WoD: The Sky Untuned - Charming. There and Back Again.
Charming paces the hallway of the halfway house before taking up a space on the staircase. One crisis down, he thinks. Half down. Whatever. They’re closer to reality than they were. Where ever it was that they’d ended up. Stainless handled himself well, considering. Even Yin had handled the weirdness well, hell-
They both handled it better than him. It chagrins him to admit it. Everything there had punched his buttons. Fake mages, false magic. Goddamn fairytale bullshit. The whole time they’d been there he’d been on his last nerve, waiting for a dragon to come around the next corner. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, and grumbling his way through all of it so they’d never see how entirely freaked the fuck out he was. It had been far too much like Arcadia. That same foggy knowledge from nowhere he’d had as he Awakened had plagued him, moving his body in ways he had no control over. You couldn’t have made a better headfuck if you’d... Tried.
Charming’s eyes narrowed.
No.
That would mean sentience. That would mean something more than the incoherent, chaotic babble of the Abyss. Or it meant order. Something, or things putting him through his paces and dropping him back with new information.
You know, like the potentially soul crushing memory of some fuckwit Mages screwing a public ritual in the middle of the Grand Final and ripping open a hole to the Abyss. Yeah. Something like that.
He realises his hand is at his jacket pocket, stroking the outline of something through the leather. He fishes it out, brow furrowing, Spurs. Silvered spurs, a gift from that place.
Or a trap.
“Huh.” Charming turns them over in his hands. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
They both handled it better than him. It chagrins him to admit it. Everything there had punched his buttons. Fake mages, false magic. Goddamn fairytale bullshit. The whole time they’d been there he’d been on his last nerve, waiting for a dragon to come around the next corner. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, and grumbling his way through all of it so they’d never see how entirely freaked the fuck out he was. It had been far too much like Arcadia. That same foggy knowledge from nowhere he’d had as he Awakened had plagued him, moving his body in ways he had no control over. You couldn’t have made a better headfuck if you’d... Tried.
Charming’s eyes narrowed.
No.
That would mean sentience. That would mean something more than the incoherent, chaotic babble of the Abyss. Or it meant order. Something, or things putting him through his paces and dropping him back with new information.
You know, like the potentially soul crushing memory of some fuckwit Mages screwing a public ritual in the middle of the Grand Final and ripping open a hole to the Abyss. Yeah. Something like that.
He realises his hand is at his jacket pocket, stroking the outline of something through the leather. He fishes it out, brow furrowing, Spurs. Silvered spurs, a gift from that place.
Or a trap.
“Huh.” Charming turns them over in his hands. “What’s the worst that could happen?”