RP:Banishing a Thing From The Light and The Dark
Background
This is part of the Kurgan's Run story arc.
Colton and Jolie, while their companions are being misled, have found the Main Hall of the fortress, and the well housing the Obsidan Pool. Jolie begins to weave a dangerous spell, in order to banish the Pool from the physical plane.
In the Main Hall
Fate has a terrible sense of humour. This was never more apparent to Tenebrae then when the path they’d walked, seemingly forever, had abruptly spilled them out into a familiar – to her, at least – room, where large stone couches were scaled to the massive hearth, and a low paved ring of stone housed the soul of a ruined illusionist. “Oh thank be the…” Gods? She almost laughed. Here she was, back to face her eternal nemesis, snap the chains of the past and gain her freedom – by murdering a murderer, in the company of a murderer. “Right,” she said, all business, tossing her pack down. “Here we are, then.”
Colton took a seat, his stare following the woman's movements with something akin to disinterest. Within him, twisting, the shadows he had first begun to feed had grown and now threatened the limited restraints he possessed. It had been a long time since he'd attempted to keep them twisting like a tumultuous ball within his belly. The great dark that surrounded them served as a siren's call, desperate and cruel, to which all things shadowed wished to answer. For now, he was alright, though the strength of his hand had suffered and it shook as he produced a cigar from the folds of his coat. This time, rather than use the dagger, he merely bit off the end and spit it to the stone floor. A moment later its smoke twisted about them. His eyes returning to Tenebrae and her place before him.
It didn’t strike her as odd, at all, that the Pool was so very still. Nor that the being whose soul it once had been had barely acknowledged them, offered no fight. It really was not occurring to her that Fate really was a bitch, who loved to shovel irony like coal onto the heads of those who crossed Her, and that things were far too easy, and that there was a thread running through all of the things that had happened since she and the conjurer had first stepped into this accursed place. Tene was focussed, rather, on unpacking her bag, from which she produced a bewildering array of items – white and black candles, a chalice marked with the symbol for light, another for darkness. In fact everything she set down on the floor of that room was dedicated to one side of the dichotomy or the other. “For the ritual,” she explained, needlessly, only wanting to hear a sound other than silence. “Banishing A Thing From the Light and the Dark, it’s called. Found it in a book.” A forsaken book, famed and elusive, which had come into her possession and then vanished without a trace before she could do more than study its footnotes. But even in those, she had discovered arcane secrets she would never have even dreamed of. From where she was crouched, she canted her gaze up to Colton Black. “You alright?”
Paid to the hunter, the woman whom had brought him here, the man known as Black afforded only the most scant of nods. It was not an expression of his temper, or impatience, that drew his manner to be short and his features drawn into something akin to a snarl. It was, instead, a consequence of the darkness swelling inside him and the amount of energy he was burning attempting to keep it churning within him. She had plans. That much he knew. But he had plans as well. It seemed more than possible that either or both would end in tragedy. Perhaps it was this place but to Colton Black each candle she placed, each item drawn from her bag, seemed to ring with a familiar foreboding.
His silence drew her to her own, not only the cessation of words but of the chatter of her mind, as well. She needed to focus, now, on the necessary perfection of the trappings of the spell, material symbols of powers outside the realm of the physical world that would act to anchor the dissonant threads of the dichotomy. It was a dangerous act, this; the spell would basically draw two powerful and diametrically opposing forces together and cancel them out, creating an arcane rift to the unknowable spaces beyond this world, into which – she hoped, desperately – the broken creature in the well would be drawn. Black, white. Darkness, light. The bowl, the dagger. A soft nub of chalk produced elaborate lines, feel runes of illicit arcana plundered from the edges of that terrible book, each item placed on a strategic point. The censers were lit: one fumigating the space with sweet herbs and resins, the other with acrid minerals and powdered bone. Swinging these like twin pendulums from their chains, she intoned the first canta – which would seal their invisible circle, draw it around them like a sphere, a bubble of protection from any wandering spirits who might deign to intrude. This done, she studied Colton, her brows knit into a flicker of a frown – his tension was palpable, and after what she’d seen… “I need you,” she said, still watching him. “Over here. You can embody the light or the dark. Choose.”
Colton chose the light. He chose against himself. The reason lay within him, wrestled by the invisible hands of his will, and submitted through brute force rather than some tremendous, well-practiced technique. There was no apology made for this. He'd nothing he wished to share just yet. Instead, his cigar abandoned without so much as a glance, he forced his squared and stubble-clad jaw to lift and his eyes to meet Tenebrae's own. She'd find his attention upon her clear and unapologetic. She'd find his eyes twin, liquid pools that were black as tar.
The Darkness only nodded her acceptance of his choice, whatever surprise she felt buried under the onerous weight of the task at hand. She would guide the conjurer to take his place – not, as one might expect, among the array of white candles and holy vessels that comprised one hemisphere of their circle, but among the black, the dark, the tainted. She then placed herself, opposite him, the Day to her Night, Animus to her Anima, Female to Male. Around them both, a ghost-wind billowed, sensed in the mind rather than as a displacement of air and on it were carried faint voices, snatches of conversation. It was only to be expected that such temporal or spatial oddities would occur, what she was attempting here was blasphemy. The next canta began, the summoning of Light and Dark, in turn and equal measure, and the room would seem to swell and heave, the floor beneath them buckle, though not a single candleflame flickered, nor did any item topple. The well in which the Obsidian entity was house has, until this moment, lain dormant, as if in waiting. Perhaps ripples of its distress would be felt through the fortress as pseudopods of inky matter fingered their way across the lip of their prison, bled out through the air like ribbons of dark blood in water, until they reached the boundary of the circle drawn in holy and profane smoke. There, they recoiled, snapping back as if burned, writhing like agonised serpents. When next Tenebrae lifted her eyes to meet those of Colton Black, her own were stripped of their green and entirely gleaming a bright, pearlescent white.
It had been an unfortunate assumption made by some that his sight bled away with the color of his eyes and so it was not his assumption that Tenebrae had lost her own. The rules and distinct natures of necromantic rituals were as foreign to him as this queer place and still, as the air grew charged with the potent sensation of magic, he knew enough to remain silent and keep his focus turned inward onto the shadows that lay bound in knots within him. He doubted that she would see those that had been drawn out from this place as clearly as he did. The years of his life had been woven with darkness so tightly that he knew of its subtleties and its desires. He watched, over her head, as the inky tendrils of shadow returned to the shield that repelled them. This time, rather than testing it, they crept along the arch of its bubbled surface, swirled together with mercurial intent, until their vision formed as a massive ebon tumor directly over him. It swelled by the second, fed from the walls of this place, and were that not concerning enough he felt his own darkness swell to answer. It tore at the restraints he laid upon it and surged, upward, as though born by the most unholy of magnets. His teeth grit and the conjurer realized, suddenly and certainly, that should she not finish soon this would not end well for either of them.