EVENT | INTERMEZZO | Palace Exploration Log

[ironwood]

Characters: ALL!
Date: Sept 28 and onward
Location: Palace of the Landed Sky, Keeliai
Situation: In the wake of Malicant's bold taunt, and the death of the Emperor and five hatchlings, the Palace is left abandoned and open for the Foreigners and kedan alike to explore.
Warnings/Rating: CONTENT WARNINGS are noted in the various subject headers, please take note of them!

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zwischenzug | (ˈzvɪʃənzuːɡ) | intermezzo | n. (in chess):
1. A tactical move interpolated into an exchange or series of exchanges to improve the outcome.
2. "in-between move". An unexpected move tossed into an expected series of moves. (German)
---

Where once the Palace of the Landed Sky was a majestic and beautiful thing to behold, it now seems to pulse with negative energy. The outer walls are crumbling in most places, unsteady and fallen into disrepair. The walls of the Palace itself remain for the most part sturdy, minus a few fallen stones and the ruins beside the Courtyard.

The Palace is empty. Though some bodies can be found scattered haphazardly about the halls, most of those who were working in the building have disappeared entirely. There’s no question as to whose doing it was.

Small groups of kedan have also ventured into the Palace in order to loot whatever rooms they can get into, feeling confident that the reward will outweigh the risk of facing off against Foreigners who may feel the need to repel them. Mostly they'll be in groups of 3-5, though individuals or larger can be encountered as well. Some will engage the Foreigners in hostilities and some will grudgingly be sent on their way without challenge, depending on how bold they feel.

No banners, rugs, lanterns, or furniture within the Palace remain in pristine condition (with the exception of Eshai’s room). Everywhere one looks, items are torn, scratched, or smeared with blood. Even the interior walls are often cracked or caked in what one hopes is only blood. Perhaps more unnerving are the ‘veins’ that run through the walls, floor, and ceiling. These thin black tendrils, equal parts within and without the surface they spread across, are textured and feel like pine needles to the touch. These veins run throughout the Palace, yet never seem to thicken, intensify, or coalesce in any one room or area.

Though the walls are still made of white marble and the floor remains interlaced with rose quartz and mother-of-pearl, the shine has gone from them and something of the life and light they brought has withered away. Though the structure remains intact, it feels in some areas as if the walls have closed in, making the previously grand rooms now seem shrunken and constrictive. An air of eerie calm and discomfort can be felt from the first step on. The building is not the Palace anyone remembers.

---

LINKS
Throne Room | Eshai's Room | Storage Armory | Library
Ritual Chamber | Prison | Courtyard | The Turtle's Head

OOC NOTE
The Palace becomes available to explore as of the 28th, but will remain accessible until further notice. Please direct any questions regarding this log to the QUESTIONS section in the original OOC post.

There will also be a State of the Shell post coming soon to address the current status of the city and its key players. Thank you!

Comments

[skeletonenigma]

It was difficult avoiding the secret passage in the library after Skulduggery found it - especially after he realised how far down below the Palace it went. But he'd resisted, and waited until Anton was with him. He'd made a promise, after all. He'd made a promise to one of only three people on the turtle who knew the truth about Vile and accepted him nonetheless; he wasn't going to break it simply because he was curious.

He waited impatiently a quarter of the way down the stairs, debating the wisdom of lighting up the area with a flame in his hand. For Anton's sake, of course. But something about the smell made him refrain, and Anton's verbal confirmation of Skulduggery's suspicion a moment later banished the idea from the detective's mind. It was never a wise idea to add fire to a scene of magical death.

He was tempted to answer Anton's question flippantly - of course he could. What did Anton think he'd done every time someone died within the last two years? Gone off the rails? - but given the situation, he didn't believe it would be appreciated. So he kept his answer simple and direct: "Yes." Without then waiting for an invitation, Skulduggery floated down to join Anton, and looked out into the large dark chamber.

Not for the first time, he wished he could turn off his inexplicable sense of smell. The stench was already overpowering.

[gistful]

It was dark and Anton didn't like the shadows. He found the stick of wood he'd stuck into his belt and closed the circle on the set of light-sigils carved at the top, and light bloomed at its head. Then he stepped further into the room, holding the torch aloft.

Even through the handkerchief the smell was powerful. Anton breathed through his mouth and blinked away the water at the corners of his eyes, and he went first to the cages to investigate the bodies. Both were dead. He didn't look toward the grave.

Instead he went to the ritual circles, and made sure not to step into it. He just examined it from outside, glancing up at the circle on the ceiling. "These are sigils," he said, "but I haven't seen the sort before. Have you?"

[skeletonenigma]

Anton moved off the moment his torch was lit, but Skulduggery hesitated before joining him. He wasn't quite sure why. An impending sense of doom, perhaps? Maybe it was how the colour of the stone in the walls had changed to black. Maybe it was the idea of so much death so close by, even if Skulduggery wasn't currently capable of feeling it the way a necromancer could.

Then he stepped onto the curve of the shell, and suddenly he was.

The atmosphere seemed, to Skulduggery's nonexistent skin, to grow cold and intense, somehow invigorating. His presence bent the shadows around him like he was a metaphorical heat sink. The feeling of the lingering deaths in the chamber rushed in to fill the empty spaces between the bones in Skulduggery's frame, causing him to stop and bend inwards, fighting back an audible gasp. Without his will, without his permission, without so much as a stray thought, Vile's armour solidified around that death, drinking it in and reaching solid tendrils of shadow greedily toward the pit. It took all of Skulduggery's strength to rein it in and keep it contained, and still the armour rotated very slowly around his body, impossible to dismiss and impossible to ignore.

Another moment of concentration, and Skulduggery managed to retract the helmet. It disappeared smoothly into the rest of the armour.

"This," he said, his voice layered with the effort his control took, "shouldn't be happening."

[gistful]

It wasn't the least bit an answer to Anton's question and he turned with a frown toward Skulduggery, and then stopped. Adrenaline rushed through him and he nudged Daisy off his back to slide into his hand, at his hip, ready to fire at a moment's sign of hostility.

Then the helmet slid back, and even though Anton knew what that meant, the sight of Skulduggery's be-hatted skull on top of that black armour still made it difficult to lower his shotgun. After a moment, he managed it. And he had to ask, again: "Can you endure?"

His voice was tense. He felt that was understandable. Not many things could make the Dead Men actively afraid. Lord Vile had been one of them.

[skeletonenigma]

That was a much more interesting question than it appeared at first. The obvious answer was no, because the armour had manifested, and there was so much violent death smeared across the walls of the chamber and the Palace above that it was physically impossible for Skulduggery to de-manifest it again. The wrinkle in that assertion was also obvious, however - it wasn't often Skulduggery could wear the armour and still know, quite firmly, that he was Skulduggery. In fact, this was the only time he could think of.

But it was taking everything he had to keep it that way, and Skulduggery knew better than anyone what the consequences were if he slipped for even a moment. If it were possible, he needed to leave, to avoid the risk entirely. If Anton wasn't right there, he would have.

"Yes," he said again. "But let's not stay here long. Which sigils?"

[gistful]

"These." Anton nodded at the circles on the floor and ceiling, and even though he couldn't quite see them properly he couldn't bring himself to turn his back on the armour. Five years. Five years spent fighting the bogeyman Lord Vile had become. Five years never knowing which shadows were benign and which weren't, whether fallen comrades would remain either fallen or comrades.

Years of hearing Ghastly wake screaming for his dead mother.

"Have you seen these sigils before?" Anton asked again, evenly, because he wasn't sure whether Skulduggery had heard him the first time.

[skeletonenigma]

Skulduggery walked over - slowly, carefully, keeping the shadows from forming a wave under his feet to speed his tracks - and considered it an achievement that the helmet remained dispersed when he reached the other end. He wasn't right next to the mass grave, but he might as well have been. Every facet of the armour, and several facets of Skulduggery himself, were screaming to be let loose over the kedans' corpses.

Sigils. He was interested in the sigils.

He could barely see the sigils. The grave, the bodies in the cages; they kept stealing and holding the entirety of his attention.

"Yes," he managed eventually, looking up at the ceiling - or rather, through the ceiling. "On the roof. There's an identical circle directly above these, fueling a portal." Skulduggery moved just as slowly as before over to the grooves cut into the floor, and knelt down to run a hand over the jagged stone. A moment later, he changed his mind and withdrew that hand so he didn't have to look at the shadow-gauntlet encompassing it. "They collected tainted blood and poured it into Asti."

[gistful]

"A portal to where?" Anton asked, though Skulduggery may not know, if he hadn't dared to step through. There was no guarantee the portal led to anywhere that allowed them to get back.

He noticed the way Skulduggery's attention kept being drawn. It was in his stance, the shifts in his skull's position. Anton didn't like that, either. He moved closer, his grip tightening on Daisy even though the shotgun was still lowered toward the floor. He stood at the edge of the grooves and crouched, and lowered the torch to peer into the gloom. The grooves went deep ... very deep.

"They were trying to taint Asti?" he asked, and it was a question because Skulduggery, being Skulduggery, would know more of the pieces to slot into place. "Have they succeeded?"

[skeletonenigma]

Skulduggery began to shrug, then thought better of it when the shadows-plates over his shoulders eagerly sharpened in anticipation of an attack. "I don't know. I recognised the sigils before, but..."

... But he had no idea if he recognised them now, let alone from where. Something about the planes, he thought. He'd been worried the portal would lead to the Death plane, hadn't he?

The second question, however, he did know. "Yes. They succeeded a while ago. This..." This ritual sacrifice of kedan, of tainting them and corrupting them and collecting their blood, didn't make much sense in the grand scheme of things. Eshai hadn't sounded like a woman who would be oblivious to rituals like this occurring right underneath her Palace's floors, and if Asti had already been compromised when the Palace was taken, then what was the point of this?

Power. That was the point of anything, really. Malicant's agents took the Palace because they needed this room, this proximity to the shell, and this much free access to God knows how many kedan. And then they spent the last few months pouring more and more of Malicant's power, Malicant's influence, into the turtle's shell.

No wonder Malicant was confident enough to let the Foreigners have the Palace.

"This was his endgame from the beginning," Skulduggery finished his earlier thought. "And we let him do it. How many kedan are over there?"

[gistful]

"Two in the cages. Too many to count in the pit." Some of them had been there long enough that their bodies had begun to fall apart and feed into the rest; the bottom of the hole was likely a mash of sludge and dissolved body-parts, and Anton had no intention of looking too closely. This was the sort of place best destroyed by energy-throwers, left a scar, burned into cleanliness instead of washed out.

Some things never washed out.

Skulduggery could probably tell better how many there were, but Anton wasn't going to mention that. Not when it meant using magic neither of them wanted him to use. Anton sidled around the grooves and sigils and pit toward the door, still half turned toward Skulduggery and wishing Dex or Ghastly--no, not Ghastly, Ghastly would be compromised to see this, make it Rue or Ravel--were at his back to guard the armoured skeleton.

He didn't go in, he just stood in the entrance and looked, his torch thrust into the room. The magic light burned away the shadows. "Vials," he said. "Potions. Most are destroyed."

He glanced toward Skulduggery. Anton had no intention of investigating further without knowing he could leave the same immediate vicinity Skulduggery was in. "So we stand upon the back of a being possessed if not already dead."

The gist-user didn't spare time for wishful thinking, but right then, he wished the others were there. Something like this would seem almost simple if the Dead Men faced it together.