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wildestlogs2022-02-14 01:51 am
wildestmods) wrote in wildestlogs2022-02-14 01:51 am
IMLADRIS
IMLADRIS
The group is told to take a week of rest in the Last Homely House as the injured and sick among them heal. The Elves promise them that after the injured are healed, there will be a great Council, with representatives of several peoples in attendance. There Lord Elrond will meet and assist them with speaking with the Green.
Until then, they can wander the peaceful halls of Rivendell, which are filled with travelers from all over the Wilderlands who are making a rest stop while they travel through the lands of Middle-Earth.
There are many halls in Rivendell, but the most notable part of Rivendell is the Hall of Fire, a great feast hall where people can eat, drink, and be merry. Alongside chairs, cushions line the floors in much of the hall. This is the great social hall of Rivendell, where the Elves and their visitors share news of lands far beyond, tell stories, or perform music. The music here almost sounds divine, especially when the Elves sing and play instruments, but they're just as eager to hear songs from other lands, so if any of the squad decide to share, they'll be glad to listen.
Some of the hall's guests are a touch more lively than the others, like a party of dwarves staying at Rivendell. Their stories are a mite more adventurous and if you get in their good graces, they might be willing to share some of the beer they brought with them. Listening to their stories or their talk about their craftmanship is a way to get into their good graces. They have news of the lands beyond.
The Elves love learning, so there are libraries the group is allowed to browse, though they mostly only contain tales of Middle-Earth (for now), though the Elves seem to be collecting what books about other lands they can. These libraries often have viewing stations with telescopes pointing at the sky. Though concerned about what it portents, Elves have been almost delighted by the changing skies, enjoying the challenge of trying to understand how the sky has been knitting itself together with the addition of new worlds.
There are also beautiful balconies here, overlooking the gorge and the waters below, and terraced gardens filled with flowers, bushes, and flowering trees. Their rooms are open to the outdoors and have beds that seem grown into the shape of bed-frames instead of carved. The bathrooms actually have running water. The Elves have figured out how to direct the clean running waters of the gorge in primitive indoor plumbing. Water for hot baths has to be heated first in brass cauldrons over coal braziers before getting dumped into the bath, but are at least located right next to the tubs.
Different flowing slides and fountains can also be used as waterslides for the adventurous, though this will make the Elves tut in disapproval. (X cw: warning for mild nudity from a distance.)
It's time for the squad to rest, eat, and regroup. If a great Council is going to be called involving them, it might be a good idea to make sure they go into it as a united front, because the Green is clearly fine with trying to make decisions for them.
❧ Cursed Weapons/Powers: So they know about how they'll be treated: those with cursed weapons and dark powers will be tolerated by the Elves after entry. While they'll get the same general treatment, the Elves around them may at times seem uncomfortable. Those with cursed weapons will only be distrusted a little, as the weapons themselves will seem more suspicious than their bearers. Those with dark powers or some kind of dark nature (such as being a vampire, Necromancer mage, werewolf, etc.) will be treated with the greatest distrust. But they'll be allowed to wander freely.
❧ Communication: The Elves will make it clear a Council will be called when the injured have time enough to heal and that the group can stay in Rivendell until they're all healed and refreshed. They'll be told they'll be equipped with weapons, clothes, and supplies when they eventually leave. The characters can move freely and characters can stay at the bedside of injured friends.
❧ Injuries: Characters with morgul-blade wounds will be find that any areas or limbs where the shard was will no longer hurt but will be numb at first, with feeling returning over several days. They'll be physically weak for several days at well, winded when walking a short distance. Within a week or two, depending on their constitution and the severity of where the wound was, they'll be able to walk on their own and start to rebuild stamina. Other non-Morgul-blade injuries will heal fully within a few days of treatment.
❧ Clothes: The group will not yet be fully equipped for their travels (that will happen upon leaving) but everyone will at least be given new clothes in Elven styles since theirs are dirty or torn. These are in many different colors but most commonly colors found in nature, like green and blue. Characters without appropriate footwear will also be given light and sturdy boots that will somehow be in their size without their size being asked. They'll also be given basic toiletries like scissors that can be used to cut hair and beards. There are no razors, however, because the Elves don't need to shave so they don't keep them on hand.
❧ Food: Food and drink are plentiful. The food leans towards fruits and veggies but there's enough game for any meat-eaters, cooked well in unknown spices. Wine is abundant, some vintages more inebriating than others. The restorative cordial miruvor is available to help weary travelers get their energy up and revive their strength. It doesn't get characters drunk but helps them revive their strength. It has a light, pleasant floral taste and smell. Beer can also be provided, though that of the traveling dwarves is superior to what Rivendell has to offer.
❧ Weather/Atmosphere: Rivendell is open to the outside air but the temperature is always perfectly temperate and pleasant. The sun shines frequently and is only lost behind shimmering mist. Sunsets and sunrises paint the sky in sections of the valley in every color imaginable. The valley is safe to travel in as long as they don't go back past the Ford of Bruinen or through the gap in the mountains past Rivendell on the valley's opposite end. The air is filled with the smell of green things and delicate perfume of flowers.
❧ Archivist Spells: Around the valley, Archivists can bank up to (4) iterations of a water spells that blasts a brief torrent at an enemy, with the force of a fire hose.
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Need is a small, light sword and the leather of her grip is very worn and showing age and use reflected also on her scabbard and the attached belt. Despite this she feels good in Dan's hand. It's an intense but comfortable version of that poised sensation that sometimes comes with live steel, and there's a very faint something like a touch to the back of his head at the same time.
Oh, yep, he's got problems that it'd take her a while to catalogue, she can see that in seconds. Hard living in a body that's losing more and more of the elastic resilience of youth. Quite a portion of lingering pain. Well. Need is not going to make this man a project, she tells herself, people aren't projects, but while she's in contact she can intercept the pain and does it slowly, so it's not all at once.
:I don't have ears to hear you with, child. I do hear thoughts, but if you prefer to speak aloud, that's fine. Try 'sending' at me as if speaking.: Need broadly disregards Mindspeech etiquette as more human people try to practice it but in her experience people, not all of them human, are happier when a coherent as-if-out-loud thought is responded to than the general soup of their state of mind. :Do you have very much experience with Mind-speakers or equivalents?:
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Dan always figures it's polite to check in, especially when he can't read facial expressions and body language like he can with most humans, so he asks as he turns Need over in his hand. He isn't used to swordsmanship, aside from the few lessons he got from Guts and Saturday; the Sartorises relied on firearms, hunting bows and knives.
Even in this moment, he finds some of the hurt in his stomach and back easing up. He wonders if that's psychosomatic.
Should I go find somewhere to lay down? He closes his eyes, as if that'll help him hear her. I ain't ever done nothing like this. Closest that I had was back at the Rig, when we all saw chunks of each others' pasts. I didn't care for it.
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Her most recent bearer before coming here once slipped Need under her bedroll to help mend a concussion and then had enthusiastic sex on top of her. Need doesn't mind this as much as most people might but it's still very exasperating. Dan might or might not pick up on that.
:That's generally how it works, yes. And tell me something about this... occurrence.: She knows something about the goings on at this Rig - what a hubris-of-humankind scenario it seems like - but knows she's missing a lot of it. :Are you more concerned about someone seeing your past, or seeing someone else's?:
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Dan doesn't need a visual aid to imagine what sort of uncomfortable situations being seen as just an object might lead to. He wouldn't put Need in that position. He's conscientious like that.
He's getting used to the way Need 'sounds' in his head. It reminds him a little of Alloran's thought speech, the way the words are fuzzier but the emotions behind them clearer, like precision has been dialed down to make room for more context.
I'd rather no one see my past. It ain't that I'm ashamed, it's just... Dan can't really put words to it, but Need may receive an ugly, messy clump of emotion, like a clog of dark hair in a shower drain. It's just that Dan doesn't want to remember. Thanks to fiddling with the timeline, his past doesn't even technically exist anymore except inside his own head, and he still can't get rid of it. Anyway. Back on the Rig, it's like we were walking into dreamworlds, but they were folks' memories. We all saw each others'. Generally they were some of the more intense memories folks had, deaths and losses and betrayals, things like that.
Dan's mostly weren't. Dan's were mostly the aftermaths of the deaths and losses and betrayals, or the peaceful preludes that now just remind him of what he lost.
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Dan's past has the feel of the classic tangled unhappy memories situation, where attempts to touch it at all have been painful, and burying it is preferred in the hopes that it will fade. Having it jarred unnaturally - though she finds the idea of a group of people walking through each others' memories very interesting and rather wishes she'd been there, Need's well aware that her perspective is unusual - would not have helped.
:Hmph. Well, don't worry on my account, I don't just probe into people's pasts and drag things out. Not without a very good reason.: It's almost impossible to lie convincingly in Mindspeech, with that flow of connotations that comes with it. :A lot of the memories I've hung on to are on the intense side like that, you should understand. If nothing too powerfully emotional is happening at the time, it's probably colored by things that came after.:
Need allows herself a second to bask in the faint continued ache of the pain she hasn't totally suppressed, in the tidal filling and emptying of breath, in the heat and motion of life. It doesn't matter that Dan's got quite a lot of physical problems, he is alive and part of Need envies and covets that, a part she's very used to disregarding.
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A little tension goes out of the back of Dan's neck, one of the places where he keeps anxiety, knowing that Need isn't about to go digging. Dan really doesn't mind if she knows, but he minds if she wants to talk with him about it.
I'm used to intensity. I just am real bored of my own. He relives his intense memories constantly, forgetting where he is day after day, waking up disoriented, until he wishes he could just wipe everything from his mind out entirely. Back when he still had faith, he'd pray to God to just replace his brain with someone else's, rewire it until he was a completely different person who didn't feel so miserable and anxious all the time. Now he just drinks and does drugs.
Maybe this will be better.
Is this a favor you're doing out of the kindness of your heart, or is this enjoyable for you too?
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:I'm not a kind person,: she says immediately upon Dan asking. It doesn't ring false because Need doesn't believe she is; she knows she can be kind but also that she can be harsh and judgemental. She is a also a kind of lich, always hungry, always longing to experience the world without intermediaries, and if anything that's gotten worse without her Magesight. :It is enjoyable, though. Sharing a memory like this helps make it last. It helps me out, too - I don't have to eat or breathe, but I have to have some kind of communion with other minds or I'll 'fall asleep'. No one wants that.:
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When Dan lays ghosts to rest, often all they want is someone to be there with them, someone to witness them, someone to assure them that they left a mark on the world. It gives him a sense of purpose to do that for them. It makes him feel at peace with the uneasy reality of death.
He can hold some memories for Need, let her replay them and embroider them into his mind.
If you ever need someone to communicate with to keep you from sleeping, I'm happy to help. Dan means that. He loves nothing more than to be helpful, than to feel like the life he drags himself through is of some benefit to someone.
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:I'm not in any danger of it now, but it's kind of you. You might like these memories when you're awake too, I suppose. That Changechild mage thought of it as like drowning, when I showed him an older memory, but I suppose it strikes different people in different ways.: By the images she means Raistlin, who Need regards as, basically, a precocious eight-year-old with some troubling fears and a bruised face. :But that's for later. How do you like to arrange yourself to sleep? This will work as long as I'm only a few arm's lengths away but I prefer some level of physical contact the first time. 'Through several layers of fabric' works, thankfully.:
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He isn't sure who that is. He limps to the bed in his room and gently wraps Need in a blanket, then lies down with the bundle in his arms. When he's on his side in the bed, he can feel how exhausted he is, how poorly he's slept for weeks now. How's this?
He's sure that she can sense how sleep always fills him with a sense of dread. Sleeping has always been the tax Dan pays at the end of the day, the price of another day alive and moving. Nightmares and sleep paralysis and waking up feeling completely unrested are the cost Dan pays for the endless days he didn't even want to purchase.
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She waits as Dan settles himself, not bothering to clarify who she meant; they'll meet, or not, and it'd be a distraction to start talking about her boy.
:It'll do. Look, how are you about letting me settle you down? This could take a while otherwise.: She doesn't, technically, require permission in order to manipulate the emotions of others, but it seems like it's a good idea most of the time. Mind-Gift ethics is a complex subject and different people draw different lines, with dyheli especially being far more comfortable with constant, sometimes dramatic use of Mind-magic than most humans. Need has a general sense that she should have limits for herself, and knows she's got a tendency to want to move them around.
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He closes his eyes, purposefully trying to slow his breath and visualize benign, repetitive images. Staircases, waves, all stretching out to the periphery of his mind's eye to crowd out the images and sounds that so often emerge. He focuses on the feeling of the blanket against his skin, the layers of clothing he sleeps in keeping him warm, the position he's holding Need in so they can be near-touching without him worrying about her edges.
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Over her time bound to this sword, Need's own emotions have sort of become shallower. Some of it is being a lyke-blade. There's a reason why most of them went to evil given long enough, their purposes for hanging on to the world warping; the human mind stratifies and changes when made to function contained in an artificial structure for lifetimes on end. Some of it is that one of the spells she'd worked into the steel, thousands of years ago as a living woman, was called simply Calm.
Either way, with a few exceptions Need simply doesn't feel most emotions very strongly anymore, not without deliberately using her power to share in others' feelings. Her habitual amusement and annoyance are recurrent but easily brushed out of the way. Under them she is calm, she is steady, these have been reinforced and reiterated into a waiting, bedrock stillness. Surrounding Dan with that is like resting an overwarm body against cool stone. Need takes the turmoil of the moment, that dread and anxiety, into herself as if leaching heat, examining these feelings with detached interest before they dissipate.
In return the stillness wells and wells in that metaphorical pool. The calm and quiet of the inanimate, of something that can be a clear center in the midst of chaos or heartbreak. Things still exist that can shatter Need's self-possession, but none of them are here right now.
:You've had a hard time of it,: she says in her gravelly Mind-voice. :Lay it down for a little while. Rest. I'll show you something you'll like.:
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And he is grateful as she starts to slip into the easiest state of rest he's been in for a while. His back doesn't hurt so much. He isn't as nauseated as he usually is, and the ringing in his ears is gone. He feels as if he's lost the sense of where his body ends in space, as if somehow his outline has relaxed, like he's usually a solid shape and now he's a shade bleeding at the edges.
He's sincerely grateful.
God, it would be nice to be someone else for a little while. Sometimes he feels like he's become someone else when he's sufficiently intoxicated, but maybe this will be more total. Maybe for a moment existing won't feel like so much work.
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She waits as that perception dims, and when she decides the moment is right Need opens a memory to engulf them both. She was not here when the memory was made, she was not awake in all her time with the person who it concerns, but she was with Tarma and Kethry for most of their lives, and this was a memory that Tarma had made into a story and told herself, and Kethry, and her children and the new Clan, any number of times. It's not as clear and sharp as a memory Need would get from being there or even being awake to receive it, it would have a somewhat distant quality even if Dan was awake to see it.
Dan and his perspective isn't in it all. There is only the Shin'a'in Tarma shena Tale'sedrin, last and first of her clan, sworn to the service of the Warrior, oath-sister to the outlander Kethry. Tarma looks back at an incident from her childhood that was not so important then, but hindsight lends it such bittersweet savor, as with anything she told her and Kethry's children about the kin they would never know. And she had been such a different person as a child.
Summer. All the members of Tale'sedrin, the Hawk clan, had come to travel together off the Plains, their herds traveling with them, so they could sell goods to the house-folk Outlanders. So much context comes with it, about the Clan and culture and the many relationships, that will largely fade later. Tarma, telling this story, has had to stop and say they mostly sold beasts, woven goods, fermented milk, and maybe the services of some young warriors who wanted to see the outside world as mercenaries for a while. And that this wasn't the year the clan was murdered. Hush.
This year Tarma was twelve, entering that exciting period between being a child-who-could-be-trusted and being an adult. At last, when the bulk of the Clan camped out in the shade of the still slightly uncanny edge of the Pelagirs, she got to go with the delegation to meet the Cousins, the strange Tayledras who lived in the deep magic-warped centers of the forest. Young Tarma was eaten alive with interest and curiosity and the many odd stories she'd heard. Shin'a'in who proved to have magic all either entered service to the Crone, had the talent burned out of them, or left, and most of the last were taken to the Tayledras, so how strange could they really be?
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The world is fuzzy, hard to grasp, just a little incomplete. But the emotions are clear, the anticipation and thrumming optimism, the curiosity. The youth. It isn't an absence of heaviness, but an absence of psychological injury so damaging and deep that recovery becomes impossible.
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The shock of recognition and strangeness finally seeing the Cousins appear. They had the eyes and facial features of her own people, they kept their hair long and braided in the same way, and their skin was paler but recognizably similar. But they all had almost the same face and body, she struggled to tell ages, and that hair was white and their clothes were bizarre, multilayered and in patches of all the colors of the dark forest, very unlike the brilliant geometric patterns she and hers wore. And there were more of those birds all around them, hawks and falcons and owls and crows, mostly at least partly white, always huge and too bright-eyed and apparently trusted completely.
That they all ate together while she tried not to lose face by staring or refusing the thick, bittersweet chocolate drink they offered, or the unrecognizable fruits and grains and vegetables. She was approaching adulthood and wanted to take this with proper equanimity. That her father urged her to sing for them and it dried out her throat in sudden terror. Older Tarma, a woman whose throat was scarred in the same attack that killed her clan and can't so much as hum pleasantly, has to pause and explain that her voice had been something special once. She can't bring herself to describe it. It's as well that even Kethry doesn't understand, that she never heard the contrast or saw the pride her family and clan took in her singing.
She had sung eventually, after some coaxing, after the Cousins and her clan representatives started and took the pressure off. She had seen the dancing, seen the trading and the arguments, seen people slip away together and been utterly scandalized when her oldest sister went with three Cousins and came back flushed, with pine needles in her hair. The simultaneous relief and disappointment when the Tayledras covered their white hair and faded back into their forest. She remembers later, spying intently as her sister confided in a friend that the Cousins were as shameless and profligate as kestrels. That's how Tarma tries to remember her, alive and brimming with laughter.
That's where the memory ends, with that sense of looking back on what was and can never be again. Something of it lingers, that presence fading slowly. The memory comes from someone who lost everything and everyone and pared herself down into a single purpose, and tried to die fulfilling it. Kethry stopped her and the love and hope she brought kept her going, brought her to a good life even if it's strange. But she can never return to who she was, that gulf can't be bridged anymore, and she can't let herself wish.
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But he has a memory, now, of being someone else, of their curiosity and trepidation and relief as if it were his own. Dan feels as if he's holding someone else inside him like an ingot in his chest. He recalls how it felt to hold onto people's memories back on the Rig, or rather, the snapshots of how they felt. He always told Bunny it was like tending to a garden, nurturing growing, living things inside him that languished if he didn't think of them often.
His internal garden went barren when he left the Rig. He hopes that that doesn't happen to the memory sitting inside him now, the chain of memories that makes up a life. He stirs a little, exhaling deep as he tightens an arm around the blanket and the sword.
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Well. In any case, she has the impression that Dan could very easily form a dependency on these memories. Need can imagine why, she's paired with a lot of people from terrible situations in the past. There are many things that shared memories can help with. And a lot of things they can't. It's not good or healthy to try to live only in other people.
Keeping some attention on Dan's sleeping mind, she lets herself feel as if this is her, living body and grimaces internally. Need is very close to the surface, to the material world, right now, between the contact and the lingering memory and Dan's consciousness being out of the way. It would be utterly trivial to take that tiny remaining step and get control, and the thought of just pulling in another deep sigh - not doing anything bad, not even getting up, just indulging in the simple pleasure of controlling 'her own' breath - is tantalizing. But if she starts acting on that kind of impulse and taking control like that for no reason beyond that it satisfies her as a hungry ghost, that's a road that ends poorly.
Instead Need starts a gradual catalogue of injuries and general damages and aberrations. There's a lot she can't do as she is here, but she can still investigate. And it still feels good to be pressed against that life.
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"How long was I out?" he murmurs, not opening his eyes yet, when he's back in control, conscious enough to think of himself as existing in his body. Dan rarely conceptualizes his own existence. He spent too much of his youth expecting to be struck dead. Untethering from his body feels like untying a balloon from his wrist, like he's chancing it to float away from him forever.
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Besides, even though it's a vague sense she does have the feeling that she shouldn't be making alterations, even helpful ones, without the body's owner approving first. She has no such qualms about blocking pain while she's present, though, and letting Dan surface at whatever rate he surfaces at.
When he does and with that question, she gives him a waspish :And a good morning to you, too!: She doesn't mean that level of annoyance and that's readily apparent. :How do you reckon time? Never mind, I have it. About seven hours. Get up and go relieve yourself.: She was blocking that sensation, too, or it would have roused him earlier.
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He realizes he's been speaking to her out loud again, and switches back to just his thoughts. Thanks. I'll be right back.
When he's taken care of biological necessities, he sits back down on the bed with her, feeling as if he's relearning his body, in a way, a reaquaintance. Like saying a familiar word out loud and realizing what it rhymes with for the first time, a sort of attention pulled to something that's already been known. Thank you for that. I didn't know what to expect, but I feel rested for the first time in a long time.
He cracks his neck. Do you ever need rest?
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:It's not a big deal for me,: she says gruffly, because it's that or being very smug with a 'you're welcome'. :I've had a lot of bearers with a lot of bad dreams and so on, and they make things harder than they have to be. Sometimes fatigue creates a margin of error you just can't afford.:
Ooh, that's a satisfying feeling. Joint cracking, just one more of the things she doesn't remember she misses until she vicariously experiences it again. :Not in the same way, as a function of the body. I've got to spend a certain amount of magic at all times to be conscious. If I use up my reserve and cut into it, pfft. I call it being asleep, it happens the same whether I'm drained or left with no one who can hear me talk for too long. It doesn't in any sense mean I'm inactive, but I'm pared down to some base impulses.: