214. Visa Check
[Designation: THE MARK OF THE OATHLESS]
[Realm of Origin: TIDEREIGN]
[Trinket Description: May your dreams grow wilder with the deepening Night. Those who bear the [Mark] are granted passage into the twice-lit city and access to its [Oathless] domains.]
***
As soon as Serac received her prize, she was unceremoniously booted out of the Mirroring Lotus. She found herself back on solid ground and at the center of attention. Every one of her fellow party members eyed her with varying degrees of concern.
“That bad?” she asked with an apologetic grimace. “How long was I in there for?”
“Not long,” Zacko deadpanned. “Maybe half an hour?”
Half an hour? That was much longer than it’d felt. And apparently long enough for Zacko’s pissy demeanor to correct itself. To be fair to him, Serac now had a decent understanding of how someone could come out of the Mirroring Lotus in a less than charitable mood.
“Your Trinket is different,” Renna observed by way of greeting. “In name, description, and color.”
Serac brought the pendant up to her face, finally able to get a good look under the sunlight. [Mark of the Oathless] was a box-shaped lotus like its [Oathward] sibling, but its luster was indeed of a noticeably lighter hue. Serac was surprised to find she recognized the color. HIEROPHANT’s [Dusklight] softened by CROZIER’s gold. Warm, confident, and oddly youthful, like a rose garden in season. It was—
“Raw umber,” Oriole the Tidereigner murmured and left it at that, as if he’d said much more than just name a color. The Serac of even a fortNight ago would’ve been pleasantly confused by this. ToNight (toDay?), however, she felt a little like she’d been let in on an inside joke.
“Okay, but what does it mean in practical terms?” Zacko wondered aloud for the group. “Was Princess denied entry? Or is she just on a different visa from us?”
Serac didn’t know what a ‘visa’ was, but it sounded like a question for the entity that had issued the damn thing. She looked up at the hybrid giant, wondering if her earlier moment of clarity had been a fluke or an ongoing arrangement. The Gatekeeper gave her nothing, however, merely staring ahead with its pupilless eyes.
“It shares the same designation as my spell.” Oriole the displaced local took a stab. “Maybe it serves the same function as well? Protect you from [Unmooring]?”
“A reasonable guess,” Renna appraised for the group. “I do think it’s important to understand the difference between [Oathward] and [Oathless]. Their descriptions are nearly identical, right down to the oddly bureaucratic warning against swapping them with another Wayfarer. The only distinction of note is this access to so-called ‘domains’. I assume that’ll come into play once we’re inside the city proper.”
“Yeah, so like I said, different visas for different conditions,” Zacko repeated himself, only to draw another round of blank looks. “Anyway, what’re we waiting for? Let’s get inside the city proper so we can all put our new Trinkets to use. The thing is heavy as all get-out, so I better get my money’s worth.”
By ‘heavy’, Zacko of course meant the Trinket’s Burden value rather than its physical weight. 27 was certainly on the more burdensome side, bringing Serac straight past her max capacity and the [Overburdened] threshold. Unless she liked being one hit away from Poise-break, she’d need to put away her other Trinkets. Or…
[Glutton’s Last Meal]. It was as good a time as any to put the Aberrant tripe to real use. Before Serac left Duskpool, she’d sliced up some Glutton stomach and oven-dried it into jerky. The thing was tough, gamy, and mostly tasteless, but it served a practical enough purpose. She forced down a few mouthfuls now, keeping an eye on her status all the while.
[Satiety: 117/154 -> 106/154]
[Burden: 48/38 -> 48/49]
[Wayfarer Status Effect: HEAVY]
Trading 11 points of [Satiety] to give herself a one-point buffer in Burden. That was enough to alleviate the status effect by one tier, down to a much more manageable [Heavy]. She offered the same ‘treatment’ to Renna, who partook in the tasteless jerky without complaint.
Zacko, as a Manusya, was shit out of luck. He would’ve refused the [Last Meal] anyway, being a much fussier eater than the Rakshasa he called ‘Princess’. Oriole too was in the same boat, except…
“I’m fine,” he explained with a mystified shrug. “The pendant I got doesn’t register as a Trinket, so it doesn’t count against my Burden.”
That certainly was a little mystifying. But unless the Gatekeeper suddenly became much more communicative (and fluent in the CMV), there was nothing the party could do but shrug and move on.
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“So, we can just go, yes?” Serac checked one last time. “You won’t stop us again, Mr Gatekeeper?”
The giant gave no response. Neither did it put away its Instrument or shrink back to whatever dimension it’d materialized from. It merely stared straight ahead, as if… as if waiting for something. Or someone?
Serac turned and followed the Gatekeeper’s gaze. The valley looked no different to how she’d left it, save having turned a brighter note of sepia. Between the wide, empty footpaths, the Sanzu rushed toward the Gloaming mists and the ‘surface Realm’ below.
“What’s up, Princess?” Zacko, already starting toward the gate, called over his shoulder. “Doubt you’ll learn anything new hanging around this chatterbox.”
“No, you’re right,” Serac murmured, even as her gaze lingered on the deserted valley a moment longer. “Let’s go.”
With nothing in the way of concrete instruction, the Upheavers were left to puzzle out the next steps on their own. Luckily, the solution proved intuitive enough, readily presenting itself to the prospective visitors as they reached the foot of the obsidian gate.
“Look at this,” Renna noted as she traced out a rectangular outline on the wall. “It’s the exact size and shape as our pendants. I have to assume we’re meant to place the [Mark] against this imprint. Engage some kind of lock mechanism.”
“Like those keycards at a hotel,” Zacko said drily, again going somewhere the others couldn’t follow. At this point, one had to assume he was doing it on purpose. “The question is, does it matter which one?”
“I wouldn’t think so.” Serac re-scanned the item descriptions for good measure. “‘Granted passage into the twice-lit city’. That part’s the same for both [Oathward] and [Oathless], word for word.”
“Then let me try mine.” Oriole pushed his way to the front of the queue. Perhaps in some parallel setting, it would’ve been considered bad manners. “Even if it hasn’t been vetted by Pathsight, it’s gotta be good for something.”
The only thing for the tabbycat to do was push his replica of the Mirroring Lotus against the ‘keycard’ slot. A perfect fit, and the massive gate responded by groaning to life. Is this whole thing going to slide open? Serac wondered vaguely, watching the seam in the middle. Feels like overkill to let in just four people.
As it turned out, Twicereign’s city gate was far more sci-fi than a Rakshasa had any way of knowing. The seam did separate, but only in part, from the ground up and just tall enough to match Zacko, the tallest of the visitors. It then widened into a man-sized rectangle—a door for all intents and purposes—as its insides reshaped itself into a tunnel.
Serac gaped. Renna’s frog eyes bulged. Oriole’s tail swished frantically in alarm. Even Zacko looked on in slack-jawed amazement as the obsidian slabs completed their transformation. This was followed by a repetitive beeping sound that rang from somewhere inside the gate. Serac had never heard anything like it, but it immediately struck her as deeply unnatural and oddly irritating.
“We better hustle.” Zacko was the first to snap back to the task at hand. “The beeping means the gate will only stay open for a limited time, or I’m not my mama’s son.”
There was no reason to argue, nor to test the theory. Tail-swishing Oriole led the way as the rest of the party fell into single file. The beeps grew only louder as the Upheavers delved further into the tunnel. Serac did her best to ignore them, even as her heart pounded to an unfamiliar beat.
The Rakshasa had brought up the rear, so her first view of the city proper was blocked by Zacko’s burly frame. Almost as soon as she stepped into the light, the beeping behind her coalesced into a single, continuous ‘bzzzt’. Then the gate transformed again, this time in reverse to close shop. Back to two enormous slabs of obsidian, with a barely visible seam in the middle.
Serac could only hope the gate had been kind enough to wait for the last visitor to pass through. She shuddered at the alternative, and at what might’ve happened to her if the party had been too slow with their tunnel walk. That was when she was jolted by a firm hand on her shoulder.
“Princess, you gotta see this!” Zacko enthused, uncharacteristically touristy. “You and I have been through a lot, but this… this is something else.”
By Serac’s count, this was the third distinct ‘civilization’ packed into one Realm. The parched, clay-lined sunscape of Dawnwick. The bricks, smokes, and shadows of Duskpool. And now the otherworldly, obsidian majesty of Twicereign.
Dawnwickers drew lines and grids in pursuit of order and structure. Duskpoolers huddled close, the better for neighbors to help each other through short, senseless Nights. Here unfolded a different story altogether. Clearly, the Twicereigner’s motto had been ‘make all the things’, and their only limit had been the heavens themselves.
The first thing to greet the visitors was a plaza of sorts, centerpieced by an art installation as bizarre as it was huge. A veritable labyrinth of painted stone and metallic pipes, it was at once a fountain, a Mriga bust, a Tiryaga statue, and maybe even a diorama of an entire city. Serac wouldn’t pretend to know. You can tell me it’s all or none of the above, and I’d believe you, no questions asked.
After that set the tone, the monstrosity of a city first spread in a rough circle before tapering into a conical hilltop. It built up and up, ever adherent to the Realm’s natural slope while molding its contours into a madman’s dream or a perfectionist’s nightmare. No two buildings looked the same, whether in shape, size, color, or function. Roads twisted out of thin air, only to disappear into solid walls.
Yet, despite its disparate and clashing elements, a sense of inspired purpose permeated and unified the city. The fountain-statue-diorama in the plaza was meant to shock, awe, and confront. Houses were as weird or sensible as their residents wanted or perhaps needed it to be. Madmen dreamt, and perfectionists built nightmare into enduring reality.
Even the heavens above conspired to illustrate this frenzy of collaboration. Perhaps due to the altitude, the skyveils hung low over Twicereign. They filtered the glare of sunlight, softening the sepia tones into something gentler, duskier, sleepier. Together with the purple mists that rose from the waterfall in the distance, the skies blanketed the twice-lit city in a persistent—
Gloam, Serac realized with a start. Oh. I think I get it now. This is Realgar’s [Twilight], where time slows down and takes on greater weight and possibility. This is the ‘Gloam’ that at once unifies and divides the two sides of Tidereign. This is what the Keeper’s so hell-bent on protecting—no, preserving—for its people to come back to.
Serac looked past slack-jawed Zacko, past wide-eyed Renna, and at the much quieter, much stiller figure of Oriole ere’Quinlan. The tabbycat’s eyes were closed, and the fur around them was wet with tears. Serac thought she understood. Because she too had forgotten. She too had remembered. And she too had dreamt of home.
[EXALTED FEAT accomplished: Open a path into the city behind the veils.]
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