Teyouma.

---

Teyouma moved on from Pegasus eventually. It was a nice place - he would return to it soon - but his desire to keep searching and keep learning was too great. He found his way to a narrow passage and ducked inside of it, unaware of its possible dangers and otherwise unphased, trusting in fate and in his abilities. As he skittered along on all-fours he found himself wishing there were things to climb; there were cliffs, but they rose on either side of the path in an ominous manner, as if they might scythe down and crush him if he got too close. The terrain was otherwise easy to manage.

About halfway down the corridor he stopped to rest, and that was when his eyes caught upon something different in the topography: a doorway. It looked like a passage, as any other cave door looked, except that it was sealed and the decorations upon it looked detailed. The lights further down the main corridor shifted in value and became almost purple; they didn't look inviting, so he lingered by this massive doorway instead. Teyouma raised a hand and touched the surface, stroking it with his palm and carefully lifting his talons so that he wouldn't scratch it.

How odd, a doorway here, of all places... He looked up at it from where he's crouched, thinking that it looked more and more like a plain wall - except for that clean edge that indicated otherwise. Had someone sealed it shut? Was it a false door? He steps back and regards the thing with his neck straining, standing on his hind feet as tall as he can make himself; he flares his wings, balancing like that a few seconds, before coiling back up to a hunch.

Warmth radiated from door the simian's palm pressed against. It thrummed softly, as if it might almost be... living. Perhaps it was the overgrowths that gave off such a strange—seemingly imagined—feeling. A cluster of Oil-slicked gem jutted from a section of rock near where he sat. If Teyouma stared for long enough, they seemed to almost breathe.

@Teyouma II

Teyouma.

---

It occurred to him a few minutes later to investigate the area around the would-be door. Where the carvings terminated in to the floor, near the flanking sides of what would have been pedestals if the door had been open, and further along. Nearby where he had hunched was a cluster of something dark; he thought they might be mushrooms at first but they didn't feel right to him. More accurately: he couldn't feel anything coming off of them the way he would in Polaris, the interconnectedness conjured by his element. As mushrooms caused decay around them he often felt the presence of specific bacteria and could sense clusters in that manner; here there was nothing of the sort.

He approached the shapes and cautiously grasped one. His talons were useful in this moment, as he pried a smaller gem from the cluster and held it aloft using the sharp spikes of his claws as careful investigative tools. It would have been quite a sight if he'd had a lapidary's eyeglass to check for facets. The gem felt wet. It was layered with something but he couldn't determine what, and that something leaked upon his fingers and seemed to turn the digits a matte black. He didn't really notice because Teyouma's points were already a natural soot color.

Wondering if there were more clusters like this, and if they held any power like the other gems of the cave, he sent out a probing wave of magic.

Touching the oil-slicked gem would leave a sense of wrongness. A brief pulse and urge to smash it--destroy it--to crash it into something else and destroy that instead, to see what shattered pieces resulted and whether his own palms would bleed.

It would not fade, but it would dim, a dull throb in the back of his mind that would now accompany him, as if this magic had insinuated itself into him, as minor as it was--as persistent as it was.

His sense itself would show him a strange disparity, a dichotomy: the Pegasus side of the tunnel was... clean, peaceful. But there was magic as the tunnel darkened toward Draco: something that resonated with this new chaos that hummed in him.

Teyouma II has gained one point of Corruption. If he was not previously, he is now Touched.

@Teyouma II