#I'm so blessed with friends who enjoy dabbling in shenanigans off the cuff!

[vahalia-cress]

⸸ Chiaroscuro ⸸

Fingers splayed forward and when the aether thickened within the room, the torches along the walls within the stone sanctum flared to life, the other hand of the witch-woman carefully clutching an ornate bottle within her grasp. Upon one of the stone benches was a variety of tools, none of which looked to be too damning or cause for alarm though might have been a point of piqued curiosity.  Heels on stone sounded out as the sable-haired woman took a few steps forward and she set the bottle down next to the goblet at her right.

The space was a solid stone structure with pops of color amongst the stonework that was nestled into the stained glass patterns of windows that were neatly inlaid around the circumference of the space. Were the sun brightly shining, lights of stretching rainbows and dazzling mixtures of colors would have been quite a beautiful sight to see had the day been far more fair. Alas, the outside bore no light, only that of distant rolling thunder off the coast of Black Water and heavy rains to let the earth drink.

Heavy footfalls strode down the path with a sort of hesitance, or wariness, though the aether slowly permeating the chapel nevertheless acted as a slow lure, drawing Hakan in as he approached. There was something itching at the back of his head, which had never been noticed until now. The implements laid out only served to heighten that feeling by increments -- That they were harmless, physically, and did nothing to abate it. If he had ever listened to that feeling and acted on that itch, it likely would've done the opposite. And he was certainly was no coward. He kept walking until he stood behind Vahalia, a mask of determination wrought on his face.

The bell at Vahalia’s neck shifted, ringing out in a whisper of a knell as she rose and looked over her shoulder to the coming footsteps, "Well, I would certainly hope you're comfortable. We might be here for a while though the space should go undisturbed as these parts of the Laeves are unpopulated at current and quiet." she turned more to face Hakan, "You suggested this happen away from the Keep for safety reasons and this will have to settle."

"Mmm-- Comfortable," he parroted half beneath his breath while taking in her attire. She certainly looked it herself as his eyes drew to the expanse of her thigh, and the lack of any material to suggest modesty beneath as was often the theme with Vahalia while in the privacy of their own spaces. "Hopefully it'll be enough. I don't expect any fireworks, but I won't write it off. Nearly setting the room ablaze while unconscious...You explained how this worked before. Is there anything more to just drinking whatever alchemy you've conjured?"

"That depends. You've mentioned me being with you during your journey. I claimed I did not know a way and would inquire with cohorts of mine. I have found an answer and if you still wish for me to dream alongside of you, there is but a few more steps to get to that point. Simple, quick. As the Dreamweaver said when she offered me the spell and tools, she did say it wasn't invasive but could be dangerous should something happen where both of us are enraptured within a dreamscape."

Hakan’s expression gave way to a slow and deepening frown, "And it requires me to do more than drink that?" he asked with a tip of his chin. "I've no intention of retracting my offer, but if it requires a...mental magic connection to be made, you'll have to hold my proverbial hand." He inhaled a deep breath, the scent of rain fresh, relaxing if he could've done that.

"You've methods of breaking yourself free, should, or when, something occurs?" he asked.

"I'm not quite sure. Creature would do much should I require it as he never sleeps and he is physically tied to my consciousness in many ways. His existence is heavily dependent on my own. The elixir only lasts an hour anyway before the body starts to break down the compounds and metabolize the herbs within. After that, it would be like waking from a regular sleep, albeit somewhat slower."

The Dalmascan made another grumbling noise. "Convenient...but I've neither done nor researched something like this before, so if that's enough then that's enough." He stepped closer, forcefully tearing his gaze from the expanse of her thigh to the elixir in her hand. Distractions were only that. "Is there anything I might should expect?"

"I'm new to this just as much as you are. What's a little risk with a journey?" She flashed a smirk, reaching behind her for the goblet as she turned to situate herself by the stone bench, “Find a spot, sit. Get comfortable because we'll be here for a little while yet and then we can get started. The elixir will hit quickly, you might feel lightheaded at first but drifting should be rather quick and painless. Your tastebuds, however, will loath you."

He let his brow scrunch, glancing towards the benches to either side of them before looking back at her. He hiked a brow. It wasn't all that smart for him to be on one when absent faculties and at risk of spasms, vomiting, and so on as first described. So he sat on the ground instead, hand extended to the goblet in an expectant manner.

Vahalia stepped forward and she softly slapped his expecting hand away, "Patience." she huffed down at him and she gracefully knelt to oversee the necessities better. When the goblet and elixir were placed to the stone floor she took the hand he had outstretched, snatched it almost, and turned it over in her own, the small sickle at her belt held by a chain was brought forth and she drew the curved blade over his palm and then swiftly did the same to herself, an act she had done many times over in her summoning of Creature. Her palm and scars no stranger to the pain and it only dulled over time.

If they were to be linked then they would have to do so by vital. Her hand balled into a fist over the goblet, dropping her lifesblood into the cool slope of the metallic goblet, and then repeated the gesture with Hakan's, "A few more steps left."

Hakan’s frown disappeared, the equivalent of – for him – a pout replacing it and that too disappeared as she watched Vahalia go about drawing his blood and then her own; hot vitality trickling. Now this was what he expected of rituals. He squeezed his fist to join his blood to hers again. "Such as?" she asked.

She hummed as she unfurled his fingers with her own then laced their open and wounded palms to one another, interlacing their fingers, "A tool given to me by the Dreamweaver." she reached to the stone bench nearby and took up the shimmering red string showing it to him. It was long and clearly held magic as its sheen seemed to shift and move on its own, "A binding." While their hands remained clutched to one another she began to wrap the red string around their wrists, softly whispering – chanting – her count with each weave. Three times around each wrist, three more around them both, and courting the weaves between their fingers. When the thread ran its length she tucked the end downward into the threads by the wrists. Next, she uncorked the elixir and poured it into the goblet until full, "Mugwort also known as Dreamweed, blue lotus, yarrow, and myrica gale." she offered the goblet to him, "Drink half, drink deep."

A soft scoff caught in his throat as she twined it around and around. Too many stories for him not to have heard about red strings of fate, and here was a real cliche. Still, he looked at their bound fingers, and hands. If he were to lose control at any point there was no way for her not to be burned by his uncontrolled wrath. When the goblet came up, he curled his lip and clicked his tongue. "I suppose if it was just me, I wouldn't pause." He sighed. So much for not worrying about the taste by shotgunning it. Taking the goblet, and holding it for a second, he did as told. Any thought about how something called myrica gale should maybe taste good evaporated the moment the concoction touched his tongue.

Vahalia smirked gently as she watched him, something caught in her eye, a sinister glint though it was natural to her nature at this point and she reached for the goblet to partake herself when Hakan took his, "There is risk in everything, one must leap than hesitate at the first step." she coaxed him and her nails tinked gently along the curve of the goblet. Vahalia knocked the remains back, she too had to partake to be at the level of state and sleep her partner was to be at, and when she swayed the empty goblet to the side she leaned in, free thumb tugging at the bottom, the most center part of Hakan’s lip, "And should we never wake then it will be a journey at an end, together." leaning in she stole his lips in a hard, hungered press. Stilling the bitterness that found her throat.

He might have once hidden his disgust, an emote of any kind being a vulnerability, but in her, Halia's presence? It was there, even if comparatively muted. The talk of death in sleep as she pressed digit to lip screwed his mouth in a way clearly marked as distaste before she claimed his mouth fully. If she wanted to be wicked before the slow rolling fog overtook them both, he could do the same, free hand finding the space between her legs quickly for a parting tease at her exposed flesh.  

He wasn't able to tell whether his grasp parted from her or not, not as sensations became dim and distant, distant…

As silence came over them both, Vahalia’s ears prick at the distant chittering of voices that always followed her that was nothing but silence to those around her. More and more garbled they seemed to blip from her senses and the familiar growl of Creature eased away as she settled Hakan back to keep him from injuring himself along the stone floor below. 

Palm met stone shortly after as she kept herself up right to the best of her ability, the thread remaining firm as the weight of her body followed through in its desire to simply lay and exist took hold. The rain grew hazy and the space around them began to fade into darkness. 

She was the last to drink, the last to sleep, and likely the last to wake if all went according to plan. A subtle twitch surged through her fingertips as her body eased fully along the ground in its weight. 

The blackest of pitch engulfed them both.

Hakan’s awareness drifted, in and out, expanding and receding like a flash, like the ripples in water after a droplet fell and broadened. The spreading ring waves carried him out, out…

He stood in a room, a hall, a box, dim and closed until he felt with a push of his arms walls turning to smoke, evaporating, gone. There was something wrong with this, something all too strange, and it took too much of an eternity to realize there was something, a reason, a purpose -- to remember what he'd done. It felt like his throat was closed, a vice around his neck, squeezing. Just squeezing. 

He could swallow and, breathe, but the sensation of choking remained. There was something awake around him and rousing, waking something he couldn't fix. There were supposed to be answers, memories, and questions, but he had to ask the questions first. 

To remember he could ask the questions. The city burning around him, the beat of drums and thundering feet, screaming, made him want to huddle and clap his hands to his ears out of sheer instinct.

When Vahalia’s vision came to the cacophony of sounds wrinkled around her and the vivid lights of the blaze, she had found herself within an expanse of unfamiliar sights. When she had caught up to the margin around them and her form had been present, she felt herself reaching out, blinded at first and her hand found familiarity where fingers traced impetuously at the flesh before her. Grabbing for it, Hakan's hand she stepped forward once, and then a second as she halted, the colors and sounds around her beginning to take form around them both.

Already Hakan’s fingers clawed against the shell of his ears, palm pressing in and in as the whirling smoke enveloped streets, skies, muffled noise s-- One breath, then two, another and another, he wasn't a shaking child alone in a city on the edge. His hand was in someone else's, his eyes on the streets as people ran past in blurs of color, as inky smudges. This wasn't why he was here, Rabanastre wasn't his goal. Anchored, accompanied if hardly aware, there were the dreams, the voices; that's what he was searching for. Not home. 

Awkward legs took him forward along the path, over golden roads and blue tiles. Muffled words that felt distant, reached forward but they were still unclear in his mind’s eye. They were standing before a gate, a doorway. Giants on either side, sand pouring from bottomless hourglasses held against shoulders to burden the weight. There was a heat in the darkness, a furnace, alive, pulsing….beckoning…

As if it were designed for her to do so, Vahalia followed. The only familiar scene she had to call home, was an anchor among the blurred colors and coruscating sounds that remained in the lingering touch she had afforded to Hakan. A strange place and none she had ever seen before. The chaos sparking around them, her feet feeling charged with energy neither good nor bad though that hadn't made her feel any safer in the place in which she stood, eyes taking in the assembled pieces before them, "Is this...." she paused, her voice almost an echo as she followed what she could only naturally surmise to be Hakan's attention, the moving sand from the massive sand clocks.

She already knew.

A foreign home of hers linking her through blood. For Hakan it was a collective of stored memories, perhaps some simply visions to be untrue. A broken home to which there was no returning.

Transfixed before the black, the thrum and heat of something distant were the only promises of light that Hakan could feel. 'Go, Don't Go, Don't, Don't..' a whispering chorus in his ears. A barrier before him, a lock which honored no key. He snarled, teeth-baring, face contorting, a leonine flash -- a crack, shattering. The sands continued pouring, filling the sloping entrance, and swallowing it. His feet took him forward, body moving through the grain. The vice within his neck, the cords digging into his heart had eased with each step. Asking 'Who' as he parted the billowing dark with his companion. Echoes of feet, his own, others, bouncing off the halls. 'Who are you, to tell me I'm unready,' he snarled, figures looming in the expanse, the threat behind and surrounding him growing close but not.

Vahalia walked, perplexed as she heard the words echo and clip but they had not been directed at her. Perhaps....elsewhere? Her attention snapped and much of her wondered if there were other things inbound that Hakan himself could hear or sense that she could not. Missing a piece to the puzzle before her but such was not her dream to coax to reality or to twist and warp at her whim. 

Here, there was no magic she could utilize, she was beyond any hand to play. Her presence only meant to play witness, a passenger in the scape of Hakan's mind. When the colors shifted her attention shifted back to what captured Hakan's attention as they walked.

He marched forward with a growing purpose. A sort of clarity. The shifting wrongness, it felt alien, of things around him began solidifying, forming something more coherent. Shadows along the walls curled backward to bleed away and murals revealed cloaked and staff-bound figures. There was old writing that was unfamiliar to him, possibly ancient – still twisting, inverting, but there. Recognizable. 

Crests peaked alcoves, buttresses; suns, lions, bulls. Hourglasses. He noted them, recognized them, and moved past them. He was not here for history, for bygone ancestors and bloodlines. Stopping, asking, and diverting from the task of the voice and its incessant, erratic, and forgetfulness was the goal. 

“Why, why do you plague me? Why take my dreams, my memories, my time?" Hakan seethed, voice low and never a shout. 

There was rumbling in the distance, a rhythm. Something mournful, something amused, something…

There was a figure in the chamber. Figures, twelve and thirteen in the center. It towered over them, over the outline of a shadowed form. Eyes that glowed like miniature suns. 

They looked at him. 

Through him. 

They looked at Vahalia, aware.

Like a pinprick -- sharpened to the vibrant eyes nestled within a deep shadow before them. Vahalia quickly garnered theories, as per the norm, but she remained quiet. Still and vigilant.

 The chamber, the catacombs, the purpose, all were gone. There was only the figure, the entity which could have easily resembled a kin of titans. Smoke and fire and crippling pressure "Untested. Sundered." The voice boomed around them, collapsed walls into the sand, and replaced air with lead. Chains found Hakan’s wrists, and pulled him from the back of his neck, his back, into the ground, rattling, scraping. His arms, skinny, too skinny, couldn't lift the gold, the iron. "Our vessel." Its voice echoed, derided. 

A halo bloomed behind its skull, features still unknowable. And as it looked at him, judged, a mirror cast on Vahalia where she too had been strung up, lifted high, chains shooting to her wrists, ankles, and neck. It towered over her, indomitable, a pillar breaching the sky, and stood face to face. "Potential," it seethed, voice flowing slow and thick. "Perhaps. Kindling at least."

Vahalia’s attention barely had a second to snap to Hakan the moment the chains shot toward him and by reflex, she aimed to bolt toward him, naturally, but she had been jerked back and too found the shackles at her extremities. There was a vicious roar that echoed through her mind, a reminder that she was not solely alone within herself as Creature's presence was alert, keeping her grounded to some degree but angered. This was not her space, uncontrolled and wild. 

She knew the implications in which coming into this would be but it hadn't deterred her either way. Such was the price for curiosity and attachment. Her palms felt sweaty, the only thing that was of the true essence of feeling within this realm and thus she tested the restraints, a cruel smirk pinning to the corner of her lips. 

Kindling -- how fitting.

Hakan had found himself dragged, pulled, and shuffled along cavernous corridors lit by fired sconces. In each flame, a crystal, power. Memory. Memories of elsewhere, others, memories that weren't his but could have been. Were.

 A pale knight clad in silver amidst a city, sandals in the dirt, grass on his skin. A chorus of blasts, horns, men and women charging monstrous figures with too wide of mouths, and stitched faces. 

Vows in the dark, in the light, before the sun before being carried below. He pulled at the chains, arms straining, voice breaking as he struggled against the pressure on his throat, chest aching. "Why? Tell me why, why take and take? Give me something." The plea was swallowed down, dispersed. 

Still, he fought the crowd, the surge of bodies trying to flee, the hand pulling at him speaking of rebellion and promises he knew would break. The strange shadow entity, its halo dipping forward, a crown with horns rising on either side, and a third sun sat between the spikes. It was bright, blinding, burning, just like the stars in its eyes.

It now fixed on Halia. It saw her, saw what grew in her, saw the darkness slick under her skin, coiled. Coiling.

"You do not belong. What you carry...might, if untarnished." The entity stepped closer to her and loomed, a presence trying to engulf her. "If stoked."

Eyes of liquid gold followed the thing before her, silently searching for chinks within its shadowed armor. She knew nothing of the sun or light but she knew plenty of the darkness -- she had been forged by it. Her attention drifted across the expanse of the area and it was here she found her vision limited beyond what was happening elsewhere than what was before her. The chains that bound her shifted and she angled forward, daringly, dangerously but her closure was finite as she ticked her head, owlishly slow to appraise and weigh the 'thing' before her. The strain on the chains kept her from narrowing the space between her and it, "Sad little shadow." she loosed a tut, "A vision. A memory. A dream, yet so far from reality."

That which encapsulated the space before Vahalia was not conjuration, not a figment. It EXISTED. 

She shifted forward and her throat was in its palm, fingers, talons, pricking and piercing the skin of her neck that garnered little to no response from the woman. The heat from its digit burned off the blood, the power beneath the shadow dormant but present. Growing. "Sad little shadow," it parroted towards the witch, taunted, STATED. "Chained to a fragment. Empowered" It looked into her. It looked at Creature. "By a mere child grasping for what it cannot reach." The being reached as if into her, the question of whether to eat in the air. There were chains on its wrists, its throat, its back. Features like Hakan's, similar to Hakan's, unlike his at all. Red scales, gold, red-gold. The black smoke, of ovens and furnaces, metal stamping, bombarded the senses from afar. Growing, growing, there. Distant, then growing again.

Was this simply a spectacle of inner madness?

Hakan jerked at his bindings, metal stressing, fracturing, melting into him. He rose off the ground, one knee then the other, stood. His arms felt leaden, weak, as if they were not his at all, and then it all felt to be too much. Power filtered into his veins, made his skin burn, want to split and burst. "Speak damn you! Tell me what you are, who!"

The figure aimed to reach Vahalia, into her, reaching for Creature and it then ceased, stopping briefly. It stood towering, still containing the Witch, focused on her, but moved into the space behind her where it faced Hakan, looked down at him, "Another vessel. You. But you are broken. Untrained, untested. The threat is gone, the battle won. But not by you. Yet we remain, so we remain. Hungry. Unfilled. Until you, until a promise, proves worthy. But you are not. Not yet. Guidance is needed. Return when you have it."

For a brief moment, Vahalia felt a laugh brewing in her throat though it was snuffed quickly, her attention shifted to the side, briefly calculating, curious about where Hakan had been as they had been separated for all that she knew as there was little to see beyond what was in front of her despite something happening behind her.  

Was this something that nestled deep into Hakan’s being as Creature was into hers? A reflection of inner battles or perhaps a fade of the past, what was yet to come? Her eyes danced over parts of the figure and she remained silent for a stint. A migrant figment of the one she was eternally bound to? Perhaps a collection of thoughts, memories, trauma and the past bleeding into one singular source?

Her attention snapped to the familiar voice – Hakan – and briefly, the feeling of relief seeped into her senses. A flicker of darkness and sweeping tendrils slithered forth from her chest toward the being unlike Hakan before her and then retreated once more as Creature’s essence was drawn to the immense power that loomed so close, within reach, yet her avatar struggled to connect. She tested the chains once more when the entity moved, placing focus now on Hakan which it seemed to converse.

The tendrils of Creature were not unnoticed; a creature aware of everything even half-slumbering could not be so blind as to miss it. Creature reached and at that moment the power of the being flared, nova bright, star waking further. It threatened to consume, the power real and untamed, unharnessed, with no control. Almost no control.

There was a star in her too, a potential too small to snuff out. Too large. A darker part of the horned and crowned collaborative entity, something tied to Hakan, from Hakan, made its touch less cold. More hungry. Savage. To look at it was to see something old, something beyond mortality, something only barely bound by rules self imposed rules hardly befitting the civilized. 

This was Hakan’;s dreamscape yet his power and control waned was his subconscious took hold. A myriad of blips and recognizable and unrecognizable all in one. When something began to make sense, it quickly shifted from parts of reality. Smudges of uncertainty and painted imaginations one could only find on a canvas or neatly written in stories.

Hakan growled low at the sight, at the slumbering numen. Himself.

"Guidance? Guidance? Who, what, are you to say I needed it without ever having given a sign–" Hakan finished in a rasping bite, voice scratching the back of his throat. “he image of the being, the scales and crown, three suns, transposed onto his features for a mirrored moment. For an instant, he was something else and almost unworldly beyond any definition to the waking mind. Different, more, and he loomed behind Vahalia and the being, its reflection. 

"We did," it spoke back, and Hakan was himself again, confusion writ on his face. "You appeared. You were unready. Unalone. It interfered...so you lived. Live. Not every correction since was in your grasp. Measures were taken." The voice began growing distant, the darkness more encompassing. The star entity dimmed, grew distant. "Reforge yourself, o vessel of cultivation. Retrace your steps...and see. Learn. Grow, as your ancestors promised."

Vahalia loosed a quiet breath and hearing the words spoken she still took the time to inspect the irons that clung to her, the hungry void within shot out toward the blipping light, reaching with wild snaps and the tendrils expending far past Vahalia's vision when the darkness came once more. There was silence. A cold darkness and the familiar roil within her chest that begged for release, straining to reach for what it could not obtain if only to snuff it out entirely and then some. Creature extended himself too far from her mortal cage.

In the instant Creature struck, the being slathered by the light of the sun retaliated. The metal of Vahalia’s chains sank into her flesh, pierced it, became part of it, heat engulfing her body. Fabric burned as if it was never there, she was bare before the might of the sun, its hand around her throat squeezing, possessive, the heat pervading it hungry, unyielding, undeniable. There was the presence of Hakan, the core of him within the center of its touch, an animal looking to sink deep into the Witch, claim her, consume even as the stars sought to annihilate whatever stood in its way. A clash between shadow and light sparked the expanse between Vahalia and the entity that was not of her own, the darkness of the shadows blipping out due to the light so bright that it could only shrink and recoil back and though Creature had vanished it wasn't known what had come of the initial grasp. What was known was the scream that ripped through Vahalia as her flesh felt ablaze and pricked by sharp stars, burning into every fabric of her being. What would have continued had become silenced into submission once her airway was seized. Not all that had not been seen, slumbered, and as swiftly as it happened, it also ended and there was...

Nothing!

The presence engulfed everything, wiped away the city visions, and the fields, turning the sands to glass, hourglass shattering and time stopping. "A tethered child, starving...Pitiable. Our Herald," were the last words before there was all-encompassing blackness, then light, searing, and finally wakefulness.

The cold stone under them, the passing rumble of thunder that boomed above followed by the gentle rains of Black Water. Finally, the hour had passed and the bell tower in the distance cut through the patter of precipitation outside of the Laeves Sanctum. 

Reality returned.

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