Horrors / Reunion
Kithri found her sandaled feet on a rocky surface, walking toward a silhouetted figure who reached out to her. The figure struck her as familiar: perhaps an elder from Reunion, the gentle cult that had raised her and other moonchildren. She called out with a watchward.
“I speak with the moon; I would speak with you.”
“And I am here. Nephthys, you have returned to me!”‡
That was not the answer she had expected. He seemed friendly, although his outfit was strange and formal. He gestured her nearer. Kithri looked around and was startled to the world, set like a jewel in the velvet of the void.‡*
“Please explain—where am I? I— I don’t recall being called Nephthys. Who are you seeking?”
Her questions were cut off as he approached and enveloped her in his embrace. It felt familiar and comforting, and she laid her head upon his breast. After a moment he gripped her arms and stepped back to look full in her face.
“Many things have changed or been lost. For a time you were forgotten. I am overjoyed to again have my consort at my side.”
" I don’t remember you, but I feel joyful. Explain this to me.”
“I thought you destroyed. You were hurled against the Wall and shattered into pieces. I scarcely hoped I might see you this side of convergence. It has been too many years.”
“We were together, then? Perhaps in a past life?”
Everything about the experience felt true, but Kithri didn’t recognize herself in it. Looking down, she saw that her Pristine Guard uniform was gone, replaced by a linen dress of brilliant white embroidered with blue and yellow thread. Gold bands and jewelry decorated her wrists and neck, and the hair extensions that swung into her periphery. Threads of gold wove through her belt. She wore soft sandals that fit her unfamiliar feet perfectly, and as she looked down, she was reminded of the weight of her crown. She straightened and looked into his eyes.
“Who is Nephthys? Who was I?”
“Nephthys was my beloved. We were together since the beginning of the Actuality. We were the moons that encircled the suns; we danced the dance of creation. I don’t know if I offended you, or somehow scorned you. You left, or something split us and caused you to disappear. I’ve been forever traveling since. I’m so, so glad you have returned to me.”
He took her hands into his own, and she felt herself dissolve and fall like sand through his fingers and onto the moon’s surface. She fell through the surface and further, an eternity of falling, before her head snapped up in a medium-sized room that was mostly empty. The window along the entry wall was boarded, and the wall was uncovered brick. A few wooden crates were carelessly stacked against the right-hand wall, while a tall mirror hung opposite, showing their dingy reflection. A sunken mattress rested off-center on the floor, and a book splayed spine-up on the pillow. Another door nearly opposite the entry stood closed.‡
She turned around. No one was there. But the door to the outside stood open, and no one stood there either.
Kithri stepped forward and grabbed the book. The spine read Crime and Punishment—Dostoevsky. Whispering to it, she asked, “How did you come to be here? Who is your owner?” ¶
“Greta has read me many times. She changed into someone else and left. I thought she was going to return, but she hasn’t yet. It’s been some time.”
Kithri was relieved to find herself in uniform again, and she stowed the book in her medic bag. “I think I’ll take you with me.”
She opened the door opposite where she must have entered and found an empty room that looked like it had housed heavy machinery in the recent past. Further in, a hallway showed her several doorways, all closed.
The first on the left revealed pallets of piping in orderly rows, held in place by forked supports. Something rancid made her nose wrinkle, and she stepped in to trace the source.
Feet scurried behind a set of boxes farther back. Approaching cautiously, curling her steps from the heel forward, she rounded the edge until she found the source.
An emaciated face stared back at her: the grotesque eyes of a small child gone wrong. Extra limbs poked out unevenly, two of the hands full of the remnants of an unfortunate rodent. Its mouth was full of meat, blood dripping down its chin and staining its sharp teeth. It swallowed, then backed into a threatened crouch and bared rotting fangs at her.
Kithri held up her hands and stepped back. Individual roachgoblins weren’t a threat on their own, but they liked to swarm and could overwhelm anyone in large enough numbers. She had cleared out infestations of them before as part of patrols, and she had no desire to deal with a potential pack solo. Exiting into the hallway, she closed the door on the roachgoblin’s hisses. Enthusiastic chewing resumed as the latch clicked.
The door on the right opened into darkness and the sound of gushing water reverberating through a large and seemingly empty room. Burst pipe, she figured, and moved along. It took her a moment to reconcile the hallway she was seeing to the one she had been in a moment before, but the door her memory had guided her to next was a mere wall. The three doors further down seemed more inviting.
She opened the first. A pantry greeted her nose, with whole spices giving the room a pungent aroma and bags of flour lay open, raided by scavengers. Jars of pickled items—not all of them identifiable—lined one counter, and other substances she couldn’t place lay stored in dusty corner shelving.
Toward the back she passed a welded-shut service door in the wall and found a hatch in the flooring behind the pantry, the words Wine Cellar stenciled on it in faded and scuffed black capital letters. She took hold of the pull-ring in the panel and heaved. It opened with a smooth and heavy swing.
She looked the length of the ladder into a round room with wine storage three-quarters of the way around. The fourth quadrant opened into a hallway that looked like a sewer line but smelled more aromatic and pleasing.
Kithri walked back to the pantry and found a bag of flour that was still mostly full. She propped the hatch open, descended into the chilly stone room, and turned without hesitation down the tunnel.
She reached a T-intersection and turned left. She continued this way, keeping always to the left, and just as the repetition began to bore, the tunnel opened up to large wooden double doors with iron ring knockers. Placing both hands on one of the rings, she gave a heavy pull. The door opened with a ponderous, smooth motion.
For a moment she saw a group gathered around a table in a grand room with a majestic figure presiding. As she stepped forward, though, another image superimposed itself. The tableau stayed in place, but incompatible images fought for control of her eyes, and she shrank at the pain it caused. She gave an involuntary cry, and it suddenly, jarringly, snapped into place. ¶
She recoiled in revulsion and horror. The table remained full, and she recognized Marweg, Rhea, and Ward seated at it, but every square inch of the room was dark and slick, coated with a viscous dark ooze that seemed to pour itself down the walls and over the floor, dripping over the table and chairs. It pulsated with a deep, liminal rhythm and bulged like bloated and corrupted flesh. And the figure standing over the table, smiling at its company, could not be mistaken for anything but the demon it truly was. ‡
Kithri’s heart sank like a stone, and her stomach tumbled over inside her. We’re inside a hate cyst!‡
‡ Watcher. Very auspicious.
‡ Silver Sun, Unknowable Truth
* This scene tries to set up connections to Kithri’s past and connecting to the broader conflict.
‡ Blue Sun, Watcher
¶ Subuchin’s Thousandth Word [Beta Vance Spell]
¶ Perception test: Seeing through Deception. One success, magical flux.
‡ +2 to all actions (from Watcher?)
‡ Red Sun, Tyrannical Clock