寒露

[singlemilletgrain]

One might expect Shu to be participating in the Harvest Festival festivities. After all. That's... her expectation, in some sense. Not simply her job, but the reason for her existence. However, there were times when one needed to take on multiple roles, as unpleasant as some of them may be. And her other role, for a thousand years...

is the keeper of lost souls.

The Collapsals (that was a Sami term - the Yanese had a different term for the demons, but Esthere language mapped more closely onto non-Yanese words, she had found) and their incursions had been held at bay by Shu's powers for so long, she had almost forgotten what it was like not to have a heavy fraction of her power leached constantly from her into the land. Vice-versa... after a year in this place, it was good to have a reminder of the perils that still awaited at home.

Shu spends much of the following weeks in the research facility, cleaning up bodies, putting down monstrosities, praying, burning incense. On the gates outside the laboratory, she has spent many hours tying ribbons to the bars. One ribbon for each soul devoured by the disgraceful experiments conducted within. Though their flesh had been corrupted, their beings, she trusted, would return to the earth once flesh had been purged.

Not that she knew of 'being' outside flesh. But the people of all lands believed so fervently in such a thing, surely it must exist. And if it did not...

Then she, if no one else, would remember, such that they lived on.

Comments

[purplexing]

Dealing with the dead is far from Donnie's comfort zone. But he'd been tasked with helping go through the more technical aspects of the laboratory and its security systems. It's however difficult to separate what had happened within and outside of those walls.

He still can't look at a body for long without feeling his gorge rise, not in the various states of mutilation as these had been. At least the halls within don't smell like the dead or of decay, but the incense that lingers is strong and almost as nauseating at times. Donnie extracts himself from the place to try and get a fresh breath of air and take a break from staring at machinery.

And so it is that he finds himself looking at the ribbons decorating the gates, the ends blowing in the light breeze.

[spacetogrow]

Ilphyl didn't grow up with much reverence for the dead. Lolth's teachings tended to view death as a failure state for survival. But their first encounter with non-drow had been myconids, who used dead bodies as a resource, as mushrooms did. And it fit into a druid point of view: souls might go to the gods, but bodies should return to the earth via scavengers.

So they are happy to help clean up bodies, and accept the view that whatever had happened to the souls, they were out of the situation. They have a bunch of seedlings with them, because... well, if the earth can reclaim this place, all the better, from Ilphyl's point of view. Mostly plants that are just intended to be beautiful, rather than food or herbs.

"I'm going to have to learn if any of the chemicals used here are bad for plants," they said.