[PALACE GAME - LAN WANGJI RUN]

[laughitoff]

Everything is red. You are dying, somewhere far beyond pain, the very essence of yourself going to pieces. You’re shattering so badly you don’t know if you’ll ever find all of yourself again, if you’ll ever put yourself back together. There are teeth on you, ripping, tearing, devouring. There are teeth inside you, carving their way out, and those are worse.

This is a memory, happening at a remove. It is not yours. This is not happening now.

Everything is grey. You wake up in a prison cell, eyes wide, the ceiling flat and blank and unfamiliar above you. For a moment you simply think, no. You think, Please, wasn’t it over? Wasn’t it enough? You consider closing your eyes again and refusing to get up, until oblivion reclaims you. Even if you’re no longer dying, everything hurts.

This is a memory, happening at a remove. It is not yours. This is not happening now.

What is happening, then?

You–

–sit up.

Comments

[laughitoff]

[Not at all, sadly.]

[strikingchords]

[well, it's hardly the first time he's had to work in darkness. moves forward, cautious but decisive]

[laughitoff]

[When you pass through, you hear feral howling, the clash of metal on metal, and screams so high and pained that you can’t tell if they’re animal or human. You smell sweet decay and lung-clogging smoke and burned meat. In your mouth, you taste nothing but blood.

Continue?]

[strikingchords]

[stops and closes his eyes, trying to get a sense of the space around him; is there any sense of a path? a larger space with conflict happening? can he pick out any voices?]

[laughitoff]

[The noise seems to be in his head, not reflected in the location itself. Physically, as far as he can tell, he's still traveling down a rock hallway. He cannot make out coherent voices saying anything.]

[strikingchords]

[continue, then]

[laughitoff]

[You emerge on the other side, and find yourself standing in front of the gate into a raucous village, kind of like this but with a Chinese instead of Japanese aesthetic, oops. It’s full night, with clouds blotting any source of light in the sky, but torches blaze everywhere and all the buildings are brightly lit.

There’s also all kinds of monsters roaming the streets, a colorful variety; some of them look like those you’ve seen in Reverie, and some of them you’ve never seen in your life. None of them look human, and none of them are paying attention to you. They’re dancing, there are bustling stalls and attractions – you quickly realize they’re in the middle of some kind of festival. It’d be enjoyable to just watch, if the horrible smells in your nose would just go away…

The hot wind blowing doesn’t help, but it does make a bright-blazoned red banner stand out on one of the stalls near the gate. THE RECKONING, it reads.

You could investigate that, or explore around a little more – up to you.]

[strikingchords]

[his head hurts.

are there any other stalls with notable names or details?

how big is the festival area? is it possible to find the outskirts?]

[laughitoff]

[The layout is somewhat sprawling. The stalls are clustered near the gate; the bannered one stands out most but the others are selling concrete goods he could check out. There are definitely outskirts to the place that he can go to. If he starts to wander I'm just going to give key areas because I absolutely did not detail this whole village.]

[strikingchords]

[GIVING ME KEY AREAS SOUNDS LEAST PAINFUL FOR ALL OF US. at the least he'd check out what concrete goods are available and what the edges look like but you know how this guy gets.]

[laughitoff]

[In general the edges seem like quieter areas, seedy unidentifiable or residential buildings. Largely the population's clustered more towards the center of town and the main excitement of the festival. The goods of the vendors are parodies of what one might find in a typical town market, food and drinks and medicines and accessories largely formed from meat, blood and bone.

The key areas, all marked with banners, are:

- This stall at the market, at the mouth of the central main street
- The monument of a tiger at one of the main intersections (if he keeps going down the main street)
- An inn in the middle of town (if he keeps going past the tiger monument)
- A teahouse to the west, a bit less central than the inn
- A temple wayyy off down the side streets to the east
- One of the squares to the north, close to the outskirts
- A collapsed building that's part of the outskirts, fully on the opposite side of town from the gate.]

[strikingchords]

[heads to the collapsed building first, it's that kind of day]

[laughitoff]

[You don't know if it's for some kind of demonic game or ritual, or if everyone just did not want to maintain it for some reason, but this one building near the village edge is an utter wreck, long since collapsed in on itself, barely recognizable as anything more than a stack of rotten timbers. Every now and then a passing monster kicks it, causing a little more crumbling, a little more damage.

Someone's playfully stuck a spear in the heap, with a red banner flapping from the top of the shaft. THE GREAT MISTAKE, it proclaims for the world to see.]

[strikingchords]

[ah.

he'll reach for the spear...]

[laughitoff]

[It's all over. You watch, with your hands folded into your sleeves and your thoughts dulled and red, as Granny and A-Yuan play their game of hide-and-seek, slowly in deference to Granny's arthritic knees. There are few places in the Burial Mounds where a child can play freely, safely, properly. You and the Wens contrive to do your best. A-Yuan is sensitive enough to have caught some of the atmosphere of fear and despairing terror that pervades their little home, but they do their best to distract him, to continue on with him as though life is still the semblance of normalcy it had reached just a few months ago. Why hurt him more? he's already condemned to death, just like the rest of them.

You don't have to ward the little hill with its copse of scraggling trees. You're stretching yourself thinner and scraping yourself rawer by the day, trying to build your wards strong enough to withstand the inevitable invasion, trying still to keep them all safe, trying to find a way out for the Wens if not yourself, trying, trying, trying. You should not be sparing strength for this sentimentality. You do it anyway.

Your sister would have appreciated it. In some other world, her son and A-Yuan could be playmates. Some other world, where you hadn't killed her and her husband, and doomed the people under your care.

Granny meets your eyes for a moment, while she makes the rounds of the trees, and you both try to smile at each other and fail before just nodding. A-Yuan is laughing, the only laughter that's been heard in the Burial Mounds these last days: ah, to be a child again, with any trust that the adults will make it right for you.

You are going to die. They are all going to die. You welcome it for yourself at this point, not so deep down. But perhaps--

The memory ends.]

[strikingchords]

[what...

what?

swallows around the lump in his throat and hefts the spear, pulling it loose of the rubble]

[laughitoff]

[He can do this.

In the wake of the memory, several dozen individuals appear perched and frozen upon the house timbers, a couple of them in ragged white robes with red flame motifs, the rest wearing threadbare homespun. All of them are elderly, and all of them appear to have been violently killed. Only the little child A-Yuan is missing.

He has seen them all before.]

[strikingchords]

...

[bows to them]

Honored elders.

[laughitoff]

[They don't appear to register him. They are frozen, unmoving ghosts.]

[strikingchords]

[... do they react to a touch...?]

[laughitoff]

[No. His hand goes through, chilled by the contact.]

[strikingchords]

[frowns and investigates the spear further. does touching the banner do anything, or is there anything strange about the spear itself?]

[laughitoff]

[Both seen ordinary -- the banner is red silk -- and touching both doesn't spark any changes.]

[strikingchords]

[...

tries taking out his guqin and asking the ghosts something through Inquiry

Are you able to respond?]

[laughitoff]

[He gets dull static back.]