718 Vhalar 14...
Poison.
It crept out of the bladed shadows, crawling along the empty grey expanse, corrupting and twisting and tainting the empty order into a dark loamy soil. Thin black vines sprung out of the encroaching landscape as it began to gain speed in its realization. The more swords that sank deep into what had been absence before drew life out of its metaphysical flesh like a thick, oozing ichor - each wound allowing the shift to take hold faster and faster.
Soon, they stood upon solid ground - a small, ashen clearing in the midst of building-high brambles and even more massive, looming trees that blotted out the sky. Their amethyst and onyx leaves rustled in the gathering, foreboding rise of the wind. Large, gnarled trunks soon obscured the gradual advance of the creature - of the nightmare. While the threat might have been hidden from sight, it found itself multiplied ten times over, and there was no doubt it still inched forward, hungry and longing.
While most of the swords had begun to leak a sense of reality into the blank canvas of the dreamscape, others released a dark miasma of shadows that began to coalesce into half-beings - things vaguely ascribed to the human form but wispy and featureless. Effortlessly, they slid the blades from their sheaths of earth and wood, blank faces turning toward the pair of them, thin, spindly legs pushing them forward at a limp, then a walk, then a run.
Mathias was not built for combat. He was meant to detain, obstruct, defend and deflect. He had never learned to wield a weapon with any sort of proficiency - he had never needed to. Mages, once neutered and forced to rely upon the mundane, were hardly a threat - hardly a challenge. They were simply subdued. Some were captured; some were executed; all of them found themselves at more than disadvantage against him.
The shades and their swords, however, were unlike anything he’d been forced to face before.
There was no scent of magic in the air aside from his own. There was nothing for him to seal. There were only the shadows, the Nightmare, and the Dreamers. And from where he stood, knees bent at the ready and etheric armour settling into place with the briefest of shimmers around him, the odds hardly seemed in his - their? - favor.
Normally, he would have simply fled. It was by far the wiser choice, but Fiona had already explained there was nowhere to go. It was his dream - or hers? - and though most mornings he woke without memory of his countless sojourns into unconsciousness, he remembered enough of them to know that there was no escaping. Not for him. Not yet, anyway.
The nearest of the creatures to him lunged forward, sword swinging far more accurately and precisely than its gaunt, nebulous build seemed to suggest, but Mathias was far more concerned with the threat at hand rather than the mixed expectations that arose as he faced it. Without flinching, he held a hand up, the minuscule spheres of his ether erupting from his fingertips like a shower of invisible sparks, swarming through the empty space between the rapidly approaching edge of the inky-black blade and the pale marble flesh of forearm. In the next trill, each concentrated point of his ether found there place, their chaos synchronized into a unified harmony, all fifty-seven thousand three hundred sixty-two of them.
The barrier warped the air around him for just a moment, a blink of the eye, but it was more than enough to absorb the strike, to slit the exposed throat of its momentum and leave the thing hanging, suspended, worthless until the wraith understood just what exactly had happened.
Mathias didn’t wait to give it the opportunity.
Without blinking, he stepped forward, the momentum shifting up through his legs, curving through the slight twist of his body, and culminating in his carefully clenched fist and he aimed to punch though where the jaw would have been and up into the sky. His aim proved true, in both respects - while the spectres seemed capable enough in strength to wield their weapons with proficiency, their bodies were as fragile as they appeared. In a hiss of smoke, the wraith disappeared into nothingness. The sword thudded to the ground, and Mathias stared down at it for a trill, blinked three times in rapid succession, then found his attention forced onto the next.
He could see Fiona in the narrows of his focus, a lithe half-shadow that darted in and out of the corner of his vision - and she moved with a finesse he’d never once considered a mage might even possess a fraction of, let alone such mastery over her own body. Graciana had spoken at length about combat mages, about the lethal blend between etheric mastery, physical expertise, and killing intent. Magic, for all the grief levied at it by the unenlightened, had its applications; to heal, to create, to grow, to sway, to control - but those that used it solely as a means of martial dominance were some of the most dangerous beings an abrogant could encounter.
Abrogation was the vizier, Graciana would often remind him, the most cunning and careful of the Domains, but those who existed outside of the court, outside of whispered words and intricate plots, those that could just as easily slide a blade through a body as they might hurl fire or tear apart a person from the inside of their mind… those were true threats.
Though relief wasn’t quite the word for it, he did find it fortunate she was there to fight alongside him rather than against him... Though the fact that she had hurled a blast of ether at him but five bits ago was hardly forgotten.
Nor were the next wave of wraiths approaching him.
If the death of the first wraith served as any deterrent to the encroaching mob - more and more appearing out of the scattered swords by the trill - it did not slow their advance. They surged forward, inky fingers gripped over their swords, and Mathias would never discover whether they this particular batch was as skilled as they were quick to approach. A rumbling of exploding ground greeted them a trill before they were close enough to swipe at him, and all that was left in their wake was thudding swords, one, two, three, four, five-
Poison.
It crept out of the bladed shadows, crawling along the empty grey expanse, corrupting and twisting and tainting the empty order into a dark loamy soil. Thin black vines sprung out of the encroaching landscape as it began to gain speed in its realization. The more swords that sank deep into what had been absence before drew life out of its metaphysical flesh like a thick, oozing ichor - each wound allowing the shift to take hold faster and faster.
Soon, they stood upon solid ground - a small, ashen clearing in the midst of building-high brambles and even more massive, looming trees that blotted out the sky. Their amethyst and onyx leaves rustled in the gathering, foreboding rise of the wind. Large, gnarled trunks soon obscured the gradual advance of the creature - of the nightmare. While the threat might have been hidden from sight, it found itself multiplied ten times over, and there was no doubt it still inched forward, hungry and longing.
While most of the swords had begun to leak a sense of reality into the blank canvas of the dreamscape, others released a dark miasma of shadows that began to coalesce into half-beings - things vaguely ascribed to the human form but wispy and featureless. Effortlessly, they slid the blades from their sheaths of earth and wood, blank faces turning toward the pair of them, thin, spindly legs pushing them forward at a limp, then a walk, then a run.
Mathias was not built for combat. He was meant to detain, obstruct, defend and deflect. He had never learned to wield a weapon with any sort of proficiency - he had never needed to. Mages, once neutered and forced to rely upon the mundane, were hardly a threat - hardly a challenge. They were simply subdued. Some were captured; some were executed; all of them found themselves at more than disadvantage against him.
The shades and their swords, however, were unlike anything he’d been forced to face before.
There was no scent of magic in the air aside from his own. There was nothing for him to seal. There were only the shadows, the Nightmare, and the Dreamers. And from where he stood, knees bent at the ready and etheric armour settling into place with the briefest of shimmers around him, the odds hardly seemed in his - their? - favor.
Normally, he would have simply fled. It was by far the wiser choice, but Fiona had already explained there was nowhere to go. It was his dream - or hers? - and though most mornings he woke without memory of his countless sojourns into unconsciousness, he remembered enough of them to know that there was no escaping. Not for him. Not yet, anyway.
The nearest of the creatures to him lunged forward, sword swinging far more accurately and precisely than its gaunt, nebulous build seemed to suggest, but Mathias was far more concerned with the threat at hand rather than the mixed expectations that arose as he faced it. Without flinching, he held a hand up, the minuscule spheres of his ether erupting from his fingertips like a shower of invisible sparks, swarming through the empty space between the rapidly approaching edge of the inky-black blade and the pale marble flesh of forearm. In the next trill, each concentrated point of his ether found there place, their chaos synchronized into a unified harmony, all fifty-seven thousand three hundred sixty-two of them.
The barrier warped the air around him for just a moment, a blink of the eye, but it was more than enough to absorb the strike, to slit the exposed throat of its momentum and leave the thing hanging, suspended, worthless until the wraith understood just what exactly had happened.
Mathias didn’t wait to give it the opportunity.
Without blinking, he stepped forward, the momentum shifting up through his legs, curving through the slight twist of his body, and culminating in his carefully clenched fist and he aimed to punch though where the jaw would have been and up into the sky. His aim proved true, in both respects - while the spectres seemed capable enough in strength to wield their weapons with proficiency, their bodies were as fragile as they appeared. In a hiss of smoke, the wraith disappeared into nothingness. The sword thudded to the ground, and Mathias stared down at it for a trill, blinked three times in rapid succession, then found his attention forced onto the next.
He could see Fiona in the narrows of his focus, a lithe half-shadow that darted in and out of the corner of his vision - and she moved with a finesse he’d never once considered a mage might even possess a fraction of, let alone such mastery over her own body. Graciana had spoken at length about combat mages, about the lethal blend between etheric mastery, physical expertise, and killing intent. Magic, for all the grief levied at it by the unenlightened, had its applications; to heal, to create, to grow, to sway, to control - but those that used it solely as a means of martial dominance were some of the most dangerous beings an abrogant could encounter.
Abrogation was the vizier, Graciana would often remind him, the most cunning and careful of the Domains, but those who existed outside of the court, outside of whispered words and intricate plots, those that could just as easily slide a blade through a body as they might hurl fire or tear apart a person from the inside of their mind… those were true threats.
Though relief wasn’t quite the word for it, he did find it fortunate she was there to fight alongside him rather than against him... Though the fact that she had hurled a blast of ether at him but five bits ago was hardly forgotten.
Nor were the next wave of wraiths approaching him.
If the death of the first wraith served as any deterrent to the encroaching mob - more and more appearing out of the scattered swords by the trill - it did not slow their advance. They surged forward, inky fingers gripped over their swords, and Mathias would never discover whether they this particular batch was as skilled as they were quick to approach. A rumbling of exploding ground greeted them a trill before they were close enough to swipe at him, and all that was left in their wake was thudding swords, one, two, three, four, five-
