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Once the procession has passed through the Thura to which Maddy provided the Key, they enter the familiarly unfamiliar realm of the Mists. As its name implies, it is a place where fog and smoke roil about them, where the sky is occluded by cloud and fog, and where form and shape are ideas. Mere suggestions, really. Implications at best. Everything might be something, and nothing might become something or everything at the drop of a hat. Banks of fog take on fleeting forms, familiar to the minds of the observer, but then forgotten. Like a favorite book from childhood whose title you've forgotten.
One is instantly aware of how thoroughly alien one is to this place. These beings of solid, resolved potential. These traversing creatures of materialist composition, with telomeres counting down the cell divisions until entropy and death. Each one a little biologic machine ticking away to its own ruin, here amid the eternal now and the always then.
Stepping through into the Mists, for Amity, is like coming home in some ways. She is far more in tune with the Mists than an human being who isn't a Walker can be. She lets out a sigh like someone stepping through their front door after weeks away before turning to the others to make sure everyone came through okay. "Everyone good?" she asks. "Take a minute to orient yourselves. Try to stick close so that you don't get separated. If the Mists start talking to you, try not to listen to them. If you want to try to forge your new destiny so you can leave safely now, go ahead. I'm going to wait until after we study the tree, in case it gives me any ideas."
Harmony is in play, Mary currently secondary to the Arrow. She's come dressed in dark, practical clothing, a single sword sheathed on her back. Thanks to Fox's efforts, she moves with unearthly grace, even in this strange place. Her tied back hair adds more of an austere look to her normally bright appearance. "It's your lead." She tells Amity with a nod. "I already know what I'm after for my destiny though. To help bring Dandelion and all the others safely home."
Portia's first reaction on stepping through the Thura is wide-eyed surprise. Having something like this described to you and the wonder of experiencing it yourself are nowhere near the same thing. That experience is familiar to her, after her first trips to the Astral Realms, but this is nothing like the Astral, either. She says a soft prayer under her breath in Arabic, shifts the strap of the rifle that's slung over her shoulder, and then tells Maddy. "I'm going to follow your lead in that. Do you mind if we pause for a minute to study what we see around us with Sight? I can't help but be curious."
"No promises, buddy," comes a low and unrelated murmur from the tattoo-covered Enchantress, last to arrive. She appears to have her hand on her shoulder, but it is, in fact, perched on the top of her compound bow, scratching the top axle like some sort of clingy parrot that needs to be comforted, and assured that it is a very good birb. "What? Yes. All good." Who the fuck she's even talking to is still not certain because she's not really bothered to look at anyone yet, more fascinated by the Mists, but in that slightly dangerous child-near-the-traintracks way.
The mists swirl around River's feet like an insincerely affectionate but very hungry stray cat. They just love Acanthii who are new to the Mists. This is the only real activity one can say is occurring here at present, apart from the general form to formlessness roil of the fog around them. At present, the mists and their resident anachronisms appear to be treating the group near the Thura with mostly neutral indifference.
Of course, they're still right by the Thura.
"Take whatever time you want to study," Maddy says with a nod. She shrugs off her backpack, takes a sturdy glass bottle out of it, and scoops some of the mist that's swirling around her own feet into it, then closes it and tucks it away while she's speaking to the group. "Mary, I'd try to tell you what to do to forge your Destiny, but it's difficult to explain. Your best best is to use Fate to manipulate the Mists, understand the Pattern of it, and shape that Pattern around yourself. I'm going to see what I can do to shorten our trip from here to the Martyr's Tree here in the Mists." After which there's a brief flare of nimbus around her, and a sudden release of magic as she stops pushing on the spell when it hits resistance.
Harmony nods at Amity, studying the Mists around her, voices, images, ephemeral impression of what was, what is, and what could be swirling past her. Reaching out, she grasps on various strands, seeking, exploring, tugging. Changing. All to seek out a destiny better suited for seeing Dandelion and the other Host captives home safe.
"I love getting picked first. Put me in, coach," River mutters, pulling an arrow out and swishing the tip of it through the fog like she was shooing away that stray cat. "Just kidding, league boycott."
With the mists being toyed with to create destinies, they finally do take notice of the general collection of new arrivals. They're not merely travelers lost, or strange anachronisms with solid potentiality. They're meddlers. A few moments after Mary creates her future, the mists retreat before the group, revealing a path over the craggy, wooded ground. Like entering some strange primeval forest, filled with fog, and of which only the immediate ground before you can be clearly registered.
Viewing the mists through mage sight is a whole other experience.
Mind sight reveals some sort of latent intelligence to it all. Or maybe just a bunch of little intelligences all tied up in the mists. In that way a slime mold is an entity in itself, made of composite cells which are themselves distinct lifeforms. The way bricks form walls, trees forests, and sand beaches. It flashes and flickers between awareness and quiescence. Between perception and incoherence.
Through Time Sight, it's like dropping several tabs of acid and MDMA at the same goddamn time. How can you view everything and nothing at the same time with any sort of clarity? The threads of temporal sympathy shred, weave, blanket, tear, unravel, knit back together, and burn away. Every moment is always. And always is never. And never is now. There, that was just the next few hundred years, there. Clear as day. And it's gone again. Stay. Stay and learn everything. What does it matter that seventy five years have passed by back home while you're reading this? Time is meaningless here. Even to those who came from a place and a time and would like to go back to it. Don't you agree?
Life sight is more alarming. In that nothing here can be said to be truly alive but for the mages visiting it. Had a mage been standing over the chemical slurry the moment lightning struck and caused amino acids to form DNA, this is probably what they would have seen. Flickers. Flashes. The potential to be. The denial of being. Over and over and over again.
Spirit is more enlightening. Not that the creatures that exist within the mists are spirits as they know them back in reality. But they are ephemeral. They stand out in the roiling fog. And with it, one can see how they control that fog and will it this way and that, form it to their purposes, and use it to confront their senses with images and ideas foreign and tempting. The puppeteers pulling the strings, these.
Space is likewise quite revelatory. One can see the connections between objects and people, people and places, places and objects, objects and concepts, concepts and realities. Space is likely the way to go for locating the tree, through the sympathies that connect all beings and all possibilities here. One has only to narrow down the potentiality and travel, in theory.
Fate, however, is truly an awe inspiring thing here. The possible is probable, the probable, certain, and certainty questionable. It's like watching a fungus explode from a corpse, as a thousand thousand futures cascade from every rotting moment. A million potentialities weaving their threads into fabrics, which shred and tear and unravel and knit back together again in different combinations to form different patterns. One could weave a world of one's own making here, and wear it like a cloak. Become a God. Just grab a thread and start knitting. Forget about the world beyond the Thura.
Portia spends a little time studying their surroundings with her Sight, gleaning information and understanding that would have been beyond her otherwise. "Fascinating," she says. She might be more effusive in her emotions if she wasn't magically enhancing her own composure to the point of near inhumanity. "It seems like Space, unsurprisingly, might be our best way to proceed in finding our destination?" She looks to Amity, who is both experienced with this place and also more skilled with Space than she is.
As everyone else is studying the magic of the Mists, Amity is busy trying to figure out how they're going to find their destination. She sits down on the ground, takes out her Bodhrán, and starts playing as she softly chants in High Speech.
As she finishes the chanting she stops her playing and casts a pair of dice, watching to see how they come up, and the magic of her Nimbus flares around her. Since people are using Mage Sight they can see it, a warping of Space around her in much the same way that the Mists warp Time, with all possibilities overlapping. It appears, bending reality, and then vanishes a few seconds later.
"I can guide us to the Tree from here," she says. "It shouldn't take us too long to get there, if we use magic to speed us up. I can do it with a combination of Space and Time, if you'd like? Or Decima can handle the Time component."
Harmony stares at the swirling Mists, but, beyond that, to the figures, the entities lurking within them. Those who have their fingers woven tight in strands of destiny, who twist and tempt it to lure the unsuspecting in.
"Be very, very careful." She advises the others in a steady voice, focusing mostly on River and Layla as Amity almost certainly knows this. "This isn't just randomness, there are beings in there, controlling it. And they're aware of us." A nod towards Amity. "If you take us, I'll try to ensure we all stay close together."
As they group continues their preparations and deliberations, a form steps out of the mists. It takes the form of a middle-aged man in a rumpled brown trench coat, a white dress shirt, black slacks, and a tie. There's a badge on his waist and a gun on his hip. He mimes tipping his hat to the group and turns to begin wandering up the revealed path before them. It's hard to discern if he's really there, or just a trick of the anachronisms that infest this place.
River doesn't seem to reply to Harmony, or even hear her. She does, she just makes no nevermind of it, but the affectation is thoroughly convincing. "This must be what a speedball looks like," she murmurs to herself, and when that form moves out into the foreground in front of them, she reflexively scrunches up her nose but, as he doesn't seem to pay them much more attention, she doesn't see any further, immediate cause for alarm. Immediately.
Since Portia is mostly along for the mental boosts she can provide people, she decides that following the lead of the Acanthus in this situation is the smart course, and lets them decide what the plan is. "We're supposed to do our best to ignore those people, right?" she asks, looking at Maddy.
Ignore is exactly what Amity does when the figure appears. "They'll try to convince you to accept a destiny of their choosing, rather than your own," she says. "It's one way to get out without forging one for yourself, but you never know what you'll get. Let's be off. Stay together, so we don't have to try to rescue anybody who wanders off."
She sets out, making sure not to outpace anyone else. "The way back should be easier, since I should be able to teleport us back to the Thura," she says as she ground vanishes behind her. It might be disorienting for someone who isn't used to it, when they take a step and cover the ground of two, while everything else goes slower around them.
Mary's mouth thins at River's response, but she says nothing, nodding at Maddy and moving along, taking up position near the back of the group if possible to try and keep an eye on everyone as the Walker leads them onwards.
Time and distance are difficult concepts here. Forever is never is now. All the ground looks much the same, the idea of a verdant temperate rainforest, lush undergrowth, plenty of soggy mosses and hanging vines. Slippery rocks. There isn't a path, so much as a constant slow to clear wall of fog all around them. They devour the ground, of course. They put miles between the Thura and themselves. In moments which are centuries, even.
Either the mists figured out where they were heading and why, or the tree is a really happening spot. Dozens of beings loiter about the tree which is... oddly static here. Oh, it's enormous and wrought of fog and smoke, but that mist that gives it form is stationary, unchanging, unwavering. Caught in a twitching image of perfected life branching out in all directions. Up and away, up beyond the ability of the eye to see it, lost in the fog. Away in the same manner. An expansive canopy that reaches, reaches, reaches, and never ceases.
The gang is all here. Men in the dress of the Restoration period of England and Europe. The cop they saw earlier. Other, more modern figures. There's even one that looks like the painting of Pontiff that hangs in the Consilium Hall. One of the most celebrated Silver Law scholars ever to grace Philadelphia. They cluster like petitioners at a royal court, waiting to catch the king's ear.
And it would seem the King is arriving, "Zounds! We have been waiting here an eternity! You must hear our most urgent petition!" This from a man in a black frock coat with a receding hairline and a long, pointed beard. The characters all begin to crowd in on the group. Not threatening but instead pleading, waving sealed letters, folios of papers, rolled up scrolls. The cop does not encroach, he just loiters back, leaning against the tree's trunk, munching on a fruit of some sort.
When the Tree, and its attendant crowd, rises up in the foreground, River slows her gait, tonguing one of her molars and then making a clicking sound behind her teeth. She draws in an exhale and then heaves it out, audibly. To the loiterers, she spares a hollow glance, but the Tree consumes most of her attention, and she takes a few steps to the side in an instinctive circling arc. To the rest of their small group, she makes a 'nuh-uh' cutting motion across her neck, the universally understood gesture of Nope, pointing at the gathered bodies or forms-like-bodies.
As they start to get swarmed by creatures of the Mists, Portia brings up her Sight again in an effort to study them, being paranoid about whether or not they might all be what they seem like they are. As they provide to all be thinking beings, but not ones that bear a human-like intelligence, she relaxes again and then works a spell to attempt to make all those minds pay no notice to the mages. "This is definitely weird and creepy," she says. "Which is kind of what I signed up for today, I guess. How do we want to proceed, Amity?"
When the presence of the visitors is occluded, the anachronisms appear confused and disappointed. Most just return to what they were doing prior, which was sitting around the tree in still, insensate silence. Like statues, really. Frozen moments. The cop just takes a final bite of his fruit, shakes his head, and tosses the half eaten thing at the foot of the tree. It doesn't loiter, though. That particular figure starts off into the mists again, picking at his teeth with a pinky finger to get some of the rind out from between his teeth. He fades into the fog, either disappearing from view because of it or joining with it. In either case, he's gone.
"I suggest we start out by scrutinizing the Martyr's Tree, working through whatever occlusion there is so that we can get a good look. Please be careful, and make sure you don't leave your signatures on it. All the usual precautions," Maddy explains as the various figures in the Mists stop paying them the same attention that they had been. That makes her pause, give Layla a nod, and then continue. "How many of you have studied the Tree before?"
Mary flashes Layla a smile too, nodding at her. "I've spent far too much time doing that." She admits to Maddy, some of her currently restrained personality showing itself. "But I did when it developed fruit, back when this all started. So I've some experience there."
"When it was acting out," River murmurs in response, circling around the broad base of the Tree, idly thumbing at the cam of her compound bow as it poked over her shoulder, and it's not particularly clear if she's relieved or disappointed to not have been given a reason to draw it. Probably both, possibly neither. "Well, not acting out, but when the blooms were discovered, first discovered. I just happened to be there when it happened." Of course. Just Acanthus things.
"Mundanely," Portia answers with a shake of her head. "Not with scrutiny, since people just coming along and doing that is frowned on outside of certain circumstances. I'm familiar with not digging too hard when scrutinizing, though. I'm pretty sure I know what you mean, and I can abide by those rules."
"Then I won't waste a lot of time explaining. Pretend that Epiphanius is here, and treat the tree accordingly. I'll cut off our sympathies to it before we leave again, too." Amity brings up her Mage Sight again, adding in Prime to the Space, Fate, and Time that she normally gets to ensure as much coverage as possible.
The emanation of the Martyr's Tree here in the Mists is a potent thing. It bears consideration whether it came first, or the tree they all know in the material world. Certainly this one is more potent, this one more far-reaching in its implications. Literally and figuratively larger.
It is the stuff of Time and Space and Fate, of course. But its origins do not appear to be supernal in nature. Perhaps it grew in response to the tree in the real world, and perhaps it was always here and became linked to the tree when it appeared. The causality is unclear, but the prospect of the imperial magic necessary to create such an entity in either location cannot escape notice. The practices involved would be beyond their understanding, in any case.
They can clearly discern various potential futures for the tree by examining it. As though each branch and fork within it were a parting of ways of potential outcomes. So, too, with its root system buried deep in the ephemeral earth. It pulses with untapped futures and unrealized pasts, and remains thrumming and vital in the eternal now of this place.
It is a consequence and it is a cause. A chicken birthing its own egg from which it will one day hatch. There is a common theme to the central trunk, however. Hope, growth, and change. All reaching up, up, up, up to a distant ideal future that lies well beyond the vision of those on the ground, lost up there in the mists somewhere.
A plan, its architect, its builder, and its resident.
Mary's eyes widen as she drinks in the sight of the Tree and all it seems to represent. She's briefly lost for words, and fights the urge to rest her palm on its trunk. Instead she takes back, taking a few breaths to collect her thoughts. "If it's not of the Supernal in itself.. does that mean it wasn't created through arcane magic, but some other method?" She glances at the others, chewing this over.
River ambles in a semi-circle around the Tree, sucking on the back of her teeth. She cants her head to the side, an exaggerated reach and lean, shagging her tattooed fingers through her hair and eyeing the sprawling network of roots and branches and the entirety of the in-between through colorless, gunmetal grey eyes. "No more answers than questions, hmm?" Again, she seems to be talking to herself, but she isn't. She turns her attention towards the rest of the group, blinks like she's seeing them for the first time in a few hours. "I'm more at a loss than when I started," she admits.
"Perhaps it was created as an echo of the creation of the one in the Fallen World?" Layla suggests after taking the time to study the tree thoroughly after the opacity is peeled away. "Does anyone see signs of the missing fruit?" she asks. "Assuming one was also created for Rashida's Awakening, maybe we can get some clue about it here." She shakes her head and looks at River. "That seems to be the way things go with this tree."
As she lets the supernal sight clear from her eyes, Maddy stares in wonder at the majesty of the Martyr's Tree as it stands in the Mists. "This is the realm of all possible futures," she starts explaining in hushed tones. "The Tree no doubt existed here as potential before it was ever created in our world. There may be a dozen other things like it here, which we just don't know where or how to look for." She begins chanting in High Speech again, going through her litany of yantras to enhance her spellcasting, reaching out for the Spatial ties of the tree.
When the sympathies are viewed, there is a common theme. It is tethered to the tree in the real world, obviously. So too to the one in the Shadow, and one in the underworld, as well as the one in the Astral realm. There are others, too, in emanations and realms you are not familiar with. Three in all. The balance of the sympathies belong to the entities surrounding the tree, the strongest belonging to those in the oldest style of dress from the late 1600s / early 1700s.
Maddy provides the others all the information she gets from the spell she worked.
Mary's eyes widen, but she holds her reinforced composure. Still, her hand goes to the hilt of her sword before she forces herself to relax. All the same, that figure is receiving a death glare. "Gaveston." She states coldly. "It's Gaveston. Or at least a representation of him. He can affect emotion and will, and has power over fate and destiny. But he can't leave this tree, and if he does, he'll fade away and eventually die."
Once Mary puts her finger on it, it's kind of been staring you all in the face the entire time. That one does look quite a bit like the woodcuts of Gaveston that are to be found in the archives. And that one, that one looks like Constantine. And that's got to be Walsingham. It's all of them. And others, too. But clearly, the whole cast of murderers are here, gathered in patient conference around the tree. Waiting in eternal silence for a moment which is forever.
River looks at Mary, arching one of her well-manicured brows, and then she turns towards the tree and throws her arms up in the air. "Voldemort! Asshole." The words are said at either end of the spectrum of enthusiasm, the first strangely bright, the second deadpan and disdainful. Silver Ladder; she takes it personally, the grievance, the perfidy. She inhales a long breath, lets it out; it rumbles, vibrates, like a purr. "We could do this now." Casually offered, but not idle.
Meanwhile, over here is Layla, pulling in the mists around her, working to shape them to some purpose she doesn't share with everyone else. It doesn't take her very long to shape the destiny she came here to create, and then it's done. "I don't think it will do anything," she says. "From everything I hear, there are probably an infinite number of versions of him here, of infinite characters. It's just a risk that we have no reason to take."
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