[IC] Gates of the Mire

[Elendra]

There was an unspoken agreement between the four at the vine rope wrapped round the stone blockade, and they began to pull upon it with hopes of removing it from the pass, enough at least for them to progress beyond it. Feet pressed into the floor, and legs and backs heaved with effort. The vine went tight, stretching as the stone began to give way. With a low earthly grumble, the taut vine pulled upon the stone as it rotated and ground into the wall at its closed side. With great exertion, more and more the slab turned, until there was just enough room for the most lithe of them to fit through. The taut vine, chomped between the rough edges of the rock, snapped and sent the group falling backwards onto the circular passage that encircled the inner tower.

Kalia was quick to take the opening that was left, wide enough for her to get through, she went off ahead hoping for an easy way out of the situation. Following at her heels was Nymona, slipping through but not rushing off ahead without the others as Kalia had done in her escape. Despite this, their efforts were not in vain, as there was plenty of room for the men to leverage themselves against the stone to turn it enough that they each may pass through as easily as those who went before them. Dirt and dust fell from above, but the way was open, and the seventh passage laid before the wretch and the gentle giant.

The stonework of the passage was remarkably similar to those of the other six at each ring, although completely lacking in the embedded dark stone chambers, such as the ones that they emerged from. There was also remarkable little growing in it by comparison to the rest of the tower and its rooms. Some vines and roots, but the architecture retained most of its sculpted form without the overgrowth. Stonework and sharp contrasting carvings at diagonals with each other adorned the walls, inlaid with further sculpting that was battered and broken. Chunks of masonry in the ground, and the faded lingering of colour splattered them darker than their natural hue.

Along the walls were torches that lit the path towards the natural end of it, which was unique in its particular brand of light. Whereas the other passages and halls held only torch light, the further into the path one looked, the more sunlight there was coming in from the sides and from above as the passage became lass hall, and more airy walkway. Kalia moved along it and saw the source of these lights first. After some distance, the walls were carved to be open, empty holes for windows with chips of what was once glass infrastructure sticking forth at odd intervals in a myriad of colour, primarily blue. Above were more of the same array, the remnants of windows that would have bathed this way in tinted light.

She could see outside. The world around the tower itself. The tower sat amidst a great body of water, stretching near infinite to the heavens as far as she could see through looking out of the holes in the walls and ceiling of the passage. A body of water that she could not see the depths of, nor even the shallows. Unlike the water inside, it was not so observable. It was not clean. It was dark, black, with green life atop it, and the occasional fish breaking the surface. The water was thick, each splash moving it about in a slow sputtering way. Surrounding the water in which the tower sat, for in all directions that Kalia could see, were several high reaching walls, layered and tiered with outcroppings jutting forth. This passage, this bridge, connected the two structures, tower to the concentric structure of walls upon the water. At the far end of the enclosed stone bridge was a door, a metal piece of rusty red and brown, that hung ajar but near closed.

On the other side of the door, Kalia thought she could hear the distant echo of armoured footsteps, metallic and heavy, but far away.

[Jorick]

The sunlight and the sight of the open world beyond the structure were a great relief for Kalia. Never mind the fact that the water was scummy and there was still no clear way out of the strange building, just seeing the promise of freedom to come was enough to lift her spirit. She'd been trying to repress the horrifying thought that there was no way out at all, that she would die trapped in the strange building she'd woken up in without ever seeing the outside world again. For a brief while she had considered the notion that she had died and been sent to some god's twisted idea of an afterlife, a punishment for her wrongdoing. Now she could set aside those notions, and it felt as if a weight had lifted from her shoulders.

Kalia's forward progress was halted by a rusty metal door. That in itself wasn't worrying, since it was already ajar and presumably could be opened all the way without much trouble, but the sound coming from behind the barrier halted her where she stood. She heard footsteps and clanking metal, probably meaning it was someone wearing armor moving around, but they sounded distant. New fears rushed into her mind, but she couldn't let that stop her now. Kalia felt so close to breaking free of this nightmare she'd found herself in, and cowardice would only hold her back. None of these brave thoughts moved her forward, however. In the brief seconds she stood paused in front of the door, the thing that got her moving again was the thought that since the footsteps were so quiet it meant that the source couldn't be anywhere near the door, so she'd be safe so long as she stayed quiet.

The rusty door presented an obvious problem in the stealth department. If the hinges were as bad as the body of the door itself, they would creak loud enough to wake the dead. There was nothing for it but to try, so she moved to the door and gave it a light experimental push, ready to bolt back down the passage if it made a loud sound. The hinges seemed to be in decent condition, but there was something behind the door that resisted her push, something that made a rattling metallic noise. It wasn't very loud, and there was no shout of alarm from the room, so she kept on pushing the door slowly open. Once there was enough room for her to slip by, as with the stone before, she slipped through the gap.

Just inside Kalia found pieces of armor piled up against the door. She hadn't knocked any over with her gentle door opening, else there would have been a racket probably loud enough to draw the source of the footsteps. For a moment she considered just moving on ahead, but then she remembered the few people who would be following shortly. She wouldn't be surprised if one of them came barging through without a care, scattering armor and making tons of noise, and that would ruin all her caution. Sighing at the necessity, Kalia started moving pieces of armor carefully away from the door in order to make enough from for even the big man who'd helped with the vine to get through, hoping she could get it done before the others caught up to her.

[Sukisho]

The shock of landing on his ass stunned Carl-Johan momentarily. As he stood up, the two women that had been helping pull the now broken vine were slipping through the small opening they had created. He tried to stop them, but he was too late and they had disappeared behind the large rock. He groaned audibly, wondering why they didn't see that splitting up was not the best idea. He looked at the man next to him, who had also risen to his feet now, and realized that he was the only one that would not fit through the small opening created. Not wasting any more time, especially since the lithe women had already gone towards what ever dangers could lie ahead, Carl-Johan moved into a position near the entrance. With his back against the wall and using his legs as a lever, he started to shove the rock to create a larger hole. The man in navy, whose name he had still not learned, soon joined him and together they quickly opened the passageway enough so they could both enter easily.

There was some faint sunlight behind the stone coming from the medium crack that surrounded the joint between the hallway and the alcove where the stone had been jammed. Carl-Johan noticed that this crack was not one that had been caused by the age of the tower, but had probably been intentional in the original design. Additionally, it appeared that the stone had prevented any plant-life from taking over this area of the tower. Continuing across the threshold, he entered the torch-lit hall. The shorter of the two women, dressed in pale orange, was waiting for them on the other side of the stone in the hall. Carl-Johan took this moment to speak to her.

"It isn't wise to rush ahead into unknowns. I understand the need to escape, but I think we will do better as a group."

He only waited for her to acknowledge what he said, before walking past and heading down the hall. It was obvious that this hall was very different than the others. The stone in this corridor was stained with pigments implying that the walls had once been painted in vibrant blues inside the large zigzag frame the ran the length of the corridor. The ceiling and floor however were bare of the pigments, but not necessarily of detail. Walking carefully through the first half of the hall, Carl-Johan focused on the detailed mosaic of the floor, mesmerized by the attention to detail.

Had it not been for the blazing midday sun, he might not have initially seen the change in scenery of the hall. This second half of the hall was just as long as the first but the only thing they shared was the mosaic floor. The ceiling had given way to the open blue sky above and the walls were now adorned with what once was larger windows that now just contained remnants of stained glass windows in shades of blue and green. It was obvious to Carl-Johan that this part of the hall, no, this part of the bridge would have been stunning to walk through when the windows had been unbroken and the stain glass sparkled in the in afternoon sun. He paused for a moment and looked out on the world.

The wall intrigued him. It appeared more than just a wall to keep people out or even in, but a structure that at one point most certainly held people. Maybe it was a fortress, or a castle, or even a village. It was too hard to tell from this distance, but Carl-Johan did notice that the bridge they were crossing was leading towards the wall. Soon he reached the end of the passageway where the other woman was no where to be seen, but the rusty metal door was very much ajar, and sounds of shifting metal could be heard as he approached.

[Herzinth]

The sight of the bridge nearly brought Nymona to tears. Sunlight. She wouldn't die in the murky dark, there was freedom ahead. The lights, the tests and the bear, it could all be left behind. Nothing more than a bad dream. She didn't know where she was or how to get back to her forest, but one forest is much the same as any other. Quiet and solitary.

"It isn't wise to rush ahead in unknowns." The voice caught her off guard, and she whirled to see the large man in green. "I understand the need to escape," he continued, "but I think we will do better as a group." Nymona only nodded in response, eyes wide, and backed into the wall as the man passed.

When he was a safe distance ahead, she followed out onto the bridge proper. Leaning out through a window, she looked out at the world and laughed. The water was black and overgrown, but it was outside. Past those walls everything would be alright. Everything would be normal.

[Card]

Samsa heard the slab scrape along the stone floor and air seep into the room when the wretch tumbled backwards as the vine snapped, his feet sliding out from under him. Stumbling as he stood upright again, he found the women had slithered away through the narrow crack. His arms fell to his sides. The last shall be last.

He was not quite alone, however; the green giant had wedged himself in the crack, preparing to force it open with his legs. The wretch rushed to his side, his baggy clothes swirling around his bony body, and joined him. As the hulking slab yielded to his (and the giant's) collective strength, he noticed strength in his lower body that he did not have before. His upper body was also stronger, proving itself a moment earlier. When the slab gave way to a wide enough opening for the man in green to pass through, Samsa let him by, and followed in after him, eager to find the exit.

The wretch marveled at the stretching hallway, departing from the man in green. He took his time to study the walls; if a giant slab of stone obstructed the exit, how did he ever get here? How did anyone carry him here? He couldn't make sense of it; he had known one place for most of his life, and after some unsettling dreams he awakes in another one. He continued feeling the walls and looking at the torches, which looked nothing like what he was used to.

He noticed a couple torches that were likely extinguished by the opening of the stone slab. He removed the stick from its sconce, longer and thinner than the ones "back home." A lump of ashes slid off the burnt stick and fell to the ground at his bare feet; tossing the stick to the side, he buried his hands in the ash pile. It all seemed too strange to be real; the warming sensation of the ashes told the wretch that it was. Not a guard or prisoner stalked the halls of the tower. The ashes drained through his fingers, except that which clung to his hands. He rubbed his hands together, trying to get them off, but they would not leave him. Nothing but ashes.

His pace hastened as he saw the broken fragments of natural light scatter the halls, piecing together a complete blanket of warm, welcoming sunlight. He was a at a jog when he saw the outside, which brought his eager trotting to a halt. The air brushed against his sun-wrapped skin. The scent of the sea was thick in the air, and the sounds of the waves shoving against the immobile tower, erect midst the open ocean. His loose clothing again swirled around his thin, and now visibly pale, frame. He was almost outside; in the real outside, not confined to the yellow grass inside a stone wall. However, he was not free yet; he yearned to feel living grass in his toes and life beneath his heel. He was still trapped on this stone spire in the middle of the sea; sea which was nowhere near the landlocked prison he was used to. Furthermore, he saw walls surrounding the ocean, confining this tower and everyone in it to the black pond in which it rested. Perhaps it was not truly ocean, but who or what could make such a great body of water themselves? Perhaps the same thing that built such an imposing spire.

He could see a rusted door, thick and daunting, slightly open; to Samsa, it was gaping. Living in a prison, one sees many doors, and one knows which doors were carelessly left cracking and which ones were sneaked into and hastily left gaping. Someone walked in, and it was likely the other girl that was with them. In all of his dawdling, he found himself behind the other two, and had been for a while now. The green one and orange one were off to the rusted door, and Samsa was behind them; the wretch eyed their vibrant colors: green, a lively, youthful color, and orange, a gentle shade of sunshine. He looked down at himself and the nothingness around him. He started with nothing before he came to this strange world, and he had nothing here. Still following the two, he looked down at his ash covered hands. Ashes to ashes.

[Elendra]

There was a lot of armour. More than just the piles stacked up against the door, there were armours in piles strewn out about the mouth of the great chamber that Kalia had entered. Stacks, and stacks, and stacks of it, along the floor, cramped up against the walls, and more. From a brief look, one could guess that near an army could be clad in just the armour present, but it was old, in disuse, rust on some of the edges of it. The armour was broken at various parts, bent and torn at others, noticeably well used before it was cast aside in the piles and piles that surrounded the doorway.

However, this antechamber quickly opened up into a grand hall, supported by massive columns clad in green life and surrounded by small pools of stagnant water. The smooth but living edge of the columns stretched to the ceiling where the occasional drop of water fell along the otherwise stale unmoving form and into the rank festering slime of the water at their base. Unlike the base of the tower, the drop of the edge led to a dry floor, two floors down to the base of the supports of the great structure still standing.

The antechamber stepped quickly into a wide walk that lined the edges of the seemingly circular hall, wide enough for a horse and carriage to trot across it. Stairs went upwards into more ramparts along the same height of the battlements that stretched and looked inward upon the tower, but more than that there were many rooms across the hall as interwoven bridges as a spider’s web crossed between columns at regular intervals. The network was vast and complex, with such interconnectivity that it seemed both easy to get lost, and easy to end up anywhere from anywhere.

However, despite the grand scope and size, the many obvious doors that alluded to rooms and halls and residents… other than the faint growing steps in the distance from an unknown source, the structure seemed empty. There were no voices. There were no other footsteps. There were no patrols, no guards, no servants, no masters. There were no men, nor women, nor children, nor elders. There was neither the smell nor sight of horses, and the sunlight illuminated the vast emptiness of the entire citadel, from the still standing bridges that connected across columns, to those that had crashed in and broke upon the ground, to the trees growing in the middle of the halls, and vines descending from what once would have been a majestic window. Old, rotted wood adorned the ground in heaps as the outline of geometric form gave way to a mass of growing mold and termite ridden mess. This was a decaying decrepit place, much as the inside of the tower, and further than that, there were larger breaks and busts in the walls and structure. More than just a simple stair was ruined, as the bridges collapsed under their weight, and doors were caved in as some doorways themselves looked noticeably collapsed and destroyed.

From where Kalia was, there were five true paths to take without going back to the others. The network of bridges provided at least one bridge that had not fallen into the ground to get her across the massive hall, if it would keep standing at her weight or any added upon it. If it were to fall, that would be two stories and rubble for a drop, but getting across seemed to open up to such a plethora of doors and rooms and various other routes that it may be worth the risk. She could tread off to the left of the door, the source of whence came the distant and leaving footsteps of metal upon stone. To the right followed along the wall to a point where the bridge that would have connected to the wall and structure above her had broken and crashed down onto another bridge that would have strode along as the path across. It offered a split, a way to cross right over to a higher level on the other side, but she could just continue on to the right as well, to whatever end was offered there. Straight and centre before her was a spiral stair, giving her the easy choice of up unknown levels, or down to the hall’s main floor itself, where it’d be possible to take the opposite spiral stairs to access the various floors opposite the grand hall.

[Jorick]

After spending some time moving armor away from the door, Kalia eased it open slowly, taking care not to knock over any of the discarded metal strewn about the floor. She was able to get it open far enough that she judged that even the largest man following behind them would be able to get through without needing to open it any farther. For a moment she considered just hurrying on ahead, but the thought of someone bulling their way in and slamming the door into some of the armor she hadn't moved was enough to stop her.

Kalia stepped out from behind the door and saw that some of the other people were already nearing the door. She spoke to them with a hushed voice, hoping that it did not carry to the source of those footsteps. "I cleared some old armor away from the door to open it quietly. Don't push it open any further or you might knock some down and draw attention."

Rather than waiting for them by the door, she turned back and carefully made her way through the room. There were many ways to go, but she immediately discarded the idea of heading to the left, as that would be heading toward the footsteps that worried her so. The path to the right offered a couple options, but neither of them seemed particularly appealing. The bridge was tempting, but all the other such walkways now reduced to heaps of rubble seemed indicative of the standing bridge's strength or lack thereof. That left the spiral stair, so Kalia headed toward it. She could go up, but why bother? It seemed to her that the most easily accessed exits to this structure would be on the ground floor, so that had to be the best place to look for a way out.

Kalia once more forged onward without waiting for the others and headed down the stairs, stepping lightly and cautiously to avoid making much noise.

[Card]

Samsa slipped his way into the doorway, heeding Kalia's advice. He immediately noticed the array of scattered suits of armor, now unfit and unreliable. Samsa knelt down beside one of the armor sets lying on the floor, caking his fingertips in rust. These ancient things must have been unusable for quite sometime; how long did they last? In their time, whom did they protect? That didn't matter, because they littered the floor of this place now. Before long, they will have withered away so much that the wretch could grind them beneath his heel. Seeing the guards in shining armor used to make him grind his teeth, but seeing the metal as it was--penetrable, breakable, destructible--provided a new perspective.

Samsa entered the hall; the signs of the outside world strengthened his hunger for freedom. He felt natural sunlight, and he could smell the life in the air, or at least the rank water. Elaborate and confusing though the place was, Samsa was determined to find his way out. He walked by several doorways and observed many collapsed and destroyed bridges, but he needed a way down. He needed to leave. He started towards the spiral staircase, but the distant sound of footsteps dissuaded him. He looked behind him; he didn't particularly care for anyone else here, but those footsteps could be the end of him. The footsteps down a corridor. Marching footsteps, metal clanging. The footsteps of a guard's watch.

He waited by the spiral staircase, communicating very plainly his vote. If he couldn't get his support, he might take his chances.

[Herzinth]

As others began making their way through the far door, Nymona pulled her head back out of the window and went to follow them. She still didn't know or trust these people, but at the same time they were in the same situation as her. At least for the moment, they shared a desire to escape this strange place. This impossibly huge ruin of vines and stone.

Crossing the length of the bridge, she began to slip through the door when she heard it; footsteps. Footsteps that sounded heavy. They clanked and clattered and echoed. They weren't the footsteps of any of the other robed people she found herself with. These were new. New meant dangerous.

Backing out onto the bridge once more, she began to mutter to herself. "Someone there, there's someone there. Someone coming, someone there." She was on the verge of climbing out the window when a thought struck her. The green guardian sounded heavy. Death had proven temporary in that other world, and if she was here, perhaps he was as well. She did not know him, nor him her, but he had saved her life nonetheless. With deep breaths to steel herself, she made her way into the grand hall, baffled by the maze of stairs and walkways.