thecrossinglogs | THE CROSSING #1

Entry tags:

THE CROSSING #1

It's time.

For more detail on the particulars of the event, be sure to refer to our info and planning post!

time to choose

— CALM BEFORE THE STORM

It likely isn’t a surprise, when The Ferryman speaks into your mind again. You’ve known The Crossing was coming, and for the past hours, days, or weeks (however you prefer to section your time in this place), you’ve been feeling it drawing closer.

You’ve felt the pull on your soul, guiding you to follow The River; you’ve felt the changes in the Cavern, and in yourself, a shift in atmosphere that seems to start in the humidity of the air and sinks deep down into your bones. You feel solid. More importantly, you feel vulnerable.

Those who want to pay the toll are invited to gather at The Ferryman’s point of vigil; those who don’t will at least have the draw of The Crossing to guide them.

If you have anything to say before the split, now is the time to do it.

— LIGHTS OUT

Because when the moment comes, it waits for no one.

The Lantern doesn't extinguish immediately. Those gathered with The Ferryman (and, perhaps, those gathered near The Ferryman) will see it: a precarious flickering of flame behind glass. The light shrinks, and with it comes a feeling of something else retreating, too — something that you may have understood was there without realizing it, or that you may have assumed was simply another aspect of the light itself.

The bubble of safety, you realize, is receding. And when The Lantern's Light finally goes out, so too does the shield keeping you separated from the wraiths prowling the tunnels.

The darkness closes in. The Cavern's glowing plants are now the only steady source of light in the entire chamber, which allows your eyes to adjust, but only so much; it becomes difficult to make out the faces of even those standing right beside you.

It's time, so says The Ferryman. Make your decision.

follow the leader

— PAYMENT COMES DUE

There is no pomp or ceremony associated with The Ferryman's toll collection. You need only to be willing, and ready.

The darkness seems to shroud The Ferryman more than it does the rest of you, somehow. You can't make out the features of their face, only hear their voice bidding you to step forward when you're ready. For any of you who might need a moment, The Ferryman will wait.

A mote of light appears in The Ferryman's palms as the toll is paid, growing in proportion to the number of memories it receives. It's small, but you can feel the influence of it: that protective bubble you felt recede when The Lantern extinguished grows again around the light, just enough to envelop the group gathered here.

Time to go, says The Ferryman. And even though you can't track their movements in the darkness, the light tracks it for you: over the lip of the land bridge, and down to the black River below.

Nowhere to go but forward. When you step off yourself (even if it takes a bit of psyching up to get there), you'll find that the drop is gentle, and that your steps suspend safely over the water.

Just don't get left behind.

— HEAR A VOICE THAT CAUSES YOU PAIN

And so, you journey.

You walk on the surface of The River as if it were a wide, black road. Ahead of you, that same mote of light follows in the steps of The Ferryman, illuminating the ripples they leave in the water as breadcrumbs for you to follow. The air above The River is cold, certainly, and sometimes the icy water might splash up onto your shoes or ankles — but The River is wide, and there's room enough to walk together, even if you can't see each other well. It's as comfortable as a journey like this might ever be.

But The Crossing is a trial. You didn't forget, did you?

It starts slow: sounds from the darkness that could be voices, unless it's been dark for so long that your ears are playing tricks on you? Shouts of anger, high-pitched laughter, cries of fury and despair.

Then there are words. They beckon to you from the darkness: some plaintive, some punitive. They want you to stop. They want you to stay. They want you gone. Most of the voices are unfamiliar to you, but at least one, you know very well.

You need to keep moving. If you lose sight of The Ferryman's steps, you run the risk of being lost in the Cavern forever. Or perhaps it's someone beside you who's on the edge of losing their focus, someone who needs you to help keep them on the path?

trust your gut

— FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE

The rest of you, left behind on the banks of The River, have only your wits, the contents of your pockets, and the pull of something beyond the darkness to help you on the journey. The darkness is smothering, but not completely impenetrable: you have the glow of the Cavern plants, the faint gleam of the toll group’s steps on the surface of The River, and anything you may have picked up before you got here.

You can travel together or alone, but you must move. The metaphysical pull on you is growing stronger and more insistent the longer you stay in one place, and the Cavern, before preternaturally silent and still, is beginning to stir.

The wraiths, once silent, shapeless, harmless shadows following you about the Cavern, have changed. Where before they were merely unsettling to look at, now they have become larger and more monstrous: sharp eyes and claws, wide eyes and mouths. Where before they were silent, seemingly both unable and unwilling to make any sound, now they wail: wordless cries of pain and anger giving away their positions in the darkness.

Some of them may even be familiar to you, once they get close enough; the wraiths that before had seemingly taken a liking to you, seeking you out and following you wherever you went, now seem dedicated to hunting you specifically.

What the wraiths want from you, it's hard to say. If they catch you, they will tear at you without strategy or direction, like a ravenous animal — or perhaps a terrified one.

Any injuries you sustain during this time, whether from the wraiths or otherwise, are just as real to you as they would have been when you were alive: you bleed, you break, and you feel every inch of the pain inflicted on you.

Nowhere to go but forward. If you follow the pull in your gut, you'll get to where you're going. One way or another.

on the other side

— A MOMENT OF RESPITE

Whichever trial you've chosen, there is, eventually, the end.

You feel it first in the atmosphere: a resettling of the off-kilterness that's been surrounding you. The air slowly becomes drier, and the darkness less punishing. The plants that line the walls of the Cavern become more and more rare, their light replaced by ambient light leaking in from somewhere above you.

For the group traveling with The Ferryman, the wide expanse of The River gradually becomes shallower and narrower, until it's hardly a trickle beneath your feet, winding through the cave system. For the group traveling on their own, there comes a point where the wraiths seem unwilling or unable to follow, their shrieks in the darkness growing further and further away.

You feel it next in yourself: a smoothing of your rough edges, aches and muscle pain and physical exhaustion melting away. For any injured on the journey, your wounds resolve themselves as if natural healing on fast-forward. Natural healing is not always the cleanest or the most comfortable, though; you might be left with scars, crooked fingers or noses, or some other lasting memory of what you risked to be here.

Lastly, once The River has narrowed enough and two groups have reunited again: The Lantern relights. The Ferryman, for all that they were nearly invisible to you in the darkness, seems just the same as they were before. You made it through, they tell you, with no small amount of warmth and pride. Let's take a load off.

You should rest. If you took anything from the Cavern to help you on your journey, you'll find that it's gone from your pockets — when did that happen? Did you set it down? It's been such a long journey, it could have been a lapse of memory.

A memory? Ah, there's something else gone too, isn't there? Willingly or otherwise. If you try to reach for it now, it's like dust in the breeze, or a dream upon waking. You know it was there once, but the harder you try to recall it back, the thinner the details get. Eventually, you might not remember even that there was something to forget.

Congratulations. The Crossing is complete.

Image credits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 + stock imagery unless otherwise noted

code

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Calm Before the Storm

It's time, and thus - they must prepare. As they all begin to gather on the beach, Celehar takes a few moments to step away from the group, turning to face the dark - he doesn't go to his knees or clasp his hands before himself, but he closes his eyes and lets his head dip. The shrine is left behind him, but he mouths a silent recitation of a prayer to himself, a single and solitary figure steadying himself.

It takes a few minutes for him to settle, but when he opens his eyes, it's with an assured stillness to his features. Maybe his worn face looks a bit like he's preparing to step before the unknown, but he makes a circuit of the group, even those on the fringes avoiding the Ferryman's loose circle - those who look restless with nerves, or agitated in some way.

"What troubles you still?"

He does a poor job at projecting soothing, but he does radiate solemn interest, and a willingness to listen.

Hear a Voice that Causes you Pain

The light flickers out, and Celehar steps forward to give over his memory. The words catch in his throat - in the dark, no one can see. So he steps forward, to follow that mote. Under their feet the water's surface is still and plain - he keeps an even pace, his gaze focused forward on the light.

When the first voice rings out, his step hitches. On the second, he cannot bite back a gasp of a name - "Evrin," he says, quiet and pained. When one of the echoing voices says "Thara," with so much bewildered pain, he stumbles over his own feet. When he rights himself, his expression is a tight grimace of pain, and his expressive ears are pinned low against his head. He looks like he's been kicked in the gut.

And every time that quiet voice rings out, it lands on him like a stone, piling each hitch in his step as he falls back further and further. His eyes are no longer on the faint light held by the Ferryman, but staring down into the deep, black waters below them.

"Thara, I didn't know what else to do."

Those defeated words amidst the chorus are what finally break his stride. He lands with the smash of forearm and cheek against the water, a vicious tremble taking over his limbs - and for a long time, too long with the Ferryman's light receding, he stays there.

A Moment of Respite

Celehar doesn't make it more than a step onto the riverbank before sinking down to sit on the stones. There's no mark on him, aside from a lingering redness around his eyes, but his braid is more escaped curls than plait, despite the pins holding it together. He settles there for a time, hand curled over fist and propping up his forehead as the others collect there and the ache, physical and emotional, begins to fade.

Eventually he'll rise once again, look for the faces that were so hidden in the dark. Check his notebook for updates from the others who wrote during the Crossing.

For now, the rest is sorely needed.

[Happy to swap to brackets! Or do a different part of the prompt, if you so desire.]

Need finds herself playing sheepdog, roaming out farther from the Ferryman's light than feels safe. She can ignore the voices, she tells herself firmly, time and time again, especially if she keeps moving.

The good thing about Celehar being so pale is that he's one of the easier people to track in this dark, even if her eyes are strangely blurry. It's been so long since she wept that she doesn't understand that that's what's happening. She sees him several times, but doesn't stop for longer than it takes to say a word or two before she moves on. Eventually, looking back, she notices him collapsed on the water's surface and turns to go after him at a run. Need actually skids to stop before she can trample him, splashing icy water in the process.

"This is a poor place for a nap, Prelate," she says, her voice thick and hoarse despite the lightness of the phrase. Need glances back towards the fading light and bends, touches his shoulder.

The first sound that ekes its way out of Celehar's throat is more a thin moan than any intelligible word, a wounded animal sound rendered rough by his always-harsh voice and rougher by the shivering. His shoulder is juddering with it when Need's hand comes into contact, a tremble working its way out from his very core and through his limbs.

He isn't unconscious to the world - the touch to his shoulder evokes movement. Celehar shifts the arm under himself and lifts his head. Stray curls have begun to escape his braid and a few have plastered themselves against his face. There's a strain in lifting his head, and he's unsteady as he scrapes himself up to a half-propped sitting position. In the darkness, a woman's voice is mocking someone, but this sound doesn't make Celehar flinch. It takes him a few long moments of hunting through the dark to settle on Need's face, the flicker of shadows struggling to resolve into familiar features with their light source continuing on without them.

"I - " he starts, his throat grinding the words to a halt. He has to swallow and attempt them a second time, closing his eyes against the dark. It can do nothing to shut out the voices murmuring around them. "I'm afraid I've been a fool, Othalo Need." It's a poor attempt at his usual solemnity, his voice fractured all through with emotion before it dissolves into a bitterly hopeless laugh.

She'd had a glowing square pinned to her chest, but it's come undone at some point. Need goes ponderously to a crouch and her knees, remembering being aging mortal joints, protest the action. Celehar's in a bad state, about as bad as she's ever seen someone who wasn't unresponsive or seriously injured or ill. Need feels that urge to furl her wings around him. It's not possible as she is now, but that's fine, as a sword she'd only be able to get him up by seizing control of his body.

She touches three fingers to his cheek. "Lad, that's just part of being a person." In the darkness, seemingly only just out of sight, Need hears Vena sob and hiccup. Yes, that had tended to happen to the poor girl. Any time she laughed or cried for too long...

Oh, yes, the light is definitely dimmer now than even a minute ago. "I'm going to get you up and you can tell me as we go, all right?"

Lad. No one has called him that in - he can't remember then. It cuts through the black fog in his thoughts, and the callused brush of fingers, warmer around him than the cold air and the water beneath him, drags him away from the echo of voices. The physical symptoms of his distress don't fade so easily, but he focuses in on her, reaching up towards Need's hand. He grasps at it, squeezing to communicate his understanding.

"I'm sorry," he rasps. "Are you..."

The faintest hint of light catches on the track of a tear along her face - another jolt to his system. He grits his jaw against the trembling and nods, his eyes dropping back to the dark floor of the river, shamefaced. It might ache to accept the help, but if he could have gotten up by himself, he would have, before Need was forced to run to him through the dark.

Need revises her opinion; he doesn't want to stay here and let the darkness claim him, he's a little better than the worst she's ever seen someone. Still bad, he's shaking like he has a fever.

"I'm here." She genuinely doesn't understand what Celehar's not-quite-asking. Need is putting all of her focus on the task at hand. This seeming of a body is a tool that she feels distant from just now, and if it's doing some sub-optimal things like gasping and leaking from the face, that's something to consider later. Need could ignore her real apprentice-daughter when she was still most of the way human, she can ignore a specter of her and a tool not functioning quite as she wants it to. It's fine.

If Celehar's trembling this much sprawled half holding himself up with his arms, trying to brace him at her side to help him walk isn't going to work out. Need opts for the simple solution: she scoops the elf up against her chest like a bride carried over a threshhold, and heaves herself upright, a low groan forcing its way through her throat as she does.

"I've been carried around in some stupid, stupid ways. Dignity is overrated," she says. See, she can still make jokes(?). It's all fine. Now, where is that light...

He surely wasn't expecting the rough yank - he may occasionally feel like a pile of sticks tied together at the joints, but he's a grown man still, and certainly not an easy burden to be carried. And yet carried he is, despite his initial instinctive jolt at the practice. It gives him a strange flash of the carter-woman on the road to Tanvero and the ghoul, of the twin gravediggers who had to help him with the labor of burying that corpse.

The association alone would not have been enough to prevent him from trying to force his knock-kneed legs from carrying him once more, if it were not for two things - the receding light of the Ferryman's tolls, and his name, called again from the dark.

Celehar's hands curl towards his head. Despite the pain the voice seems to cause him, he doesn't block his ears.

"Evrin," the name tears its way out of his mouth, sharp enough to hurt him in the passing from thought to sound. It's a response to the voice itself more than any explanation for Need, but the emotion thickening his voice is an explanation all its own.

Oh, yes. Celehar's so thin that she thinks he weighs as much as a child, but children are actually quite heavy, and he's long-limbed enough that this is physically awkward, too. Like carrying a gangling teenager. Need's implement is a recreation of the body of a seventy-something woman who had had a measure of strength and vigor left, but nothing like what she had boasted in her prime. It protests this use and labors to do what she demands of it. Her vision is very unsatisfactory right now, but - turning, she thinks she has it. Need had wanted to accelerate into a charge. She manages a stumbling, unsteady run.

She should have taught some of these people to whistle, so they could locate each other in this cursed dark, she thinks as Vena's voice says you should have left me where you found me. Need turns her attention from that sharply as Celehar cries out a name.

"It's not him. How - hah - how do I know that? My daughter was older than this when she died." She has to stop talking to gasp for air, then, and doesn't understand why she said it so intensely. Sweat plasters the lower layers of her clothing to her skin, but aside from her apron they're perforated too and some of each breath escapes, carrying a faint scent of seared flesh. She's slowed down already. "It's memory, lad. It's real but it's - not - him."

It's mostly the distress that makes the smell of burnt flesh close his throat - the terrible memories there, those of the Amalese workers killed in an airship accident, are entirely separate from the memory of Evru, but the fragmentory recollections of the dead always did seem to plague him when other concerns hounded his waking hours.

The unspeakable well of grief wants him to protest that Evru or not, it is only right that he feel the grief welling up to drown him - that the guilt should swallow him up and leave him the same husk he was in the wake of Evru's execution. That selfishness such as carrying on...

But the sharp gasp to Need's words are like a slap to the face. Selfishness is here, too, in forcing Need to attend to him, and this guilt, too, adds itself to the pile gnawing at him. The shaking isn't lessened, but she's gasping for air and slowing down, and carrying him surely can't help.

"Your daughter - ?"

Onwards, onwards. History is sealed and unchangeable. There's no way back, only the road ahead, into the dark. Need's arms burn. She should have got Celehar on her back instead, she thinks indistinctly, it would at least hurt differently. The not-entirely-rational thought now is that if she lets go at all he'll drift away on the current.

"All my bearers are my daughters. Or sons. Or daughter-sons." Most of them. She won't claim Elspeth like that, and half the reason she'd claim Firesong is because he's so much fun to prod. "But she was my apprentice first. Little urchin tried to - pick my pocket. Caught her and she bit me. The guard there - they cut hands off. So I brought her - back home, to my Sisters. She trusted me first."

Need doesn't remember that. Not directly. She remembers it like the words laid out in summary, in much the same order as she's just said them. Maybe a little more coherently. She growls and shakes her head, trying to clear it, and keeps trudging doggedly, much less certain of the way now.

"I've got sweat in my eyes," she pants. It's not sweat. "Point me in a direction."

It's an echo of his Calling, to listen to the grief of others - to focus, in the midst of everything, to someone else's pain and provide, if not comfort, then a space where the emotions might be poured out Celehar latches onto it like a lifeline. His Calling has already saved him from this grief before, though here, with Evru's quiet voice seeking him like an arrow, it's a double-edged sword that he grasps blindly.

"Your - " Right. Her soul, sealed in a sword. The foundlings, who she sought justice for. It takes him a moment to remember it, in that conversation on the riverbank. "You knew her before." He doesn't - can't - know the details, but the pain in that voice - he's met many, who would do drastic things in moments of desperation. Who would make terrible choices...

It takes a moment for him to find his voice again, and when he does, it's more rasp than words. "There - the right. You do not have to carry me the whole way, Othalo."

"Her name was Vena," Need growls, gradually moving to a generalized anger. Anger is familiar, something she can recognize, one of the few emotions she's still felt strongly after so long in the sword. Sometimes it feels like her studied calm is just a skin over rage that goes to the bone. That isn't a good thing, but as long as that skin's intact it's better than feeling nothing. Controlled anger is a source of strength.

It shouldn't matter if the effort and a strange pain cloud her eyes, she shouldn't have eyes. She should be able to make up for that by impinging on the sight of others. The physical is something she should only be aware of secondhand. All that's actually hers is the dark, and the cold, and the awareness of the flow and the flicker of others' lives, right there, in her grasp.

She veers right, but it takes a few more steps to process what else Celehar said. "Are you up for it? It's going to be harder if you can't." Harder to get him up again if he collapses, she means.

It takes him a long moment to answer, to think through it. It's not that the tremors have ceased, or that the voice no longer affects him - he thinks it will tear through him, every time Evru says his name like a plea. It does, and each time he bows his head with it, quiet though it may be.

"He is my burden to bear."

There's a heavy certainty to his voice when he says it, squeezing her shoulder almost too tightly.

"I cannot ask you to carry it for me." Not when her own grief hangs around her neck like a stone, plainly visible - he can see the glint of the faint light off of her eyes, when he glances up towards her. A parent's grief, intermingled with their child's. He's seen it, twisted in all its forms enough to recognize it here. Whatever she needs he cannot give it - but he need not be another burden, in his grief. He has done so much of that, already.

Thara Celehar | Ferryman Group

voice

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

respite

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject