The fighting doesn’t end all at once. The air smells like smoke, blood, biodiesel and leviathan salts. The stars are occluded by oily smog rising from fires in the Docks District and you can still hear the distant sound of struggle as cultists, buoyed by mania, try to reach and reclaim the bodies and lives of the Archons.
[[But those heralds are dead.]]
The Thicket burns lethargically. So much green wood does not a forest-fire make. Instead, the entire city is filled with the opaque haze of heavy smoke and pollen that renders the forest a still more isolated and confusing labyrinth.
Indistinct pinpricks of luminescence, the glowing fungus that is slowly co-opting the “light” in “City of Light and Sound”, play will-o-the-wisp against the dark.
And, lacking a proper direction or a means to ascertain one, [[ you wander.]]There are bodies, too many to count - barely dead. You see white robes with shockingly red stains, common Essex citizens contorted around trees as if flung with incredible force, and the occasional Highroller staked into the bark with long, wicked lengths of rebar.
Even as you navigate these corridors of dead, they begin to rot. The smell fills your nose, your eyes - and you wonder briefly why the dead stink so strongly in those few minutes between death and absence. Nothing has, so far as you know, decayed for a very long time.
Perhaps, it ought to stink. [[So it does.]]
“They ran it over with the Ox,” You hear one man saying to his companion, as they pull the half-sundered corpse of another citizen from beneath a fallen tree trunk. “We loaded about twenty five hundred pounds of confiscated salts onto the caboose of that thing. I bet they melted the tracks something bad.”
The other Survivor nods, but does not reply.
[[Keep wandering.]]
“Some kind of gun,” Another person says nearby, their cracked voice drifting through the trees, “Something the Grave Council confiscated from a warlord years ago round the Hiway War. Heard they stole it straight outta the Council’s best-guarded safehouse and turned it on the Archon at the last possible second. Heard they blew the whole thing to smithereens if smithereens was guts. I saw the flash from my bathroom, where me n' the missus had been hidin'.”
“I heard,” another Survivor replies, closer than the first. “They dropped the whole thing in the Dead Drop and the zed down there made a made meal of the whole thing. Just tore it to pieces while they laid on it till it didn’t have limbs to move no more. S’what I heard.”
“That’s ridiculous,” says the first. “Ain’t no way they could lure it out that far. Let alone bait it off a cliff.”
You smile inwardly, because you know [[it’s all true.]]
You move on. You’re looking for something now. But between the fog, the fearsweat and the crescendo of violence that only just let its final note die - the City of Mist and Shadow feels very large and very alien in the dark and dust.
You wonder if you'll see your friends before sunrise. You wonder, dully, where you'll sleep.
[[But then you hear it.]]
A few lonely notes on a guitar. You know that song. It’s been playing for the better part of the past 48 hours; in the sumptuous gambling hall of the Brass Rose. You've learned the tune. You hum it.
You turn your boots in that direction and, with all the exhaustion of High Saturday, you begin to ambulate in the general direction of the chords.
[[Listen and walk.]]
You pass by huddled cultists, alive but unseeing, their backs pressed to trees and their arms folded under their chests. For some, there will be a time to help and to heal. For others, you expect there will be grieving.
For you, you just want [[a drink]].
You recall the Archons, wet-tire monster with too many teeth. Spindly horrors who bend and break but refuse to die. Hulking, clawed, and improperly proportioned. Inhuman.
You have lived your entire life above the Mortis.
You know the shape of its children.
And to the core of yourself you cannot convince yourself the Archons are agents of the Gravemind.
[[So what are they?]]
The implication exhausts you. But before you reflect too deeply on the nature of the threat, the haze begins to clear. You’ve reached the treeline.
As you step out of it and into the dusty halo of light that surrounded the Brass Rose, you feel - perhaps for the first time since coming to Essex - a sense of powerful homecoming.
The warm yellow light of electric lamps beckons you in, and the smell of cooked food and good drink hang on the air almost as powerfully as the blood and the biodiesel.
[[Wait outside a bit longer.]]
You pause as the wind picks up. For a moment, the smoke shifts and you are treated to a perfect vision of stars and the darkness beyond them. But, you are not occupied by that, or the moon that hangs fat and full above the Fountainheart, which still burns languidly at the heart of the city.
When you tilt your head back to gaze at the Lonestar Sky, you wonder what lies beyond it.
And it occurs to you, that [[something must.]] F I N
OOC: We did it!
That's the last story beat for the main overarc of our event!
Thank you so much for sticking around and playing with us. We really hope this event was good for you - we worked hard on it for many many months! Hopefully that paid off.
Soft RP continues through Sunday at 10pm!
But we're done running scheduled mods, Red Ledger Hunts and any other mechanically proc'd Game-Master behavior that requires us to sit in a room for more than an hour or so.
Hopefully we see you soon!
<3 -Shan, Aesa and the whole DRNatl Team