Upon The River: Carlston Dale, August 21, 1921 [English Eerie] [One-Shot]
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| Art by Doug Bolden but see Credits for more explanation. |
Previously...
Strange birds attacked Carlston Dale when he stumbled upon the decay corpse of an unidentifiable creature. Then, the group found odd sigils drawn in the sand by their tents. The sigils caused the group to grow distant from one another and interacting with them has resulted in sickness and nausea.
About Upon the River
August 1921: Carlston Dale takes his dying fiance on a trip down a idyllic river so they can have the honeymoon they will never get to experience. Things go wrong when they wash up upon a riverbank where the rules have changed and things move in the constant fog that always blocks the horizon.
Content Warnings: Mild tobacco use, mild drinking, death, some cosmic dread...
Upon the River is played using English Eerie scenario "The Lost River" (with obvious nods to Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," as will be obvious). No additional oracles or tools are used. It will be played in one-day-per-day style format.
Any errors in geography, history, or language are all mine. I do my best.
This "one-shot" will be played In-Line style.
CARLSTON DALE
5 Spirit :: 2 Resolve
The son of shop owners in Bicester, moved to London after a war injury involving a landmine occurred in the very final days of The Great War. Became an undertaker and got engaged to Julia "Jules" Harcourt. She has been diagnosed with an incurable heart condition and is not expected to live past the end of year. She refuses to marry Carlston, now, so instead they take a trip with two of his friends—Mary Jones and Geoffrey Rose—as well Mary's friend Ivy Prairie. Meant to be a chaste honeymoon and likely Jules's last outing.
Distinguishing Features: Red hair, deep scars on right arm, walks with a notable limp.
Fears: Silence, Deep Water, and Being Trapped.
Just to clarify, there was not a missed day. It is in the fiction that Carlston missed a day writing his journal. The previous entry was August 19, 1921.
Morning Card (20th): Secondary Character Harmed (6).
Geoff grows increasingly ill. Failure to save him. Carlston loses one Spirit.
Afternoon Card (20th): Clue
The sound of strange piping in the distance, moving along like some strange carnival is moving past.
Morning Card (21st): Environmental Obstacle (7).
The remaining food rots, Carlston and Mary are unable to save it. One Spirit lost.
Afternoon Card (21st): Clue
The stars are finally visible and they are wrong.
August tewnty one. no time at all, really...
God did not heed my prarye prayer of two days ago and I am convinced we are beyond His Grace at this point. I have few words really to convey. The stars above are not our stars. Some other god surl
Apologies to Jules for what I did to her thoughtful gift. I gave into madness when it is clear that I need to be stronger to face whatever trials these are. You hear stories from the war of soldiers forced to
Geoff is dead. His nausea that wore upon him after the interaction with the sigils continued to grow. By that night, he had begun to vomit and shake. We got him into the boy's tent and set him up a place. Once he got to sleep I felt it was safe to leave him be. Maybe it was. Maybe it was not.
Darkness around us, Ivy made the strange claim that she was not going to be inside the tent any longer and that she was
I could have helped or at least made sure it was all ending as was best but I was tired, and drained, and my arm was immensely sore so I took a tablet and the combined effect was to fall into such a deep sleep that anything else from that cursed day was lost to me. How I wish I slept forever.
I woke to find Geoff cold and stiff. His eyes wide and haunted. I feared he had choked to death in his sleep and I could have saved him but his airway seemed clear. It is like his mind just gave up on telling his lungs to breathe or his heart to beat.
I stumbled from the tent and saw Ivy, undressed, staring into the waters. She was unmoving so I briefly feared her death as well. I approached her, too stunned by the past few days to appreciate any sort of attempt at modesty. Getting to her I saw that she was not asleep, merely deep in some trance. Her mouth mumbled words that are river sounds.
Looking down at here, then, I realized in some other world, some other time, there could have been a place for her and Mary to have made a lovely couple. Ivy's soft contours to Mary's dark boyishness. Mary's loud to Ivy's quiet. Not here, no longer. We are past thoughts of happiness on the banks of a river which devours. a foul beast loosed fro
No, not again. I must not lose my thoughts again. I feel like, at this time, my thoughts in this journal are the only connection we have to some place where all five of us found contentment.
I got Mary who came out sad and withdrawn. We embraced in a hug not unlike siblings after months of absence. Then she went and took a blanket to wrap around Ivy and I went in to give Jules her breakfast. Poor Jules has not really talked or responded to much since I returned injured.
I no longer wonder if she or Ivy drew the lines. That afternoon, after Mary and I had drug Geoff's body and conveyed it to the river because we could think of nothing else to do with it, the two of us sat in silence, holding hands. A few times we tried at everyday conversation but it always felt wrong. Then I heard the piping. Like some sort of mummer's group calling us all to witness their song. It started out back behind us and upstream and it definitely moved. A reed flute. A penny whistle. Pan flutes. Any of those. All of those.
It could have been birds or some trick of the wind or anything but deep down I knew that whatever things were playing those notes were responsible for the lines in the sand, were responsible for all of this. I pictured that strange elephantine body with its oddly human like limbs and I imagined those hulking things upright and gray and moving through the fog, giving praise to the outer dark barely held back the fog.
Piping a sound that resonated in the teeth and the bones. An ode to ache and decay. A folk song about the color of ribs bleached by the sun on some foreign shore.
I detest silence but at that time I would have given anything to find just a moment of quiet, just one more moment of reflection with Mary.
As the piping grew closer to us, following a path roughly parallel to the river, Mary and I went into thhe tent. She was on the right of Jules and I was on the left. The three of us embraced as darkness set. At least the two of us embraced Jules, our hands locked with hers and each others. I wondered if I should try to get Ivy back inside but I think I realized then it was only a postponement to try anything, anymore. Only I wonder if she might have be already
The next morning, Ivy had tossed aside the blanket and was still there and still nude, talking in the language of rivers.
Mary found our food had gone all wrong in the night, odd mushrooms and growths sprouting from even the heartiest of the rations. Starvation awaits us but since Mary and I have decided to not drink any water from the river any longer, thirst will surely get us first. We have a single canteen of water left that seems clear enough and I am giving it to Jules who is practically insensate so all care must be taken that my mercy does not simply drown her.
It takes all the willpower I have ever had to not pray for her death.
We spent almost all day in our triptych pose, feeling shared warmth has the summer temperatures grow colder with the passing hour. I went outside into the night air to see how Ivy is doing a few minutes ago and realized that impossibly the fog had finally lifted after days of taunting us. Only, it is worse.
The stars are
surly silly so
MUSICAL SHOUT OUT: Despite the obvious use of dark ambient and such music to help inspire this story, I realized that I would not be able to give focus to the increasing grief that Carlston feels if I leaned purely into cosmic horror for cosmic horror sake. Instead, I played Sigur Ros' ÁTTA because that album still has an otherworldly quality that I appreciate when getting into the mind space to play these games but ÁTTA specifically invokes a kind of grief in me when listening to it. Like a beauty you cannot quite touch any more or maybe a passion you feel despite being trapped by circumstances. While impetous of this playthrough is Carlston and Jules' doomed love, there is a part of me that considers Mary and Carlston to be the core. To people who have made a game of hiking and exploring, now both losing the folks they love and having a brotherly love to face infinity together.
Early on, Mary's lesbianism was slightly discussed in a semi-scandalous manner but part of this solo-play blog is to have queer characters effectively unquestioned for their queerness outside of other circumstances. In this post, I returned to my own center and promise in this regards by having Carlston look at Ivy and mourn her and Mary's love not because of any kind of scandal or real world consideration of lesbian relationshps but because he wanted them only to be happy where he could not only now, after seeing the stars, that it will never be.
CREDITS
Upon the River is played using only Scott Malthouse's English Eerie, Second Edition and a regular deck of cards built in the instructed manner. For this playthrough, no other oracles or tables will be used.
The picture at the top is something I created using a few settings and tools in GIMP. I just wanted a bird that was like a bird but also off-putting. I accomplished this by starting with "Bird Tree, Black and White" by Kytalpa and then started by removing all the parts that were not black and white, ran it through filters to make it more like a stencil of the the original photo, and then blurred and warped it a bit. I took that version and color-swapped to red and then cloned in the bits (which were further blurred and warped) until I got what I wanted. Only, it was not weird enough.
I took this public domain sketch of a bird head and then warped it and fitted at the wrong angle on top of the other. The eye and feathers and such line up incorrectly and that is 100% on purpose.
It's a quick fix and super big thanks to Kytalpa and OpenClipart-Vectors for uploading some sources I could use.
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