ORIGIN

Vincenzo was dead, and Aure had little to nothing to show for it.

Pride had offered to retrieve the bones — if there even are any, with what he had heard about the Trials — but he waved off the Seven's adviser with a vague sentiment of one death already being enough, and the condolences being more than enough. The Seven, friendly as their alliance seemed to have become, didn't need to be involved in this sort of thing. It was important, personal, and... sacred, almost.

Which had, somehow, led the wyvern to the forboding emptiness that was this tunnel — wondering if the barren nothing was what death was like; or, if the sweltering heat of the sun and constant buffering of sand would be felt by abandoned, irretrievable bones. Aure shuddered softly as a ghastly chill crawled up and down his spine, playing upon each vertebrae like a key. His talons snubbed against a mix of blue and orange-yellow-red shards, worn thin as glass. Another shiver ran up his spine. He shuffled away from the shards, leaving them to their dusty confines and pointedly ignored the vague bowl-shapes still marking the wall.

Shadows, dancing. Voices he didn't know. A reckoning to shutter them.

He tucked his wings tighter to his sides, ears flattening against his skull. The Bonebound were doing well, they were prospering, he was simply paranoid, thinking too far ahead, by the bones he can't breathe—! Stumbling, stumbling, stumbling he was, until he fell upon his side and curled up into a fetal position, body shaking quietly with the weight of mortality upon him. A flutter of magicka, fretfully threading its way into the creeping mycelia around him, focusing on the inconsistent pace of his lungs. Even while he lay there, eyes glassy and cheeks beginning to run with broken sobs, it quieted his rattling bones and comforted his heart until he was merely sniffling again.

Mushrooms encased him, spores stirred by every subtle shift and sniffle, until he seemed to simply be a mound of them, wallowing with soft murmurs about the dread beginning to set in and the realization that death was an unavoidable fault in living and that— stop, stop, stop.