Naunet

Gesturing again to the sand in front of them, K'deiki squinted through the shadows her granddaughter searchingly. "That there is bad to speak of troubles me, but does not surprise me," she said, voice a scratchy whisper. The bowl she had been working with earlier was set aside, and she shifted on her skins so that she was facing directly towards K'luha. Further back in the tent, K'jhanhi watched with a silent frown, his tail curling expectantly. His words tagged after K'deiki's at a natural pace, "I would caution you not to hide anything from us in this dire time."

"It would be too much to ask," came a low, crackling voice from one side of the room, "for their simple task to be completed without complication." Yellow eyes frowned from within deep wrinkles of leathery skin blotched with dark birthmarks. K'jhanhi stood, but he didn't move from his spot, instead looming from the corner quietly. "The Warden save us all," a smaller, hunched woman, K'deiki, muttered with a hint of amusement. Her fingers brushed through an array of bone beads she had spread across a small bowl as she spoke. After a moment, the third remaining elder, the grandmother K'luha had sought to call for, looked up towards her granddaughter and her nunh. Thin lips turned down. "You do not look well. Sit."

It's funny. They're worried about their precious, 70 year old toasters running out of housing lots and leading to people being unable to get a house. So their solution is to price lots so high that people are unable to get a house. Squeenix logic at its finest. It's a good thing I have my Rift dimension to take my housing attentions, and it's a thousand times better designed system than this crap. >_<

K'piru did not look up when K'ile approached, nor when K'luha made her fearful exit. She'd shut her eyes and turned away from the others and now sat in a corner at the back of the tent, bowed over her knees. When K'luha and her daughter's scents faded, there came some relief, but the memories they had stirred remained as raw and bleeding as ever. Little K'ailia's burns became K'airos's burns, and K'airi's. And Thalens. K'luha's panic echoed and intensified her own, even after the woman left, and a low, faint moan, the desperate sound of a wounded animal, broke from her throat. When K'aijeen had left, K'piru had thought she'd crumble, both from the pain of losing a daughter and the guilt over the relief she had felt, relief that she no longer had to live in terror over what her daughter might do next. But she'd had her girls, and Thalen, then. They buoyed her, recalled to her a purpose and a family. But now... Her eyes cracked open, red and wet, and peered sideways at K'ile. "They will... They will be alright, if I..." she trailed off, suddenly afraid of speaking what she had just considered, ashamed and terrified, but desperate.

K'ailia's unexpected entrance brought up short K'piru's attempt at escape, and she stumbled back from the girl as K'ile moved to pull K'ailia away. She shook, tremors visibly shivering down from her shoulders to her tail and shaking her hands, which she wrapped about opposite arms tightly, hugging herself. K'ile spoke but she did not hear him. K'ailia's words echoed in her head ceaselessly, but the young girl's voice transformed, shifted pitch and tone until it was sickeningly familiar. It was K'airos's voice, bright and as piercing as sunlight, but twisted with pain. It hurts... She turned as though to hide, found only the tent walls, and spun back around only to see K'airi, much younger than she had been when she'd left with the others for battle, in K'ailia's place. The image held for only a second before flickering away like a ghost, but it was enough to take the strength from her legs. She didn't know what K'luha or K'ailia were doing here; she didn't ask.

Letting out a laugh that tossed his head back and shook the muscles of his shoulders down to his tail, the unearthed man grinned behind the mask. "I don't think that will be much of a problem." Lifting a hand, her turned back to the road, eyed its rock path for another second, and then just started walking. If he found answers along the way, then so be it, and if he saw the Duskwight again, it would be a happy circumstance, but with his skin still muddied by grave-earth and his face obscured by a strange, wooden mask, the unearthed man decided it would be best to let those things come on their own.

The unearthed man chuckled where he now stood in the road, then seemed to consider the Duskwight's words. "Wait... You're serious?" He certainly looked it, the man thought as he squinted towards the Duskwight in the brush. "Hm." Casting a look about the road, which seemed to wind out from one identical patch of forest and bend off into another, the miqo'te quirked his mouth behind the mask and ran one dirty hand through his hair. "So. Just stay on the road, huh." He wasn't sure how he felt about being deposited on some strange road in a strange forest to make for a (supposed) city that was surely just as strange as everything else. Then again, it wasn't as though he were completely helpless; perhaps it was just that time to move on, just as he had needed to move on from the chaotic questions in his mind and the strange emptiness that refused to answer them. "If I come back out here, could I find you again?" He swiveled his head towards where the Duskwight had stood.

The unearthed man brought both hands up in front of him in a surrendering gesture, pausing his steps to declare, "Alright, yeesh. How am I supposed to know what this crazy forest can or can't do?" He regained his pace then, ragged tail swishing in broad arcs behind him. For a few long moments, he just watched the Duskwight's back, the old man's form bending and swaying in an invisible wind as he moved. The unearthed man turned his face upward, peering through the holes of the mask towards the canopy, and managed to make out glimpses of blue through the trees. The sky. Inexplicably, it bolstered him to be able to see it. He could almost remember how open spaces smelled... This thought confused him, so he shook his ears and brought his gaze back to the Duskwight. "I don't really understand how a forest can want to kill people anyway. I haven't done anything to it, except... well, not be dead." There was a pause, and then a bit quieter he added, "Thanks, though."

When K'ile's words - desperate words, pleading words - cut off, K'piru felt the jarring collision through him and cringed away, ears flattening. She felt suddenly frightened, terrified of facing anyone, let alone someone like K'luha, of seeing the grief and the judgment in their faces. Hearing their own accusations, their own losses. She couldn't bear it. The air in the tent grew thick in her lungs, suffocating, and she scrambled back away from K'ile and K'luha, not wondering how or why the other woman had come crashing into them, only concerned about avoiding her fear and pain and grief. She had to get away, before the weight of it all crushed her, and in this panic she made for the exit.

Once again, Squeenix has gotten it all completely, horribly backwards. The implement new content, but the bulk of the effort that goes into enjoying that new content comes before you can even participate in said content. For some batshit reason, they decided that the journey in housing should start and largely end before you even get the house. Horrid decision. Getting the plot/house should be at most an extremely minor bump in the road (and a nonexistent issue for individual homes). The meat of the content should come from banding together to craft and farm up materials and decorations to transform your acquisition into a masterpiece. Rift got this right. WildStar got this right. XIV... seems to have lost 99% of its braincells when it comes to designing non-combat content.

Maybe if your character is part of the military. For those of us playing civilian characters, it makes it really hard to justify being present at places like Camp Bronze Lake.

I've already completed the quests twice and don't have a third character yet at level to go through them again, so I can't provide screenshots. However, the lore comes from the quests in Bronze Lake. There are a number of them that involve you bringing liquid relief to recovering soldiers, and the NPC talks to you about how they created the place as a destination of relaxation for those stricken by war. There's even a quest where the NPC expresses great frustration at another NPC for faking a war injury (or at least, faking its severity) to gain access to Camp Bronze Lake. He treats it like some vacation spa, and the woman who gives you the quest is not very happy about it.

The thing that confuses me about this is... How are you handling the lore that states Camp Bronze Lake is a sauna destination strictly for recovering soldiers? Are you just ignoring it and pretending your resort is actually located elsewhere (i.e. not actually at THE Camp Bronze Lake)?

K'ile was very close, so much that his scent might have been enough to chase away the death and blood and fire that clung to her nose if he too hadn't also been shrouded in it, but K'piru had never felt so isolated. His words sought to comfort, but all they did was remind her of what she had already lost. "There's nothing... nothing left," she breathed and sagged forward. "And K'yohko is..." She had barely processed the words the nunh had flung at her out in the dunes, so stricken and hysterical with grief she had been, but now they settled over her and joined the emptiness. She heard them again then, the nunh's voice racketing from the corners of her mind and pushing at the fear, the pain, the loneliness. The guilt for her grief was almost too much.

She kept her eyes on his hands on her own, scraped and dirty knuckles set like an anchor against her hardly cleaner skin. She couldn't speak for a time after, losing herself in her own memories of flame and terror, feeling her heart catch in her throat as her thoughts created an unbidden and unwanted image of Thalen and her girls in that inferno. She could hear their screams. K'piru blinked back tears and realized she had curled forward so that her forehead pressed against her and K'ile's hands. She could feel herself shaking but didn't know how to stop it. "It burned here, too. So many. I don't... I don't understand what it was," she whispered. "Or why it... it took my... Azeyma's forsaken us, K'ile. If she--if she ever watched over us at all."

When K'ile left her in the tent, the emptiness in her chest seemed to grow to take his place, filling the entirety of the tent until she felt as though she'd suffocate in it. She didn't dare leave its walls, risking the sights and sounds and smells of the tribe, their words, their accusations, their grief. Somewhere amongst their tattered tents, K'yohko patrolled, and he too she found herself cowering from. Instead she clawed weakly at the sand, mumbled teary pleas to Azeyma for relief, for the return of those precious things taken from her, but nothing but the emptiness and the silence of the tent answered. Their Warden had failed. Their Warden would not answer. In that silence, she found a smoldering heat deep in her belly. It twined around her grief with a stifling strength that reminded her of the smoke that had choked their lungs as they fled across the sands. When K'ile returned with food and water, K'piru no longer lay curled uselessly on her side. She sat in the middle of the tent, legs folded beneath her, and she looked to him where he stood. Her tail still twisted weakly in the sand, her ears drooped low to the sides of her head, and her eyes and face were red and puffy from the tears that still gathered and fell. For a long moment, she took in his bowed form, the dirt and blood smeared across skin and bandages, the dull look in his usually brilliant eyes. Swallowing back the pain his image brought, she spoke, "You saw it." Her voice carried faintly, barely more than a whisper, but the tone was low and almost calm. "I want... you to tell me how they died."

It's a typo; the patch notes are hilariously full of them. It drops 0.14% every six hours.

K'ile's voice rolled over her shoulders like waves of fine sand. Dimly she thought that his words should be comforting, but every word he spoke only called up memories that now seemed stained with loss. She no longer tried to pull away from him, but neither did she turn to him, or lean against him, or open herself to his comfort. She couldn't; even if she wanted to, and perhaps some part of her desperately wanted to, she couldn't. Even his scent reminded her of them. "I need my girls," she whimpered after a long silence broken only by shaky breaths and tears. "I need Thalen." She knew. She begged and screamed at the world for otherwise, but she knew. They were gone.

With nothing else to do, the unearthed man followed after the Duskwight. The slower pace suited him just fine; he didn't think he felt like dealing with other people quite yet anyway. Hopefully by the time they reached... "Gridania? A city, right?" The name was vaguely familiar, but he had no thoughts or images to associate it with. This annoyed him, and he resolved that the first thing he would do would be to establish a sense of direction. Rubbing at the mud smeared in dry patches down one arm, the man found himself casting his gaze about him in search of something, but when he realized he didn't know what, he ceased. A moment later, he snatched a broad leaf from a bush as they inched by and began to scrub at his arm with it. "Not sure if I should thank or be angry at that girl," he mused as he scraped at the mud.

K'ile's voice, low and consistent, worked its way through the cracks of the walls K'piru hid behind, and with a glacial slowness, she dragged her awareness forward, to that voice, to those blue eyes watching her behind a mess of red hair. He looked so much like... A thin sound broke from her throat and she tried to turn away. "Gone, he's gone," she whimpered, feeling so very small. "They're not here. I need to-- need to go, to wait for... bring them back..." The words came unbidden, tumbling from her throat on faint breaths. In her grief, her thoughts melded those words with K'yohko's, and the woman coughed out a single sob before falling silent once more, eyes turned away and refusing to focus on the world around her, or the person near her. "I can't. I can't. I can't..."

The unearthed man swung his head to one side and then the other, taking in the forest now in the dim light of morning. His tail flicked behind him, still aching from the fall. He saw trees all around, trees and brush and tall, broad-leafed plants reaching for the last bits of sunlight where they could manage to squeeze in. It seemed less foreboding in this light, if not any less confusing. He could not tell any direction, and it all looked and smelled the same. The Duskwight's words he chewed over in silence for a time, scratching at his cheek beneath the mask and flaking away more dried mud. If someone had buried him, did that mean he had died? "I don't feel dead," he observed with a shrug and a half-grimace. He tried to search his memory, straining for any thought or sense of a young girl, or his relation to her, or what might have transpired, but just like all else, he found himself facing nothing but cold emptiness. The pit in his mind stared back at him like the pit he'd crawled from. He didn't like it and did not want to dwell on it. "I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine."

K'piru made no sign of noticing K'ile's arms. She was hardly aware of even his presence as her mind cowered behind desperate, crumbling walls. When he went to lift her, she just curled tighter, hands over her head, breath coming in short bursts with great gaps between. Kin-killer. Her Thalen was gone. Murderer. Her beautiful girls had left her. The words wormed their way through her brain no matter how deep she tried to burrow away. K'piru would not hinder K'ile's actions. She remained quiet and shaking as he took her from the sand.

Biting words leapt to the dirt-stained miqo'te's throat but stilled as something wooden and oblong dropped to the ground beside him. He snatched it up and directed his glare to the object: a smooth, wooden mask with two, perfectly round holes carved out of its surface through which eyes could see. "More hiding from angry spirits?" he spat, but the anger began to dull not long after those words. This grudge did not seem right to keep. As long as the Duskwight did not try to send him into anymore pits. He made to wipe his face free of the thick mud that had dried in broad streaks across it, but he had little clean space on skin or clothing available to him, so all he really managed was to smear it around and knock off the thickest of the chunks. The dirt might not have bothered him if it hadn't smelled of that ill earth he'd crawled from, but he ground his teeth and secured the mask anyway. It felt strange on his face, restricting to the expression of his features, and it caught his breath and bounced it back to him, creating an uncomfortable warmth beneath his nose and lips. Again he wondered if there was any truth to the Duskwight's insistence of hiding his face, but for now there seemed no harm in playing along. "Eh, what's another hole when you've already climbed out of the worst of them," the unearthed man muttered and stood, stretching up along one wall and feeling around for roots to use as hand and footholds. The rope he largely ignored, until he ran out of other things to grab. He put the pit to his back gladly when he finally emerged, pleased that his legs felt more stable now. The forest's chaotic smells still confused his senses, but there was less chaos in his mind to mix with it. The questions remained, but they had settled, smoothed over. He turned his masked face to the Duskwight, squinting a bit as he peered through the holes. "As much as I'd like to say I can handle it from here, I've got no clue where I am." He dropped his eyes briefly to the bundle in the Duskwight's arms and bit back an unnerved shiver, though his ears shifted in mud-caked hair to press against his skull.

She couldn't speak for lack of breath, and the desert spun around her. She brought her hands up to press desperately at her ears, but they could not block out the fury of those accusations, the hatred and horror fueling K'yohko's every gesture and eruption of word. K'piru curled in on herself in the sand, quaking beneath each blow that landed with greater weight and pain than if he'd struck her. Kin-killer. Murderer. She could hardly comprehend the words, and so she didn't. Instead, she retreated fully, away from K'yohko's vengeful rants and K'ile's scent and the family that still had not found their way over the horizon. Face down in the sand, K'piru shuddered.

There was time only for a confused huff when the Duskwight paused, and then the ground the miqo'te stood upon crumbled. He let out a shout, grasping at debris that fell with him, and hit the earth below with a heavy grunt. His tail folded painfully beneath him as he stared up at the now impossibly small and far hole, moonlight piercing through enough to cast a thin line of white across his chest. He heard the Duskwight's words, shuddered, and a roar of protest burst from his lungs. How dare he send him back to the earth, back into the darkness with the worms and old, dead things! The mud-caked man writhed at the bottom of this new pit, rolled to one side, and reached up to claw at the wet, root-riddled walls, clumps of soil tearing free in his hands. Thunder cracked above, with a violence that seemed to shake the walls and floor of the earthy cage, and the the man fell back to the ground. Images of ravenous beasts flashed across the back of his skull, their forms illuminated by the faint moonlight peeking through the gap above, and he growled in confusion. He could try to drag himself out of this pit, just like he'd done with the first, he realized, but the forest in its incomprehensible rage would be waiting. Yet it wouldn't find him in this hole? Was this not where it wanted him? What reason did he have to trust the old Duskwight? But then, a better question would be: What better choice did he have? Cracked nails dug into dirty palms, grinding the mud deep into the seams of his skin as he glared upwards and waited.