ph_logs | May Event - All Too Familiar

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May Event - All Too Familiar

Content Warnings: Walking dead, character deaths, potential for gore | Special Thanks to Meghan and Kalineh

It was a fine spring day when mysterious letters began cropping up all over Pumpkin Hollow. Letters whose apparent senders do not remember writing them, whose recipients or discoverers were harmed by reading them. Eventually these mysteries, though still unsolved, come to a quiet halt as stealthily as they began, but not before a mail carrier in a cowboy hat trots out to Elsie’s tree with a letter in hand, unmarked aside from being addressed to her.

She gleefully rips open that letter, hoping it's another message from her father. It isn't and, at first, she's crushed. But only until she starts to actually read it.

Elsie,

River la Croix has been hiding something in her forge for a while now. It is called the Book of the Dead. In its pages are hundreds of spells from across time and space with the power to give life to those no longer with us.

Your father is doing his best to revive your mother. But this island’s barrier is blocking his will, resisting his magic. I can no longer watch you suffer in solitude when a solution exists. All you have to do is decipher the text, and its powers are yours. Your mother will be returned to you.

River does not want to part with it. She will become suspicious of you if you ask, and it will become harder to acquire it. You will have to take it without her notice by levitating it out of her forge. She, like many others, is fearful of the Book’s power. This fear isn’t entirely unwarranted for them, but for you, your connection to the Feywilds’ magic will be enough to grant you access to that otherworldly power.

Good luck, and all my love to your dear mother when she returns.

Fond regards,
A friend

Could this be it? Could this be the miracle she's been waiting for? Hope swells painfully in her chest as she clutches the note close. She mustn't celebrate too early. She still needs to get the book. At least her mysterious friend has already told her where to find it. Her jaw sets in a look of determination, and she speeds away into the dusk.

It doesn't take long to reach the forge. River has defended it well, but Elsie slips into her own shadow and sneaks beneath the door without so much as a whisper of sound. Only her hand extends from the puddle of shadow on the floor inside, like a disembodied arm hovering before the flames. Mustering her will, she reaches out to the ancient book and commands the winds to lift it. Sweat beads her shadowy brow while she concentrates, the flames flicker and dance around the slowly levitating book. Just a little more, a little more… There!

It's heavy in her hand, and remarkably cool to the touch despite having been pulled from the fire. She retracts her arm and the book back into her shadow and slips out the way she came. Her heart thumps in her chest as she races back to the safety of her tree. To her mother, who will soon be able to wrap flesh and blood arms around her like she once did. All that's left now is to read. Her friends have been teaching her how. Her mother will be so proud of her.

Carefully now, she opens the book, feeling her skin crawl as a sudden unease grips her very core. No, she will not be deterred. The language is unlike any she's ever seen. The letters, if indeed they can be called that, feel jagged and painful to her mind. Still, she will Not Give Up. She screws her eyes shut, thinks of her mother, and holds tight to her desperate hope to be reunited.

When her eyes reopen to behold the page before her, understanding strikes like lightning. Suddenly, she knows she can speak the words. As they escape her mouth, an unknown magic swells into the space around her, then beyond her. The ground shakes. The air turns foul. And as the trinkets in Elsie’s tree chime together in the unsettling breeze, ringing out with notes more sour than usual, it quickly becomes clear that the advice she received was not from any friend.

The forms of people begin to pry themselves loose from the ground all over town, as if emerging from water, leaving the ground unbroken as they lift themselves out of the ground. They bear horrid injuries, shambling along grotesquely, telling a story of death. However, these are not skeletons from the graveyard, housing the souls of long-dead locals. These are things of flesh and blood, however exposed they might be, wearing newer faces.

Much newer.

Since the barrier went up, many people have died, only to have their bodies vanish and replaced by a new one. Those bodies now walk the town, seeking to unleash a wrath brought on by the corrupted magic of the Necronomicon. Anyone who has died inside the barrier will have a violent, undead copy of themself representing each death wandering the island looking to increase their ranks. Which means that there will be many, many, many Yoricks.

Destroyed copies will remain destroyed for the standard overnight period of any other person. But there are too many of them to defeat this way, and their destruction is impermanent. Thankfully, help is on the way!

In the midst of the undead and their attack on the citizens of Pumpkin Hollow, tiny glimmers of hope appear in the form of folded paper birds. The little gold birds flit from fighter to fighter, small whispers promising that if enough enemies can be felled then the High Priestess can intervene. The necessary number is unknown, but if a bird alights upon someone, they will feel their weariness vanish for a short time, and perhaps, should she feel like it, they may receive a temporary boon to use against the undead.

Eventually the High Priestess will show herself, making good on the promises of the little birds. With a smile, her magic will wrap around the remaining undead, returning them to the unseen graves and binding them into Death once more, leaving the living to pick up the pieces.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Two moments would make me feel better.

There is some rushing around as they come down into the middle of the homestead, but most of the people here know who she is, so there is no panic. Max is within the main building, with changes of clothing for her and plenty of food.

Do you care to come in?

"I'll stay outside if it's all the same. I've got a lot of blood on me, they probably don't want me tracking it in."

She could fix this easily, but she's not in a hurry to. And if she stays outside, she stays standing, and keeps going. It's that simple.

Valdis nuzzles her again before she steps away, up the steps to the main house, tugging on a blanket draped over a chair so that it flips over to cover her as she shifts. She needs a shower herself, and Max won't let her go back out without eating.

"I'll bring you out some food."

"Thank you. Take your time - I won't leave before you do."

Fever will find somewhere she can sit down for now. She'll take those two moments, with her biggest concern dealt with. Time enough to think about where to go and who to fight next, with familiar faces among the dead. Time enough to feel a little of the weariness in her bones that will only surge when it's all over.

But for now, she's fine, and she'll keep being fine.

Valdis slips inside, worrying that Fever may grow restless should she take too long. After a brief word with Max, promising to return to speak with him and rest, she quickly showers, puts on fresh clothing and returns to her partner with some warm bread and a little dish of butter.

She knows Fever didn't leave as she could sense her the entire time, but there was a strange feeling in her chest the entire time they were apart. Fever can take care of herself, but she's more worried about the woman's emotional state.

"Here."

She holds out the loaf of bread and the butter.

By the time Valdis reappears, Fever's managed to at least wash her face and hands, thanks to a helpful bucket, and then sits back down. Food will help, since she can distantly feel herself being hungry - another thing that will hit her when this is all over.

Oh, bread. Regardless of anything else, the way her eyes light up is immediate, and her smile is grateful as she takes the items.

"Wonderful." After only a second's consideration, she withdraws one of her daggers from her robes - the amber one, perfectly clean - and uses it to cut a piece off the loaf, holding it back out to Valdis to accept or decline as she wishes.

When Fever's eyes light up at the offer of food, Valdis allows herself to relax. They can sit, eat, and rest without fear here. After Fever takes a piece, Valdis tears off a bit for herself, scraping the butter with a small knife and spreading it across the warm bread.

They will both feel better after they eat.

"Do you need something to drink?"

It's definitely her turn to fuss.

"I can get water in a bit."

It's a genuine effort to get herself to eat at a reasonable pace, fighting the urge to wolf it down and immediately get back to it. It's so good though - she knows she's going to be starving when all of this is over, burning through her energy like she can afford it.

"How are you feeling now? Anything lingering from her?"

Valdis shakes her head.

"I'm fine, Fever. I might be out of my element fighting mages, but I am very difficult to kill."

More difficult now that she has experienced some of those spells as they will be less effective now overall.

"I wish you would worry less about me and more about yourself."

Her eyebrow lifts in confusion, chewing another bite before she responds.

"There's nothing to worry about. I'm completely fine - you're the one that was getting hit."

Besides, if she worried too much about herself, she'd never be an effective fighter.

Valdis reaches for Fever's free hand.

"I understand your hatred for your former self, I cannot say I would have held back against my former self should I have met her, and I also know that it is normal for us to want to defend our loved ones. I just feel like your rage went deeper than simply me being injured."

Her hand goes still in Valdis's own. Fever knows the concern is warranted, that moment where she'd cracked and suffocated the other under how much hate she bore her. But how is she supposed to explain it in words where Valdis will understand, smile, and not bring it up again? She remembers nearly going to pieces in front of Hawkeye, and he hadn't even seen her fight herself.

How is she to explain it isn't merely the past, but every mirror? If she looks too long, if she thinks about it too much, it all wants to boil out and overcome her, this coiling hate with nowhere to go. It's in the groundwater of herself, poisoning the roots of everything that wants to take hold. If there was another her in front of her right now, she would do the same all over again, just as hateful, just as brutal.

"She hurt you. And she was a threat to everyone else on this isle. She had to be stopped."

It doesn't need to be more than that. It doesn't. This isn't the time to talk about this, when she needs to be out there giving everything she has to hold the line.

"Fever."

Valdis feels the turmoil swirling within her partner, the pain, the hatred, the fear of falling apart. She knows those feelings too well to misinterpret them, after all, she's felt them plenty herself.

"You didn't just stop her, you annihilated her."

She won't say Fever went too far, but she fears that the reason the woman went to such lengths was because of her deep seated hatred for herself. Fever's path to healing has to belong to her, just as Max's had to belong to him, but she doesn't want Fever hiding from her. Holding everything in just leads to the eventual explosion. She and Fever are not exactly the same in this, but she knows the damage her own violence causes upon her psyche, and Fever's soul feels pain just like hers.

"It needed to be done. She'd come back from anything else. Any viable passageway for her to return, she'd find it, she'd seize onto it. I know this."

Knows it like she knows the scar across her abdomen, knows it like she knows how many steps it takes to get to the kitchen from her front door. And slowly, all those feelings, she takes into her fist. Crushes them and they bleed red, red, red. It hurts, but there's no place for them.

"And I will do this every single day that she dares set foot back here."

Valdis falls silent, resting in the anger and pain wafting from Fever. She had never felt self-hatred like this, the kind that allows one to damage and treat oneself in a way that you would never want your own loved ones to treat themselves. She'd seen in it humans, but not to this extent, and of course those humans had never had the chance to inflict that hatred upon their own face the way Fever had.

Still, they both know that the undead doppelganger had died long before Fever had actually stopped her assault.

"Are you angry with her specifically? Or with the fact that you are still capable of doing what she did?"

Fever had once refused the relationship because she remembered the way she had horribly injured someone she loved. Now she had seen that very thing happen, in that this seems to be a completely normal reaction, but it still feels off somehow.

"...can we not talk about this now?"

She knows it's running away from the conversation. But she can't, she can't. Not here, where anyone could walk out and see them. Not when she needs to be focused to fight the undead. This sort of talk always leaves her exhausted, frustrated when she can't explain what she needs to.

"What matters is that I'll see to it that what damage she causes will be limited."

"We don't need to discuss it now, but I hope you will trust me with your true thoughts at some point."

Valdis knows it will take time, but she trusts Fever, just like she trusts Max and Miles.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

May Event - All Too Familiar

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