Post #2359437 in The City of Chains, a roleplay on RPG

Afternoon had long threaded into evening, but the Tranquil was heedless of the passage of time. He was not without such bodily needs as food and slumber, but he was quite able to ignore such needs for extended periods of time. He slept at regular intervals because his limbs and mind stopped functioning properly if he didn't, but he never felt fatigue. He ate, but he did not hunger. At least... not most of the time. Unfortunately, occurrences outside the realm of the ordinary for him were becoming increasingly common due to his cohabitation with a possessed individual, and he could not to deny to himself that he was avoiding Sparrow to some degree, pushing his hours at the shop back further and further past even a reasonable closing time. He'd flip the sign, lock the door, and light several lamps by which to continue some project or another, and he was now so far ahead in his orders that he had almost nothing to do. He supposed, when it came down to it, that he was displaying a reprehensible cowardice, but when her very presence brought him into the proper frame of mind to miss that which he would ever be without... he could not call it irrational.

Without any more pressing work to occupy his time, he was transcribing a list of ingredients from the book Ashton had helped him procure some weeks earlier. Many of them were rare, but there was only one that he thought he would have major difficulty finding. He'd need to do more research in order to locate possible sources, but there was a problem: it appeared on another list, one he was working on just as secretly. But that, should it become a problem, would be one best dealt with when he came to it.

Adding the last flourish to the list, Rilien replaced the quill on the worktable and rolled up the parchment. Tying it off with a string, he placed it on a shelf, and, bereft of anything else to occupy his time with, decided to clean his instruments. By now, he was very clearly wasting his time, but he had no desire to return to Darktown at this juncture. He supposed he could not remain here forever; Sparrow would show up eventually. But perhaps not until tomorrow.

Had Rilien been so lucky, but alas, Rapture was seeking him out. She'd taken control of the woman's body whilst she was lounging in the Hanged Man, impatiently biding her time in the dark quarters of her mind, until Sparrow had a few drinks swirling in her belly. It only took a few moments to wrestle with her subconscious, slithering in like an overpowering viper. The briefest gloss of her eyes, or the unnatural twitch of her fingers, told of something gone awry. The act in itself was becoming easier and easier to fulfil, which was surprisingly boring. The skittering sparks of indignation, and complete revulsion, were becoming as stagnant as a withering plant. She supposed she'd enjoyed their small, fruitless bouts. Nowadays, Sparrow's fiery willpower sizzled like a pile of sopping wet coals. She was a dead fish, hardly worth the effort of goading. Her efforts, instead, had directed themselves in her companion's direction, or Rilien, to be specific. Not only had he been avoiding Sparrow entirely – and she'd noticed, oh she'd noticed – but he'd taken to cooping himself up in his shop.

Which was where Rapture was heading. She very nearly skipped down the alleyways, unafraid of anything that might face her in its shadows. She'd already taken to slaughtering thugs, thieves, and petty gang-members whenever she grew bored, reminding Sparrow once she'd awoken that her hands were getting mighty bloody. Her inability to control herself kept her up at night, as if staying conscious would ward the insolent demon away. No amount of sleeplessness, of caution, could keep her in the shadows. If she wanted something badly enough, then she'd take it. Her desires were greater than Sparrow's wavering inclinations. Familiar faces were beginning to blur, dimming the line between friend and foe. Every single face became their faces, sneering and whispering and plotting. They'd hurt her again, she said. They'd do it while she slept, while she thought everything was safe, while she dropped her guard. Her greatest friend was beginning to look like them, and she was beginning to lose sight of what mission she'd undertaken to rid herself of all of those thoughts, to exterminate the source.

Rapture rounded another corner, walking languidly back into the streets. Her gait was purposeful, unusually sensual. She paused in front of a doorway, resting her hand on the copper handle before pushing it open – and of course, Rilien was there, hunched over his desk with an all-consuming focus. She did not stop. Footsteps, quiet as skittering mouse-pads, drew up behind the bard, until she settled her hands, so unlike her own feminine talons, around the man's shoulders, slipping them down across his collarbone. She knew as well as he that her advances, her unwelcome touches, brought something entirely uncomfortable – feelings, sentiments, slivers of what he'd lost. Her chin came to rest atop his head, and she blew fluffy strands of white from her lips. She wanted to pick apart his flaws, and pinch everything he wished he still had between her fingers until Rilien hurt so badly that he, too, crumbled under her words. Unfortunately, those inflicted with the Rite of Tranquillity were difficult, if not impossible, to overpower.

He hadn’t missed her approach—how could he? She was like a flashing dock-light, distractingly-bright and reeking of the Fade. It smelled like home, and he despised that about it. But when the moth refused to fly closer to the flame, the lantern grew inclinations of its own and came to him, lighting up the stubborn darkness of his world with that peculiar luminescence he’d once basked in. He’d been a creature of emotion himself, a flame burning ever brighter with brimming magic, a vessel for that uncanny light that was magic, and it had lit his eyes from behind, flashed somewhere in his capricious smile. He had been magic, then, and she reminded him of what it was like.

He didn’t tear his eyes from his task, knowing that to ignore her was perhaps his strongest recourse when he wasn’t willing to harm her host. He sat still, his only motions those familiar ones that came of oiling instruments to a shine. He did not so much as acknowledge her presence.

Once, that had been enough to stay her. Then, they’d both come to a most unfortunate realization: when the demon touched him, he felt. The Fade in that close a proximity lifted the Tranquil haze from his mind, and like a flame released, his emotions returned in full force to burn him from inside out. It had been a complete accident; he’d shown up at the Hanged Man one night when he felt her take over, as he often did, to make sure Sparrow would do nothing she would later regret. She’d brushed him, purely by accident, and he’d actually yelped as sensation overwhelmed him, for the first time in years. He’d come to a realization, then: he hadn’t remembered what it was like to feel, not at all. Not like that.

It was a tidbit of information she’d been steadily growing bolder and bolder in exploiting ever since. She. Rapture. The demon that held his friend.

She was not cowed by his steadfast refusal to see her today, and not-Sparrow’s hands trailed over his shoulders, whispering just a fraction beneath the fabric of his tunic to brush over the skin stretched across his collarbones, and Rilien tensed. He resisted this, despised it, not so much for the fact that it caused him to feel, but because the moment she decided she’d had her fun and released him was all the agony of the Rite, over and over again. Like a flame plunged into cold water, everything was simply… snuffed out, and pain replaced it until that, too, was numb, like a body slowly dying of hypothermia, only the victim was his soul. That was the part he reviled the most. She tortured him, and she knew it.

“She hates being around you, did you know that?” Rapture hissed between her teeth, tapping two fingers against Rilien's starburst tattoo. Her fingers dropped away, and she linked her arms around his neck, intertwining her hands. How long could he simply avoid the subject? It seemed peculiar, given his nature. Skirting around the issue, from what she'd witnessed so far, was not his style. The Fade hung around her like a heavy blanket, pooling around her feet. Her lips pursed, lidded eyes staring ahead. “Almost as much as you hate being around her. But, you know, you're starting to look like them. Her attackers. I keep painting their faces here,” She continued in a sing-song voice, thumbing his cheekbones, “and soon, she won't know the difference. How would you like that?”

With the uncanny calm of his Tranquility sloughed from him like an old skin, Rilien was acutely aware of every subtlety she was attempting to wring from him. His anger, his distress, and even indeed his bodily awareness of the proximity of another person, one he cared about. For indeed, he was also free to care. But he was not so easily divested of his own subtlety, nor his logic. Before he was Tranquil, he had been sly, and even now, he remembered the lessons he’d been taught by the Lady Montblanc, on manipulation and deceit. He’d not had to put them to use for a long time, but things like that didn’t leave you.

He knew that he had to turn the tables, put the demon on the defensive, or he would not have the time for the veritable coup de gras before she defeated Sparrow utterly. It was only himself-as-craftsman that could accomplish her ultimate demise, but Rilien-as-bard had more than a few tricks in the distraction and subterfuge categories. He was angry, enraged that this creature thought to toy with Sparrow’s mind as though it were nothing important at all, as though Sparrow were insignificant. He desired little more than to slit her throat, or perhaps to burn her if he could trust himself to remember how, but he could not. Not while she still wore her flesh.

Don’t get angry when you can get even instead. Of course, I probably don’t have to tell you that, do I, dearheart? the Bardmaster’s voice was as amused as ever in his recollection, and he allowed it to bring the slowest of smiles to his lips. Standing slowly, he turned to face not-Sparrow, his gaze boring into hers with a half-lidded languidity that did not belong to the Tranquil. Certainly, he was dealing with a different beast than he was accustomed, but she needed to learn that she was, too. Pausing for just a moment to remind her of the fact that he was, in fact, just a fraction taller and broader than she, Rilien hummed a note of mock concern in the back of his throat. “Am I?” he questioned, his voice bereft of its usual neutrality and infused with something throaty, like the purring of some great cat. It was all about keeping her unsure of his intentions, after all.

Indeed, to this effect, he reached up with one hand, crooking his index finger and using it to tilt her chin upwards by a small degree. “But Sparrow knows I’d never hurt her,” he continued, inclining himself slightly forward and down so that his breath fanned over her cheek. He held there, for three full seconds, letting her draw her own conclusions about his thoughts, their faces so close that their noses almost touched, but just as quickly, his intent look vanished, replaced by a quick, sanguine grin, and he pressed the pad of a callused thumb to her chin and used it in tandem with his gentle hold on her jaw to tilt her head just a little away from him, so that he was speaking nearly directly into her ear.

“It isn’t her I avoid, demon. It never was her. And if she didn’t know that before, she does now, because I can feel her in there. It isn’t her I hate. It’s you. And mark my words: I will find a way to expel you from her mind, and when I do, I will make you hurt, so badly that you’ll beg to die. When you do, I’ll let her kill you, in whatever slow, painful way she most… desires.” His hand slid down her throat, to rest gently about the base of her neck, just enough pressure on her windpipe to be suggestive of something much less comfortable.

”She is not a toy for your amusement, and neither am I. You should have picked easier targets, creature.”

This not-Sparrow smiled gleefully, aglow with cruelty, as if she'd won another small, insignificant battle. One that she'd willingly conjured every time, breathing life into old wounds, and rubbing them raw with salt and brine. It was a wicked thing to do, but it still served as one of her preferred pastimes. How she longed to pierce her talons through thisTranquil's tender neck, needle-pointing across his unmoving Adam’s apple – Sparrow's useless nails, sheared short for convenience, could do little more than scrape over, serving as a minor annoyance. She pulled her fingers away from his cheekbones, and roughly snatched up a handful of his hair, where she'd been leaning her chin. However, Rapture did not jerk her hand back as she'd intended, but allowed the strands to sift through her fingers, falling back into place as if she'd never grabbed it in the first place; eerily similar to how she toyed with his Fade-inflicted emotions. Important things he continued to lose each time they were in physical contact.

She took a step backwards, as if she were pulling the Fade-blanket off of him in one fell swoop. She wanted to sever that uncomfortable bond, and remind him that every time she was around, he'd have to suffer that same awareness of having something familiar being ripped away. Perhaps, each time, it felt as if the Rite of Tranquillity was being performed. The fire-hearted, brimstone breathing demon idled, adjusting her weight from foot-to-foot. Every ruin she created, every life she'd managed to extinguish in her short time occupying Sparrow's vessel had been a lesser feast. She was not finished. Her appetites could not be so easily sated, and until her residency became a little more permanent, then she'd continue pushing and pulling and manipulating Sparrow's thoughts until she simply stopped fighting. Until her heart, and her consciousness, grew sluggish and exhausted, far too tired to run a such a hopeless race. It would be difficult, but she'd always loved a challenge.

The Tranquil's lack of response was not disconcerting, nor surprising in the least. When did any Tranquil react with anything but empty-eyed, flat-lined frowns? Though, circumstances were profoundly different. The Fade still lingered, sticky and heavy. It did surprise her when she saw Rilien's shoulders inch backwards, followed by his entire body. He was standing up. Her eyes widened, pupils shrivelling down to pinpricks. There was a deliberate indifference snapping wildly in his eyes, lidded and impish. As if he was holding all the cards, and just as many secrets. This was not his accustomed apathy. The soul-gazing serenade of silence, of learned behaviour and automatic reactions, were absent, for once. He was taller than her, and he was looking down at her. The thought, in itself, professed weakness. She bristled irritably, straightening her shoulders. Already, Rapture could feel victory slipping away.

Each demon had their own dirty-laundry list of weaknesses. They kept them quiet, locked them up in steel boxes, and threw them out to see, never speaking of them again. Hers were obvious enough, if one was immune to her wiles. Her persuasions were two-fold, double-edged swords. The Tranquil's weighed words, enticingly evocative, slithered down her spine, snapping obnoxious synapses in her veins. They were alight, burning with need, want, desire, and lastly, hate. She wanted to snuff the light out of those eyes, ring out every breath, but even she could not wrestle that pleasure from Sparrow. A sharp intake of breath, two-pints surprise, and half anger, hissed from her half-parted lips when the Tranquil held her chin, crooked slightly to the side. Unbridled fury rose in her throat like bile, and retreated as soon as he leaned forward, barely a breath away. Helpless, helpless, helpless. When had she lost her footing? There was a gentleness in his touch, but the implication was clear. Rapture's mouth, still parted, produced a carnal sound, and before she'd had the chance to claim the Tranquil's lips, to utterly extinguish his threats, he'd tilted her head and moved to her ear.

His desire to destroy her far outweighed her own goals. The realization came quickly, with each enunciated word. Clenched muscles twitched along Rapture's jawline. He would expel her? She wanted to laugh, to snarl and bare her teeth, at such a preposterous idea. They'd struck a deal. Deals could not be broken, ripped, or annulled. Did he not know the rules? He was a mage, after all. But, it was Sparrow who'd given her pause, slamming her fists into the barrier, the little birds' cage, she'd created within her Fadespace. She'd heard, loud and clear. He was ruining things already, kicking down the blocks she'd been so painstakingly building. Her expression transformed itself into something else entirely, impetuously serious. “Threatening me, Dearheart?” She laughed gaudily, hands clasping his wrist, “I can ruin her. I can destroy her. I can do anything I desire, boy. And you'll be powerless to stop me. So, have her while you can.”

Rilien's nostrils flared, his jaw tightening with irritation. This was indeed a game that both of them played well, but he could at least be satisfied with this: she did not know. She didn't understand just how far he was willing to go to accomplish her separation from Sparrow, and frankly, he wasn't so sure about that either. What would he give up for that? The question lingered at the fringe of his thoughts, always, made salient by a possibility he could not quite bring himself to form into a coherent thought. There might well be something important, something vital, that he would have to sacrifice, and the potentiality of this, he could not ignore. Not completely. Perhaps it was better that neither of them knew-- it would make her complacent and him cautious. This was as it should be. The last phrase seemed to have extra meaning, and it wasn't long before he caught on.

Her eyes, once illuminated with unnatural reflections, dulled; pupils evening out. Sparrow's skin felt too-tight and uncomfortable as Rapture left her, only leaving a lingering sense of unease in her wake, dragging burning seashells and coals. Her lungs felt as if she didn't have enough air, wheezing wet and parched, all at once. The blood in her veins pounded through her head, erratic and out of tempo, like hard rain on a windowsill. Her hands fell away from his, and she leaned slightly forward, like a fallen pillar, into the pressure at her throat. She'd heard his threats, wished deeply that they weren't needed, that she hadn't been so weak in the first place. The reckless, unstoppable strength that was impacted into her very core felt like a long lost thing, drifting apart – it was drowning and she'd keep coming up for air, resuscitating it at the last second. But, this time, she was too tired. Her shoulders sagged, drew together, then rattled into a boxed-up sob.

It was painful. It was too much.

He felt her retreat, and Sparrow's return, as ripples in the movement of the Fade about him. This part was always the worst-- it did not vanish from him immediately, oh no, it seeped away slowly. The flame was snuffed, but the heat would recede, leaving him uncertain what to do in the meantime. The disappearance of that source, though, wracked him with a shudder, and he immediately drew his hand away from her throat. It was too familiar a touch. Taunting a foe was one thing. But this was no longer that.

The raw sound of a sob tore from Sparrow, and Rilien felt a surge of misery he had not been expecting. In this liminal state between what he was and what he could have been, were the world a more merciful place, he lamented her torment without truly being able to understand it. He'd looked demons in the face and laughed his defiance, but to keep fighting one after it had already nearly won... this was a kind of struggle he did not know. Could not know, any longer. He hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to do with himself, and knowing that his ability to do anything was fading fast. Deciding not to wait for that, Rilien stepped closer to Sparrow, twining his arms around her torso, just beneath her shoulders, and pulling her against him, stooping a little to prop his chin on her shoulder.

"I'm sorry," he said, with the uncomfortable certainty that it wasn't enough, not nearly enough. To his credit, the hug wasn't at all reserved or tentative on his part-- and he'd had to draw on his very early childhood for that, as he hadn't been properly hugged since. He could have said more, could have promised her that he'd do whatever he could to make it better, to fix this, because even through the fading haze of his feelings, he knew he wanted to, but he'd never been one for words when actions could do so much more, and so he stood there quietly instead, willing to move if she pushed him away but otherwise quite unruffled by remaining right where he was.

It had been long, so long, since anyone was last precious to him.

Snippet #2359437

located in Kirkwall, a part of The City of Chains, one of the many universes on RPG.

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