Quest 228

[primrosella]

The blonde girl sits silently at the foot of the bed, her defeated posture echoed in the hollow look that has consumed her eyes. The door has shut, the lock turned with a resounding click; she is trapped. What's more, she is defeated. Her quest ends here, in the tower room that belongs to her husband-to-be, and her failure will be sealed twofold at

Comments

[horrible_penny]

Nightmare number... what number was it by now? Penny feels as if she's been through hundreds of nightmares by now. This one is cold and dark. At least there isn't any blood. Yet. Just stone walls and shadows, and--

And Rosella?

Even in the dark, Penny can make out the blond (did it become lighter, or is this one of those convenient nightmare happenings?). She's up the stairs, yards away from Penny, and in a doorway. What can only be a bow is in her hands. From her vantage point, Penny can't see farther into the room. She creeps up the stairs towards Rosella, careful not to make a sound.

[primrosella]

The screams of the witch are more than loud enough to echo down the tower to where Penny is, so there is no missing every curse and threat that is hurled in Rosella's direction as she stands petrified in the doorway, still reeling from the horror of the moment.

She'd meant to shoot the witch. She'd thought--and perhaps it was a foolish thought, hoping to control one as evil as that--but she'd truly thought the arrow would only cause Lolotte to love her as the unicorn had. She hadn't considered that love might be so utterly abhorrent to the witch's very being that it would be enough to slay her instead.

Her face is white as she stands there, bowstring still vibrating from her shot, absorbing every threat and waiting desperately for the witch's inevitable death.

[horrible_penny]

The screams and curses make Penny jump. She shrinks back into the shadows momentarily, afraid to go closer. No, that won't do. Rosella's just standing there. She needs help.

"Rosella?" Penny speaks loudly enough to be heard over the witch, but no louder. She approaches the girl and peers into the room. Her jaw drops. Had Rosella...?

[primrosella]

The sudden surprise of Penny at her side is enough to jar Rosella's attention--however momentarily--away from the dying witch and over to her friend. Even so, she doesn't look any less startled than she had before; if anything, Penny's presence here only inspires more panic in her as the spider's legs erupt from the bedsheets and the hands begin to reach from the walls.

"Run!" she cries, grasping Penny's arm and urging her toward the stairs, even as the witch's mandibles begin to snap and the groans of the undead start to fill the air. "Penny, run!"

sleep on the right side of the white noise ][

[oshutup]

There is nothing in particular that Peter can think of that would call him to another dream. The last time that this happened it caused a rift between himself and a sorcerer long-gone, a rift that never mended in a way that he could ever settle with. Tonight he finds himself falling into someone else's shadows at a run. It is as if one has woken from sleep only to realize they have been chasing something in it, driven by a single point of light or need; this focus happens to be a voice he knows well or well enough, and by coincidence or fortune or even dreams taking mercy in not letting him arrive too late he only stops once he is in the room with Rosella and the witch. Something in him must have known what would have happened or the nature of it, for he is dressed full in armor minus the helm, Rhindon a mutual possession in waking hours and to a degree always his at any other time

sleep on the right side of the white noise ][

[primrosella]

The presence of someone else at this moment in the nightmare is jarring, to say the least--jarring enough, in fact, that the skeletal hands falter on Rosella's arms, the shadows waver, and both Lolotte and Rosella simultaneously turn their eyes to him, one with her mouth gaping open in surprise, the other with her mandibles snapping in rage.

"What are you doing here?!" one of them screams, but it comes so suddenly and so frantically that it's hard to be certain which uttered it. But only one of them recognizes this intruder, knows him as a savior--and the sight of him has renewed a fighting instinct in her as she thrashes and kicks, trying to free herself from the undead hands that have trapped her.

sleep on the right side of the white noise ][

[oshutup]

He can't quite make out which one of them is yelling at him, but it seems unimportant compared to continuing the fight on the proper side, which he does as best he can with skeletons grasping at them from every side that isn't dominated by Lolotte.

"The door!?" he doesn't mean to order Rosella around in her own dreamspace but getting out is more than appealing enough to compensate for some bossiness. Aside from that, he doesn't expect her to be able to read his mind, intuit his questions, or whatever when spider legs keep jabbing out at them and the witch's mouth seems to clutch and claw its opening and closing motions, wholly inhuman. Which isn't new to him. But this is not the kind of inhuman sort he would welcome in any world. Rhindon lashing out, a well honed extension of the rest of his movement and intent, he aims to relieve the witch of at least two of those legs.

It might just be him, but the screeching, howling quality of the monster's rage seems to be getting louder, borderline unbearable

sleep on the right side of the white noise ][

[primrosella]

"Yes!" she shrieks--undeniably Rosella this time--but then stops short and fixes wide blue eyes on the monster rising from the bed, snapping at them even as the undead arms hold her back. "No!" she cries instead, fixing her eyes not on those glowing red eyes burning with hatred, but at the red gem beneath it, straining against the place where a neck would be. "The--at her neck!"

One of the hands clamps over her mouth, pulling her back toward the wall, and her stomach twists in abhorrence as she sinks her teeth into it, biting as hard as she can and trying to ignore the flesh that comes away in her mouth as she does, spitting violently as soon as the hand recedes. "It's a talisman, get it off her!"