ORIGIN

He stared at her, intently, his head cocked very slightly to one side and all his eyes observing. Her intrusion into his mind caused nothing visible bar a slight tightening of his fingers around the halberd's haft. Inside, however, he was reeling: the imagery was sharp, real, the emotions that came with it surprisingly keen. They were stronger than he'd ever felt, certainly, and he felt a sudden, strange and distant pity.

But he considered the vision itself for what it was worth, and he felt that sense of resonance again. As if this magic were linked to him; as if this void, and its whispers, were a part of him. The whispers the halberd offered. The murmurs of his chaotic magic.

He considered.

He tapped into it, and extended one clawed hand, turning it palm-up and uncurling his fingers as if to beckon Giggle forward.

And he did what would terrorize her most of all: he banished her with but a gesture, a gentle touch of ice cold magic.

He stared, blankly, as she vanished from before him, and he knew with sudden certainty that he had just sent her to the darkness. And even more certainly, that he could remove her from it.

With another gesture he did just that, soundlessly returning her to the here and now. "If she can be sent," he informed her, "then she can be retrieved."

It lasted only a few heartbeats--the world fell away, and everything plunged into darkness.

Into nothing.

The last thing she saw was the Sentinel extend a hand toward her, and then she was gone, the world was gone, and memories and terror crashed in. Adrenaline spiked. Fear roared through her, eclipsing sentient thought, panic thrashing her limbs wildly in the void-nothing.

-And then she was back, crashing to the rock below, and the Sentinel was speaking as if it were nothing.

Giggle didn't hear his words. She felt the terror and the distant call of Omen, felt her own rage bubbling...

"YOU SONOFABITCH!" she roared, mindless, her heart hammering in her chest as she scrambled up.

She lunged for him without thinking, black lips peeled back from her thick teeth, jaws slamming shut for his forearm, his chest, his face--anything she could reach, in a series of savage and rending snaps.

She wasn't just angry; she was terrified. This was the worst attack she could think of, and her fight-or-flight was screaming fight with every nerve in her body.

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This--had not been the reaction he'd been expecting, which in truth said a great deal about his lack of social graces. His spined arm came up, the halberd crossing his chest, head twisting away, in an attempt to block the worst of it. Here and there, her teeth connected, but he managed to keep it to lacerations instead of a crushing, mauling bite or serious puncture wounds.

She stumbled him back, her weight and momentum nearly throwing him off his feet, and for a moment he was silent against her assault. It did not occur to him to really protest, to promise it hadn't been a genuine attack, to reassure her that he was not her enemy. He was simply taken aback, stumbling, all his focus on preventing the damage she might inflict.

When she fell back, snarling, her dark eyes molten with rage, he hastened to speak. "It did not mean--attack," he said, his tone one of obvious confusion. He hadn't meant it to be a genuine assault. Surely she knew that-?

Trembling with rage, adrenaline, and fear, she fell back. Her head was low, gaze smoldering, fangs still bared. He simply stood there, staring at her, and she was torn by a strange mixture of guilt and hatred. Her thoughts jittered in her skull. He didn't mean-... How DARE he?! -not even an adult- -into the VOID!

She backed off, body settling into trembling, anger and fear still tearing her mind in two directions. Old memories were jolting, snarling past her vision--blackness, darkness, nothing, empty void--her own screaming, body rail-thin, nothing making sense. Kerberos-...

She shook her head, thick fangs bared to the gums.

"Don't ever do that again," she growled, her voice roilingly deep, and dangerous.

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He had never been... threatened, before. Or outright attacked. The whispers in his head were roiling up, snarling threats of their own, urging him to violence.

The shadows of the Void had coiled close around him, like a shroud--and didn't seem to be departing. A new 'gift,' then, from this magic-?

It was this that refocused his mind--only barely, and he realized abruptly that his grip on the halberd had not only tightened but begun to raise it up again. Slowly he returned it to the ground, and took a step back. And a breath. Control, Sentinel. Voices: be still.

Almost reluctantly, they obeyed, or seemed to, at least--the intensity of them dimming down, some. The Sentinel looked to Giggle, then.

"It did not intend attack. Perhaps, if she is taken, it might return her. It does not know." If someone else pulled a victim into the void, could he find them-? He wasn't sure. But for now, he dipped his head, acknowledging his misstep.

The urge toward bloodlust trickled away.

"Will she... teach it of her magic? It would ask such things. How she Sees, and how this functions. She went into the Sentinel's mind. He did not know this could be done," he added. Bold of him, to throw another request her way after chucking her into her worst nightmare for a moment.

But then, he wasn't exactly the most socially savvy of critters; the Chaos Forge wasn't very big on etiquette.

Oh, the nerve of him-! Giggle stared, incredulous. He had the nerve, now, to ask if she'd teach him-?!

She forced black lips back over her teeth, and took a shaking step backward, fury still thick in her eyes.

"No," she snapped, and felt an immediate pang of guilt. Begrudgingly, she went on to modify that blunt refusal: "...Not now. I can't focus now. Come back later, and then maybe. But leave me alone, for now."

Overhead, Omen let out a haunting call, a threat, a promise, Giggle's fury echoing in her. She was just a tiny thing but she felt her linked "sister-mother's" rage. She'd taken flight--Giggle didn't quite know when--and was offering what little support she could.

Giggle glanced up at her--then fired one more baleful look at the Sentinel before turning away.

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An outright refusal.

He had never been denied, before, and for a moment he did not know how to take it. Did he demand? Insist? Did he succumb to anger, and storm away, never to return?

No-... Some part of him was at least self-aware enough to understand that she was not in her right mind. Perhaps if Agate had not grown up close by, he wouldn't have the experience to grasp it, but the Agate was a brat, and when emotional, all logic fled. Maybe others were the same? Maybe Giggle, when upset, could not think straight.

The Sentinel turned without a word, and paced back toward Oliver's grove. Perhaps he could rest there, then--and return a little later on.

Some time later...

He rested for hours. Half a day, perhaps. The mosses and grasses back at the oasis were cool, pleasant, despite the vaguely unsettling nature of peaceful, ever-growing life--so much the antithesis of chaotic, rocky Draco. He drank, ate some of the fruits left there, and slept.

When he returned, Giggle was not present--nor was her black bird. So he waited, sitting in silence, for several hours more.

He is here, Mother-Sister.

The thought--not really words, but sensation, imagery, intention--flickered through her mind the moment she awoke. It had taken her hours to force herself to sleep, curled and shivering at her den, growling and gibbering to herself periodically about the audacity of this dog.

Now she was waking, groggy, and Omen was informing her through their shared link that the Sentinel was back. She could see him, there--from the Sentinel's silent, still perch high above: he was sitting, quiet and motionless, beside the bone pit.

Shit. Well, at least he's mostly well-behaved, she thought to herself, dourly. Aside from chucking me in the fucking void.

Still, she took her sweet-ass time in going out to greet him. She took some kind of perverse pleasure, in that--in making him wait. She stretched, went to her water pool to drink, and even went out hunting for a spell--a smallish, wounded cave rat she'd been halfheartedly tracking for a few days served as a suitable meal.

It was almost an hour further before she returned to her bone pit, her lope a sour and unfriendly one, distant. But she didn't reject him outright, at least. She came up the trail and halted some twenty yards away, eyeing him for a moment.

"Right," she snapped, trying to ignore the jump in her heartrate from his mere presence, from even the threat of what he was capable of. Of the implications of it, things that had gnawed at her as she'd finally drifted off to sleep. If he can do that, she'd thought to herself, is that why that shit-cat can? Could anybody learn it? -Could I?

"You said you came to learn. I'll teach you, but in return I want to know how you sent me to the dark. Without a repeat performance," she added, in a growl.

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He didn't have to turn his head to watch her: the eyes on his 'ears' were doing a fine job as it was. But as a matter of instinctive politeness, he did stand before addressing her, and turn his whole body to face her way.

He considered her request. Not whether to grant it--that much was a given; it cost him nothing to simply speak, and he was rapidly learning that the exchange of information was a valuable thing in the caves. "It will... explain what it knows," he rasped. "And then--she will show it how her magic works? How to look into a mind; how she fights?"

She lifted her head a fraction, studying him, a little hostility bleeding away as he readily agreed to her terms.

"Explain, then," she told him. "And then I'll tell you about my magic. What I know of it, at least. If you want to fight, well, that'll be something else. We'll decide after we talk," she added. "Don't hit me with that fucking shadow-spear" would be first on the list of rules, she thought; and "no throwing me into the bones-damned void" close on its heels.

No--the void thing first. Spear second. Priorities were important.

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