audio | un: yiling patriarch | early on during the summit

[weifinder]

I've been whistling while I work, and I have yet to find any response whatsoever. Which is to say, ( he continues, almost at a laconic drawl: ) to any and all of my fellow ragtag members of the eastward bound Merchant's caravan with a gift for detecting life, death, or anything of the spirit: have you felt anything?

( he freely admits to how unnerving it is to him to have no reaction, no response whatsoever, when he reaches out to find the resentful energies that have been throughout all of this world they've wandered since his arrival, well over a year before. )

Because I, for one, can't find a damn thing.

Comments

[weifinder]

Which city are you assigned to, again?

[scrapgege]

I'm in Eidris.

Where in Eidris, I'm not quite sure, I keep getting lost on those errands people keep sending me on.

[weifinder]

Haaah, if anyone tries recruiting you for subversive groups here, send word?

( smiling, albeit grimly. )

I've spoken with Asgeirr, this blindness to death and life is recent, and it doesn't extend to the places outside the citadel limits. That was confirmed with young Red.

[scrapgege]

I'll do my best not to drink strange drinks this time.

So... this is a bit like Ellethia, then?

[weifinder]

Ah, hahaha, ah, yes... that's been a feeling I have. Only so far, after asking Asgeirr, he doesn't feel the same sort of magic, that death is suspended, and life forced in perpetuity. He did back in the lighthouse, it unnerved him.

( unnerved a dead scholar. a long dead scholar. a long dead wisp of a scholar, who now has more substantial form. )

[scrapgege]

It's definitely different. back there, Time itself was messed up, and that's not happening here. But it's like... I don't know, like people don't realize they might be dead? It might happen to a young ghosts that they don't quite realize yet they're dead for good, but not on the scale of a city, and you'd still be able to see them and talk to them, and here? Nothing.

[weifinder]

They're convinced otherwise, by something... some illusion, do you think, a shared dream? That whole moment at the summit was strange enough, but then Wrath and Emilia witnessed the leader Arabella suffering from a kind of shift in temperament that to me feels like sliding back into the sorts of bodied dead we've seen in other regions.

[scrapgege]

Like there's two different people inside of her?

[weifinder]

... Possibly, or two awarenesses that aren't compatible, at the least. What I mean is, enough of those turned into bodied dead don't retain their sense of self. Here, spirits might still be attached in a way that allows them to recall, until the connection is tampered with, or further eroded.

[scrapgege]

But it's not limited to just one part of the city either...

Or to humans.

[weifinder]

But it is limited to the citadel, from what Xiao Red is saying.

[scrapgege]

The people outside are okay?

There aren't that many of them, though, right?

[weifinder]

In the Mouse House? Orphans, drugged petty thieves and those who work in all odds to make ends meet. Those who want most are the ones there, ah? Okay is relative. They have other concerns, but their deaths, their lives? Are provable.

[scrapgege]

I mean, they're not sick? They don't bear traces of this illness people speak about?

[For the rest, well, yeah, Xie Lian know what's it's like, but daily life for most people in these circumstances.]

[weifinder]

I don't know, I'll see when I head down there myself. But from what I understand from our newest companions, the people of the Mouse House are not touched by that plague, if not healthy from other ills.

[scrapgege]

Strange... It's as if... the illness, or the curse is self-contained in some ways.

[weifinder]

Maybe it is, or the disease is, but it still only showed a slip to those of a young age. And then the survivors in the Mouse House who should have or would have been in the citadel at the time of the rise in sickness.