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1010s?
Sylas and Ixtalan
Tala
She stands on the deck of a large ship, looking over a green-black sea that fills the expanse, butting up against a dark, star-filled sky all around save for a tall, pale lance of white that rises up over the horizon.
She blinks, shakes herself, and looks around, hand reaching out instinctively to grasp at Lati’s. She shivers harder when she finds nothing but air. Where is she? Where is Xalati?
“Shallot?” she calls. “Mama? Papa?” No, Papa wouldn’t be nearby. He was back at home, in Shepherd’s End. He hadn’t come on the Diamond, that had been a special trip for the two of them–
TEETH BLACK BURNING PAIN CRACKING HER CHEST SEARING HER SKULL LANCING
Her mind shies and flees. Her body follows suit. Light overwhelms her, bleeds into her, a dizzying vertigo tumbling through her veins as she thrashes until she opens her eyes, panting.
She stands alone just below the crest of a low hill, looking up at the branches of a leafless tree spidering across the pale gray sky. The land stretches out flat and sky-gray around the hill, featureless but for a black ribbon winding across the land. A river, maybe?
For lack of anything better to do, she starts walking toward the river. Ashen grass crawls out around her, blades motionless in the heavy, still air. No sound of insects nor birds breaks the silence.
She can’t tell how long it takes. When she gets to the riverbank, she looks down at the glassy black water sliding by with barely a ripple. Instinct warns her that sort of water could have dangerous undertows, and something about water is putting her off at the moment anyway.
“Shallot? Lati?” she calls, tentatively. Silence answers, so heavy it fills up her ears.
For lack of anything better to do, she turns around and walks back toward the hill and the leafless tree. Just to hear something, anything, she starts humming a jig usually played at the festival dances (though even someone who knows the song probably wouldn’t recognize it from her attempt), skipping along to its rhythm.
Sylas
Sylas was left standing in place, motionless, as the fog of the Pale flowed past him and through him. He struggled to maintain his sanity - the denizens of the Pale suddenly vanished a millenia ago leaving him in unending solitude with only his thoughts and the knowledge that the matriarch of Ravens had higher expectations of him still. Having walked for years, in search of any other souls, his body came to a halt and has not moved since. Was he abandoned only a week ago? Perhaps this was meant as a type of eternal punishment - it’s only been a few minutes though so it’s difficult to say…
No, that isn’t right. Keep your fucking wits about yourself Remnant; time if flexible in this space and while time has certainly passed, it hasn’t been nearly long enough to lose yourself yet. Has it…?
“Shallot? Lati?” An echo that was carried by the fog from right beside him, yet when he cuts his eyes in that direction, Sylas is only met with the same gray void he had grown accustomed to. His hope was raised and dashed in only a moment and now he was left with a sinking sensation as he tried to calm his quickly beating heart. Was it a trick of his mind or had this place finally grown a horrible sense of humor.
Despite his second guessing himself, a poorly carried tune is heard through the fog; distant yet only feet from him. If this was a gross machination of the Pale, he decided it would be better to play along if it meant he held onto his sense of self with an objective in mind, even if only for a few more days. Marching through the heavy mist, Sylas focuses all of his senses on that sourceless tune. He didn’t recognize it, nor did it appear to be well performed, but it was something; the first sound he had come across in hundreds of years.
He breaches the haze and identifies a familiar, gray hill with a leafless tree in the distance. This was usually where She was situated, so it was strange to see it empty after all this time. Only now, from this distance, Sylas barely perceives a small figure leaned against the tree. That wasn’t the god he had come to both hate and respect, their stature was far too small. If this truly was the plane inducing hallucinations within him, he swore that would find some way to destroy this place.
Sylas begins rushing up, calling out to the small figure. “Oy, you! What’re you doing under that tree? Have you seen the Raven Bitch? Where the fuck’ve you been, I’ve been looking for someone for ages!”
When the figure finally comes into full view, the fog no longer obscuring his eyeline, he sees the scaled frame of a child, looking up to him with wide, confused eyes. “Oh shit it’s a kid…
“I’m fuckin terrible with kids…” he mumbles to himself, now praying the Pale was indeed playing a foul trick on him.
Tala
Tala arrives at the hilltop to a complete absence of change. Same leafless tree, same rounded hilltop, same lack of anybody. Despite her best attempts to keep her spirits up, she sags against the tree, her humming faltering. How long had she been doing that, anyway? Her voice feels like it should be going rough – well, rougher, it had never been quite the same after the fishhook – but there’s no particular difference she can tell, and she’s neither thirsty nor hungry. Nor even out of breath or sore, despite the interminably long – or had it been short? – walk up the hill.
Before she can ponder the lack of feedback her body is giving her, a shout startles her out of her thoughts, sending her darting behind the only cover around. Not that the slim shelter of the tree trunk gives her much, even if Mama teases them all the time about being little saplings.
She stares at the approaching man, unconsciously backing up as he steps closer. She doesn’t know the funny accent he has or the style of clothes he wears. He does sound a little like the dockworkers at home and the sailors on the Diamond, at least with how much he uses the bad words that Papa scolds them for using and Mama laughs at. That slight tinge of familiarity, on top of all the unfamiliarity about him and the oppressive silence and emptiness of this place, is just too much weirdness all around.
To her absolute mortification and disgust, she bursts into tears.
She has to bite her lower lip sharply with her fangs to regain a modicum of control over herself. Acting like a baby, now of all times! Shallot isn’t here (and that thought nearly makes her bawl again) but when she finds her again she can’t embarrass her sister by telling her she went to this weird place and then just cried the first moment something actually happened. As her fangs press down, she can feel her poison glands tensing up, but holds them back - while she and Lati sometimes had fun making themselves dizzy with their own poison, right now, with a stranger, doesn’t seem like the best moment. Anyway, she might need to bite him soon, too.
Releasing breath and lip both, scrubbing the offending tears away with her balled-up fists, she demands, “Who are you? Where are we?”
Sylas
Sylas has fought aberrant nightmares, hordes of undead transformed by mind corrupting worms, survived years within the Feywild against creatures they could never fully comprehend all with an excitement or without batting an eye. Yet, it was a sole crying child that caused his stomach to immediately sink and force him to second guess their approach to a situation. In a split-second, numerous thoughts poured into Sylas’ head as they tried to determine the next best plan of action in this unexpected scenario.
Oh shit, oh god, she’s crying! Do all children cry when yelled at or was it just me? Maybe it’s because she died? Does she realize she’s dead? I suppose most people would be upset at that fact…Is her throat swelling? That can’t be a normal child thing - wait she has scales - okay I’m mostly positive that isn’t a normal child thing…
Stopped in his tracks, Sylas takes a knee a few feet away from the child. She was already crying and this was the first person he had interacted with in an incalculable amount of time. His chances of further ruining this interaction couldn’t be much higher than trying to mend it.
Well, it’s not as though I’m unfamiliar with poor introductions, he thinks to himself with a sly smirk.
Clearing their throat, Sylas speaks up, an awkward tenseness in their tone. “Um, hello…little girl. I, uh, apologize. For frightening you I mean. I don’t mean you any harm, so please stop crying and doing that—that thing with your throat,” he motions towards her neck region. “It’s just a touch off-putting.”
Solid recovery, keep it up.
“To answer your questions in order, my name is Sylas Remnant. And you are in the Pale Lands, where all souls are sent to wander before being herded off to whatever place exists beyond here,” he gestures his arm out wide bringing attention to the vast, gray void that surrounds the two of them atop this hill. “And I guess I’m the recently designated greeter,” he says with more annoyance in his tone, as he falls to a fully sitting position, crossing his legs and sighing.
“How bout yourself? You remember your name or where you came from? Oh, how about what you are? Don’t think I’ve ever seen a…snake(?) person before. Though I’d have to really sort through my memories to be totally sure.”
Tala
Golden eyes widen, a tinge of outrage pushing past the morass of feelings that are, despite her best efforts, still knotting up inside her throat. “You take that back, we are not little!” she protests, drawing herself up to her full 5’5” and taking an involuntary step closer in her impassioned defense. “And you are off-putting. You are a human! That is weird. Especially here where there is no one.” Her arms fling wide, in unconscious imitation of the gesture Sylas themself makes. “Why would a human be here, and who is a Raven Bi-iitch?” Despite her attempt to act grown-up, her voice drops a little and she stumbles slightly over the bad word.
At least she’s not crying any more, though.
Tala folds her arms, eyeing him suspiciously. “What is the Pale Lands? I have never heard of that, and I have heard of places as far away as Red Landing and Deepgrave. And what do you mean souls? Like ghosts? Are you a ghost? No, you said you are a greeter, whatever that is.”
Her eyes narrow, pupils slitting slightly. “Mama said not to tell my name to strange folk, and to look out for Lati.” Her expression shifts, the corners of her mouth tugging downward. “And Shallot is not here so I can only do the first part. She said it is fine at home because we know everyone and ‘nothing ever happens in that little hole anyway,’” her voice drops momentarily to mimic her mother, apparently a verbatim quote, “but I should not trust anyone I meet outside of Shepherd’s End unless she tells me it is all right.” She pauses for a moment, thinking, then adds, “But Gilgain has said that part of society is knowing and offering trust to one another and not keeping secrets, and he is also smart and Mama and Papa said we should listen to the Teacher, so I will give you one name. Ixtalan. But my friends call me Tala and Shallot calls me Fish. You are not friend or Shallot, so you cannot call me those.”
His last question nets him an incredulous look and an exaggerated sigh. “You do not know very much, do you? How can you have not seen yuan-ti? There are not as many of us as halflings or dwarfs or gnomes, but it is not like we are tritons or real giants or—” Her voice drops and she looks around involuntarily, “—tieflings. And even I have seen a tiefling. The Temple way north has a tiefling girl.”
Sylas
Though he is caught off guard slightly at the sudden outburst from the small figure, Sylas maintains his ground and lets the little creature vent. As she expresses her frustrations and defends herself, Sylas listens more carefully to the words that are not spoken to better understand this person. She references “Red Landing” or “Deepgrave” as places she knows far away, cities perhaps - locations Sylas is not familiar with. A teacher that speaks of a trusting and knowing society and races within it such as halflings, dwarves, “yuan-ti” (perhaps the name for what she is?). Wherever this little snakeling is from, it is well beyond the borders of the kingdom of Isendel, possibly across the sea. Finally she mentions her family and “Shallot” or “Lati” - interchangeable nicknames for the same person that her mother directs to watch out for. Most likely her sibling; meaning that if she isn’t here…
Despite himself, the child, Ixtalan, is able to provoke a hint of annoyance in her implication that he does not know much. While he accepts that his knowledge is limited in scope, he would sooner bow in absolute fealty to the Raven Queen before allowing a blubbering infant to attempt and outsmart him, much less imply his intelligence is lacking.
“Oh child…” Sylas laments, pressing his hand into his brow, thinking of how to broach the next subject. This was something the Matriarch and her lap dog handled, why has this horrible responsibility suddenly fallen on his shoulders? He had never been one to gently express information so why try and start now.
“Alright,” Sylas begins, remaining kneeled to let the girl have a feigned sense of superiority, if only briefly. “I can answer your questions though you won’t like the answers. You can disagree with me, spit on me, fight me but the facts don’t change. You called me a ghost which is partially correct but technically wrong, in more ways than one,” Sylas mumbles to themself with a smirk. “The Pale Lands are a plane of reality that exists outside the material plane - a liminal space for souls to pass through before being guided further beyond to their final resting place, whatever that may be. The Raven Bitch, or the Raven Queen if you’re feeling polite, is the ruler of this realm and the guide for all the souls that pass through.
“Now think on it a moment - where were you before you arrived here? How did you come to this place from where you previously were? This place can…do things to your mind, fog your memories. But find a point that you can recall and follow it to its natural conclusion.”
Tala
Different planes of reality? A “liminal space?” Her eyes fix on Sylas, pupils dilating with the intensity of her focus as she goes still, but there’s no change of expression or indication of comprehension on her face at his words - in one ear and whistling right out the other, as far as can be told. The only thing she says, sliding in a quick little interruption as he attempts to explain the situation, is, “I only know of Queen Lil’lith, but if this Raven Queen rules a place and is like the Queen, I do not think she would like to hear you call her that.”
Her gaze remains in his direction but loses focus as he queries where she had been before here, staring past him into an unknown history of—two hours ago? A century? What had she been doing? She’d been with Lati, of course, and they’d been… on the Diamond with Mama, that was right, Mama had brought them along on one of her work trips for the first time, and it had been so terribly exciting. Going out to sea so far that they could not even see the land as a thin stripe on the horizon, the slow rolling of the ship on the waves, lesser than on Papa’s Wind Jewel, all the sailors and whalers running around them who variously scowled at, ignored or made much of them (she’d heard much harsher words from dockworkers on the docks, but had a vague sense that perhaps Mama’s presence made these sailors nicer), the crack of sails filling with wind, the thick mist of nothingness that crept up on the horizon until it became a howling torrent of wind and rain that whipped by so fast it felt like rocks hitting her skin, muddled flashes of light and overwhelming crashes of thunder, the stairs up barking her shins painfully as she stumbled climbing up them to see more of those beautiful pink and blue lights in the water that she could see through the porthole, the sudden shift of the world tilting under her and a wall of water as the ship crawled up an enormous wave, the world suddenly making no sense and having no up and down as darkness filled her vision and a cold fire she dimly realized was actually water flooded her lungs, pink and green and blue lights rising before her–above her? around her?—just as beautiful as she’d imagined, sudden lances of pain crushing her head all around and squeezing until– numbness, blessed and fragile, her memories and awareness draining away as she fought to cling to an image of—herself? No, hair in braids, not cut short, and screaming in a way she’d never seen herself—
And then true nothingness.
And the ship, empty. And the hill.
She stands just below the crest of a low hill, looking down at a human kneeling in the pale gray grass, her throat swollen tight and face wet with tears. Her body begins to tremble as the realization floods her, her knees sagging liquid and spilling her against the strange man, unable to loose even a sob from behind her locked throat.
Sylas
Sylas carefully watches Ixtalan as he instructs her to recall her recent past - ignoring her interjection of her own kingdom’s queen. A name he again finds himself unfamiliar with; just where exactly does this girl hail from?
He studies the young girl as she enters an almost trance like state, parsing through her memories, fighting past the fog of the Pale to reclaim what has been lost to her. He watches as her pupils dilate and shrink, the subtle twitches of the fingers, the quivering of her lips. Sylas recognizes the familiar signs of someone remembering what has been lost to them and steels himself for the barrage of questions she will surely have. Perhaps if he is able to guide her through the initial shock, and she accepts her circumstances, he can pepper her with his own questions as her being here doesn’t make much sense given the Matriarch has seemingly gone awol.
Ixtalan’s knees begin to buckle slightly and Sylas is able to discern that she has nearly finished her recollection. “Alright now I know that’s a lot but next you – woah, woah, woah!” he is interrupted mid sentence as the tall girl collapses forward, falling into Sylas who reacts just in time to ease the impact, as he is forced from his kneeling position to fully sitting down as she silently weeps against his chest.
“Okay…” he sighs, as Ixtalan heaves, her face buried away. Sylas, in desperate manner, quickly pans around looking for someone, anyone, to come and take his place in comforting the girl. While he could empathize and understand the upheaval that death can cause better than anyone, he also freely and readily admits that more than anyone he is potentially the least equipped to comfort.
“Right okay. Um, there there?” he mumbles slightly, as he robotically pats the crying child’s back one, two, three times. He begins going for a fourth pat but stops short, second guessing if more pats would actually aid in her comfort.
Harvest help me, what the fuck am I supposed to do? I didn’t fall apart when I learned what dying twenty different ways felt like why is she a mess over just the one? Where’s Ringo when you need a hand to help guide through anguish?
Sylas opts to instead remain completely silent and to let the girl cry herself out. While he may not be able to comfort Ixtalan in this moment, he can wait for as long as he needs before she’s ready to ask the questions he can help her with. That said, hopefully it isn’t too long - he can feel that both his leg and back are held at awkward positions and while not painful, are quite uncomfortable.
Tala
Time is strange here, and so it is both an eternity and only a few short breaths before Tala’s throat unlocks and permits her to take gasping, shivering sobs that eventually wind down into breaths hissed from between clenched teeth.
She pushes back from Sylas as the tears start to dry up, the shock finishing its course through her body, oddly unembarrassed by either her collapse or his attempt at comforting her. The chaos roiling in her mind has entirely eclipsed normal thoughts of pride or shame; the only thing it contains can be summarized as OH SHIT OH FUCK I AM DEAD I’M DEAD OH SHIT. It feels as though her throat ought to be sandpapery and dry as a summer drought after all that sobbing, but the same strange timelessness that left her completely fine after climbing the hill also leaves her sounding almost normal, albeit a bit stuffed, when she opens her mouth and says, “So I am dead.”
Another thought occurs to her, driving the remaining panic and shock right out of her mind and replacing it with a fresh worry. She leaps up, looking around frantically. Same hill. Same – wait, the river is gone now. Only mist remains in the distance. Weird, but not at the forefront of her mind just yet. “But wait. Lati is not here. So she is not dead, yes? If she was, she would be here?” If that is so, then for once, it is a good thing that they are separated.
Another realization, then, and she blinks, turning back to look at Sylas, her pupils dilating again as she focuses on him. “So you are dead, too? And you still have to work?” Wasn’t that supposed to stop or something? She does not really remember what Gilgain or others have said about what was supposed to happen after you die, but she has some vague idea that things were supposed to change for you once you went… wherever. Here, apparently.
Sylas
Ixtalan pushes away, the shock of her discovery settling as she reorients herself to the current moment. She stands up and examines her surroundings once again, looking for something or studying the environment. Either way, Sylas releases a sigh of relief and moves to stand back to their full height, rising just a little over half of foot above Ixtalan. After spending an impossible amount of time and yet none at all comforting her, Sylas finds themself ready to move on as they still have questions about where she came from.
“Correct, you’re dead. Unfortunate but it happens to the best of us,” Sylas confirms. “‘Lati’ is most likely not dead but that’s not fully guaranteed regrettably. In my time here, I have met souls that perished and were bound with another and others that were separated at the moment of their demise, if only temporarily. In this realm, the time and place of death on the material plane doesn’t matter. That said, given current circumstances, I think that you may be the only casualty of whatever accident you found yourself in. Everyone finds their way to this hill eventually.”
Ixtalan follows up asking about Sylas’s own state of being and the “job” they have. Sylas can only sigh very heavily, pinching the bridge of their nose tightly before responding.
“It’s complicated; yes, I’m dead and should have been ushered on at some point so I could finally take a well earned break but just my fuckin luck that some other shit happens!” Sylas stops for a moment, breathing to calm themself. “Something happened on the material plane I think that is affecting this domain. And now it’s become my responsibility to fuckin sort it out somehow,” Sylas confirms with a look of annoyance at no one in particular.
“My turn for questions. How are you here? Everyone, all souls, including the Raven Bitch and her guard dog, vanished from here. Like a shift that pulled them elsewhere and since then, I’ve not seen another soul. Did you first wake up here? I’m just wondering how I didn’t come across you sooner…”
Tala
She blinks at him, taking a moment to unwind his complex words – some of which she only picks up from context – and rephrasing them. “She is probably not dead, but you have sometimes seen people who died at the same time and were not together, and others that did and were still together? But you guess that I might be the only one dead from the storm and the monster?” She suddenly remembers, guiltily, her mother, and the rest of the crew of the Diamond; she hadn’t even thought of them or their fate since finding herself here, only of herself and her sister.
She takes a little comfort in his guess, haphazard though it may be—people who used complex words to talk often seemed to know a lot, at least, even if it did not make them easier to understand. She stops looking around, taking a breath and angling herself fully back toward Sylas as she replies very seriously, “You are the one who told me I got here by dying. Is there supposed to be some other way?”
A small frown thins her lips as she thinks about the path of her experientially-short time here, her gaze flicking away to the gray flat emptiness beyond this hill. “I was…” FREEZING BLACK CRUSH WAVES BATTERING — She suppresses the memory, entire face squeezing with the effort, and continues on a little breathlessly, “I was on a ship. Not the Diamond, I think, or at least it was empty instead of full with people. It was night, and I saw stars, and the Spire. But I think I… started remembering…” NEEDLES IN HER SKULL IMAGES SCENTS SENSATIONS FLARING FADING— She sways a little, putting out a hand to the tree to steady herself. “And… I do not know what happened next—I wanted to run, I think? There was some kind of light, and I felt dizzy? When that faded I was here. And I did not see anyone around, so I started walking until I got to a river. I still did not see anyone there, so I turned around and came back here, and here you showed up yelling at me. I have not seen anyone besides you.”
Sylas
“The rules of this place are complicated and seemingly contradictory at times,” Sylas explains on Ixtalan’s follow up question. “While my answer may not be satisfactory, it’s also the best you’ll get. Think of it like this - until such a time that you should cross paths with your sister here, you should think of her as alive and not another potential victim of whatever incident befell you. It’ll make your time here easier.”
Sylas looks out aimlessly where the gray fog obscures anything further beyond a middling distance as he considers the girl’s question about reaching the Pale Lands through other means. A hint of sadness burrows his brow before he turns back to her, “There are technically other means of reaching this place. Death is both the easiest and kindest means of doing so; I’d recommend not concerning yourself further with it…”
He listened closely as Ixtalan recounted her first memories upon waking in this place; an uncomfortable and disconcerting experience. As he listens, Sylas finds himself reminiscing, thinking back on the memories that helped to pull him together - he never considered if the souls he absorbed would travel to the Pale. A thought that he shrugs off quickly - he has enough to deal with as is. The last thing that he needs to concern himself with is being potentially haunted.
Ixtalan describes a river which immediately catches his attention. The tree and hill they were currently standing under were the only bits of terrain that naturally existed within this realm. The rest of the environment was a foggy replication of the material plane but it was rare for something like that to manifest without the Raven Queen. “Take me to this river you found,” Sylas instructs.
Tala
She nods seriously at his answer, seeming to take a little heart from the—well, not exactly reassurance, but at least pragmatic advice. It’s the first positive emotion she’s shown since they met; relief melts across her face, a small smile lightening her expression, before it gets washed away with the next topic.
“Um…” She rolls her lips in between her teeth and looks around, puffing out her cheeks in thought. She’d always been good at orienting herself in the world, so even though the viewpoint from the low hill is mostly sourceless fog, she fixes on a particular curl of branch and closes her eyes, trying to remember how she’d been angled with the tree and which direction she’d walked in when she spotted the river.
Opening her eyes, she steps a little to the right, squinting out at the fog. As though in answer to her seeking gaze, a flash of black cuts through the haze, a billow rippling the mist aside. “There,” she says with more confidence than she really feels. She squints, as a needle of white seems to spear up, momentarily, on the other side of the riverbank—or did it? Memory and knowledge jostle uneasily in her mind, ephemeral as the fog around them. She remembers the Spire, somehow, but she also has no idea why she remembers it, or how it showed up—it just will have been. “You can see the Spire on the other side. If it exists?” Her voice cants up more tentative than she would have liked at the end, doubt creeping in.
She sucks in her breath and begins marching forward toward the river. “What is it? Is it important?”
Sylas
Sylas cocks an eyebrow at the mention of the Spire walking in step with Ixtalan. “I’ve actually been referring to it as the White Tower for some time - something on the distant horizon of the Pale that I could catch glimpses of through the fog but never actually follow. I like Spire better though; short and simple. I first sighted it after the disappearance of the Maiden. Something about it or something that it’s doing is tied into the vanishing of one of the most powerful beings on this or any other plane of existence but I’ve only been able to theorize up to now - I think it’s dreadfully important,” they affirm with a sigh.
“If wherever you came from can lead us to it, maybe I can better grasp the situation we’re stuck in. Let’s pick up the pace, yeah?” Sylas could sense a grim energy from the direction they were walking and the urge for expediency was beginning to overwhelm them.
As the two travel for days or hours, a ripple of energy, appearing as though the very fabric of the environment was sliced open, slowly begins to make itself known through the thick fog. As they approach the tear, an image of another realm became easily visible on the other side; red skies, an environment that was not fully affected by gravity, structures in the distance that floated upside down in the air, a river not much further from them - the one referenced by Ixtalan earlier. Sylas ran their hand on the boundary of the schism and could intuit the nature of the tear as…forced open? Not with intention no, or at least, not the primary intent…
A wide smile broke across their face at the impossible puzzle found in front of them. Fear, but also a thrill, was growing within Sylas’ chest as they spoke up to Ixtalan. “You know, I once knew someone, a friend really, who told me that if I ever wanted to endear myself to others, I should give them a nickname. And I think it’ll be important for us to be on good speaking terms at least as I suspect we’ll be traveling for a time,” Sylas explains, as they step through the tear into the other realm.
They breathe in deep; this place had a different smell, a different energy, than the Pale Lands. Even though it felt wrong in its existence somehow, Sylas welcomed the change. For so long they had felt aimless, drifting without purpose, with only the most vague impression of needing to accomplish a task assigned by the Raven Queen. In this place, that sense of anxious uncertainty grew into a sense of anxious momentum - a task with an end goal. Looking back towards their young partner, they hold out a hand. “So, Tala, no point in putting off the inevitable; let’s get to work. I promise I’ll grow on you eventually,” they say with a wink.
Tala
The change of energy and shifting of the landscape is viewed with interest and a little concern, but considerably less alarm than before. She is feeling better after a wee cry, some sapient interaction, and reassurance (however lukewarm) that whatever is happening—dead or not—at least Lati is not being subjected to this. She can already feel the ache of missing her twin beginning to chew a hole in her belly, but all things being equal, better for her to be far away from here than dead alongside her.
“Last time I just saw the river,” she offers, still hiding a few steps behind Sylas, but watching the expanse of land and structures with keen curiosity. She did not think it possible, but that may be even stranger than anything she has seen thus far. “It seems bigger? Or maybe only the river was here last time, and the rest of it is coming in a bit at a time?” Hey, it seems as likely as anything else, to her.
Despite her newfound confidence, she balks on the edge of the tear, toes rocking up against the visible demarcation between This Place and That Place as Sylas strides beyond. This Place might be empty, but in however short a time—or whatever it is—she has spent here, it has started to become at least a little familiar. That Place is nothing of the sort; and even the rules of physicality do not seem to be the same there.
But Sylas is already across. She glances around, looking for—what, exactly, she doesn’t know. Some other answer than to follow someone she just met into an even weirder place than this one. Her casting gaze finds nothing of the sort; rather than answers, she catches the strange, fuzzy borders of this tear creeping inward. Even as she watches, a little fascinated, a little repelled, the tear is slowly beginning to shrink, pulling inward like a scab over a wound.
The panic at the idea of being left alone again overcomes any hesitancy at plunging into new depths, and she grabs at Sylas’ extended hand and stumbles the single step needed to cross over from the gray, misty grasslands to this place of red skies and yellow dirt. She’s panting a little with nerves, pupils slit thin against the brighter light here, and her hand is clutching theirs just a little too tightly to be completely at ease, but her voice holds steady as she says peevishly, “That does not count as giving me a nickname. I already have that one, and I also said only friends call me Tala, and you are not a friend yet, even if you did let me cry on you.” She orients toward the Spire, ominous and beautiful in the distance, and starts walking, pulling at their hand. “Call me Ixtalan.”
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