Chapter Notes: What the jailbreak looked like from the inside. Kosei comes of age in Carceri, until suddenly she doesn't. (Worldbuilding the prison dimension, and backstory for an oni with bard levels.)
Part the Second: What Came Before
(or, Five People Who Changed Kosei's Life)
Tamae—
"The hero married the princess, and they ruled together wisely and well for the rest of their days, at least until the green dragon from the kingdom next door flew in and drowned the whole kingdom in acid. The End."
Kosei squints at the text in front of her, then turns in her mother's lap, frowning. "It doesn't say that last part, Mama."
Tamae sniffs, dismissive. "It might as well have. There's no such thing as a happy-ever-after, my giblet." She closes the book with a firm snap. The lantern light gives the worn leather cover a dull gleam, and shines in Tamae's looping black hair. The wagon cover curves close overhead, enclosing them in warm solitude, though Kosei can hear the odd murmur from the caravan guards or the horses away outside.
Kosei's skin feels too tight. She scratches at her elbow, annoyed. "If there's no such thing as a happy-ever-after, why do the stories all end with one? Why do you always have to change the ending?"
"Realistic expectations." Her mother sets the book aside and picks up a brush instead. She spreads her fingers—short and pale, and dull—across the top of Kosei's head and turns it firmly back towards the front. "Trying to be a hero here will get you worse than killed."
"Then why don't you get a different book to read to me out of?" Kosei fingers the edge of her mother's kimono, turning it up to examine the recently redone hem.
"Firstly, because we're still new here, and there's only so much of the merchandise they'll let me handle." The brushstrokes fall firm and steady through Kosei's hair, but one of her mother's hands remains braced gently across her skull. "Secondly, I'm teaching you to read; the caravan only has so many books that are appropriate."
"What's in the other ones?" Her knuckles tingle, Kosei drops the kimono and balls up her hands into fists, tucking them hurriedly behind her elbows.
"Oh, diaries, treatises on the historical impact of dwarvish forging techniques, useless necromantic texts—that sort of thing. Let me see your hands, dear."
Kosei tightens her arms. Four needles prick at each of her palms; she's tired, and she's slipped again. "Whose diaries are they? Are they from here or outside?"
"…Kosei." Tamae pauses in her brushing, voice gone low and cold. "Your hands. Now."
Heat building in her face, Kosei turns out her hands. In the lamp light, her claws gleam, long and black, and sharp. Color suffuses her fingertips, bleeding out from her knuckles, a blue to match the true sky, or so her mother once told her.
Tamae sighs, the air tickling at Kosei's ear. "Well," she says quietly, "you've kept them the right size, at least. You remember how to put them away?"
Kosei does, she thinks, but she shakes her head anyway. Her mother keeps form perfectly—a human woman with languid brown eyes and a sad, refined smile, hair smooth as a stream and black as a crack in stone, teeth straight and white. Kosei misses her real form, the pale ring of her eyes, the shining black of her claws and her teeth.
Kosei misses truth in a way she guesses her mother must miss freedom.
Tamae sets the brush down and tucks one arm around her daughter's waist, reaching her other hand out where Kosei can see it. Dark blue spills across her skin; her fingers lengthen and harden, and her nails shift to black, gleaming as they narrow down to knife-edge sharpness. When the change is complete, she rests her cheek lightly against the top of Kosei's head.
"It's like walking. You decide where you want to go, put your foot out in that direction, and move your weight from one leg to the other. Keep doing that until you're there. We want to look human, so we remember what humans look like, and we take it one step at a time until we're there." As she talks, the words whispered into Kosei's hair, she turns her palm upward, taking Kosei's smaller hand in her own. "The humans we want to be have skin much paler than ours, so first we pull out the color until it matches. You're already much closer than me, so just follow my lead."
She circles her thumb across Kosei's knuckles; kneads at Kosei's fingers with her own. Kosei sighs, small and unhappy, and follows her mother's directions.
Orthin—
"So how does chicken taste, then?"
"Eh, some people say it tastes like humans."
Kosei sighs, heavier than she'd intended, and looks gloomily at Orthin through the maze of pipes and metalwork that make up his still. "So that's no good either."
The dwarf shrugs, busy with his mortar and pestle. The rods of cinnamon he'd traded a gallon of his last brew for filled the inside of his wagon with their scent, and dusted his hands with a fine reddish powder. "We're a little limited on fine cuisine here, my girl. But that said, it seems to me that the answer to your dilemma is to cultivate a connoisseur's palate."
"What does that mean?"
"Give the batch a stir, will you?" He elbows a glass rod dangling from the array of rods, reeds, measures, mugs, and tools suspended along his ceiling. "It's like this: back where I come from, if you walked into a tavern, put a coin down on the bar, and said, 'Gimme a flagon o' your finest ale,' you'd get an ale. But how it tasted, that'd depend on the bar and the coin. And if you were a no-account amateur drinker, you'd maybe think your copper-piece flagon from the dive tasted about the same as your gold-crown top-shelf from the king's row. But as a connoisseur, you'd know the first one was swill, just—" he pauses to make a face at her, eyes rolling back beneath his heavy white brows, tongue sticking out one side of his mouth "—complete goat piss. And the second one, well, you'd be able to pick out ingredients, you could tell what mountain it was made under, you could guess the type of wood it distilled in—ah, Kosei, I could go on for hours." He shakes his head, sighing with a note of mourning. "And if someone told you, 'Well, they taste about the same to me,' you'd say, 'You slanderous rotter, I challenge you to say that to me when I have an axe in my hand!'"
Kosei, kneeling on the workbench and swishing the rod around the inside of the still, listens in interest. She isn't certain about all the words—a copper-piece sounds different than an ingot of copper, and she has no idea what a tavern is, other than some kind of building, nor does she know how a tavern bar might be different from, say, a wooden beam or a crowbar—but Orthin is telling her a sort of story anyway, even if he wouldn't think of it that way. Not everyone in the caravan is so willing to talk about The Outside.
"So…" She trails off, frowning. "But Mother says babies are delicious. Wouldn't they be the—top-shelf gold-crown, compared to things that just taste like them?"
Orthin waves this off, and sets the pestle full of cinnamon down at the far side of his bench. "Pass me the rod and put the lid back on," he instructs, and takes the tool from her when she obediently pulls it out of the still and holds it out to him. He runs it under his nose, sniffing at it, then touches his tongue delicately to the smooth surface. "Good, good," he murmurs. "Coming along well.
"I've never had one," he continues, turning his attention back to her, "but I'm sure and certain babies would be too fatty to be any good. It's just a matter of getting you used to leaner meats. And more cooked ones, at that. I'm sure we can do it."
"And that will mean Mother and I can stay?" Kosei presses. "In our true forms?"
"Mondon never goes back on a deal." Orthin wipes the rod down with a cloth, then tips it into a bucket of water under his bench. "You're getting old enough that he's going to want you picking a trade soon, though."
Suppressing her smile, Kosei lets him sit on the words, and mulls them over herself. He goes on working, scooping a container out from under the table and beginning to tap the cinnamon into it, his lined hands rocking in time with the even sway of the wagon. When he's finished—container back under the workbench, mortar and pestle wiped off and added to the wash pail—he finally shoots her a glance, raising a heavy eyebrow.
"What, no ideas at all?" he prompts.
"I like your stories," she answers. "And how you work so hard on…" She lines the words up in her head, testing the sound of them before she lets them go. "On making your drinks special even though—"
"No one else cares?" he asks, but she shakes her head.
"Even though they'd drink them anyway," she finishes.
"Well," he says, short and dry. "I don't know if your mother's told you this yet, my girl, but everyone in Carceri needs something to care about. If you don't have that, eventually, you just…" He trails off then, frowning down vaguely at his work bench.
"You just what?" she asks him after a few seconds.
"…You like my stories, you say?" he asks, looking over at her. "This isn't a nice one."
"I want to hear it anyway." Kosei presses her hands down flat on the surface of the workbench, gingerly pushing herself into levitation. She's been kneeling for a while now, and her knees are sore. Unbending them from beneath her, she stretches her legs once, then settles back down on the wood and looks back at Orthin expectantly. "Please."
"Right. Well, I wasn't always with the caravan, of course. When I was first magicked here, it was with a—lets call him a partner of mine. We'd been getting ourselves in a lot of trouble that winter, and…"
Kosei listens, attentive, as his story unfolds.
Karsha—
Every six months or so, the caravan stops for a few days, and everything that needs stillness and rest is done all at once. Mostly this means repairs, for the wagons' taxed axles and splintering wheels, metalwork that needs to be forged away from flammable wood and cloth, but also horse foaling and delicate alchemical work. The drivers find as safe a place as they can, trade with anything already living there for a few days of alliance, and for a little while, the caravan lets down its guard.
This time, they've spread out at the base of a harpy lair, a cavern in the prison ringed with nests and alcoves rising hundreds of feet up towards the distant ceiling. Carceri's ambient light is dim here, and only a few torches waver amidst the wagons, where several of the inhabitants have already gone to bed.
Kosei has been practicing for weeks. She and Karsha have tucked themselves in a secluded alcove of rock, some ways away from the caravan. A silk-wrapped instrument lies on the ground between them, tied closed with red cording. Karsha sits with an unsheathed longsword laid bare over her knees, the blade glimmering faintly blue. Swathed in her dark robes, she seems to bleed into the shadows at the edges. She looks at Kosei with inscrutable eyes, liquid black, and says, softly:
"Play for me."
Kosei nods and takes a steadying breath. One step at a time, unhurried—the preparation is as much a part of the show as the playing is. She reaches out and begins to untie the cords around her instrument—Karsha's instrument, still—unwrapping the pale silk and laying it flat across the stone until the koto stands revealed. Its polished body gleams, ivory bridges curving across its surface like exposed vertebrae, its thirteen yellowing strings wound taut.
Kosei pushes back the sleeves of her kimono to bare her wrists, then pulls out a small pouch tucked inside her obi. From it, she removes the three fingerpicks, carefully pressing them over her claws—sharp enough to sever the koto strings in a single stroke. In front of her, the strings hum, teased by licks of wind from the outside.
She lays her right palm over the strings, stilling them with a touch. Whole focus narrowed down to the instrument before her, she begins to play.
When she's finished, Kosei stills the strings again, listening to the echoes fade off into the cliffs. She breathes out and looks up, expectant.
"Very good, Kosei," Karsha tells her, but her eyes are elsewhere, turned upward. "Wouldn't you say so?"
Kosei follows the gaze and spots the clutch of harpies roosting at the edge of her darkvision—two females and one male, all of them sleek and lovely.
"It's not really our style." The one in the center shrugs, her speckled wings lifting and resettling behind her. "But it's nice enough. What sort of instrument is that?"
"A koto," Karsha answers, her hands resting lightly but prominently over the blade in her lap. "It comes from the outside. I'll be passing it on to her, in time." She lifts one hand and gestures to Kosei.
"Something so precious…" the male says, his voice low and husky. "Will she be able to protect it as well as you?"
Karsha smiles, slight and secretive under her hood. "Kosei?"
Kosei nods to her, then looks back up to the harpies. "I'm an oni," she says in explanation. "My kind can forge a bond with a weapon, to keep it with us no matter what form we take. The koto will be mine."
"Doesn't look much like a weapon," the smaller female says doubtfully, but the leader snorts and extends one clawed leg to shove her roughly.
"Chick! You would say that? A harpy? You who lure your dinner into your claws with your song alone? Huh! Get back to the nest!"
Stumbling, the rebuked harpy sniffs with ill grace and takes off, flapping back up into the darkness.
The leader rolls her eyes and looks back down on the musicians. "It was a good performance," she says to Kosei. "Though it would be better with some singing."
Kosei inclines her head, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. "Thank you for your ear." She removes the fingerpicks and begins to re-cover the koto, one careful layer of silk at a time.
"Will you play again?" the male asks, his talons shifting along the cliff edge. Kosei looks to Karsha for an answer.
"Not tonight. We should be getting back," her teacher says, and stands gracefully, her sword hanging lightly in her right hand. "But," she concedes, "perhaps before we leave, I will allow her one more performance."
Wrapping the red cords around the instrument, Kosei permits herself a small smile.
Kinya—
"Kosei, this is very important and I need you immediately."
Caught in the middle of a training session with the caravan's guard captain, Kosei looks up mid-mace swing, blinking.
Kinya floats down towards them, her lambent hair casting orange light all across the dim walls. Her skirts, each of them dyed to a different gem-shade brilliance, settle around her long legs as she lands.
Kosei lowers the weapon. "What is it?"
"I've found something in a crevice up there, and I want a second opinion on if it's worth prying it out." Kinya delivers the words in a level, serious tone, almost wholly convincing, save for the way her eyes glitter with anticipation.
Behind Kosei, Eru makes a skeptical 'hm' in his throat. "Want to take a pickaxe up there with you?" he asks, but Kinya shakes her head.
"No need. If we can't get it out between fire, claws, size reduction magic and intangibility, I hardly think a pickaxe will make the difference. Kosei?"
Kosei hides a smile as she turns back to Eru. "I'll come back as soon as I can," she assures him, passing back the mace. He waves her off.
"If it's something valuable, don't make a rush-job of it on my account. Go on."
Kinya extends a preternaturally warm hand to her, which Kosei takes, pushing lightly off the ground to fly after her. The two of them drift up along the stone walls, past the lower level graffiti and into the old mychonoid murals. The artwork—a pictoral history of the time the colony had spent here—blooms in bright colors against the dark bricks, sketched out in biomatter decades ago and left to flower forth into patterns of lichen.
They leave the illumination of the wagon's torches below, a soft ring of lights in the darkness well beyond the range of either of their darkvision. The lichen begin to peter out soon after, leaving the murals only visible as discolorations on the stone, pale lines floating like thinning smoke against the dark. A new warden takes over, the pictures say, and the prison grows colder; the colony leaves to find warmer climes, a paradise of steam a passing band of prisoners once spoke of.
What a fascinating meeting that must have been, Kosei thinks, and wishes she'd been alive for it.
"There," Kinya says, breaking Kosei's attention away from the murals. "The lanterns."
A lamp has been unevenly wedged into the brick and abandoned, its glass walls cloudy with age, its brass base gone umber brown with tarnish. Kosei glances around and sees two more like it, spaced some fifty feet away from each other along the walls, at similar heights.
"They're very interesting," she says, looking to Kinya with a raised eyebrow. Kinya has an ulterior motive here, obviously, but for the life of her, Kosei can't see it. "But not, I think, very valuable."
"They're magical, just a bit. Put a drop of blood in one," Kinya suggests, and though Kosei doesn't pull away, her eyebrows both arc considerably higher. "It's perfectly safe," the efreeti goes on. "I found these the last time the caravan came through."
"Why didn't you show them to someone then?"
Kinya smiles her ulterior motive smile—impish, crinkling her eyes and just barely showing teeth—and tugs Kosei closer, into the aura of warmth she emanates simply by virtue of existing. "Because I wasn't together with you then. One drop of blood. It's child's play."
"Then why don't you put a drop of blood in one?" Kosei asks, feeling her own smile begin to tease at one corner of her mouth.
"Because I don't regenerate like you do, obviously."
Other people might beg, prettily, or say please, but Kinya is a prideful creature down to the flame at her core. She simply goes on staring, amber-bright eyes glowing and expectant.
And—well, by this point, Kosei is well and truly curious. She eases open the lid of the lamp, then presses the point of her thumb's claw into the pad of her middle finger, harder and harder, until the skin tears, and cobalt blood spills down to bead and fall from her knuckle.
For a moment, nothing happens. Kosei's wound closes cleanly, leaving nothing but the fleeting memory of pain, and she stares at the dark spot inside the lamp, just visible through the murky glass thanks to Kinya's faint glow.
There's no flare of light, no burst of flame, but slowly, slowly, the inside of the lamp gets brighter, filling up with some sourceless illumination. It spills out past the glass, a clean, warm light not quite like anything Kosei's ever seen.
Beside her, Kinya releases a low, satisfied sigh. "Sunlight," she breathes.
"Sunlight?" Kosei asks, surprised.
"Or something very close to it. Here, look at me," Kinya demands. When Kosei does, she floats around her, looking her over, head to toe, eyes roving over every inch, lingering at the base of Kosei's throat, her wrists, her horns, the nape of her neck. "Mm. Beautiful."
Amused despite herself, Kosei smiles at her, ruefully. "Was that what all this was for? Getting some time alone?"
"Oh, there was more to it than that," Kinya answers, and slides her arms around Kosei's waist from behind. "I wanted to see what you looked like in a different light. A natural light." Her voice drops into a throaty, heated whisper against Kosei's neck. "I've never seen a shade of blue quite like your skin."
A shiver races across Kosei's flesh, and she wraps her hands over Kinya's arms, leaning her head back onto Kinya's shoulder. "Is that so?" she murmurs.
"Mm. Yes, it is." Kinya gazes at her face, then her eyes slide down, as her hands begin to tease and pry at the edges of Kosei's kimono. "Someday I intend to find a way to dye silk the same color. I'll name it for you. Kosei."
Hot fingertips find her skin, and Kosei's breath catches. She turns, allowing Kinya to push the kimono off her shoulder. In the lamplight, Kinya gleams more brightly than ever, a clear golden flush to her skin, rosy color standing high in her cheeks. Sighing in pleasure, Kosei cups her cheek and pulls her in for the first kiss.
Keinan—
The last of them, she never meets—or at least, not in Carceri.
One day, soon after lunch, and for the first time in months, the prison slams into lockdown. Twice inside of a single hour, paralysis seizes the caravan, every person, every mount, every caged creature. Only a handful of the members shake it off the first time, and most of them fall to the second round. Eru hits on the idea first—someone must have challenged the warden, battling her for the control rod. Mondon decides to stay camped for an hour longer, to let the matter resolve itself. They prepare defenses, ready for shifts in temperature, gravity, air flow, or anything else.
In less than the hour, far less, Karsha twitches back her hood, one ear flicking.
"Do you hear that?"
Kosei, her belongings shouldered, straightens and looks around. After a few silent seconds, the hum in the walls rises enough in pitch to enter her hearing range. Confused voices sound through the caravan; they turn sharp with alarm when light bursts out of every crack and crevice in the stones around them. Carceri itself shrieks a protest, and for one moment of sheer dread, Kosei wonders if someone is awakening all the prison-dimension's dead, the myriad throngs of trapped souls barred from their natural planes of rest.
Then she hears a sharp curse, and snaps her head over to see Orthin floating up off the ground.
"Gravity shift!" Mondon yells. "Everyone stay—"
"No!" Eru interrupts. "Not a gravity shift; not with all the racket! This is something else!"
"Everyone grab onto something, then!" Mondon snaps, and, for his part, pulls himself into his wagon, where he keeps the chest with the caravan's rarer magic items.
Everything—no, not everything, Kosei realizes, everyone—is lifting off the ground at a slow drift. Even she, already floating under her own power, is rising towards the distant ceiling. She's already carrying her chest and the koto case; she looks back to Karsha, opening her mouth to call for something else to be tossed to her.
And then the ceiling vanishes, and she begins to rise much faster.
Gaping, Kosei spins in place, staring past the members of her caravan at the teeming throngs of prisoners likewise filling Carceri's orange skies.
"Kosei! Kosei!" Someone calls out to her, unidentifiable over the rising roar of mingled sounds, the confused voices, the whipping wind, and the howling of Carceri. Kosei catches a glimpse of copper before Kinya tackles her, locking one arm around her shoulders. Kinya's bright hair glows incandescent in the white glare bursting from the prison walls below them; her arm points insistently upward. Kosei looks up.
Five silhouettes carve black holes out of the sky—three of them humanoid in size and shape, a fourth a round spheroid, awkward, skinny limbs emerging from it like half-sunken arrows. The fifth… Kosei's mouth dries at the size of the fifth, huge, as tall as the giants that make their homes in the uppermost levels of the prison. It stands before the other four, the details of its form obscured beneath long robes, but in the brilliant light, Kosei can see the bare skull beneath its hood. The name comes to her from a lifetime of learning every scrap of history anyone in the caravan will teach her: Zalivance, a wizard hero from the earliest reaches of mortal time, imprisoned in Carceri for endangering the balance of all.
Kinya tugs on her arm again, and, when Kosei looks to her, points down.
Maximum Security, the war cube, has twisted out of its alignment and is slamming itself, clumsy and ponderous, into the walls of Carceri, the scrape of stone-on-stone adding to the deafening roar. Faintly, faintly, Kosei hears Kinya's delighted laughter.
They're rising faster now, and everywhere Kosei looks, prisoners are blurring into streaks of light, lancing away across the skies like, as her mother once described to her, stars falling from the heavens. Humanoids, goblinoids, great beasts, monsters—the power, Zalivance's or otherwise, has made no distinction she can see.
There's another tug on her arm, and then Kinya's elbow hooks around her neck, inescapably strong, and Kosei turns into an insistent kiss that burns through her in an instant, a bolt of white fire, before Kinya is torn away.
She can't see anyone she recognizes—her mother, Orthin, Karsha, Kinya, all of them gone, and as the horizon darkens to blue, Kosei closes her eyes, and lets herself fall, up and up and up...
It will be several eventful days later before Kosei learns the truth of this. First, a landing with hundreds of others in a village poorer than most and plainer than any she ever saw in Carceri. Second, a pair of minotaur princes, a zenythri boy barely into puberty, and a human girl, a villager, declaring the freedom of the prisoners and the villagers alike, and fighting for it when the prison gangs rise up to test them. Third, searching and talking with the others to learn the one thing they all had in common: all of them, from the minotaur brothers, the clutch of harpies, the tieflings and the aasimar, Kosei herself, every one of the varied races that have landed on the Prime Material village of Goat Path, had been born in the prison dimension.
The Phylacteries of Zalivance, the four figures who had stood before him in the sky, had been offered their heart's desire, and one of them, Keinan, unable to find a way to distinguish between innocent and guilty, deserving and undeserving, had wished for the freedom of all of the prisoners of Carceri. Those with homes to return to had returned to them; those without, those born in Carceri, had come back home with him.
And now—rather predictably—the planes are in chaos.
Notes: And that's how an ass-end of nowhere village of farmers and herders became a refuge for an interdimensional jailbreak. The game that followed was a much more normal 5th Edition D&D game than its prologue, save that anything in the Monster Manual that was naturally born and bipedal was available as a player race, subject to DM approval.