caine
—« Red crosses on wooden doors / And if you float you burn
Loose talk around tables / Abandon all reason
Avoid all eye contact / Do not react
Shoot the messengers »
I
t happens slowly.Slowly enough, at least, for Caine to blink—and blink again—and when that doesn’t seem to clear away the illusion staring him full in the face (for it cannot be reality—an illusionist doubts first his magic for going rogue, and then his eyes for going mad), he takes a shuddering step back, and then another, until his hooves crush shards of glass to powder and her wail sunders the newborn night to pieces.
He is both drunk and painfully, painfully sober. It is possible to be both, he tells himself hypnotically. It is more possible, at least, then what is happening to her.
He had been holding a star in his arms and then he hadn’t. She is there in front of him until she isn’t.
She is writhing, and the sight is short of demonic.
When Warset’s bones begin to crack apart like twigs, the first growl slipping in torment past her bloodying lips, Caine begins to shudder. He cannot go to her. He is rooted in place, shadows solidifying to bedrock. He wants to move but he cannot.
His face is a mask of shock, petrified into rigid horror.
This is his fault.
“War—” he stutters, before his throat closes around the end of her name. It tastes like acid in his mouth and though he has spoken it only once before, how quickly he has lost the privilege. His teeth bite down on his tongue as he tries to decline what he knows to be true. From the day he had awoken wrapped in bandages and a magic that refused to be anything but red, Caine had suspected.
No. He had more than suspected. He had known.
It is not unconceivable for unnaturally gained illusion magic such as his, when corrupted, to reach into the head of another and plant images that then turn horrifically real. The nightmare is no longer contained. It is no longer sight and smell and the longing dream of a touch. It is flesh and bone and blood. It is real.
It is his fault.
Caine's mouth opens and shuts, nothing coming out, nothing going in. He tries to move, to help, to run, but his legs are dead trees, dead limbs, dead. There is a shrieking in his ear and he cannot tell if it is her or his madness. His wing skates against her contorting shoulder, the skin as hot as a flame, and he recoils as if burned. He thinks he hears the star whisper “I am—” but it is lost in the torrent of wails clawing out of her lips and he can do nothing for her but turn himself inside out, rooting desperately for the source of this malevolent magic.
But there is nothing where there ought to be something, and in his panic, his eyes have turned the red of fresh blood and the night a darker, more gruesome shade. He has lost control of his magic. There cannot be another reason. Stars do not turn to beasts; but boys with cursed blood can.
“I—” Caine says, unable to get anything else out because his voice is shaking, and she is shaking, and when he blinks again there is nothing left of her but a pile of smoking black feathers and the snarling white teeth of a leopard blacker than the sky.
And then it—she—is gone.
He does not stop shaking until the first blush of dawn.
@Warset || fin! <3 another amazing thread ;__;
