2022-02-14: Crow and Dove: Hosts of Spirit and Memory
- Log: Crow and Dove: Hosts of Spirit and Memory
- Cast: Isiris Shango'Ra, Magilou
- Where: Aifread's Hunting Grounds(?)
- Date: 2022-02-14
- Summary: After learning the secrets of Ostagovo Manor, Magilou finds a man unraveling his own memories. She subsequently tries to murder him, and takes back something he took. (Content warning: Heavy illusionary violence.)
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
---./\/\/`---------------
It has grown to the point that even the idea of closeness to him causes the perception to do strange things. The shiver of silver is a familiar sensation, approaching his demesne. It's the sort that whistles a faint siren song in the ear that doesn't exist, a thread plucked somewhere deep in the soul that never quite stops singing. The sufferance of the world twists, dilates, undulates, shivers at every raw, bleeding edge. It is the sort of thing that repels all but the very and most ambitious.
The man in the grey coat stands in the open field, but for as long as he's stood there, it has not been 'open.' Ghostly impressions, images of rotting and decaying buildings from another world entirely eat up the open air, as true as heat mirages in the distance, but still vividly clear. As he has, he always frequents these places, where he can be alone and in solitude to his own mind, sorting out the thoughts unspooling around him. Above him, the idea of concrete sloughs off of the ghosts of gutted steel frames, drifting slowly into a sky that seems less and less like the sky the more one looks at it.
He whispers to himself, thinking at some level or another.
One hand reaches to the left temple, slipping fingers beneath the raven cut of his hairline.
In his free hand is a sword, and its edge glows raw, angry red.
He steps forward, slow, steady, once.
And raw red embers twist around him, an equal dance, of something that used to exist only moments ago.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Logic and magic make terrible bedfellows.
Stay still. Don't cry. Drink this. Count down -- five, four, three...
When Magilou discovered what he was doing, his ultimate plot to meld one with the other, she wasn't surprised.
She was resigned.
She was tired.
A new gun. A new toy. A new method. The old one was broken!
Oh, well.
Lanval did try to warn Bienfu.
She just... wasn't listening.
Ra isn't the only man who can get lost between the past and the now, too distracted by the memory to see the shape of what's changed. Past a certain age, the memory overwhelms the present. Keep it locked and barred, until someone else tries unthinkable experiments, carves their initials into human misery.
No one grafted anything onto Magilou.
No -- he just tore out her heart.
Nothing under her feet, where the grass should go.
Her hair is still rain-slick, clothes still damp from clouds which didn't stray this far. Perhaps that's why she doesn't notice the shiver, at first; she already is. When her hollow eyes turn up to see the condemned buildings, her response is a flat, atonal: "Ah."
Damn him, she thinks, and musters no energy for an exclamation point.
She stands, string-cut, on grasphalt path. She watches, for a moment. Another.
She puts her mask on, a dissatisfied scowl. She takes her shikigami doll between two fingers, and the paper flutters, as a wind-green Seraphic glyph alights under her feet.
"Is it hot," she asks, rhetorical, "or is it just me? Crown Fire!" The tornado, as it turns out, feed flame -- and a fiery vortex erupts around Isiris, threatening to engulf him whole.
She didn't even say hello.
GS: Magilou has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Crown Fire! GS: Magilou has gained 1 Combo! GS: Magilou has entered Avenger Stance! GS: Magilou gains 10 FP from her Daredevil! GS: Magilou has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The tornado engulfs him before he even notices her presence.
The steel and grass sky shifts slowly over her head, of no weather that can exist in this world, the seraphic-empowered flames churning through the open space and turning air to sulfur in an instant. And the last she can see of him is the firewall that falls upon him, bright enough to cast obscene light over the decaying architecture cast by a lost dream. And in that lies the spread -- that he could have died simply, but that even for him, the simplest thing does not kill him.
In the curling inferno, he only dimly becomes aware of the smouldering force when his glove starts to sizzle around the hilt of his blade. Ideas, glyphs, lattices of obscene ideas and the ghosts of arcane diatribes flicker at the periphery of his notice, coruscating flames whirling around him, casting his coat in a crazed light. It takes him longer than he -- or even really she -- is fully aware to notice the peril, saved only by his disbelief, and the unseen ghosts of black, shadows that surge and float around him. And even so, she is a divine sorceress, the heat enough to erase him entirely, if only given the time that does not exist in his haunted eye.
It is a reunion of all things, he explains to her.
You were forever destined to return to me, as was she, and she.
Everything is because of what left us in the past...
He slowly turns towards her, not truly seeing from beyond the wall of scalding flame and molten shadow, heat curling from his mantle as he does so. Passive, ruthlessly, mercilessly passive, he watches her eyelessly from beyond the madness, as if their understanding grew by the heartbeat. |||||||||| i've spent a long time with you -- |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| And the young man steps forward, his boot set to the sizzling earth, the drift of his eyes something more felt than seen. Beyond the fire, the shadow of the buildings are visible over them, the nest of madness surrounding him. And in the distance...
the world that was misses you.
He raises the razor curve of his sword slowly.
The fire undulates, shifts, shears violently at the middle, a sudden abscissa of stillness cutting through the flame where even fire cannot move and is cold and dead. And from that wound comes the malignant black.
The black wave spreads virally through the flame, a great threading wind that shears and pulls apart the tapestry at its source, floating threads of black embers cast through the body of what used to be the tornado that was focused on him. And yet despite this, the wave goes. It spreads, blooming as a mad flower might, disgorging its arc through the nature of the world, the affair of a single stroke folding the fabric of the mother beyond the nameless Ra, consigning it as it spreads. And yet despite this, the wave goes. It belts the lands, shearing the earth where it stood, and leaving nothing in its wake, pulling the threads of black from the core of everything, as a shear through the mind of God. And still the wave goes.
It approaches her, and bursts apart into a shearing wave of blackbirds, to both cut her down and snatch what's left from her body and breath.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Magilou with Nevermore Mantra! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Magilou suffers a terrible blow from Isiris Shango'Ra's Nevermore Mantra for 166 hit points! GS: Charge!! You gain 40 FP! GS: Magilou activates Arcane Font and Gleam!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
It's a dirty shot.
Magilou remembers the form; she remembers the words. She remembers how to kill first, so no one will ask questions. She remembers all these things she keeps in check, politely tucked away in her sleeve, a willingness to go too far without flinching or faltering.
She can never forget.
And she gave Isiris no warning.
"You scarcely know me," Magilou says, with her words, as she fixes her violet-green eyes on that flaming silhouette. She doesn't flinch as he steps forward, either.
If only he'd immolate himself! Save her the trouble.
"I won't go back."
Her words land heavy, anchor-dragged into the strange sky. Her eyes narrow, at the black; her lips purse. She looks perfectly disgusted at the display.
"Don't you know? I'm alive. My scars are mine, now."
The feathers meet her; a burst of white light, concentric circles, meets the feathers. Violet-blue-white-MAGENTA, as the light edges into unfathomable shades, all pastel-blocked, magic fluttering out. "Super Absorber."
The light consumes her.
What was pink and purple and dark blue now is red and white and black, her costume turned to some mockery of a playing card. (That isn't what it mocks.) The feathers on her mantle are white as doves, now -- white as one stocking, one tip of her hat, one-half the diamonds on her chest.
Red is more honest.
And the light, pulsing around Magilou, consumes. It consumes endlessly, passively, without charged intent. She takes in the powers of the world -- she neutralises them -- she makes their blood hers.
She brings his hungry abyss to zero, inside herself.
And on taking that power, she lifts her hand, and intones, with no incantation preamble: "Gravity Gale."
As if she would show him the power of darkness, fueled by emptiness.
The shadows coalesce above him, rich magenta to striking black. They expand, more a black hole than a star, as the wind swirls around that nexus of dark power. The elements act in conjunction, to pull in, to crush, to destroy.
And then the star collapses, to a pin-prick.
It threatens to collapse anyone inside just the same.
DC: You switch forms to Scourge of the Self-Righteous ~ Face the Wrath of Magilou Mayvin!! DC: Magilou switches forms to Scourge of the Self-Righteous ~ Face the Wrath of Magilou Mayvin!! GS: Magilou has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Gravity Gale! GS: Magilou has gained 1 Combo! GS: Magilou gains 10 FP from her Daredevil! GS: Magilou has completed her action.
GS: Gamble: Moderate! Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Magilou's Gravity Gale for 167 hit points! GS: Misery inflicts a random effect! Entangle applied to Isiris Shango'Ra! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra activates Arcane Font and Sufferer! GS: Magilou drains Isiris Shango'Ra! Magilou gains 84 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"Hmn..."
The man in grey watches the unfolding flower with limited captivation, with eyes that would appear almost pale blue if not for everything wrong with them. The bloom of light that flares high and along her, shocking his crawling black wave with opposition, and nay, more -- absolutism that draws in his Ether, unfolding it according to the laws she herself imposes along the earth, turning the chaos of madness into orderly, cold spite, stepping immaculate from his killing wave in a new, lovely form.
The darkness that recedes, terrified, from the cast of his eyes tilts as he moves his head, jawline dipping imperceptibly before her unfolding before him. It is easy to imagine that there is a part of him that is pleased, but his mouth is a thin line across his face, lips pursed, neutral, and cold.
That part of him was one he left aside.
The blackness blooms over him, slowly eating away the light, the tide he released adopted by the rise of a negative moon over the world, crumpling and folding the earth before him, uprooting both the idea of concrete and the reality of grasslands and the earth beneath both all the same. It crushes light, it draws him in, ragging at his coat and forcing him to plant his sword in the ground, in the black, anchoring something, anything in place before he has to raise two hands-- first one, with a noticeably dark expression, then a second, palms flat and open as the powerful blast draws him forward, into its event horizon, all before the doors shut, the infitesimal point smashing every pound of her spite shut on him with the force and weight of an entire ocean. An ocean that falls from the sky itself.
His power is only so much, and it's hard to tell where the audible crush of flesh ends and the piercing shatter of his 'disbelief' begins. Blood sprays the battlefield, and he is driven to his knees beneath the weight of the thing itself, his hands to the ground, blood spraying from the seams in his coat. Red crawls down his cheek, wept from his eye.
The agent is reduced to a panting, living thing, instead of a ghost of a memory long past. And it is that 'living' that brings him to be, a slow, cruel smile betraying across his features in the dark. His hands stay there for a long time, gloved fingers splayed wide in great, thick handfuls of earth that yet still look before him to be sections of street. The blast ate away a section of sky above him, leaving a sick crescent shape where a full, hale and whole building once stood, the idea of hundreds of thousands of people living in a great honeycomb structure disappearing in an instant.... an instant....
His form ripples, shifting, as if he were correcting an error in his memory. Folding slow, rippling away like a heat haze, he steps beside himself, never actually rising to his boots once more for her. She said for a moment that he scarcely knew her..
"A pretty little dream you espouse," Ra opines, pulling his gloves tight over his hands where they slipped from all of his blood. "But there is danger in not believing..."
"Do not worry."
He leans to a side, turning his hand away from her, reaching into the darkness of the building she ate with her spell, gripping something in the air as if it were whole. He grips it tightly, the snathe of madness that exists between them. And there he stands for a moment. "This is not a meeting that can be dominated by a millennia of 'strength,' imbali. I'm already in control of one part of you. Perhaps by the end, you'll give me every other."
"Because I will never fail you. I will never allow you to disbelieve.."
And then, Ra moves every shadow she's ever known.
"transcribe termination command. obscene miracle."
He steps into the motion, and pulls down the shadow of the skyscraper's memory and the crescent she cut into it in one swing of the scythe. His nightmare, the one she absorbed only a moment ago, even denatured, is poison in the belly, riling the moment he moves. All of the blackness she conjured, all of the threads she crossed with him in that moment are her 'weapons' rooted in 'idea,' the idea of the dark. A darkness that they share, an idea that is between and only them and no one else. An energy that belongs to him now belongs to her but belonged to him until she took it and made it part of her to give to him when he still has a part of her that she wants so she takes but it never stopped being his because it belongs to him but now belongs to her until she took it and it became something else but never changed and began to fold in on itself because it now belongs to her but it never stopped belonging to him and the connection is poison because it belongs to her and even a touch is enough of something that belongs to him like this can you unseal it, can you unseal it, does it belong to her or is it all becoming part of her head, the connection, the connection--
--is pure madness.
The obscene miracle causes steel to breed in shadow, every bit of darkness between them coming alive and boiling with shimmering blue in a laser-straight trail shearing through every bit of ground, crawling across the earth and through the sky and in the air and then -- she has only moments to determine exactly where his curse is causing reason to bleed away into nothing, before she forgets that the shadows cast by her own body are not part of his Ether. Before she forgets that his blade is not -everything- inside of her at every moment in every instant, and before she cuts herself to pieces on every bit of black she casts inside of her own absorption, inside of her own clothes, inside of her own mind.
The miracle is that she touches the dark, and then she belongs to it.
He swings the scythe without a blade, and everything becomes knives.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Magilou with Obscene Miracle: Esper-Killing Scythe! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has gained 1 Combo! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Magilou suffers a terrible blow from Isiris Shango'Ra's Obscene Miracle: Esper-Killing Scythe for 146 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Magilou gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Magilou activates Arcane Font and Gleam! GS: Magilou enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Crush. Splatter. Magilou hears these noises, watches this display. Her eyes and her soul are impassive. She does not feel remorse, for him.
Don't expect her to cry for illusionary souls. She shed all those tears long ago.
"Give it back," she issues to him, cooled, as he lives and breathes. It might class as a warning, except she has already crushed so much life from him.
Maybe it's a threat.
But he rises (he does not rise) over his blood and his pain, and he reassures her (it is not reassuring), and he grasps (the thing was destroyed). A shudder roils through her skin, and distantly she observes herself and remarks that it's hardly fair for him to play on vulnerabilities he doesn't even know exist.
Now, of all times, he finds her.
She finds him.
He transcribes.
Magilou may well be closer to an esper than not, these days.
Her absorption is a terrifying thing; she takes expression and erases it, atomised into power she can use. But there is something to be said for her mind -- for her memories -- for the way those scars groove her, even now she has made herself their master. That she absorbs his madness at all may be its own trick, its own knife through her mental ribcage.
His power is so much fuel for the fire, reduced to the same uniform existence as anything and everything in this world. A fruitless prototype, empty and dull, all-consuming. A power which could --
His influence is another matter.
"That won't work on me," Magilou says, a lifeless retort, as the light pulses.
Where the madness touches her, it ripples -- it disappears, into herself. The weariness is worn on her soul, not her skin. He bleeds: she is whole, despite the way the shadow cuts. It cuts and cuts and cuts. Into nothing it cuts. Nothing it cuts. Nothing is cut. She absorbs it all, takes it into herself. (Makes it hers. It was his.)
"I'm not afraid of impossible things. He made sure of that."
The only hint that she said too much is the delay, at those words -- the way her lips press together. Her ultimate absorption has consumed her emotions, too, perhaps.
Her hand thrusts out, straight, in front of her. She invokes: "Lightning Blast." Perhaps it is a boast, the way she sparks lightning into the world, against those shadows, to create so many more. From her hand fans out an explosive, concussive wave of lightning, arcing along 180-degrees in front of her.
What it touches, it destroys, in just the way electricity at maximum voltage does.
Strength will save her, here. It was her might and cunning which saw him sacrificed. She'll do it again, if she has to.
It is telling, perhaps, that Magilou hasn't wasted time on a single warning shot. She has only moved from aggression to greater aggression.
As if there can be no tolerance for him.
There is nothing more threatening than his kindness, to a historian who came from a garden of lies.
GS: Magilou has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Lightning Blast! GS: Magilou has gained 2 Combo! GS: Magilou gains 10 FP from her Daredevil! GS: Magilou has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Gamble: Moderate! Isiris Shango'Ra partially evades Magilou's Lightning Blast for 207 hit points! GS: Misery inflicts a random effect! Break and Entangle applied to Isiris Shango'Ra! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra activates Arcane Font and Sufferer! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The lightning cracks the sky.
A moment ago, he pulled down all of the shadows of the world to cut her. He pulled down all of the world itself to put blades into her through the abominable connection. And for many, that would have been the story of it. Knights cut to ribbons inside of their armor, not a nick on their steel. Mages, missing arms inside of their barriers. There is much to be said for his power, that of miracles. And it is that power that she breathes in, breathing in the killing and making it her own. But it is not hers. For it to be hers, she would need to share their truth.
She can make it hers, if she wants.
The elder mage tells him that it won't work, that she is not afraid of impossible things.
And the boy smiles to her, the passionless effacement of the warmth in his gesture still inviting.
An instant later, he is shot down in the field like a dog.
The light hits him full in the chest like a spear, the young man's arms ragdolling to the sides as he is lifted bodily from his place at the table, an instant spinning in time as all perception of the world breaks, cracks ever slightly as he is engulfed in light, every part of him blazing with electric force, and throwing him to the ground which no longer is. And as he does, an idea threads through the world around them. The ability to trust -- an idea, so simple. To take the world as it is. To do as you are told.
The world tilts as he drops to the earth, the light of lightning branching out over him to strike him, over and over, as he hits the ground. And when he does so, his body hits. And as he does so, his body hits. He lands, the instant stretching on into forever. He crashes, and the moment folds. He crashes, and the world tilts, as if all of God were an eye trying to look at him from the correct angle to make the kaleidoscope makes sense.
"As you are now, you are wanting. Your will is not commensurate to the task..the task of 'remaking the world to be/////////free of sin.'"
The shadow of him grows long and cold over her, the approach of an enemy behind the mage. He speaks with her so plainly, as if he has known her all of her life. "Of course, the first thing we are afraid of is the impossible. The things that hide in the closet. The things under the bed. And then we remake ourselves, to a better version of who it is we are. We tell ourselves that we are no longer afraid of that which we know isn't true and real."
The body, laying there.
The body, in free-fall, flickering and splitting in and out of the view.
Ra steps towards her, just on the periphery of her vision. It's hard to see him at first, it's hard to see the glow of his eyes amidst the branching light and the needling whistle that underthreads the entirety. It's hard to see him approach. Him, and the others, each one a version of the boy who brought 'trust' into the world. The idea that anything he says is simply the way it is, the ability to be a child. It is trust, truthfully. Hers, or rather the black little thing it had become. And yet he has done something to it. He has nurtured it.
"Then we grow, and we are told how things are, and what they must be. We are told the next version. That we are only fit to live as something small. And then we kill ourselves again. We remake ourselves again, telling ourselves that we must be who we must be, irrespective of our shackles."
As he dies there on the ground, he comes towards her, not fast at all, his approach slow and meandering, even as something else whispers to her in the distance, something powerful, something great. He tells her that she is not enough, that she should never have come after something so small and pointless so as to be worth nothing at all. And yet that boy has taken care with it, nurturing it in her, the thing that tells her that she is still loved by something beyond the veil. Something vast, benthic, alien. The man in the grey coat leans in close, gently taking her by the outstretched wrist, in that frozen moment.
"Then we love, understanding and dreaming of being something more than we know we are in someone else's mind. But what we hope what are and what we are are two seperate things. And so, we are betrayed. And so, we must remake ourselves again. On and on we remake ourselves, in a broken cycle."
"But we don't realize is that we were always right, all along."
She'll feel it, another hand on her shoulder, as he reaches out. He reaches out, taking her by the wrist. He reaches out, taking her by the arm. He reaches out and takes her by the neck. All the while, she is not enough. She won't ever be enough. Unless..
"The possible was never what we should have been afraid of."
The body crumpled in the middle space, deep in the harsh shadows of the lightning blast, flickers and splits, shivering out of this world as if a mistake hastily scraped from the canvas by the artists of the universe. What is left are those who hold her in place. One by one, they will latch onto her, one by one they will hold her down. But they do not hold her down. Not in the slightest. She is told not to move, to accept her fate in bondage. But contrary to that thing behind her, he is kind, and he is consoling. "I will never leave you," he tells her. "You are incomprehensibly, irreversably alone... but for you, I will always be here."
In lieu of that useless spell, he reaches out, placing the hilt of his sword in her hand.
She is so close to the thread of that which she wants that it's hard to see through the impossibility. He surrounds her, and approaches her, and holds her down, and sets her free, all at the same time, all while sitting beside her, all while standing in front of her. His gloved hands slowly lower to his sides.
"I will always be here to save you... one who was left behind."
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra spends 1 Combo on Link! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with The Lies Our Eyes Tell Us...! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has launched an attack Link! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra heals Isiris Shango'Ra! He gains 200 temporary hit points! GS: Restore! Break and Entangle removed! GS: Surge applied to Isiris Shango'Ra! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Formation! Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Magilou with Evince Transmigration - Mirrormad Synthesis! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Magilou has activated a Force Action! GS: You have activated the Force Action Guard! GS: Magilou suffers a terrible blow from Isiris Shango'Ra's Evince Transmigration - Mirrormad Synthesis for 225 hit points! GS: Magilou activates Arcane Font and Gleam!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
It isn't the trust he took.
That was something which never knew the innocence of a child. An infant abandoned for her attention to details no one could see -- a girl raised as an object of mockery and curiosity for the masses -- a young lady carved down to a weapon, emotion shorn away and power in its place.
At no point in her nascent life did Magilou have anyone she could trust. Every time she extended it, she saw it destroyed before her eyes.
For many years, through many crimes...
Her trust is a fundamentally adult thing, hard-won and stubborn. It is something she had to construct from ideas which did not resonate with her, a bone broken and re-set without willowbark or condolence. It is utterly discordant with the idea of doing what you are told -- it was forged in disobedience.
The disgust of the dissonance creeps up on her slowly, dispersing through the air like so much fresh ozone.
"Free of sin? Don't make me laugh. Sin is the only thing worth a whit in this world!"
He's done something to it, all right. She tracks it through the words, soon enough. They're not the first ones she's ever heard with imperatives behind them. No: Magilou has trained very well against this sort of thing. She recognises the influence he's weaving.
She steps, quickly, from the Ra which approaches. "I have no time for your trickery," Magilou issues him, and that one isn't even owing to her mental fortitude (or perhaps that word is a politeness).
No: he's done this before, this endless approach.
He repeats the same illusion.
She has no intention of dying a hundred-hundred deaths again.
The moment is frozen: nevertheless, she moves. She defies his words, though they're coated in some inversion of her eviscerated heart. But it is that same wound which aches, as she feels the way she is wasting her time and all her potential, the way she cannot measure up to the shadow she must cast, countless disappointments over the dinner table --
Magilou lifts her hand to strike, to bring down yet more of the magical Armageddon slinging that boy around like a discarded doll.
One finger curls around it; another. Another.
Her breath hitches in her chest, eyes squeezing shut, in that pained moment. "Damn you," says a woman who knew so little love, from her joyless circumstances leading through to her own toxic bite. She says it, and she stills.
Fingers at her shoulder -- fingers at her neck. She knows better, of course. She knows they're hungry ghosts, and she knows they're not here to support her, either. She knows the tricks in his playbook; she's died to them before. Even so, even still, she is still.
It doesn't work well, perverted as it is, laid against a woman who was raised in the shadow of questioning everything she saw. But it doesn't have to work WELL. It just has to work ENOUGH.
She can't move, in that moment, but she wasn't lying about making her scars hers. Her absorption is a constant, reactive thing, draining the power from the world, draining it into herself. In a sense, it is the ultimate defence. In a moment, she classes that grasp-which-isn't as an assault, too, and they phase into the shining white as she slips away, turns around. She bears no scars. They are on the inside.
Her fingers curl around the hilt of a blade.
Her opposite hand is the one which lifts.
"I don't need saving," Magilou says, in flat disgust. "I'm the best salvation the Gods have on call. Sin is at the heart of the world. Sin built it, sin preserved it! Deal with it, or die. I don't care which."
The elder points to the younger, and with no preparation or preamble she judges him thus: "Tetra Detonator."
It is not only water, coiling in towards him. It is not simply fire, or wind, or earth. In sheer defiance of the standards of the Blessing it is all these things, all at once, all converging -- four orbs of power, roiling in their cages, seeds of elemental potential which converge
and EXPLODE
meeting each other in the stark light of a star being born, all those millions of elements shattering into the world in a flare of bright-white power. Concentric circles arc out, shining, flaring, as everything flares to a single point.
GS: Magilou has activated a Force Action! GS: You have activated the Force Action Snipe! GS: Magilou has activated a Force Action! GS: You have activated the Force Action Full Clip! GS: Magilou has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Tetra Detonator! GS: Magilou has gained 1 Combo! GS: Magilou gains 10 FP from her Daredevil! GS: Mighty expired! GS: Magilou has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
There is nothing he says to her that he does not believe.
An earnest nature can be the sharpest blade when you believe in a world of knives. And this is no different. She tells herself they are not real, that they are simply ghosts, ideated memories of a reality much worse than real. And the buildings, the dilapidated street, and the devastation that she herself wrought in them, that they too are just memories. But the body doesn't know which is which, the eye doesn't know which is which. She can question them all she likes, disbelieve all she likes.
But for the thread to that flower which he's cultivated so kindly for her.
His belief in her is more than sufficient.
The boy on the other side of her has no ultimate defense with which to draw the power away, the tidal waves of force and elemental power that whirl around him at every direction, casting his grey coat in a nimbus of colors as the hurricane of heat, weight, energy and force pressurize in towards him. But instead of retreating, his eyes roll up slowly, looking up to the forsaken sky without moving his head, his hands still at his sides as everything seems to crawl the moment it enters his notice. He does not have an ultimate defense as she has. But then, it isn't necessary when his judgment is different from her own.
And the mad world coalesces to his side.
"That's too bad."
He slowly raises his arms forward in the twisted space, as if time had no meaning. He raises his arms as if conducting a great symphony, his eyes not visible, but his mouth set in slow determination and aplomb. He slowly interlaces gloved fingers before him, as if praying. There is a difference to the gesture, as if he were forming a great cage, even as the spheres around him begin to tear apart the world. And then the world replies.
He splits himself into five, one each for each of the wind's beloved directions and one for the center. And from every angle, he raises his hands, flat out against the winds as they rebel around him. And from each of his hands, arcana. From each of his hands, a titanic wall of screams.
The catastrophic blasts are swallowed up in a cacophony of pain, waves of black shooting high as buildings into the sky, forming a four-sided needle in the center of the calamitous burst. It is in this way that the man so named 'Ra' believes, and when the dust and light and black clear, the young man is floating a thousand paces into the air, the braid of smoke and sand dragging from his feet in great long shuddering waves. His eyes, that eerie light cast from them, look down. The ghosts on the ground flicker as he looks over them, as if the sorceress' ultimate defense drew from them in her escape. But they follow his eyes, and though they shift in and out of this plane, eyes upon eyes watch her.
The buildings are crumbling, as if shattered by her blasts.
That's too bad, he had said a moment ago.
"Because there are no gods left to call those such as we.."
And then, he closes his eyes to this world.
Her fingertips closing around his sword was an invitation. An invitation for her to end the nightmare, end the matter, and take back what was hers. Now the only thing that is left is to bring her to her limit. From his point on high in the air, he grips the braid of her tightly. The sky cracks, ominous horror though it may be. It starts in the distance, motes of things too small to see disgorging from beyond something that cannot be seen -- something the size of a mountain, and yet built by men. The idea of something that does not yet exist in the world. The motes of things that come from beyond the mountain grow, threading and cracking the earth. The boy stands there in the sky, as if insensate to the wind of it, the force of it. The schism between ghost and illusion grows hard to determine. Magilou can taste it, the sudden rush of energy. The power that writhes through the ideas of buildings, shattering them to pieces. The black force that is formless. The black of the ocean. The black of madness. There is no collusion of elements, for he has none. There is no ultimate defense, for he cannot conjure one.
There is only a memory of once being. A memory black as night. A memory that grew to encompass the whole sky. Using the memory of his blade, he will call it down on her, a black tide to feed her to bursting. A black tide to crush her. A black tide to wash apart the ground and force the mage into the sky. There is no explosion, only a deafening, merciless whisper.
It is there Ra intends to kill her current self, kill her by putting back what he took from her heart with a single blow.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra spends 2 Combo on Gatling, loading 2 into Gatling! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Magilou with Deviant Divinity Thesis: A Cruel Orisha! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has gained 1 Combo! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Magilou has activated a Force Action! GS: You have activated the Force Action Guard! GS: CRITICAL! Magilou solidly guards Isiris Shango'Ra's Deviant Divinity Thesis: A Cruel Orisha for 133 hit points! GS: Magilou activates Arcane Font!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Well, one of them believes.
Reflexively, Magilou does not. She cannot. Recognition of the unreal is written so deeply in her that she cannot help but tear at the threads, unweave what is woven. It was like a matter of life or death, once.
And there is nothing here quite captivating enough for her to pretend.
She is familiar -- agonisingly familiar, deep to her skin, deep to her flesh, deep to her bones -- with the concept of seeing what her eyes do not see, feeling something other than her body. She is too, too familiar with the doubt, the second-guessing, the horror in her gut.
Do you think it ever stops?
Raised in illusions, there is always, ALWAYS the question.
The world tilts; Magilou tilts the other way. She does not renege on her assault, as it threatens to destroy this world she loathes so much. She would atomise the lot of it. Shatter every split piece of him -- until he had no more to slice away. She is no merciful woman, seeking to rescue him from his plight. She has never been kind.
White meets black, crow-feathers to dove.
"You wretched fool," Magilou replies. The building shatters. The ghosts stare, steady as dying lightbulbs.
"I'm doing this for him."
Different him. Magilou doesn't bother to explain the discrepancies of the pronoun, less an -ess. She wouldn't have time, anyway.
She is grasped from the shadow of her, clutched tightly or not at all. Motionless, she watches, as the sky breaks. She watches as a skyscraper is reduced to its form and function, its girders, its concrete, scraps which might have been something else. The ground beneath her feet shatters, crumbles, fractures -- and she, held in place, butterfly-board pinned by the penace of his belief.
So, she thinks. Here comes the beginning and the end of the world.
It comes with absolutism. The sundered earth floods away, washed out like treacherous roads which look safe enough after the rain. It crashes down; it thrusts up. Caught between --
She absorbs. The runaway effect of Super Absorber is the presence of constantly absorbing, constantly neutralising, constantly draining away. But the consequence of adapting her absorption was always where the extra power went. She draws it into herself, erases its impact on the world, creates an existence where they did not cry out or struggle at all --
The balance of power was always that it impacted her, instead. She cuts herself on the blade, so that she may catch it in her hands and stop it from carving into everyone. She does not speak of making herself a sacrifice, in this small way. She doesn't talk about the effort it takes.
She is un-touched, one and the other, the light rippling against the endless black, transmitting the force into her. There would be no explosion, one way or the other. Perhaps it's crueler there was none planned.
Into the air she is tossed, ragdoll-limp, ragdoll-heavy. The blackness crushes in against her chest, into the absorption, THROUGH. It is a thoroughly terrible way to return what was lost, to plunge in and force it back into the hollow where her heart should be.
"Aaaahhh...!!"
To a high, exquisite pitch, her voice cries out, borne to the bare edge of her.
Did you know that there was once a girl who talked to spirits nobody else could see? The Little Witch was pretty popular. She had many mysterious powers, like moving things without touching them and divining where people would find lost objects.
Magilou is a girl who could never rely on the mortals around her.
But there's a reason she's closer to an esper than not.
Ra's not the only one, as it happens, who is friends with ghosts.
Magilou cries out, in agony and despair -- and she is answered.
A spirit of a fallen log enters the madness-land.
A spirit from the coastline scrambles out from under the sand and through the horrors called sand here.
A spirit of the sky drops straight out of the clouds.
A spirit of the shattered rocks rolls one away, and lumbers in.
A spirit of the gentle shade takes offence to the ravenous black.
Ten, twenty, thirty --
Forty-nine Normin Seraphs pour into nonexistence, into Magilou, into that heart Ra wishes so desperately to break. She spreads her arms; she will play host to them all, channeling them to herself, into herself.
And she is not alone.
"There!" Magilou forces her words out, forces the smirk onto her face. "Was it so hard to give that back? But I hope you don't think I'll forgive you... for profaning something precious to me. Now --"
Through the blackness, her hands come to rest on her hips. It is unthinkably blasé, in the wake of his annihilation. It is unquestionably Magilou's response. And from the focusing-point which is her, those Normin begin to rain from the sky. "Army of immortals! Forty-nine souls!" Magilou explains, as each crashes down with their elemental specialty. She flicks a shikigami under her feet -- yet another spirit, called to her side, standing by a lonely girl. The light pulses -- absorbs -- frees her, as she sails towards Ra, makes her demands: "Will you withstand their assault?! Or will you fall before them?!"
She'll pull up before the final explosion, though -- as much dark as light, all eight elements crashing down, crashing together. Each Normin blasts Ra, with their full might. Individually, their full might isn't much to write home about. But almost fifty, all at once...
That final explosion carries the light of all their souls back to her, as she swoops overhead.
"This is the end!"
GS: Magilou spends 2 Combo on Headshot! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Magilou has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with The Host of Forty-Nine! GS: Magilou has gained 2 Combo! GS: Magilou gains 10 FP from her Daredevil! GS: Magilou has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Gamble: Moderate! Isiris Shango'Ra suffers a terrible blow from Magilou's The Host of Forty-Nine for 340 hit points! GS: Hyper applied to Magilou! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra activates Arcane Font! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has Fallen! He is no longer able to fight!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
It exists now only as a suggestion, an ancient monolith carved by a hundred hands and chained down by a hundred bolts.
The massive monument is only visible in the far distance as the black splits from it, visible in the same way a mountain is visible in the far distance, hazy and indistinct from the world, but larger than any one manmade thing had a right to be. It is the existence of dread and a strain of something that sticks in the mind long after it glitches, twisting and fading from the corporeal world. Somewhere beyond the memories, somewhere beyond the nightmares, lies a monument to madness.
And so does he call to it.
The torrent from the sky, imagined as hundreds of thousands of twisting tendrils and black trailing motes made of fine insectile grains, crashes into her like the ocean, the earth twisting on its axis from the sheer weight of nonreality's driving rain. And her strength, that absolute absorption, capable of even holding gainst his ideological weapon, is the only bulwark against the brutal tide, standing above her, bright and strong. But he is indefatigable. And his roots in her go so, so very deep.
There is only so much a soul can stand to save the world around it.
His hand drips with blood, though it is his own.
The man in the grey coat breathes, the world of memories crumpling and destabilizing around him as he rises, the sand and water of memories flowing off of his shoes in the black wind. His laugh is bitterly joyous, intensity relieving to cooling, ever inviting emotion. And as he rises, he absently rubs his figertips together, feeling the slickness of the blood on his gloves. Its source, his eye, he is dimly aware. It bleeds, the slow weep of blood from his tear ducts from the rigor of battle and his overexertion. Far from red, the pin-trails of crimson are lit, black and glowing edges of neon blue while his unsen eyes yet remain open. The whispers fade only on his will, as she is supported, a whole Host at her back.
And he invites them as well, the wind howling past him.
"Enjoy my gift, imbali."
And then one less than fifty come to claim him.
He doesn't even pretend to stop her, the wide blast of energy buckling his body from the very first seraph. He is crushed, and each time he is hit, the blast stutters, and pushes him out of himself, a disassociative artillery battery splitting him off into his component iterations. Ghosts bleed from him like water, as fire and ice and lightning pull him apart, pull him through the falling wreckage of the ghostly memory of buildings without substance. His eye, bleeding, narrowing, looks on, over his shoulder, even as he is torn apart in a hail of contradiction and magic.
"this much, alone, by itself..."
The last bit of him is pushed out, tearing his memories from a world that is once again glad to forget.
She and hers is alone in that sunny field, her and her host.
Only his mad blade remains, stuck upright in the dirt.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"I won't."
He doesn't pretend to stop her; she doesn't pretend she isn't erasing him from this world. She is aware, of course, that he's poisoned the landscape entire, and even if every spirit she hosts tears him to shreds, it may well be part of the metaphor.
But she'll settle for scrubbing his existence out of her hair and her hunting grounds.
With this much power, she banishes the memories, and comes to rest in the present. She sags, knees to the grass.
She coughs, once, twice. Something black sloughs from her lungs to catch at her palm, and fades in the disinfectant of open sun.
Magilou glares at it, and draws a laboured breath. Forty-nine lights stream from her; all at once she is surrounded by the spirits of this place. It's the Void Normin, Bienfu, who stands beside her, as she lifts her head -- no longer bleeding light, hat all black and pink and purple again.
"You're late," she chastises the Forty-Nine, all sagging on an elbow. Her hand grasps her heart, and what was re-placed there.
"Seems we were right on time," says a Light Normin -- her name is Soove -- adjusting her prim little cap. She wanders up, and puts up her little hand-paws, to offer some healing magic.
Magilou takes a breath, and straightens up, a little swaying back-and-forth. "Seems that way," she agrees, mildly, as she goes and grasps that cursed blade, wrenching it from the earth.
"Ugh... what am I supposed to do with a stupid sword, anyway?" Magilou asks, waving it about. "Do I look like a Hellion?" After a moment, she flips it about -- she's evidently learned a couple of tricks from that man, despite her antipathy -- and offers the hilt to a Darkness Normin, name of Delither. "Hey, kid," she says, because he's one of the youngest ones here. (That's still pretty old.) "Take this back to the Ladylake estate, all right? Yeah, the one with the wards," she specifies, as he gives her a quizzical look. He takes the sword, anyway.
"I'll be around to section it off soon," she explains, waving a hand, before it comes up to her temple. "Yadda yadda, cursed blades, whatever, I get it, I got it... look, if you do find that moron, tell him I want to talk to him, would you?" She doesn't specify which moron she's asking after. They Know.
She gestures, and with the sound of fluttering wings, a fainting couch with feathered detail appears behind her. Magilou sprawls upon it, bonelessly. "Just, right now..." Her voice grows vague, looking up to the sun in the sky.
"... you can get out of here, idiots," she mumbles, to the Seraphim too weak to be a danger on their own. "I'm not keeping any of you here... don't you have other people to bother, these days..?"
Magilou's hand dangles, from the side of the couch. Wordlessly, she grasps Bienfu's hand, when he grasps hers with those little pawsie hands of his.
For now, the other Forty-Eight aren't going anywhere, either.