Liliana Vess (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deathsmajesty) wrote2025-04-08 02:45 am
deathsmajesty) wrote2025-04-08 02:45 am
Entry tags:
- [tamiyo],
- at least these ain't lili's bad choices,
- eldritch moon: rise of emrakul,
- jace is the actual worst,
- nfb,
- nfi,
- planes: innistrad,
- this warning not in jest,
- warning: gore/body horror,
- what: i told you so's are rude,
- what: inexplicable fuckery,
- what: mutilating canon for fun & profit,
- what: tamiyo's journal,
- what: teal deer crossing,
- where: kessig,
- where: stensia,
- who: ignis scientia,
- who: jace beleren
Diverse Parts of Stensia and Kessig, Innistrad, Tuesday (Fandom Time)
Stensia, Morning
Since leaving Markov Manor, Jace had been consumed by the journal: what it said, what questions it asked, what answers it gave. Both men had agreed that clearly something greater was at work here - after all, they'd found the journal in Markov Manor, which had been destroyed by some as yet unknown force, and the journal discussed many of the weird issues plaguing Innistrad currently: the madness of angels, the monstrousness of werewolves, the twisting transformation of villagers...and sometimes their villages as well. It seemed like each step across Innistrad they took, they found evidence of some new fresh horror at work, and they'd barely been at this for a full twenty-four hours.
Fortunately for them both, he'd been released from the tense delusions of Markov Manor; his composure and thoughts had cleared. He was fully back in the land of the sane once more.
Jace knew that Ignis was impatiently waiting for him to pack up the journal so they could continue their trek, but he couldn't help but linger over their breakfast at the inn they'd overnighted in. But how could he go on, when there were so many fascinating noted to uncover within? Intricate field drawings filled the pages in front of him. An angel's wing—each feather described in painstakingly detailed line work. A gridded table of field drawings of delicately shaded circles under the boxed heading "Material Composition of the Heron Moon." A full-page image of a part-man, part-wolf, depicted in profile. This journal was as much art as it was scholarship.
Entry 433, Harvest Moon:
A stoic rider on a dappled gray arrived at my study unexpectedly this morning, carrying with him a most curious delivery. A burlap-wrapped parcel, easily larger than a human, required both of our efforts to heave into the observatory's foyer. The rider said little, but pointed with a soiled boot-tip toward the label written in Jenrik's scrawl: "Specimen for immediate inspection."
As I removed the wrappings, my breath caught in my throat as I saw fur, then claws, then the lupine muzzle come into view—a werewolf. A cursory examination revealed it to be far larger and more complete than nearly anything else of its kind that has passed through my hands. To my great surprise, the corpse was icy cold and had been dead for some time by now. The post-mortem reversion of lycanthrope corpses to their human forms was a well-known fact that stood in harsh contradiction to the specimen before my eyes. Though quite eager to begin my work, I did inquire for a receipt confirming the time of delivery—he signed it simply "R. Karolus."
The specimen was cleansed, drained, and labeled, and I began on the left anterior section. Large amounts of thick fur were first removed, revealing the sample's dermis.
There were three paragraphs of personal feelings and reminiscences as the author had examined the wolf, but they'd been crossed out, as if she were embarrassed to have let something as unscientific as her interior musings into her notes.
...I have often admired the lycanthrope's orderly interior, organs neatly packed and encased in their membranes, branching vessels traversing perfect pathways throughout. Massive lungs for communicating with their packs over great distances and for tree-lined sprints, a relentlessly effective liver for processing the flesh of their prey within minutes, heavily vascularized adrenal glands prepared to spill their contents into the bloodstream. An oblique reflection on the human form, elevated to a predator's ideal.
This one, though. This one was...new. There was, in fact, little or nothing of the human form that remained within.
The peritoneal interior was filled with a network of tough sinew of varying thicknesses that had grown to such an extent that it pushed aside many of the organs. Though the animal had appeared larger from the outside, a significant portion of this bulk was likely made up of such a substance. They connected in some places in thick nodules, clustered together.
The largest cluster resided on what used to be the animal's liver, swollen to nearly twice its usual size.
The organ emitted a foul odor—briny, rotten, and easily detectable despite my thick examination mask. I found myself surprisingly loath to excise the thing, though curiosity quickly conquered disgust.
The halves separated, leaving a hard, round object embedded in one half, not unlike a sliced peach. They revealed a spongy mass of the twisted sinew studded with what appeared to be three broken teeth, and strands of thick gray fur.
The pit stuck in the center of one of the halves. I rolled it over to face upward.
No, not a "pit," but a sightless, yellow, lupine eye. An eye most likely staring skyward. Perhaps, as its cephalic sisters, heavenward toward the Moon.
Okay, maybe that was enough reading for the morning. With a hard swallow of the last of his coffea, Jace tucked the journal into his belt and went to see if Ignis was getting anywhere in negotiations to rent some kind of conveyance.
***
Stensia, Afternoon
Their horses didn't like the marshes. At first, Jace thought it was just that they didn't like the dampness, the uneven footing, the chill mist that seemed to find every gap in clothing. But as they continued, it became obvious that it wasn't the marsh specifically that they were leery of, but something within it. Finally, right after noon, the mists thinned a bit and they found themselves looking at a twisting monolith. It was approximately his height, the foundation formed from raw stone pulled from the earth that quickly turned to a hard-edged, twisting shape. Staring down the axis of its tip, Jace noted that the formation pointed to another just like it a couple hundred meters away. It in turn pointed to another, and another, until they disappeared from view in the distance. Looking closely, Jace saw that the very trees themselves had begun growing in the direction of the monoliths.
"Ignis! Ignis, look at that! This monolith is unmistakably the same as those we saw at Markov Manor, and I'm certain I saw the exact same image here the journal!" He missed Ignis' reply, barely even noticing the tone it was delivered in (a scathing drawl), because he was quickly diving back into the text. "And you, our paper companion, what did you know about this?" He eagerly thumbed through the pages to the image of the same twisted stones that he remembered glancing over the night before, when he was still puzzling over the Kamigawan script. An entry followed:
Entry 643, Hunter's Moon:
Alchemical analysis on the moorlands' cryptolith formations was completed today. It indicates a number of exceptional features of the samples received, including a high surface hardness, and a directional energy field along a twisting axis. Curiously, inspection of the striations suggests a material only recently emerged from the earth. In contrast, crystalline analysis seems to indicate the samples are far older than all other geological formations found within the area.
Jace nodded. "Not methods I know well, but I like what you did here," he said aloud. Though he missed the convenient expedience of reading minds over picking through some of the minutia of these accounts.
The strength of the internal lodestone field in each monolith is able to distort local field lines and poles. Over time, we have received more reports of these formations, causing a net migration of our poles to a location just offshore. The disruptive properties of the stones appear to also extend to an ability to warp the flow of mana through the region, with potentially severe effects for beings composed of raw mana—particularly the angels of the plane. Perhaps there's more to Avacyn's madness...
Jace held the back of his hand to the bottom of the monolith. It was cool and smooth, with a subtle network of some other lustrous mineral enmeshed in its surface.
A scintillation on its pointed upper face caught his eye. As he reached forward to touch the end of it, there was a POP and a spark jumped from the end of the monolith to his hand. Jace jerked his hand backward as a thin trail of white smoke rose from his glove. The breath of something bright and bell-clear bloomed on his senses, then quickly faded.
"AH—! Azor's blood, what was that!" His thoughts went immediately to the journal, and he cradled it in the crook of an arm. "Are...are you all right?" he asked the book as he scanned it for scorch marks and rubbed the cover gingerly with a corner of his cloak.
"Well, did you ever find out what these actually...do? What do we make of these? Am I just following someone's trail into another scheme or trap or...?" Jace aimed a piercing stare at the journal's pages.
"Or is that what happened to you?" The journal, of course, said nothing.
The moor was silent, save for a rising buzz of swamp insects and the restive movement of their horses. Ignis was asking him something or other, tone a bit concerned now, but Jace didn't answer. He had more reading to do.
***
Kessig, Evening
They had followed the stones - cryptoliths, the journal had called them, all the way from Stensia to the border of Gavony, but then had turned and ridden south towards Kessig to see if the lines of stones could be found there, too.
Indeed they were, all uniform in height and size, equidistant apart.
As our colleagues in Kessig had seen the renewed savagery of lycanthropes, here in Nephalia we too have recorded signs of the moon's unease (see Table 6-32). The oceans themselves have risen to record high tides in addition to a change in their direction—
Jace pored over the charts on the previous page's ledger with a critical editorial eye that would have made Lavinia proud, had she seen him do so more than a handful of times as the Guildpact.
—despite experiments performed in triplicate, far exceeding tolerances for measurement error. The gravitational force governing the movement of the tides appears to have shifted from the moon itself to a location very close to the sea—
"Wait a second. Hang on," Jace said indignantly to the handwritten pages. "I've seen Kiora move the entire Halimar Sea. Or at least try to. And...and even if it was something that could move the tides, it would have to be huge. There's no way such a thing could have gone unnoticed!" He gave the book a cautionary glare, as if warning it to not turn tricky on him.
Each of my studies seems to blossom into more inquiries. For every answer, three questions...
More questions, endless questions.
More clues, still with no answers. Jace clenched and unclenched his fists, filled with nervous energy. The evidence was infuriating - nothing to hear, grasp, or know on his own. Even his own eyes seemed useless. He had no choice but to let the journal lead him along.
"Why aren't you here, in person? I have so many questions..." Jace gave a longing sigh toward the journal. Silence. "Of course. Wishful thinking."
The text of the pages stared back at him, defying him to reread their final words. "I know, I know. We've found a trail in the stones, I'll—-er, we'll follow it." He gave a guilty glance to Ignis; he had spent more of the day talking to the journal than he had his flesh-and-blood companion. "I just...I wish I knew better what we were looking for? Trail or trap, what have you left me here?"
Either way, they'd find it in Nephalia.
[Once more into the breach, dear friends! This post spliced, diced, and julienned from "The Drownyard Temple" by Mel Li. Ignis modded with permission from the wonderfully game and always enthusiasticchef_chocobro. Warning for length, because of course there is, I'm adapting very long "short" fictions, okay? NFI, NFB, OOC is cherished. Follows the events of this post. Also, warning for gore/body horror under the Entry 433, Harvest Moon cut!]
Since leaving Markov Manor, Jace had been consumed by the journal: what it said, what questions it asked, what answers it gave. Both men had agreed that clearly something greater was at work here - after all, they'd found the journal in Markov Manor, which had been destroyed by some as yet unknown force, and the journal discussed many of the weird issues plaguing Innistrad currently: the madness of angels, the monstrousness of werewolves, the twisting transformation of villagers...and sometimes their villages as well. It seemed like each step across Innistrad they took, they found evidence of some new fresh horror at work, and they'd barely been at this for a full twenty-four hours.
Fortunately for them both, he'd been released from the tense delusions of Markov Manor; his composure and thoughts had cleared. He was fully back in the land of the sane once more.
Jace knew that Ignis was impatiently waiting for him to pack up the journal so they could continue their trek, but he couldn't help but linger over their breakfast at the inn they'd overnighted in. But how could he go on, when there were so many fascinating noted to uncover within? Intricate field drawings filled the pages in front of him. An angel's wing—each feather described in painstakingly detailed line work. A gridded table of field drawings of delicately shaded circles under the boxed heading "Material Composition of the Heron Moon." A full-page image of a part-man, part-wolf, depicted in profile. This journal was as much art as it was scholarship.
Entry 433, Harvest Moon:
A stoic rider on a dappled gray arrived at my study unexpectedly this morning, carrying with him a most curious delivery. A burlap-wrapped parcel, easily larger than a human, required both of our efforts to heave into the observatory's foyer. The rider said little, but pointed with a soiled boot-tip toward the label written in Jenrik's scrawl: "Specimen for immediate inspection."
As I removed the wrappings, my breath caught in my throat as I saw fur, then claws, then the lupine muzzle come into view—a werewolf. A cursory examination revealed it to be far larger and more complete than nearly anything else of its kind that has passed through my hands. To my great surprise, the corpse was icy cold and had been dead for some time by now. The post-mortem reversion of lycanthrope corpses to their human forms was a well-known fact that stood in harsh contradiction to the specimen before my eyes. Though quite eager to begin my work, I did inquire for a receipt confirming the time of delivery—he signed it simply "R. Karolus."
The specimen was cleansed, drained, and labeled, and I began on the left anterior section. Large amounts of thick fur were first removed, revealing the sample's dermis.
There were three paragraphs of personal feelings and reminiscences as the author had examined the wolf, but they'd been crossed out, as if she were embarrassed to have let something as unscientific as her interior musings into her notes.
...I have often admired the lycanthrope's orderly interior, organs neatly packed and encased in their membranes, branching vessels traversing perfect pathways throughout. Massive lungs for communicating with their packs over great distances and for tree-lined sprints, a relentlessly effective liver for processing the flesh of their prey within minutes, heavily vascularized adrenal glands prepared to spill their contents into the bloodstream. An oblique reflection on the human form, elevated to a predator's ideal.
This one, though. This one was...new. There was, in fact, little or nothing of the human form that remained within.
The peritoneal interior was filled with a network of tough sinew of varying thicknesses that had grown to such an extent that it pushed aside many of the organs. Though the animal had appeared larger from the outside, a significant portion of this bulk was likely made up of such a substance. They connected in some places in thick nodules, clustered together.
The largest cluster resided on what used to be the animal's liver, swollen to nearly twice its usual size.
The organ emitted a foul odor—briny, rotten, and easily detectable despite my thick examination mask. I found myself surprisingly loath to excise the thing, though curiosity quickly conquered disgust.
The halves separated, leaving a hard, round object embedded in one half, not unlike a sliced peach. They revealed a spongy mass of the twisted sinew studded with what appeared to be three broken teeth, and strands of thick gray fur.
The pit stuck in the center of one of the halves. I rolled it over to face upward.
No, not a "pit," but a sightless, yellow, lupine eye. An eye most likely staring skyward. Perhaps, as its cephalic sisters, heavenward toward the Moon.
Okay, maybe that was enough reading for the morning. With a hard swallow of the last of his coffea, Jace tucked the journal into his belt and went to see if Ignis was getting anywhere in negotiations to rent some kind of conveyance.
Stensia, Afternoon
Their horses didn't like the marshes. At first, Jace thought it was just that they didn't like the dampness, the uneven footing, the chill mist that seemed to find every gap in clothing. But as they continued, it became obvious that it wasn't the marsh specifically that they were leery of, but something within it. Finally, right after noon, the mists thinned a bit and they found themselves looking at a twisting monolith. It was approximately his height, the foundation formed from raw stone pulled from the earth that quickly turned to a hard-edged, twisting shape. Staring down the axis of its tip, Jace noted that the formation pointed to another just like it a couple hundred meters away. It in turn pointed to another, and another, until they disappeared from view in the distance. Looking closely, Jace saw that the very trees themselves had begun growing in the direction of the monoliths.
"Ignis! Ignis, look at that! This monolith is unmistakably the same as those we saw at Markov Manor, and I'm certain I saw the exact same image here the journal!" He missed Ignis' reply, barely even noticing the tone it was delivered in (a scathing drawl), because he was quickly diving back into the text. "And you, our paper companion, what did you know about this?" He eagerly thumbed through the pages to the image of the same twisted stones that he remembered glancing over the night before, when he was still puzzling over the Kamigawan script. An entry followed:
Entry 643, Hunter's Moon:
Alchemical analysis on the moorlands' cryptolith formations was completed today. It indicates a number of exceptional features of the samples received, including a high surface hardness, and a directional energy field along a twisting axis. Curiously, inspection of the striations suggests a material only recently emerged from the earth. In contrast, crystalline analysis seems to indicate the samples are far older than all other geological formations found within the area.
Jace nodded. "Not methods I know well, but I like what you did here," he said aloud. Though he missed the convenient expedience of reading minds over picking through some of the minutia of these accounts.
The strength of the internal lodestone field in each monolith is able to distort local field lines and poles. Over time, we have received more reports of these formations, causing a net migration of our poles to a location just offshore. The disruptive properties of the stones appear to also extend to an ability to warp the flow of mana through the region, with potentially severe effects for beings composed of raw mana—particularly the angels of the plane. Perhaps there's more to Avacyn's madness...
Jace held the back of his hand to the bottom of the monolith. It was cool and smooth, with a subtle network of some other lustrous mineral enmeshed in its surface.
A scintillation on its pointed upper face caught his eye. As he reached forward to touch the end of it, there was a POP and a spark jumped from the end of the monolith to his hand. Jace jerked his hand backward as a thin trail of white smoke rose from his glove. The breath of something bright and bell-clear bloomed on his senses, then quickly faded.
"AH—! Azor's blood, what was that!" His thoughts went immediately to the journal, and he cradled it in the crook of an arm. "Are...are you all right?" he asked the book as he scanned it for scorch marks and rubbed the cover gingerly with a corner of his cloak.
"Well, did you ever find out what these actually...do? What do we make of these? Am I just following someone's trail into another scheme or trap or...?" Jace aimed a piercing stare at the journal's pages.
"Or is that what happened to you?" The journal, of course, said nothing.
The moor was silent, save for a rising buzz of swamp insects and the restive movement of their horses. Ignis was asking him something or other, tone a bit concerned now, but Jace didn't answer. He had more reading to do.
Kessig, Evening
They had followed the stones - cryptoliths, the journal had called them, all the way from Stensia to the border of Gavony, but then had turned and ridden south towards Kessig to see if the lines of stones could be found there, too.
Indeed they were, all uniform in height and size, equidistant apart.
As our colleagues in Kessig had seen the renewed savagery of lycanthropes, here in Nephalia we too have recorded signs of the moon's unease (see Table 6-32). The oceans themselves have risen to record high tides in addition to a change in their direction—
Jace pored over the charts on the previous page's ledger with a critical editorial eye that would have made Lavinia proud, had she seen him do so more than a handful of times as the Guildpact.
—despite experiments performed in triplicate, far exceeding tolerances for measurement error. The gravitational force governing the movement of the tides appears to have shifted from the moon itself to a location very close to the sea—
"Wait a second. Hang on," Jace said indignantly to the handwritten pages. "I've seen Kiora move the entire Halimar Sea. Or at least try to. And...and even if it was something that could move the tides, it would have to be huge. There's no way such a thing could have gone unnoticed!" He gave the book a cautionary glare, as if warning it to not turn tricky on him.
Each of my studies seems to blossom into more inquiries. For every answer, three questions...
More questions, endless questions.
More clues, still with no answers. Jace clenched and unclenched his fists, filled with nervous energy. The evidence was infuriating - nothing to hear, grasp, or know on his own. Even his own eyes seemed useless. He had no choice but to let the journal lead him along.
"Why aren't you here, in person? I have so many questions..." Jace gave a longing sigh toward the journal. Silence. "Of course. Wishful thinking."
The text of the pages stared back at him, defying him to reread their final words. "I know, I know. We've found a trail in the stones, I'll—-er, we'll follow it." He gave a guilty glance to Ignis; he had spent more of the day talking to the journal than he had his flesh-and-blood companion. "I just...I wish I knew better what we were looking for? Trail or trap, what have you left me here?"
Either way, they'd find it in Nephalia.
[Once more into the breach, dear friends! This post spliced, diced, and julienned from "The Drownyard Temple" by Mel Li. Ignis modded with permission from the wonderfully game and always enthusiastic
chef_chocobro. Warning for length, because of course there is, I'm adapting very long "short" fictions, okay? NFI, NFB, OOC is cherished. Follows the events of this post. Also, warning for gore/body horror under the Entry 433, Harvest Moon cut!]