katabasis | [psl] dos rowdy boys

In the street, the shape of the fire and black smoke is dense as a weight—a force exacted against the body, embers splashing to burn fine pinpricks into fabric and the bare backs of hands, and liquid fire boiling away the moisture in cracked paving stones. There is the rush of heated air, and the thunder crack! of imperfect stone splitting under sudden heat, and the shriek of undead things as, burning, they surge from the splashed fire.

The charging wyvern bowls through the collected sword points and axe edges. Half a dozen skate off the surface of tightly knit scales. Half that find some soft point by chance and are driven by momentum into the stringy fetid flesh.

Flint, the fabric tie stripped from under his belt and wrapped now about the head and face to protect himself from the smoke and billowing sparks, finds himself being forced backwards—half clinging to the sword punched in under the undead wyvern's shoulder joint to keep his footing as the animal moves bodily through them, and half bracing to see the blade worked deeper.

No, there's little telling the shriek of a griffon from the scream of possessed wyvern here on the ground.

Which means there isn't so much warning when a griffon drops from the sky.

A controlled drop, talons extended, as though the wyvern were a promising looking elk who hadn't looked up at the right time. Monster lands with her full weight, claws sinking into rotting wyvern flesh and bone, screeching early victory as her wings flare, and she ducks in to rake her beak through where the creature's skull connects to its spine, a spatter of ichor following the tear. The undead creature in her grasp doesn't freeze up as something more alive might, but she only latches on harder.

In the saddle, sootier and a great deal more windswept than they parted, Marcus braces against the lurch of riding out her attack, a tight fist about the reins. Panting, breathless from the sudden plummet, and not able to do much to help or hinder his own griffon's participation in the battle for the moment.

A look out at the street and the people gathered, and backwards towards the ruined wall.

He flinches. It's the natural reaction, whole body twisting from the huge shape that comes plummeting out of the sky through the ash and smoke. The griffon's impact with the wyvern briefly flattens, but doesn't quiet, the undead wyvern. Wrenches the sword directly out of Flint's hands, and has him tripping free of the fray's slashing talons and thrashing wings with little more than his belt knife.

For what is maybe five seconds. Then his boot heel finds the handle of an axe similarly knocked free from its owners grip, and it promptly becomes Flint's axe in time for a second wyvern to come staggering up through the melee drawn by the stench of blood or the shriek of its sibling spirit. Or it comes simply because the fire burns, and all spirits in the waking world are drawn to the bodies of the living with the kind of hunger that makes all creatures insensate. Never mind that there is a modest armed throng waiting to rebuff it, and a griffon ripping into one of its fellows.

A brief look—he can hardly mark Marcus, save for the general shape of him there in the soot smudged griffon's saddle—, and this his attention too diverts to the wall.

The struggle of Monster attempting to rip apart the still thrashing wyvern beneath her is a little like attempting to stay on the back of a bucking bull, Marcus gripping onto the saddle and reins for the time it takes him to concentrate—

And collapse incorporeal, forming into smoke and flowing quickly down onto solid ground, embers trailing. Boots scrape in a slight stagger, and only the nearest of the gathered swords might spook backwards at the sight of a gust of smoke roiling under its own power and turning back into a man. The rest are more occupied with the crashing appearance of the second wyvern.

From here, he can mark Flint, face covered and all, more immediately for his stance and shape than anything else. This time when an arcane barrier is cast, its runes scatter broad enough to imbue at least half the gathered company, whether they recognise it for what it is or not. The flash of his magic only barely precedes Marcus moving alongside while his griffon makes messy work of the wyvern behind.

No time for an Alright?, when men and women, wielding weapons, are already attempts to ringfence the wyvern in to ensure it doesn't break through.

What there is time for in the scattering embers and floating fragments of ash under the blue glow of the arcane barrier is the thought that the wall won't have come down for nothing. Something will come passing through it sooner than not.

Then the second wyvern's lashing tail comes cracking across the face of that warding. It recoils, swinging it's great head impatiently around, and snaps it's jaws at the closest brandished sword. The wyvern earns a shout of surprise and the blade punching directly into the soft palette. Because the wyvern is already dead, this doesn't discourage it from clamping its rows of needle pointed teeth down on the arm of the unlucky unguarded mercenary.

Flint with his axe and protective barrier leaps reflexively after the animal. A half dozen men and women do the same, looking to stab and slash and hack at the fire mutilated creature—a kind of animal impulse of their own as the wyvern's jaws tightens and the caught mercenary's scream adds a curdled note to the butchery Marcus's griffon is presently engaged in.

Existing in tandem with the rise of fall of the axe: the consideration that they will need to cut up and away from this soon, and make all haste farther down the harbor to meet whatever means to make this evening more complicated than it already is.

Fire and strange green light stabs in through the crowd here and there—with decent precision, though some may feel a superficial sting of close heat or the odd prickling presence of raw Fade magic, may shy back from it. The brunt of these attacks strike true, burning desiccated muscle from bone or weakening hide under the next slamming down of the axe.

Eventually, someone gets a blade in at the hinge of the monster's jaws, and two others pull the mercenary back, his face grey and his arm and torso coated crimson, but breathing.

Behind Flint, a familiar sound, a sharp summoning whistle. It has Monster finally leave off the now disabled wyvern, clambouring down and nearer. Marcus turns, climbs back up into the saddle, and there is a brief wave of vertigo, a rush of blood where some internal chemistry is hastily configuring itself to make up for depleted reserves. It isn't unfamiliar, just something to sit with a moment before he barks across the way—

"Flint," and there's no conscious decision between it and 'Commander'. One is more economical than the other.

A fleeting glance follows in answer (to the whistle, maybe, as much as the shape of his own name). It hardens a moment later, prompting a barked order from the man to one of the an elven woman extracting her saw toothed sword from the side of the mangled wyvern's flesh and for him to bend and snatch a sword from off the smoking ground.

("Right, we'll see to the quay. You there! Stop gawping and see to tying it off. Maker's fucking tits, have I got to do everything myself," she grumbles, shucking black blood from the blade with a shake as she steps across a strewn bit of flesh.)

When he straightens, the axe is shoved unceremoniously into his belt and the sword simply remains in hand as he strides through ash and ember toward griffon and rider. He extends an arm to be hauled up when he gets that far. There's space behind the saddle, and little point in walking in the direction Marcus might see them flown faster.

"Our people should be nearing the wall if they haven't found more trouble on the way."

The last fastening of his own harness is yanked into place, and the leather strains as Marcus leans down to grip Flint's arm, helping haul him up. Monster is hardly able to stand still, let alone properly bow to make his going easier; the fire, the smell of blood and the clamour of strangers, the rotten shreds of gore caught on the rough edges of her beak. The reins are pulled in tight, neck arched and eyes blazing, to stifle some of her energy.

With the other hand, freed once Flint's gotten a leg over, Marcus collects up the half-loose leather lead intended for passengers, to guard against the likelihood of slipping off the back, and offers it as he starts to apply some pressure to the stirrups.

"Aye," he says, more acknowledgment than affirmation.

Most of the sooty cast to his clothing and skin is likely to do with his own magical run-off, where the only meaningful fire that's broken out are the nearby purging flames. Clean, otherwise, less gore-spattered or even mud-speckled from racing through Lowtown. Just smudging grey, and the slightly acrid scent of the Fade, beneath campfire overtones.

Monster peels off from the crowd with a tug to the reins, moving to find an adequate position to take flight. "No sign of the city guard making a push, yet," he says, meanwhile. "Some barricading, nothing coordinated."

"In Hightown, no doubt," is a blasé remark, the Guard presently so devoid of relevance to their current affairs that he can't summon the will to be heated rather than factual.

(This is probably unfair, in any case, but neither is he in the mood for charity.)

Instead, Flint twists the loose line twice about the arm and cinches himself in tighter behind the saddle seat. Finds a one handed grip, a fist closing on the back of Marcus' clothes. Between his knees, he is aware of a ripple and flex of muscle as the ash colored griffon's body clambers clear and tenses. Feather pinions flicking, thick cords of sinew unwinding.

"How much have you left in you?"

Magic. How far can he yet reach with it?

A grunt in the affirmative. More or less, and likewise not relevant enough to elaborate much further. Hightown will be fine, and Lowtown will continue to be in shambles for the foreseeable future.

Flint's fist clenches tight and Marcus glances down and aside to confirm this as signal enough that they're clear for flight, but pauses first at that question. Some amount of internal measuring, before he says, "Enough for a scrap," and he wouldn't even really know how to better answer that to a mage who has first hand reference, never mind a man who is only sympathetic to one.

A fight's a fight, and that internal fatigue that is neither physical nor mental but some other thing is familiar enough to manage. A sharp kick and Monster coils up, and catlike stillness in the haunches is a sharp contrast to her restlessness a moment ago. Then the lurch, the catching of air beneath wings, the ascent.

"I can keep something in reserve to protect us," louder, over his shoulder, "or focus fire downwards."

So he will more useful than Flint presently is, stuck on the back of a griffon with a hand axe in his belt and and unsheathed short sword. He longs for a crossbow. But there's nothing for it. He will just have to find some other way of utilizing his arm.

"Hold until I tell you which," is barked against the wind, the stomach plummeting sensation of leaving the ground, and the muscular working of wings and expanding lungs that sees Monster from the street.

In short order, they have pinwheeled above the thickest of the black smoke, and above the dying fires, and Kirkwall recedes into balls of lamplight and the pale spiderweb of paved streets reflected in either them or the ragged moonlight. Here and there: bright flashes of arcane energies, and the surging shapes of figures in the dark. Ahead of them, there is a dark scour of shadow splitting the city's wall, and in the rubble a fight is mounting.

The motion of the griffon is too extreme for a a spyglass to be worthwhile even if he'd a hand not occupied by either the tether or the sword. But from even this distance, he can mark a scattering of figures—a glint of gleaming red lyrium light, or the crackle of some arcane casting maybe; and a throng of the same wyverns they'd faced in Lowtown and along the harbor front. Though here is a brilliant flare of neon green Rift-light, and a matching flare of elemental fire. Marcus is hardly the only capable member of Riftwatch.

The arduous work of Monster's wings evens out into a glide as they circle ride around where the fighting has thickened at those crumbled walls. One might have expected an army, maybe, but there is no marching force making good use of the fallen wall.

A fight, nevertheless. Runic flashes and contained blasts of fire and Fade-green. It's spilled into the city like an injection of venom, but Riftwatch and anyone brave enough to lend their arm has done something to stop it from flooding much further than the now shattered market square that's turned battlefield.

"See that?" Marcus shouts back, and points.

Past the main scuffle, which is a clash of Venatori currently dammed up in a wide thoroughfare by Riftwatch and anyone brave enough to lend an arm. Back, towards the wider open space, where morning would have seen the square lined with merchant wagons and fishmongers. Now, a circle of figures, and little more detail than this, until the glow of runic patterns begins to light the cobbled stone beneath their fit, concentric pulsing circles of queer blood red glow and rippling shadow.

Up here, there's no chance of hearing whatever they might be saying or, more likely, chanting, and perhaps it wouldn't be useful to them if they could. When Marcus tilts in his saddle, as if straining to hear, it likely has nothing to do with anything that the traditional senses can pick up on.

There is no second set of stirrups on the griffon's tack, otherwise he might make some absentminded effort to rise in them (as if an additional two inches would really make any difference, given they already have such a favorable vantage to observe the chaotic tableau laid out under Monster's shadow). Instead, Flint wraps the secondary tether once more about his forearm to steady himself—an equally reflexive motion in answer to the thrill of adrenaline that rises unbidden in answer to the pulsing red glow emanating from the ring of figures.

There are six of them there. It's not so great a number, save that they must all be mages. But their pointed lack of interest in the fighting among the rubble and on the streets beyond suggests some focus is required for the work in which they're engaged.

"Take us in. Low." His grip, adjusting in the sword. "We'll rake them as we go."

That circle beats, a sickly red pulse then shivers outward—light stretching its fingers in fits and starts along adjacent pathways like water creeping up and errant hem.

"Aye Commander," maybe goes unheard when Marcus doesn't shout this back, instinctively unwilling to draw focus, but it hardly matters when Flint can feel the bucking of movement beneath, the coiling in the shoulder as reins are adjusted. Answer enough.

All three might well be of a mind, predatory adrenaline surging, bracing. Marcus frees a hand on the side opposite to Flint's sword, held out and aside in preparation to draw magic from beyond the Veil, a pulse of rippled heat emanating from open palm, and the smell of smoke. Both of these things, easily cast aside by the rush of cold wind as he kicks Monster into her dive. Marcus hunkers down, tight into the saddle, as cognizant of Flint behind him as he is focused on the six robed figures below.

Something strange, in that split second. Marcus can feel it as an invisible rending in the Veil—expected for a summoning of this power, its lines spiderwebbing out through streets as though they were imprinting one massive rune upon the city for Maker knows what purpose. But Flint (and Monster) can detect the other thing too—the unlikely and unmistakable smell of blood, thick and coppery in the air. Tainted, repulsive of an animal level.

But they slice down like a swinging axe, Marcus flinging flash-fire and Monster giving a piercing hawk's shriek.

They only need to draw attention for a moment. Then the others fighting up and over the shattered rubble of the wall will be through it—if not all, then a half dozen at least. They only need to complicate the question as to where the assault is coming from; the rest of Riftwatch on the ground will make ample use of the distraction. Mages or no, the number of Venatori there in that stinking arrangement are hardly so many as all that. And as with all mages, they must be dealt with quickly and decisively or risk accomplishing nothing at all.

The ground rises rapidly to meet them, briefly more brilliant and red than the fire Marcus throws down before them. The heat is sharp and instant, and the sensation of the air splitting around it or buckling at the behest of the Venatori's work tangible even against Flint's own senses. There is a feeling when magic is at work—the hind brain shivering, a ripple of goosebumps breaking across the skin, the stomach rising toward the throat without any assistance from the griffon's dive.

They're among the circle in an instant. With the kind of unlikely precision that only an absurd moment of adrenaline can grant, the point of Flint's sword drives directly down into the shape of a shrouded figure as the griffon falls out of the sky amidst the lick of fire. And then a wing beat and the sword is wrenched from his hand and they are shrieking out of the embers and away from the too bright glare of the Venatori's blood soaked work.

Three seconds, he thinks. Then a volley will follow them.

This has been done many times before, in the past—a swooping down, the frantic lift. Monster barely needs to be told via reins or stirrups what to do, screeching as they tear through the circle. Well used to the flaring of fire as Marcus casts a broad wall of it beside her, a couple of feathers curling and singeing but only that. She swings back up towards the sky as if on a pendulum, already on an ascent before she needs to flap her wings.

That she has wriggling prey in her talons doesn't slow her, snatching up a robed figure only to let them be thrown loose of her claws, the impact too great for the cultist to even make a sound save for when they hit the ground.

Three seconds. Maybe less. The air is cold, and still strangely tainted with organic copperiness in scent.

A lurch. With the ascent, it's natural to sit in the saddle (or behind it) in such a way to counterbalance the tilt, but as Monster suddenly dips, Flint may find himself jarred forwards into Marcus' back, and hear the grunt of irritation-surprise from the other man as instinct has him setting his heels in his stirrup as Monster moves against instruction. A swerve aside, a wild turn, Marcus barking a vowel sound in an attempt to corral her.

And only then that might feel it, an odd psychic prickle at the backs of their minds. A moment of disassociation, confusion, anger. A more immediate and violent effect on the mind of a less intelligent predator, maybe.

It's paired with a weightless belly sick moment as the griffon moves one way and the momentum threatens to carry him another, little more than the dig of his heel and that tethering of the narrow cable lashed about the arm to drag him along. Later, he will mark the bruising about his forearm and it will be the least of his concerns but the part of this most easily criticized. He has worked with lines all his life, and should know better than to be foolish with them.

But in the moment—

A hot flare of animal fear and impatience both. A demanding constant growl as his hands scrabble for purchase at the saddle's cantle. The griffon veers still further. Bucks and squirms sideways in some unlikely aerial acrobatic effort. It's coincidence, he thinks (if that's the word for it) not intent, that sees the violent burst of some arcane bolt go searing just shy of their port side: a bright white flash of magic ripping across the dark, burning away the impression of stars above them and the glow of the fire below.

It should be enough, that warning shot. Enough for him to instinctively reach for shielding magics and abjure the inevitable second volley. But under his hands, Monster twists and fights her bridle as if in pain, briefly dropping out of flight entirely as her wings lose air and grace before ingrained instinct does something to override whatever torments are trying to tear at them, and her wings flare out once more.

Which isn't nothing, because they're not dropping out of the sky like a boulder. But she still shrieks her confusion, showing her broadside, and arcane energy streaks up them again.

And hits. Magic isn't quite like an arrow or even the natural elements it resembles. It cleaves and burns and impacts and stings and numbs all at the same time when sculpted well, and the slice of it rakes over all three in a flash of blinding white. The tether winding around Flint's arm lays deep another series of bruising that might circle the joints as well.

But magic slices easily through the harness at Marcus' hip which feels like a minor detail compared to the way it hits the rest of him, repelled directly off the saddle in enough of a shock of force that his hands go loose off the reins. That the other fastening simply snaps loose can be a conversation had later with whoever saddled the griffon up back in the Gallows.

There's no sound. All the air has left his lungs in that same moment when he is knocked cleanly off his seat and there is nothing to grab onto but the Veil as he goes plummeting.

He is gone before the shock of it registers. While Flint's jaw is still locked from the liquid and tearing sensation of the mage bolt, and every muscle is seized tight either in the desperate effort to cling in place or by the snarl of heat and not-heat sizzling through him. One moment, Marcus is there. The next, the night is sickeningly bright and cutting and yanked senseless and taut, Marcus is devoured by it.

Flint lunges after the harness strap in the numb aftermath anyway. By some unlikely miracle, it whips neatly into his hand and is seized by fingers ready to haul in and grasp after weight that should be there but isn't. Instead the snapped end strikes angrily up after him, lashing hopelessly as the griffon lays squealing and twisting over.

(And then he is lucky to have two points of connection to the tack, though the concept of fortunate bounces hard off him as Monster veers and jags further, releasing a piercing shriek of frustration or confusion or fear or pain. It's senseless and automatic: clawing forward into the empty saddle; scrabbling for the flagging reins, hauling and kicking at the frenzied griffon to, what? Demand her attention? To just wrench at something for the sake of wrenching?)

And then they've strayed far from the courtyard, and the circle of Venatori mages, and the confused flashing of arcane light, and from where Marcus would have fallen, and the city itself has fallen from under them in favor of flying over the dark water of the harbor. Monster sways even. The tenor of her pulling turns shivering and panting. There is wind and a higher buzzing of blood in his ears, and a mumbled squawking of crystal chatter. It's possible that it's his imagination that the saddle is still warm from where Marcus had ridden in it, or that the pitched cry the griffon spits out into the dark is despairing.

It takes a long time to go looking for him.

It's the nature of the thing with the city wracked with the effects of the mages' work, and the need to scrape together a counterattack, and the cold logic that creeps in at the back of the mind that insists he has seen what happens when men fall to the deck from the upper yardarms. Ordering another griffon rider to sweep the area for any sign of Marcus is stupid when there are Venatori in the streets of Kirkwall and when Flint barely known where he fell, but he does it anyway and is frustrated by the inevitability and the waste when a preliminary search at the height of the chaos turns up nothing.

But when the worst of it is finished, he takes Marcus' griffon low through the darkened city in the direction his instincts suggest is more likely. She has better senses than he does in the dark, and maybe she will know her companion in any state.

The city isn't quiet by any means, but this sloped part of it that had seen the worst is as close to abandoned as any district of Kirkwall will ever get. Some small mobs of bodies and some individuals, some opportunists and others limping out the way they came. No active fires guide the eye, and the smattering of lanterns here and flames corralled into braziers still burning away obliviously offer little angles of illumination.

Beneath the saddle, Monster is tired. Unlike the trot of a horse, the labour of flying necessitates good form and disguises the fatigue, but she offers soft complaining croaks here and there between attending to direction. Griffons seem to act either as smart as loyal dogs or cunning felines, but perhaps both creatures have the kind of intuition Flint is calling on. And now the air smells a little less like smoke.

Whether it's that or luck or something else, inevitably there's a site of wreckage.

A small storehouse, not so far flung from where Monster had begun her wild jagged flight at that crucial moment, has been the victim of some strange damaging force. The roof's partial inwards is the first sign, but there at the corner, debris spills where the south-west corner is, well, gone. Once sturdy wood has not merely been burned, but reduced to white ash in some sudden flash of immense heat. Glass melted, stone shattered and scorched, an unnatural sundering of raw material and the faint taste of Fade in the air.

The man half-hidden by the collapse of debris is unmoving but, once one attains the right angle, apparently whole.

Flint marks this unnatural shattering from the air with a critical assessing eye that has decided (some seconds or minutes or hours ago, when he didn't wrench Monster around to search immediately and instead had forced her back into the fight) he will not find Marcus Rowntree alive. It is a matter of mechanics, and he has already done what feels like overly optimistic math. The dark smudge of a body half buried in ash only looks whole from a generous distance. When they land—

It will be something else. This is just true. So why even come looking?

Monster lands heavily in the cramped, debris shocked yard. Ash swirls from the force of her backwing and shattered bits of stone turned gravel crunch and scatter. It takes some time for Flint to unwind from the rack and slip out of the saddle, though she makes it easy to do having already lowered her belly to the cool earth.

Flint picks his way to the battered shed, clearing back some shattered fragments of wood that had once been a portion of the outer wall before being shredded by this last spectacular burst of Marcus' power. He'd seen him from the air and so the shock of the man up close should amount to nothing. But he stops, a hand on the splintered edge of the scorched wall, and regards Marcus in the rubble with a welling pressure between the ears.

Some hours ago, he'd fallen for seconds. Just enough time for a kind of magic that operates on the level of nerve-response and adrenaline first, thought second, the sort of thing that draws a hand away from a hot surface before a decision to do so can be made. That he is unconscious now is as much a product of magical over-spend as it is the impact. Maybe more so.

Hard to tell from where Flint is standing. The ash that had been kicked into the air on impact has had time to settle in a whisper-soft layer of grey and it certainly makes a convincing corpse of anyone. But there is something in the way he lays that is not completely that of a man who died when hitting the earth, not awkward and broken enough for that. There is evidence of having moved just a little, where blood has dried to paste at the mouth and down the throat, darkly visible beneath powdery ash.

(Some thirty-odd years of demons whispering at the edges of his dreams means that, when the entropic thing in him stirs at the sense of living bodies near by and it brings murmured, formless offers through the cracks of his consciousness, it takes no effort at all to silence them. Fuck off.)

But it means Marcus draws in a deeper breath than the shallow intakes he's been living off of until now. Chokes immediately on the particulates in the air, lungs spasming to expel them again in a cough.

For a split second, he is stood in the soft shallow banking of ash and splintered wood without comprehending the source and fit of the sound. Just that it is noise where there shouldn't be any, and a blank shock that might become horror given any measure of latitude.

Before it does, he is yanking away fragments of debris and wading through the shattered remains of the structure. It's possible it only takes a few seconds to do. Or it's minutes, sweat abruptly thick on the back of his neck and the punctured sensation in his side made by exertion when he succeeds in uncovering Marcus to the degree necessary to make any kind of assessment of his current state. To reach for his face and neck, roughly smearing back grey ash with his own dirty hands.

"Marcus," a hand moving to tangle in the grey shoulder of the man's clothes. "I have you."

It's a stupid thing to say from his knee in the wreckage beside a man too insensate to hear to. A moment later, Flint is fishing after his crystal. Nevermind the pounding in his head; one of Riftwatch's healers will be only short minutes away.

There'd been no time to don a scrap of armor at the start of the thing, and so there's an out of placeness to a nice coat under Flint's hand when, in far less violent circumstances, he'd find stiff leather and rough fur lining, the edge of a metal breastplate, buckles. That they are both still dressed for a dinner out, Marcus sporting some brocade along with plainer linen for lighter layers, makes assessment easier. There is some injury around the side that has flooded blood under his waistcoat, fabric torn. The blow that knocked him loose, maybe.

Beyond that, a lack, where there should be plenty.

Marcus' head tips back under Flint's hand, loose on the hinge of his neck. Beneath the thick layer of fog from which he is attempting to emerge, he has the sense of fingers, palm, somehow more acute to him the way they rough against his cheek and throat than the deep pulse of pain that spears up where bones had broken and mended in the same second.

Another wheezing breath, and a protesting knitting of tension at his brow. A complaining sound rough across the next breath out, eyes cracking open. Hand wandering inwards.

It is possible to do two things at once. For example: he can hear himself give brusque direction over the crystal, rationalizing roughly the correct direction and distance someone might need to travel at the same time that his spare hand (what spare hand? He should be doing five things with it) shifts to brace at Marcus' shoulder. Stop moving, it says, harshly rational, as he scans ruined clothes and the lay of Marcus' body and that narrow flexing of muscle that signals something like sluggish consciousness.

And then the crystal is set aside into the ash. He has two hands again, and they both turn restless and grasping without the distraction of common sense. At Marcus' face, and after his hand, as that thick knotted sensation in the back of his head aches like a blow.

"Stay as you are. I'll see you out of this."

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#rememberwhen

sweeps responsibilities off desk

penance: the longest tag

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