ORIGIN

The black cat's magic had been dragging her down. For the last week or so, her Chaos had been mounting, stacking upon itself, dark sand pouring into an ever-increasing cascade that threatened to smother her entire.

'Corruption,' some of them called it. To her, it was a manifestation of her very essence. Her regular aloof indifference sparked more frequently into irritation. A tail normally languidly curled became a constantly flicking signal of aggravation, hanging low when she stalked the Palace and its grounds, lashing at the slightest provocation. She knew what it meant, of course; Aethril had taught her, early on, that she would need to visit a Font every so often, to drink at the very source of her magic and sate her growing hunger.

Her magic itself, too, had both increased and increased its effects upon her: a constant flickering roar that set her hide to twitching and left ghostly fingers caressing and stabbing at her flanks, sent her spinning with bared teeth and hissing to find nothing there. Obieth saw the Void as often as she saw the real world, empty of all but shadow and drifting motes of dust, and somehow that was calming--it was a temptation to slip away into it, to rest there and leave behind the source of her fury, for awhile. The whispers had grown louder, too. They were a constant susurrus in her ears, a warning to her prey, half a constant annoyance that had gradually grown into comfortable normalcy. At first, she'd found it hard to sleep; now, silence might have kept her blearily awake. Ahh, and then there were the hallucinations...

Even now, as she stalked along Tunnel G toward Draco, the walls bled black and began to distort in shape. An Oily shape slid out from the rock, and then another, and they crept toward her; she greeted both with a saberfangs-bared hiss, tensing to leap. They faded, and she recognized abruptly that they were false--like all the little lights and shadows and menacing fae nothing that came and went. Worst of all, perhaps, was the thirst.

Obieth had toyed with water. She had begun to learn to corrupt it: to turn it black, a witch's grinning stare shifting what was once pure to Oiled dark. But the magic had reached back, in turn, and she had come to understand--to her dismay--that power granted demanded a price. Now she thirsted, incessantly; she was visiting Cepheus's streams almost hourly, lapping with near-desperation at their quenching flow. When she was away from water, for a time, she began to feel... dessicated; parched, the roof of her mouth and rasping tongue unpleasantly warm and dry, her skin almost shrivelling.

The corruption was taking its toll, and she knew that.

It was with angry flashes of teal eyes, then, and the permission of her master, that Obieth prowled along the tunnel: jaw clenched, her normal demeanor become baleful and even hateful. She would visit the Black Spire; she would calm the hallucinations, the glimpses into the Void, the incessant whispering and the sharp-fingered prodding at her back, and soothe--at least a little (she hoped)--her body's constant demand for water.

She reached the entrance--and up ahead she saw the Sentinel, forever standing guard, as impassive and implacable as the rock itself. And with the irritation her magic was bringing her, she felt as though she hated him--well, perhaps not hated; but there was instant annoyance at his very presence, and if Obieth could have simply deleted him from the caves then and there, she might have.

"I am going to the Spire-stone," she rasped at him, coming up from her stalk into a stride, and then a halt, the tip of her tail glimmering teal and flicking behind her.

When he simply granted her entry, some part of her felt... disappointed. Her eyes slid away, glaring dully into the shadows of the tunnel. The chaos that raged in her blood demanded to be sated, but for now, she pushed it aside; it did not yet hold enough control over her to push her into senseless violence.

'It is entwined deeply in its magic.'

What the hell does that mean? she thought to herself, irritably, and then shook the thought away. But even as she did, she was looking back toward Sentinel, and considering other things. Considering... how often magic failed. How much she'd been warned, by her Hand and the Overseer, against relying on it. And this one--the Sentinel, they called it--it was a fighter, so far as she knew. It had been there around her hatching, and again each time she'd ventured into Draco. Did she know it well enough, did she hold enough authority, to demand it relinquish its duties to offer her its knowledge?

Well. There was no way to know but to try. Ah-... Well, there was one other way.

Tail-tip twitched behind her. The urge to lash out was still strong, and the knowledge that she could gain something from this one by doing so only influenced the sense of malicious mischief. She succumbed to the idea almost at once, reaching out invisible black hands to grasp for the Sentinel's mind, to give her words more weight.

"You will come with me," she declared. "There are things I want to learn from you. To ask you. Come," she repeated, prowling around him, but following him with her gaze, as she slipped through the Aperture and into Draco.

Obieth flinched from the Sentinel's words, a horrific sensation of being chastised flaring through her. Embarrassment, shame, a feeling she usually only harbored when Aethril gently pointed out some awful mistake that she had made.

A memory briefly lit her mind: Obieth leaping onto Aethril's bed, and the Hand's quietly chiding tone. Another: a warning from the Hand not to delve into other's minds. That it was rude. Obieth had gotten so used to doing it anyway, and without being caught, that she'd made a habit of ignoring that little bit of guidance.

With a sour glance at the Sentinel, and with her Chaos briefly quelled rather than stoked higher, she crept away. "She will come back," she muttered, ears flattening back as she slunk off into Draco.

When at last she came to the Black Spire, she settled there. It had been a long trip, and Draco was not known for its water sources, and so she was both thirsty and weary. But the presence of the Black Spire itself sated her. It felt as though she were taking in a heavy, hot meal. What had been an irritating, empty pit--a drive to find and sate herself on Chaos, with the same increasingly mindless desperation of the starving--became a slow brimming of heat and fulfilled calm. She sat with body slowly relaxing, eyes drooping to half-lidded, as she stared at the Oiled, ever-shifting crystals; her breathing calmed and her muscles softened.

The prodding slowed, the whispers dimmed, the hallucinations--for now--ceased. Even her thirst abated, a little, though she knew it was only staved off for a few hours at the most.

When at last she'd had her fill--when her magic was stabilized again--she pushed back up, padding away almost reluctantly. The strange and acrid scent beneath the Black Spire, as though some enormous beast were resting there, she more gladly left behind--whatever it was, its scent cloud was large enough to be oppressive and instinct warned her from drawing closer.

She crept back away again in silence, and made her way back toward the Sentinel.

Some part of Obieth wondered if the Sentinel was simply immune to her mind-magic. She hesitated before actually asking, disliking--deeply--the admission that she did not know; but her newfound stability calmed her enough that she asked the question without too much bitterness behind it.

"It--you--knew what I was thinking. My magic did not touch you--why?" she asked it, stalking around to face it from the front and the side, still a few yards away. She sat, relaxed now, tail languidly curling up around her haunches as she regarded him.

And now, instead of irritation, there was observation: she took note, without the anger to distract her, of its empty gaze and placid face, of the lethality of its spikes and the alert stiffness to its posture.

The faint scent of rot lingered on them both, a gift of the magic they bore.

"I am the guardian of the Hand," she went on, though she imagined the Sentinel knew that full well. He'd been there for her hatching and recruitment, and her later visits at Aethril's side, after all--but it was perhaps best to err on the side of formality. "I have been warned not to grow too reliant on my magic. You are the guardian here; do you use magic? I want to know how you deal with it. With failure," she explained.

Teal gaze travelled over him, again, while she waited--then settled on his face.

"I have learned to... try to have a backup plan. In case my magic fails." There was wry disappointment in herself as she realized she'd forgotten that lesson even as she'd entered Draco an hour prior. "But I can't reach very far with my claws alone... Is that what your metal thing is for?"

She looked to the halberd, staring at it curiously, but she wasn't quite sure how the thing was used. She knew only that it was glimmering black, shrouded in its own soft whispers, like a thing alive.

She gave a soft huff, half-amused. "Preferably not by actually striking," she responded. Some part of her--some part still, and always, infused by Chaos--wished he would attack her. Wished for bloodshed, for claws rending flesh, for Oil to spill across the stone and for the heat of muscle twitching between clenched fangs. For the vital and all-important battle of life versus death, of savage victory proving the strong. But it was, now, a much smaller part of her, and she disregarded it well enough.

"Show me," she decided, sitting a little more upright. "And... I apologize for trying to use my magic on you." It was a genuine apology, and she made no excuses (mostly because she didn't truly consider it a mistake), but it wasn't one spawned of remorse: it was a sort of polite, high-class primness that elicited her clipped and smooth words. Apology was the correct thing to do, and so she did it, though with a lesser being she might not have bothered.

The Sentinel's speech was not particularly fluid; she had trouble telling where "it" was her, and "it" was him in turn. Everyone, apparently, was "it" to the Sentinel. But she could grasp the overall concept well enough, and it was the same one that Cain and Aethril had driven into her already: magic was fickle. The body was not.

Obieth would have accepted this without issue, except that her body simply could not reach as far as magic could. Her magic, too, could do things the body couldn't--like banish Aethril to the void to protect her from a multitude of dangers Obieth herself could not face down. Fire, or an army--the Void would protect her from these, where claws alone would lead only to both of their deaths. She found it hard, then, to accept such wisdom at face value--but perhaps the Sentinel had something she could learn.