"Well great, you scared him off." Nimue said as she pushed another drink towards Balthazar.
"I don't think that was me." Balthazar grumbled as he looked around and noticed something unsettling. Once Zemos had run from the building, Balthazar and Nimue were the only patrons left in the bar. For a few trills the workers continued to go about their work. A server brought a tray of dishes into the back and the bartender continued cleaning cups like machines going through the motions.
"I'm not angry. He was strange." Nimue said, oblivious to Balthazar's growing sense of discomfort. Balthazar's hand slipped up to the necklace Doran had lent him. It was a gift from an Immortal and it was supposed to mask his presence from the Empty but they'd all been unsure of whether or not the necklace would work. Unfortunately, it did.
A strange thing happened when the servers thought that the bar was empty. They all just stopped. Worse than that, they stopped and turned to face Nimue- the only being in the bar that they could see. Balthazar's eyes widened and he opened his frequency to begin attuning to the various servers. It took trills for him to pick up their frequency and only a few after that for Balthazar to dig enough to see something was wrong. It was just like when Nimue possessed someone. In every man and woman standing in the bar at that moment, Balthazar sense not one, but two frequencies. They were
all possessed... and they had begun walking slowly towards Nimue.
Nimue noticed Balthazar's expression and turned just as a waiter reached her. He lashed out and grabbed hold of her shoulders with both of his hands and Nimue's expression shifted to terror as she felt the waiter begin to syphon her ectoplasm. A ghost being syphoned by another ghost felt similar to being burned alive- at least that was what Nimue described it as. Balthazar stood suddenly, knocking his chair to the ground as a horrible smell filled the air.
In the middle of the room, the shadows on the walls seem to collect into a humanoid figure that approached Nimue with it's arms reached out. Balthazar knocked his table over, crossing to Nimue and pulling the possessed waiter's arms off of her.
"Nimue run! They can't convert me." Balthazar pulled the necklace off and threw it around Nimue's neck causing the specters in the bar to turn their gaze from where Nimue had been to where Balthazar was.
Shit. Nimue was safe... the mage was not.
"We can take them!" Nimue shouted in response as the various phantoms pushed their ethereal bodies out of the victims they were possessing. The staff slumped to the ground, unconscious without the ghosts inside them. Balthazar grimaced and unsheathed Nimue's anchor.
"Not this time." Balthazar hurled the anchor out the window, and Nimue was dragged with it, leaving Balthazar alone in the bar with five phantoms and an Empty controlling them all. He couldn't risk the Empty doing the things he had heard it could do. He'd known Nimue only a season or so but their bond had become a close one and he was not going to allow the Empty to take her from him. Maybe they could win the fight together, but Balthazar wouldn't risk it. He estimated he'd bought himself ten bits before she could haul the anchor back here... unless she possessed someone... then maybe five bits.
"You!" Oh great... it recognized him. Balthazar's back was to a wall with no exit and no windows which made fleeing a little more difficult. As if it knew his intentions, one of the phantoms had moved in front of the window and materialized, obscuring the view of the street just enough that Balthazar didn't want to risk trying to teleport out.
"I warned you." The shadow said as it moved towards Balthazar. The mage was quick, thrusting his hand forward to command the wind when suddenly invisible tendrils wrapped around Balthazar's forearms. They tightened quickly and tried to pull Balthazar's arms out to his sides but the mage resisted. The specters tugged with their tendrils as Balthazar pushed with all the strength in his arms to resist the pull.
Yet hope was lost when four more tendrils wrapped around each arm overpowering the mage and yanking his arms out to the sides. The shadow of a man reached Balthazar and placed his hands on both sides of Balthazar's head.
"I warned you." Balthazar could feel the shadow's grip on his head beginning to tighten and a trill later something worse happened. His mouth went dry and all the scars across his body began to burn as the Empty started sucking life force from the mage. His sparks raged against the drain, his mind raced with decisions, and then Balthazar struck.
His first effort called on his newest spark. He reached into the Empty's frequency, attuning to it and then quickly synchronizing with it in an effort to force the Empty's arms out to the side. He'd tested the technique once before on a blacksmith and was relatively easily able to impose his will on the blacksmith, but in this case he only managed to learn a few of the notes he'd already expected to find in the Empty. It was too difficult to synchronize fully while his life was being drained from him... so Balthazar changed his plan.
Balthazar reached inward and called on his oldest spark. He called on the fire to burn and fueled it with whatever ether it demanded to get the job done. The tendrils wrapped around his arms suddenly burst into blue flames tracing all the way back to the phantoms who'd conjured them across the room. The phantoms screamed and for just a moment, the shadow man syphoning Balthazar seemed to turn his focus towards his wounded servants. It seemed to hurt him to watch them burn. But the moment of lost focus would cost the Empty his prize. Balthazar's arms had burned free and the specter blocking the window had moved out of the way when it was lit aflame.
With a wave of his hand and a leap, Balthazar tore a blinking portal open from the middle of the bar to the street outside. He crashed and rolled slightly on the ground before scrambling up to his feet. He had to ignore the pain of the few scrapes from the crash and keep moving. Balthazar had no idea how far that Empty could track him through the city without the necklace. So he ran and he ran and he stumbled but then he turned down an alley to take a breath.
That was where the ghost found him. Fortunately it was Nimue, not the Empty.
"What the Beneath, Balthazar!" Nimue punched Balthazar on the arm and he groaned.
"What? I made it out, didn't I?"
