OF WISPS AND WHISPERS
ORION - In Nightmares
As Reign's spell backfired, there was a strong sense of
wrongness. It was as if bad luck hovered, as if something controlled his destiny. He would fail. There was no way to win this. He was trapped; he would be ended, here, followed and hunted to the ends of the caves until at last he fell in shadows, nothing but fear in his heart, alone in the cold. A soft laughter echoed in his ears, an icy breath, mocking to its core.
The ruins themselves echoed strangely with Dread's roar, the sound careening off into the rubble and fading, seeming to distort, and change, like a dozen voices wailing into slow silence. The light from Zevruu's orb seemed oddly muffled--the light itself bright enough, yet the shadows clung to it, creeping in, so that the bright pool ended abruptly only a few meters to either side. It would take effort to remain in the light, and not to touch the surrounding shadows. Miru's blue glow, too, seemed to stop abruptly not far from her. The shadows almost seemed to be giving off their own not-light, draining the magical glow at its edges.
Reseda, however, would see none of this--not at first. To her, the ruins seemed to grow darker, and darker; they grew towering and ominous. She went inside, wandering the crumbled roads, peering into pitch-black doorways, an unfamiliar fear mounting in her. A shuffle came from just behind her, and a sharp pain at the back of her neck. At the same time--and yet separately, as if in another room, another window, another reality--she saw a dark figure far ahead, unaware of her presence. And a third reality: Reseda fleeing, the rest left behind, silent as they fell. Strange, stray ghost-lights flickered all around.
She awoke to reality.
