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Priscilla     Weeks of steady, hard, dangerous work. A task that imperils life and limb, and sometimes mind and soul. A journey of excavation and unwelcome discovery through the disaster of modernity, the castle metropolis of latterages, its forgotten corners of old, its ancient underworld, its primitive subterranean labyrinth beneath, and finally, the primeval earth beneath even that. Stones laid by long-forgotten peoples. Water that has never seen the sun. A world cast in perpetual darkness, miles and miles below the realm of light.

    Breaking the floodgates on the oldest flagstones ever laid and emptying the vestigial remnants of its primitive life from within, the water inevitably runs downhill. It drowns the last fragments of a degenerate tribe forgotten all but completely in even the last century, closing out the repeating circle of humans driven down to these depths, and its taint flows through the labyrinthine corridors, gradually following the inevitable, inexorable tilt of this secret place, seeking its way to the oldest, unhewn rocks, and finally flows out the crumbling maw of early civilization and into the vast cavern depths beyond, tipping over the stony ledge and its stalactite teeth, and into a bottomless depth of blackness below, disappearing without ever making a sound.

    Even here, the earth isn't done receding into itself, consuming its substance in its own blackness. You must already be far deeper than any mine on Earth, but the drop initially before you is far steeper still, and seemingly unsculpted by human hands. The sound of water comes from a waterfall of uncertain origin, pale and freezing, tumbling through a wide, flattened crack high up in a wall of the enormous, cylindrical shaft you enter, and tumbling down an infinite height, until it dissipates into so much mist that not a single drop reaches the bottom, filling the chamber with a chill fog that saps warmth all the way from the bones. It's some coincidence of nature by which the concentric bands in which the walls narrow slightly, in concentric tiers as they go lower, provide narrow, criss-crossing walkways, barely traversable on foot for their irregular shape and damning slickness, but harrowingly serviceable as veins of spiral ramps all the way down into the deeper shadow.

    You can smell the rot as you approach the bottom. In a place where there should only be the stone and water from ages untold, the whiff of putrid flesh eventually rises up to meet you as the spirals in the walls flatten out, sodden and bloodless in character. You scarcely have to leave the edges of the shaft before your footsteps must be planted in a carpet of half-dissolved meat, worn into a squelching carpet of obscenity by time and damp rather than any microbial organism fit to break it down. It heaps upwards into a charnel hill approaching its center. Years and years of wasteful butchery, carelessly thrown into the bowls of the earth in a collective trance. Meat thrown into the hole from which the Hunger emanates. The tangible presence of voracity, tingling in the air, gnawing at the edges of the mind, serving no apparent purpose but ritual and habit.
Priscilla     At the center of even that, though -- at its very geometric crux -- raising the light upwards reveals a flat, water-weathered obelisk of cracked and half-crumbled stone, too flat to be natural, but crooked, faceless and smooth from the long, faded ages of time. Tumbled together at its foot is a mountain of bones, half-buried in the sludge of fillet viscera piled around it. A petrified skeleton fully striated in the mineral black and brown of ancient fossils. Something of tremendous size and strange proportions. The vertebrae of a spine that rises out of the mount, descending down into something that is perhaps a tail, and ending with no skull at the terminus of its lolling tilt, but scarcely a heavy anchor of bone. Plates like shoulders attach awkwardly to its side, a splay of six multi-jointed limbs randomly skewed all around it, its lower femurs submerged in charnel flesh.

    A terrible mass of mangled and misshapen ribs -- too many to count -- spreads open to the air above, perhaps shattered and ripped open in some tremendous act of violence, with an uncanny, accidental resemblance to a gaping, voracious maw, as if throwing all of this meat into it would cause it to snap closed. The work of years has evidently been completely fruitless, though. A mindless waste of time and barely edible meat.

    Or perhaps not quite. As Artorias himself holds up the glow of his silver pendant, and kicks aside a layer of slick and glistening fat, greyish-red muscle and sinew can be seen clinging to the bones buried in the heap, oddly moist, as if freshly skinned, or 'growing' on the scaffolding of the broken skeleton.

    "We are in the right place." He concludes. The echo of his voice behind his helmet and mantle takes on a new quality here. A slightly too-resonant tone, repeating with a little too much delay, as if the confines of his pseudo-mask were far away. "Though I know not how far from here, or what exactly it is we shall find. Only that I will know it when I see it." He casts a look around the black reaches of the shaft's floor. "We have a ways to go. The taint of this place is yet thick, but should be tolerable for some while. I sense nothing too great in the way of our foes, scattered as the stragglers that could have retreated here may be, though the way be rough."

    Descending the morbid hill, he quickly finds a cavernous throat in the walls of the stony descent, angling gradually downwards into a branching network of venous passages, a gentler way crammed thick with spindly teeth of ancient stalactites joined to their lower brethren at the middle, and a steeper, rougher, twisting and turning away into nothingness. The imagined gnawing in the pit of your stomach, working tiny needle teeth into the corners of your mind, is clearly the strongest around the mysterious petrified skeleton, but oozes some way deep into the paths, collecting more strongly in the shallow and densely packed way, like a thick fog, though no doubt settling firmly at the bottom of the steeper way.

    "I caution utterly against wandering our own ways. If what I believe is true, before we reach our journey's end, we will toe the borders of crossing out of Lordran. The touch of black fire has dripped into this place, and dredged things up from beneath which will lead you astray."

    FINAL JOURNEY:
    LENGTH: 7
    DIFFICULTY: 6
    PERIL: 6
    FOES: 4
    STRESS: 0/100
Mordred      "How can fire be /black/? That's not how fire works." MOrdred scoffs lightly as she focuses in on that of all things, the childish petulance largely serving to distract her from the vile stench of everything she's been stepping in. Even with her armor, the dampness let out by the constant squishing of boots on meat eventually has even the Knight gritting her teeth in visibly irritated discomfort even with the horned helmet hiding her features.

    "Well... We got any other options, or is it just this?" She looks from the gentler path to the steeper path, letting out another irritated grumble before looking towards the latter. "I say we take the crappier path. There's bound to be more crap to deal with if we go that way, so we can handle it as we find it. Taking the easier path could be trouble if everything from the crappier path decides to pounce all at once."

    She's seen enough of the abominations work to to know better than to tempt fate again and again, especially after lingering down in this turgid hell for so long.
Raziel 'The earth swallowed us as we delved deeper into the undercity.  Deeper as we went, the signs of rot and decay only grew stronger, not fainter the farther we went from the city.  No doubt, whatever lay beneath may have been responsible for those poor creatures that were once people's transformation, or at least guiding their behavior.'

Raziel lands, softly, his tattered wings helping him break the fall.  His eyes looked around, their lighted orbs looking at what lay before them.  Rot, decay, and meat, all overwhelming in smell.  Standing, the Reaver immediately comes to hand, and it's colors change from the light blue-green of its natural state to one of a reddish hue.

Raziel wonders if any person had ever been to these depths if anything could truly survive here.  Artorius speaks, to which Raziel returns with a nod to.  "Yes, splitting ourselves would only bring doom that much faster.  Together we shall cut a path through this dungeon of decay and death."

'Even I thought the words hollow, but what little choice did we have but cut through?  The place only reminded me of my brother, Zephon.  His...gifts included turning an entire cathedral into a place of terrible meat, and his children into hive-minded slaves to his demented will.  All the while shouting about the survival of the fittest.  The irony was palpable, as his children and he needed light to see, and the undoing of his empire came down to the very light he used: Fire.  Perhaps here too, fire would avail us.'
Starbound Flotilla "Is that... it can't be, right?"
"What do you recognize, my friend?"
"I've... *felt* that before. No, I've felt a *tiny* bit of that."
"Ugh, you've been in this godawful pit before?"
"No... this was a long time ago. A long time ago."
"Anxious. Where was it, George?"
"On Earth. I could swear I felt something like that in Earth orbit."

"I could swear I felt... a bit of it, just a little bit of it, the day that the Ruin ate the planet."

    No more partial-coverage outfits. What the Flotilla have on is armor that's engineered from supplies and equipment once found at in truly abyssal depths. The taint is THAT awful. They look more like armored-up seafloor scientist-explorers. "You don't gotta tell us," George says, dryly. "'Cause lemme tell you, we know all about sticking together. Only way to live in the worst times." They're ready to make their way through. Prepared to finish this.
Tomoe The grim work is over, well that grim work Tomoe is pressing on with the rest of the party keeps moving on. They head deeper thing get worse the fog also at her making things colder making her feel chilled the deeper as she goes down. She tries to not think about what they had to do, but it's over. What now awaits them she doesn't know but the stench of rot that she does know and she feels something that just gives her the chills. Then she will behind the thing at the center. What is that? Are those bones? The shape of it just what is that thing? It leaves her wary and she replies to Sir Artorias.

"I do not know...I almost fear to know."

Almost but not quite but it seems they are in the right place that's the good news. She will follow after the Knight not wanting to lose her way as she does her best to keep her wits about her and be cautious as who knows what is lurking down here.

"So lets get on with this task..."

Georges words fill her with concern...

"So bring our A game as we should then, right? George?"
Eryl Fairfax     They've made it. The absolute bottom, the source of all the detritus, This ancient skeleton, packed with meat from above. Eryl feels momentarily sick as he realises what the butchers from above were doing. Thrying to feed this nameless hunger, throwing it down to this ancient corpse in the hopes it might... revive it? Sate the phantasmal hunger? Both?

    Artorias reveals the skin that seems to be growing back on the bone, and Eryl shakes his head. "For the best," he affirms to himself only. Something like this is probably best left dead. Time to move on. Two routes before them.

    "The faster route would also mean we can get to the bottom faster, and thus leave faster. If we find where it bottoms out, we can take the easier path back up for a safer ascent."

    If no one dissents, he begins directing for ropes to be attached to stalagmites so as to make the harsher descent a little safer.
Guzma After being busy with some stuff for the tail-end, Guzma's finally here to help again. He's brought his Ghostwalker spider, helpfully named Walker, with flashlights out to help see through the dense darkness. The Goon Squad is closely huddled near him, not separating at risk of disappearance or death.

Guzma clutches his nose, trying not to smell the awful meat-kudzu, and trying to avoid looking at the skeleton. "Yeah, fastest way is best way."

As Eryl directs for stalagmite ropes, Walker starts making thick webs to function as netting and climbing utilities, probably working together with the Flotilla if they decide to set up ropes.

"So, you guys flooded these tunnels? Hardcore."

Guzma lets Eryl go first, once the passage is up. He can tank!
Zero Kiryu Zero Kiryu hates this place instinctively. He hates it because the feeling that emanates upwards from it is all too familiar. In a way, that makes it easier to /resist/. But it also makes it harder to ignore entirely. He is already hungry in a way that is almost indescribable, and to have further external hunger prodding at him from the outside is beginning to make him cranky. An unusual sight of late, he fumbles a little with a paper packet full of what looks like pills.

He moderates his intake, though. So far, at least, he hasn't just upended the whole thing like the old days.

"Sir Artorias." His voice is involuntarily agitated. There's not much to be done about that. He inquires, "This world has always seemed vicious to me. But if I'm not misundertanding your... role, and place in the way things are, you've been here from the very start-- or close to it. It seems like it wasn't always so rotted through. How was it kept together in those days?"

He's not certain that the question even makes sense. But, once more deferring to Eryl's preferences, he soon thereafter joins in on assisting in a quick descent. Quite fortunately, this is actually something he's quite adept at.

Extruding vines in great creeping clumbs, Zero abridges the need for ropes by forming a crisscrossing network of vine handholds, ladders, and where possible crude staircases-- though where it /is/ possible, it's probably of the kind that stretch the sides of obscure mountains, nearly vertical, numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Yuuki Kuran A cavern of meat and hunger. Pulsing, squelching, squirming. Does it have a voice? An intelligence, a sentience beyond boundless hunger?

Yuuki had started this journey, weeks-if-not-months-ago with a light jacket, scarf, skirt, leggings, and sneakers. Now, high fashion is all but abandoned, trading anything with a heel for the surity of thick soles capping gothy black boots with silver rings and bracings.

Still, like with the pools of strange fish before them (and before sending the friendly fish directly into what is apparently Meat Hunger Hell), Yuuki squats down, balancing on her toes and pressing a hand into the squelching ground.

"It feels like..." She begins, but trails off, not wanting to explain the odd feeling of deja vu or the mirroring sensation of seeing a part of you on grand display.

Mordred asks a good question, though! "Well... A flame can be a lot of colors, depending on what it's burning. Have you ever felt a clear flame? There's a lot of symbology behind the colors of fire."

Knight Artorias is indicated. "Perhaps it is a black flame because it provides no light."

Yuuki is absolutely content to get her read and then assume the rear of the party, Eryl's judgemet on risk assessment taken as gospel.

Watsoning along behind the party, Yuuki lets her mind wander.
Priscilla     "Ruin be as apt a word as any." Artorias opines with an uncanny, grim softness. "Though sometimes ruin is brought by calamity, as up above, most times it is a slow thing that goes by unseen. Men are born and die too briefly to mark its progress." He shakes his head slowly, no doubt knowing some of what Eryl is thinking, being someone of, relatively, like mind. "Those creatures that were once men; they were ruined some time ago, first in mind and then in body. The fact that the god of their tribe is dead probably matters little to them, if even they noticed. Hopefully, without them now, it will stay that way."

    He leaves the corpse. In his lieu, Yuuki senses no living intelligence of any kind, but only a mesmerizing haze of that charnel need. Almost hypnotic, like a predator bidding its prey to come defenselessly towards it. There is some sick, alien vitality about it. As if heaping death upon something dead had somehow lessened its lack of life. Slowly but surely.

    He takes some time to respond to Zero in the tunnels, descending first so that his considerable weight may tighten the ropes and test their resolve, lopping off especially inconvenient stone growths with the silverblack edge of his ornate, almost grotesquely beautiful sword, trivially as tatami cutting. True to his name, he seems, somehow, 'at home' in the dark. Not in that he is comfortable, but that his whole shape and form seems to meld into it, like a tiger in dense jungle.

    "Aye. Though I am the most junior of the Knights of Gwyn, I fought in that war. The battle waged for the sun. Things were very different then than they were at the golden age considered the legacy of Lordran, and then they were different again; now they are different still. Everything changes in the light of fire. Things are revealed and obscured. They take on different tones, and their shadows, different shapes. A world without Fire is one without life. A world given life by Fire is one that depends upon it. Without Fire, it fades away."

    "The living are driven to stay so by any means, no matter how bleak, when pressed so gravely. Some things crumbled away in the dark days when the First Flame waned most severely, because the world lacked the light to define their shape, but most things break and rot because they are forsaken. There are as many stories of ruin as there are men who wanted to live, and most of them, we will never know. The age given to us now is very young. One that will be defined for years still by picking up pieces of old."

    "The ruins so far down here are best left forgotten. It is only a shame that the black fire did not consume it as thoroughly as the city in the sunlight. I will be glad to see the day when it looks the way it once did, though a city for humans it may be. As it is now, it is a glaring reminder of the Last Dragon; he that ruined it."

    
Priscilla     Though you leave the hideously malformed arrangement of bones behind, the hunger follows you. It trickles downhill. Like water. Like cold fog. Pooling around your feet. Collecting in the bottom of your stomachs. It flows like rolling fog until it stains the stones. Stained like the hot crackle of firing atoms, slowly breaking apart for the next hundred, hundred years. The harder way is the shorter, exposing you the least at first, but making you slog through an ocean of it at the bottom, placing pressure on the psyche to hurry along swiftly, lest it become consuming.

    But you aren't the first living things down here, nor will you be the last, but the others are no longer like they used to be. The primitive descendants you'd found swimming in their cut off ecosystem of old were the tip of the iceberg. The still-feral things that live in these caverns, old as time, adapted perfectly to the dark, are creatures driven to a singular madness by all the fraying that a dim and prototypical consciousness can undergo.

    Simple and alien as they are, hunger is a universal concept, and one that has misshapen them after years of seeping into the rocks they crawl and the water they drink. They no longer shrink from the light. They no longer keep to their black burrows and crevices. The heat of bodies and the humidity of respiring animals. Walking meat. The subtle, intoxicating scent of souls. That draws them out for miles. Things that have never once seen a human, nor even a human corpse, but thirst for blood by sheer instinct.

    Crawling hands of cartilage and rubbery black skin lunge from shallow pools, wrapping finger-like limbs around whatever head or neck or limb they can grasp and crush, sinking rows of teeth into warm flesh and blood, worked deeper by the wild thrashing of vestigial, tail-like bodies. Swaying fronds of translucent, nearly invisible gel extend from thin cracks and shallow puddles, stinging viciously to the slightest touch and tugging inexorably into the digestive hubs of protoplasm anchored in the rocks. Enormous, segmented worms, covered in two inches of pitch black chitin, erupt from burrows on countless stake-tipped legs, sighting their prey by the faint, green light of bioluminescent moss and polychaeta and their manyfold rows of opaque black eyes, snatching and hooking pronged jaws into prey to drag them away into the pit, dumbly pulling as to crush bones and mangle limbs to make it fit. Formless, pale ochre ooze, drips from stalactites and pukes itself from pitted walls, the undifferentiated mass of millions of tiny, primitive organisms working in concern to squeeze and crush and dissolve.

    They are creatures of flesh and blood all the same. Cold and alien and stupid, wholly tangible, wholly predictable, and consumed with mad voracity. Almost long-extinct things adapted to lie in wait for months or years, conserving their energy for the moment they strike. An individual, unwitting wanderer would disappear in a heartbeat, without a doubt; with even less doubt, driven to distraction by the strangely formless, gnawing taint in these twisting passageways. An armed and cautious group less so, especially with a veteran, native hero at the fore with a great shield fit to block the whole way and a tireless, invincible arm to blunt the worst of it. Contrasting the hunger, at least, they are a threat that can be bled and killed.

    To spot them early and prevent their attack is made difficult by the sheer density of it all, some of the terrain subtly split by less-old violence and seismic shift, with narrow spaces filled with recently moved water. It is a mercy that their territory runs out quickly enough, as the ways climb uphill, releasing you at last from the pangs of unsatisfiable starvation, but it is a small one, for their living spaces end only at the boundaries of where they can no longer survive for long.
Priscilla     To hope that they only forsake places so wide and flat and barren, free of opportune corners and buried dens, would be wishful thinking. Even just emerging into a wide and empty plateau, you can see the way the rock is bleached and scoured. Smell the acrid tinge in the air. You can see the yellow-greenish motes of detritus floating sordidly through the air like dust, stirred up by more than just your footsteps. You can hear the unwholesome slurp and squelch of the vast, flattened way ahead.

    STRESS: 7/100
Mordred      It certainly sounds like the group is in agreement, and so Mordred soldiers on, joining the frontliners in THE DESCENT. "Clear flames? You mean like the... The outer part of the ones from stoves near the blue fire?" There's a thoughtful hum reverberating inside her helmet, and then she nods at Yuuki. "Yeah, I guess that kinda makes sense. That stuff's pretty hot even if it's not blue anymore... But a black one?"

     She looks from Yuuki to Artorias, tilting her head sloooowly just a moment later. The symbolism is probably lost on her, unfortunately, but Yuuki does get a shrug as a follow up rather than just dumbfounded silence. "I just can't see it happening. Fire makes light, and clear isn't black unless you can't see it.."

     A beat, and then Mordred finally lets out a vaguely understanding 'oh' noise! She probably doesn't get it, but the important thing is feeling like she does while Artorias speaks of the people-shaped creatures. His past as a Knight of Gwyn. The importance of fire... No, Fire and the First Flame. Even without a long-held understanding of any of this world's... Anything, even Mordred finds herself retaining some degree of it and almost forgetting to pay attention to the path in front of her.

     Almost. The feral meat beasts that come out to face the group draw quiet chuckles from Mordred as her silver blade Clarent is shouldered once more, and she takes a position beside Artorias. "Should be a good warmup for whatever else is down in the Black Fire hole.. But don't get careless, people! If you die here of all places, we'll all be laughing at you later!"

    That might be a pep talk preceding slicing, chopping, and general violence. Mordred actually fights with some semblance of strategy this time around, letting Artorias slow down the charging monsters enough for her to leap overhead and cleave through several of them at once while they're exposed, then bounding back to repeat the process throughout the group's advance.

    ""So... This Black Fire's that First Flame, or is it what you'd call the Fire going out?"
Zero Kiryu "I see. So the Sun waned, and things grew cold." Zero observes, taking another pill without seeming to think about it. He remarks, "Our world went through a process of breakdown and build-back-up, some time ago. The world grew unsurvivably cold and ruined, and in that ruin the first vampires appeared... supposedly. Wars broke out between mankind and vampires, until the threat of extinction quelled both sides. Since then, vampires have adhered to an uneasy structure of law and counteraction by hunters who work to identify ferals or murderers."

He waves the hand grasping the paper packet vaguely towards Artorias, "Who is this last Dragon, and how did he ruin it exactly? I wouldn't have thought that a dragon of the like we saw at the peak would even be able to interact with this place."

The journey further down is... simultaneously less and more tense for Zero than is ordinary. He seems especially attuned to detecting the creatures laying in wait, pausing short on several occasions to bait something out and then hurl it someplace-- well, harmless to them. He seems to be relying on sheer brute strength to get rid of some of these more amorphous creatures.

To Yuuki and Mordred, he comments, "More than likely it is representative of a breakdown of physics as they exist. Less 'symbolic', and more 'alien to how the universe should work from our perspective because it fundamentally doesn't'."
Yuuki Kuran Hunger.
"Heat without light. Light has a meaning here, and a flame of darkness would produce an effect like..."
Hunger.
"... an all-consuming thing without other useful properties. A torch is an offering you make to light the way; oil and cloth that you give up to gain heat and warm light as a bargain to the-"
Hunger.
"-fire. Lordran places a lot of mythological importance to fire, probably because there's a lot of real, tangible benefits to fire here. Most myths come out of something being true, somewhere, isn't it? Otherwise they'd have no power. If I'm being very sure of myself, I'd say that the Black Flame is just-" Hunger. "-'hunger'."

Her expression is a queer sort of self-reflectively queasy combined with a vague Shoujo 'on edge', due to the presence of all the Hunger. The actual strike of the creatures provokes a vicious defense, biting and chittering and drawing-in recieving a uniform response of 'jaguar elbow, tiger knee, spin kick, hcf fierce kick' as the lesser attacks of opportune monsters bounce off her Totally Normal levels of endurance. With Artorias at the fore, all she has to do is follow close behind and rely on the ultimate power of holding down-back and having sonic booms and a flash kick.

"I feel like I'd be hungry too if I wasn't so queasy!" She asides, largely to Raziel and Zero.
Raziel 'Sightless, twisted creatures blocked our path, and somehow despite probably never seeing a person in their entire existence, they immediately became hostile.  Was it truly for our flesh that they hungered?  Or was there a deeper need..?'

Raziel kept light on his feet, making sure to not get caught between two of the monsters.  While they might have had the element of surprise, Raziel had his own agility and speed on hand, aiming to keep just one step out of their awaiting claws and jaws.  The Reaver swinging through the air, and bursting with the element of flame as he connects each blow.

Between encounters, and as they moved along he noticed the agitation with his two friends.  Raziel did not say anything aloud, but his gaze was more than enough of a meaning.  'Are you alright?', because he too knew the hunger that they were experiencing.  Thankfully, the thirst had left him long ago, but the feeling of consuming souls was no less lost on him in a place that only spoke in elemental hunger.

"That seems more likely a theory than symbolism.  Though, that representation of the breaking down of the universe at large could be a symbol in and of itself, though by accident than anything else," The ghoul pipes in.  "Though I do remember in the stories I heard about another of our world's vampire races, that the fire in his domain glowed with a green hue."
Guzma As they climb down, Guzma sends out Vikavolt to light up the way with lightning on its mandibles and also to keep them moving fast, a flittery creature. As he can feel the hunger, the pool of darkness, he shudders, keeping close to the trio and moving as quickly as he can.

"I hate this place so much I want to lock it up and make sure nobody ever has to come down here again, crud!"

When the abominations attack, Vikavolt fires off bolts of lightning from the mandibles. Hopefully they could take them down quickly, shot after shot, instead of having to do protracted battles, and hopefully arcing lightning could take out multiple at once.

"I'd like some fire, it's cold and dark and not enough light. How do these things live down here?!"
Tomoe With Eryl heading on in Tomoe will follow after him swiftly as she's able for she too is going to be tanking whatever this is. There are a lot of people on this mission who are far more important than her. She will od her best to get up with Eryl and work with the Grandmaster as they attempt to move the HARD PATH. She heeds Artorias's words they make sense and this is his world, for all her adventures here? He would still know more about this world than she does. She holds the same hope that one day this city might be properly reclaimed but for now, they must go deeper.

With the bones left behind she'd thought the hunger would vanish? She was not so lucky to think that as it does indeed follow hr as she goes. She feels it in her she's hungry but is it her? She notices many strange cave lifeforms as to them? The party is a dinner gong being hit as hard as one could.

Tomoe does not see all of them in time and she's forced to engage some up close others she will spot and make sure of fire bolts to try and keep them at bay to thing them out as she moves. The sound of the slurps from her footsteps make her shudder without even thinking about it.

"That might be a question we don't want the answer to Guzuma but something adapt to places like this. There was a sealed cave netowrk on my Earth that has had life in it for millions of years alien to anything on the surface...."
Eryl Fairfax     "The Last Dragon..." Eryl echoes, thinking on what Priscilla had been saying on the radio. "That we know of."

    Eryl backs up Artorias during the descent. When those gnawing things come out of their holes, they're immediately proffered his arms or legs to bite on, only to find hard metal instead of appetising flesh. This is usually followed by him dashing them hard against the nearest surface and letting them fall. Those great armor-plated worms get his whole arm shoved down their throat to grab at their internals and pull them out. A grisly display, but effective.

    He doesn't talk much on the way down. That pervasive hunger gnaws on his senses in a way that would make even him accident-prone. All attention on the next step, all eyes on any potential hiding place for the local fauna. It's not until they begin ascending out of it that he deigns to speak again. "We're leaving that deep pool of 'it' behind now. Stay sharp everyone."

    They arrive at a plateau of acrid air and squishing rock. "Tread carefully, and wear a mask if you must" he calls over his shoulder before stepping forward onto it.
Yuuki Kuran At Eryl's insistence, Yuuki ties a handkerchief over her nose and lower face like a bandanna.

The Grandmaster of the Paladins has not been wrong once this entire long journey. Following their suggestions, in general, seems to be best practices!
Tomoe Tomoe will pauses open her inventory and pull a bandana to wrap about her face for all the good it will do her.
Mordred      "Oh. So it's something that doesn't make sense to us, only here." Mordred nods slowly as Zero clarifies that, somehow seeming to understand. Genuinely, even, as she doesn't follow up with any sort of frustrated noises or anything. "And the black fire being hunger... Hm. Yeah, I think I get it now."

     Almost. The helmet will have to do as a mask as Eryl warns, but it won't do much against any sort of gases that might creep in through the gaps. It's something, at least!
Starbound Flotilla     "Only game to bring." George says, nodding heavily at Tomoe. He cocks his shotgun heavily. The whole gang is really hating how appropriate the abyssal sea gear turned out to be; these horrible crawling limbs and tendrils are much more suited to the bottom of the fucking ocean, for goddamn sure. Everything here has developed in just that specific way that things develop when they don't ever, ever see the light of day.

    The poetry is lost on literally every member of the Flotilla besides Moonfin.

    But Albert doesn't need to know poetic coincidence to be able to manage tactics. "Star Five, guillotine target at one two-hundred units! Star Three, hold pressure with me, two and ten! Star Two, surge, pressure at twelve twenty units! Star Four, cauterize, cauterize!" The Flotilla keep formation, tight and ruthless, laying down huge volumes of fire and powerful swipes with melee in carefully timed squad organization.

    And, conveniently, they can offer filtration where needed. Masks handed off, mostly by Seft between assaults, and nanoskin projections, trying to keep the toxic-seeming air thoroughly resisted.
Priscilla     Having cut and shouldered his way to the end of the twisting hunting grounds with the rest, Artorias takes his time to examine the new surroundings, again, before responding to anything. "A strange story, that humans and the things that once were them, would live close together. Especially those that feel that hunger for their own, former kind. Even the Undead, sane until the day they were no longer, were not nearly so welcome in any civilized land." He has a deep, echoing, humourless chuckle for Guzma. "Then you have the right idea."

    "Though it isn't an objective truth, the 'last dragon' is the less-used moniker of the one known to have reappeared, and then disappeared once more, a thousand years ago. Though Seath the Scaleless obviously outlived the others of his kind, dubiously related as they were, and some scattered descendants are known by some to have survived in obscure corners of the earth, there is but the one known to all men as the last, true remnant of that war."

    "Kalameet. Mightiest amongst their number. An Archdragon embodying wrath beyond description. Though it is impossible to understand whatever culture -- whatever like mind -- they may have once shared, perhaps I should compare that beast to a kind of warrior-tyrant. A god-king of battle. One who felt little for even his own kind, but only hate for the traitor Seath. It is said that he was the last survivor, disappeared and never again found, for the fact that he never truly fought on the behalf of the ancient dragons -- not directly against the gods -- but the truth is that even at the height of Anor Londo's power, they feared provoking his ire, for the fact that in the effort of slaying him, the battle might wipe them out completely."

    "That dragon returned only twice in history. Both times driven mad with wrath. A thousand years ago, the outpouring of the Abyss, that consumed the ancient civilization of Oolacile that once existed in Lordran, found him in slumber, and his form became impure. He became the Black Dragon of Calamity, feared as the mightiest of beasts, but in reality, driven to rage for the way he had been lessened, and he destroyed that country overnight. The second time was five years ago. When a particular relic of the Ancient Dragons was unearthed, and sensing its reemergence, he sought to claim it for his own, to restore his old power. The great city of humanity, above us now, was his victim that time, before he was eventually slain through tremendous effort. Even still, the curse of his fire, tainted by the Abyss long ago, festers here."

    "I am told, by our Lady Archlord, that his obsidian bones are now sealed in the Kiln of the First Flame."
Priscilla     The blasted plains you must now travel are not barren for terrible wind and sun, nor salted earth and cracked foundations, but for the terrible poison that it plays host to. From where it comes, it may be impossible to say. Perhaps some of it is the waste of the primitive horrors in the dark, and perhaps some of it is the secretions of the fungus and tube worms that give off their faint, sickly radiance, but the vast, reaching lake of pure acerbic death is something no accident of venomous creatures and poisonous plants could hope to create.

    A singular body of world-toxin has sat here for ages, party to no cycle of rising and falling into the sky; it only grows, drip by drop, year by year, as all the foul things -- all the death and all the rot and all the black magic and occult runoff from all the sins of men and monsters -- of the earth far above collect through its porous veins of stone and find their way here. Maybe to other, identical flooded caverns as well. If this were a work of god, it is something that a god has created in anger. At least it is, for the most part, shallow.

    Not that going over it helps much. The mire is so toxic that it fumes with such intensity that it creates genuine updrafts, fit for a bird to take wing on before promptly expiring, falling out of the air, and skeletonizing in the muck. A kind of toxic that eats right through clothes and invites itself in through the skin, where a hundred and one poisons inevitably find some combination that erodes away the life of anything that meets it within minutes. Even the vapours are blistering, though largely less corrosive, and sickening to breathe adjacent to, even only the slightest amount. The walls and ceiling are slick with a pallid residue that will eventually drip back down again. The sheer size of the cavern suggests it may have been eaten away by contact for centuries.

    Even then, it won't leave you alone. Though the monsters in the dark have no prayer of settling this place, as is the way of Lordran, something always does. Small islands are created out of mysterious detritus that arises from the lake, like a sick perversion of a coral reef, sometimes resembling bleached branches and broken trunks of fossilized trees. In many cases, they do look exactly like mounds of fossils, patterned with the whorls and spirals of ancient shelled creatures fallen into the sea floor, and the strange tapestries left by things without legs or tentacles both.
Priscilla     Though they're easily the safest places to physically navigate, as those of significant width largely becomes eyes-in-the-storm where it comes to toxic fumes, their matted forests are home to tall and grotesque forms of such gaunt and stilted shape that they fit right into the imitations of driftwood, coarse-haired, backwards-legged, claw-fingered, with heads that resemble little more than warped masses of dozens of horns of random length and direction, rendering them blind, though not unable to consume the blood that they try to shed with their freak strength, uncanny agility, predatory pouncing strikes and vicious, tight-gripped shredding, resembling the habit of a shark or crocodile -- those apex predators unchanged for millennia -- interpreted into roughly humanoid hands.

    On their shores, or else scattered about on shallow rocks or raised paths, what should be easily taken for gnawed and skeletonized remains of previous prey are equally aggrieved by your presence. Even in closest, most harrowing proximity, they cannot possibly be anything but eerie centipedes of conglomerated bones; elongated spines and too many ribs with multiple human legs and arms each, only matted curtains of hair remaining to obscure whatever emaciated face is still stuck to their skulls and the masses of jagged teeth within their screaming maws -- and they do scream, with a shocking and unholy fervour. Anything they could consume only falls through their open, unnatural ribcages, but whatever morbid energy compels them to attack bids them try to rend flesh from bone all the same.

    The world catches light easily, here. Sometimes by itself. Belches of diseased fire occasionally erupt from the toxic hell. The slightest sparks cause chains of crackling flames to erupt through the air. Bits of land explode for no reason. Even then the smoke is like breathing in heavy mercury and arsenic. At other times, without warning, some burst of flame erupts from underneath the mire, and spews a geyser of toxic death high into the air, showering it back down on the earth. If only, would it be, that some fine work of sequence breaking had skipped this place. Alas. Miles of toxic swamp.

    The Abysswalker, at least, doesn't need to be looked after. The most grimly famous adventuring hero of Lordran, equivalent to the great Herakles, save an ordained champion of the gods, is perfectly ready for this. Stamping the point of his shield three times into the ground, calling upon the protection of Gwyn, the courage of the son, and the beneficence of Gwynevere the daughter, he invokes the powerful divine blessing laid upon his shield by the gods of the sun, and the manifold rings of golden light that enshroud him purge all poison, filth, and corruption in a small dome around him, allowing him to wade through cold, strangely viscous water -- perhaps with room for one or two if they stay very close.

    STRESS: 21/100
Raziel 'Deeper still we go, and deeper the abominations continue to crawl.  It appears, that here, the poisons coalesced into a single point.  It was almost as if every single impure thing from the world above combined into the swamp-like pools before us now.  Even I could tell, stepping into these things would spell our deaths, though I would recover from such an inconvenience, there was no point in tempting fate.  These coral-like structures, which seemed more like bone than coral, would be our ticket across this dangerous place.'

Unlike the others, Raziel was without the need to breathe, only direct contact with the fumes themselves caused him harm...just like everyone else, but the fact that he did not breathe saved him some amount of discomfort.  

As centipedes made of bone harried their path, Raziel mixed his tactics up with those of others.  Aiming to blast attacking pedes with forceful blasts of telekinesis as they charged.  The aim was to stun it long enough for an ally to drive it off, as opposed to leading the charge himself.  Raziel was of a mind that if they could blunt their assaults, that they could push through.

"Well, speaking of swamps...though this one is far deadlier than the stories I was told of swamps in my world."
Mordred      "Dragon bones in this First Flame thing? I want to see this now." Laughing to herself, Mordred soon turns her attention back to the mission at hand. There's little respite from Mordred for those toxic fumes, and her only options are to simply power through it with her own natural resilience, or rely on someone else to handle it for the rest of the group.

    That, and dipping into Artorias' dome of safety every now and then to take the edge off. Alas, Mordred's too proud to just attach herself to him the entire time, instead toughing out for several minutes at a time and only drawing near disguised as brushing past him to strike down a human-armed centipede or other such monsters. The bursts of fuming flames give the Saber a brief flash of genius or madness, and red lightning once again returns to Mordred's blade.

     Of course she's going to try blasting geysers in the distance. Someone has to see what that'll do, but she'll eventually turn that on the denizens of the toxic swamp sooner rather than later if blasting the geysers doesn't do anything particularly helpful. It may help with softening them up before they can draw close, if not simply obliterating them right away.
Eryl Fairfax     Eryl was build to survive the blighted wastes. Made to handle the most averse weather conditions, the most dire environmental conditions, even made to survive nuclear fallout in the case of stumbling across revealed radioactive waste disposal areas, or nuclear plants.

    This place is by far the most hazardous, toxic and awful region he's ever had to cross.

    He does not stick with Artorias, leaving space in his miracle bubble for someone less able to handle the swamp. But the bottom of his pants, his socks, shoes, and false flesh melt away in the vile stew and expose his metal feet and lower legs to be utterly bleached.

    "You don't," Eryl says to Mordred. "Want to see those bones I mean. They're there for a reason." He points up. "The first region we passed through, with all the melted rock and pockets of Dark in the wall. Kalameet was responsible for all that. I was not present when he was finally put down, and am thankful for that, as the fighting was fierce. Archdragons are deathless things. His corporeal remains are sealed because he may revive from them otherwise. They are not to be disturbed."

    The skittering, shrieking bone centipedes. Eryl makes a face at the sight of them. Animated by scraps of soul that sloughed down here to make this toxic pool perhaps? But they move and scream with such uncanny vigor. Lordran ever clings to life, even in its forgotten, lifeless places. Eryl puts them down at a distance, aiming heavy slugs that fire from his elbow at centre mass to shatter their forms by snapping their vertebrae.
Zero Kiryu "The general public isn't aware of the existence of Vampires anymore. A pilot program has been in place to normalize the idea, but it suffered complications. There's opposition on both sides for obvious reasons, and for the most part it only remains viable within the umbrella of a community that can have its behavior enforced on by someone very powerful." Zero replies to Artorias. He gives a more deliberate shake of the packet in his hand, "The pilot program developed a feeding solution that isn't harmful to the people who contribute blood, but it's not particularly filling. Tastes bad, too. But in a place like that..."

He indicates the way they came, where the gnawing hunger had lingered, "It helps. And I can't say that such earnest hopes put into action are wasted, even if they didn't quite achieve what they set out to."

He listens to the story of Kalameet quietly, nodding or vocalizing here or there to make it clear that he's paying attention. Once the story has finished, he asks, "Do his bones being sealed therein help in some way?"

Zero joins Mordred in dipping in and out of Artorias's barrier, though he isn't nearly proud enough to pretend that he's doing anything but keeping himself as comfortable as possible. Judging by the way he controls it, he might not actually be keeping himself all that comfortable at all-- because he forms a marching jungle ring around the barrier, providing an outer ring of aggressive foliage that withers, dies, regenerates, and dies again. Its only goal seems to be to keep things from getting close and staying close-- it isn't venturing out far. Possibly because Zero is having to constantly renew it.

His thorns do not attempt to find anything resembling blood to drink here. It could only be hideous and toxic.

The man himself dips back into the barrier only when the blistering from the miasma reaches a peak of grotesquery, and he feels like regenerating. The pace at which he's consuming the pills increases considerably.

To Raziel, he says, "I've seen jungles in this world that correspond at least to jungles as I understand them. This isn't a swamp, even by the standards of this place. It's... reality, decomposing, I think."
Guzma As they enter Blighted Poison Hell, Guzma's group decides to hang near Artorias, swapping who is inside his sphere based on need - usually Guzma or Rapp.

The skeletons get fried by Vikavolt, who starts lagging from being out close to the nasty, so Guzma recalls it, letting the others focus on assault for a bit.

"Let's not decompose with it then, yo." He directs to Zero, on edge.
Tomoe They keep going the bandana will either help or not but it makes Tomoe feel a bit better as she heads out carefully. More information is given by Sir Artorias, and she files it away as she thinking about where this could end up going. Kalameet sounds like something beyond anything Tomoe's really ever fought before and she is very glad he's dead. They move across the plateau she looks about. She can't fly down here not with the lack of the sun, moon or starlight.

So she trudges on. The toxins are no laughing matter even with her ability to purge this sort of thing. It might overpower her abilities. She does her best to avoid it as she moves, the monsters get treated to ranged magic unless they get up int Tomoe's face she's not breaking formation from the party here as they keep moving deeper. Deeper into the horrible toxic swamp.

For now, her protections hold but Tomoe is wary knowing if she's pushed past a certain point she's the most mortal of everyone here. The only comfort to her here is she's not enduring this alone.
Yuuki Kuran The protection offered by Artorias is too limited to greedily gobble up the preciously limited space. Even if Yuuki wants to be next to Artorias and his big chad-like ideal of a form and ability.

Islands rise out of the caustic muck, and so Yuuki spends her time riding updrafts like a leaf (or a princess wearing a particularly poofy dress) and finding bits of 'don't immediately start melting' to linger on.

"If I may admit something to you, Artorias, I had thought to solve this problem by just consumig it. Like a pile of overcooked vegetables, just plugging my nose and swallowing. But this..."

She doesn't even really bother attacking the screaming, stressful bone monstrosities unless they directly aggress on her.

"I have been dissuaded. This is vile beyond even what I could imagine. No wonder Priscilla doesn't want to go down here after."
Starbound Flotilla     Okay, good. GOOD. Good, this is atmospheric poison and it's something the Flotilla knows how to deal with. Georg'es engineering is expert and effective in environmental protection for atmospheric dangers. Which is why it's so concerning that the filters and joint seals keep reporting decay.

    The Flotilla can't stay down here long. Even with George's engineering, they keep having to take moments to swap out filters, repair corroded joint seals, and restock important equipment, setting up small workstations on the islands. The others, of course, were offered things like nanoskins, but those might get eaten up by the acidic and toxic dangers as well.

    Still, though, the technology is specialized for this. They can manage. They won't hog that dome. Biteblade might dart in to give Artorias a hug though, that looks exhausting. Moonfin looks as miserable as anyone has ever looked. "Down here, it is as though every great and terrible ecosystem disaster has collected, pooled, and bred. I have trudged through invasive species, poor water and waste management, pollution, and now *this*. Truly, this is why people say the things they do about /humans/."
Priscilla     "It always goes as such. Order is only something that can exist in the shadow under someone with unchallengeable power -- or at least power that others perceive to be. That it be the kind that is used in magnanimity is something to be grateful for. Power used in pity is almost as woeful as power used in greed." That point feels strangely relevant in some way. "The bones will stay there so they cannot be disturbed, if nothing else. Otherwise, in that hub of creation, time turns not, souls neither enter nor leave, and a land of ash bears nothing and changes never. I could not think of a more bare and permanent graveyard than the charred pit from which everything sprang and long left behind."

    Yuuki's admission finally causes him to laugh, if briefly, and certainly in very grim character. "I advise against it in principle. Consuming the old to make way for the new, often in fairly literal terms, is a common theme, repeated over and over in history, but more often than not, it leads to a cautionary tragedy, or some horror best left forgotten. Take it as my personal encouragement to consume nothing you cannot identify." The laughter leaves him by the time he thinks to respond to Moonfin. "Many things are indeed said about humans. Not all of them are fair. Fewer are true than most realize. Some have not even the slightest comprehension of what robes their words grasp."

    Though it is absolute hell on environmental suits and seals alike, the hazard is a known and honest one; it doesn't change and it doesn't go anywhere. Though it is volatile and unpredictable in where it chooses to act up and explode, but the same thing can be exploited by those looking to do so, burning through their enemies and finally to shallower reaches, up fume-choked rising tunnels, and finally back down, where the rising fog won't follow.
Priscilla     Finally leaving behind a place of too great a poisonous hell for any living creature to survive, means, of course, entering a place that isn't. That means, more often than not, especially down here, that it is free game for something -- there is always something -- to colonize. Since the crude and savage creatures from before have been completely cut off by the nightmarish swamp you've left behind for untold generations, it isn't their ilk, or any close relatives that you have to deal with. That which menaces the next stage of your noxious journey is not such a discrete thing. It's almost equivalent to the landscape itself, in a way that you're familiar with by now. At least somewhat. In fact, it might just be here for your weeks of digging and selective destruction. Or it might be from whence it came.

    To call it 'meat' would be too inaccurate. The grim heap which you had first arrived at was 'meat'. 'Flesh' might still be too much, save in the most abstract sense of the word. It is skin and blood and gristle, oil and fat and capillaries of a sort, running over the stones like carpets of mushrooms, creeping up the walls like climbing vines, budding from the round like trees, growing from nothing, yet pulsing with a perverse life of its own. In the otherwise perfect quiet, you can hear the throb of the tainted landscape's circulation; it is diffuse and uncentralized, but unmistakably, blood flows through its great, interconnected mass, alive and well. Certainly, far more vigorous than the infestation you'd found in the archaic depths.

    It's been fed. That much you can tell. There's no way of telling if by the blind vermin that fled from above, or by some stranger things that lived in seclusion here, but it's not long before someone has to stumble over freshly picked bones half-poking from the morass, or hunched shapes stretched taut and smothered in tissue, like prey recently swallowed by an enormous snake, drained of blood. Merely stepping near, or even on it, doesn't seem to be harmful -- at least at first, but . . .
Priscilla     "We have reached the border." Artorias says, without explaining a single thing further. And he needn't bother. Even without the scholarly knowledge of what or how, you can see it for yourselves. The further you go, the more abnormal it all becomes. Corrupt. Deviant. As disgusting and arcane as the sight of it already was, blood and gristle and cancerous tissue are recognizable things, only remarkable for occurring in an unnatural way. The deeper into the darkness you venture along this stretch, the more your lights begin to constrict around you, their radius shrinking as if held deep underwater, and keeping pace, the more the flesh-flora unravels into something uniquely deranged.

    Raw pink and muddy crimson flesh turns shades of black eelskin and vivid, chemical blue. In places, it blisters with parasitic sores of dark blueish tint, like enormous, clotted blood blisters, which burst at the slightest provocation into purplish spatters of liquid that smoke with pure, condensed, necrotic energies. Not disease or poison, but a complete failure of flesh and blood, fit to consume to the bone.

    In other places, the unique textured and coloured buds split apart, unfurled into bloody petals like perversely artistic flowers, exposing their brightly and unnaturally uncoloured interiors, arranged in mesmerizing swirls. Those are an even greater danger, as the thorns that lie all around their roots are rock hard razors, and the nectar that oozes from their centers is congealed, entropic poison, which they are more than eager to force into the nearest moving source of heat with sudden lashing stabs of branching tendrils. In places, the stone itself is eaten away into a million little pores, bubbling up a tarry black oil, which smoulders with blue-black flame when touched, rapidly eating through just about anything pressed to it like hellish acid.

    There aren't any true foes here, at least in the form of stalking creatures to ambush and assault you, but there are still inhabitants, of a sort. The moving suggestions of spectres, like in the shadows nearest to the sun in the city above. Somehow, against total darkness, your eyes still pick up their movements, noticing them only once they've vanished from your field of vision. They don't stray terribly close, nor do they seem menaced in any way by the increasingly twisted taint of the meat-colony that found its way down here. But, there are more and more of them as you advance, and only your collective light provides enough illumination to walk safely.

    STRESS: 33
Raziel Raziel looks towards Zero for a moment.  Reality itself decaying?  He considers something for a long moment and then speaks.  "Perhaps then this place had time to decay longer than Nosgoth has.  I suppose worlds decay in spans of time far longer than even those who were once mortals can comprehend, even with their extended lives," he says, in no small amount of melancholy.  

Something is perhaps eating at him, but not in the literal sense.

'If the last area was grotesque then we're about to run out of synonyms for things.  The horror of this place was not lost onto me, to call this alive was only barely correct.  While no foes came out to immediately assault us, the creatures that did inhabit this place seemed unconcerned with our appearance enough to not even consider us.'

Raziel moves on, using the ambient hue from the fire reaver to guide him.  The blade at the ready should something come to actually challenge them.  

'I could tell this was a place not meant for human life.  Not just being hostile, but in a sense that it was sculpted in a way that was distinctly inhuman, as opposed to growing from runoff, or being shaped by creatures degenerating from humans.'
Guzma With Vikavolt returned to its ball, Guzma coughing, he sends out Scizor, the armor hopefully keeping it from getting screwed over completely. As they push into the not-exactly-meat area, the disgusting organic wall-coatings, Guzma avoids the masses as mcuh as possible, and pushes through near Artorias. As the lights go out, the trio grab their own flashlights and concentrate beams, Scizor moving to keep the group from getting hit by lashing tendrils with extreme speed.

When they see the group of inhabitants, it chitters defensively, and moves to maneuver in the light to keep the group away from them. If an inhabitant attacks, Scizor counters first, trying to keep up an overwatch.
Mordred      The lack of poison lets Mordred breathe fully again, potential other safety matters be damned. "Hah... That wasn't so bad!" She boasts, feeling quite good even while fighting off the remnants of those poisonous fumes and preparing to fight off yet more awful denizens of the dark hole while the group continues onwards. Fighting happens, bleeding happens, things crack and break, and the increasingly blatant corruption of the region becomes more apparent with Artorias announcing that they've reached their destination and the light dwindling around them.

     Mordred's not even sure her lightning would help in this situation, but she'll certainly try using it to light their path every now and then.

     The denizens not trying to come near the group are left alone, but Mordred's still on edge after heading through that swamp. What she lacks in actual detection abilities, she compensates with firing lightning into the darkness. For the knight, it's less about landing a direct blast on the creeping figures and more about letting them know that she knows they're around. With the helmet on, meanwhile, she'd even be able to hide where her eyes are actually looking in favor of simply turning vaguely towards them to enhance that threatening posture!

     She's assuming they even know what eyes are, anyway.
Yuuki Kuran The colors are what really get Yuuki. What she had said, before, about how Lordran is beautiful and dangerous, becomes oddly true. Past the border of the truly caustic swamp is colors in their natural state.

"Raziel, look!" Yuuki points at one of the blisters pulsing electric blue and necrotic dark. "Color in nature can be strange. Many bright colors are warnings. Colors in our minds is strange, because what we see is what our eyes perceive. When you eat plants, you have eyes well-suited to finding green. But here..."

"Color is a gift from the flame, I think. Here, in the deep places, the colors are as they simply are. I'll take a picture!"

Yuuki draws out a phone, raises it to snap a shot, and the device promptly sputters and begins melting in her hand.

Pouting, she produces a hazardous waste baggie and seals the phone's detritus into the disposal container. "Well, I'll just have to take a picture with my mind."
Zero Kiryu "There's nothing worth consuming here. Our hunger is bad enough." Zero says to Yuuki, simply.

His attention turns back to Artorias soon after, "It wasn't a bad idea in spirit. But the unchallengeable person was never going to stay and keep it validated. And there's no one big enough to assert the same across the whole world besides. For that idea to bear fruit in the grand scheme of things, the thinking of all the people involved must first be changed. Not... an easy task. A school is a good place to start, but I can't say I can see a way to go beyond that. Maybe just time."

He replies to Raziel, "It's the distance from what defines reality here that makes this so decayed, I think. I don't think it's all decomposing, just the parts down here. I wonder what sort of implication that has on the grander structural integrity of the lands above, though. There is a 'sense' to it..."

Killer plants are answered with killer planets. The ring widens with Artorias at its center, thorny vines growing and attacking... well, practically anything except the phantoms. Mostly, though, it's the /other/ plant life that's here that it goes after if they stray too close to it.

The phantoms, Zero addresses differently. He directs a quick pulse of psychic push towards them-- a ping, an 'are you really there' more than an attack or a true read. After a moment he adds to it a simple suggestion: Walk with us if you like, but don't stray too close.
Tomoe The warning of not consuming something you can not identify is a good one. The poison hell has taxed Tomoe even with her abilities and she's glad ot be past it away from the horrible poison. She's not free from danger just she's expecting some new flavour of it. Hopefully something she can better handle. She almost missed the swamp when they get to the next one issue. It's some sort of biomatter and it's nightmarish to her as she keeps moving. It's alive something clearly been maintaining it and she ties not ot think about it as she pushes on soon they each the border as Artorias give them a head up. She'll take a moment to behold what's down here. There is something else down here they are being watched and Tomoe is on edge, her eyes dart about somehow picking up signs of whatever these things are watching them. yet? That's the best she can do. She notices how somethings are being consumed such as the stone itself is being devoured too.

"And yet we must go deeper..."
Starbound Flotilla     God, finally free of the hell. And yet... now /this/. "Nnnnh. Floran... hatesss." This is uniquely offensive to a Floran. As a being of floral nature with a connection to flora things, seeing this corruption is horrid!! It should all be *plants*. Avoiding it is a nightmare, but is a little better when Pavo starts handing out her flight-packs. Single-use, for most, little temporary things with fast-burning nuclear cores to allow one to float over some of this, though they also need to maneuver around the hanging stuff... there's no easy way of doing this. Not one.

    It also does nothing for the locals. Albert seems particularly anxious and paranoid about them. It feels like *being watched*. What is all this? Are they searching for information, or searching for an angle of attack, or working on some sort of instinct? Albert knows plenty about how to handle mass tactics, so he tries to understand some more about what intentions they're displaying through their movement, imagining it as if he were controlling them for some objective or another.
Eryl Fairfax     Walls of meat and flowing blood turns Eryl's stomach. When they get back, he is going to recommend that Priscilla just collapse the lip of the hole in which they descend and leave this place to its own devices. Right now, there are clear lines in the sand, but should they blur and give rise to something new, something awful infested with that hunger and with enough drive to make for the surface, it would be a new threat all over again.

    As the red meat gives way to eel bluish-grey, he places his hand on the surface. Meat - or at least, some kinds of meat - is red due to the blood flowing through it. Blue 'blood' is akin to the hemolymph that flows through the open circulatory system of insects and crustaceans. Why is there a transition? Is it just the Dark of this land pervading and corrupting even corrupt things, or something else?

    Yuuki bemoans her lack of a camera, and so Eryl produces a USB and plugs it behind his ear, as he did on Archdragon Peak. After a moment spent transferring files, he offers the drive. "Here. With any luck, we'll be the last people to ever behold this. I suppose pictures should exist, to discourage people from coming down after us."
Priscilla     Firing blasts of arcane lightning into the darkness seems to chase the phantom movement away, for a time, but it always circles back. The bolts never seem to strike a surface now. Though there is no reason to believe you've left the depths of the earth behind, it isn't long before you completely stop finding walls. Even when briefly flying, no one can find a ceiling. The empty space grows and grows for lack of boundaries to define it, until it becomes a menace unto itself. The slightest deviation in a straight course -- already impossible to maintain so rigidly, with crucial allowances needed for avoiding corrupt 'flora' at every turn -- could send someone wandering for miles of circular travel, over and over, without ever finding the place they were last at, never mind an exit. The terrain itself offers no help. Even when metallic vines rip open its skin and let spew its juices, only to be consumed in turn, that trail of obvious carnage seems uncertain as it falls behind and recedes out of the light.

    The last that can be stopped to examine bear no resemblance at all to the fleshy cancer of before, something so terrestrial as mutant meat having no stake in its own form when immersed in this deep blackness. It is quite unlike anything to the touch, slippery and slick despite being perfectly dry. Indescribable smells only distantly adjacent to some conflicting images of chlorine, wet grass, coal smoke, lavender, burnt copper and coal tar. It twitches with a very different life of its own, its pulse gone, eerie still in the dark, swaying in imitation of a breeze that would never even reach the very uppermost sewer systems.

    And then, at last, those disappear too. Even the ground beneath your feet does, after a fashion. It begins cutting off in repeating series of sudden, steep drops. Some of them are fatally deep, while others stop only a few feet down, or in some lucky cases, only a very steep stair's height, each ending in another level of flat ground, which only drops off again. The ancient, nondescript grey stones become less recognizable with each step, gradually paler, rougher, matte and oddly porous. Dips and depressions collect water again, this time ice cold and partially clear, though the deep blue of the ocean even when only an inch deep.

    It all breaks apart more and more as you advance, until it's something like an endlessly tumbling staircase of rounded pillars that all absorb and occlude each other, to which you can see a hint of curvature in the distance, like the inside of a bone snapped open and revealing its minute structure for you to walk on, further into its exposed marrow. The allusion becomes even worse when you're giving the option of forsaking that slope entirely to climb on the paths that mysteriously run over it, arching up like bridges and gracefully curving back down again, crossing through each other and lacing together in lazily curled nexuses that skip great deals of downward climbing, but cannot help but eerily resemble some conjoinment of enormous spines and ribs all half-melted and slumped together, or buried in enough mineral layers to look half-smooth, though spikes of bruise-blue crystal jut from along them either way.
Priscilla     What deleterious taint is in the air, here, is hard to say. No truly offensive sights or smells assail your senses, nor do any excessively unwelcome sensations invade your attention. It takes a long time to notice. The little insidious signs. The face of a watch or screen of a phone, cracked through a hundred places. Polished buttons, new spare change, earrings and buckles, covered in black tarnish like silver lost to sea. Less durable leathers and metals, scoured across their faces as if by months of heavy hail. Bits of magic bleeding from less fortified enchantments, dripping their essence away into the dark, absorbed like blood on sand. Itchy skin. Bleary eyes. Sluggish pulse. Narrowing vision. Vertigo and loss of place in space.

    And still, somehow, you aren't quite the only ones. You're so very far in that nothing here could have wandered in the way you came. There has to be somewhere else. Some other places. Odd twists and lightless corners someone might find or run to. Places that don't quite connect, where this dark reaches as far as it can tolerate towards the sun, poking out through whatever other capillaries in the earth this layer of the deep might reach. That'd be the only thing which would explain the other wanderers in the dark you encounter.

    Some are beasts, probably. Not dissimilar in concept to the rats that'd grown to the size of horses from decades of implausible survival and consumption. Once terrible and grand, but now only the part 'terrible', for the ways in which they've changed, with little rhyme or reason.

    Everything you encounter, perhaps ten, twenty, fifty, ninety minutes apart, for all you can tell, wandering blindly in the dark, passing through your light by sheer happenstance, or revealed by it when approaching something previously comatose on some landing or another, is larger than you are; there are no simple and unassuming things that find their way here. All of them have been warped. All of them in ways that are so strange that they've strayed too far from nature to truly be called grotesque, or even uncanny.
Priscilla     Their forms are muddied, blurred, 'splashed', 'dissolved', rendered 'abstract', as though their silhouette were spilled paint. Sometimes limbs splay into grand trails of tendrils or gnarls of 'roots'. Sometimes backs blossom open into wild and irregular flowers, or are pinched and stretched into ragged 'fins' and 'fingers'. Sometimes a tail becomes a wedding train of gently writhing extrusions, sometimes a mouth splits open into a near-fractal of individual mandibles, or their teeth spill over to run along their skin. Sometimes eyes divide into many, or host three or more pupils fused into the same orb. They're washed out in ghastly monochromes, sometimes host to colonies of dark blueish lights that throb on their surface, often drooling some black substance from mouths and eyes. Those that still breathe do so in constant, slow death rattles. Those that still have a pulse, only bleed entropic violet.

    Some amongst them were unfortunate to once be human, and are the most misshapen of all, given joints and fingers where nobody would ask for any, skulls swollen to absurd proportions and given ornate black crowns of whorled bone that extrude from their grey skin and white hair. They are, to a one, even more viciously mad than the unfortunate apex beasts. Every one of them are hostile. All of them throw themselves upon you with a singular violence, bereft of any purpose, whether to feed or to defend themselves or drive you away from their territory -- it can only be to kill.

    But once-humans are the worst. Even though everything from the blood and saliva of the warped 'living' is even more toxic than the 'flora' behind you, the shapes that can run on two legs, or at least two arms, have a uniquely unhinged propensity for recognizing your presence with run-on bouts of obscene glossolalia and screaming, as well as a penchant for some sort of mad sorcery that surely none of them ever knew when they fell down here. A kind of baleful, unconscious magic that bleeds out their crowns and into the dark, congealing it into flesh-stripping monochrome fog, orbs of colourless, lukewarm fire, bolts of weighty nothingness, solid, tangible screams.

    Even this, Artorias is prepared for, though in a sense that seems like it comes from bitter experience. That pendant he'd lended to Yuuki before is the only silver here that remains pure, and the same pulses of light she'd used to purify taint burst from it with tenfold intensity to reflect and turn away those spasms of dark magic, where he can be to interrupt it. The engraved shield is capable enough of handling all manner of anathemic secretions, as well as rending claws and teeth, and the great sword in his other hand glows an ethereal, moonlight blue all down its edge, standing out like a beacon in the dark, and obliterates the dark creatures with even glancing strikes. Still, his focused is too taxed for him to have much to say, until you're left only with the choice of high or low -- bones or the pit -- whereupon he says "We've already crossed over. At last, we must almost be there. This site runs in circles. The Dark always finds the lowest point. There must be something at the center."

    STRESS: 49/100
Mordred      Walls cease to function. Ceilings cease to exist. Mordred can barely even tell she's going the 'right' way, relying entirely on following the footsteps of those arund her and the vague unpleasantness at her feet and surrounding her. When that stops working, she starts to follow nothing at all, and she curses up a storm at each of those sudden drops when the first of them catches her off guard.

    Not feeling the ground will do that to a person. "How much further is this stupid thing? Feels like we've been walking forever!" The frustration is rather evident in her tone as she draws her blade, using that to stab at the ground just to try and feel /something/ while she moves along that isn't just those abrupt drops of inconsistent heights.

    Even that path is a welcome respite at this point. Even when she notices the screwed up spines and ribs, she sticks to the path. "We... Yeah, we really need to seal this place when we're done here. I ain't coming back to this... Can you even call this a hole if it's this big?"

     The complaints cease somewhat, thankfully, as they soon start to encounter more awful things that make even less sense than what they've fought earlier. The beasts are relatively straightforward enough, but the things that can't even be described as having logical physical forms give the Knight of Treachery some trouble. What's she supposed to even aim at? Is she striking anything at all, or was she looking at something's shadow?

     All the weird metaphysical sounding things are taking their toll on her temper. She lashes out, growing increasingly agitated by the moment by all these things that simply don't make sense to her. Ultimately? She's still just slashing and blasting away as she usually does, but there's something concrete to be angry at rather than just fighting for its own sake.

    "Low, of course. Down is down, and this place... Doesn't make sense. Dammit." Mordred grumbles anxiously, taking off her helmet to get some air or whatever counts as it. "Geh... If this place /is/ as weird as it gets, though, then does down mean up? Screw it... Let's just go down into the pit of crap and dig through if we have to!"
Guzma There's a lot of sensory conflict, disappearance, and overall hell, and it bugs the group of mundane humans passing through. Scizor is even on edge, as Guzma gags at the conflicting scents. When they get through the strange steep drops, carefully not falling through, Guzma kinda holding his breath, they reach the two paths: the bridges of bone, and the pit into the unknown.

Before anyone can voice their opinion, though, they're attacked. Scizor intercepts what would probably be a deadly strike on Guzma, taking the inhabitant and sending it flying with an impact strong enough to incapacitate if not kill, followed by follow-up strikes to others. It takes beatings from both the savage strikes and sorceries, but they don't break through the metal entirely, instead dinging and carving into it without getting into whatever fleshy interior there is.

Once they're cleared out, Guzma pants from adrenaline, and shifts over to Artorias. "Let's take the bones. I'm not vibing with another death pit of horrible scents and textures when we can have actual solid ground under our feet, y'feeling me, knight guy?"
Raziel Raziel nods to Zero, "That could be a more apt observation.  Though one might wonder if this is the decay of a dead world or a dying world?  Nosgoth, despite all of her wounds, I hope still thrives despite what that bastard has done," A pause as he considers, "Though even I have to admit, what became of my brothers has some relation to what we have seen here.  Perhaps it is past time that I go on the search again, if not only to avenge myself but also to prevent this..."

However, Yuuki even detecting that someone has fallen into some sort of sad-boi phase has gotten excited over the colors.  Distracted by her antics for a moment, even he was disappointed by the phone not being death proof.  This is why you should get your phones from EDISON.  

"Perhaps there is some beauty in this.  Though one wonders if that is in spite of the surroundings, or because it feeds on those who still hold hope in their hearts, and are far less weary than ourselves?"

However, now even form leaves them, as Artorius announces that they're even closer.  The ground turning into a sort of makeshift staircase, shifting into barely knowing where one truly was.  How far were they?

'Deeper we crept, still more drawn into the Abyss, searching for the object that had drawn us down here.  The dubious thing, however, may have doomed us all.  There seemed to be no way out, no light, no real feeling of direction.  Only the decent we seem to be crawling down. Even here I felt myself start to fade.  Much more quickly than I do normally on the material plane.'

Raziel's physical body flickers now and again, the energy needed to manifest it being slowly drained.  The Reaver turning itself off, as Raziel was concerned that the drain needed to manifest himself would only become worse if they came to fight.

On Raziel moved, deeper down into the abyss of light.  Thankfully, there was no bald guy shouting about darkness within darkness.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki helpfully raises the pendant, closing back up with Artorias to give him more breathing room and better secured flanks. She doesn't punch or elbow any more, relying on her poor beleagured boots who've lost most of their rubber to snap kick away any ravenous '''humanoids''' that close in.

"Up or down... Well, if darkness gathers in the deepest place, down it is!" She agrees with Mordred.

"Something can be beautiful by simply being present and observed. There's something here that's... despite all the danger, exciting. I understand why someone like Knight Artorias would adventure across the lands and gather such varied and powerful tools as he's shown us."

Biting her thumb, she flicks a few droplets of blood onto Artorias' shield. Something so alluringly pure and violent alive would surely draw the foes to Artorias' strongest side:

And into that big chad sword of his.
Eryl Fairfax     Eryl's sensors start going haywire as fundamental physics begin to bend and warp. His attempts to deal with the twisted figures that assail them with mortal intent match their viciousness in turn; failure drills repeated twice and three times to make sure they don't get up, crushing grapples that snap several limbs. These things likely don't conform to a sensible anatomy, and so must be put down with extreme prejudice.

    "I'm running low. How far do we have to go, do you think?" he asks Artorias, and gets a promising answer. "Excellent. Let's take the pit then. Our prize is likely to be down there."
Tomoe The taint is still here but she can't put her finger on it. She keeps moving with the party she takes stock of the strange area. The local monster that are down here leaves her unsettled even if she has an idea of what they might have been. The times between encounters grow larger and larger. She gets more on edge the deeper they go the worse they get she dreads each counter not knowing what will be next when there fighting, she tris to no think about it too hard as she uses spell and blade to take them down but she's being worn down by all these fights. Tomoe wonders what is going to be at the end of this?
Starbound Flotilla     "We're so long past bad mortal architecture. Did they make a tesseract and then crunch it with all the bad civil engineering? I feel like we lost the thread on the 'burg' idea." Pavo mutters as she helps lead the way through. "It's like one of Petrov's wargames. Like fighting theoretical enemies. Well fine, but I'm a *theological* enemy. I'll see this old myth cleaned up the way it ought to be."

    Shining gold weapons lash out, but this isn't dark that has an elemental weakness against light is it? No. But it's as effective as anything has ever been in the Flotilla's hands against huge masses of physically warped enemies. At this depth, they've been brutalized pretty thoroughly, and armor is beginning to fall apart from even just the changes to physics, but it can take more depths before it fails. "As our guide said, what lies beneath is where our objective collects." Moonfin says. "Further down is what one must assume is our objective."

    Down it is. One last push, deep below.
Zero Kiryu "It may be better to compare it to a shifting of states, rather than a true decomposition. For instance," Zero gestures 'above', "the state of the water, when subjected to heat or in the absence of it. It changes the behavior of the material drastically. Only... applied on a much more fundamental level. The difference between one ruling force dictating the rules, and another."

He winds up falling back to Yuuki's side as things get stranger and more disorienting. Vines wind their way down his arm and coil around her, creating a tether that he renews periodically.

He doesn't join the fighters in dealing with the Things that live down here this time. Zero is focusing his mental radar firmly on Yuuki, and on keeping within the protective umbrella that Artorias provides. With his free hand he shuffles around in his jacket shakily, searching for an extra pack of medicine.
Priscilla     Deeper below it is. Truly, neither choice was ever going to be safe, in any way shape or form, nor would either lead anywhere that anyone would truly wish to be. The exercise is one in picking a poison, and an ultimate angle on what there is to see at the end, but in that sense, it is meaningful in of itself. Something that is direly lacking in this gradually sinking, perfectly still vortex. A continued crusade through the blurred corpus of battlesome aberrations, drawn to Yuuki's blood across Artorias' shield, cut down by only one with his title could claim to, blasted apart with defiant rays of light against the darkness, riddled with slugs, slashed and crushed until they take a repose at least seeming to be death. Even these, too, must yield. Even these, too, are transient. Even these, too, cannot exist when you reach the periphery of the Old Dark. For that is exactly what Artorias names, when the last question is levied. Not 'Abyss'. 'The Old Dark'. He will not elaborate further.

    Reaching, at last, a vast plain of basalt-like stone, hard and flat despite the way that every inch of its surface is covered in whorls and ripples -- like the rained-on surface of water, or innumerable knotholes in a gnarled and ancient tree -- you enter the realm of intangible things. The surroundings defy your sense of direction and relativity even further. The usually-invisible feeling of your own weight starts to lapse. Your extremities grow numb and cold, tingling with pins and needles. The lights gutter as if squeezed in a chokehold. You feel the tapping of fingers. Whispers of breath. Hear the sounds of singular footsteps. Catch the glint of eyes. The plain does not vary in anything but the seemingly random pattern of the stone, but Artorias seems to know the way in some inarticulable way, driven by some singular experience and intuitive instinct, now that you've chosen this path.

    The last thing that lies in your way is the least assuming, and yet the most intractable of perils there are to face. All that happens is that, one minute, you're walking through the seemingly endless dark, and the next, you stumble into a crowd. You feel the presence of others all around you, in that formless, instinctive sense that humans 'feel' other people around. You hear the distant thrice-echoed remnants of incoherent murmurs only after. You see the countless rows of pale white points in the dark yet only after that. Pairs of two. Close together. Glowing without casting light. Some higher, some lower, most hovering in the band of your eye level. Here and there they wink in and out. Like blinking. Like shifting and occluding.

    They're all watching you. You've intruded on the gathering. Walked brazenly into a place you aren't supposed to be, as if barging in on yearly mass, and drawn the whispering stares of everyone in the room, watching your every step, hissing unpleasant nothings behind your back, followed with galled intrigue and a shadow of intent. All around you, the most abstract possible suggestion of eyes, the most reductionist thing of two circles spaced apart that a human brain will leap at to assign a face, project both feelings of both quietly hostile scorn, and strange, nostalgic longing. They don't want you here. But they want you. They follow behind you. Watch you from every side, though it'd be impossible to suggest a turned head no matter what. They part before you as you proceed -- until they don't.
Priscilla     Though they're only scattered silhouettes at first, drifting here and there, you soon find yourselves but with no other options but to somehow proceed through dense gatherings of suggested, abstract humanity. When you're far enough into the dark that they now trespass the boundaries of your light, becoming something coherent in the places you can see, more than mere glimpses and phantoms, even then their tangible shape is the barest minimum that triggers the brain's recognition of the human. The not-quite-round suggestions of heads, divorced by the slumped suggestions of shoulders by unclear suggestions of necks. The vertical suggestion of a torso, slightly convex with the suggestion of arms, before giving up and tapering away into nothing. All limmed in a colourless haze that catches the light up close, and becomes a foggy white blaze, as if they were shadows against a photo-negative fire. Weightless ghosts. Drifting sprites.

    They stand around as if ogling you, waiting for some strange offense, some great disaster, or some exciting event. They move back and forth as if shuffling past you, needing to get somewhere, apathetic to your presence. They hover around in clusters, blocking your path, not budging, busy with something or other. They cross back and forth ahead of you, in the way, like flows of pedestrian traffic. Some have the audacity to crowd the air, seeking some privacy or freedom of separation to gather elsewhere. Some feel the chilling need to be as small as children, staring up at you with their same, dark paper cutout doll heads.

    None of them attack you directly, but they don't really need to. You aren't supposed to be here. Their substance is complete anathema to yours. Antimatter, except theirs doesn't annihilate in the reaction. They're soft and lukewarm to the touch, like holding someone's hand, but to do so is to be wracked with convulsions of agony, drained of life through the merest contact, never mind where they might callously pass right through you.

    Everything about them is a cauterizing knife to something vague and formless inside of you, and it makes them the most horrible, dreadful, poisonous thing to touch. To be close to. And there are far too many. And Artorias' sword and pendant only go as far as to push them aside in disgruntlement, great, cleaving sweeps equivalent to muscling through a crowd, as they tatter, weightlessly drift, and reform again.

    STRESS: 61/100
Priscilla
    But he was right. The end is in sight. Figuratively, as you approach it, and then literally, as at last your lights fall on the only thing that stands above the ground. A plural of things, but all one design in a collective sense. An arrangement of stones that are clearly hand-worked. Pillars and walls in the sense of monuments rather than architecture. Strange obelisks and geometric spires without recognizable writing or design. Rows of metal things like thorned crosses, somehow fused into the ground. Odd sculptures, featuring geometric themes of intricate 'unraveling', and drawing the eye always into some swirl or pit or vortex somewhere within them. There's only one thing that looks properly hewn in good sense, rather than by some blind madman guided only by his fingertips in the dark.

    It is a vast stone mural. One that looks like it must have fallen down here, or somehow drifted with convulsions of the earth, because who could have, and why would they have, dragged or built it down here? Probably a forever ago, though age is no object to it here, without wind or water or sun. It requires many lights spread out to get a good look at it, for its size and elaborate nature. Contrasting its surroundings, it's carved from a single, enormous slab of ivory white stone, polished to a matte lustre, softly diffusing light into a warm glow.

    On the far right side of the mural, a high gothic-styled depiction of the sun is lovingly carved in multiple layers of detail, radiating out geometrically repeating spokes of light across the upper half of the piece. An impressively rendered fortress of arches and spires and cathedrals is perched atop a high mountain below it, almost touching. Down from that mountain runs a deep, densely etched carpet of forest, and then at its base, a more modest city of clean lines and round shapes spreads across the great horizontal center, exaggerated in emphasis, and places to receive the bulk of the sun's rays from on high.

    From that city, a river runs, and rows of men and women dressed in unfamiliar garb follow it, carrying with them urns and scrolls and staves and bows and arrows. They follow it all the way to the far left third of the mural, where the engraved rays of the sun finally stop being drawn, leaving a vast, dead space. The forest fades away, and then the barren land drops away into a jarring cliff that descends past the bottom of edge of the mural, and the river drops over its edge, becoming a waterfall, that fills something that resembles an ocean, but without the slightest depiction of waves, as even the most primitive people would render in their artwork.
Priscilla     The leftmost edge of the mural is instead occupied, top to bottom, vertically complete, by something like a Greek grotesque and a Jan van Eyk scroll of demons, depicting with equal care and detail what can only be described as a wall, or perhaps a pillar, of naked, androgynous human forms, perfectly interlocked like jigsaw pieces such that the completely fill the space without repeating, all possessed of no features save morbidly skull-like facial characteristics, abstract as they are when detailed so small.

    A man at the forefront of the procession bears a spear shaped like a bladed norse knot, and an orb of light hovers over his head, divided down the middle like a half-moon. He is passing over an unfurled scroll in one hand and a crown in the other, held out to a naked human standing at the edge of the cliff, hands outstretched, stood with upright dignity, with some great, ring-shaped mark on its breast, notably taller than he is. Several more figures are crawling up the side of the cliff, climbing up to meet the pilgrims leaving from the city, as if pulling themselves free from the tremendous pillar.

    And gods bless, a desperately hopeful scan of the best tools still at your disposal finds that the conjecture of how it got here is true; there is a gap somewhere high above, where so few rays of light reach through that it'd normally take a powerful scientific apparatus to detect, at some concerning distance measured in the double digits of miles that there is certainly no way you've physically traversed in the vertical. The sheer distance, like being at the bottom of the ocean, completely blocks out any sign of the sun through that piercing in the stone sky, but even that seems to be enough to make certain not one single phantom enters the entire ring of pillars and monuments.
Eryl Fairfax     Cold.

    Eyes.

    Pain.

    Pressing through the mass of figures only defined by their shining white eyes is an awful experience. Eryl bites the inside of his cheeks, and slips into a sort of automated state. One foot after another. Stay close to Artorias. Until, finally...

    "This is it," he calls, rushing towards the great fallen mural. "Thank goodness it's not in pieces." Upon figuring out the procession of time depicted goes from right to left, he begins following it, slowly noting what he believes it depicts. "That's Anor Londo atop the mountain, with the surrounding forest and townships. They're... following the river. Travelling away, beyond the god's influence, out into the wastes. Banished perhaps?"

    They come to the edge of the world. "The river goes over the edge into... the ocean? No, the water is depicted as still. A great lake perhaps?" And then across from that. "A mountain of... demons? Some form of Other. The leader of the procession is offering something to this tall figure... This place is across the great span of water at the end of the river that flows from Anor Londo."

    The end of the world. They've figured it out. "But where did this fall from...?" He looks up, and lets loose a loud, shrill whistle. It bounces upwards, and he listens for an echo. Anything to signify that this hole leads to a dead end. But there's nothing. "We can go straight up out of here. Please, call your ships if you can," he asks the Flotilla. He does not want to climb back out of all of this. This trip has worn even on him.