RP:The Real McCoy

Background

This is part of the Kurgan's Run story arc.

Jolie and Colton continue on their search for the Obsidian Pool and -- find it. But not quite in the way they expected.

Somewhere, In the Fortess’ Maze

Joliette Thorne had done as the conjurer bid and led, her heart sinking as time passed and they seemed no closer to anywhere in particular. Colton Black seemed to her a man of immediate action, and one who did not tolerate tedium well at all. And this is just what she led him to, miles of tedium wrapped in a long, straight corridor with no further discernible features than a growing feeling of unease. “That wasn’t it, you know,” she’d say, to break the silence that had become almost an entity itself, a looming weight. “The monster.”

Colton followed in silence. He did not acknowledge her presently, or at all, and kept himself along a tirelessly tread of stone floor beneath handsome boots. It had all the distinct and prominent hints of an illusion. The corridor stretched on and the pair walked, seeming to never get closer to the distant end. There was no wind. There was no sound. There was only their mindless striding and her sudden and anticipated attempt to inject life or levity into the moment. The man known as Black knew enough of her to know that somewhere, despite it all, she felt responsible for their adventures. It was a weight she took upon herself. There was no assuring her, so instead, he merely inclined his head and kept pace at her side. There was no complaint made. He had none to give.

If there had have been a rock to kick, Tenebrae might’ve kicked it. She followed Colton’s suit, and said not a word more, simply huffing resignation to the fact that nothing was happening. Or perhaps, was the prickle in the back of her mind, never would… Thus, they were given over to tedium and passing miles, until the very lull she’d been fighting, the mental slouch of boredom, was abruptly broken by a sight she didn’t catch in full, on first glance, because it wasn’t the ongoing nullity she expected. “Do you… see that?” she murmured, her gaze on a figure, small for its distance from them, pacing back and forth across their field of vision, vanishing beyond the edge of the corridor’s stone barrier, suggesting an intersecting path. It was man, she could discern, tall and thin, in a suit of some sort, pacing with his torso slightly bowed forward, hands clasped behind his back. The necromancer almost.. almost.. whooped for the sheer relief of having something different on which to fix her attention. Beyond the man, who noted them not, she could make out, too, a vague sort of bustle, as if the shadows were alive and going about their business as would any townsfolk.

Colton said nothing. He was uncertain as to what he was seeing, just what existed there beyond them. What he knew, what he felt, was the tug of the darkness within him. It strained, leapt, surged outward in a sudden strain against the restraints he kept upon it. The figure was considered at length and the movements beyond it more so. For all his experiences with shadow and darkness, ink-like and alive, he had never seen such a thing. Illusions, she had said. But if she had said that then she was wrong. Pure darkness, manifested under talented hands or otherwise, was never entirely unreal. Illusions were harmless on their own. The required a willing mind to play out within. The conjurer knew, believed entirely, that what they were seeing was no mere illusion.

The necromancer would reset their pace, or at least her own, hurrying toward the man who still showed no sign of having seen their approach nor in being likely to want to do so. Closer, they came, and closer, until Tene could plainly see that there was no crossroad, at all. The man was treading to and fro –through- the apparently solid walls of their erstwhile prison, vanishing, reappearing to pace back again across the width of the path. This had a profoundly disturbing effect on her, even as familiar as she was with the tricks this place played upon a person, mind and soul – and sometimes, body as well; the shiver she felt through her very bones was not matched by the seeming innocuousness of this figure, his lack of direct threat. He was vaguely familiar, she realised, though her thoughts repelled from the attempt to recall why he was so, the way water is repelled by oil. She dared not risk a greeting, but it was clear they would have to pass him by, in order to reach.. Her gaze took in the backdrop, then, and her heart made a wild lurch. Beyond the span of the walking man, the corridor bled out into a different view altogether, which was also familiar, but in a way that she could entirely comprehend.

This was Vailkrin, she knew, it was the road that passed by the dark forest, and the people passing were local merchants and citizens en route to or from the city that lay to the west. Here, the road was darker for the encroaching branches of the twisted oaks and hemlocks that grew wild beyond. Her stomach was a knot, and she for some reason felt her unease sinking into her belly, giving the feeling a label: shame. But shame for what? That thought occurred at the same time she noticed that the pacing man had vanished. She’d glance to Colton, wondering if he was seeing the same things, and when she turned her gaze back to the road, the junction that led into the forest’s leafy depths, a small cry escaped her lips: for there she was, Tenebrae, herself, creeping like a cloaked predator, her skin not just pale but the stark white of ice, into that cursed glade. Green eyes grew wide, and the knot in her gut hardened into a fist. Yes, she knew this scene. She’d played it in her mind, over and over again. “I know this,” she said, half to herself “I don’t want to see it. I don’t want…” To watch herself murder a good friend and clansmate in cold blood, all over again.

This scene was nothing familiar to the conjurer. It stretched on from one moment to the next as what had once been vaporous apparitions came together to forge themselves as certain as concrete. The streets of the city manifested themselves and surrounded them and left them as third parties to this vision. He had, in his considerable years of conjuring, never witnessed anything quite like this. Beside Tenebrae, the true Tenebrae, he remained. His eyes cut their way across what the shadows were presenting, watched silently as the woman beside him began the slow and steady march towards panic. Reaching for her, the man known as Black closed his strong hand on the delicate stretch of her thin wrist in an attempt to ground her to the moment and to his company.

Joliette Thorne, Tenebrae, had never needed to soak up comfort from a man, that way – the gesture was taken as given, an anchor of reality in the midst of madness. And they were drifting now, further beyond the bounds of sanity as they followed the creeping figure of the necromancer-past, when she’d worn another frame, a different hunger, drifting though their feet did not move and they did not will themselves so, two ghosts gliding, joined by Colton’s unwavering grip, through clutches of trees, over dank roots and brambles. And they’d see her lie in wait, there in the shadow of the trees, with a knife in her hand, and the one-eyed man, the assassin Jaidin Traye, walking openly on the path. They’d witness Tenebrae leaping out, the poison blade sinking into his flesh, and the man’s death-throes. The way he winced up at her, shock and horror, a man betrayed by his leader and his friend. And finally, what she did to his body afterward, so that after she was gone he’d rise as a travesty of himself, a walking corpse, confused and still stained with the life’s blood that never would pulse through his body again.

Joliette curled herself inward, against Colton’s frame. She did not weep nor confess, but merely pressed her face against his chest, willing and willing that this scene be gone – not only from view but from her heart, and from the possibility of the conjurer’s knowledge that she was precisely this – a foul traitress, never to be wholly trusted.

As it had come, it went. All that was sure and solid around them turned to smoke, wispy tendrils of gray and black, like fog and soot-filled smoke twisting together. The shadow stretched out and undulated once, trembling like a blanket snapped from a maid's weathered hands, and settled upon them once more. Gone, still, was the thin man. He who had seemingly begun this turn of fates had vanished far more entirely than the wispy shadows in his wake. While they churned once more, congealed and eventually stuck, Colton Black recognized two potent truths. He smelled freshly baked bread. Earthy and appetizing. It came suddenly and filled his senses, overwhelmed the stink of fear that drenched the lissom body beside him. And in his heart, the place where Shadows twisted and trembled, he recognized that whatever was playing this crude game upon them was deeply confused.

The scene took shape in a millhouse, upper floor. Out a solitary, battered window the spool of the waterwheel could be seen. The shadows took shape quickly now but not quick enough to give them one last hint of what was shaping their visions. The water upon the wheel was black for a few seconds, misty, before finally taking on the clarion blue of water. It was summer outside and the heat of it came next, heavy upon his skin. Two boys played. One, ebon-haired and hazel eyed, sat cross-legged upon the floorboards while the other, fair-haired, levied a finger at him. "Do it again!" He said. Fearful and anxious all at once. He was winding a golden pocket watch that Colton Black's uncle had given to him. Colton Black remembered how he had felt then, how it had felt to begin his conjurers tricks with his cousin in the Miller's sons loft. The two ennobled boys exchanged a laugh, rocked some, and Colton Black remembered even then understanding that there was more to his talents then a change of eye color. Still, he leaned over and slammed the bottom of his small fist into the trunk where he had locked the Miller's son. From within, muffled and miserable, came the sobbing wail of a terrified child. He had stopped his endless screams and settled beyond the panic of his captivity into hopelessness. It filled the room suddenly as the weak-hearted whimpers from within the trunk continued, stretched on. "Your father is going to lash you." His cousin called. Suddenly not laughing. "You should let him out." "Look. It's working."

Young Colton Black answered. His voice, even then, deadly and flat. He remembered how it felt that day. The Shadows swarmed within his heart, excited it to beat quickly as they poked and prodded at it with inky fingers. That was how it had always been until that day. A tickle. A discomfort in his chest. His eyes would change from amber-flecked hazel to a deep, chocolate brown. The pupils would swell. His nose would bleed. These things, on command, had fascinated both he and his cousin. His trick. But this time those inky fingers had prodded deep, pierced him. It was not pain that he felt but a sudden, icy cold in his chest. He remembered that he was not afraid of it. He remembered that it was a comfort of kinds, even as that inky tar-like shadow began to inject itself within him. It welled up. It swallowed things and surged and suddenly, Colton Black knew that this was something entirely new. He knew that he had reached into something far greater than his trick and pulled out something wonderful.

His cousin trembled hard, color drained from his face. Young Colton Black's eyes drained of colors, melted away whites and hazel entire until naught but inky blackness remained. And his young cousin went ramrod stiff and pissed himself, hot urine splashing the interior of his britches and stinking in the summer heat trapped within the Mill. The boy in the trunk suddenly gave a soul-wrenching wail and went quiet. He could not have been more than eight, Colton realized, looking at himself. The watch that he had taken from his cousin once he had stopped moving had been with him for his birthday, in his pocket, concealed from the family. Eight years old. That Colton, the Colton of the past, leapt suddenly towards his cousin's form and braced his small head in his long-fingered hands. He had always been the stronger of the two. The faster. He had excelled at all things save the means to earn the affection of his own parents. Now, posed atop the stricken form of his cousin, Colton Black levied both thumbs over the fair-haired boy's water-blue eyes and as he remembered that day, felt nothing of kinship for him. He buried his thumbs to where they met his hand in those eyes, felt them resist before abruptly popping and giving way. Hot blood sprayed from the sockets and soaked his fingers and the boy beneath him gave an inhuman scream. The little legs jerked and little boots thudded helplessly upon the floor before after a minute, maybe two, the body went entirely still.

The rest of the scene would play more quickly. Colton Black, age 8, had released the Miller's boy from the trunk he had first stuffed him within to find the 10 year old entirely catatonic. He had shit himself and bitten clean through his tongue in pure, blind, maddened panic. He was drooling blood and spit from his mouth and onto his linen shirt. The Miller's boy had been blamed, of course. Colton Black had not answered any questions asked of him but, being noble, was simply assumed to have been an unfortunate and traumatized witness. Ironic. The Miller's boy was imprisoned and would refuse to eat. He would shit himself and piss down the front of the scraps they clothed him with. He would never stand in shadow and, if touched by darkness even for a moment, would wail miserably for hours until his voice quit on him and he was left pissing himself and trembling. Eventually, unable to eat, he would starve to death. They would find his shriveled form curled beneath the light of the wall-sconce across from his cell, mashed to the bars. His father hung himself within the very room his son had supposedly murdered a noble man's boy long before that, two days after he was given his sentence.

Colton Black felt no regret. He felt no shame. He was not, despite Tenebrae's place at his side, concerned with the lens through which she had seen this act. In fact, as he looked on, he remembered only the glint of his cousin's watch in the sun as he toyed with it before the window. He remembered how glad he felt when he finally pried it from his lifeless fingers.

She had felt him tense, and peeled herself away to watch the charcoal shades descend, the scene warp, disperse, re-meld into another, wholly dreading what other shames might be visited upon her, and almost moreso that the conjurer would be witness to them. But this was not a slice of her own life, that quickly became obvious. She’d stare at the children, trying to make sense of it, trying to recall… and then she’d turn that gaze on Colton, recognising, even in the childish roundness of the dark boy’s face, a certain predatory awareness, the shape of his eyes. Tenebrae’s attention snapped back to the scene, and she’d experience a different, more vague kind of guilt at her voyeuristic eagerness to learn something of the man beyond the stoic wall he presented, so rarely breached, and never to this level. On she watched, and he’d feel her fingers tighten where Joliette had come to clutch his arm, not so much for any reaction to the suffering of the other boys, but in the sudden and very clear realisation that Colton Black –was- a monster, a monster born and still one now. There was no horror in it for her, no crawling revulsion or disapproval at either the scene or the thought – had she not herself once found children a favoured meal? – but moreso shock, as if his human skin had been peeled back, to reveal what lay under it, and found there a worse monster than she had ever been. Worse, not for his crimes but in the soulless way he committed them, and not even that, but that she had underestimated him, very badly indeed, and it was this dismay and no other that had pulled her lips into a small ‘o’ and perched a furrow on her brow. He was a monster, in every sense of the word. Killer. Murderer. Predator. The look she turned to him then, as the hanging man swung, and the vision faded back into the endless corridor they’d walked before, spoke of a feral understanding, a rush of excitement, evident in the blood that made her cheeks into roses, and a terrible, wonderful surge of the fierce joy, the killer’s joy, that she had suppressed so hard these past years in her attempts to defy her own soul’s irrefutable darkness.

“Bravo!” The exclamation, the sharp clapping of hands had Tenebrae wheel sharply toward the source: the thin man, the one who’d paced through walls. He was leant on the stone behind them, his figure bizarrely jaunty and archaic all at once and more besides, drenched invisibly in the stink of the endless Void. “What a show, eh? Bravo. Brava!”

Of all the many things he had been called charming was not one of them. Colton Black was not, as Tenebrae had taken habit of putting it, a charming conversationalist. He looked over his shoulder and watched the thin man's applause, paying sudden and absolute attention. All at once he recognized the uncomfortable position in which he'd been put. The immediate strength of his instincts lay in attacking the thin man, burying his hammer between those slender shoulders until it stopped moving. But he did not. Instead, between confusion and inaction, Colton Black lingered. His primary means of coping denied to him, he set his jaw and turned inward, focusing on the swirling darkness straining within him. Undoing, or not, it was not his intention to think his way through anything in life.

“I know you…” the necromancer’s voice was soft. She knew him, his face the dim memory of an old nightmare dragged from slumber into the solidity of the world. She knew, better, the crawling prickle that shivered her skin, the crackle of her synapses fighting to keep control of muscle and brain.

The thin man – whose slenderness sat ill on his frame, like a thoroughbred horse too long unfed – nodded affably, tilting himself away from the wall. “Of course, dear girl. And how –wonderful- to see you again. Have you gained a little weight? Cut your hair?” His smile was a white arc. “And you’ve brought a friend! And what a friend, what a –charming-… “ the word was spoken with a crisp emphasis , “…pair you make.”

Tenebrae had a very clear sense, then, of Colton at her side, the tension in him yet another string pulled too tight, here. She said, very quietly, “Colton Black, I’d like you to meet….”

The man butted in, tsk’ing, “Now, now, we’ve no time for niceties, have we?” His black stare was not the inky stain of Colton’s while magic coursed through the conjurer; this was the absolute nothingness of eternal night, into which no dawn had ever yawped. His large hands rubbed together briskly, “For there’s adventure afoot, if I am not mistaken. Adventure, and peril, and murder – oh my!” The man chuckled, and peered at Colton, “At least there’s a better class of henchman about these days. The last few.. abysmal, really.” This was somehow hilarious to him, and he roared with laughter, slapping his thighs. “Oh, oh, this is all too, too precious. And…” he straightened, abruptly, raising a forefinger, the humour gone from his features and replaced by a vulpine mien, “…too close to the bone. I’d wish you both luck, but.. well. You understand…” and with that, he tumbled back, the stone melding around his frame as it swallowed him whole.

“That.” Tenebrae was almost whispering, still staring at the dark stone where the man no longer was. “Was the monster.”