Drownyard Temple, Outskirts of the Port Town of Selfhoff, Nephalia, Innistrad, Thurs. (Fandom Time)

[chef_chocobro]

After their trudging journey, pouring over the entries in the journal they'd found for mere morsels of information (Ignis, naturally, frustrated that he had to rely so heavily on what was, no doubt, Jace's highly selective readings of the information), they finally made it to Nephalia, the road ending and winding along the base of its sea cliffs. Ignis kept close to Jace, knowing the path was likely narrow and treacherous, and figuring his best bet was to simply follow in the wake of Jace's own self-preservation, as he doubted the other man would take much of Ignis' own safety into consideration as he went along. The incline was steep, but, over the sound of his companion's labored breathing from the effort, he heard, too, in the distance, the creaking masts of ships and the somewhat familiar scents of the port town of Selhoff, the waves lapping against hulls, far off in the distance, but they were getting close.

He also heard someone approaching the way they were going. His companion's pace didn't flag or falter, which made him realize that he clearly hadn't seen the other person yet, and if his calculations were correct...

"Jace," he said, in warning, reaching out for the other man's shoulder to stop him, hopefully before he and this approaching individual collided.

Jace	"Huh? Wha--?" Jace asked, short of breath and mind hundreds of miles away from the sea cliff they were on. "Ignis, why did you--?" And that was when he saw the fisherwoman he (that might have noticed in time! You didn't know for sure that he wouldn't've!) nearly upon them. "Oh! Sorry, I didn't see you th--" It was not Jace's best day for finishing sentences.
Fisherwoman	Her eyes affixed to his - wide and vacant with an unblinking stare. "So...another come to listen to her call, hmm?" she asked, her words tumbling out slowly. "You've come to see her too?" An eerie simulacrum of joy crept into her voice. "So many have arrived just today!" "See her? See who?" "She's finally here! Brought her feathered ones from the sky, tide came up right on with them! Broke right through the floodwalls, washed all of it away!"
Ignis	Listening carefully, a frown marked Ignis' expression, not even remotely tempted to make some snide offhand comment on how he certainly hadn't come to see anyone at all. A celestial conductor, the journal had said, she commands the mysterious motions of the primal heart that lead to transformation or murder with the shifts of her tides. "The tides," he murmured, frown deepening. "You've witnessed their shifting?" And, what he felt was far more important: "Who else has arrived today before us?"
Very Normal Fisherwoman	"Oh, we had no need for all those things - we've found...something so much more than us! Think of all these things we're holding onto, weighing us down. Living in these shells made of meat, carrying our worries, slogging forward day after day. She's up there now, waiting for us, waiting to take it all away for us, to usher in a new world!"
Jace	"Slow down...'she'?" Jace glanced from the woman babbling nonsense to Ignis and then back again. "Who is 'she'? What is she bringing?"
This is just how fisherfolk are, okay?	The fisherwoman barked out a laugh that lingered too long. "I was like you once. It's a terrible burden, knowing. So many questions, drowning in questions, and never enough answers! Now I've let them go, washed right out of my mind like the sea over shipwrecks. But once I'd wanted to know…things. Lots of things! Silly things. What is my greater purpose and will I ever achieve it? How will I die? When will winter end? Where does the eye stare? How many eyes? How many legs on the moon shrew—?" Meaningless words flowed from her mouth until she gasped for breath like a land-bound fish.
Jace, King of Consent	"Okay, so I don't know about you, but I think I've heard enough," Jace said to Ignis with a long sigh. "We're not going to get too far with conversation, but we need any information her mind might hold." With a well-practiced gesture, Jace reached out with his mind to grasp at her thoughts. The first one he caught dissolved on contact into a cloud of blue vapor. The second was just a collage of images: twisted stones and something dark and roiling...the sea? Each thought seemed oddly hollow, formless. He frowned. "I can't seem to grasp--wait a second, this is going to require more intensive measures. I'm going to go deeper." Opening his own thoughts, he bridged their two minds--
Ignis, Already Tired	"Wait, Jace, you can't just..." Silly Ignis. Believing Jace Beleren would believe in things like mental autonomy and asking permission first. Of course, even in the brief time of knowing Jace and working with him on this ill-conceived venture, he realized he was probably too late. So he breathed a sigh of relief when it was clear that it hadn't worked, and they could-- --not move on, apparently. "Jace," he insisted, not yet realizing Jace had already gone further, "leave her be. I'm sure if we just continue on, we'll find out mo-- "Jace? "Oh, gods dammit."
Jace, Continuing to Learn No Lessons	...and looked out into a dull, gray calm. It formed itself into gently curved walls of perfect smoothness, like the inside of an egg, though the floor he was on was flat. Half an egg, then. The roof of the dome was similarly smooth and featureless. No doors, no entrances, no exits. He looked down, expecting to see the fisherwoman's hands. Looking down, all he saw were his own damp palms and blue robes. Jace swore silently. And, much like in Markov Manor, Ignis was nowhere to be seen. All right, so clearly his form was somehow trapped in the fisherwoman's mind. He was her living, breathing mental figment, trapped inside of her head. At that, panic began to set in, turning the silence into a high-pitched ringing in his ears. Deep breaths, Jace. Deep breaths. This was...unexpected. But he could handle unexpected! Has been doing so his entire life. This was nothing. First, he needed to get a handle on the space. Jace moved slowly around the perimeter of the dome, feeling the wall for cracks or imperfections. A complete circuit around the room produced nothing. Trying to suppress that lurking panic, to remind himself to breathe deep and that he could handle this, he leaned against a wall and glanced at the center of the room. A nebulous shroud of some...thing hung in the air. No, not something, but nothing. A blind spot in space that seemed to remain no matter how he tried to peer around it. His pulse thundered in his temples, in tune with the blind spot in the center of the room. His sweating palms pushed against the smooth walls firmly now, though they refused to give. He had altered minds before, instilling wild visions and distorting truths. But he had certainly never been one of those distortions before. No, he was still real and true, he was certain of it. He could prove it. He took a deep breath, planted his feet firmly apart, made a fist, thumb outside his fingers as Gideon had patiently insisted to him, and took a swing at the wall. The impact resonated back through his body, and the shock through his nerves threw him backward. The walls vibrated like a tuning fork, each wave jangling through Jace's tortured brain. His eyes flicked toward the center of the room. The blind spot in his vision had swelled to become an Object far larger than Jace himself, nearly touching the floor and ceiling of the interior of the dome that trapped Jace like a spider beneath a glass. He shut his eyes tightly, gripping his head and trying to stay calm and concentrate.
Just What We Needed, Another Jace	"Solidly built, this one." Jace's eyes snapped open. There stood another figure in hooded, damp, blue robes surrounded by a pale luminescence, who rubbed at his chin, staring thoughtfully up at the Object. It looked just like...Jace. Or, more accurately, one of his illusionary duplicates. "We've never seen a place like this before, huh? Thoughts are a mess, place is just empty. But fascinating! What do you think is inside this thing?"
Jace Prime	Jace gaped at the hooded duplicate, words starting to form, then deflating on his tongue. He was certain he hadn't summoned it. Or had he, instinctively? He couldn't remember. Was it an effect of his entrapment in the mind of another?
Yet Another Jace, Yippee	"Oh, come away, can't we? We're so close now!" insisted another voice. Jace turned to see a second duplicate of himself, this one unhooded, moon-pale skin visible. "We've no time to waste with this poor woman - leave her be. We're almost to the Drownyard!" In the world outside the mental landscape Jace found himself in, both he and the fisherwoman began chanting in unison, "Almost to the Drownyard. To the Drownyard. Yes, almost to the Drownyard, to the Drownyard we go."
Ignis, King of Regrets	And just when Ignis had began to wonder what more could go wrong next, while contemplating exactly where do go from here (he was leaning, heavily, toward just leaving Jace to the fisherman's mind and continue without him; gods knew he'd likely have a much easier time with it, too), that chanting began. Oh, that could not possibly bode well for them. "And what, pray tell," he asked, tensing slightly, hand ready on his daggers, "is the Drownyard?" He was not expecting an answer. Nor did he believe, all things considered, he actually needed one to know.
Even Jace Doesn't Like Jace	Indeed, no answer was forthcoming. Inwardly, however... The hooded duplicate shot an icy glare at the second. "And do what? Follow more of these anomalies? I'm tired of filtering through all these dead ends; there has to be someone around here who knows what holds it all together!" The hooded duplicate put two hands to its forehead and stared earnestly up at the Object. Its face reddened and two veins bulged comically on his forehead as it began to sweat profusely. Jace grimaced, watching himself with naked, harrowing self-consciousness.
Getting Real Crowded In Here	"You really do look like that, you know." It came from a third duplicate, this one violet-eyed and smirking. It whispered something into the ear of the second, pale duplicate and the two giggled conspiratorially, pointing at the first duplicate that was still deep in concentration.
Hashtag Priorities	The pale duplicate composed itself and laid an earnest hand on Jace's shoulder. "Months, no, years, of physical studies, observations, measurements! You're so close to helping me complete my records!" The pale duplicate tugged on Jace's arm with earnest, impatient insistence.
This Is Why We Don't Touch Minds Without Permission	The Object, now impossibly, menacingly large, stared down at Jace. All of the Jaces. The smooth walls of the chamber warped and bent under the Object's pull, then buckled with a loud CRACK. Fragments of the sundered walls tore themselves away and into the Object, revealing a spidery lattice underneath. A myriad of eyes opened, buried within the latticed walls, staring through Jace and the fisherwoman and toward the Object in manic ecstasy. Voices from behind the walls roared with a white noise that pierced through Jace's senses and brought him to his knees. The floor, too, cracked, though he could no longer hear it, but vaguely he knew that it had also given way under his weight, and realized that he was falling-- --His eyes snapped open to find his hands clapped over his head, his body curled up on the ground. As he scanned the trees, the shape and substance of those sinewy walls clung to his vision like phantom limbs.
Fisherwoman Who Was Just Minding Her (Crazy) Business	The fisherwoman stumbled as she came to, locking eyes with Jace in a brief, knowing stare. After a few inaudibly murmured words, she scrambled to her feet with a guttural snarl meant to keep both men away from her further, and scurried down the path away from the coast.
Ignis, Who Just Loves Planeswalker Adventures	Tense in his own familiar world of darkness, Ignis strained to listen for any indication of what might be going on, ready to act, and then, finally, when there was movement again, a breathing that suggested one had quite returned to that which surrounded them, and then a body crumpling to the ground, he acted. The snarl as the woman staggered away made it clear to him that his initial assessment had been correct, and he moved toward Jace to assist him and hopefully letting that poor woman finally just be on her way. "Jace? Are you alright? What happened? What did you see?"
Jace, Ever-Helpful	"That's the thing, I couldn't see it," Jace babbled. "The Object, I couldn't see it, but it was huge, vast, how can I finish the records, the weights, the measurements if I can't see it? It hid itself from me, but the eyes, they keep looking from the lattice..." He broke off, trying to look in every direction at once.
Ignis	....the moon's orbit itself, the journal had read, is being pulled in some direction by a very large, very nearby object still invisible to humanoid eyes... Ignis frowned. "Come on," he said, as he helped Jace up. "Let us continue on our way." Curiously, both the tidal vectors and the field distortion provide identical foci that may be traced to the same coordinates--a large reef off the coast of Nephalia... ...the Drownyard? "I'm sure the answers we seek await for us there." Or possibly just more questions... ...endless questions. And they wouldn't find their answers here, and so he would gently guide Jace to return to their path, and if gentle would not work, well...
Jace	"Yes, yes," Jace said vaguely. The gravitational force governing the movement of the tides appears to have shifted from the moon itself to a location very close to the sea. "Yes, we must get to the Drownyard. Things will make sense there."

***
Jace spent the rest of their walk deep in thought. The trail ended on the rocky shores just north of the reef near a small fishing outpost. Its floodwalls, as the fisherwoman had indicated, were indeed nearly a foot underwater, and a thick, shining layer of rotting marine slime coated what had once been the dock and its ships.

Boots caked in slime and sand, Jace waded into the shallows and let the waves pass over his feet. As he waited for it to recede, he realized the water was moving parallel with the shore, not away from it.

Something down the beach was indeed changing the normal motion of the waves.

South of the village, the moonlight shone down on a massive ring of jagged structures jutting up from the ocean, clawing at the waves and passing ships.

"The Drownyard," Jace breathed. "This is it! All the cryptoliths point here!"

Ignis	As Ignis followed with caution, his own mind found itself quite distracted as well. The scent of the place was overwhelming, all the worst, noxious smells one might expect from a seaside village but amped up into a vicious stew of petrified fish and salty brine, strong enough to sting his nostrils and turn his stomach. And then there was just the feel of the place. As someone who depended so heavily on basic principles of physics, the air around him pulled and shifted in ways that felt uncomfortable and unnatural. Disorienting. And with Jace being....well, Jace, one less thing he could depend on was very unnerving indeed. But then, that breathy revelation. "Show me," said Ignis, hand falling on Jace's shoulder to brace himself for what would come next.
Jace	Jace was a mind magic adept, the most powerful telepath to walk the Multiverse. Usually when he slid into Ignis' mind to share his senses with the other man, it was fast and seamless, and only the disorientation of seeing things from a slightly different angle than he would expect to remind Ignis that it was not his own eyes, now suddenly working, that he saw through. This time, however, it was neither smooth nor seamless. There was a moment of something like...like stepping through a field of static, with as little sense as that made...and then it was like his mind was suddenly jerked sideways before settling in to see what Jace saw. The strength of the internal lodestone field in each monolith is able to distort local field lines and poles. Over time, we have received more reports of these formations, causing a net migration of our poles to a location just offshore. The disruptive properties of the stones appear to also extend to an ability to warp the flow of mana through the region, with potentially severe effects for beings composed of raw mana-- particularly the angels of the plane. Perhaps there's more to Avacyn's madness... They had theorized, almost endlessly, just what the cryptoliths would be pointing to. And here, it seemed, they had found it: this nearly-finished ring of the same structures but writ so many times larger, thrusting up from below the surface of the water to tower in the air. The twisted stone formations hummed with energy, a low vibration the men couldn't exactly hear, but could feel in their bones, and the tapered points each pointed to the center of the circle. Flashes of movement caught his eye. Dense clouds roiled overhead, and a long procession of shambling humanoids waded through the frigid, shoulder-deep ocean water below. Zombies. More specifically, the waterlogged corpses of long-dead sailors left within Nephalia's reef. The stench of rotting meat was not, in fact, fish at all, but a well-brined undead labor force. And in the sky above them all was...nothing? Hanging aloft in the skies above this jagged ring was nothing more than the familiar heron moon. Jace had been prepared for a lot of things. But nothing? "I thought you'd promised me something here! You told me I'd find something!" he accused, withdrawing his mind from Ignis' own.
Ignis	Thus far, the experience of seeing the world, or at least brief glimpse of it, through Jace, had been a wholly unpleasant but necessary and admittedly useful experience for Ignis, but it certainly had never felt like that before, and, with what he saw...things were certainly not getting to be more encouraging. He frowned as he considered the formations and the wandering undead, but as the image faded from his perception and Jace spoke, his frown deepened. "How is this not something?" he asked, weighing the consideration for whether or not it would be pointless to also counter that he hadn't promised anything, just that they would likely find out more if they continued. And clearly, this was already proving true! "Perhaps we just need to get closer to find out more. Or, better still, take what we've already discovered to someone who might know more, like Lili--" But Ignis stopped, realizing that Jace was not listening to him, and that he was actually flipping through the pages of that journal yet again.
Jace	In summary of this initial set of observations, our best explanation is the sudden migration of a large celestial Object in increasingly close proximity to Innistrad. That was what the journal had said! A large celestial Object in increasingly close proximity to Innistrad! But above the jagged ring was nothing more than the familiar heron moon. He stared down into the empty, unfinished ring of stones dubiously. Large, but certainly not what he would classify as "celestial object" large. And the space above the ring appeared to be just that - empty space. "Uh, exactly how large were you thinking this thing is?" Taken in total, the findings presented in this work support the presence of an object of significant mass. Most likely a new astral body, an eldritch moon of sufficient size as to provide a gravitational pull able to disrupt the normal patterns of both the tides and magical energy. "Astral body? Moon-sized?" Jace looked down into the empty area above the ring. Was there another illusionist hidden nearby? He didn't sense anything of the sort. Future field studies will be arranged to investigate. Jace flipped forward in the journal, but found no more written on the topic. "You can't stop now! We're so close! Tell me! Tell me what it means!" He gripped the leather spine and shook the book with more force than he intended.
Ignis	A comment had been hanging on the tip of Ignis' tongue for a while, but every time it tried to come out, Jace began to speak again, until finally, he blurted it out, in his own frustration. "I don't think our paper companion has anything more to reveal that it hasn't already, Jace..."
Jace, Doing Just Great Right Now	"It keeps dancing so close!" Jace snapped, shaking the journal at Ignis as if to loosen from its pages its final secrets. "But then it doesn't deliver!" He forced himself to breathe, to calm. "We're close," he said. "Whatever this Drownyard is, whatever it does, we're close to figuring out the mystery, solving the puzzle. It's all connected, don't you see? The werewolves and the cryptoliths and the Object--we're so close to knowing even what the journal doesn't know!" He glanced to the circle of stones in the water. "But not close enough," he realized. "Come on. We've gotta get closer."
Ignis, Losing Patience	"Oh," said Ignis, "you mean just as I have been suggesting we do ever si--" But he stopped himself, biting off the words with a sharp inhale of breath and holding back an old desire to pinch the bridge of his nose. Well versed in the art of picking one's battle and having a feeling that attempting to pull back now would be even more frustrating and futile, he sighed and tried again, though his voice continued dripping with sarcasm with every single syllable. "Yes, capital idea, Jace. Let's go investigate the thing we specifically came here to investigate. I can't imagine how I didn't think of such a thing myself..." At this point, the amount of apologies and You Were Rights building up to take back to Liliana just may very well be massive enough to use their own gravitational pull to counteract their elusive Object...
Jace	If Jace noted the sarcasm, he didn't react to it, simply turned and headed for the circle. The telepath gritted his teeth against the bracing cold of the ocean water and waded in, keeping his distance from the prying eyes of the zombie procession. The vivid memory of Liliana's zombies, their cold, rotted hands pushed up against his windpipe, loomed in his mind. This is a dead end. Go home, Jace! Liliana had said to him, surrounded by her mindless, faithful undead. "No—!" He insisted aloud, with a vehemence that surprised him. His thoughts were too loud. Slow down, Beleren, he instructed himself. A few of the stones jutted up from the shallows, away from the procession that gathered in the center of the circle. "There are more of the smaller cryptoliths here," he told Ignis. "I'm going to examine one. Keep an--ear out, for if any of those zombies head our way." An ear. Definitely the body part he'd intended to say the whole time
Ignis	Honestly, at this point? The fact that Jace still had the wherewithal to correct himself was...oddly reassuring. As were the instructions, that no matter what might be going on inside the other man's head, there was at least some part of it still focused on what was around them in the here and now and physical plane. And he always did well with instructions...when they made sense for the situation. So he, with his blades already having been drawn and dancing with fire as much for the extra protection as the added warmth, nodded, and paused, and listened, not to what could be heard easily at first, but everything milling underneath it, that few rarely could even notice when he tried. Tracking in particular the movements of the zombies, any shifts in their scents, even, or just the pull in the air, strange and discombobulating as it was, to ensure none of them were about to make their task more difficult. There was a small part of him that almost felt that, should he find them on the attack, to merely step aside and not raise the alarm, but he quickly shoved that thought back and refused to acknowledge where it may have come from.
Jace	Jace made his way toward one of the stones and extended a hand to trace its direction in dim light. As before, a jolt of energy jumped from the surface of the stone to Jace with a loud POP, setting his ears and head ringing with a familiar sound. He raised his head slowly. A memory twitched. A blind spot, the Object, loomed in his vision, hovering just above the circle of stones in the distance. It pulsed with power in time with the lustrous web of veins on the monoliths below it. This was the nexus of Innistrad's redirected leylines, the siphoned center of its energy. That meant...
Jace's Imaginary(?) Friends	"You never were able to keep your hands to yourself, Beleren. And did you really have to let that thing zap you again?" A voice came from over his shoulder. The accompanying face peered over Jace's shoulder and emphatically rolled its violet eyes. "For a famously perceptive mage, you've had better moments." It reached forward as if to tap him on the tip of his nose with an illusionary finger. Jace's errant violet-eyed duplicate from his mental entrapment not even a full hour ago. Behind it were the others--the hooded duplicate and the pale duplicate.
Jace	"What are you doing here?" Jace sputtered, unaware he was once more speaking aloud to the empty air. "I left you and the other..." he pointed accusingly at the other duplicates, "...errant delusions back in that madwoman's head! You weren't welcome there, and if you're not going to help us against that," Jace motioned angrily at the reeking mass of zombies, "consider yourself unsummoned!"
Jace & Co	"There's no need to be defensive. Look, you're doing a fine job of handling it already!" The violet-eyed duplicate pointed toward the center of the formation, where the pale duplicate and the hooded duplicate were eagerly advancing into the center of the ring of stones. They didn't appear to notice or care for the teeming zombie masses in their paths. "Get back here! Move!" Jace hissed at them under his breath, beckoning them like an aggravated parent with errant children. "Move back, damn you!"
Ignis	"Jace! What--" Ignis had only just recovered from that loud POP, wincing at the ringing that seemed to bounce around in his skull and rendered him utterly useless until it began to fade. He'd barely gotten those words out before realizing there was some sort of commotion he'd missed in the meanwhile, and, instinctively, hearing Jace's hissing words emerging from the resonance as it drifted away, he did move back. But he had a hissing demand of his own as he regained his orientation as best he could. "Jace! What is happening? What did you do this time?"
Jace	"They're here!" Jace said, sounding incredibly aggravated. "They came out of my head uninvited and now they're not doing what I say! Even though they're my duplicates!"
Ignis	"It would seem," Ignis murmured, mostly to himself, echoes of previous statements made about what should or should not belong inside Jace's head never quite leaving him, even now, "you've got quite the issue with that lately, haven't you?"
A...sorotomi?	"We can finally complete our measurements! What would you put the dimensions of these stone samples at?" The pale duplicate's form wavered, its features slimming to delicate angles, rumpled hair becoming two neatly plaited tresses held in place by what appeared to be two leporine ears. The pale duplicate had reformed completely into a soratami--one of the moonfolk of Kamigawa. The same, it seemed, as the vision that he'd seen in Markov Manor, the one who wrote-- "--the journal. Is this...?" Jace sputtered, clutching at the book in his pocket. "I mean...is that you?" "Most likely a new astral body, an eldritch moon of sufficient size as to provide a gravitational pull able to disrupt the normal patterns of both the tides and magical energy," the soratami illusion intoned with sudden solemnity. "I need you to focus, we've work to do--and where's your compass?" it yelled back at Jace as it strode purposefully toward the stones.
Hooded Jace	The hooded duplicate had already reached the base of the Object, where he stopped and stared up. "Just like in the madwoman's mind! Why did you have us leave her behind? Now we'll never know what she knew!" Was it just Jace's imagination, or did the assembled zombies begin to stir at the shrill pitch of the duplicate's voice? "Jace, look up!" it cried. "They're here!"
Original Flavor Jace	As Jace turned, something fell onto his head from above and rolled off into the sea. And again. Raindrops? He held out a hand, and grasped at the next as it fell. They were...feathers? Falling from a dense cloud overhead. He squinted. No, it wasn't a cloud, it was made of moving things. Huge winged things. Angels. They swarmed in midair above the center of the circle, some wheeling near the cryptoliths like moths to a flame and calling out in harsh, birdlike tones. The sound of their massive wingbeats echoed against the cliffs and through Jace's aching head. Oh yes, he'd seen these before. The same pages that had first described the cryptoliths had described Avacyn in the same breath. A sign, a clue...it was something, it had to be something. "The angels..." he whispered. "They're all here. Why are they congregating here?"
Ignis	Ignis had just started to wonder what he was even doing here, just trying to follow as best he could the half-sided ravings of a man clearly experiencing things well beyond the veil of what he could perceive, so, instead, he focused on what he could. The movement of the horde, the odd crashing of the waves, any signs of distress beyond his ramblings from Jace, and, in doing so, he started to hear it, as well, probably well before Jace did. A stirring of air, the beating of wings, the rustle of... Something brushed against his cheek, and he lifted his fingers at the touch of a feather's kiss. A moment later, he was able to catch the next as it began to fall past his nose. Pieces shifted, rearranging themselves. Jace's whisper all but locked them into place. "Well," Ignis murmured again, oh-so-eloquently, as he found himself pulling back the magic from his daggers so that he could sheath them neatly and reach for the lance at his back instead, "fuck."
Jace(s)	"What?" Jace asked, blinking at Ignis preparing for battle. "I don't...the angels, what do they mean?" "Impressive-looking but useless creatures. Bird wings and bird brains," the violet-eyed duplicate scoffed, leaning against Jace's shoulder. He slashed his hand into the empty air beside him. "That's not helpful right now! Ignis, I know these three keep yammering on, but what are you--?"
Ignis	"Preparing a weapon more suited for avian enemies than undead ones," Ignis snapped, which then huffed out into am irritated sigh that he couldn't hold back any longer, followed by a further expression of his frustration. "What else? Have you forgotten already, Jace? The angels have gone mad. Lunacy, Jace! The use of the word is typically tied to beliefs of a madness borne specifically from the moon, and here we are, drawn by that journal, to this unknown Object with the ability to alter the tides, and you think they're here....what? As a welcoming committee? Oh, I'm sure we'll be truly esteemed guests in the bloody Drownyard Temple!"
	"Oh..." Jace said softly, while the violet-eyed duplicate snickered. "But the author of the journal...the moonfolk..." He pointed, forgetting how useless that gesture was for Ignis--and how useless it would still be even if the man could see. Below the swarm, the hooded duplicate only stared up at the sky, transfixed by the inexorable pull of the Object and the angels circling overhead. "What pulls the tides?" Jace heard it murmur. "Zombies or angels? What is my purpose, how will I end? Too many questions..." "Too many questions," Jace echoed. "But what..." The hooded duplicate walked forward toward the center of the circle of twisted stones, up to its neck in the icy seawater, head tilted back, eyes still firmly focused upward. It continued moving doggedly forward as the waters closed over its head, entombing it below the surface. Jace watched in silence as the duplicate's face, his face, slowly disappeared. "He's drowning...all the questions pulled him under? Or was it the answers that did it?" He walked further into the ocean, water up to his thighs making his movements ungainly. "So many damn questions."
Liliana...?	A voice spoke from over Jace's shoulder. "You remember what she told us, don't you?" the violet-eyed duplicate asked with a raised eyebrow and a smile too wide to be sincere. "Excuse me?" Jace Beleren croaked, his throat dry. "That first night when you came here to see her." The duplicate's voice had changed. It was...recognizeable now. The outlines of its illusionary form wavered under the moonlight, and slowly it rearranged itself to a familiar form: Liliana Vess.
Jace	"I didn't come here to see her! I—I came to find Sorin!"
Ignis	Oh, but to be a fly on the wall for the other half of whatever conversations Jace Beleren seemed to be conducting right now, the disjointed reactions and stuttering giving Ignis barely anything to work from in deciphering the things that only he was apparently bearing witness to. But something in that last one, in particularly...oh, that one struck a chord, especially since he was quite sure where these visions had taken the other man now. "You came here," Ignis reminded him, firmly and insistently, though he had a feeling it was of very little use, "to investigate the cryptoliths, Jace. We are here to learn more about the Object, so if we could please refocus our attention while we still can." That flurry of beating wings was doing a worrisome thing to his heartbeat, and the addition of possibly having to rein in his increasingly unreliable set of eyes in this matter even more was beginning to weigh on him greater than any gravitational pull...
Liliana(?)	Oh, darling. You were making such good points, but you knew how captivating Liliana could be. Did you think a mental construct of one would be any less? "She knows you. She didn't ask you to come here, surrounded by the undead and those..." she flicked a hand upward in brusque disgust "...winged vermin." Liliana's voice jangled his raw nerves like a skilled violinist playing a chord, leaning into him, so her lips almost brushed his ear. "This is all so very interesting, don't you think?"
Jace	Jace stopped in his tracks. Of course. He'd known it all along, hadn't he? "It was you! You brought them here! That was why you'd sent your ghouls after me, why you'd warned me about angels when I first arrived!" Jace could feel the blood rising in his face and could hear his voice, grating and shrill against her calm. He stepped forward to face her. "This is your doing! You've always hated them, and you've been planning this for years, haven't you? You're the one twisting their minds, making them rage, bringing them here! Lambs to the slaughter, all gathered together for you to cut down in one blow. How did you do it? What do you have planned? Do you know what forces you're toying with?" Blood pounded in his temples; beads of sweat rolled off his brow. "Answer me! I'll not let you make a fool out of me!"
Liliana	"You don't need my help for that, Jace. And you...you know better, don't you?" Though illusionary, Liliana's eyes were the same ancient, depthless violet that Jace had remembered. They brimmed with terrible secrets crafted from lifetimes of ruthlessness.
Jace	Frustrated words and accusations piled up in Jace's throat as he stared at the Liliana illusion's smiling face, but as he started to speak, it suddenly dissipated into the cold night air. "No! Lili! Where did you go?! Get back here!" He whirled around, searching for the ancient necromancer, whose secrets were only matched by her capacity for cruelty. He didn't find her. But he did find Ignis. "I'm so stupid," he sneered, advancing on the other man. "How the two of you must have been laughing at me together. Imagine, me actually believing that she'd let you come with me against her wishes! That she'd run after you to say goodbye! Ha! Are you her puppet, come to keep me from putting it all together? Figuring it all out? Or did you volunteer to keep your place in her bed?"
Ignis	And that shift, that halt in Jace's trudging before him in the water, the calming of the sloshing water surrounding them, shifted Ignis' attention sharply toward him, especially as his suspicions of the nature of the specter holding Jace in such a debate became clearly confirmed. The Liliana he claimed belonged in his head, refusing as any Liliana should, to be confined by any such entrapments. He listened to these wild accusations with his brow knitted in consternation, and he may have scoffed at the ridiculousness of the notions if it weren't for the direness of their situation, Jace's grip on reality slipping even further with these illusionary ravings with himself. At least even his wild imaginings of Liliana knew better than to stick around and listen to his desperate rants, but then that left-- Ignis stepped back as Jace started his way, the lance in his hands twirling slightly as he shifted his grip to better serve close combat, if need be. His other hand lifted, reached out in a placating gesture. "I assure you, Jace," he said, his voice calm and steady and determined, "whatever involvement you're thinking Liliana has had in all of this, it isn't true. She couldn't even be less disinterested. This is just like what we experience at Markov Manor. Insubstantial glimmers. Wayward illusions. Ephemeral glimpses no doubt meant to distract you, to obfuscate the truth. Focus, Jace! On the cryptoliths, on the puzzle. Puzzles want to be solved, Jace."
Jace	At that, Jace wavered. Right. The vampires. The cryptoliths. The puzzle. The buzzing in his head was getting louder, more insistent. He pressed his hands against his temples like he could shove it out, and shook his head. What Ignis was saying made sense. Wait no, it was a lie, it must be, Lili always lied. "Stay away from me," Jace mumbled as he turned and made his way back to the shore. He sat alone, shivering in the dark. His robes did nothing to keep the chill from his bones, and his numb feet refused to regain feeling. He was unhurt, but shaken. In front of him, the procession of ghouls continued on, undisturbed by Jace's passage. Above them, angels wheeled in a large loop. He looked back at the circle of stones. The Object had disappeared. The buzzing in his head grew stronger and with it, his certainty that Liliana was behind this. His shaking hands went to the journal, but stopped as they went to flip open the cover. Questions still flooded his mind - how had Liliana moved the tides, or the stones for that matter? What was the astral formation that the journal had insisted on? The words of the journal lingered in his mind: "For every answer, three questions..." No, a dull, buzzing voice reverberated through his mind. Stop asking. Too many unanswered questions. You don't need the book and its bottomless well of mysteries. They'll drown you. Jace shoved the book away into his robes. You've come this far. You know the answer. Stop searching. He played the images over and over again in his mind; unable to erase the image of Liliana's face and its mocking smile. "Angels. Zombies. Dead end..." The silver moon hung alone in the sky expectantly, its soft light seeming to cleanse the land and sea it illuminated. Jace knew what he had to do. "It's a lie," he said, standing up. "Maybe she's fooled you, too. Gods, she played me like a fool for months and I never knew. But it's not true. It can't be true. Zombies? Angels? Immense power? And Liliana's disinterested?" He scoffed. "You're a fool if you believe that. Let me give you some advice. Liliana always lies. There's only one person she cares about and that's herself. She's just really good at pretending otherwise, but when you get between her and what she wants, that's when she shows what she really is. An ancient power-hungry being with no morals and no scruples. And whatever she's got planned, I can't let her get away with it."
Ignis	"....Jace." Ignis had lowered his weapon; he cautiously relaxed his stance the moment the other man had told him to stay away, backing up a moment to honor the request, to give him that moment, although he did, eventually, follow him through the water to the shore, keeping his distance, shifting his attention slightly more, to the eerie shift left in the wake of the Object's disappearance, unbeknownst to him, though he could certainly guess, until Jace spoke again. And he listened. And he understood where Jace might be coming from with his reasoning. Was there still a small part of him that seemed to flicker with the idea that perhaps he was right? Perhaps. But even if that little flicker of doubt was correct, it really didn't matter. All that mattered now was just walking Jace back from where this recent bout of delusion had led him. "Please..."
Jace	"You should go. Get off this plane, out of her clutches. If you truly don't know what she's up to. Because I'm going to stop her, Ignis. And if that means stopping you, too, so be it." With that, he stepped backwards, Planeswalking away in a complex crisscross pattern of blue light that hummed in the air like a neon sign before fading away.
Ignis	"Jace! Wai--" And Ignis stepped forward to reach for the other man, but he knew before he could even reach out to him, what that buzzing hum and the sudden shift in the energies around him, that sudden absence and the odd way the essence of the air had changed and shifted and then scrambled to set themselves right again meant. And he cursed himself for forgetting that Jace was just as much a Planeswalker as Liliana was, and, after a moment to reorganize his thoughts, breathed out and turned to head away from the Drownyard Temple the only way someone who was very much not a Planeswalker could. And as if it couldn't get any worse than that, he realized, just a bit too late, that trudging around in the ocean water was unfortunately an excellent way to waterlog one's phone and make it nearly impossible to even send Liliana a message of warning, let alone summon a portal for himself.

[[ the journey of Ignis's godlike patience is continued from here and yoinked and yeeted around from "The Drownyard Temple" by Mel Li by myself and the incomparable, incalculable, incredible deathsmajesty, with all the same warnings for length and NFB, NFI, OOC love addendums! ]]