Summary:Varanim and Cerin journey with Imrama in search of the best way to utilize the plane of Letheon.
XP:
Tags:< The Great Work | Sol Invictus Logs | It Waited For You >
The Fable bursts out through the border of the Leagues, sliding gently into the undespoiled stretches of Letheon, the plane of rebirth and complement to the Underworld of Netheos.
A reddish-golden light stretches out in every conceivable direction, like a world whose entirety is inside the center of an immense glowing peach.
Here, where the vessel has broken through, the half-forgotten ideas and strange idealized memories which fill other parts of the plane seem to be thin on the ground -- or in this case, thin on the air -- though the warm winds are still omnipresent, and a strange, faint singing seems to be coming from a point off to what might arbitrarily be chosen to be the "Northwest."
Varanim wanders up to the rail from wherever she's been slouching, crow on her shoulder looking a little squinty-eyed and her own expression slightly more grumpy than usual. "Good luck navigating," she comments to Imrama.
Spring "What is that singing?"
Imrama Enjoying the full freedom of a directionless space, Imrama sets the Fable on a wide and gentle corkscrew heading in the rough direction of the singing.
As the vessel lazily pilots through the emptiness, objects begin to appear in the largely-empty space, and float past the ship: large feathers, ten feet or more across, of every color in the spectrum, blowing gently across the bow of the Fable.
As it draws nearer, the singing becomes louder, more comprehensible -- seven voices are joined together, singing slowly and wordlessly a melody that sounds at once intimately well-known and quite unfamiliar.
Varanim "Have I mentioned how much I hate the fruity symbolic planes?"
Cerin "Only by implication."
Spring listens thoughtfully to the music.
The voices that perform it are not only clearly inhuman, but clearly incorporeal -- Spring notes the conspicuous lack of vocal timbre borne of not singing using an actual throat.
Listening carefully to the wind currents, Spring can also feel confident that the feathers come from exactly the same place.
Spring relays this information to his compatriots.
Cerin "How curious," Cerin remarks, as he sketches.
Eventually, the ship's arc takes it towards something whose shape begins to emerge, as if out of fog, despite the utter cloudlessness of this endless sky:
a cluster of smooth-edged rocks, floating together in the vague shape of a vast sphere, with, positioned nigh-equidistantly across its surface, vast pillars of marble, three great wings flapping langorously at each one's peak.
The singing voices seem to come from somewhere within.
Spring "Hm."
Cerin ::Hmmmm. The Trinosi?::
Spring ::Not impossible.::
Varanim frowns and shrugs, in the process dislodging the crow from her shoulder, which wings its way toward the sphere to check for openings on the other side.
The sphere's surface seems to slowly shift and flow against itself, in time with the music ushering forth from within or perhaps some mysterious rhythm from an unseen clock, and with it come slowly-shifting holes, breaks in the texture of the surface -- Varanim's familiar spots one, maybe ten feet across and twice as tall, around the far side of the sphere, slowly moving down towards the bottom.
Varanim "
Varanim "Hole coming up on the bottom, if we're going to indulge this," she notes.
Spring "I believe we are."
Imrama steers towards the break, indulgently.
The vessel steers inwards to the inside of the vast, rocky structure, and finds something altogether different within.
Strung across from side to side are numerous vast, diaphanous cords, like glittering and incorporeal spider's silk, which slowly wind into elaborate cat's-cradle structures around one another as the rocks on the outer surface to which they are anchored pursue their slowly shifting paths.
At the junctures of those strands, clusters of Essence like little liquid pearls form, the Essence dripping from the outer rocks to coalesce together where the strands meet.
And nestled at the bases of the pillars on the exterior are ghostly, wan forms, elegantly lithe and feathered, their translucent white forms almost invisible against any sort of light background... and from somewhere within the spiritual center of each emanates a single note of the song that drives this whole process, the song of rebirth that animates every part of this strange structure....
Cerin examines the ghostly forms with his sight beyond sight, noting how the essence twists and flows to make them whole.
Spring "Fascinating."
Cerin "Yes, it truely is," Cerin says. "They are slowly working towards the rebirth of more of their kind."
Varanim leans out precariously to touch her fingers to one of the Essence drops, looking thoughtful.
It feels like water, only particularly soft and cleansing water of a perfect temperature for swimming in, and it sticks ever so slightly to her fingers as she pulls them away again.
Varanim Still frowning, she brushes the liquid across her eye.
Cerin watches with interest
The feeling of the soul-fluid coating her eyeball is refreshingly cool and comfortable, like a healing salve soothing away the irritation of an eye made red by spring allergies.
Spring "That is disgusting."
Varanim "Replay it in your memory a few dozen times, and you'll attain enlightenment vis-a-vis us and your stomach."
Varanim blinks experimentally a few times, then nods. "Anyway," she says to Cerin, "what kind are they trying to rebirth?"
Cerin "Whatever they are. I was hoping Imrama would come up with a name."
Spring "What happened to the others? Why do they require rebirth?"
Varanim "Steer closer to one of them and I maybe can answer that one."
Cerin "I would hazard a guess that they died. But it could be that this is how they reproduce. There are a number of odd Hundredfold reproductive cycles"
Spring "Imrama?"
Imrama "There are a lot of complex names here, most of which I don't have the vocal range to pronounce properly. But I think they're called ja'Dikera."
Cerin "Thank you, Imrama"
Varanim As the ship banks closer to one of the pillars, Varanim makes another precarious lean to lightly touch one of the singing creatures, looking to see if it had a 'death' as such things are generally defined, and how it appeared in life.
Varanim sees a vision of a lithe creature, spinning and whirling across a wooded hilltop -- black and blue feathers streaming from its head, six limbs somehow moving in perfect, elegant concert, its form too swift, too blurry to make out in any great detail.
Moments later, its death comes, abruptly: a miscalculation, a slight misstep in pursuit of a vicious prey -- and the hunter becomes the hunted, slain in a stroke by a clawed, furred creature Varanim does not recognize.
The other ghosts seem to have died in altogether different fashions -- one peacefully of old age, its criss-crossed bones and tiny bodily carapace no longer vibrating too fast to see as it slips away, another triumphantly of war wounds after leading a charge to slay a vast force of opponents --
but each seems to have recognized before that death came that they were marked for a future destiny beyond the veil.
Varanim "No connection in their deaths except that they all knew they'd be doing something afterward. So, is there one of these for every race?" Her thinking face deepens.
Spring "Hm."
Spring "An excellent question."
Varanim "Oh, come on. I thought you loved this philosophical crap."
Spring "I said it was excellent."
Spring "If there were others, we would be able to find them."
Varanim "Shall we look, then? Lethe sort of makes me itchy."