He dreams of alien, geometric landscapes. Endlessly repeating fractal shapes shimmering white like clouded glass, or gold like woven gilded thread, or crimson like veins just beneath skin.
It's disorienting. It's beautiful. It's all that there is.
And then his dreams shatter and give way to loamy soil beneath his palms and damp, earthy jungle air. He spends a long moment on his hands and knees, hacking fluid from his lungs while he tries to remember how he got here. Through the muddled-brain haze of sleep, it's hard to tell anything is wrong.
But.
He remembers that painful and terrifying death at the claws of an enemy he was an idiot to
And this brainfog isn't just from waking up after a long sleep. It's something smothering, almost predatory. An encroaching presence every time he thinks too hard about the fight, or the warnings, or his chrysalis. Something that wills him to calm down, to not think so hard. That everything's alright.
The presence was there, and one might call it 'lurking' but it wasn't--not exactly. It was more like... a word at the tip of the tongue; a song one could not quite remember. It was present, and it was at the very edges of Cyneweard's mind, not yet fully realized.
Now and then, a sensation--possibly unsettling--would brush past: thoughts not Cyneweard's own, though not fully realized either, brushing past the edge of his consciousness. It was like hearing distant snippets of conversation: words passing, too muffled to quite make out, but heard with his magic rather than his ears.
It would take time--a cycle or two--for the link to strengthen enough for Cyneweard to hold a true conversation. But for now, something else had been prepared: a greeting from Mother herself. It came in the form of a battered Hallowed Caller: one of the creatures capable of mimicking speech. This one looked a little sickly, though not dying; it fluttered down, black wings settling across its back, the red eye in its forehead peering to Cyneweard.
"You... are..." the creature said, its voice a croak as it fought to produce Mother's words for her. "...protected. You... are... family. Ursa... family." It had to pause to breathe, heavily, and in the wake of this speech came the slightest touch of reassurance to Cyneweard's mind: a strange flicker of...
...love?
@Cyneweard
He watches the hallowed caller warily as it approaches. His first thought is
And it begins to speak. And he knows that it is whatever lives in the fungus, and that it is lying. And he is just about to open his mouth to tell it exactly that when he is hit by a feeling.
And he is reminded, suddenly of how lonely he is. Because that flickering hint of a feeling, however faint and fake, reminds him of how Ruvaen used to make him feel. And he realizes, even if he's met nice gembound and had nice conversations since then, he hasn't felt that way ever since Ruvaen went missing. Part of him had gone missing, too. But just for a moment, he had felt whole.
But it's fake.
He stands suddenly, wobbling for an embarrassing moment before steadying himself.
The place of the battleground was some ways from the Arborspire, but Rift considered himself more a guardian of the cave as a whole, and had come across the bloodstained ground some days ago, horrified by the dried gore and the chrysalis webbed with white infection. He did not know what had happened here, but he had checked on it every so often, determined to be there when the one within woke up.
Why? Ah...he didn't have much of a good reason besides curiosity. His feelings towards the Hive were mixed. On one hand, their tenacious fungus had infested his home cave for all he could remember, staining its beauty, choking life to replace it instead with its sickly decay. But...Mother had helped reunite him with a piece of his past. She had allowed him to speak to one of their Hosts without any interference. She had given them mercy. And, because they had been granted that mercy, Sebastian had been reborn. The chrysoberyl was still buried deep within his tree, but it was a part of him. It was his previous life. That was important to him.
Still, he could not deny his disapproval for the Hive as a concept. Oliver had told him enough about it - infection, the loss of autonomy, removal of free will to become part of a whole. It was disturbing and a part of him feared it and wanted it out of his cave.
So, lets just stay on curiosity for the situation.
This time, as he was bounding through the canopies of the trees to check on the spot, he found it to be shattered, and the creature that was within standing, speaking. He didn't initially see what it was they were speaking to, and thought maybe it was speaking to itself. He paused in a tree above, considering his next action for a moment, and then carefully began to climb down from the branches and down the trunk of a tree, landing a few feet away from Cyneweard.
The sound of a stranger's voice makes him jump, whipping around to face the green mountain lion. His gaze flicker, ever so briefly, to his battleaxe, still lodged in the dirt near the center of the clearing. He half expected them to be another one of Mother's messengers but... no. They seemed normal, and he didn't feel any sort of pull or connected like he assumed he would with someone actually infected by the fungus.
Suddenly, he feels a pit of nervous doubt deep in his stomach. Should he really tell this around gembound everything? They're a complete stranger! He has no idea what their actual intentions or morals are! What if they're just trying to lure him into a false sense of security? What if he tells them that he's infected, and they decided the best way to 'cure' him is to just rip him to shreds so the fungus has nowhere to hide?
Maybe he should just go back to Cepheus. Of course, he'd have to pass through Ursa-
Eyes widened minutely, perhaps not too visible beneath the mask, at the description of the drone. Alarm bells immediately began ringing in his mind and he whipped his head around, as if expecting a gigantic white tank to come rolling in any second. He cast his magic out into the grass beneath his feet, extending out through the entire network of the cave, but with all the remaining black-spots in his senses due to the hive's influence, it was hard to get a read. He didn't notice any kind of gigantic force barrelling their way through the trees at the moment, which was a relief.
The sense retracted and he glanced at the chrysalis too. And then he stared. Throughout the blue, he could see strands of white, not unlike the infectious mycelium that currently dominated the caves. An alarmed glance between that and back at the humanoid, and he understood.
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The green wildcat began to visibly panic, and he threw his hands up in an appeasing gesture,
"You're Infected." He said it so plainly, like Cyneweard's mind hadn't constantly circling the issue while refusing to put a name to it. Calling it an
"I can try and help you-" OKAY great! Great, just what he- "-I can try to force it out of you." -Wait that didn't- "It might be painful." Oh no.
He'd barely caught Rift's greeting through his own panic. Belatedly, he'd return it
He flinched at the panic, a little surprised at the sudden need for appeasement, surprise immediately replaced by sadness. Eyes roamed over the humanoid thing and he stepped forward slowly.
He could visibly see the alarm, the raised fur, the clenched fists, he could see it sparkling in their eyes. He didn't blame them, but it alarmed him to see such fear directed towards the infestation of Order. He had not realized how frightening it was, but thinking about it now, seeing someone directly faced with it, it made sense. The loss of autonomy could not be pretty or pleasant to go through. He understood the fear and it gave him a determination to help them, and then wipe out the remaining fungus from this cave.
He stepped forward.
...But nothing happened. He stared for a moment, waiting for something to happen, but the magic he sent out found nothing. It wasn't that it didn't work - it did - but as he attempted to pull fungal spores out of the humanoid, it found nothing to catch on.
He stared, confused. He had not been expecting that.
@Cyneweard
But...
...Nothing happened...?
(He could feel the barest impression of
He didn't know what to do. He thought back on the last few moments, remembering the feeling of the spell, tossing it over and over in his mind to make sure that he wasn't wrong. There was nothing in Cyneweard to pull out, there were no spores under the skin that could bloom. He pressed a paw against the ground, and did the same thing, pulled from spores to bloom - and they did, latent white fungus trapped within the grasses coalesced and bloomed in front of him. He felt it there as he pulled it out. Just as how he didn't feel it from Cyneweard.
He stared at the knight, the smallest shake of his head betraying his distress.