come_sailaway | "Which way ought I go from here?" [Open and one Closed]

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"Which way ought I go from here?" [Open and one Closed]

Who: The Daedric Prince of Madness and YOU!
What: Who knows? Could be anything!
When: Mid to late September
Where: Various
Warnings: Body horror, general existential dread, transformation horror, other warnings to come

"You must be mad, or you wouldn't have come here" [Atrium]

There's a new gentleman about the Serena Eterna. Or perhaps he's something other than a gentleman. Perhaps he's a cat, or a cloud, or a bad idea. The face he wears is different for whoever he meets.

Currently, he's leaning against a balcony railing, looking down into the atrium of the Serena Eterna, whistling like a mockingbird. Do you approach, coaxed or driven by fear and fancy?

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast" [Closed for strangearchitecture]

"Helen!" he slides up beside her, holding a plate as if it's a steering wheel. He, of course, does not actually have a vehicle; that would be against the rules. His appearing next to her is inexplicably accompanied by the sound of a window being rolled down, however, because comedic effect.

"My dear semi-sinusoidal seductress, I don't suppose you've heard the rumors of the infinite cheese shop on board, and the fortress of cheese that lies within its depths?"

"A grin without a cat is the most curious thing" [Hallway outside Stellar] [CW: potential body horror]

Amongst all the flowers, a fungal grotto has appeared in the hallway outside of Stellar. It's a strange sight indeed, filled with curtains and irises of fine, wispy mycelium and dotted with fruiting caps of vibrant yellow-oranges and metallic purples. There are also woody roots and stumps, out of place in a fungal environment, that periodically release clouds of green, sweet-smelling spores. If you pay close attention, the bursts of spores almost seem to come and go at a rate suspiciously like someone breathing.

"At least I know who I was when I got up this morning" [various] [CW: transformation horror]

The Prince of Madness is in a frightfully fickle mood, and without much warning, perhaps not having even given you a customary greeting, he brandishes a staff in your direction and lets loose a blast from it. In a peculiar sensation, rather like becoming water and going swirling down a drain faster and faster, you find yourself stretched and squashed into a new form. Perhaps your mind is unaffected, or perhaps you immediately begin wondering if you've always been this way, and the thing you were before was but a dream. In either case, it's going to be a weird couple of hours while the effects wear off.

(In particular I'm looking for at least one person to become a sentient pinball, but I'm up for anything, in the direction of both something harmless/inanimate and something large/dangerous. The suffering can go both ways here)

"I can't explain myself, for I am not myself" [stern, various] [CW: general existential dread]

Across the stern of the ship, in various places, there's a sound like a man howling and weeping, and the sound of fingernails scratching against metal and chalky paint. In a twisting line, the words "The sea knows what isn't. The sea knows what can't. Is the sea a thing that is? Am I, because it is?" are being scratched into the paint and the metal of the ship over and over again.

"A most uncivil offer" [Sports Deck]

Oh tarnation! Oh tribulation! Here he is in a place where he might ply his craft with sword and crossbow, yet he's brought neither. But perhaps someone eager for a sparring partner might offer to lend him one?

"Is it labelled 'poison?'" [Wildcard]

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He cups his chin in his hand.

"Partaking in Lord Sheogorath's blood isn't usually what brings a mortal here. Such is more often the way they hasten the merging of their soul into his being. No, what brings one here is usually the process of becoming someone else; this is where the former identity resides, when someone decides to become someone entirely new. The resting place of the old ship's ghost when every one of its parts has been replaced, if you will."

"I'm not sure I understand."

Either part of it, really. The whole soul merging deal - there's a lot to unpick and unpack there, but the idea of becoming someone new? She hadn't signed on for that.

"I'm still me. I haven't decided otherwise - I don't think that's why I'm here."

But she's not sure, all the same. That's one of the troubles with a brain full of holes - certainty is harder to find.

"Interesting. Well, I suppose not everyone here decided to be someone knew, but it happened to them one way or another."

He tilts his head, smiling.

"But I think you're right that that's not what's happening here. Call it a hunch. I tend to have some small inkling of what Lord Sheogorath is thinking, and I don't think a new chamberlain is in the cards for him right now. Or a new him."

"Then what is your inkling telling you right now?"

As long as it means she stays Fever, for the moment, whatever answer there is, she'll take.

Edited 2023-09-27 01:22 (UTC)

"I think... I think perhaps you're here because he wants to grow closer to you, in a different way than most mortals. I think he looks at you and he thinks 'family,' which should be utterly incomprehensible to a Daedric Prince. But of course, he's Lord Sheogorath, he's the embodiment of the incomprehensible. And I think he wants to cultivate that closeness by letting you in on secrets... secrets most people aren't built to handle. Like this place."

"At least, that's what I would be thinking, if I were Sheogorath."

Family. There's an ache in her to hear that, fingers pressing against a bruise that goes bone deep. But she doesn't know why, couldn't track it even if she tried her hardest. A shape she can't grasp, no matter how she stretches her fingers towards it, only to fall into hollow. Just another thing that's lost to her - another thing known by its absence, the great and yawning void of who she used to be before now. The scattered fragments she has are wrought in agony and gore, and they are all Fever has. Glimpses of a self swallowed by the tadpole's ceaseless hunger, or the brush with death, or that necromancer's explorations, or perhaps never there in the first place. Who knows, because the scars she does bear cannot speak.

Why me, Fever thinks, when I don't even know who I look at in the mirror?

(That damnable butler, she should have gripped him by the throat and demanded all the answers he held the moment she saw him. He must have known - she should have ripped it from him, instead of him leaving her to have to beg Shadowheart to bind her hands and help her fight. It will only get louder, the more it's denied - she should have vented it on him and saw where they ended up.)

Distantly, she knows she should think on it as some kind of honor, if a god is letting her know secrets, saying that she can handle it, and maybe she does feel that, but it's hard to express it in the moment. Hard to put words to all of it in a succinct and precise way.

"...who are you, then, if you're not him?"

"My name is Macaelius Athatel. I was one of his lordship's dukes, back when I thought I was real. But that's rather a long story, and this isn't the best place to loiter- might I offer you some tea, back at the gardens?"

"It'd be much appreciated."

Because why not, when she's still in the heart of the storm of her own emotions at present, follow this Macaelius and see where she ends up.

He gives her a warm smile; it's the same smile that Sheogorath has given her once before, only with a normal and proper number of teeth, albeit for oddly long, sharp upper canines. Macaelius leads her down the halls and out into a cavernous valley, the rolling slopes underneath something that is at once a solid ceiling and a moving, mechanical sky comprised of ornate metal rings. It's claustrophobic and vast beyond measure all at once. Down the road is a high-walled garden, which he leads her to. It's full of plants of every color and shape, as well as butterflies that come in just as many hues.

"Please, sit. Now, let me ask you- do you know of the Daedric Princes? The capricious gods of Oblivion? Or should I begin my explanation with them?"

Her eyes flit here and there and everywhere, drinking in as much as she can as she sees it, accepting the discrepancy a little better if she tells herself she doesn't have to reconcile the sights, the feelings. The garden is received with equal wonder, and she only sits after gazing after a cloud of butterflies that pass by.

"I know of gods, but not your gods. So you might have to start there."

There are so many pantheons on the Sword Coast that adding another into her belief system, particularly that of another world, isn't difficult at all.

"Right. Well, among the spirits that formed the world, there were those that took part, and those that did not. Those that took part, the Aedra- High Elven for 'our ancestors'- found that the world sapped them of their power. Most of them fled, but eight god-spirits stayed behind to continue to hold the world together, and they fell into torpor. Of the spirits that did not play a part, the Daedra- 'not our ancestors'- sixteen of them were of particular power. But one of their number, the Prince Jyggalag, was thought to have known that the world was a spirit-trap; his predictions of all things were thought to be flawless, yet he told no one of the threat. So at the same time that the Aedra tore apart the spirit that proposed the creation of the world, Lorkhan, in gainless recompense, the Daedra turned Jyggalag inside out, forcing him into a form opposite of everything he was. They thought that the resulting being would be too broken to function, too incoherent to so much as inch its way across the cosmic fabric of Oblivion. Even when it proved them wrong, even when a crawling thing emerged from the quivering heap they'd reduced their unbrother to, they thought nothing of it. They called it 'worm,' lowest of orders, least of spirits."

"Their mistake stemmed from the fact that until that point, no one had seen or even thought of the creature called 'caterpillar.'"

"Are you following so far?"

She's been nodding at the appropriate points in this story, listening to how his world was created. In her mind, a little play of everything takes place, with shadowy figures, and the one marked Jyggalag is mercilessly turned inside out, with all the tinny screaming and agony that comes with. And then it twitches again, life returning.

"I am. So they mistook the caterpillar for a worm?"

He nods.

"And they were very surprised when it changed."

"The being that came to call itself Sheogorath didn't hesitate to show the other Princes how badly they had messed up. He bested each and every one of them when he saw the opportunity to do no, not letting them forget for a moment that this was their own doing. Sheogorath began to prove in time that he was just as capable of being dangerous and poweful as Jyggalag... with one caveat."

He pauses to pour her a cup of tea from one of many, many, MANY teapots on the table in the center of the garden.

"At the end of every age, Jyggalag would re-emerge from Sheogorath, tearing the Madgod to pieces and laying waste to his opposite's realm; indeed, he was justified in doing so, for everything the Mad Prince had built kept the Grey Citadel of Order buried beneath it, trapped and slumbering. But any time Jyggalag came close to victory, came close to freeing his realm from the tangle of roots that had suffocated it, he would transform back into Sheogorath, and the cycle would begin anew, with Sheogorath struggling to rebuild everything Jyggalag had destroyed."

"Sheogorath took little joy in being Jyggalag's prison, as well as being his own prison, in a sense. But what could be done, when the two only had one existence between them?"

"The answer, it seemed, was to do something impossible."

Edited 2023-09-28 00:54 (UTC)

Taking her cup of tea in her hands, she continues to listen, the little shadowplay in her head moving on with his words. Ruin, rebuilding, and then more ruin and rebuilding, and a suffocating tangle it must be. Not a happy existence for either of them. Both of them being the other's chains. But like he said, what could be done?

"You said he's the embodiment of the incomprehensible. So the impossible might not be as far off as it seems?"

She's not some scholar, well versed in fiddling words and exact ritual. Nor does she have on the headband that somehow clears her thoughts, draws that specific intelligent focus. No, right now, she's just Fever, muddling her way through with guesswork.

"Certainly less far off than impossible, and yet somehow not any more probable. Lord Sheogorath knew that he couldn't possibly stop Jyggalag's Greymarch, for whenever one Prince would emerge from the other, it would kill their opposite until the other became still and cold and dead once more. So how impossible would it be, if despite all that, Sheogorath still somehow met Jyggalag on the field of battle?"

"Pretty impossible, from where we sit."

But she knows that's not the end of the story. And so she sips the tea and waits for the answer that her mind can't fathom, not accustomed to thinking in the ways a Madgod's might.

"It was simple, for an impossible task. Convince the world that Sheogorath was alive when he was dead. How could Jyggalag then go back to being Sheogorath, if someone else was already filling that role? But creating a forgery of a god is no easy task when the eyes of reality itself are upon you."

He takes a sip of his tea, seeming to consider his next words carefully.

"It's a very old, very profound, very fundamental magic, to know that the world can be tricked, and through its belief in what it thinks it sees, the world can be made to change."

There's a silence between them, as she struggles to make the pieces line up in her head. Tricking the world? But...wouldn't there be some obvious tells? How to make such a switch, when someone's directly looking at you?

And then something gently connects, a puzzle piece having found a home.

"Forging a god."

Two meanings in that. Two paths, in the same sentence. All you have to do is turn it one way or the other, and the second message goes quite unknown. Angle one's perception, like a hidden switch in plain sight, and no one will notice until it's pointed out.

He smiles.

"Precisely."

"A branch from a timeless tree. An eye that holds secret unspoken. Find these things and bind them as Sheogorath's symbol of office, and who's to question that the bearer of that station isn't the Madgod, when it was by their own hand that they formed that mark of authority? From there, there's just one final proof- don't fall on the end of Jyggalag's sword, for the Madgod is a mad god, and it would be rather suspicious if such a being were so easily cut down."

"The same way you're not going to question that the man on street in fine clothes is a noble, regardless of whether you know his backstory or not. So then, what is seen becomes an accepted truth by the world."

She laughs a little, leaning back in her chair with her cup.

"Clever. And so then, he can't go back into his prison, because someone's already filling the cell. That's why you talked about 'another him.'"

"And when the world sets the rules, then what it believes to be truth becomes fact."

He reaches over and cuts her a slice of a nearby pastry. It's some sort of tart with a red filling, the crust beautifully flakey.

As he hands her the plate, he continues.

"A slight adjustment there. The world sees that the cell is filled, but it cannot see anyone in there. The cell is simply unable to be occupied in its understanding, for the cell has become its own inhabitant. The secret inhabitant at the heart of the ruse thus goes from being in the cell to being a part of the cell, and the name and the face and the life of who that person might have been fade from the world as the world is convinced. Otherwise, a new cycle would have begun, with the cell's new inhabitant raging against its prison. And... perhaps that was the case, in the beginning. Only the Prisoner was willing."

There's a strange emphasis on the word 'Prisoner,' there, the meaning of which is not especially apparent.

Fever takes the plate, listening well, for that is her role here. To listen, and recieve what secrets are to be placed in her keeping, to tend them well because they have been given at all. It hardly feels fair, all this telling - but then again, the Madgod can read her thoughts. Her secrets are not so far away, what of them she has. Perhaps Macaelius can peer in there as well, and her head is but an open box to those with power. Oh, there's an unsettling thought. She doesn't like it.

"Do they remember who they used to be? Or does that go away as the world gets convinced?"

It's a good tart, when she bites into it. Her host sets a very fine table for tea.

"Well, some would say it's better to forget. There's evidence to suggest that clinging to that knowledge can drive someone mad. Of course, if you're meant to be mad..." he trails off.

It's a strawberry tart, oddly tangy with a hint of red wine. It would pair incredibly well with a mild brie. Oh look, there's some on a dish along with five other kinds of cheese.

"But even if they remember, they change. They cease to be the person they used to be, moreso than the average person, who wakes up a new person to find that the world that existed for yesterday alone has been destroyed and replaced with something new."

"Such a person who seeks to exist in that very particular manner ends up here, in this particular subset of nowhere."

A few threads knit together in her mind, but it will only be when she's alone that she can fully grasp the implications. For now, instead, she uses the cheese knife to put a bit of the brie on the next bite of tart, tasting them both at the same time. Delicious, but a combination that is never going to not remind her of this moment, after today.

An entirely new world. One to explore, ponder, rage against, weep for, laugh with, live in. What else could this reborn person do?

"...Will I see you again, after today? I don't really like the thought of you rattling about in here entirely on your own."

"Oh, I'm never too far. Just a thought and a forgotten dream away. I'm sure Lord Sheogorath will find an occasion to let us see each other once again."

He gives her a wistful smile.

"Of course, you might still be here tomorrow. I'm not sure how long something like this lasts, nor does time move in a coherent fashion here."

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