution that the answers are not worth the risks and warn that anyone outside cannot be saved. If they're out there, they're already dead. If you insist on going, they'll tell you not to leave the safety of hearth and fire without a torch in hand or your chances of surviving will drop from slim to none. Pay heed to the cautions of those more experienced than you in this new horror or you will not survive the long, harsh night and the ever more unsettling noises it brings.
🜙 Weather

	The cold fluctuates between -18 to -32C (0 to -25F) during the Long Night. At these temperatures, the risk of frostbite and hypothermia are greatly increased and without proper precautions, a person could experience frostbite in 10-30 minutes when exposed to the elements. In addition to this, wind, sleet, and snow periodically drop the temperatures further. The weather may be the least of your worries, however, as the cold is far from the most dangerous threat the Long Night brings with it.
🜙 Creatures

	The creatures that emerge during the Long Night are nearly all horrors rarely or never seen beyond this week of frozen darkness. The only exceptions to this are the Tundra Manticore and the Greater Bearbat which can be rarely found living in the highest points of the mountain caves and peaks where the weather remains icy year-long. Tundra Manticore: They share little in common with their lower mountain counterparts beyond their violent disposition. Their bodies glow from within due to the venom stored in their abdomen. They can secrete this deadly venom from their mouths or their barbed tails. The venom is said to burn like liquid fire and causes severe burns on contact. They live only in the coldest parts of Idan due to the significant heat generated by their venom that would cook them from the inside out in warmer climates. They consume ice and snow to maintain an internal temperature balance and if that balance is thrown off the combustible venom within them causes them to burst into flames. As a result, they are terrified of fire. They are silent stalkers and lone hunters. Greater Bearbat: Greater Bearbats are sound-based hunters that descend from their mountain homes, attracted by the shrieks of the shade imps. They are indiscriminate hunters, content to eat wayward travelers or other monsters without concern for what prey they catch in their long claws. They run on four limbs while hunting and will rarely take to the skies unless in pursuit of flying prey. Sound and heat deter them and light will blind them. Shade Imps: Seekers and servants of the Darkener, these monstrous shade imps can take a multitude of forms (Crawlers, Scouts, & Hounds) and shift between them at will. They are completely blind and travel as silent as the shadows they melt in and out of. They hunt through scent, sound, and taste, searching for traces of blood and fear on the air. When they aren't hunting, they communicate with other imps via ear-piercing shrieks or gut-churning howls, going silent only when they locate their prey. Their silence is more dangerous than the sounds they make. They recoil from fire but grow increasingly more determined the longer they are kept at bay, eventually overcoming their fear and attacking the source of the fire to attempt to extinguish it at the cost of their own lives. When fire touches them they go up in a puff of black smoke and a scream. Darkling: No one knows what darklings look like. They are the lost spirits of elementals consumed and controlled by the Darkener. They have no physical form and can control and manipulate shadows and sound. They mimic sounds to trick people into opening their homes or venturing out of safety and can perfectly replicate any sound they have heard, even capturing the voices of people speaking on the other side of walls. Their goal is to lure or force people out into the darkness where the Darkener can find them. They can be disrupted with light. Bayobat: Swarms of flying bat-like insects summoned by the Darkener. They have sharp, metal proboscises they use to pierce victims before consuming their blood. They are blind and seek out warm-blooded bodies to launch themselves at. Their screeches are metallic and mixed with insectoid clicking. Their bodies are sharp and metallic but their mouths are vulnerable. Their tails are lined with tiny, sharp spikes similar to barbed wire. They fear fire. The Darkener: An ancient being that is thought to come from the Outer Realm. The Darkener consumes flames with a touch, transforming them into shadow flames that burn black, giving off no heat or warmth. It possesses long-forgotten magic. Few have seen more than a glimpse. It causes temporary blindness in all who witness it, their eyes turning black with trapped shadows. Its image lingers in the mind, causing hallucinations. Those who witness it are often driven mad, growing increasingly certain the Darkener is watching them from the corner of their vision. It can be struck but doing so only causes darkness to erupt from the wound, consuming the Darkener and everything around it. There is only one Darkener.

🜙 Top

⤛ Navigation

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

“I mean what I said,” Daud answers, voice flat and inflectionless, utterly composed even in the face of Billie’s alarm.

“The monsters were attacking a girl — one of us.” The awakened, the ones of the grave, whatever they’re called now. “We were too slow because her animas was injured. It caught Mercy before we got back inside.”

He pauses, thinking, then looks up at her again. “I don’t know why I’m not dead. I could feel her being torn apart, but then she was gone.” Despite the harrowing experience, there’s something in his expression that’s almost lighter. Daud’s never been one to carry his burdens very openly, but it’s there. However, his expression remains sober, finger fishing out the thong around his neck holding the glass vial with its strange fluid inside.

“I noticed there was less of this, after.”

He got himself killed protecting another one of them? Of all the damn stupid things to do—

"She would have come back on her own, Daud," Billie carries on being the upset one here. With Daud, again, it's tough to tell something's off, though it's beginning to strike her as creepy how unbothered he is by something this alarming. She wants to much to ask him when he decided to play hero because that's exactly what that sounds like but she bites that part back, focusing on the vial instead.

It is less full, that's for sure, though she'll grimace and move to dig under the neck of her shirt for her own, dragging it out to compare. Just to be sure. He is right, though.

"Maybe it'll be like before. Notice your old death catching up with you yet?"

Daud doesn't bother trying to justify the decision. Here and now, it does seem absurd he'd gone after her. It wasn't as though it would be blood on his hands. Agreeing to take on the job didn't mean having to put himself out on the line like that.

"Not yet." He shakes his head. "Nothing to do but wait and see what happens." In lieu of an answer he doesn't have, Daud flexes his hand, still gloved, demonstrating he is (for better or worse) still hale and whole -- in body, if nothing else.

Then, much more directly, since he's got no reason not to prod at old wounds--

"Changed your mind about seeing me die, then?"

There, that, that finally strikes Billie as out of the ordinary. As far as she's been guessing thus far, they've maintained some kind of unsaid truce on what happened in the past. He doesn't bring it up, she doesn't try to stab him again, it all works out for the best (physically, if far from emotionally).

She's left speechless for a moment. Just a moment. Then anger flashes across her face. Briefly, but it's there before settling into wary neutrality, her fingers curling into fists on top of the table where she'd been resting them.

"That was different and you know it."

Edited 2019-02-05 03:35 (UTC)

“Was it?” Daud asks, without heat — or very much inflection at all, for that matter. He looks at her steadily. “I thought that’s why you were following me around, at first. Waiting for the chance to slip a knife between my ribs again. I might have actually let you.”

He shifts, leaning his elbows on his knees. “But you’ve never been subtle about wanting revenge. So I’m left wondering ... is this really how you want to spend your second life?”

Her knee-jerk reaction would be to tell him that he should just tell her to leave if he didn't want her around but Billie knows better. If he wanted to ditch her, he would and she would never be able to find him, not if he didn't want to be found. That means his question is a real one and she immediately hates it because she doesn't have an answer for once.

Not a good one, anyway. Not in her opinion.

"I knew exactly how I was going to spend my first life and that's all gone now, all save for you," Billie says. It amounts to a giant 'I don't fucking know' and that's the upsetting part, even if she isn't about to betray just how frightening the thought is. "You've had your entire life to rethink what you'd rather be doing, Daud, but replacing you was what I wanted to do. I'm not going to find something new anytime soon."

Daud watches her a moment longer, two, before his gaze casually shifts to Deirdre instead. It's funny, the tricks they've picked up since they got these extensions of their souls -- his gone now, something that feels like the the absence of a pang in his stomach reminds him.

"You might want to consider getting your hands on a ship, for a start," he offers, finally. "Unless you've lost your taste for boats, I always thought that was at least half the reason you wanted to take over the Wolves."

Deirdre, for reasons known only to Deirdre, takes offense at Daud looking at her at all right now. She puffs up her feathers and makes a rude noise at him, though Billie only waves a hand towards her to get her to shut up. For once, she actually does.

"And you might want to realize a boat is useless without a crew," Billie replies dourly, all because she originally had one particular crew in mind. That's a lost cause now. "What happened after I died? What happened to the Wolves?"

"The job went as planned," Daud tells her, listlessly. Whatever reservations he might have had about imparting that information to her before, they're gone now, the recitation rote and stilted. "We took out the dragonborn, delivered her daughter. It was after then that things got odd."

He stares into the fire, the light casting the lines of his face into sharp shadows. "Without anyone to lead them, things fell apart fast. I told the Wolves that they didn't have to stay -- that I didn't have any more jobs for them. And then something started picking them off."

"But they had a leader," Billie objects, eyes narrowing dangerously as she watches Daud from across the table. "You were their leader. You don't expect me to believe you just gave up after that job, do you? You did something to stop it, right?"

It would be difficult to talk about it, if he could feel anything right, now, but Daud can't -- so it comes out very easily.

"At the time, all I could think about was how it seemed like no less than what we deserved," he says, woodenly. "For the all the years of arrogance, thinking our blades were shaping the world ... when in the end, we were as caught up in the madness as everyone else. Dogs biting at their own tails and barking at shadows."

He stares into the fire, tail twitching contemplatively.

"It turns out it was the bodyguard. Tougher than we gave him credit for. I thought I was ready for it to be over, but I fought. And when it was all over ... he let me keep my life." He pauses, then shakes his head. "Not that it mattered. It wasn't long after that when it all ended."

Billie's quiet for a while after he says his piece, taking it in, considering it, and deciding it is complete and utter bullshit. That really shouldn't surprise Daud. She doesn't like giving up, which is what he clearly did.

"Guess I was right to challenge you after all, old man," she says quietly in the end. As much as she would like to turn the table over and yell at him, she won't. Anyone else, maybe, but not for Daud. Instead, she gets up from her seat peacefully and pulls her coat closer, prying heavy gloves out of its pockets.

"I'm going back out."

Snatching up a hat and scarf on the way out the door, she does just that, skulking off into the long, empty, deathly cold night for her turn to watch the bonfires up close.

"Maybe you were," Daud answers. He won't complete the rest of that thought: that a victory she'd taken without him putting a fight would have been no victory at all, and the fact that her schemes had come to naught in the end even with the weakness she perceived saying enough. He's said what he intends to say, and that's enough.

He doesn't stop her from leaving. He doesn't see the point. Either she'll come back again, or she won't. She doesn't owe him her loyalty, not anymore.

The days after that pass as predictably as the ones before, but the Long Night is nearing its end. While the red finally bleeds away from the sky and people sigh in relief and begin to pick up their lives again. Daud's animas is dead. Daud himself, however, remains, with no apparent sign of being about to rot or regain his injuries again.

His emotions, though, remain conspicuously absent. He's pinpointed that to be what's happened to him now, and while the prospect of an emotionless eternity should by all rights be an alarming one, the tiefling is simply literally incapable of it. It's simply another thing to stolidly accept and endure, like everything else since they've woken up.

She does come back, eventually. She waits it out as long as she can before the freezing weather drives her back inside but even then, she returns in silence and seems intent on remaining that way for the rest of their time at that particular post. That's about how well the rest of the Long Night passes, too, though Daud will find himself with a much closer shadow than before while his emotions and animas are both still missing.

Billie doesn't say much during that time, either, if only to save herself the headache of asking questions and getting uncaring answers. It isn't as if Daud had ever been some fountain of caring thoughts and friendly conversation but even his normal level of stoic observation was miles better than this. It means she does her best to settle into a similar lack of emotion but she's by far worse at it than he is.

Why? Because unlike Daud, she does still have her animas and Deirdre frets and paces and preens nervously in her counterpart's place.

Daud doesn't ignore her, but he doesn't go out of his way to interact beyond what's necessary. If he minds the way she dogs his heels, he doesn't complain, though he does end up watching her animas more often than not. What he makes of Deirdre's restlessness, though, he keeps to himself. The Long Night may be over, but there's still things to do around the city, cleaning up the remains of bonfires and the lost belongings of people who've more than likely ended up in a monster's stomach.

It's while they're in the middle of scattering the ashes from a temporary bonfire that Daud abruptly doubles over like he's been struck, arm going around his middle.

As ever these past few days, Billie isn't far when he reacts that way. To what, she can't say. Snapping her head up to look around them, she'll find no immediate threats. Just Daud, hurt, or seem to be, in any case. She drops the broom she had in hand — blackened by all the soot and no doubt useless for anything else because of it — and steps immediately to his side, reaching out to steady him.

Her first thought is to make fun of him being old and being winded so easily but with how tense it's been, with how utterly devoid of pretty much anything he's been, she falls back to a simple, quiet, "You alright?"

Daud opens his mouth to speak, but he can't answer for a moment, choking on air. He can't breathe. Why can't he--

A flutter of feathers has him looking up, and the relief the sight brings wrenches through him so hard it's almost physically painful.

Mercy perches precariously on a fire-marked fence, obviously weary but whole. Her gaze is on Daud, but it flits to Billie after a moment, crooning softly. A bird can't look apologetic, but there's an air of something like regret.

Billie stays by Daud, still steadying him, even if she does look up to meet Mercy's gaze.

"About damn time," she mutters, her own relief that the osprey has made a reappearance at all thinly veiled. She doesn't want to get emotional about it, despite how she really does feel.

That said, it's a wholly different case with Deirdre, who immediately launches from her own perch to flop down next to Mercy and immediately begins railing at her in angry bird noises. It's going to be one long triad, wings spread and feathers puffed in rage in some attempt to make a tern look more intimidating. It doesn't really work, mind, but she's trying, damn it. To this, Billie finally straightens up and just hopes Daud can stand under his own strength.

"Deirdre! Cut that out!"

Mercy seems weary, but she doesn't move away, bearing the shrieking with about as much stoicism as Daud might normally display, then shifting after a few minutes. Handily more than twice Deirdre's size, it's almost comical when the osprey unfolds her wings and simply proceeds to drape the smaller bird in them, tugging her in to tuck under like she might an unruly chick.

Thankfully, Daud doesn't seem to be about to fall over. He grunts, painfully trying to straighten himself -- he doesn't get all the way there -- before he finally finds his voice.

"I see losing an animas ... isn't without its consequences."

Edited 2019-03-16 06:46 (UTC)

That really only results in slightly muffled sounds of indignation from the tern, though being so much smaller, there's not a whole lot Deirdre can do other than huff, puff, and trill in complaint.

It does mean Billie's attention is shifting back to Daud, though, since Mercy seems fully capable of dealing with her animas without help. Him stating the obvious earns a well-deserved scoff from her.

"You think? You would have ever guessed it."

“But it is survivable,” Daud answers quietly, his haggard breaths finally evening out.

“That’s worth knowing.” So in a pinch, killing someone’s animas may be a better alternative to it being used to torment one of them. For now, he rubs tired at his eyes.

“And now you know what happened.” Not all the pieces, but enough.

Billie's silent for a moment, lips pursing into a thin line rather than frowning outright. It's not like she needed to be reminded. That hasn't been that far from her mind this entire time, while waiting out the Long Night, cleaning up after it, trying to stay busy and not dwell too harshly on what he told her.

"You were going to have to tell me someday," is what she settles on saying to that, stepping away since it's obvious he isn't about to collapse. That's it, that's all. She turns stiffly to walk back to where she abandoned her broom, apparently choosing to carry on the age-old tradition of not discussing it further.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Event #2: The Long Night

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject