Preparing For War: Enter The Ragman

[Mathias Blackwood]

2 Cylus 720 | Mathias Blackwood | A Dream

It was dark and the walls felt like they were closing in on the archer who crept forward through the dimly lit sewer with his bow in hand and an arrow resting at the ready. There were torches at various points along the long dark corridor, distanced just enough that you’d be engulfed in complete darkness before you reached the light of the next torch. Yet it also seemed as if you could walk on through the sewer forever without making any actual progress. In truth this dreamscape would not be explored by walking along the narrow stone pathways. There was only one direction, down.

In the waking world Mathias and a few other volunteers had begun a journey to Storm’s Edge and they decided to rest again in a small campsite. Yet Mathias often found himself trapped in dreams such as this when his eyes closed. Dark dreams haunted by a laugh that echoed off the stone sewer walls with every step Mathias took forward. When he looked to the water that flowed between the two pathways through the sewer, he saw his father looking back, laughing with a whip tied around his throat.

Mathias turned away from the water and continued walking down the dark pathway. He went aimlessly from one torch to the next looking for the laughing man. He wore a tattered white shirt that exposed his rune of naming and the silver running across it. The veins in his hand gave off a soft glow which he used to guide himself through the never ended sewer.

[Kasoria]

He chose the door because it was familiar in its squalor. In its despair. In the darkness that seemed to seep and permeate it, even under the surface of the Ocean. Such was the nature of Kasoria's Veil, after all. A vast ocean, stretching from horizon and back, with no suns or moons yet always lit as if it were the middle of the trial. Under the surface were countless doors, entrances into dreams. From cave mouths carved into stone by nature and age, to intricately-crafted gateways in the most erudite of cities... to this. What he looked at now.

"Hmm."

The dreamer made little more sound than that as he squatted down and peered at the shimmering portal beneath his feet. Oh, you could walk on the water. That was hardly the most surprising thing about the place. He'd gotten over the absurdity of that quickly, all things considered. Mainly because he was more aware of just what was under his feet.

People. Places. Dreams. Fantasies. Nightmares. All and more.

This one looked like the Underground of Etzos. The sewers, maybe, though they seemed narrower, even more claustrophobic (if that were possible). There was a door, of course. But the wood was old and he could even spy what looked like rot. A damaged mind, perhaps, reflecting in etheral construction the state of the psyche? Kasoria shrugged inwardly. Fucked if he knew. So, best way to find out-

-was by reaching down, grabbing the handle and-

He never knew if it was him pulling or being pulled, the the sensation was always the same. A brief, half-trill of submersion, of cold water, of drowning in it was if chucked into an ice bath from a thousand feet up. Then the feeling passed and he was standing in-

Yep. Definitely a sewer.

Kasoria crinkled his nose and peered around his cramped confines. He knew he wasn't actually smelling anything, and his body was Fuck knew how far away in the waking world, but still... Fates, but why would anyway want to remember this? The little man swept back the hood of his cloak and let his mane of hair hang freely. Bloody mess, was this place. Just like under the Big Rock. In fact, if he didn't-

A laugh crackled and rattled through the tunnel like wind in winter. Kasoria instinctively snapped a hand to his gladius. Again, not a real one, but real enough for the Emea. The little killer frowned and decided this was not a friendly place, and-

Footsteps. Slow. Cautious. Stealthy, or trying to be... and coming from-

Kasoria started walking down to meet the dreamer, staying to the shadows, and keeping a hand on his weapon.

[Mathias Blackwood]

2 Cylus 720 | Mathias Blackwood | A Dream

Kasoria would find that that laughter seemed to emerge with his footsteps, and as he concealed himself in the dark, the laughing ground would always betray him. Not that Mathias particularly noticed the other set of laughs trailing behind him until it grew just close enough for him to realize it wasn’t his own steps. The archer turned quickly beside one of the torches and held his arrow to it, igniting the tip before he took aim down the narrow pathway. He couldn’t see down the hallways but he’d be damned if he couldn’t think of a way to make it a little brighter.

”Show yourself!” Mathias demanded as his eyes narrowed on what seemed more and more like a human figure in the shadows. He drew back the bowstring and fired the arrow to the right of the figure so that the arrow would carry a brief light down the hall and illuminate the intruder... yet it flew fast and when it struck the ground the flame upon the arrow was extinguished, filling the sewer with darkness again. Mathias caught only a brief glimpse of the fairly intimidating Kasoria and stumbled back a step.

Mathias notched another arrow and backed away slightly with more purpose. He didn’t go far enough that he’d left the torchlight but he also didn’t remain in place with the other figure approaching from the shadows. He drew the string back and held the bow, waiting to see what the figure did in this hellish land.

[Kasoria]

Fuck me. Always hated those things.

In fairness, he was hating it because he wasn't the one using it at the moment. A bow, that is. All the bare-fisted ability and blade-mastery in creation wasn't much good when some bloody kid was popping off arrows at you from fifty paces away. A trio of scars across Kasoria's body started to ache angry as he remembered how they'd come to be. They ached even more when he realized from the voice that yes, it truly was a kid shooting at him.

The Raggedy Man hissed like a nightwalker exposed to light when the arrow whipped by him. Damn, but the little shit had good eyes, too. The flying, blazing missile was only by him for a moment, but it cast light across his shadow and by the time it was extinguished he'd been made and the archer was already nocking a fresh-

Move!

-Kasoria didn't stay in the same shadow. He scuttled forwards, forever staying in the darkness that seemed to rim every circle of torchlight. Thick and deep enough for him to move unseen, but the archer wasn't lowering his weapon. He called out again for the intruder, and Kasoria resisted the urge to shake his head. Boy should have been smart and backed into the darkness, too. Hidden from sight and with the advantage of a ranged weapon, he could have taken potshots all night. Now, he was in the open, exposed... everything Kasoria was not.

Careful. Still gotta get to the kid.

The plan was made in the time it took for him to creep closer through the shadows. Staying to the sides of Mathias' vision, less likely for him to look. He walked on his toes, every step slow and measured and, above all, quiet. Nothing was unsheathed about his person; the shining steel stayed hidden. Until he got within twenty paces... and slowly drew a little knife from his bracer with one hand... and gripped the hilt of his gladius with another.

Be swift. Be sure. Don't fuck it up.

His arm whipped out and the throwing knife flew through the air. An arc of silver exploding out the darkness, slamming into-

-the wall next to Mathias. Not the boy himself. The weapon clattered and clanked and donged, sounding almost like an almighty bell in the tunnel, echoing around it. Kasoria almost winced, not at the nose, but the unforgivable sin of a bladesman so blunting one of his weapons. But it was not in vain, for Mathias spun around, towards the noise, away from Kasoria-

-who lunged out of the shadows and towards the boy, taking advantage of that half-trill he would have.

The time it would take for Mathias to realize he'd been fooled.

Start turning back around.

Facing the leaping, black-eyed gargoyle hurtling at him from the shadows.

Fire the bow.

All taken into account. Which was why Kasoria's sword was already up and swinging-

Timing. Gotta have the right timing.

-and swatted the arrow from the air. The boy was trembling so hard mayhap it wouldn't even have hit him, but he was bare feet away by the time Mathias fired. Either way, the flat of the gladius knocked the wooden shaft away and by the time the boy had reached for a fresh arrow-

The Raggedy Man had slammed him to the wall with one hand and pressed a sword to his throat with the other. Suddenly he was still. They both were. Barely even breathing hard, the assassin was immobile save for the rise and fall of his chest. The blade never wavered. His gaze never broke with the wide eyes of the archer. When he spoke, it as with a voice low as rocks moving under water. Accented heavily in Etzori, that lilting, garrulous language of the fantastic merchant and mining city Mathias had heard so much of.

"Pudit down, boy," Kasoria said. "Or dream a' not, I'll open yer fuckin' throat."

[Mathias Blackwood]

2 Cylus 720 | Mathias Blackwood | A Dream

The dark figure moved quickly and the young man's eyes widened in panic. His hands fidgeted with the arrow on the bowstring a little costing him valuable time and the worst past about it was that with every step closer that the Raggedy Man took towards him, the louder the laughing echoing on the walls became. Mathias kept moving backwards, still not lucid in this place and therefore still not bound to his physical abilities. The Raggedy Man was a frightening arrival but he seemed very much in his element in the sewers and as such his presence had done little to shake Mathias from the dream he was having. The knife however did scare him a little bit. When it flew passed him and hit the wall with the loud metallic clattering noise, the laughing was drowned out by the sound of metal meeting stone and Mathias almost visibly jumped, the arrow slipping from it's place again as Mathias's head swiveled to look behind him.

It was then that he saw where the dagger had chipped away the brick and realized that he'd been deceived. He turned his head again, seeing the shadow dashing toward him. Mathias drew back on the bowstring, clumsily adjusting the arrow as he did so and he loosed it only for another flash of steel to strike the arrow from the air. Mathias panicked, instinct taking over, and dropped the bow before Kasoria had even slammed into him. Instead as the bow dropped from his hand- and the Raggedy Man would certainly see this even if it amounted to nothing- Mathias's veins began to glow a bright silver as a golden javelin of light began to form in his hands. Yet before it could solidify completely, Kasoria grabbed Mathias.

The initial contact began the changes, the stone walls around them beginning to adopt different, vibrant colors as if someone had come through and painted each one with some different shades of luminescent paint. The laughter that had been mocking seemed to become a pained laughter, as if the source had laughed too hard and was beginning to choke, running short of air. When Mathias' back hit the wall the bricks around him turned an almost light-consuming black and the archer froze. Kasoria's blade to his throat. "D... Dream?" Mathias asked, raising his now empty hands at his sides.

[Kasoria]

What in the living FUCK?!

That's what he meant to say, when every surface and some spaces between them exploded into color. What actually came out was a strangled, burbling "Urghhh?" noise that was not recognizable by any bipedal linguistic structure in Idalos. By the time he'd smashed the kid into the wall and made his threat, everything was changing. Visually, anyway. His last words trailed off into that odd, querying sound as the grey bricks suddenly snapped into bottomless black, like his magic-mutated eyes.

Before that, it was practically a rainbow.

A barrage of colors assaulted Kasoria as he held what dominance he could. He gripped boy and blade tight, figuring he had to maintain some control over the situation... even as kaleidoscopes of light and color and variance of form in filtered beams exploded all around the tunnel. He looked about madly for a moment, seeing colors chase each other like living things. Running down the walls, strands of blue and red doggedly pursuing green and orange and then paint and liquid sprang from the surface and invaded his eyes and then there was black, just black, endless, soulless, hopeless-

Laughter again. Only now it sounded like it was being choked.

"D... Dream?"

The Raggedy Man looked back to the boy who was... actually quite a bit taller than him. Strange how he never seemed to notice that until after the deed was done. He squinted up at the square-jawed kid, who looked even more confused than him. Slowly he nodded his head... and the gladius started to slowly move away from his throat.

"Aye. Yer dreamin', son. All this shite? S'in yer head."

Finally, the blade lowered, and he took a step back. Enough for the boy to breath and recover himself. But it didn't go back in the sheath. Not yet. Not until that eerie, malicious laughter had been found. Kasoria looked left and right down the tunnel, trying to spy some source, discern some direction. He heard a brief scrape as the bow was reclaimed, and ignored it. He had questions to ask, not blood to spill.

"Who's dat laughin'? 'ever it is, dun' sound too fuckin' pleasant..."

Non-Lucid, he thought suddenly, Llyr's word for the uninitated into Dreamwalking popping into his head. Fuck me. Gotta be careful with this one.

[Mathias Blackwood]

2 Cylus 720 | Mathias Blackwood | A Dream

"That mean you're in my head too?" Mathias asked as Kasoria lowered his sword. The archer didn't go for his bow, thinking of more mystical weapons he had at his disposal and being unaware of the danger it would bring to them, but he didn't attack. If this was a dream, if it was all in his head, what would have been the point? He could slay all the specters in his mind and it wouldn't change the past. It wouldn't get him closer to Storm's Edge either. Mathias looked around, momentarily forgetting the Raggedy Man. He didn't know how he'd gotten here. How was he going to get out? What had he been doing before the stranger arrived? He was just walking... but where had he been going? Mathias didn't like thinking this hard about where he was.

When the laughter echoed through the sewer again, or at least when Mathias noticed it was still echoing, he retrieved his bow from the floor. The figure had asked him a question. "I don't know. It sounds familiar." Mathias looked down both ends of the narrow passage that they found themselves in. It seemed to stretch on forever to either side with a few branching off paths but there were so few torches it was almost impossible to navigate. "Sorry I shot at you." Mathias said in a somewhat offhand manner as he took a step away from Kasoria and the torch on the wall. The laughter echoed and so his effort to find a source would be in vein. However Kasoria would likely notice the laughter only began when they moved, a series of laughs beginning to echo with each step.

With the physical contact and blatant claim shaking Mathias's reality, the man had become lucid- unfortunately for both of them. "I'm more interested in getting out than going on a hunt in the sewers."

[Kasoria]

Well, that's a fucking start.

Kasoria resisted the urge to spit out the sarcastic response. The boy was having a hard enough time with all this as it was. He could read the shock and confusion in his face; the fear in his eyes; even his voice quavered in a place where he did not even have vocal chords. But there was some upside to all this. As Kasoria watched, he seemed to see the boy become... more solid. More... no, "at ease" was not the right term. He was being menaced by a total stranger in a stinking sewer, haunted by disembodied laughter.

Not at ease. But starting to find his feet.

"Sorry I shot at you."

It was a moment before Kasoria realized he'd been apologized to. It didn't happen often. The Raggedy Man stopped perusing his surroundings, fixing those black eyes anew on Mathias. Not with the same flinty, hardened warning as before. They were more open now, or as open the eyes of such a man could be. He snorted, and his breath came out as a puff of steam in the cold air. He shifted, just barely, and there was a titter of laughter from under his feet.

"Dun' worry about it," he said, sheathing his gladius. "Occupational 'azard an' all dat."

The younger man spoke one more time and Kasoria nodded his approval. This whole place wasn't a sewer; it was a trap. A maze. Designed to befuddle and confuse and, above all, keep you there. The more you tried to track down your enemy, the louder the laughter, the worse the torment. Kasoria spat to one side and swore he saw a grinning maw in the swirling water at his side-

-before the water swept on, and it vanished.

"Aye. Fink yer right. So..." He nodded down the tunnel. The way the water was flowing. "Down there seems like an idea." Without turning around, the Raggedy Man spoke one more time, before he started walking. "m'Karim, by the way."

Apology accepted, mate. But that don't mean you get my real name. Not yet.

[Mathias Blackwood]

2 Cylus 720 | Mathias Blackwood | A Dream

Mathias couldn't help but grin a little when the Raggedy Man said that it was an occupational hazard. In their line of work- though it was unfair to group them as Mathias was in the beginning stages of becoming a terror and Kasoria was already quite advanced- people often came after you with one manner of weapon or another. Mathias tilted his head slightly when the man introduced himself as Karim. He didn't look like a Karim... he looked like a Hector... maybe a Victor... or Bronn. Mathias chose not to think too hard on it and instead began to follow the man, keeping his bow in hand as they moved down the sewer. "I'm Mathias." The archer said in response. He understood the need for secrecy in many places but not in his mind. He didn't understand how the world they were walking in worked and as a result he was still somewhat convinced Kasoria was a figment of his mind- or Karim as Mathias thought he was called.

The two of them would walk in silence unless Kasoria saw fit to strike up a conversation, which Mathias figured he would not. The only sound would be the sound of choking laughter growing softer and softer with their footsteps as they followed the stream. The water in the stream would begin to grow a darker shade of black, with pale outlines seeming to float beneath it as the duo walked. If Kasoria looked closely enough he'd recognize the faces of those he most recently killed. At first it would be the faces of those he felt justified in killing, maybe even those he felt proud to have slain, but the longer he looked at the pale outlines in the black sludge that lead them he would begin to see the faces of those who he regretted killing (if the man regretted any of the lives he taken at all). Soon after he'd see the bodies of those he'd lose- if he'd lost anyone floating beside them.

But no exit.

Were they getting out or were they going deeper in? If the water flowed in one direction that meant it had two points of interest, where the stream ended and where it began. In a dream, who could know which one would bring freedom? Mathias would visibly tense as he and Kasoria moved further into the darkly lit maze, seeing similarly haunting figures in the water. His father... Perseus... the Traveling City... Sylvia... It was odd how this false land had no false stink. It was a sewer for sure but it smelled clean, almost sterile.

[Kasoria]

His mistake was assuming the laws of reality would apply here. Stupid one to make, really.

They walked through a sewer that did not stink, across wet stones that were not moist, and the more he looked into the water they were following... the more he saw the past, not the future, or an escape. Stupid old man. Thinking there would be any logic in the mind of one who could not even control his dreams. There was no governance here, like there was in his own Dreamscape. The boy wasn't even lucid, until Kasoria's touch had made it so.

The Raggedy Man flicked another glance into the water. Faces. So many of them. Appearing stark and clear for a fraction of a moment, then running into rippling, bubbling sewage and becoming someone else. Some of them he didn't even remember, but apparently this place did. Most of those he remembered, and blinked at them with calm, remorseless recognition.

No point feeling bad about it now, he told himself, the same refrain he'd relied on for pushing thirty arcs in the mortality business. Doesn't bring anyone back.

It was easier to feel that for the work, the contracts, the bodyguards and the muscle, the staring majority of gangers and thugs and fellow scratchers. Occupational hazard, just like he told the boy: in his world, you accepted death as part of the life. If you couldn't, stay out of it. Yet the more they walked, the more he glanced, the more the faces became... intimate.

Those scarce few snapshots that remained fresh and bloody in his mind. Because he regretted them. Oh, he'd gone through with it, because a man had his professionalism to maintain, but still... some of those faces made him look away. Some of them made him sigh and shake his head and then-

"Fuck's sake!"

Then Kasoria saw his son, and his breath caught, and his fist slammed into the nearest wall.

"S'gettin' us fuckin' nowhere, boy," he said through gritted teeth, rounding on Mathias, eyes narrowed and black and shadowed by lank hair. "C'mon, y'gotta think. This is your dream. How d'we get outta here?"