Seeking Counsel [Rizali, Alyra]

[Rizali]

All things have a right to grow

Her footsteps through the cold Snowpeak halls were silent. She never had trouble hearing the other Seekers as they clanked around the fortress in their metal armour. Even the lighter-adorned tapped or thudded across the floors. But, strangely, the Twili hardly seemed to register to the light world. Rizali's footsteps had always been silent. She didn't have any interest in negating that advantage, wearing cloth magical robes and the slightest flats she could manage.

The heavy wooden doors at the end of this particular hallway led to the offices of the Lord Commander. Riza was arriving four or five minutes early for their meeting, her standard arrival time to this sort of event. The Commander's guards knew her face- their grandparents had known her face- and gave a warm greeting. She responded in kind, asking the sorts of questions one might be expected to ask in this sort of situation, checking in on families and their comfort, was there anything she could do to help them. It had become a numb routine over the centuries, but she did her best not to fall into a desperate boredom, to remain as present in those moments as possible. She eventually asked if the Lord Commander was ready for their meeting yet, and the younger Hylian entered the door to check for her.

Though unsure of what exactly might happen in this meeting- she was never entirely sure what would happen with Alyra- this wasn't the type of meeting where anything untoward or unexpected should happen. Rizali met with the Lord Commander on a monthly basis to discuss the ongoing magical protection of the fortress, the training of its mages, and to receive instruction on any special projects expected of her. Though they met more often than that, having a dedicated meeting time helped to maintain a routine and ensure that everyone in the fortress kept moving on a proper schedule. And, to Riza's satisfaction, the previous month had progressed without much issue at all.

[Alyra]

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I BOW TO NO ONE

The dark haired woman sat in her dimly lit office - wax dripping from candles that landed on metal plates, scattered across cabinets that hugged the walls. She was slouched in her chair, looking over the scrolls that littered the surface of her desk. Just from the last week, there were dozens of new reports... the hoards were getting larger, and pressing farther into territories untouched by them before.

Pressing her palms to her face, she let out a sigh, knowing that soon, more action would need to be taken. She was awaiting the court mage for their monthly meeting, and unlike the months prior... the news would be quite bleak this time around. More steps would need to be taken for protection.

More acolytes stationed around the settlements. More training on warding the areas to protect it from the blight. What's worse... there appeared to be an infection spreading by those bitten by the monsters, and she knew nothing of how to stop it.

Knowing that it was around that time for Rizali to be making her entrance, Alyra pinched the bridge of her nose with a quiet sigh, before clearing her throat and looking up at the door. "You may enter."

Rizali

[Rizali]

All things have a right to grow

Rizali stepped silently into the Lord Commander's offices. Her eyes met the desk first, memories of the previous meetings gliding through her mind. She then looked up and met the eyes of Alyra. She'd always found it interesting how different this chamber felt from the rest of the fortress. It seemed the exhaustion of overwork had settled permanently into the stones of Snowpeak, but here it contained an extra air of stoic weathering, as if those who occupied this room were meant to outlast even the stones surrounding them. She had little doubt they could.

Taking her place standing across the desk from the Lord Commander, Riza gave a slight smile and nodded her head. “Good morning, Lord Commander. You're looking well, today.”

[Alyra]

[googlefont=Roboto]

I BOW TO NO ONE

"As well as I can," Alyra murmured to the court mage's response. Taking a deep breath, she rested her hands on the desk, cupping her palms together as she looked over the various reports once more, and back to the mage.

"I've received... numerous concerning reports," she started, one hand moving to a pile of pages. "The hoards are getting bigger... and some of them are able to infect non corrupted beings. I'm... unsure how to tackle this."

Perhaps if they captured one... but she could not risk having one brought back to the keep, putting all of their valuable forces at risk. "I'm not certain how blight can overtake a soul, but each report is inconsistent for some it takes weeks. Others, merely hours."

She moved her hands, allowing for the mage to scan over the reports if she chose to, only then crossing her arms with a sigh. "We're in deep shit. We need to acquire the infected and contain them before they spread them. We can't risk killing them if they can be cured."

Rizali

[Rizali]

I've got the key to my castle in the air, whether
I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

The news was more dire than Riza had anticipated. The Twili had not anticipated the Lord Commander to bring news as positive as hers was, but had not expected things quite this bleak. She took the chance to scan over the reports when presented with the opportunity. It was a small comfort that consolidating workload at Snowpeak would allow for more people in the field, possibly balancing this somewhat.

It was the last part of what the Lord Commander said that rang a distant bell in Riza's memory. The mage looked up at Alyra before her eyes darted around a bit, her brow furrowing as she tried to remember, tried to search through ancient memories to find why that seemed so familiar. “Contain them… hm.”

What was it, what was it?

And then, her eyes lit up. “Oh! Lord Commander, I don't know how familiar you are with the story of how my people first came into contact with Hyrule. Not long before I was born, a traitor overthrew-” her voice caught for a moment, before she cleared her throat, “deposed our princess, Midna. The usurper, Zant, staged an invasion of the Light World by partitioning off the provinces into containment zones with twilight magic. He did this so that Castle Town could not receive reinforcements when he walked his army in. This containment locked the people of Hyrule into a dreamlike state, huddling in their homes waiting for the nightmare to end. If they reached the walls of those containment zones…”

She flipped through her notes, to the earlier, slightly-yellowed pages of ideas long past. The pages contained sketches of twilight portals, the Mirror of Twilight, and the disfigured beasts Zant made from his followers. “Some time ago, I began an attempt to reverse-engineer that magic to harness it for our cause, but then the Calamity changed everyone's priorities. While we wouldn't be able to- nor would we particularly want to- lock down the entirety of Hyrule, I believe that, with enough time and study, my mages could create some small, ideally-impenetrable shadow cages. We might even be able to warp enemies to those containment spaces.”

Ah! Settling on one particular page, Riza turned her notebook around and placed it on the table in front of the Lord Commander. On the page, a much younger Riza had sketched Hyrule Castle in a prismatic pyramid, and underneath that had written some basic formulae for how one might begin to create a twilight containment zone without stealing the source of the light spirits “Zant had a dark god for a patron, which we don't have. But he created a special containment zone for Hyrule Castle that I believe could be replicated. At your word, we could begin research on it… though I might need to travel to gather more information.”