but I have seen what the darkness does

[Seraphina]

Rumors of a Shaman who’d had the luck to find the relic of Tempus had drawn the mare to Ruris; her intent, of course, had been to venture to the Abigo Caves to find this Shaman to see if they might be opening to bargaining for the relic, or to, at the very least, make sure that they had no intent to use it against the denizens of the Day Court. Before she could arrive in the caves, however, Seraphina found herself standing in front of a massive maze of hedges that were most definitely not there the last time she’d visited. Dappled starlight danced along her frame as she paced back and forth at the entrance to the maze, brow furrowed in something of an internal debate. Nothing that was less than godly could manage this sort of a feat, she imagined, so the shaman – and the accompanying relic – was likely somewhere within the maze, or on the other side of it, and she was duty-bound to find out what the shaman intended to do with the relic. However, the maze could very easily be a death trap, designed to keep out anyone else who might be in search of the relic. She couldn’t blame the Shaman, if the intent was to keep others away from their prize – Seraphina had stumbled upon various other travelers who sought the relic for their own purposes, and she imagined that some of them would be happy to shed blood for a chance to satisfy their wishes. As for Seraphina…the thought of the others and their wishes made her feel a muted pang of guilt for even standing in front of the maze. Some of them seemed to genuinely need a miracle to complete themselves, some godly intervention to satisfy some desperate want. Seraphina had sought the relic because she felt like she was supposed to, because it was supposed to be her job. She didn’t remember what it felt like to want anything, or, more accurately, she didn’t really want anything at all. There was a strength in trying to better oneself, to grow…she wasn’t sure if obtaining an object that would, if rumors were to be believed, grant your wishes actually qualified as that much personal development, but she supposed that it was better than waiting for life to happen, which was most definitely what she was doing. At least they were trying. At least they had a reason.

(She supposed that not having a reason did, at the very least, give her less misgivings about entering the ominous, gaping halls of the bramble-covered maze that might very well be a trap designed to kill unwary travelers in the middle of the night.)

She paused in front of the entrance, tail lashing and mismatched eyes staring into the darkness without seeing anything. Seraphina had the stars to guide her, if that was any consolation in quarters that were likely so cramped and twisting. (She doubted that they would make much of a difference.) Dragging her tongue along the tips of her teeth, she stepped into the darkness of the maze without another glance at the world she was leaving behind, breaking into an uneasy hum – some tune or another that Viceroy had taught her. (She could barely remember the words to the song.) Reasonably, she had telekinesis, and more hair than she knew what to do with; if she tied a few strands at each turn, she probably wouldn’t get lost, right?



@Random Events - super excited for this plot! <3

[Random Events]

The Shaman Has Appeared!

As you enter the maze, the world around you seem to dampen and grow darker, the tall hedges casting shadows from every direction as they seem to lean in towards you. The air cools the further you venture in, crystals of ice covering a few delicate leaves on the hedges, the ground hardened under hoof. Each breath of air you take is cold, and small puffs of frost are emitted with every exhale. From somewhere up ahead comes a high pitched cackle, disembodied in the mist.

Rounding the next corner will show a lone figure standing there, his skin as pale and thin as stone, tangled locks obscuring a good portion of his face. Across his body is draped the skin of some animal you don’t recognize, covering frail shoulders.

”Is it the relic of almighty Tempus you seek, Seraphina?” he asks, his voice youthful despite his aged appearance, carrying a lilt you cannot place into any of the Courts. You do not know how he knows your name, for he is a figure you have never seen before, and you can only wonder what more he knows about you. ”You will have to follow me to find it.” And with that, he turns and takes off further into the maze, ever leading you northwards. His speed belies his age, for he is constantly just ahead of you, sometimes disappearing into the dim but never venturing far. As he disappears around the next corner, you become aware of another creature lurking somewhere behind you, one of the many beasts to have make the maze its home.

---

@Seraphina you’ve found the Shaman! However he is not one to stay and chat, and has already taken off into the brambles. It is up to you to hunt him down or not, but be warned: the maze contains many hidden dangers and beasts lurking within it that you might just get caught up in!

Feel free to write in your own obstacles or beasts, or tag the Random Events account if you would like one given to you! You have until Wednesday, July 19th to get your next reply in, at which point the Shaman will again respond.

Happy writing!

[Seraphina]

Seraphina is twisting a lock of snow-white hair around a tangle of brambles, and he is not standing in the path in front of her. She looks up, and there he is, but she didn’t hear him appear and jolts back several feet; thorns press into her side, deep enough to draw thin lines of blood. It’s cold – very cold – and her panicked breath comes out in a cloud of thick white smoke as she stares him down wide-eyed, choking on her tongue. There is something about him that feels wrong, like a violation; the youthful, unfamiliar cadence of his voice does not match his wizened frame and frail skin, and, for a fraction of a second, she wonders if he is an immortal, like Viceroy. But immortality does not work in reverse… His hair is a disingenuous tangle that covers most of his face. It puts her in the mind of a mask. He asks her if she seeks the relic of Tempus, but not as a stranger – her name is on his lips. He informs her that she has to follow him if she really wants the relic, and then he is off, disappearing into the brambles and the murky dark that has descended upon the maze like a thick fog. (It was already dark, of course, but she can no longer see the stars – she feels as though she is underground.) Before she thinks, she is dashing into motion behind him, but he’s faster than she’d expect. “Who are you?” She calls to his rapidly disappearing form, tone less imposing than usual in her confusion; he is always just a step ahead of her and then twisting a bend. No matter how she tries to keep pace at his side, she can’t catch him. A strange, prickling sense of uncertainty curls up in her chest and stays there, and, no matter how she tells herself this is just a stranger like any other, she cannot bring herself to believe it yet. “How do you know me? We’ve never met before, have we?” She has stopped twisting her hair around each turn in the maze, but she hasn’t noticed it yet.

It is important, she supposes, to acknowledge that she can’t trust her own memory, left in tatters as it is by Viceroy’s trials. You could grasp the basic form of a landscape with a thin enough blindfold and enough light, but the picture would always be distorted and incomplete, and that vague fuzziness was most of the past three years of her life. (She thinks that she’d rather not recall them, though.) She could very well have met this stallion before, she reasons, this Shaman - he could have simply been another face blacked out, ripped out of her skull by her mentor’s interference. And yet…

She feels like she would have remembered him. It doesn’t make sense, she reasons. (Unless, unless, unless…)

Perhaps it the relic were as almighty as Tempus himself, she could believe that this stallion had created this maze using its power. (But what reasonable god would gift that to a simple mortal?) Perhaps if he didn’t feel so contradictory, with his youthful stride and his ancient frame, she could have thought him just a Shaman. Perhaps if he didn’t know her – while she didn’t know him – and she didn’t feel that she should have remembered him, she could have simply walked away, or laid her pointless theorizing to rest. Perhaps if she didn’t think – know – that most people were horribly greedy and power-hungry, far too power-hungry and greedy to give up something like a relic of an almighty god, she could have thought of him as another unmemorable stranger. (She’s thinking too much.) Perhaps if she hadn’t felt so damn sentimental lately, for reasons she couldn’t completely understand, so pointless and blurry and confused – the perpetual drifter, caught between conflicting worldviews, caught between past and present, caught - and looking for something holy, she would have simply walked away when their paths had crossed, dismissed him and thought nothing of it like she would have when she was only just a bit younger. (But now she wasn’t pursuing him for the court. Now it was something else.) Perhaps she just wants him to be something else entirely, because they had been too long without ---

He turns another corner, and she is right behind him. Before she can fully process the question that is about to pop out of her mouth, it has materialized on her tongue. “Are you-?” She is cut off before she can verbalize the most important part of her question. A loud growl emerges from the darkness just behind her – how long had it been there? – and, before she can react, a massive, shiny, black creature is leaping at her, claws extended, massive jaws wide open to clamp around her gut. She hasn’t seen anything like it before, this mess of eyes and limbs and wings, and it instills in her a primal fear that she had forgotten. It isn’t about living or dying, because Seraphina doesn’t care if she lives or dies. This is pure instinct, a matter of survival; her teeth are bared and her ears clamped to the back of her skull in an instant, and the creature’s great claws only graze her before she is off in a sprint, winding through the maze like liquid quicksilver. The stallion is gone like some apparition, and she has no more time to contemplate him. Her heart thrums against her ribcage with the desperation of a moth beating at a lantern, and her breath comes out in choked pants; her lungs ache with a cold that clamps and makes her mouth taste dry and coppery, like old, dried blood. She hacks. The creature barrels along behind her, bulk filling most of the space from bramble-coated wall to bramble-coated wall. Each time she turns a sharp corner, hooves skidding to nearly lose her balance, she hopes that it will lose control of its blubbering mass and crash into one of the thorny walls. Alas, it is snakelike and writhing in its frothing composition, like a blob of slithering ink, and navigates each twist and turn with far more grace than she can imagine. When she looks back, back at those mouths full of sharp teeth and those rolling white eyes, she screams.

She feels other things move in the darkness, too; hisses and growls, groans and roars, the flutter of wings just above her head. (Occasionally, she swears that she feels the brush of feathered wings against her spine, then dismisses them as the touch of brambles or leaves because she sees nothing.) Sometimes she feels her skin crawling, like worms or beetles are running across it, but if she looks back, she sees nothing but the predatory smile of the creature as it hunts her down, like a victorious, gluttonous fox about to corner a rabbit – its skin bubbles, like tar. She keeps running, but she doesn’t know how much longer she can. When she feels her legs stumble or her pace falter for even a fraction of a second, she can hear Viceroy in the back of her mind, telling her to keep running, and she finds herself sprinting again. (He’d never been the type to save her.) The brambles catch in her braids and pull them loose of their constraints, allowing the full length of her mane to drag out behind her in a thick mass of tangled white, dragging leaves and small branches of bramble along with her; her skull prickles. The beast takes advantage of the fuller length and swipes at it, claws clamping in her silky tresses; she jerks away, lurching the full weight of her body to her front hooves and kicking blindly at its paws, but loses a few tangles of hair in the process. (Nothing, she imagines, that she’ll miss. Needs to just cut the lot of it off.) She runs. She runs like she only ever remembers running on the last day she saw her mother. She runs until her lungs think that they’ll give out, until her legs feel like they will seize or else turn to putty. She doesn’t know how long she’s been running, or how far she has disappeared into the maze, or how far she is from her target. She only knows that she can’t keep running for much longer. Seraphina casts a final, frantic look back at the hulking mast of beast; it seems to have moved closer, not father, and it threatens to overwhelm her, to swallow her up. Its mouths are open wide, its eyes watching her from all angles, all those odd wings and limbs and angles and it’s about to bite and-

Her hooves aren’t on solid ground.

She falls; she doesn’t know how far, and she can’t judge from her injuries because she falls into water, black and rippling with specks of pale light like a star-filled sky. This is fortunate, initially, because it breaks her fall with little more than a smacking pain, but then she finds herself sinking below the rippling black surface. Seraphina has lived her entire life in a desert, and she has cultivated her skills accordingly – she never learned to swim. Her head sinks below the water, and she’s breathing in water, and it stings; she wants for oxygen, but only dirty black water enters her mouth and lungs, sucked up in waves that leave her choking and coughing on more water. She manages to kick to the surface, limbs flailing wildly, and sucks in a frantic gasp of air before she sinks below the surface again. She manages to drag herself to the shore in this manner, finding the small, but deep, river(?) to be surrounded by solid ground and tall crags that lead back up to the maze; Seraphina does not see where the river goes or where it comes from, even as she tugs her waterlogged body onto the bank. It emerges and disappears into darkness. She hacks up a mess of bloody saliva and dark water, legs trembling beneath her weight as she struggles to stand; her hair lays straight and heavy down the side of her neck, dripping a steady stream of water. Seraphina feels cold, so very cold. Her entire body quivers with it, jaws trembling and teeth knocking together. Her breath comes out as steam, and she feels nauseas, but the creature hasn’t chased her down – for now.

She is faced with returning to the upper portion of the maze, and finds, to her relief, a steep, thin path cut into the crags of the cliffside that stretches up in front of her. She stumbles to it, and practically drags herself up it, long legs trembling with each narrow stride for all of her polished musculature and training. (This is likely pure adrenaline.) When at last she reaches the top of the cliff and finds herself surrounded by walls of pure bramble once again, she swallows down a suffocating sense of fear and glances back at the opposite side of the crevasse. The creature is gone.

She hopes that it has returned in the direction that it came.

Returning is no longer an option, but she knows that she has lost the Shaman. She stands alone in the dark, deathly silent, her body quivering and dripping with cold, dark water; it takes her a few moments of this eerie return to quiet to muster up the capacity to speak, though her tongue feels bloated, and she feels like she’ll swallow it when she opens her mouth. “Hello? Are you…still around?” Of course, no response comes from the brambles, and, still trying to catch her breath to proceed through the maze, Seraphina stares up at the cold, dark sky, wishing that she could see the stars. (What she wouldn’t give for navigation; she’d lost her path what felt like long ago.) With nothing else to do to calm her frazzled nerves, she resumes her quiet, nonsensical singing, pacing a bit in small circles to try and shake the cold. She’ll proceed in a moment, wander further into the darkness of the maze – perhaps her steps are a bit more uncertain than before, weighted with a caution that was not present when she entered. Once you touch fire, you don’t forget that it burns.



@Random Events - I took...lots of liberties with the whole 'reality-warping maze appears out of nowhere' thing. hopefully this is fine? excited to see where this goes, in any case <3

[Random Events]

Intrigued by both your sudden appearance and by your pacing, a fuzzy brown creature appears from hiding within one of the shrubs. It’s a prairie dog, one of the inhabitants of the plain before the maze popped up.

It stands upon its back legs, peering at you inquisitively. Hesitantly it scurries closer, its black nose twitching in the cold air as it reaches forward to take in your scent. And then the rodent takes off, running down the aisle so many meters before stopping and staring back at you. It seems to beckon you forward with one tiny paw, as though it, too, is waiting for you to follow it.

---

@Seraphina

It was perfectly fine!! You now have until Wednesday, July 26th at 11:59pm PST to get one last reply in before the Shaman reappears, so please reply accordingly!

Happy writing!

[Seraphina]

(Blind faith, Seraphina, She whispers, laughing, as she leads her daughter up through clumps of trees and ferns on the dense mountainside, the silver-blonde of her tail lashing like rays of sunlight in her face. sometimes you just have to have blind faith. And I have faith that we’re going to find some of those rare mushrooms they pay so much for at the market if we juuuuust keep following this path for a while. I don’t think it’s a path if you’re simply wandering through the woods, mother. Don’t be silly, darling. Everything is a path. Angelie’s voice is a warm, musical cadence, almost childlike, fluttering – she had nicknames for her daughter, but Seraphina can’t remember them, so she replaces the words with terms that she thinks are meant to display affection. Her eyes are brilliant blue, like the sky, and she has an easy, forgetful smile. She can’t remember the color of her coat. She can’t remember what she looks like. She can’t remember –

She remembers the clink of jars, like ringing bells. She kept the herbs around her neck. These are puffball mushrooms, see? Don’t mistake them for Amanitas. Make sure that they- Don’t have gills. I know, mother. See, you’re starting to pick up on things, now. We’ll make a herbalist of you yet, sweetheart. I don’t want to be a herbalist, Mother. Collecting mushrooms all day is boring. It’s not just mushrooms. It’s also- Lavender, chamomile, marigold, and sage. That’s what you have in your vials right now. Such a smart, smart girl. You’ve always had a good memory, honey. Not like your Mum. You’re going to be a smart, smart girl. You’re- She is sure that she wouldn’t remember those plants if she saw them now.)

The chubby, tan creature’s sudden appearance from the brush sends Seraphina skidding back a few feet, hooves skidding dangerously close to the drop-off to the bank below; dirt kicks off the edge, landing with a dull thud in the sloshing mud. It meets her gaze almost immediately, almond-brown eyes wide and inquisitive and far more intelligent than she’d like to admit, and she realizes that it is a prairie dog, and chides herself inwardly for being so startled by. It lean up on its hindquarters and eyes her for a long moment, then darts forward, wet, black nose wriggling as if it is smelling her. She’d a bit startled to see it here, after her run-in with The Monster. Seraphina wonders if it was left here when the maze appeared. It was part of the Eluetheria Plains before, wasn’t it? She is fairly certain that she has seen the little creatures darting to and fro among the tall, needling brown grass, though they often ran off before she could get a good look at them. This little one doesn’t seem especially scared of her. A bit bitterly, she considers her waterlogged, quaking appearance, mane and tail tangled with clots of mud and branches, and she imagines that she wouldn’t be especially scared of herself either.

It goes darting off into the maze, then, but pauses before it is out of sight, unlike the Shaman. Standing back up on its hindquarters, it extends one fuzzy little paw, as though it is asking her to follow it. Seraphina finds herself faced with a decision – she can remain standing in the cold or the dark, perhaps try to find her way back to the entrance if she’s willing to chance The Monster, or she can follow the tiny rodent further into the maze. She imagines that she has already made her choice, but it feels different to stake her fate on a prairie dog. At least the Shaman, enigmatic as he was, could actually speak.

Blind faith, Seraphina.

She swallows her misgivings and follows the tiny rodent further into the maze, gaze rarely leaving its sides.



@Random Events - <3

[Random Events]

The Shaman Has Appeared!

The prairie dog waits for you at every turn, never wandering far from your side. You travel together for an indeterminate amount of time, enjoying each other’s company in the otherwise desolate maze. Occasionally you can hear the sounds of other creatures lurking on the other side of the hedges, but none appear to threaten you. And when the rodent finally stops, it places a tiny paw against your front cannon, blinking up at you with its dark eyes. A cough sounds from behind you, and the prairie dog disappears into the maze.

“So, you’ve made it to the center of the maze,” the Shaman says in his lilting voice, standing in the path you just came from. “You’ve even made a friend. Now all you have left is to answer my riddle. Get it right, and what once was lost may again be found—get it wrong, and I will leave you here to face the Maze once again, without my guidance.

Answer me this:

“This thing repeats, no man ever yet did see,
it never was but is always to be.
From Orien’s first breath to Caligo’s great dark,
Birthed from nothing and returning thenceforth.
It leaves behind a single sign:
the passing of the sun across the sky.”

---

@Seraphina

You may write your character interacting with the Shaman, but please pm your response to the Random Events account! Title the pm as “RIDDLE—Character Name.” You have until Sunday, August 6th to get your answer pm sent! Your IC may be made during that time or after the winner is selected. If multiple correct answers are received, a dice roll may be used to decide who the winner is.

Happy writing!

[Random Events]

The Shaman Has Spoken!

The Shaman's sneer deepens, a jagged line across his face as he arches his serpentine neck back to peer down at you. A long pause stretches between the two of you, your answer hanging heavy on the air.

"Wrong."

With that the mist returns, crawling up his legs and over his spine, thickening until his entire body is obscured. When it again clears the Shaman is gone, in his wake a strange darkness falling across the maze.

Leaving you alone.

---

Seraphina

Your answer was incorrect; the correct answer was time. It is up to you whether you decide to roleplay your character finding their way out of the maze or not; you no longer need to tag the Random Events account in your reply unless you want to continue writing to the prompts. There is no longer a time limit on these threads!

Happy writing!