And behold him now.
See how much in so short a time he has changed. This Luc who took her hand, who pulled her close, who dared instead of shied. Yes, the self was as treasure buried beneath the sand, waiting to be unearthed. And there lay no greater delight than guiding another to it, sharing in those moments of discovery both small and significant.
His blue eyes, made more so; lovely was their color. The great mysteries in the depths of the oceans or beyond the bounds of the sky encased therein.
Anima and Luc flew on the wings of his wind magic and the blur of
Elbion mattered little. She stared at those eyes whenever possible. Enthralled.
Down to the cobblestone of the alley, and away with the glow in Luc's eyes. Yet she knew it still to be there, for that beauty was encased in a jewel of memory all her own. Hers to become lost inside as it so pleased her whim.
The Midnight Dream.
She looked out of the alley and across the way of the intersection and illuminated in the night by candle and lantern it stood, the tavern they'd be tasked to deliver the pendants to.
Back to Luc. A smile as he said her name.
And she listened. A bristling of excitement as she let the clear confidence in his spoken words wash over her.
There would be no dispute, would there? His desire was her desire. For she basked in him. Yes.
"You have given--"
yourself over to him, haven't you?
Those remaining words unsaid as his finger touched her lips and surprise froze her. It was these small moments that could be hers now. Pure and raw. Unfiltered. That desire as experienced through
Lydia and others, distinct from the platonic nature towards Peter and others who had fallen and joined her. The echoes of the obsession born in Ared'luin, the selfsame obsession found by Lydia and all those across
Arethil who were bidden by their beating hearts to give themselves over to another.
She watched him go. Yearned for his return.
And there.
A strange feeling.
Creeping in the back of her mind. Intruding on her pleasant moment.
That feeling of being watched.
* * * * *
Walter saw him. Luc, coming across the cobblestone intersection. He was the one Claire and her team had captured. He was alone, missing the other. Anima.
Walter swallowed. Lifted his pipe back to his mouth and smoked and the smoke did not expunge the dripping guilt in his chest.
He stared down at the ground as Luc went inside the tavern.
* * * * *
The members of the Black Circle sat as five at a table in
The Midnight Dream not unlike any of the other patrons. They wore mundane clothes and robes appropriate for their daytime work in Elbion or the College itself. They were men who were on the surface unremarkable. They ate their dinner and drank their ale like all the rest.
But they wore about their necks and tucked into their clothes certain pendants. Pendants which had encased within a covert and dark enchantment of their own devising.
And Luc carried into this proximity two other pendants, crafted by Khadija Han, laced with violent counter enchantments specific to the Black Circle's own.
A low humming as the pendants made by Han and in Luc's possession vibrated. Heated up. Cracked.
The members of the Black Circle did not notice until it was too late. One of their number looked down at his own chest and then as if spurred on by his gaze alone the reaction occurred and it was both his misfortune and his fate that his would be the most catastrophic of all the five as a spray of purple flame burst forth from his shirt and engulfed his head and rushed all the way to the ceiling above and scorched the wood with a corrupting purple and melted it on contact and there came straight down a rain of pestilent, scalding purple droplets that once were organic and beautiful and of Arethil but now had been changed in whole to something of abject abhorrence. The man's body slumped from his chair and the flesh and bone of his face slid off the remainder of his skull and pooled on the floor where it mixed with the purple rain of liquefied and transformed wood and became indistinguishable from it.
His was not the only death. His fellow of the Black Circle, seated next to him, struggled to remove his pendant and he jerked in his chair as the purple rain fell over the Black Circle's table and burned holes in his robes and he panicked and slapped at his arms and his face and his head and he fell from his chair and landed on his back and his hands were covered in the steaming purple liquid as the pendant on his chest burned through his ribcage and sank into and through his heart and in the unholy smoke rising from the holes in his robes there existed all he had ever known and what little he had loved, dispersing and dissipating into the air of the tavern.
The other three members of the Circle had all stood or fell or rolled from their seats and struggled mightily and succeeding in varying degrees to remove the volatile pendants from about their necks and throw them--smoking and steaming and rippling with unnatural arcane fire and tendrils of unleashed and provoked magic--to the tavern floor.
Smoke filtered out through the crack in one of the pendants Luc carried. A haze of purple and the faint reek of putrefaction.
And the panic from all the other patrons inside
The Midnight Dream became palpable. Bedlam followed.
* * * * *
The magical etchings on the iron door faded.
Kha smacked Claire on the arm with the back of her hand and said, "Look! Look!"
Claire glanced up and smirked and flicked her hair and said, "Oh, how
pristine, they've done it! I didn't have any doubts at all."
"Help me with the door."
They turned the large handle and Kha and Claire both could feel the bolt retracting from the jamb. And together they pulled and pulled and the door they had been waiting for weeks to open finally did so.
Kha and Claire looked inside. Their smiles and elation fading and disappearing when they saw her.
They knew her only as "the Vicar," for that was what the members of the Black Circle called her. Here in the basement and entombed in the arcane laboratory locked behind the iron door the Vicar hung affixed with rope at her wrists and her ankles to a large and worn wooden crucifix in the center of the room. She wore only a
blindfold. Her
elven face a visage of calm bliss.
And a creature protruded from an open wound in her chest. The thing like an enormous, bloated leech, the lengthy excess of its body going up and over her right shoulder and dangling freely down by the small of her back. The thing white in near entirety, save for flecks of formless black scattered about its body. The "Symbiote," the Black Circle called it.
And the Symbiote's body convulsed.
"What do we do?" Claire said. Voice small and fragile. "
What do we do?"
"This isn't right. We weren't ready for something like this," Kha said.
Eight thick and impossibly massive spider legs erupted from the Symbiote's body and thrashed and flailed for purchase upon the floor and the walls and the ceiling of the laboratory.
"Run!" Kha said. "Just run!"
Kha and Claire turned and ran back up the stairs and behind them a terrible snapping of wood and a great clattering of falling things and many shatterings of glass. They ran through the main room of the Senior's house and heard it coming behind them. Kha threw open the door to the house and both she and Claire dived out of the way as the front of the house exploded into a shower of debris as the creature burst forth from it.
Kha saw it. Skittering across the street and up onto another house and across roofs and moving with frightening speed. The Vicar upon her crucifix like the body of the nightmarish spider as its deep black legs clutched and clawed and shifted at a blurring pace.
And the creature moved in a particular direction across the roofs and walls of Elbion.
Directly toward
The Midnight Dream.
