Playing With Shadows I
Aug. 4th, 2020 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conjuredskiesHe really had hoped he could leave all of this behind.
The high slopes of the Jerrall Mountains are cool even in summer, though the breeze is hard to feel down among the pines. The only sounds are the rustling trees above and the crunch of dry needles underfoot. Felix has never been much of a hunter, but to him it feels too quiet up here. It adds to the unpleasant dreamlike feeling as he enters the small ruin of white stone standing amid scattered trees, the bones of a forgotten city jutting up from the earth like the tip of a vast and ancient skeleton.
It was a dream that guided him here the last time, he thinks. His dreams- or rather, the cold, dead things that whispered in his dreams, seductive and cruel. The runeblades that only had to touch his soul but once to sink their claws into it, haunting his thoughts, drawing him inexorably into their hold. He thought coming here in daylight would help, and it does, but it was a long trek up from the town where he teleported in and Felix already doubts he can be gone before nightfall. He didn’t tell anyone exactly where he was going- only that he was heading into a forest for research and he’d only be gone the one day. Didn’t let his uncle know when he PINpointed into his family’s house in Bruma and snuck straight out. If he takes too long he’s going to face some difficult questions from someone.
Still, he should be all right. He has protection, besides the reinforced leather of his armor. A soft silver hood that clings close as a shadow when he tugs it tight over his head- for shadow is what it was made from. A tool of powerful unknowing, meant to protect the wearer from seeing too much. Something to guard him against the tug of the unnatural energies that must still pervade this place; against the thousand little glimpses and reminders of his ordeal that would corrode his resolve and unmake his long healing.
It seems to work. Certainly he feels calm enough when he approaches the stone door hidden among the broken walls and weathered columns of this topmost level. The fallen needles have piled against the door, and the air within is stale. It doesn’t look as if anyone has been here since- (don’t think on it) two winters past. His boots echo gently on the stairs that spiral downward. He casts a magelight to see by, though he knows where all the traps are. They’re still broken, when he checks. He made a lair of this place, back then; when he-they needed a secure hideaway for research for losing himself in their his purpose-
Felix stops at a landing, trying to breathe slower, a hand seeking out the cold inert stone beside him. Above him the magelight bobs bright and white above his head, casting prismatic haloes over elegant pillars. This is just a place. A hollow shell of stone where idiots come to hide their bad ideas. This part was his idea, he’s pretty sure. A veneer of choice over the urges that infected him. The blades drove him here to drain the life and light out from his body and soul but they are gone now, worlds away and feeding on the damned soul they were meant to be paired with. He’s okay. He’s in no danger here.
He keeps going. Down to the small chambers littered with papers and books and the moldering remnants of a bedroll that never got much use anyway. His boot knocks against a candle stub, sends it skittering into a pile of papers. All he needs is to find where he left the books he stole from the College of Whispers. If only he could remember where he left them…
Truth is, Felix doesn’t even remember taking them in the first place. (Reading them, oh yes: the prize of knowledge was all that mattered in the end.) He doesn’t remember what he said to Mathieu, to persuade him to help sneak into the restricted library when Felix doesn’t even belong to the College. Nor does he remember making the choice to grab the rare tomes and PINpoint away with them to his bolthole. He knows he did it. Knows how much trouble his friend is in without the College to support his work or protect him from the Synod mages just waiting to quash anything they find distasteful. Like most mages Mathieu doesn't have Felix's sort of family ties, libraries and research supplies and the freedom to travel where he must. He can't afford to be cast out of his College.
He just needs Felix to do the right thing for once. Just for a few minutes...
Felix searches the whole room beneath the frozen light hovering over him, trying to be systematic. Efficiency means expediency. The notes and sketches of two years past slip between his hands as he piles them aside; some neat, lucid, marked with wry asides to himself; others wonky and straying out of line from lack of sleep, or scrawling, indecipherable, chaotic as his mind grew more fevered and his reason less his own. Looking at them too long makes his skin begin to crawl, his heart to pound. Felix begins throwing them in a heap in the middle of the floor. He has no desire to peer back through that window.
The pile grows as he circles around it, a building monument to his own madness, shifting and sliding now and then beneath the weight of a notebook, a burned-out scroll, the sound making him freeze in his search each time. The light dances over the lines of the room and it’s so easy to remember the shadows dancing with the flicker of his candles, how secure he felt down here, how desperate he felt, the things he dragged down through this room with such fearful determination…
He reaches the end of the loop, and the worry starts to gnaw at his gut. He makes the circuit again once, twice before he finally admits it. The books aren’t up here.
Felix turns to look at the doorway behind him, gaping like an empty grave. The darkness beyond leads further down. Into the crypts. Into his… their workshop. His feet are leaden when he manages to cross the floor to it, skirting the rustling heap of madness in the way. His magelight casts a wan shimmer down the stairway.
He must have left them down there. Next to some bloody notes or mangled experiment. He wouldn’t have to even look. He could be quick. He’s been here so much longer than he ever meant to be. He wouldn’t have to look…
Wouldn’t have to because he remembers, doesn’t he, what the bones and flesh looked like splayed out, put back together, what had to be done with the heads-
His limbs won’t move. He’s rigid, mouth dry, frozen at the very top of those steps. And then the light bobs, and a dank, sickly scent wafts over him. Something moves, down there in the dark.
Just as the spell runs dry, and the light goes out.
He’s not sensible of anything until he finds himself lying on the courtyard stones, bits of grit digging into his palms. His chest is so tight it hurts, and he breathes in big half-sobbed gulps of air. He doesn’t even know why he was so afraid. It’s no longer bright but the sun is somewhere beyond the trees and the open air smells clean around him. He got out this time. He didn’t need the light to find his way. Thank Mara he got out.
For a while he just lies there, weighed down and exhausted in a way he lacks words for. How could he have thought of asking Jim to go down there? You can’t even face your work with the hood’s protection and you’d make him do it again?
No.
He is Felix Caelus. He is a conjurer. He came here with another plan.
Slowly, deliberately, he pushes himself to his feet and wipes bits of dirt from his damp face. He finds a potion in his pack that fizzes softly with the magical energy it contains; Felix makes himself chug the lot. It’s bare moments before he starts to feel the strength reinvigorate him, putting life back in his limbs and lending his thoughts some focus. The summer days are long, but even so the shadows are growing with each moment. He has to work quickly.
He’s grateful for his own foresight in bringing a brush to clear the ancient flagstones; charcoal and salts to mark out a circle; the book he needs to check his work against. He's quick to pull off his leather gauntlets and lay them aside: they're protection, but they dull his senses. This summoning is of a new kind to him, and delicate; if he gets something wrong it will go badly for him. A familiar, even his atronachs would be easier, more reliable – but he needs a mind more adept with human instructions, eyes that see as his do, hands that will not burn nor crush. Few mages even know how to perform this spell, but Felix has learned much since he was rescued from this place.
Still, the circle keeps going wrong, at first. The stones of Rielle are suffused with latent energies, marked by the dark deeds that took place among them. The shadows of his protective hood obscure them from Felix, so that the outlines of his wards warp and shift in his hands without warning, until finally he drags the hood down around his shoulders. It’s not working well enough to protect him anyway. He needs to see this place in all its stark truth. Just long enough to get the spell working.
It's easier this way. He can feel, now, how the memories of this place seep into his ritual spell. The pulse of otherworldly power, the shape and flow of the magical energies he’s drawing on as he completes the spell. It feels so familiar. How many rituals did he mark out- not like this, they weren’t like this and he needs to focus- he counts out the sigils around the circle, fingertip tracing around the diagram in the book to be absolutely certain and he can’t but know it was so much easier to use the blood but that’s not helpful and it doesn’t matter now. This isn’t necromancy. This is conjuration. He knows this. He knows this.
He repeats that several times before he lights the candles, watching the circle shimmer to life in the gloom. The shadows stretch deep around him, on the cusp of true nightfall.
Jim trusts him. He clings to that. "This isn’t necromancy. What you do now- it’s not the same. You enjoy it. It’s what you used to do before that."
Felix lingers on that memory, of the fierce trust in his husband’s gaze. On a warm hand squeezing his. He holds onto it as he sets the book atop his pack and steps into the circle. He knows what he’s doing, as he begins to chant from memory.
Of course, he thought that before, too. The circle begins to glow brighter, as he raises the power stored in it, letting the runes focus the spell for him. Thought I was in control when I made the ritual for Harrowheart- The energies of the circle envelop him as he chants, all his will devoted to seeking out and drawing in an entity worlds away from this-
And he trusted me then, didn’t he? Trusted me to know what I was doing with the blades.
…allowing other thoughts to slip in…
Just like Jim trusted me then-
…he’s so close he can feel it answering, pulling on the threads of his spell as it draws toward him and it’s strong-
Right up until I-
Felix freezes, locked on the thought of blue eyes wide in terrified betrayal, and the throat beneath his hands is warm with the life he’s squeezing from it-
The spell comes apart in a roar of purple fire and burning shadow. He hits the stones with a thud that jars up his spine and smacks the back of his skull. His hands and arms are full of white-hot pain, but he rolls over- something in him makes that happen- enough to see a shape take form over him. A shadow like a man, tall and huge and bristling; clad in black armor that glows a dull red from within. Felix stares at it leaning over him, lucid enough to feel its palpable contempt, sense the strength of the dremora push against his wards.
And keep pushing.
The red and black face above him parts, baring teeth triumphantly. It isn’t bound. Something is materializing in its hand and its will overpowers his circle with ease and it’s fucking unbound-!
Its voice is blood gurgling in a wound, the guttural joy of flames consuming a pyre: “You will join my trophies, nithing!”
The desire to live slams back into him so hard he ignores the agony when he rolls over and shoves himself out of the circle, knocking candles aside in his wake. Metal crashes against stone behind him.
Oh Sanguine, oh sweet Stendarr-
He tries to rise and a blow catches his ribs with a heavy whumph, throws him onto a fallen column. He hits hard, all the prayers knocked out of him as he wheezes.
”…ssshit oh shit oh shit….”
“On your belly, bloodsack! Weep before I end your craven existence!”
There’s a crawling in the air, the crackle of magic and the scent of the daedra’s wrongness and he can’t think straight, everything is pounding and he’s about to die out here alone-
I’m a fucking conjurer. I’m never alone.
He’s not sure how he pushes himself onto his side. Only that it hurts when he lifts a smoking hand and forces it to contort into a spell he knows better than breathing.
The air nearby warps. Snaps once more.
The snarl of the dremora’s gloating is cut off by the wham of a glacial fist.
Felix sees it reel back, turn enraged to face the tower of living ice looming behind it. Even as the frost atronach draws back its fist once more, the daedric warrior howls undeterred.
"YIELD, CHURL!"
By the time Felix reaches his feet he knows he can’t run. Nor is he staying to watch this. He hobbles, lurches forward until he’s bolting for the deepest patch of shadow he can see among the ruined columns around them.
pleasemyladypleaseIasksafepassagethroughyourrealm-
He doesn’t fall to his knees until the darkness enfolds him.
The high slopes of the Jerrall Mountains are cool even in summer, though the breeze is hard to feel down among the pines. The only sounds are the rustling trees above and the crunch of dry needles underfoot. Felix has never been much of a hunter, but to him it feels too quiet up here. It adds to the unpleasant dreamlike feeling as he enters the small ruin of white stone standing amid scattered trees, the bones of a forgotten city jutting up from the earth like the tip of a vast and ancient skeleton.
It was a dream that guided him here the last time, he thinks. His dreams- or rather, the cold, dead things that whispered in his dreams, seductive and cruel. The runeblades that only had to touch his soul but once to sink their claws into it, haunting his thoughts, drawing him inexorably into their hold. He thought coming here in daylight would help, and it does, but it was a long trek up from the town where he teleported in and Felix already doubts he can be gone before nightfall. He didn’t tell anyone exactly where he was going- only that he was heading into a forest for research and he’d only be gone the one day. Didn’t let his uncle know when he PINpointed into his family’s house in Bruma and snuck straight out. If he takes too long he’s going to face some difficult questions from someone.
Still, he should be all right. He has protection, besides the reinforced leather of his armor. A soft silver hood that clings close as a shadow when he tugs it tight over his head- for shadow is what it was made from. A tool of powerful unknowing, meant to protect the wearer from seeing too much. Something to guard him against the tug of the unnatural energies that must still pervade this place; against the thousand little glimpses and reminders of his ordeal that would corrode his resolve and unmake his long healing.
It seems to work. Certainly he feels calm enough when he approaches the stone door hidden among the broken walls and weathered columns of this topmost level. The fallen needles have piled against the door, and the air within is stale. It doesn’t look as if anyone has been here since- (don’t think on it) two winters past. His boots echo gently on the stairs that spiral downward. He casts a magelight to see by, though he knows where all the traps are. They’re still broken, when he checks. He made a lair of this place, back then; when he-they needed a secure hideaway for research for losing himself in their his purpose-
Felix stops at a landing, trying to breathe slower, a hand seeking out the cold inert stone beside him. Above him the magelight bobs bright and white above his head, casting prismatic haloes over elegant pillars. This is just a place. A hollow shell of stone where idiots come to hide their bad ideas. This part was his idea, he’s pretty sure. A veneer of choice over the urges that infected him. The blades drove him here to drain the life and light out from his body and soul but they are gone now, worlds away and feeding on the damned soul they were meant to be paired with. He’s okay. He’s in no danger here.
He keeps going. Down to the small chambers littered with papers and books and the moldering remnants of a bedroll that never got much use anyway. His boot knocks against a candle stub, sends it skittering into a pile of papers. All he needs is to find where he left the books he stole from the College of Whispers. If only he could remember where he left them…
Truth is, Felix doesn’t even remember taking them in the first place. (Reading them, oh yes: the prize of knowledge was all that mattered in the end.) He doesn’t remember what he said to Mathieu, to persuade him to help sneak into the restricted library when Felix doesn’t even belong to the College. Nor does he remember making the choice to grab the rare tomes and PINpoint away with them to his bolthole. He knows he did it. Knows how much trouble his friend is in without the College to support his work or protect him from the Synod mages just waiting to quash anything they find distasteful. Like most mages Mathieu doesn't have Felix's sort of family ties, libraries and research supplies and the freedom to travel where he must. He can't afford to be cast out of his College.
He just needs Felix to do the right thing for once. Just for a few minutes...
Felix searches the whole room beneath the frozen light hovering over him, trying to be systematic. Efficiency means expediency. The notes and sketches of two years past slip between his hands as he piles them aside; some neat, lucid, marked with wry asides to himself; others wonky and straying out of line from lack of sleep, or scrawling, indecipherable, chaotic as his mind grew more fevered and his reason less his own. Looking at them too long makes his skin begin to crawl, his heart to pound. Felix begins throwing them in a heap in the middle of the floor. He has no desire to peer back through that window.
The pile grows as he circles around it, a building monument to his own madness, shifting and sliding now and then beneath the weight of a notebook, a burned-out scroll, the sound making him freeze in his search each time. The light dances over the lines of the room and it’s so easy to remember the shadows dancing with the flicker of his candles, how secure he felt down here, how desperate he felt, the things he dragged down through this room with such fearful determination…
He reaches the end of the loop, and the worry starts to gnaw at his gut. He makes the circuit again once, twice before he finally admits it. The books aren’t up here.
Felix turns to look at the doorway behind him, gaping like an empty grave. The darkness beyond leads further down. Into the crypts. Into his… their workshop. His feet are leaden when he manages to cross the floor to it, skirting the rustling heap of madness in the way. His magelight casts a wan shimmer down the stairway.
He must have left them down there. Next to some bloody notes or mangled experiment. He wouldn’t have to even look. He could be quick. He’s been here so much longer than he ever meant to be. He wouldn’t have to look…
Wouldn’t have to because he remembers, doesn’t he, what the bones and flesh looked like splayed out, put back together, what had to be done with the heads-
His limbs won’t move. He’s rigid, mouth dry, frozen at the very top of those steps. And then the light bobs, and a dank, sickly scent wafts over him. Something moves, down there in the dark.
Just as the spell runs dry, and the light goes out.
He’s not sensible of anything until he finds himself lying on the courtyard stones, bits of grit digging into his palms. His chest is so tight it hurts, and he breathes in big half-sobbed gulps of air. He doesn’t even know why he was so afraid. It’s no longer bright but the sun is somewhere beyond the trees and the open air smells clean around him. He got out this time. He didn’t need the light to find his way. Thank Mara he got out.
For a while he just lies there, weighed down and exhausted in a way he lacks words for. How could he have thought of asking Jim to go down there? You can’t even face your work with the hood’s protection and you’d make him do it again?
No.
He is Felix Caelus. He is a conjurer. He came here with another plan.
Slowly, deliberately, he pushes himself to his feet and wipes bits of dirt from his damp face. He finds a potion in his pack that fizzes softly with the magical energy it contains; Felix makes himself chug the lot. It’s bare moments before he starts to feel the strength reinvigorate him, putting life back in his limbs and lending his thoughts some focus. The summer days are long, but even so the shadows are growing with each moment. He has to work quickly.
He’s grateful for his own foresight in bringing a brush to clear the ancient flagstones; charcoal and salts to mark out a circle; the book he needs to check his work against. He's quick to pull off his leather gauntlets and lay them aside: they're protection, but they dull his senses. This summoning is of a new kind to him, and delicate; if he gets something wrong it will go badly for him. A familiar, even his atronachs would be easier, more reliable – but he needs a mind more adept with human instructions, eyes that see as his do, hands that will not burn nor crush. Few mages even know how to perform this spell, but Felix has learned much since he was rescued from this place.
Still, the circle keeps going wrong, at first. The stones of Rielle are suffused with latent energies, marked by the dark deeds that took place among them. The shadows of his protective hood obscure them from Felix, so that the outlines of his wards warp and shift in his hands without warning, until finally he drags the hood down around his shoulders. It’s not working well enough to protect him anyway. He needs to see this place in all its stark truth. Just long enough to get the spell working.
It's easier this way. He can feel, now, how the memories of this place seep into his ritual spell. The pulse of otherworldly power, the shape and flow of the magical energies he’s drawing on as he completes the spell. It feels so familiar. How many rituals did he mark out- not like this, they weren’t like this and he needs to focus- he counts out the sigils around the circle, fingertip tracing around the diagram in the book to be absolutely certain and he can’t but know it was so much easier to use the blood but that’s not helpful and it doesn’t matter now. This isn’t necromancy. This is conjuration. He knows this. He knows this.
He repeats that several times before he lights the candles, watching the circle shimmer to life in the gloom. The shadows stretch deep around him, on the cusp of true nightfall.
Jim trusts him. He clings to that. "This isn’t necromancy. What you do now- it’s not the same. You enjoy it. It’s what you used to do before that."
Felix lingers on that memory, of the fierce trust in his husband’s gaze. On a warm hand squeezing his. He holds onto it as he sets the book atop his pack and steps into the circle. He knows what he’s doing, as he begins to chant from memory.
Of course, he thought that before, too. The circle begins to glow brighter, as he raises the power stored in it, letting the runes focus the spell for him. Thought I was in control when I made the ritual for Harrowheart- The energies of the circle envelop him as he chants, all his will devoted to seeking out and drawing in an entity worlds away from this-
And he trusted me then, didn’t he? Trusted me to know what I was doing with the blades.
…allowing other thoughts to slip in…
Just like Jim trusted me then-
…he’s so close he can feel it answering, pulling on the threads of his spell as it draws toward him and it’s strong-
Right up until I-
Felix freezes, locked on the thought of blue eyes wide in terrified betrayal, and the throat beneath his hands is warm with the life he’s squeezing from it-
The spell comes apart in a roar of purple fire and burning shadow. He hits the stones with a thud that jars up his spine and smacks the back of his skull. His hands and arms are full of white-hot pain, but he rolls over- something in him makes that happen- enough to see a shape take form over him. A shadow like a man, tall and huge and bristling; clad in black armor that glows a dull red from within. Felix stares at it leaning over him, lucid enough to feel its palpable contempt, sense the strength of the dremora push against his wards.
And keep pushing.
The red and black face above him parts, baring teeth triumphantly. It isn’t bound. Something is materializing in its hand and its will overpowers his circle with ease and it’s fucking unbound-!
Its voice is blood gurgling in a wound, the guttural joy of flames consuming a pyre: “You will join my trophies, nithing!”
The desire to live slams back into him so hard he ignores the agony when he rolls over and shoves himself out of the circle, knocking candles aside in his wake. Metal crashes against stone behind him.
Oh Sanguine, oh sweet Stendarr-
He tries to rise and a blow catches his ribs with a heavy whumph, throws him onto a fallen column. He hits hard, all the prayers knocked out of him as he wheezes.
”…ssshit oh shit oh shit….”
“On your belly, bloodsack! Weep before I end your craven existence!”
There’s a crawling in the air, the crackle of magic and the scent of the daedra’s wrongness and he can’t think straight, everything is pounding and he’s about to die out here alone-
I’m a fucking conjurer. I’m never alone.
He’s not sure how he pushes himself onto his side. Only that it hurts when he lifts a smoking hand and forces it to contort into a spell he knows better than breathing.
The air nearby warps. Snaps once more.
The snarl of the dremora’s gloating is cut off by the wham of a glacial fist.
Felix sees it reel back, turn enraged to face the tower of living ice looming behind it. Even as the frost atronach draws back its fist once more, the daedric warrior howls undeterred.
"YIELD, CHURL!"
By the time Felix reaches his feet he knows he can’t run. Nor is he staying to watch this. He hobbles, lurches forward until he’s bolting for the deepest patch of shadow he can see among the ruined columns around them.
pleasemyladypleaseIasksafepassagethroughyourrealm-
He doesn’t fall to his knees until the darkness enfolds him.
