This is a nightmare of imminent death; the executioner's blade is not against Vandelin's neck yet, but it is only a matter of time before it catches up to him, strikes him down, and his blood mingles with the rivers of it that flood the corridor.
Were the stone floors slick with blood before Atticus stepped across the threshold into Vandelin's mind? It is there now.
Should Vandelin notice it--and should he turn around to follow the trail to its point of origin--he'd be confronted with a bloody spectacle: a templar soldier impaled through the chest with a wooden pike. The force of the blow was powerful enough to embed the pike itself in the stone of the wall, which now begins to crumble as though that strike alone was enough to shake this oppressive tower down to its very foundations.
That is when the lock that Vandelin had been about to melt from the door suddenly drops to the bloodied floor; the door groans as though struggling to bear some tremendous weight.
In the manner of dreams, the blood doesn't come as a surprise, exactly. Of course it's been there all along, soaking through the soles of cheap Circle-issue boots that were never designed for outdoor wear, wicking up the cloth of his robes and dampening his legs with sickly warmth. Blood is the status quo wherever templars are left unleashed.
But the things that hunt them are deadlier still, and Vandelin knows with a fatalistic throb of fear-adrenaline that whatever killed this one (humans are large ungainly creatures, he knows, but how can this one have had so much blood in him?) will be no kinder to a mage. Demons slaughter with glee what they can't possess, but the former is a universally preferable fate.
The fallen lock sends echoes throughout the chamber, and Vandelin's head whips toward the door.
This is what happens when you banish the templars. The sibilant voice in his head still sounds too much like his cousin's for comfort. Reject the peacekeepers, and you had best be prepared to fight the war on your own.
The hall provides little cover and no retreat, but Vandelin's white-knuckle grip on his staff doesn't falter. He focuses unblinking on the door, pulling the threads of a hex from the Fade and ready to turn it all loose.
Vandelin isn’t this particular predator’s prey. In fact, the predator doesn’t materialize before him, remaining cloaked in shroud and shadow, the shape of it evading the eye’s efforts to fixate on it. But the threat of the collapsing tower remains imminent, and Vandelin will be forced to contend with that regardless of what else may be hunting him.
At last the door before him finally caves in, the wood splintering with a loud crunch; there is nothing on the other side of it except the beginnings of a spiraling staircase, with carved slits in the walls looking out onto a dark, smoke-filled night. The ceilings and walls are still crumbling--
--and out of the darkness of the corridor, one last Templar utterly riddled through with disfiguring protrusions of red lyrium, charges at Vandelin with eye sockets made of fire and malice--
All right. This is not the moment for a brave last stand, unless he happens to be crushed by a falling chunk of mortar. But that would be such an ignominious way to go out, even in a dream. Vandelin can muster up a better death than that, if it's inevitable.
But it's not, yet. He can make it down the stairs if he bolts, and if the tower is laid out like he remembers, the courtyard won't be far, and maybe a barrier will be enough to shield him from falling rock if he runs fast enough as he maintains it--
The heavy tread behind him catches his ear from just far enough off that he isn't blindsided. He doesn't have even time to process the nauseating state of the thing's body--it's not a templar, surely it's not a templar; he can't imagine that it ever was--before it advances on him faster than anything so deformed and weighted-down should ever be able to run.
The remnants of that aborted death-hex still linger, half-thought, still present in the raw Fade the way sugar sits longer in cold water before dissolving. He grabs for every pluripotent thread he can, changes the intent behind them, and twists them around to wrench the templar's sightline sideways at as sharp an angle as he can. Intangible tendrils of leeching fatigue wind around its legs for good measure, but Vandelin's last thought, a nauseating misgiving, is how can a hex blind a thing without eyes?
It can, if one considers that blindness is only a means of dulling a sense. The shade of the red templar lurches sideways and away from Vandelin suddenly, letting loose an animalistic roar as it charges a phantom opponent that doesn't exist. An effective way to leverage his surroundings, Atticus decides, and wills a chunk of the crumbling tower to crash down atop the templar, bringing its suffering to a grisly end.
The doorway behind Vandelin remains open, waiting for him to flee through it; to coax him along, the ground beneath his feet begins to give way next.
He won't flinch at the templar's death, won't let himself look back, won't picture the gore spreading slowly outward from that mess of shattered crystal. There's no time for squeamishness, even before the floor begins to cave in.
There's no one left alive to hear him cry out, or so he thinks, and he doesn't choke back that hoarse and high-pitched yelp of terror as he scrambles back from the brink, turning and bolting for the stairwell with his own heartbeat dizzy in his ears. He can hold steady a barrier just strong enough to dampen the force a little if a rock should fall on him, and he can feel debris raining down through it already, eating through his defenses granule by granule. There's nothing for it. He shields and runs, shields and runs, and Maker help him if there are more templars out there in the dark.
There are no more templars--just the crumbling tower as it comes down, brick by shattering brick, around Vandelin as he makes his flight down the stairs. When at last he reaches the door and bursts through it--
--the dreamscape changes abruptly.
Gone is the rumbling, roaring sound of stone grating against stone as it collapses in on itself. Instead, Vandelin will find himself stumbling into the middle of Witchwood in the Hinterlands, the sun low in the sky and the distant sound of a raging battle just beyond a copse of burning, bloodied trees. The templars and the rebels are in the heat of combat now, but no one has noticed Vandelin's presence in the woods yet.
Masked and shrouded, that is when Atticus chooses to step into the dream, to stand beside Vandelin with his hidden eyes turned towards the fighting. "They all want you dead," he tells him almost conversationally, then turns to fix his gaze on him. "How will you make sure they die first?"
Atticus' appearance seems as natural as any other dream logic. That's not what makes Vandelin bat an eye. He gazes out over the carnage with sick, sinking deja vu. He's never been here before, not specifically here, with its frost-rimed trees and broken barricades of ice, but the rest of it is so nauseatingly familiar that he may as well have.
"They don't want us dead," he says, rounding sharply on Atticus with an argument he's made so often and so desperately that doing it in his literal sleep is second-nature. The 'us,' too, is reflexive, because it was always an 'us' until it wasn't. "What are we even fighting for, if there's never going to be anyone we can trust? You want to stay out here robbing farmers and sleeping in the dirt until they finally put us down? That's what we left the Circle for?"
In curiosity, he lifts one of his hands, and discovers that the guise he wears now is not one he recognizes. Vandelin's mind has turned him into someone else entirely--a confidante, a friend?
"What are we even fighting for, if there's never going to be anyone we can trust? You want to stay out here robbing farmers and sleeping in the dirt until they finally put us down? That's what we left the Circle for?"
Ah. An idealist. Atticus frowns with some disappointment.
Well, he can work with it, regardless. The quickest way to challenge an idealist is to attack their ideals--with spells and swords, if necessary. Besides, Atticus doesn't particularly care about why Vandelin wields his magic in combat: he just wants to see how he does it. When he has no choice but to raise his staff and cast a spell, what does he choose?
In an eyeblink, he's gone from Vandelin's line of sight, but the transition feels seamless within the dream, as dream things do. So, too, does the sudden surge of the battle in Vandelin's direction through the trees. The templars and rebels are stumbling in clumsy, violent rage towards him--though Atticus has allowed him enough time to seek cover, or higher ground. The dream is his battleground; how will he use it?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Were the stone floors slick with blood before Atticus stepped across the threshold into Vandelin's mind? It is there now.
Should Vandelin notice it--and should he turn around to follow the trail to its point of origin--he'd be confronted with a bloody spectacle: a templar soldier impaled through the chest with a wooden pike. The force of the blow was powerful enough to embed the pike itself in the stone of the wall, which now begins to crumble as though that strike alone was enough to shake this oppressive tower down to its very foundations.
That is when the lock that Vandelin had been about to melt from the door suddenly drops to the bloodied floor; the door groans as though struggling to bear some tremendous weight.
no subject
But the things that hunt them are deadlier still, and Vandelin knows with a fatalistic throb of fear-adrenaline that whatever killed this one (humans are large ungainly creatures, he knows, but how can this one have had so much blood in him?) will be no kinder to a mage. Demons slaughter with glee what they can't possess, but the former is a universally preferable fate.
The fallen lock sends echoes throughout the chamber, and Vandelin's head whips toward the door.
This is what happens when you banish the templars. The sibilant voice in his head still sounds too much like his cousin's for comfort. Reject the peacekeepers, and you had best be prepared to fight the war on your own.
The hall provides little cover and no retreat, but Vandelin's white-knuckle grip on his staff doesn't falter. He focuses unblinking on the door, pulling the threads of a hex from the Fade and ready to turn it all loose.
no subject
At last the door before him finally caves in, the wood splintering with a loud crunch; there is nothing on the other side of it except the beginnings of a spiraling staircase, with carved slits in the walls looking out onto a dark, smoke-filled night. The ceilings and walls are still crumbling--
--and out of the darkness of the corridor, one last Templar utterly riddled through with disfiguring protrusions of red lyrium, charges at Vandelin with eye sockets made of fire and malice--
What will he do, Atticus wonders, watching.
no subject
But it's not, yet. He can make it down the stairs if he bolts, and if the tower is laid out like he remembers, the courtyard won't be far, and maybe a barrier will be enough to shield him from falling rock if he runs fast enough as he maintains it--
The heavy tread behind him catches his ear from just far enough off that he isn't blindsided. He doesn't have even time to process the nauseating state of the thing's body--it's not a templar, surely it's not a templar; he can't imagine that it ever was--before it advances on him faster than anything so deformed and weighted-down should ever be able to run.
The remnants of that aborted death-hex still linger, half-thought, still present in the raw Fade the way sugar sits longer in cold water before dissolving. He grabs for every pluripotent thread he can, changes the intent behind them, and twists them around to wrench the templar's sightline sideways at as sharp an angle as he can. Intangible tendrils of leeching fatigue wind around its legs for good measure, but Vandelin's last thought, a nauseating misgiving, is how can a hex blind a thing without eyes?
no subject
The doorway behind Vandelin remains open, waiting for him to flee through it; to coax him along, the ground beneath his feet begins to give way next.
no subject
There's no one left alive to hear him cry out, or so he thinks, and he doesn't choke back that hoarse and high-pitched yelp of terror as he scrambles back from the brink, turning and bolting for the stairwell with his own heartbeat dizzy in his ears. He can hold steady a barrier just strong enough to dampen the force a little if a rock should fall on him, and he can feel debris raining down through it already, eating through his defenses granule by granule. There's nothing for it. He shields and runs, shields and runs, and Maker help him if there are more templars out there in the dark.
no subject
--the dreamscape changes abruptly.
Gone is the rumbling, roaring sound of stone grating against stone as it collapses in on itself. Instead, Vandelin will find himself stumbling into the middle of Witchwood in the Hinterlands, the sun low in the sky and the distant sound of a raging battle just beyond a copse of burning, bloodied trees. The templars and the rebels are in the heat of combat now, but no one has noticed Vandelin's presence in the woods yet.
Masked and shrouded, that is when Atticus chooses to step into the dream, to stand beside Vandelin with his hidden eyes turned towards the fighting. "They all want you dead," he tells him almost conversationally, then turns to fix his gaze on him. "How will you make sure they die first?"
no subject
"They don't want us dead," he says, rounding sharply on Atticus with an argument he's made so often and so desperately that doing it in his literal sleep is second-nature. The 'us,' too, is reflexive, because it was always an 'us' until it wasn't. "What are we even fighting for, if there's never going to be anyone we can trust? You want to stay out here robbing farmers and sleeping in the dirt until they finally put us down? That's what we left the Circle for?"
no subject
"What are we even fighting for, if there's never going to be anyone we can trust? You want to stay out here robbing farmers and sleeping in the dirt until they finally put us down? That's what we left the Circle for?"
Ah. An idealist. Atticus frowns with some disappointment.
Well, he can work with it, regardless. The quickest way to challenge an idealist is to attack their ideals--with spells and swords, if necessary. Besides, Atticus doesn't particularly care about why Vandelin wields his magic in combat: he just wants to see how he does it. When he has no choice but to raise his staff and cast a spell, what does he choose?
In an eyeblink, he's gone from Vandelin's line of sight, but the transition feels seamless within the dream, as dream things do. So, too, does the sudden surge of the battle in Vandelin's direction through the trees. The templars and rebels are stumbling in clumsy, violent rage towards him--though Atticus has allowed him enough time to seek cover, or higher ground. The dream is his battleground; how will he use it?