[center][url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/5560259][img]https://i.imgur.com/hKreI84.jpeg[/img][/url][/center][hr][hr][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][sup][color=e3e3e3][b]【Location】[/b][/color][color=bdbdbd]landow: shrines 🠞 food stands[/color]
[color=e3e3e3][b]【Time】[/b][/color][color=bdbdbd]sunday, 6:30 am[/color]
[color=e3e3e3][b]【Interactions】[/b][/color][@tlaloc][@rabidbacon][/sup][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][hr][hr][justify][color=bdbdbd]Before the crowd could even comprehend what had befallen it, already the great gust of wind, like from the shockwave of a fallen bomb, had delivered its intoxicating fallout. With traces of Regalian residue seeping their way into eyeballs and nostrils, absorbing through the gums and the pores and any other aperture it grazed, a score of people—more, even, within this or that a radius—all at once received an insidious, stupefying dose. For perhaps a minute or two would the ingestion thereof transfix them in place, swaying side-aside in blissful catatonia. Until then, the moment of their revivification, Beth could shelter within their multitudes, listening. Observing. Even as the onlookers at the peripheries of this ground zero inferred what must have happened; even as they pushed at the borders of this throng to suck at the turgid air, to thrust their tongues at every mote which glittered in the sunbeams, her human meat-wall afforded her a moment's respite. If only the one.

Before this long, tedious week, spent mostly in transit from hoverbus to hoverbus, from food line to food line, from speech to sedative speech, from ritual to soporific ritual, Beth had never visited sleepy Landowtown, nor the nearby Arosa City, across the bay, piercing its skyline with its towers, blued steel obelisks erected blasphemously at an indifferent heaven. Entirely and altogether unimpressed was she. True, all week she had balked at this theme-park simulacrum of a religious festival, with its souvenir stands and subscription plans and parking vouchers. But this was [i]every[/i] Festival of Lights, and could she blame a hopeful tourist-town-to-be for giving the gormless masses what they wanted? Their Gilgamesh petting zoos and Anima butterfly facepaintings, their family photographs with grinning dragon mascots? No, hardly a girl-fool of her eight-and-twenty years, long ago had Beth come to expect nothing better from such farces. But there, erected for all to see atop the dais, stood the true Landow; behind all their appearances, and all their decorum, their true feelings laid bare. All their tenets and values giv'n shape.

[center][color=bda6bd][i]Hast thou a friend whom thou trustest well,
from whom thou cravest good?
Share thy mind with him, gifts exchange with him,
fare to find him oft.

But hast thou one whom thou trustest ill
yet from whom thou cravest good?
Thou shalt speak him fair, but falsely think,
and leasing pay for a lie.[/i][/color][/center]
Beth did not always realize when she recited from [abbr=``The Words of the Old High One,`` a collection of songs, poems, and aphorisms attributed to Odin]the Words[/abbr], their wisdoms so troughed upon her tongue, the gestures so worn into the marrow of her hands that at times they emerged entirely without design; and, seemingly, from naught and nowhere, alike to groundwater bubbling up around the blade of the well-digger's pick. This prayer she muttered, as if to purify her mouth where her eyes supped of this place's artifice and idolatry.

Ultima—lotus-seated Ultima, in all Her soapstone glory, headdress and nipples and fingernails all leafed in gold upon the dark and greenish rock of Her flesh—tens of thousands, [i]hundreds[/i] of thousands of likenesses exactly like this one laid strewn across the countrysides, and no different was Landowtown, paying acquiescence to the greatest of the Dominants, and the most widespread of Their worldly cults. Second was She in size and majesty upon the stage, wrought by the town's more competent craftsmen. In all, a perfectly dutiful depiction, if a dispassionate one; imbued with none the reverence, none the inspiration, none the terror and ecstasy corded through the streets of Malkuth. Coincidentally, the dais and all its constructs arranged as they were, row behind row, as the hour arrived for the sun to appear from behind the sea, and for dawn's first light to glisten diamond-like upon the waves, all the shrines cast long their shadows. And it brought Beth no small amusement to see not only how Landow's chosen tutelary dwarfed the ersatz Ultima; but how for a few delectable minutes, She quite literally sat in that other Dominant's shadow. A sight so delicious it could only have been intentional; purposeful; [i]spiteful.[/i]

That other Dominant, of course, was none other than the Storm-soother, the Tidebringer; She Who Smashes the Fleets of Our Foes; Leviathan, the Deep-queen. Leviathan, whose serpentine body the Landowmen first knapped from an immense whalebone, then strung with painted shells for Her scales, these drilled through with artistic perforations, that the breeze from the sea sang through them. Leviathan, Her ivory body rasped by shipworms, bleached by salt. Leviathan whose antlers were driftwood, whose whiskers were the fronds from dried swordfish tails, whose teeth were the hollowed claws of gaily colored crabs. Steam-breath scrimshawed across Her neck, Her plumage streaming in the morning wind as pennants of silk and seaweed.

Obliging enough were the likenesses of other Dominants: a Titan of crumbling sandstone, an Ifrit of a composite fire agate, a vine-and-wicker Gaia......but much like Ultima, relegated were these to mere accompliceship; an entourage to flank the town's true patron, around whom the limelight-sucking Regalia, and, ergo, the attention of all the town, gathered. Her brother was there, as expected. His smile easily fooled the others, crinkling the skin around his eyes, seeming so warm and curious and sincere; he'd gotten so very skilled at smiling. But Beth saw Cassiel as only a sister could, and in that hypodermic smile glittered a familiar rage, waiting just behind the teeth like a venom sac. One of the others had done something to offend him, or, more likely, to compel him to pageantry thereof; the one in purple? Or the blonde in the sharkskin suit? The first Beth did not recognize, and so dismissed from her mind; as for the latter, she could not so easily banish the feeling that she'd seen that person elsewhere. Beth seldom left Cetra but to grudgingly attend the Festival of Lights, and other such travesties; a laymember of the Resplendency, then, a common sight in the Lower Circles? Perhaps a dignitary to the Crucible? Beth recalled moment after moment, scouring her memory for those pretty pale eyes, those forlorn and sullen lips. She did not realize she was staring.

But just at the moment the other Regalia—Leviathan's, judging by the guarded, sheltered way in which the woman strayed none too far from the magnificent whalebone statue—might have befallen Beth with her yearning gaze, the sleepers began to stir, and piece together one by one why they could not remember the last few minutes, and so the time had arrived to slip away from this throng and find refuge in another. Narrow of breast and subtle of step, scalpel-like did Beth sliver between the waking celebrants, pointedly ignoring all hands which descended her shoulders, all moans and cries which petitioned her to hear their ails, suspecting she to be the one who had so bewitched them, so anesthetized them with her residue. She still wanted to see. Despite how the answer always hurt her, she had to have it. Hold it in her hands and taste it on her teeth: where was Odin, and how did these Landowmen mock Him with their depiction? But then not only did the festival-goers begin to stir all around her but those masked mercenaries, the ones circling the stage to guard Cassiel and the others as if from a rabid horde. Wrist units were placed to earpieces; chins were lowered, dangerous words muttered into radios. Soon a contingent of these men had broken away from the dais, beginning to sweep through the crowds. Beth hardly needed linger and eavesdrop to infer what they sought. Nudges became shoves, skulking broke out into a hurried stride; and with one last inquisitive glance back toward Leviathan's champion, the corpsepainted girl, Death's Regalia, vanished into the masses.[/color][/justify]