[SWP] ACT II: a pilgrimage made strange

[Random Events]

endless miles seeming both wild and improbable

The ash settles at dawn.

It’s impossible to tell which hour it was when the sun grew brave and bold enough to rise through the ash-night sky. There was blackness and then there was pastel light rising above the sea. Rain came with the sun, bloated and fat drops that weighted down all the soot and drowned it in the sea. Whales and rain made ripples in the waves. Gulls swooped low as they returned to the shoreline. The dune-grasses sighed happily in the fresh, clean rain.

Everything was quiet in a sad sort of way, as if the land that was not harmed was thinking only of that island the was.

And yet--

The island had disappeared from view.  Even as the soot was still settling from the eruption that had most definitely happened, there was not a trace of any volcano on the horizon. There was no distant shore winking and in out of the waves like a star.

There was no island.

Instead on the horizon was a strange stretch of hardened lava cutting through the sea like a black blade. It rose through the water, as if the sea was nothing but a shallow puddle it decided to conquer. The lava made itself into something like a bridge, a low center path with archways rising up around it like a cage. And in the spaces between the lava, the sea, and the sky everything was both queer and terrifying.

Pearls jutted from the hardened stone like teeth waiting for a meal, or maybe a prayer. Oysters made themselves in arcane shapes and patterns, trapped forever like fossils. Marble rose into small spires on the path like bones peeking out from the stone (bones that the sea was too shallow to hide). Seaweed grew from the cracks even though it clearly didn’t have enough time to seed and root in that hard lava rock.

Each mile of bridge held more mysteries. There was a stretch that looked too thin to bear weight, where the sea peaked through the cracks like a hundred, endless eyes. Another mile had across it bits of scale that shone like trapped stars across the black when the sun shifted out from behind a cloud. The last three miles of it were a tangle of things that made no sense-- feathers opening like flowers, pink sand blowing patterns across the black, metal cogs spinning and counting no mortal time, and then fruit blooming pale orange from stone instead of vine.

What was more terrifying than all the strangeness were the suggestions of great ocean monsters appearing between one wave and the next. Every few moments a tentacle would rise from the white froth, red as blood and cracked with flames that surely couldn’t live in all that salt-water. Scared and broken fins could be seen cutting through the current, each the bright color of amethyst that no whale or shark could claim. Blooms of cooper ink would appear across the churning blue sea from no visible source. The only thing obvious in the sea around the bridge was that death was waiting, and waiting, and hungry.

On and on the strange bridge stretched. It seemed that the mortal world ended on the other side of the lava rock and some other world began. There were no birds flying over the sea and no Pegasus calling out to the horses walking the bridge. The blue sky was empty, empty and thick as glass. For the sea air denied the existence of anything between the sea and the island that was no longer visible.

But finally, although it took hours, the first horse discovered the end of the strange bridge.

And the end was nowhere. 

The bridge ended in a wall of ivy, that seemed only to exist the moment the first horse stood before it. It rose endless from the pathway, out towards the horizon and higher in the sky than any mortal eye could fathom. The ivy swallowed up the sun and the moon until it glowed with the muted light of each. The leaves were slick, and shining, and almost a green dark enough to look black. Berries could be found in small clusters. On closer inspection each cluster of berries seemed to be pulsing. Maybe they weren’t berries at all but a million tiny hearts from which the veins of ivy grew.

That first horse tried to turn away, he tried to be sensible and run back to shore where the sun shone and the birds sang like birds should. He wanted the rain and the clouds with warm sand beneath his hooves.

But then the ivy started to learn towards him as if a wind was blowing in, hot and fast, from the other side of the wall.

He forgot all about running back to a place where the world wasn’t so strange and terrifying. 

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How to Participate!

The ash and smoke from the eruption of the volcano has settled. The sky is clear, although it feels a little too thick to be considered normal. When the black clouds fully dissipate a bridge made of lava is revealed. Strange arches of rock, and things that don't belong, are curling like branches over the pathway. The bridge seems to go on for miles, and miles, and miles. At first it looks like the bridge goes into the horizon before cutting off abruptly into nothing. A terrifying thought when the sea around the bridge is frothing with more than just the waves. 

But as horses finally make their way to the end, there is nothing for them to find but a wall of ivy. It stretches deep green  from the sea to the sky, and it's dotted with berries that pulse like hearts. If there is an end to all that ivy no one has found it. A wind is blowing though and the ivy is reaching out to the horses close enough. It all makes it easy to wonder....

What exactly is on the other side of that wall. Is it a monster or the end of the world?

A NOTE: There is no way around the ivy. The air is too thick to pass and the ivy seems to go on forever. And should a horse try to swim underneath it, they will find that it extends below sea level. 

Each character may reply to this post only one time. Rolls will be done and a staff edit will be posted at the end of each reply with Random Event results. You are more than welcome, and encouraged, to branch off into individual threads to interact with other characters. You may respond to the characters before you or your reply could be set at a different moment in time (this is totally up to you). This event will last for several days IC time. 

If you reply to this thread, it gives you +1 post in an SWP. 

All replies after June 1st, 2019 will not be considered for a RE roll. 

Possible rolls and their rewards are as follows.

1 : 20 signos

2: 40 signos

3: 80 signos

4: 100

5: 140 signos

6: A mollusk shell that when crushed IC will allow for an extra RE roll (but only for RE threads during the SWP, you will have to post a memo at the bottom of your thread when it's being used) Please message @sid or @nestle with questions. If this remains unredeemed, you may use it in Act VI.