| Aurora Basin Phantom atk: 7.5 | def: 10 | dam: 2.5 |
| Stallion :: Unicorn :: 16 hh :: 8 yrs HP: 60.0 | Buff: NOVICE |
| Glo |
He expected to notice something, the sensation of ice crawling across his skin where there was naught but air, no friction, no viscosity. Roland didn't feel the same dread that might have plagued him before, that numbing uneasiness that so often threatened to overcome him. He didn't feel much of anything, truth be told, save for the wash of cool damp air over his skin like a cascade of water, a vague reminder of what had just occurred, shedding those fragments of reality that still clung to him, the familiar, the easy, the forgiving, trading it for hostile spikes and spires, the unwelcoming and unkind. A shiver took hold of him as he stepped through the mirror, and for a brief moment he thought the world was dropping out from beneath his feet, certainty and solidity crumbling, tearing. He could have sworn he heard his own name echo across the veil, and there was a noise rising in his throat, a reply of sorts, ripples of broken notes wheezing past his lips. He winced. It was as if he had stepped into the thrall, the ugly midst of a nightmare. The mirror, or rather the portal had swept him up, carrying, towing him with the force of a current, sweeping him forwards as if he had surfed the waves onto rubble and dark stone, into a realm that was as unsettling as it was undeniably alien.
Images leapt back at him from panels of glass, dark, grotesque, colossal. The spectacle seeped through his bones, a mass of confusion he no longer felt. It was odd, disconcerting and terrifying to be in the grasp of something so unknown, to feel that wrongness creep across his skin. He didn't move. The muscles of his lower body felt numb, but he sensed the frown on his face, the pressure crowding his chest, and a strange absence of fear. Only a distant nagging irritation lingered, as if he had decided the time for such things- ostentatious acts and trivial pursuits- had long since passed. He wanted what he came for.
Roland wondered, hazily, if playing the hero never particularly suited him after all. All those years of pretending he was something he was not, that he was brave, confident and self assured. Now there was no lingering hiss of fear deep within the pit of his stomach, singing through his nerves and ringing in the back of his skull; it was odd, peculiar. He would like to think it boded well. He did not know the gravity of his wounds, if there were any- didn't know much of anything there, wherever he was- but still there was something clawing at his senses, one certainty that seemed to alleviate his confusion. But where-?
There was a swoop of relief in his chest, a fluttering of the pulse at his throat as he felt the warmth of a presence at his side, heard the gentle footfalls and looked back to Lena following after him, unscathed. And he heard its voice again, everywhere, distant and all too close at once, loud and guttural. He knew its glare, expected it before he even found the mocking pair of eyes resting upon his own, vile, satisfied, goading him to bow before it. The reflections turned with him, moved as he did, and uneasiness flooded Roland like a bad taste in his mouth. At one glance he was tall and stately, thick limbs and chiseled musculature; in another his ribs cut through his hide like the sharp edges of a blade, his eyes sunken, the shine to his golden coat rusted over into something ugly and derelict, but the mare at his side remained the same in every mirror. "Why are you showing me this?" He questioned, looking back to the shadowed cat. Its rhymes echoed in his head, grating upon his nerves.
"I've no time for your games, and I have taken nothing from you." His voice was hard as he turned back the way he came, approaching the rippling glass. Unlike the others it did not show his face, did not twist him into some distorted, false depiction of himself. His gaze softened as it fell upon Lena, urging her to follow him the way they came. The glass liquefied, slid over his shoulders as easily as it had done before, and he was free once again without struggle. But time passed and the Mender did not follow through, did not join him on the other side, and panic began to rise in his throat.
"Lena?" He had asked her to help him, he had begged for her company and now he had lost her to the trickery of some wicked creature, fallen prey to its game just as he had promised himself he would not do. He would never live down the guilt, the grief of losing her to a sacrifice that was not hers to make. He would not abandon her if he could fight his way back through. "What have you done?" He sought out the shadowed form of the black cat, voice quaking with anger, an icy hardness to his gaze. Her words were repeated in his mind, searching for a purpose, an answer, a key. "You took from me. Bring her back."
@[Lena]
Push your luck if it makes you a promise
that turns con men honest.
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Image Credit
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