Private Tales A Reason for Everything

[Aldrae]

She agreed that the strange item more than qualified. In fact, 'unusual' struck her as an understatement. At least his answer gave her a bit of reassurance after the recent chaos.

Yet as Aldrae looked around at the dark hallways with its forsaken offices, she couldn't help but feel a nervous tremor skitter across her shoulders. The fading magic around them made the whole world feel as though it was losing its color. It reminded her of a nightmare she'd often had as a little girl, that a terrible monster had stalked her through a gloomy, shifting maze.

One moment, Aldrae was following Erren up the hallway in tense silence. She had an inkling that something was about to happen when a couple of the runes in the band began to shift and glow, stirring a few loose motes of magic that stubbornly remained lodged in the universe. She paused to look at the markings. Then she fainted.

Though from her perspective, it was the world that had skipped a heartbeat.

"Erren?" she uttered uncertainly into the looming blackness all around, unaware that her body was uninjured but motionless on the floor.

A distorted image of the hall flickered across the surface of the disk Erren was holding. A demonic howl echoed faintly through the building.

-------------

On the far side of the library, Averen and Hagan paused their search to share an incredulous look.

"Did you hear that?" Averen whispered.

"I rather wish I hadn't," replied Hagan.

Erren Serris

 

[Erren Serris]

The silence between them certainly wasn't helping the tense and unsettling atmosphere that permeated the lifeless College surrounding them like a stone prison, but every word spoken was a risk of being heard by those who pursued them. Once they were safe, there would be time for talk, and quite the talk it would be. Despite the chaos that strange little bangle had brought to Elbion on this day, Serris couldn't help but feel the slightest tiwnge of excitement.

After all, it wasn't everyday that even the old coots in charge had their entire lives upended in a single moment. Today was for people like him, who thrived in the unknown. He simply wished this poor girl hadn't been dragged into it as well.

Speaking of Aldrae, Erren furrowed his brow as he realized he could no longer hear her footfalls behind him. "Miss Aldrae?" He whispered, before looking over his shoulder to the dark, ominous hallway stretching out behind him. She lay there, motionless but breathing. A whispered swear leaves Erren's lips as he turns to assist her.

No sooner had he taken a step than a terrifying sound echoes through the empty halls of the College. Deep, bellowing, and angry.

The mage froze, sweeping his eyes this way and that, as though he could actually cut through the darkness to see anything properly. Even he hadn't the faintest at what the sound could have been, but he wasn't the least bit interested in sticking around to find out. Quickly, he scoops Aldrae up into his arms and continues down the hall, forgoing his stealthiness for the time being.

Aldrae

 

[Aldrae]

The college corridor twisted into a truly surreal scene around Aldrae. The ceiling and walls shrunk soundlessly into tight tunnels. The lights faded away into a conscious sort of darkness that oozed nefarious intent. It was the labyrinth from her childhood nightmares, which meant...

Gaaarrrrwwwwwllllllll! The supernatural howl reverberated and rebounded off of the darkness itself, masking the direction of its source. Aldrae spun around to look in each direction, her heart pounding suddenly in her ears.

Though it had been years since she'd had this dream, she still remembered it vividly. She remembered the primal fear; the gnashing sounds that came closer no matter how fast she ran. The fear of pain and death in a pitch black tunnel, and its eventual dead end. Her monster took the form of the scariest thing in existence - the unknown. Something that could be seen could be defeated, but something merely hinted at was given a much more devious power.

But it was a power she'd learned to defeat, in time. Shaking her head wildly, she called upon it now:

"Wake up, Aldrae, wake up!"

She felt a sense of jostled movement before she startled back to the real world. She glanced up at Erren's face in surprise.

"What's happening?" she asked as she tried to get her feet back on the floor.

Gaaarrrrwwwwwllllllll! There it was again, coming from somewhere behind them. Aldrae felt her face go pale. Wait... she was awake now, wasn't she? It must have been, because she could see that horrid relic still on her wrist, runes alight and shifting in a mockery of her ignorance.

"I do hope your colleague's office is nearby!"

Erren Serris

 

[Erren Serris]

"I'll be quite frank with you..." Erren stopped only seconds to allow Aldrae to lower herself back to her feet before taking the wrist that wasn't wearing a foreign and dangerous relic and hurrying her along beside him. "There are so many godforsaken things being studied in this place that I haven't the faintest clue what that sound is." The likelihood that it was anything the pair of them would like, though, was slim to none.

The hallway ahead of them seemed to stretch for miles, it's ending impossible to see through the thick curtain of darkness. A flash of confusion and concern, more than was already present, creased Erren's face for a moment. This hallway hadn't always been so long, had it? And this darkness, sure, the relic had drained the magic from the College, but night hadn't fallen yet.

Gaaarrrrwwwwwllllllll
Oh.

Serris cut a sharp left, pulling Aldrae into one of the abandoned classrooms lining the walls on either side of them. Curiously, it looked just the same as the last classroom they'd peeked into. Flattening his back against the wall, Erren closes his eyes and takes in a deep breath, before reaching out to pat the young woman gently on the shoulder.

"Okay, so I'm nintey-five percent certain we're being hunted by a Varrok." He breathed, trying not to sound as woeful as he felt. "If you're unfamiliar, Varroks are fear-eaters. They prey on the scared or panicking, feeding off of raw terror." Erren gestured to the room around them with his hands. "These empty classrooms? That hallway? Not real. A Varroks roar causes hallucinations, designed to bring about more fright for it to feast on."

Gaaarrrrwwwwwllllllll

The entire college seemed to shake this time, the floor under their feet rattling and struggling to hold them up as the sickening roar echoed through their heads maddeningly. Stepping away from the wall with a grimace and his hands over his ears Erren begins to look around the classroom; under tables and chairs, on the walls, out of the darkened windows.

He was making a long, bold-lettered mental note to have a stern word with whoever had been keeping a damned Varrok for study on campus.

"We have to break ourselves out of the illusion. Easiest way to do that is..." Erren turns back to Aldrae, biting the inside of his cheek. "Miss Aldrae, I need you to punch me."

Aldrae

 

[Aldrae]

So far, Aldrae had been keeping her terror at bay by imagining all of this like a mystery novel she'd read in a cozy corner of the bookstore on rainy nights, complete with a cup of hot tea and fresh cookies. Now it had taken a darker turn, and the instinctual part of her brain was giving the higher functioning part of her brain a hard kick.

Okay, so I'm nintey-five percent certain we're being hunted by a Varrok." He breathed, trying not to sound as woeful as he felt. "If you're unfamiliar, Varroks are fear-eaters. They prey on the scared or panicking, feeding off of raw terror." Erren gestured to the room around them with his hands. "These empty classrooms? That hallway? Not real. A Varroks roar causes hallucinations, designed to bring about more fright for it to feast on."

Leaning heavily against the wall beside him, she struggled to catch her breath. Erren's observation didn't help in that endeavor.

"Oh, well it's nice to hear that I haven't just lost my mind and become trapped in a waking nightmare. Good. So, theoretically, we won't be very appetizing to this Varrok if we just... aren't afraid of it?"

Gaaarrrrwwwwwllllllll echoed the horrible growl again.

She squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed the lump in her throat. "No problem," she squeaked.

Miss Aldrae, I need you to punch me."

She opened her eyes again and shot him a confused and slightly worried look. "I'm sorry, it sounded like you said you wanted me to punch you." She waited politely to be told she'd heard wrong, but the serious expression on his face said otherwise.

In her mind, there was a problem with this idea. It wasn't hurting him (even if he happened to have a glass jaw). Quite the opposite: Having spent most of her life in a book shop and a university, Aldrae's only real exercise was carrying stacks of books. She had all of the arm musculature of a noodle.

"I sure hope this works," she muttered. She drew herself up to her full height and tried to imagine being mad at Erren. It ended up being more of a light slap, though the slight electric jolt that emerged from her hand came as a complete surprise even to her.

Erren Serris

 

[Erren Serris]

The two of them weren't particularly close, having only met an hour and change prior, so Erren didn't forsee any real issue with his request, barring some hidden pacifism harbored without his notice. Still, it seemed to take a moment before she accepted any notion of laying her hands on him in a violent capacity.

Ordinarily, Serris would have been quite patient with her, but the increasing volume of the monstrous roars and the vibrations that seemed to shake the entire college more and more with each passing minute did put a bit of a deadline on this idea. Though Varrocks did feed on fear rather than flesh, allowing themselves to be prey would very much end in their demise.

"It's a bit late to act like we haven't been shaken up." The episode in the hallway probably reeked of enough fear to classify as a feast for the creature. Taking another wary peek out of the door, shrouded by the unnatural darkness borne of the Varrock's illusion, he gently waved a hand, gesturing for her to hasten with the punching of his face. "We need to pull our attention away, break the illusion it's built around us."

Whatever her concern was, she didn't voice it aloud. And eventually, she appeared to work past it. Standing up straight and shaking off her fear, she made her best attempt to look serious as she drew back and took a swing, right for Erren's jaw.

The Professor had clenched his teeth, bracing himself for impact, but...

It wasn't a particularly mighty blow. Aldrae's fingers did sting against his cheek, and the crack sound that her flesh made against his was enough to cause his head to whip back with the impact, but Erren had been hit harder by his five year old son than what Aldrae just delivered.

But it did the trick.

The jolt that shot through her hand upon making contact with Erren wasn't just physical; As Serris stumbled back, the very reality around him seemed to warp with his movements. The dark classroom they stood in melted away around him; cracks forming in thin air, chipping away like old paint before their very eyes. Chairs and tables he should have collided with vanished, and lights from nowhere seemed to bleed through into their shared nightmare.

They hadn't been in a classroom at all, but the Grand Hall on the first floor. There was no endless hallway, abandoned, dishelved study room, or encroaching shadow. In fact, his Hall was one of the few places still illuminated by traditional torches, rather than magelight. The large, rectangular table Erren now leaned back on glowed with warm orange light.

Rubbing the corner of his mouth, he nodded in approval towards Aldrae.

"Good work. He won't be able to find us again for a while." Unsteadily, he pushed back onto his feet, wincing at the tremble in his knees. It wasn't the slap that had rocked him, but the sensation of being pulled so apruptly from an illusion. No doubt she would feel it too. "Now, Pangloss' office. We're close now..."


Aldrae

 

[Aldrae]

Aldrae had been brought up to be polite if nothing else, mostly because a polite bookseller tended to be more successful than a rude one. Even though she was certainly not trying to sell Erren any books, she still felt she should apologize for both the embarrassingly bad slap and the unexpected shock. Or she would have, but she was too caught up in the illusion shattering around them like a broken mirror, only to be replaced by an image of the Great Hall. No... on a second dizzy glance, it really was the Great Hall.

At least she thought it was. Being tossed between these nightmarish pseudo-dimensions gave her a serious case of vertigo.

"Great, I'm right behind you," she said, taking a moment to steady her steps before following.

Erren Serris

 

[Erren Serris]

Well, you could say what you would about Aldrae and her seeming knack for getting herself into trouble, at the very least she took things in stride. Most of Erren's senior students of old would have been curled up sobbing after an experience like that.

Serris wasn't about to complain. They needed to be moving, and every second counted when they were being trailed. Gods forbid some other obscure horror or manufactured beast waylaid them on the trip. It would have been beyond frustrating, given how little of the trip was left; The Grand Hall was connected directly to a staircase that ran up one side of the College.

A bit inconvenient if your destination was on the other side, perhaps, but it was the only staircase that reached the uppermost floors, where the office they sought awaited.

"Ideally, we can find a way to get that thing off of you." Erren spoke behind him as they ascended the staircase, every bit as dark and foreboding as the rest of them given the lack of magical energy. Once more, he held a hand up with glowing fingers to light their path. "As much as I want to solve the puzzle of what it is, and help Elbion restore it's magical energies, your safety must come first."

There was only a short hall at the top of the stairs, devoid of light, but partially illuminated by the large windows that looked out across the entirety of the city surrounding them, waning dusklight pouring through to bathe the lavender-colored rug running through the hall in a dim, otherwordly glow. Quickly, Erren ushered her toward the red door at the other end, fumbling around in his pocket for a moment before retrieving a large, old looking key and deftly clicking the door open.

"Come in, quickly now."

For a place Erren had declared may hold the solutions they sought, it was an unremarkable office; Small and round, the walls stacked with high piles of books, with a large mahogany table and an ornate velvet-cushioned seat in the center. Strange tools and devices littered the floor and table, and a strange painting hung over the chair slightly askew.

"Sit, please. We don't have much time before your friends suss out where we're holed up."

Aldrae

 

[Aldrae]

Relief washed over Aldrae's frayed nerves as they finally came to the office; so much so that she nearly melted into the chair when she was invited to sit. As small and cluttered as it was, right now it offered a sanctuary against the pandemonium outside. Of course, the danger of such a thing was that she now had time to actually think about what was going on and how her running history of bad luck had landed her right in the thick of it.

"Thank you," she said after a long sigh. Her gaze wandered to the odd array of instruments scattered around, if only to try to keep her mind off of the one on her wrist. But there was something about the shifting patterns of runes that kept drawing her eye. It really was like a puzzle of some sort.

She lifted her arm to narrow her eyes at the band. "I don't suppose you're an intelligent artifact and I can just nicely ask you to let go? No, of course not." She frowned and let her arm drop back down to her lap. She recalled that Erren seemed to think that one of his peers might be of help in that arena. Only it seemed he wasn't here.

"A shame Maester Pangloss isn't here, but I suppose he's probably very busy-" trying to make sense of reality apparently going haywire all around us - "right now."

Erren Serris