Every second that Wilder had been in Fornax had been restless and anxious. She paced for a while and sometimes sat down at the edge of the waves and talked to the water, out of a lack of anything else to do or anyone else to talk to. A couple of times she had briefly fallen asleep and woken up in a different location with a mild headache, something that deeply concerned her, so she had been trying her best to keep track of herself at all times.

On her way out from Canis, she had actually taken a small detour to the place where she had stashed her stuff. Her little satchel with all the gemstones, and her bottles of ink. She pulled out one of them, the one filled with black ink, and was caught by sudden inspiration. On the walls of Canis there were paintings drawn by Bones a long time ago. She'd never personally met the dog, but she'd at least heard of her and seen the paintings. Perhaps if she could paint this problem out, it would be easier to face.

She set her stuff down and curled herself up, loafing in the sand, and closed her eyes, trying to focus and meditate on all of this for a while.

She woke up about ten minutes later and understood. At least a little better. Not much. But she thought she could describe the sensation. The desperation for magic. Make it a physical painting. She moved away from the sand and onto solid rock where she uncorked the vial and spilled some of it on her paw. Without hesitating, she began to paint.

She wasn't, uh, very good at painting, but what she was going for was more abstract after all. It took her about twenty minutes to finish her little painting, getting up and hopping around on three legs to get all of it and, stretching before her, in pitch blank ink, was a spiderweb.

She frowned. How did this help again? Maybe just being aware of it would make it easier to deal with. And it had killed some time. She raised her paw and began licking off the remaining ink, cringing a little at the taste, before curling herself up again. Might as well try thinking about it some more, at least.

@Aure

These past few days--- week, even ---had been arduous, placing immense strain on his magical capabilities. Aure, having gathered his wits enough follow through with his half-baked plan.

He nearly relaxed himself right out of the sky as he was met with the blasting humidity and warmth of Fornax, which immediately clung to his feathers and made him feel about ten pounds heavier with wetness. But, tired as his wings and mind were, he couldn't afford to rest anymore (the trip through Tunnel M was arduous, least to say). The wyvern didn't want to waste what time he had. So, he set to looking for Wilder--- let her still be here.

The big, black spiderweb on one of the cavern's walls was hard to miss, as was the equally dark loaf before it. Aure rounded lazily, carefully, once. He drifted a small distance away, and then alighted. A pause, silence. You've had a while to consider this. The wyvern kept his wings lose, at the ready. "Wilder?" he called softly, "I'm here. I'm sorry it took me so long." Once he felt like he had her attention, Aure forced his feathers smooth and lowered his head. "Let's just talk, alright? No magic. I won't do anything if you don't."

@Wilder

(ignore the roll ffffs)

So deep in her meditative thoughts, Wilder didn't hear Aure approaching. Only when she heard the soft call of his voice did her eyes blink open, breaking up the loaf of darkness with bright, saturated pink. Her head looked over and her ears perked. The first instinct was for a smile to slight on her face and a purr to rise in her chest. "Hi, Aure!" She started to rise to her feet when she remembered why she was here in the first place. She paused and stopped herself. Instead, she sat herself down and curled her tail over her paws, her neck bowed slightly.

She blinked slowly, her ears swiveling and twitching. "No magic," she promised. And she meant it. She wouldn't make that terrible mistake again. "That's okay. I have had time to think. I won't do anything, I promise!" She stood up a little taller, trying to make herself look confident. She wanted to be confident. So Aure felt safe and so she could stay in control.

But what to say? That it would never happen again? That she would always be in control of herself? Because that simply wasn't true. The last time she had passed out had been yesterday. The failed magic seemed to have broken a dam in the back of her mind that had been holding back that which she struggled to control. It was a whole different game now and a single week in isolation trying to figure it out wasn't enough.

So she didn't know what to say. She didn't want to make excuses. There were no excuses, after all. The only thing that came to her mind was "I'm sorry."

@Aure

Bright eyes quickly glanced over Wilder, checking her posture and her subtle movements. The little black cat seemed to move even with the simple act of breathing, her voice nowhere near the garbled monotone when she was trying to attack him, rip his gem off--- "We'll just talk and figure this out," he assured, settling down slightly as the cat seemed to grow more confident.

Aure, however, couldn't bring himself to sit down just yet.

He simply folded his wings to his side, ears swiveling forth to catch her quiet apology. The wyvern acknowledged it with a half-hearted toss of his head and soft "it's alright." His tail shook as his feathers laid flat.

A long, awkward pause, as Aure tried to figure out what to do. His head tilted toward the odd painting on the wall, noting that it definitely looked like a spiderweb, at least. It had subtle, tiny paw-shapes at the ends of the lines; Wilder must have drawn it. A trap?

"What does... this mean?"

@Wilder

Wilder's eyes looked away. It certainly was not alright. If everything was alright then she'd still be back in Canis. She would never have left in the first place. They would have talked it out there and then and he wouldn't have had to send her away for a week. But she made herself stop that train of thought. She couldn't afford another crash and burn right now. She was going to be more confident and be stronger right now. For Aure. For herself.

She looked back when Aure acknowledged the painting and she hesitated. What did it mean? To be honest, she wasn't really sure, it was just a thought that had come to her in hours of meditation. "Um, I guess it's what's in my head," she responded in a strained voice. "I don't know, I thought about it for a while, a long while, like for an hour or something, and I came up with this." Perhaps now was a good time to at least explain away a bit of it. Maybe it would make more sense.

She looked back towards Aure, her tail flicking nervously. "I sometimes get, like, needs. Really bad needs for magicka. It kind of overrides everything else. Usually it's right before or after I black out. So I thought I'd try to describe that in a picture. To, like, understand it and stuff. Make it easier to control I guess?" She shrugged and looked back at her spiderweb. How she had come up with a spiderweb and it bugged her that she didn't even know her own head.

@Aure

Maybe "alright" hadn't been the best choice of words. Wilder's reaction, however subtle, drew a soft sigh from Aure. The word was already out there, and they had already moved on.

The little black cat echoed his thoughts slightly, indicating that the web is what she felt was in her head, clouding her thoughts and judgment. A trap, indeed --- a trap far worse than any physical one, no matter how solid and sharp its iron teeth were. The mental trap was a difficult one to escape, Aure knew, and put great strain on close relationships ("sometimes I find myself looking at the ground," Eythan had said in forced confession, when the wyvern came out with his fears of murder.)

Aure sat in silence, wings tucked and ears flicked forth. Listening. Better to do so, than get overwhelmed and say something they'd both regret. His beak clicked a few times, contemplating the spiderweb. When he spoke, it was slowly and deliberately, "does your mind... feel like a trap?" Bright eyes flickered to the side and back to Wilder. "Understanding and thinking is good, but... have you tried---" and this was a stretch "---using magic to look into your own mind? When you feel the desire for magic? To see what is there and what is coming?"

He hoped she wouldn't try it right here, right now.

@Wilder

As she looked at the spider-web, Aure's suggestion actually made a lot of sense to her. "A trap?" Is that what it was? A web of trance and magic and forgetfulness strung around the inside of her head impossible to escape? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it and it felt like the right description for it. "Yeah. I think so. Like if I step the wrong way or make a wrong move then I lose control." She was a fly, trying to navigate a world of spiderwebs. Fly the wrong way, go too fast, turn a different direction, and she'd be stuck.

She turned to look back at Aure, though, as his second suggestion got her thinking. Would anything even happen if she tried to read her own mind? Or would it just be feedback from her own conscious thoughts? She very much wanted to try it, but she remembered her promise to Aure to not use magic right now. And that was probably a smart move - like she had just said, if she went the wrong direction, if the spell failed, everything would be so much worse.

So she instead just shook her head. "No, but while I was waiting I tried...looking into my own past. Like how I can touch a rock and hear its past, I tried it on myself a few times. To see if I could see what was happening when I forget things." Her ears drooped a little bit. "I couldn't really control where I was looking so I only saw random things that I remember or aren't really important."

@Aure

Aure stared at the web and the unceasing complexity in its many spokes and branches and winding loops. There were far more layers to it and dimensions than he could properly count (curse his tiny attention span.) Bright eyes blinked lazily, a soft sigh, "I see." How else could he respond to that? A harried, unsympathetic "I'm sorry?" No...

But, a spider knows its own web, doesn't it? The branches and spokes were different in subtle ways, but clear enough to the spider like a--- "a map." Ears, then head turned to Wilder, "You could make a map of your mind, if you explore it. Find out where you can go and what you can do without losing a grip on reality." Aure tilted his head slightly, raising a wing to rub at his beak, "mind magic seems to be pretty imprecise when you aren't directly connected to it."

Even then, it tended to fail in horrible ways. (Falling, falling, falling, before his mother's unseeing eyes in the Void.)

@Wilder

Wilder's ears perked up again at Aure's suggestion. A map? Like a physical one? Draw it on the ground like her spiderweb? The sounded like it would be really, really difficult. Or maybe like a mental map. But then she'd lose it if she ended up going somewhere she shouldn't go. Or it could get tangled up in her many other thoughts. It kind of hurt her head just thinking about it.

But it didn't sound like something impossible. She still had dye left. She could just make it smaller instead of a huge thing on the wall. Her tail flicked thoughtfully. "That could be something to try. I'm learning how to think deeper. Maybe if I focus more I could visualize it." This was sounding more and more like a therapy session and, to be honest, Wilder didn't want that kind of a relationship with Aure. She enjoyed playing with him and talking with him and just being friends. She didn't want to dump everything on him all the time...but after what had happened, it was a little hard not to.

Her ears drooped again as her mind wandered off. She was quiet for a second while she tried to figure out what to say, but it ended coming out as quite a blunt question. "Are we still friends, Aure?" But it was with honest fear that she asked. She didn't know what she was going to do if she lost another close friend so soon after the other.

@Aure

"Maybe..." Aure mused gently, "I could try to find something to draw it on? That you can carry with you and work on visualizing on?" He remembered seeing worn, dusty old parchment in some of the ruins in Orion and he was certain that the Seven wouldn't mind a little bit of good 'ol fashioned palimpsest. The writing on them were faded enough already. They were ready for some fresh ink. "It'll be good to think about it, though, and try looking into your mind with magic."

But all of this talk of counseling was seeming to dishearten Wilder, and she came at him with a question he wasn't quite prepared to answer: were they still friends?

Bright eyes fell beneath a furrowed brow, as he turned away briefly. Beak slightly ajar, throat swelling as if to say something. Aure snapped his beak shut with a quiet click. Something about the bluntness of that question struck him deeper than the little black cat could've ever intended to. They had drifted apart, yes, but why? Because of them? Because of an outside force greater than the two of them combined?

An image of the poor feline, tail between her legs and wholly miserable, passing mournfully through the wicked gates of Canis. The wyvern was struck by a choking sound, eyes welling up slightly. He knew whose fault this drift was, this divide was: I sent her away, when she needed me the most. Some higher power could be feeding these impulses to tear flesh from bone and to take the gems of others, but he had not helped, had not coped. All for the sake of a 'greater good.' Driven to paranoia again, Aure hadn't listened to his mother nor the bones.

Eyes glassy, he turned precariously back to the cat. His beak just barely opened to allow his quiet "if you can stand it." Clearing his throat, he added in a croaking chirp, "I'm sorry I--- sent you away. I should've helped and tried to understand, sooner. You aren't dangerous."

@Wilder