ORIGIN

All at once, he remembered.

I was to protect them.

Nightmares didn't have to make coherent sense--in the moment, the mind believed them. And when the Sentinel looked sharply to one side in horror, he knew nothing of reality: he knew only that he had failed. Canis was no longer bright, tan, bone-strewn: instead it was slicked black, morphed into the breathing oil of Draco. And while he had been toying with Fairyflies, he'd forgotten his actual purpose.

And now he saw the consequences.

The broken little chrysalises, scattered across the floor. The ragged shards, dripping with still-fresh fluid. The torn and mangled bodies of the half-formed children that had been growing within.

His gaze snapped up, eyes wide, breath caught in his chest. And yes, what he'd feared was there: the young he'd been meant to watch over, too, their little forms draped across the rock, half torn to pieces. And it seemed, in that moment, that he remembered them, these fragments of imagination: that he'd known the black eyes and spines of that one, and the soft fur of the one over there-...

The Sentinel staggered, turning from one direction to the other, bloody evidence of his failures all around him. A cry escaped him, one of anguish, and he lifted his halberd and turned--rage roaring up in him. These were emotions he'd never known, and their intensity was appalling; they were uncontained.

He would find whoever had done this.

His eyes settled on Giggle, at last, and he didn't know who she was--why she was here; he saw a shifting purple-black monstrosity whose form could not seem to settle into a single shape.

He hesitated--for a moment, he knew fear--and then he ran for her, a mindless charge without strategy or plan.

Her words--but more importantly, the imagery and the meaning--hit him just in time for him to snap the halberd up, to scramble backward and stumble to an unsteady halt instead of plowing into her. His chest was heaving with unsteady breaths, his eyes wide with confusion.

He had not felt, like this--he was controlled, calm, and he had to be to contain the halberd's insistence upon violence. This fear, this anger, was new and unpleasant, and very unwelcome.

He was, he realized, trembling.

The images were fading, and now he began to realize that they were fake--but one thought struck him, something she had said, and he blurted it before he could contain it.

"What is--Giggle?"

As soon as he said it, he remembered the others mentioning her--Oliver, Enoki--and remembered that this was her name. He had been calling her the Bone Seer, and she had not corrected him; he'd forgotten his name.

Abruptly, everything--the children, the horrors he'd briefly seen, the sudden unpleasant rush of emotions--crashed in around him, and he lowered himself in a near-collapse to the ground, dropping his halberd and burying his face in both hands.

It took him a few moments--Giggle's words mere background noise--to come to terms with the fact that it had been hallucination. And to begin to come to terms with the rush of unfamiliar emotions he'd been struck with.

At length, he dropped his hands and lifted his gaze, but his stare outward was a thousand-yard one. He was trying to both remember, and forget, the brief but horrific visions that he'd seen. To forget, because they'd been awful; but to remember, so that he never failed so badly that he would see it made a reality.

"Its task," he rasped softly, at last, "is to defend Draco, and the Chaos Forge. It saw... a failure of that." He looked to Giggle sombrely, and half-explained: "There were many young."

He had no idea she already knew this--no clue she'd been dipping around in his mind to see it for herself.

And before she could properly respond, he'd looked out at nothing, again. "It is... unexpected motivation." Prior, he had operated purely out of a sense of duty. Now, the ticking of the pocketwatch around his neck seemed almost a warning: time passed, and enemies would threaten. Would he be ready..? The sense of duty had strengthened into a sense of true responsibility: that the Forge and those within it were under his protection, and that should he fail, they would perish.

He did not wish for that.

"The Seer of Bones holds... powerful magic. The Sentinel did not expect it. Despite description. How does one fight, when one is removed from reality?" he asked, and looked to her, as if for guidance.

He was quiet, for a moment, trying quite hard to focus on her words. Practice-... he could do that, yes. Study. Learn to differentiate, as best he could.

He did not ache for another round of whatever the hell she'd done to him, but it would help him against true enemies wielding such powers. He took a shuddering breath, and then nodded, turning to meet her gaze. "It... requires such training. It has never--experienced this before. This... loss of reality." And for a moment, too, there was something else he'd never really felt: empathy. Was this what she had undergone, thrown into the void-? Separated from what was real?

"It must-... rest, again. And think on this. Its mind is-... In turmoil," he added. It was already fading--he was not an emotional being, despite what she'd thrust at him. The strong feelings he'd experienced were sinking away, like shining metal gradually engulfed by the rising mud of a swamp: drawn down, smothered, hidden entirely from view. He couldn't access them so easily, even if he'd wanted to--it just wasn't who he was, and it wasn't how his biochemical makeup worked.

Still... now he knew those feelings. He had experienced them, even if only once, and this had... changed him, somehow. He had yet to really grasp the extent of it, but launching into further practice as muddled as he was seemed somehow unwise.

He offered the briefest shake of his head, even as he pushed up, taking the halberd in hand.

"There is... another place, that it will go to." He was thinking of the grove, already--of Oliver. A relation, of sorts. It was not that he distrusted Giggle, but that Oliver had already shown himself trustworthy. The place was softer, with water, food, and cover beneath which he could rest.

A pause, and he thought to add: "Her aid is... appreciated. It will return." He waited, a moment, and then dipped his head--almost shamefacedly, not wishing to think about what had happened here--and then was gone, striding down toward Oliver's grove and the relative, welcome safety it represented.