2017-05-12: Spread your Wings and Fall
- Log: Spread your Wings... and Fall
- Cast: Virginia Maxwell, K.K.
- Where: Adlehyde
- Date: 12th May 2017
- Summary: Virginia tries to distance herself to contain the Taint within her, but the Trial Knight tells her to not look away...
<Pose Tracker> Virginia Maxwell has posed.
Just the other day, Virginia Maxwell was already enticed to the Batical Grotto under very... unusual circumstances, involving vague and ill-remembered dreams that just seem to have... pushed her towards the place, regardless of whether or not she even /knew/ they were there. She almost seemed to be in a trance as she went through the cavern, only saved from what is probably certain demise by the actions of several worried companions -- chief of them Maya Schrodinger, who's tucked her under her wing and had her rest in the Schrodinger household in Adlehyde's nicer suburbs...
...which doesn't, exactly, explain why she's missing from her bed.
Virginia wanders her way towards one of the emptier and more quiet parts of Adlehyde's gates, gurgling a little. Her injuries would heal. Scrapes and cuts and burns -- those aren't an issue, with potions and Crest magic on hand. And exhaustion and fatigue would eventually be dispelled with bedrest.
But the taint within her heart, that doesn't go away so easily.
The Trial Knight can likely feel it from afar -- someone with a rather enormous amount of Malevolence enveloped within themselves, and yet they curiously still hold a shine within their soul, if such things were under their purview. A truly resistant soul to have staved off the effects of so large an amount, for so long...
... but it's not to say they can hold on forever, especially when tipped over to one side, now can they?
The brown-haired girl clenches painfully at her chest, laying her hand to one side of the gate. "... what's happening...?" she gasps to herself.
She didn't know or understand what was happening to her, only that... she knew she had to get out. There was something truly awful, she intuitively believed, happening inside of her. And the idea that she could affect others due to her mistakes was... it scared her. More than anything else.
<Pose Tracker> K.K. has posed.
... what's happening...?
"A reckoning you are ill-prepared for."
The voice cuts through the dark and cold Adlehyde air, at the fringes of the city limits where everything feels so starkly, dangerously quiet. It punctures, tinny and absolute, without remorse and with a jarring suddenness... right behind Virginia Maxwell as she struggles with the unknown rooted inside her.
They stand there, as if they had always been standing there, even when there was little else but empty air not just seconds earlier: a figure dressed in armor of white and gold, their helmeted gaze featureless yet somehow impossibly weighty, their stance one of uncompromising authority.
Gauntlet-wrapped fingers flex at their side. And for a time, all they do is simply -stare-. At Virginia, if only noticeable for the palpable presence of their attention on her... -through- her, to what lies within. A wealth of impurity wrapping itself around a brilliantly bright core. Like muck hiding a diamond within the depths of its grime. Fingers twitch. Their horned helm tips to the left.
"You have gone somewhere you should never have gone, child," that voice continues on. The Trial Knight takes a single step forward, the heavy metal of their heel ringing like an accusation in the air. Their next words are a question, yet far from a request, as if demanding nothing less than an absolute and sincere response from the very depths of that grime-encrusted heart:
"Why are you here?"
<Pose Tracker> Virginia Maxwell has posed.
Virginia's pupils shrink, a testament to the sudden fear that claws at her heart. She shivers, feeling that presence where it was not there before, and-- she turns haphazardly, her legs trembling already as she whispers, "W-why am I... here?"
She holds onto her chest and-- lets out a pained noise again as that dark wound doubles its plague upon her. "Why...?" A pause. "In Adlehyde... you mean? Or...? I don't understand..." She haphazardly murmurs, with a whimper. "I need to ... stay away from people... there's something awful in me..."
<Pose Tracker> K.K. has posed.
"You do not understand. But you will."
The words are uttered like a promise. Another step is taken, the resounding thud of metallic weight behind it just punctuating the knight's words like a damning accusation. "You flee, but it will do no good for anyone. And in so doing, you have only damned those who would seek to save you from yourself. This is no act of courage."
Another step. And the white knight advances upon Virginia, slowly but surely, their gait steady but inevitable in its single-minded purpose as their shadow casts over Virginia against that moon-drenched night sky. "This is desperation. The act of a child ill-suited towards grasping their dreams. Ill-suited towards embracing the world."
The Trial Knight stops less than a foot from Virginia, hands at their side and presumably nonthreatening... in a way that clashes with the very feel of the thing before her.
"Do you wish to know what is inside of you, child? That awful thing within you?"
<Pose Tracker> Virginia Maxwell has posed.
Virginia tries to take a step back, but-- something hitches and halts inside her, knowing their words to be true. That she can't run anywhere. They will find her. And if it is not them, then it would be the Malevolence itself that would consume her.
"But I want to..." she grasps at her hair gently, her face pale, sweating, writhing in pain. "I said I'd spread my wings and fly... I... I don't want to go home... I don't want to look away..." She swallows, her eyes widening still, like they're going to distend from her sockets.
"I want to know... I don't want to look away..."
<Pose Tracker> K.K. has posed.
Defiance -- or resolve. Two very different things springing from very similar sources. What is it that is in Virginia's pained stare?
... Whichever it is, it draws that knight to pause just before her. Pause, looming over her like a spectre. Pause, head tilted to the left, as if to try to stare at her -- into her -- from a new light.
"... You have no means to appreciate the heights you can soar to. No means of knowing just how much it costs to fly."
Another step. That voice, unwavering, unfaltering, frighteningly pure of purpose, is accompanied by the lift of the knight's right hand. Moonlight gleams off the edge of a single, clawed finger, pristine white seeming to shine with an ethereal glow. "But you will. Or you will falter, and drown, and there will be no one to mourn your fall."
She wants to know, she says. That hand extends.
"It is an answer you already know in your heart, if you would but look. It is every moment you ever hesitated. Every fraction of a second you ever doubted yourself. Every inkling of regret you humored. Every frustration you have ever allowed to bleed its toxin into your heart." And still that little kernel remains amongst it. Light in the dark. That hand reaches out.
And the metal-wrapped finger that presses to the dead center of Virginia's chest is so cold it could freeze the very blood in one's veins.
"Do you understand?"
And with that touch, something reaches out within Virginia. Grasping upon the darkness welled inside her... to twist it. To churn it. To agitate it. To make her painfully cognizant of every ill impulse to a nauseating, soul-cleaving degree.
"It is you, child. Know it. Do not look away."
<Pose Tracker> Virginia Maxwell has posed.
Virginia's eyes... are full of fear. It is the trembling, whimpering look of a child who's rather clearly, as K.K. surmised, torn off more than she can chew, grasping at a world that she cannot comprehend.
But at the same time, there's a glimmer of courage within her, even amidst all the fear. To say that she does not want to look away... that she does not want to bow her head down and simply turn her gaze away from the ills of the world... there is resolve there.
K.K.'s finger is placed upon her. And at that moment...
"It is... me...?"
The images start to swarm within her head. Every little selfish tenet that she's foisted upon herself or others, every time she's just pushed herself through and inconvenienced others who've been there to stand her when she's fallen. All the white little lies she's ever whispered into herself, to convince that this was for the sake of others...
Her father, with his back so coldly turned to her, as she begs and screams. 'Don't go! Don't-- don't go!' she begs, helplessly, as if it will make a difference. It does not. He disappears into the light, not so much a person as he is a spectre of her imagination.
Maya enters her mind, visibly so. The blonde woman reaches out for her hand, with that cocksure grin of hers. 'Stick with me, and you'll go far,' she said. But it was Virginia's own shortcomings, her own experience, her own hastiness... that's inflicted so much trouble for Maya... to even the point where she's been hurt, once.
Virginia's eyes could not widen further.
"I'm not... looking away....."
She-- slumps, that fear dissipating. Her legs relax, but at the same time, she looks like as if she could falter. In that moment of acceptance, something overwhelming begins to twist and turn.
The seed has been sown.
What kind of flower will blossom from within it?
<Pose Tracker> K.K. has posed.
Images swarm, float to the forefront of Virginia's mind, as something tugs on that wellspring of Malevolence festering in her soul like someone pulling on the loose yarn of a sweater to watch it all unravel. And through it all, K.K. watches -- watches through the tableau of expressions that grip Virginia through every mark of impurity notched within her mind both small... and overwhelming. Memories, sentiment, twist at her, gnaw at her -- and the Trial Knight does not look away, either.
Not even for a moment.
I'm not... looking away.....
"And you will suffer for it."
She slumps. And the hand that catches at her shoulder is strong and steady and unfaltering, metal fingers clenching at the exhausted girl. Fertile soil for a vile seed. Ready to be tended by a proper gardener.
That hand clenches.
"But perhaps..."
Light, white and blinding, cloisters them in a shining shell of ephemeral energy. Against the clear Adlehyde night, it might as well be as bright as a star being born until it vanishes...
"... perhaps you will be able to see the truth, in the end."
... leaving nothing in its wake but empty air.