tushanshu_logs | [February Catch All for Yorda]

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[February Catch All for Yorda]

Characters: Yorda and You!
Date: February
Location: Throughout Keeliai
Situation: General catchall shenanigans and memory event shit
Warnings/Rating: Human sacrifice, child abuse, child death

General:

Much of the month sees Yorda helping with small tasks around the hotel or out in the city. While much of the repairs are done, she’s happy to lend a hand with errands and fetching things.

There isn’t much free time but she spends it wandering around the city looking for a good place to set up targets for her sling. With the dojo shut, she finds it’s best to go back to more self-sufficient practice.

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[ooc: memory stuff below]

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Memory Event
The Dreaming had been causing trouble again - people’s thoughts and memories were being pushed into the minds of others. That alone was a problem. But then coupled with a strange magic that Yorda had little control over, one may find themselves plunged into a vivid hallucination, set in the halls of a decaying fortress by the sea...

Yorda’s first attempt at escape had ended scarcely before it began. She was dragged back to her mother, kicking and defiant.

The Queen had taken her by the arm and wordlessly led her through the corridors. The only sound was the crackling of the torches and the occasional grunt from Yorda as she tried to pull free of the shadowy woman’s vice-like grip.

She was led to the lichyard where her mother opened a passage beneath one of the gravestone slabs. Down the stairs and into the darkness, the torches sprang to life along the descending passage until they came into a large, circular room. Yorda half stumbled down the stairs as flickering orange light gradually brought things into view.

Surrounding them were statues of men, women and children - impossibly lifelike and all frozen in either a state of horror, or bowed down, seeming in the middle of begging for their lives.

“Beyond the Castle,” said the Queen, her voice reverberating with strange harmonics that may have been the acoustics of the cavern-like room, “There is a city full of people such as this.”

She looked now to Yorda who was now still with terror.

“Do not defy me again, unless you wish there to be another.”

It wasn't uncommon for Elizabeth and Yorda to pass one another in the hallways of the Midnight Hotel, considering both of them lived there. But a casual brush this time resulted in much more than either was expecting.

She saw the statues, but more than that she saw the fear in the people who'd been frozen like that. As if they were still in the moment of it, and that was pulling her in. The Queen's voice wracked her with shivers and fear that wasn't her own.

"Oh--!" Elizabeth gasped, jerking backward from Yorda.

Yorda came to an abrupt halt as the memory passed as quickly as it had come. It was still hard for her to tell if this were some external force, or her own strange magic manifesting in odd ways.

Still, whatever it was, it wasn't good.

As Elizabeth jerked away, Yorda reached out to the young woman.

"I am sorry - are you alright...?"

Elizabeth pulled back when Yorda reached for her, but only because she was afraid of accidentally triggering another vision. "Y-Yes," she gulped. "That was... so that's what they meant, when they said strange things had been happening all over the city? Oh goodness no, don't be sorry though. You didn't do anything wrong."

Yorda hesitated and then her hand fell meekly to her side.

"It is not something others should have to see," she explained. It wasn't Elizabeth's fault she'd seen inside Yorda's memories, but she couldn't help but feel shaken by the unexpected intrusion. Whatever the cause of it was, Yorda would have liked a word.

"I think it has been happening to others as well."

"Unfortunately it seems we're not to have a choice in that," the brunette sighed. "People might have been a bit more descriptive about what was happening, though! Then we might have known what to expect..."

Except there really wasn't any way to prepare for something like that.

Then, unable to restrain her curiosity, Elizabeth asked, "Who was that woman?"

"Maybe they found it hard to speak of," she suggested. Yorda tended to hope for the best in people and did not like to think anyone had been misleading.

"That being was my mother."

Elizabeth gasped before she could stop herself. "But--!" And then she shook her head.

"Someone like that couldn't have been your mother, Yorda..."

Yorda sometimes passed through the hall with the many strange sarcophagi lining the walls. While Yorda had never seen the ritual itself, sometimes she saw the echo of a memory flitting by. Masked men carrying a horned child towards the tomb that pulsed with light, locking them in to die a slow death, and their life was drained. Some of it went to extend the Queen’s lifespan and some of it went into creating Yorda.

“Forgive us. It is for the good of the village.”

The days when these memories passed her by, she would seek out flowers from the courtyard and leave them at the foot of the tombs.

“I am sorry,” she said softly. “Your death became our life.”

Last thing Penny could recall, he was walking along in the marketplace, searching for some ingredients for a spell he was going to try yet again. Bumping into people in the crowded stretch of stalls wasn't unusual, but to suddenly appear elsewhere was.

"What the hell," Penny murmured as the image of the horned child drifted past him. The tiny hand laid flowers at the entrance. It took him a moment to realize that he hadn't teleported somewhere or ended up in someone's dream, both of which he'd done in the past. This time, he was simply seeing someone else's memory, which he only realized when his mind snapped back into his own body in the market and he saw the girl before him, the one whose birthday had passed recently.

"What the fuck was that?" He asked lightly, not angry or accusative so much as confused.

Yorda froze, startled first from the jolt of memory, and then Penny's outburst. She was very still for a time, unsure of how to explain the deaths of literally hundreds of children at her mother's hands.

"A ritual," she said in a voice as tall as an ant. "That never should have been."

"Yeah, I can tell," he murmured, trying to soften his tone and not scare the girl. It was fairly obvious that kids shouldn't be killed, even weird ass looking ones. And her laying flowers at the door were evidence of that. "So why'd it happen and why are you hung up on it?"

She remained silent, unsure of how to answer or what would happen if she did.

There were things that should never be said, lest someone seek a way to repeat that folly.

"She needed their lives to for her to regain something. Piece by piece. From their deaths, she was renewed and I was born."

Yorda bit her lip, shoulders hunched.

"It should never have happened."

"I know the type," he replied with a vague disdain. The Beast was a creature who had once been a man and was sucking the magic out of Fillory and Earth in an attempt to make himself immortal. He was the monster they were trying to defeat before he'd arrived here, but it was weird to think that Yorda was a result of someone else's horrific choices.

"But you didn't choose it, right? She shouldn't have done it, but that doesn't make you wrong. I've seen a hell of a lot of good things come out of shitty magic and you seem like you ain't all that bad."

"No," Yorda agreed. "I could not stop it."

But that didn't mean she didn't carry some responsibility - if only to ensure such a thing did not happen again. You couldn't choose where you came from, but that didn't mean it didn't shape who you were and how you felt.

Still, Penny had said something curious to her. What had he meant that he 'knew the type'?

"You met something like her before? Something with that kind of magic?"

"Something like it," he confirmed. "Some asshole that feeds off magic. Magic which helps people live and which some worlds need to even exist. I don't know if anything is alive because of him, aside from the damn moths he keeps around."

Penny looked vaguely angry at the mere idea of the Beast. He still had to rescue the girl the Beast was holding and save Fillory. It was a large task left undone, which he only allowed because he was confident in what people said about this place returning people to the exact time they left.

Her mother’s power was dwindling as Yorda grew and began to come into her own. There was no way the Queen could waste her power making good on her threats now. Fearing another escape attempt was nigh from her daughter, Yorda was brought to the Tower of Winds.

“It is for your own good,” she said, as one of her shadowy minions pushed a struggling Yorda into the black, wrought iron cage.

“You cannot live beyond these walls, Yorda. Why can you not understand?”

A hand, pale as snow brushed her daughter’s cheek as the door slammed. Yorda jerked away, and the Queen’s gentle facade turned cold.

Without a word, the cage was lifted up towards the top of the tower, where Yorda was to spend the last years of her life.

They came in droves, some on wings, some crawling along the walls spiderlike on four spindly legs. Others still were hulking figures, towering over a boy armed with only a wooden plank and his wits. They looked as though they were made of black smoke, and they were fixed on getting their claws on Yorda. The horned boy was simply knocked aside as though he didn’t matter.

One of the winged creatures scooped her up, ripping her away from the boy with horns, and carried her to a pit of shadow. She was half submerged in it, scrabbling to gain any kind of purchase on the bricks as she was slowly dragged down.

Blackness surrounded her, invading all her senses and drowning out the world. She couldn’t escape - it was foolish to think that she could ever leave this place.

And then she was drawn upwards, back into the light. The boy with horns had a death grip on her hand, as he pulled desperately. She struggled to wriggle out of the pit, but she made it, whole and hale, if a bit disoriented.

There was little time. As she got to her feet, she was tugged along towards the idol gate that blocked their path forward with several of the shadowy figures pursuing them.

Yorda and Ico came to a halt at the gate, and her light reacted to its presence, building up, crackling and then bursting forth in a bolt that struck each of their pursuers.

The gate opened, the pits of shadow from which their attackers had come vanished into wisps of dark smoke.

As the stone shell around her crumpled away, leaving a shadowy figure in its place, war raged within the confines of Yorda’s mind. The walls and floors around her shuddered as tremors wracked the castle. The Castle in the Mists was beginning to crumble, the last of the Queen’s magic that held it together now gone.

The Queen’s body was no more, and the last remains of her consciousness was scrambling to override Yorda’s. There were flickers of memory not her own - the inside of a temple, a black horse, an infant at the bottom of a fountain with two nubby horns on his head, a mysterious garden, the echo of the voice of Another, growing louder and louder. And then, the image of Ico in the throne room, the rune sword buried in her chest in her last moments.

Yorda knew where to go.

She found him, unconscious, his horns snapped off leaving behind only bloody stubs. With a strength she did not have before, she picked him up and carried him to the lift which brought them to the docks beneath the castle. There was still a boat, small, and no oars, but it wasn’t like Ico could row in this state.

She lowered him into the boat, careful not to upset his wounds, and pushed it off into deeper water where the current carried it steadily to the mouth of the cave.

Yorda could not escape, but in this moment was a small triumph. The Queen was dwindling, Ico lived, and the curse was broken. The castle and cave crumbled around her, the water slowly rising, but it wasn’t stifling like the pits of shadow. She could feel the life in the ocean teeming around her, vast and free.

As the boat drifted away, Yorda thought that this was not so terrible of a place to rest.

“...Aran’as.”

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[February Catch All for Yorda]

Memory Event Starters

The Salt of the Earth

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The Cursed Children - warning for human sacrifice and child death

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The Caged Bird - warning for child abuse and imprisonment

The Depths of Darkness

Left Behind