Dream Chasers:2017-09-02: Nightmare World
- Log: Nightmare World
- Cast: Lan Lilac, Isiris Shango'Ra
- Where: Great Aveh Desert
- Date: 2017-08-25
- Summary: A boy and a girl meet in a field. The world turns inside out.
===============================<* Great Aveh Desert *>=============================== The heart of the Republic of Aveh is its great desert. The rolling dones and blistering heat here are infamous, and all but the most foolhardy would ever dare to cross it on foot. Most do so via the great rail lines running north to south, east to west, leading as far as Krosse and Adlehyde. The ones who do cross it on foot will find the heat isn't the only danger. Mirages can lead men astray, oases are few, and great and terrible beasts sink beneath the sands until they find their prey. BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ddOSJ8571M
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
It's an awful thing, to be found wanting by your gods.
Lan Lilac is fairly young for a shaman. She just turned twenty this spring, and couldn't go home to celebrate with her family because of just how she became a shaman in the first place, but she'd felt that it was all right. She was out in the world, helping people. She was doing the will of Rigdobrite (whenever it made its will clear, anyway).
She thought she was doing well. She led an expedition to the bottom of the Guardian Temple yesterday, and found out that she really isn't doing that well after all. It was a bit of a rude awakening.
But a good night's sleep, a hearty breakfast, and some meditation (a nap) have restored her to a good facsimile of her usual good spirits. She'll prove that she's worthy. And if she's not worthy, she'll become so!
So Lan woke up from her nap and headed outside the village of Lacour to a place where she's fairly sure she won't be disturbed - just an open, grassy field at the foot of a mountain range - and got to work.
The blonde shaman moves through her warmup routine, stretches and poses flowing faster and faster. Sweat forms a sheen on her skin as she dances.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The earth does not find wanting.
After he crumpled the scholar, he chose to let her toy with his saber awhile. The blade was of a sentiment to him and of value, but transience is the natural state of things in the world, if not entropy. The pilgrimage was more important than any one piece, and his tread did not get any heavier for it.
The gods which the shaman worships mean nothing to him. As the young man in the grey coat approaches the region where she practices and trains, he moves with the footfall of a traveller, a person on his way from one place to the next, somewhere in the mountain range at whose foot she pays tribute. The coat's hood is drawn over his head, the sleeves of his coat draping over his hands and concealing all but his fingertips, the voluminous thing shifting with the step of hard cut soles. It is, truthfully, only when she comes into his view does he stop, standing motionless at the other end of the field.
A thin, wan gaze is taken of the grasslands between them, ostensibly to better frame the motions which he observes, quiet and solemn. He doesn't greet her, he doesn't move. He watches her.
Around him, the air feels cramped as if the sky hung lower in the heavens. Uneasy, reality folds and churning somewhere deep below them, a spoiled bit of meat in some grand unknowable stomach. The light slips into his hood for only a moment as he lifts his view, throwing a brief light across his pallor and the faint and noncommital expression that marks it.
Blade by blade, the grass between them turns grey and dies.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
h e ' s c o m i n g , the wind whispers. b e c a r e f u l .
Lan, the arch of her left foot resting on her right knee and her arms stretched above her head, feels her stomach drop. A heaviness rolls across the field like frost crawls along glass.
Him... that man. A boy? With careless ease, Lan places both sandaled feet on the ground, her arms back at her sides. There's a weight to her lavender gaze, a concerned survey of the stranger's distant figure.
When she sees the grass dying, Lan twitches and takes an involuntary step back. What is he...? Why is he?
"Who are you," she asks instead, pitching her voice to carry to him. Her muscles want to flex beneath her skin. Danger, danger, who is this that the wind would warn her?
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The young man stands at the other end of the dead and dying field, hands slack at his sides. He doesn't speak for a long time, the dark weight of the entire sky hanging off of him like a lost orphan or a vengeful ghost. Those with the worst kinds of memory reflect the most of ill circumstances, they will eventually come to say.
He has no concept or care of the warnings that flood the back of her mind, the wind that whispers in her ear.
But he can sense the weight of her concerns.
"The one who will take everything away from you," he answers quietly. His voice liquid with promise, running black in the dark of his hood. Blue eyes -- a flash of them, and painful as they are -- flare briefly in the dark beyond his hood. To look at them is to be stabbed in the chest, even from that distance. A bright blue that would have been pretty on any other boy, any other man. Now, his stare goes so deep that it hurts.
He is beyond calm, and the world seems to crack and break with his attention. He never actually approaches her, not physically. But as she blinks, as she looks away, as she looks up and down, he never seems to be standing in quite the same position as when last she took stock of him. He never moves. He never shifts. But soon he is standing in the middle of the field. The world shifts, snaps painfully from one interpretation to another. One iteration after another. Perception is not reason.
"It is in my nature to harm you," he explains simply and without malice. "And when I have taken my fill, what is left will be you. Will I find a person, or only a story told to adventurers to warn them away from this place?"
"The time has come," he explains patiently, "for those you worship to levy weight of judgment."
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
The wind howls in her ears, words giving way to white noise as the stranger's presence parches the ground.
Where he is all hidden, all mystery, unable to be tracked, his position in fixed space merely a polite suggestion, Lan is the opposite - open, solid, real. Where he is placid, she wears her growing alarm on her face. What is a man like this, that he could be as a ghost?
Lan takes a step backward, the heel of her sandal kicking up a puff of dust. There is a concept that her aunt tried to teach her about - the presence of a soul strong enough to be felt by even the least educated. The stranger's will is like a weight pushing down on her. Is this...?
Lavender eyes try to follow him, her senses reach out to track him through the web of life that makes up the field.
But there's nothing - just the grass, folding up with a sigh as it parches and dies.
"...It's not in my nature to let myself be harmed," she replies, though a drop of sweat that isn't from exertion courses down her temple. "Not when there's nobody to save by doing it."
There is nobody here who needs to be saved but herself.
But at those words, her face shutters. Maybe the Guardians are taking back the medium they gave her. Maybe it really was a mistake for her to leave the village...
"Then what's your name?" she asks, lifting her face. If the Guardians are testing her via this horrible stranger, What can she do but try to prove herself? The stranger... he's just that, not a man - something unknown and, she suspects, unknowable.
Lan slides into an easy position, balanced perfectly on her feet, hands forward, her center of balance low. "I promised myself that if I wasn't what the Guardians wanted from me, I would become it. If I can't save the world as I am, I'll become someone who can!"
She beckons him forward with curled fingers, her eyes grave. "So come! Judge me! I want to be worthy!"
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The individual blades of grass twist and jump as the dead reaches her. Small sparks of energy leap from the points of dew on each, turning the grass dark and brown around her sandals as she kicks up the dust that used to be grass.
The man seems no more perturbed by the shaman's declaration as he might an announcement of inclement weather. Then again, he doesn't move at all, despite the fact his position has changed on what will soon be a battlefield. Or a graveyard. She settles into an easy fighting stance, ready to proceed in the hand to hand. And yet, nothing changes. He doesn't move for a long time still, painful eyes flashing in the dark. Then, slowly, his hand raises, and slides into his coat.
What is his name?
"The dead don't need to know."
He removes a short blade from his coat--a shoddy fighting knife, little more than, and more handle than blade to boot. But he still holds it as if it were a ritual dagger. His eyes are sharp and piercing, inhumanly blue and focused on her as he lifts his hood from his head with both hands, casting it back in a thick pile around his neck. His voice never raises above that slow and inviting lilt, a deep pool of malintention. "I will give you everything you desire. You will beg me to stop. But I won't."
He kneels to the ground, and plants the silver of the short knife in the ground. The earth boils around it. Birds shriek from overhead. It sounds like laughter.
And then it begins to rain ghostly steel, ephemeral daggers of all types and shapes streaking black against the sky as they start to flood fill a broad wave in front of the kneeling man. He knows she wishes to fight him. And the first thing he moves to take is the room she would use to do so. The blades that pierce into the ground seem carved more of smoke than anything else, their forms indistinct and rippling, and never appearing to be in the same space once landing.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Lan Lilac with Enmity Radius! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Lan Lilac takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Enmity Radius for 50 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
So he'll kill her if she fails. This doesn't feel like any fight Lan has ever been in before. She's faced death before, naturally - nobody's life is safe on Filgaia, least of all a Drifter traveling on her own - but that crushing sense of intent is unlike anything she's felt. What are you, she wonders. If he wasn't sent by the Guardians, is it all just coincidence? But why?
What kind of mind lives in a soul like that?
The field dies around them. Lan feels it vanish, a wave of pins and needles and then... nothing. He's still, and she waits. She doesn't want to make the first move. Not when she doesn't know what he is. Her fingers curl the barest milimeter when he reaches into his coat, but otherwise Lan is still - breathing, but no unconscious movement wasted. That knife... she doesn't think it's a weapon. Not in the usual sense.
And she's quite right. It isn't.
"Maybe," she acknowledges. "Maybe."
Nobody ever told her that being a shaman would be easy. Nobody ever told her it wouldn't hurt. Nobody ever told her she'd live to come home.
The air is rent, but Lan is already dancing. Blades streak through the air. Some cut lines of red into her tanned skin, and her white cloak gains a few new holes. But Lan is fast, and Lan is alive, and Lan will not lie down and die for a stranger that won't even tell her his name!!
"Are you sure," she asks him one more time, holding up two fingers against the tip of her nose, "That you don't want to tell me who you are, just in case I live?"
She is there, and then she isn't.
She's behind him.
Smiling.
GS: Lan Lilac has attacked Lan Lilac with Move Like Water! GS: Lan Lilac has completed her action. GS: Lan Lilac takes a solid hit from Lan Lilac's Move Like Water for 0 hit points! GS: Quick! Statuses applied to Lan Lilac!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The man continues kneeling, an old soul in a younger body, as blades pelted the earth like angry hail. He rests there, watching the young shaman water nymph her way through them. Each one forms a gravestone, each the site of a tiny promised end to something beautiful. They sit there, slaying what's left of the earth, smouldering and smothering the ground in erratic steel, giving the field a bug-like quality, as if the ground does not sit exactly where it should in the grand scheme of things.
A piece of dust is picked up between his fingertips, and the nightmare spinner examines it, his regard not hitching even as the young lady slips out of existence, appearing behind him. His eyes, abominable moonlight that they are, do not lift from the bit of earth crumbling between his fingers in the slightest. He never rises from his kneel.
"Get on your knees and beg me for it..."
She comes face to face with a nightmarish version of herself when she moves to flank him. The appearance immediate, as if she'd stepped in front of a mirror filled with water. Her eyes are closed and her pale lips slack, as if enduring some unimaginable pain. Every part of her shivers, a drowned and wretched thing, lost beyond the ripples of water, but real enough so as to reach out and touch her. She invites it. She can be saved, just as she should save others. Chains, centuries old, weigh down her wrists, weight down her thighs and ankles. She cannot be seen, not precisely, not exactly. But she is unerringly, unnervingly real. Her lips turn a faint shade of blue, and as if the weight of her own body did so, her knees slam into the ground, ankles splayed to either side of her. She chokes, around an iron band securing her neck. She breathes outward, her chest hitching with the drowning gasp. A rivulet of water pours from the corner of her mouth.
Then her eyes ratchet open, cold, furious, haunting, despairing blue.
"When you have suffered enough," he says, "you can have from me whatever you want."
The shaman has only spare seconds to entertain the image. The voice comes from behind her. It is produced by a nightmare, a horrible thing with a knife for her back. The grass rips as hands burst from the earth around the kneeling killer like so many worms in the rain. One for each length and one for each blade of grass. If she finds herself ensorcelled even for a moment by the image of her own drowned body, he will grab every part of her with a hundred hands, erupting in rills all over the field.
-- that creature behind her cut of filmy residue and shadows left to steep too long --
A hundred hands will lay hold of her, and then when she is unable to fight him off, his ideated phantom killer will slip a nightmare, cold, dark and hard, right into the small of her back.
All the while he kneels, carefully minding nature's peril.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Lan Lilac with Merciless Genesis! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Lan Lilac takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Merciless Genesis for 119 hit points! GS: Disrupt! Statuses applied to Lan Lilac!
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
As if Filgaia weren't dying quickly enough, someone like the stranger exists. Some would be furious at the needless destruction, just another drop in an overflowing bucket - Lan is just a little sad, because this had been a pretty place before he came here.
Now it's dead, and dying, and a nightmare.
She doesn't know how it happened. She was here, and then she moved, and then she was there as well. Another her, another Lan, one eternally dying, drowning on her knees.
A chill colder than water runs through her, and Lan falters. "What--"
Her blue lips, her black chains, her white skin, and Lan moves without thinking. She reaches out, her most base desire to save another warring with the revulsion and confusion of what he's making her see. Her hands touch water. Lan opens her pink, living, breathing mouth to cry out--
And is arrested mid-lunge, caught by a thousand hands and dragged to the ground in a sick mirror of the horror unfolded in front of her. "Aaa-" Eyes wide in her face, head pulled back by strange fingers tangling in her hair, she sucks in a breath - and screams.
And screams.
And the heavens scream with her, a star bursting apart in the sky when her voices hitches with the wet shlick of a blade entering flesh. The pieces fall around them, burning as they enter Filgaia's atmosphere. The noise is deafening; Lan rips herself free of one million fingers, leaving strands of gold behind, and whirls on the stranger with angry tears streaming down her cheeks.
Breathing raggedly, she clenches her fists. "I won't."
GS: Lan Lilac has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Stardrop! GS: Lan Lilac has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Lan Lilac's Stardrop for 199 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Everything becomes more real when the knife slips in.
The hands, cut from the rejected dreams that failed to find a home, grip after the shaman as she rips herself free, swaying and gripping after her as she breaks free of the nightmare at her back. The phantom killer, once a watery replica of him, disappears the moment a meteorite collides with his skull. The ear-splitting scream and stone rain pounds the field, crumpling the chest of the field and causing great and gory ribs to punch through the earth with every strike.
The ribs crack as they break around Isiris, breaking into their base umbral components, even as the explosions cut into him, break his bones, even as they pound against his body like a hundred fists. He never rises, he never guards himself, his eyes dialated as the pain spears into his body.
The drowning woman struggles to help, throwing herself back with chained arms wide across the curve of his back. Her chest heaves as the starfall pounds against it, water sprouting from her lips with each blow until clear finally turns red. She was a watery image a moment ago, but now she is all too real, her body gaining resolution even as the shrieking spell breaks bones she didn't even know she had. In the end, she dies for her captor, her eyes glassy and distant by the time the crushing fall ceases.
With the attitudes of the wind, the hands--broken and unbroken--paw compliantly across the field, fingertips feeling and wandering around in the shadow of great ribs jutting into the sky. There must be thousands of the pawing things, in a thousand colors. They grip onto things as if trying to save themselves from drowning. Desperate and aching, they look for any purchase in the world they reach into. Their slow undulations are like watching something great and obscene, something unnatural and repulsive. But he opens his eyes, and all focus returns to them.
Haunting, crushing is the gaze he fixes on her as the man rises slowly. Though bones have been broken, his slow rise is still cautious and slow as ever, giving no purchase to tell exactly which. The limp body of his protector slumps at his side, the chains rattling as blood drains from her lips. She never quite hits the ground, her body slack against his hip. He never looks at her, he only stares at Lan absently. The knife is in his hand.
He keeps his eyes on her the whole time. When he takes the young woman and removes her head with deliberation, taking her by the hair and hooking his blade under her throat, he finishes off the thing borne of ill intent right in front of the resolved shaman. The defeated shaman at his hands seems to twitch with every sawing motion, and the blood spill is magnificent, coating his hands and soaking into his shoes and the soil at his feet. The legs move one last time, before he discards the rest of her, the hands dragging her away into the dark. The head, he keeps, blonde hair spilling haphazardly from his fingers right where he took her, his grip tight and close to the scalp. He says nothing the whole time, throughout the whole grisly process. But now there are two sets of eyes watching the shaman.
She chokes a little, gasping.
She is still dying. Again and again..
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Nightmare Paradox! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Nightmare Paradox for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper! Statuses applied to Isiris Shango'Ra!
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Surely, she's unworthy. Even Rigdobrite had looked at her with disappointment in the temple, fretting that she had much to learn.
Lan wonders if she hasn't slipped into hell somehow. Zoa doesn't have much of a concept of the place, but the outsiders' church does. She hadn't thought she'd find it on the surface of the world, clinging like fog to the limbs of a murderer.
It's Lan's voice that pierces the humid, cloying atmosphere again. He saws, and she twitches, and he grasps, and she dies. And she dies.
She dies.
Dies.
And Lan screams, over and over, eyes red-rimmed and staring, hands pressed against her mouth as if it could keep the primal, hurt-animal sounds inside her chest. But she can't. She can't save her. She can't save anyone.
There's no hope.
There's nothing like hope, not in this sick place...
She hates it.
Something hard glitters in Lan's eyes, underneath the tears and the grief. "O you of the endless heavens," she chokes out, staring into the stranger's eyes. "O you of a thousand gems." The words are hard to get out past the bile and the blood and the water, the water, the water.
"O you of secret knowledge, O you of eternal hope!"
She'll become someone worthy of the Guardians. Someone worthy of saving her dying planet.
She has to. It can't end like this.
Light millions of years old twinkles above. Comets fall from the darkened sky, smashing into the jutting ribs, the million hands, the stranger, the corpse. It sounds like cannons. It feels like thunder. It is not gentle starlight.
GS: Lan Lilac has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Meteorain! GS: Lan Lilac has completed her action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Lan Lilac's Meteorain for 36 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Finally, for the first time, he begins to walk forward.
Her head still hangs from his hand, fist ratcheted tightly into her blonde hair. Her bluish lips move, but no sound is made. Her eyes are unfocused, as if long since having abandoned trying to see anything at all for want of air to fill nothing. He carries her as if she were no more than a lantern at his side as he approaches the shaman, bloody knife in hand.
His gait is slow and methodic, every step a deliberate thing. He does not plod, nor does he labor or even stalk. He approaches with all of the calm aplomb of someone walking into one of those churches. As if the world were a normal, simple thing, even as it is now. The sky spits rock and fire at wonder itself, and the earth becomes more beautiful for it. The blasts like cannonfire give him pause, even as ribs crack and shatter above him, raining bone fragments across the dead field of broken hands. The shockwaves buffet him, throwing his coat wide in the breeze. But killing the world is harder than you'd think. And though he pauses for a moment, to look down at a blackened and charred hand in the field with a faint touch of dissension, the truth of the thing is that fear, sadness and trepidation have been long since left him. He looks up again -- with those unreasonably blue eyes -- and continues forward. Eternal hope, was it?
"A prayer," he remarks mildly, "better posed to cruelty."
He begins to split off as he closes with her, each step of his separating him into another body, a slow and inimitable stride breaking him into three shadows, one of which is holding her head still.
There is no real dance to what he does, no clever dodging or maneuvering woven into his pursuit to distract her. At the end of it all, the nightmare he spins around her will or won't hold fast. If it is an escape from this devil dream she wishes, all she has to do is hesitate for just one moment. To not run for just one moment. Just one. He will reach out and lay hold of her shoulder, and ram his blade into her just above her bared navel with all of the brutal calm of an angel doing the work of God.
The blade is one thing. The torment comes from when he continues.
His wrist works in vicious pulls, the same as before.
Left unattended, in only a few moments he will be up to his elbow in her.
In a minute, he may have her lung. Her stomach. Her kidney. Her heart...
All the while, he looks her dead in the eyes.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Lan Lilac with A World Without! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Lan Lilac has activated a Force Action! GS: You have activated the Force Action Accelerate! GS: Lan Lilac takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A World Without for 151 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
"I don't want to hear about cruelty," Lan informs him plainly. "Not from you."
He begins to split apart, and at first Lan thinks that she must be seeing things. That maybe a meteor hit her as well. Brain damage, don't you see funny things when you've been hit hard enough?
It's funny. She might die here, when just yesterday she'd decided she was going to become someone who could save a dying planet. She still wants to. She wants to save anybody that she can, because she can.
She tries to run from the stranger, leaping back from one of him - trips over the crawling wreckage of a hand, another grips her ankle in a videgrip. Lan yelps, and makes the mistake of looking down.
There's a hand on her shoulder. When she looks up, all she can see is blue.
This close, her eyes are rimmed with dark blonde lashes. Her cheeks are a little chapped from the wind and the sun. And her blood is red, red, red as it spills over his hands, as Lan gasps quietly and tilts against him.
There is something inside of her.
Her lips work soundlessly, eyes staring over his shoulder. It only takes a second, but it lasts an eternity, a single forever-long moment until her brain catches up with her reptile nervous system. Lan grips his blood-wet wrist in her hand and exhales, a warm sigh against his shoulder.
Something touches his back, an opposite echo of the place he's cut Lan open. And something slips inside of him in another echo, some chi that seeks to ferret out the cracks in the human body.
Lan sinks her teeth into his shoulder, scrabbles at his hands, and kicks him away from her.
Staggering away from him, blood pouring down her legs, she holds something close to her chest as if it were the most precious thing in the world. Something that gasps and stares. Something with long blonde hair just like hers.
GS: Lan Lilac has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Shield Buster! GS: Lan Lilac has completed her action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Lan Lilac's Shield Buster for 99 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
When they meet eyes, he seems to be one too young for what he knows. His eyes shine painfully into hers as he supports her weight. Pain is the thing that he is. It can be gentle, far too gentle as he buries his hand and busies himself with her insides. The look he gives her is not anger and it is far from pleasure. It seems reasonless. There is nothing he gains from hurting her in this way. He feels no shame, and has no fear in locking eyes with her as her body lifts under his ministration, the brutality of the blade cutting into her originating from his shoulders. His stronger motions cutting hard through her, he calmly searches for something she will truly miss. Even as the hopeful shaman seems to give up, her head sagging against his shoulder, he does not stop, his grip sure. He will support her for as long as is needed.
Only the constellation of a multi-point chakra crush separates them.
With the grisly ritual interrupted, he is broken off from his duplicates. Each shivers in space, their forms indistinct and broken as the energy wells and branches between them. Kicked away with a long and viciously unfurled leg, the nightmare spinner's boots slide in the dust and flesh-wrought gravel, his coat falling slowly over his lengthy frame and wide legged stance. He goes to ground swiftly, his lowered stance bringing him to a stop relatively quickly.
She falls away, clutching the head that used to be hers and is at once hers again. Through an unknown process, the energy she targets him with branches between the immobilized killers instead of crippling him directly, their bodies crumpling and shuddering out of existence over an agonizingly long time.
"Cruelty is unavoidable," the slightly older boy counters, rising to his full height with one bloody hand clamped over his shoulder where she bit him. When he takes it away, there is no distinction between what is his blood and what is hers. He bears it no mind for the moment. Dispassionate, his hand returns to his side. It is not the one. His other hand looks like it has been involved in a massacre already, coated to the elbow in crimson.
"Cruelty is the purifier that separates even the bird from the worm," he explains, his voice even and inviting. Pleasant, even, if it weren't so uncomfortable a notion slithering into your ear. "It takes away everything that isn't important first, and only last does it take away the one thing that is. For most, it is their life. Tawdry and predictable..."
He raises a hand, and seems to catch a mote of the moonlight in it, letting it extend at 22 degrees from his hand, forming a silvery halo around it. He lifts it slowly, until the moonlight almost drowns out the pain of looking him in the eyes. A song reverberates through the world, light and unknowable, of the sort whose name will never be remembered and latches deep into the back of your mind. He looks up into the sky briefly, absently. His eyes half-lidded, he returns his attention to the earth and the people in it.
"Even in time, your desperation will fade. Your suffering is tribute to more than you will ever know. Know pain."
In the end, he means to shoot her in the head, a silver beam of light cutting from his hand.
If she still stands against him, if she does not flee, she will be shot through. As light, there is no chance for evasion once he looses the arrow, the light of the moon reaching target instaneously. The color is beyond silver, the same shimmer as her hair ribbon. The spearing spell will cut through her, the area beyond her, and it will not stop until somewhere deep within the mountain. The strength of the Ether he channels is that of penetration without limit. She will be shot in her head. And she, the beheaded her that she cradles, will die yet another death.
Except this time it will not be because Isiris held her.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Lan Lilac with Demiselene! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Lan Lilac has activated a Force Action! GS: You have activated the Force Action Accelerate! GS: Lan Lilac takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Demiselene for 124 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
She's never seen eyes like that before. Eyes that lack even the illusion of basic humanity or empathy.
She wonders, somewhere far away from here, if she died somehow in the Temple. If everything up between then and now was the dream of a newly-freed spirit before it became caught in a nightmarish afterlife.
She didn't think being dead was supposed to hurt this much, though.
She flees from him, running despite the wound in her belly, despite the red footprints she leaves in the dead grass, or the way dessicated blades of it adhere to her blood-sticky ankles. The head in her arms continues to gasp silently, continues to dribble pink water from slack lips, and its hair becomes sodden with crimson.
Lan realizes, with the certainty of a stone crushing the air from her lungs, that she is going to die here. That she can't even save herself - her self, or the pale shade of another Lan in her arms. "I'm sorry," she grits out between her teeth. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..."
She isn't talking to the stranger. Maybe not even the head, though she cradles it much like a wounded mother would a dying child. She turns away from the shine of silver, of light so familiar - yet not, because it's never been directed at Lan before. She turns to flee, and the pencil-thin beam punches through her shoulderblade. Blood mists over her front, paints her left breast in bright, arterial red. She can't move her arm without wanting to scream. She wanted to scream already.
Lan is going to die today.
She is going to die and nobody will ever know what happened to her.
The shaman gently drops her severed head into the remains of the dead grass and tries to clear her mind. There's no pride in falling, and there's no shame in running. But she knows that if she runs, she's only leaving her back open to him. He has already ruined her; she won't survive another violation like the last.
All she can do is follow things to their logical conlusion. Refuse to beg him. Refuse to run.
Die like a Baskar.
Lan traces a circle in the air with her good hand, her bad arm twitching where it wants to mirror the motions. Facing him down, violet eyes resigned, she draws back her arm. Fingers extended into a blade, she thrusts her entire arm through the ring she made, and her soul pours forth like a shot from a piece of beam artillery. She'll spend her last breaths trying to blow him away, and she'll die like a warrior, and maybe in her next life she'll get it right...
GS: Lan Lilac has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Akashic Arts! GS: Lan Lilac has completed her action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Lan Lilac's Akashic Arts for 58 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
He slowly approaches.
The nameless spell was one of the few he learned back then, back when he was more human than he is now. It was one of the few he was capable of casting, one of the few that wasn't unmitigated atrocity. It was one he honed and perfected, like anything he has ever done, until it was a perfect offensive technique. The spear shot from the night sky.
He has cultivated his own share of pain. Blood still seeps into his clothes from his shoulder. He still feels acutely the broken bones and battering bruises from the explosions and shockwaves of falling stars. He has felt the long road of her fight. But he does not try to run. He does not panic. The nightmare spinner nearly is at a standstill, but for a patient and abiding pace, amiable to the tumultuous Baskar, whose world is painted in blood. He sees her moving, sees her tracing out the circle in the air. He could summon a shield, censure his garden from harm. But no.
Finding his silhouette is so, very very hard.
He takes the shot bonelessly, his body shot through with a beam not dissimilar to his own. Horrific eyes wide and detached from the world, the man floats into the air, coat spreading in slow motion as he..shivers in place, shaking imagery disappearing from view.
The blast ricochets off of his opened hand, the splash of soul and force cutting across it in vicious rills. The spinner stands a few feet to the left, his pursuit and even his gait uninterrupted by her blast. He approaches her eversame and nevertheless, passing into the shadow of the mountain above, his coat and silhouette slipping like milk into the dark. His lines were always hard to pick out from the surrounding environment. Now, mated with the cold, grey dark, trying to do so is enough to make the eyes bleed. He can almost not be seen in his approach at all.
But for those eyes.
Piercing, beautiful, inhuman blue.
They are harsh in the worst way, unrelatable in the way a woman feels when she looks at herself in a broken mirror. It is an awful thing to do to a person, the way he looks at her with those sedate eyes.
"You are brave," he reflects, a touch of novelty remarkable in his voice.
He has chosen to stand ten paces from her, exactly as he had before.
His knife is tucked into his belt.
"But bravery doesn't matter."
One of his eyes lids. Quivers, slightly.
-initiate phantasmal surge.-
A hand reaches from the shadow cast by her discarded face, fingers scrabbling across her cold and clammy skin. She whimpers lightly as the arm slides around, pulling the head over, making the shadow larger. From the spread of her golden hair, another pale hand sprouts, hitching underneath her jawline. Another comes from the blood pooling at her neck. Crimson-stained, it slips a hand over her mouth...
Don't look at it..
If the Baskar looks at what is happening, if she lets herself do more than hear that plaintive whimpering of the maiden at her feet, she will see the abominably smooth skinned hand close over her face, slowly clasping over a mouth that may as well had been hers. And then, inextricably, she will find that her own mouth is missing entirely. No teeth, no tongue, no taste, no lips, however dry and bloodcracked they may have been. With no mouth, and no voice, she won't even be able to scream.
It is a distraction, as from the shadow of each hand, another sprouts. They replicate endlessly, along every line and cast shadow. The infection spreads fast. Dark hands sprout from everywhere just out of her sight, everywhere the hopeful maiden can just barely not see. From every part of the ground and even her every unnoticed curve, hands with fingers an inch too long reach out to lay hold of her and every liberty she has ever known. Even one finding purchase will start a horrible chain. Blindly groping and pulling, the thousands will pull her down into the darkness and blood, and pick apart whatever of her is left.
Even if she finds her way free, they will continue to grasp at the ground for some time after, pawing and worrying at the head she left, reaching desperately for something, anything.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Lan Lilac with Phantasmal Surge! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. DC: MISS! Lan Lilac completely evades Phantasmal Surge from Isiris Shango'Ra!
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Lan is puzzling at the fabric of the nightmare that holds her. She will die here, but why? Who is the stranger? Why is he here - why does he do this? Why does he look at her like that, but put away his knife?
What is he, because no human has eyes like that?
The rush of her blood in her ears renders her deaf to the pitiful sounds made by her severed head, that other Lan who is groped and rent and smothered and subsumed. Something brushes her foot and she stomps it down, not relishing the sound of thin bones snapping. Even the thousands of phantom hands seem lost and afraid...
She's never seen an art like this. It's horrible.
The only way out is through. The only way is up. She gathers the last of her strength and leaps for him, long dancer's legs propelling her forward. Up on one leg, rotate her hips for greater force, and she aims the heel of her sandal for the oh-so-breakable cartilage of his trachea. She doesn't have the luxury of holding back her blows. Holding back has gotten her killed. If she hadn't waited for him to make the first move, maybe...
Save for her wet-sounding breaths, Lan is silent. She won't beg, and she's done apologizing. All she can do is give her last moments her all.
GS: Lan Lilac has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Akashic Arts! GS: Lan Lilac has completed her action.
DC: MISS! Isiris Shango'Ra completely evades Akashic Arts from Lan Lilac!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The hands cripple easily, snapping like the bones of a bird with delicate pops that could barely be said to be anything at all if one didn't know what they were. Slowly, the hands drag the head down into the ground, deep past the earth and soil, down to something worse, down to the place that they are drowning in.
Desperation gives way to anger. It is a kind of freedom. The nightmare spinner looks on placidly. The surge does not staple, does not fade with one attack alone, the ground rilling with hands, waves of the things bursting after the Baskar as she leaps into the air, whirling her body and curling her form. Hands snap shut after her as she sails over them, gripping for any sort of purchase whatsoever and finding none. Her mind is smooth, featureless, and beyond his reach.
This gains a mote of his attention.
"Interesting.."
They are the last words he says, one long bloodstained leg from the shaman spearing into his neck with hailstorm force. The sound his bones make when they crack are much, much different than the sound a bird's would make. He is surprisingly light, his body travelling down as she throws herself into him, ragdolling as he slams hard into the ground, his body the only proof against the waves of grasping hands reaching for her. His coat grinds into the earth, his body leaving an impact crater as blood sprays into the air from his mouth, obviously from his neck breaking and the trauma of it. The man who is younger than the nightmares he conjures seems placid, even in death.
Fingers steeple.
The throne in which he sits surveys the carnage. She is buried up to the neck of his limp and lifeless ideation, over which he supervises. The throne's back is unreasonably, unrealistically tall, and carved of black ebon. Regardless of the moon's phases before, the world is starting to look a little worse for wear, both moons hanging low in the sky and positioned exactly in the crown of the black stone's finials. He watches her for a moment. Though his tone was mildly appreciative a moment earlier, the moment has left him. However, he seems to bear her no ill will for murdering him. His breath is slow, calm.
It is getting impossible to tell what parts of the world are real and what parts are his interpretations of them anymore.
"An admirable method. As painless as possible," the killer observes calmly. "But you don't have the needed 'strength' to not be cruel. This is not a world in which you will be able to escape..." he pauses, looking to one side as if the moment escaped him.
He is beginning to feel something. It is troubling.
The voice a moment earlier now comes from the man whose neck she is, or was buried in. His neck is no longer gored on the end of her sandal. He still lays before her, submissive and compliant to her every want, her every will. He looks at her, with all of the aplomb of a man in a casket. His hands are still at his side, defenseless. His knife, the same one he used to saw off her neck earlier, is plunged into the ground beside his head. Slowly, the ground begins to give way beneath him. Beneath her. It is eerily eventless, the earth turning into the sky and rushing up beneath her. She can still feel him beneath her, and he still does not move. If she gets lost in that feeling, they will inevitably begin to freefall.
"....this is not a world in which you will be able to escape," he repeats, his warm, compliant body going hand-in-hand with that liquid, soothing voice. He looks at the knife at his side. He means to soothe her about the choice she will have to make. And the boy with the mind-chilling eyes may have succeeded. Were it not for his words.
"...without a shred of black in your heart." They are all wrong.
If Lan lingers too long on his body, if she is caught in the inverted space, she will see the world underneath this world. The waters of it are as vast as the sky itself. It is a level removed from the real world, a level further. She will see, beneath her, the world those hands were trying to escape. And she will see what she must do to escape it herself.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Lan Lilac with Malediction Chaining! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Lan Lilac takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Malediction Chaining for 54 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
For all the the outsiders' church claims dominion over the souls and afterlives of men, Lan is of a way far older, and her belief is just as strong. She doesn't want to die, but she isn't afraid of death. Not even when it comes to her like this, at the will of something that she doesn't comprehend... her family will miss her, but she hadn't planned to go back for years anyway.
She takes little satisfaction in the crunch of the stranger's windpipe. She no longer trusts something as simple or real as that to kill him. She does not doubt that it happened - Lan knows what she heard and saw and felt. But when millions of ownerless hands grope and crawl like children lost in the dark, when she has carried her own severed head in her bloodied hands, Lan can't even be sure that she is still alive.
It doesn't make the sudden reality tilt any less disorienting.
He speaks to her through a throat whole and uncrushed. Lan's eyes are hard with worry, even as she ignores the feeling of fingers closing around her ankles. The Baskar maiden looks down at the man - the boy? - with a trepidation unlike any she's ever felt before. "What is this place?" she asks eventually, her mouth dry. "What have you done?" This isn't the fear of death. This is...
The sun feels cold and distant. Lan is sure she will die in this alien world... or worse, that she may live.
Even the ground is growing mushy - perhaps with blood, or perhaps it has always been made of heaps and heaps of broken hands, of cold flesh. Lan falls to her hands and knees atop him, the will to fight ebbing as the world inverts.
A lake. Dark, distant. Deeper than Shturdark's domain, the sight of it stirs fear in her that makes Lan shake -- and then she's back, kneeling on top of the nameless stranger. Anyone who saw only them might be forgiven for thinking that they've stumbled upon a pair of lovers preparing for a tryst; her hair spills pale over her shoulders and kisses the throat that she never crushed under her heel.
The hand that closes around his wrist is gentler than it has any reason to be. Maybe she's taken pity on him, or maybe she's afraid. Even Lan can't tell anymore. "What've you done?" she asks him again, plaintively, a greyish tinge spreading across her face.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
His mouth draws tight in a thin pressed line.
The young man sits in the sling of the black throne quietly, fingers still steepled in his lap, passive observer to the crucible in which the Baskar's mind burns. He is feeling the aftereffects of his own attack, crows that do not exist beginning to gather in trees that are not there to witness his crime. Though his expression draws tight, not even a fiber of him does not move, relaxed with one leg slung over the other. His coat, a voluminous thing, piles high upon the ebon stone, making the nightmare spinner seem smaller and younger than he really is in that exact moment. The arch of the throne's back cradles the moonlight, giving the scene a cold and indifferent light.
The phantom killer is still compliant underneath the Baskar maid, arms flat at his sides. His fingertips barely rest on the ground, fingers lightly curled, relaxed beneath the warm weight of she. The movement she makes against him is warm with shock, but their eyes do not meet, and the helpless boy's eyes--those harsh and abominable eyes--loll in his head, coldly regarding the sky. He seems almost as awake ad he is asleep, somewhere on the cusp of a dream.
A dream made of an endless and dark lake of squirming, unsated things.
Even now, the promise of an end that cannot be described hovers forever in a sky that hangs too low to be real, but he is not cognizant for it. Golden strands, dingier and darker now than they were moments ago, waterfall his throat, entwining their scent with the dirt. The gossamer wave shifts only slightly as she speaks to him, her voice caught in the string cradle of fear, sympathy and confusion. The cradle called 'despair.'
When he responds, it is in the faint reverb that has tuned his voice since the beginning. It is a soothing tonality that can almost be imagined across her hairline and shoulders, his throat sounding across strands of hair like the song of a violin.
"I have shown you what you would have never had the chance to see."
He explains it as if it were a great gift. Even now, his wrist feels warm in her hand, as if he were still something new, something real. "I wanted to bring you deeper. Into the very waters of it. What you do not understand, and what you cannot know. This thing that brings your heart to a standstill... and your living now is the borderpost to the rest of your existence. If you do not like it, then you know what you must do.."
The knife is still stuck in the ground.
His offer is mercilessly seductive, the closest his throat will ever be to a knife, the closest her hand will ever be to holding it. She can feel the tendons of his hand twitch absently in her gentle grip of his wrist, a detail that makes it hard to separate the dream from the reality. "This nightmare will never end for you," the man explains again, repeating sentiment. "You will live it over and over, until you do what you wish with me. If you do not, you will need to ask yourself. Will you be able to withstand this force, this stress? Will your body understand what it is experiencing? Or will it die underneath you, a limp and sinking cage of bone and flesh..."
He smiles, as the crows begin to gather, signalling.
"But it is too late. Today, our time has come to an end.."
There are always two perspectives to every meeting. No matter what she sees, perched atop a helpless and receptive boy, presided over by the master of her own written hell, none of it is real. The throne that stretches into the sky doesn't exist, and neither does the man that sits beside it. The boy beneath her who tempts her is little more than dirt, her knees, legs and hair dipped in dust. The nightmare spinner never moved from where he was steps ago, standing in front of her from where she tried to kick him in the throat. Without knowing, she kneels before him, begging something that doesn't exist for an absolution that will never come. Patiently, the man in grey kneels to meet the Baskar, the ends of his Solarian coat rifling along the ground. Slipping a hand holding a bloodstained knife through her golden hair to move it out of her view, he leans over, whispering to her.
"You will suffer for me, in the end. It is in your nature to carry that burden."
So allowed forward, the killer will kiss her softly on the forehead.
And in so doing, brutally spear her mind all the way through with enough Ether to erase her consciousness from the waking world, and throw all that's left of her waking self deep into the pitched, cruel dark.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
What have you done?
What have you done?
He speaks so very calmly, and Lan shudders atop him. "Why." It isn't a question. Lan presses her mouth into a thin line because if she doesn't she might cry, but it doesn't stop a fat tear from rolling slowly down her cheek. "Why would you..."
In the end, there are questions that require words that haven't been invented yet. Lan just never thought she'd be in a situation to ask one of them. While the boy speaks in what may as well be riddles, she can't do anything but stare down at him, mouth working silently. Can she... will it really come after her, over and over like he says? Is he really implying that she would have to...
That she'd have to cut...
Blood soaks the front of her shirt and her shorts and her thighs, spilling sluggishly now over the body beneath her. In a different world entirely, Lan stares with eyes unseeing at the feet of a nightmare made flesh. Her blood pools on the floor between her knees.
In both worlds, Lan weeps. In one, a boy prophecises that she'll go slowly mad from this endless hell. In the other, a hand smoothes the hair from her forehead in a gesture that should be comforting at any other time.
The black sun is so bright... The glare of it reflected off of the boy's horrible eyes will blind her. Lan grips his wrist tighter, opens her mouth to try to ask him 'why' again. Something sears through her, like some merciful bullet - she jerks against him, eyes going wide before gliding shut. Lan is unconscious before gravity takes hold, and her body slides to the left into a heap. Crimson smudges the underside of her nose.