higan [Jertiza & Pelleas]
starter for @pirrhyc
There’s been word of crumbling ruins, remnants of an old town and its gravesite becoming overgrown with strange greenery. Beautiful though its blooms may be, superstition and old maid’s tales have painted it as a beautifully haunting omen for a disaster to come. To that effect, the neighboring villages are too afraid to venture and clear it up, avoiding any and all routes that might cross it, and so have pleaded for aid from every passerby willing to help. As you enter the mouth of the ruins to dispel their needless fears, however, you find that these are no mere ruins. The vines close the entryway from which you came, and, looking ahead, you find that the ruins are, in fact, a huge maze. To make matters worse, the vines that now prevent you from leaving don’t seem to be content to stop there. All around you, the labyrinth shifts and changes; the walls move, the plants snake and snap. You and your companion must hack and cut your way through and find a way out, lest you intend to bury yourselves in a grave that never needs to beg for flowers. [Grants Sword +1]
The ruins had been an eyesore. Rats darted between the crumbling houses, tangled weeds clambered over one another for the sunlight that baked the dusty earth, flower heads brown and balding. The pyres in the square still hid the bones of disease, for which the village had been abandoned decades ago, and the ghosts of the lost still roamed the streets restlessly when the moon was full. So the rumors went. But it was easier to carve a half-circle out of a journey around the village than to clean away the stories and the decay in which they had rooted.
The village was in a territory northeast of House Bartels. Jeritza had heard the stories growing up, but he supposed Fódlan had at least a dozen other villages that had grown into local legends over the years. When Mercedes left, so did his interest in the ghosts, and the stories faded away with the rest of his patchwork memories. It could have very well been wiped from history, for all he cared. For the villagers who lived in the area though, the stories grew and mutated until it was not simply a folk tale, but the portent of an untold disaster.
“Something is happening to Laagven...”
A middle-aged woman had grabbed Jeritza by the wrist when he set down a coin for his meal in a tavern a half a day away from the ruins, and held him desperately even when he recoiled at her touch.
“Please. You’re a knight. Please.”
Perhaps it was the name he had thought lost to memory, the reminder of stories by the hearth with his sister, or the resolution in the woman’s grey-blue eyes that made him think of his mother that convinced Jeritza to listen to the tale again, but he stayed long enough to hear her out. The story didn’t match what he remembered of it, but few things did these days, and the woman trembled as she recited a tale of a man and his friends who had ventured into the old village. Only one of them had made it back home, but he had collapsed within hours, foam and flowers as red as blood spilling from his mouth. The others - her husband among them - were written off as dead, too. Something had to be done, if not to save the lost, then to put the ruins to rest.
Jeritza had finished his last mission early, and loath to return to swinging mindlessly at straw effigies in the monastery, agreed to investigate on the woman’s behalf. Death did not scare him. He had nothing to lose.
The dusty ghost town of the old stories was buried deep beneath vibrant green leaves, snaking vines, and spidery, crimson blooms by now. Were that itself not so out of place, Jeritza might have passed the ruins in search of a memory that no longer existed. He drew his blade resolutely and cleaved a way through the thorns and branches, but like a wound healed by magic, the vines stitched shut behind him. Gloved fingers tightened around the hilt as he assessed the entranceway now once more overgrown. If cutting could get him through, then cutting would get him out again too. He set his eyes on the path ahead.
Birds didn’t sing here. That was the first thing Jeritza noticed as he walked, accompanied only by the sound of dried leaves underfoot. The second was that the flora was so dense in some places that it appeared to form nearly entire walls of flowers. But beyond that, he saw no sign of the missing men until he rounded a corner and nearly collided with one crouched by a row of multicolored blooms. He stepped back quickly, drawing a hunting knife from his belt and holding it in front with his left hand.
“Are you...” He scraped his memory for the name of the village he had just left. “... from Lockwood?”