Somewhere in the woods
Dawn, 17th February - The New Moon
This world is strange, solid, and long absent from their mind.
A tether draws her along it's string, from a mirrored surface to the snowy edge that separates her from her destiny. It is the first glimpse of the night sky she has stolen in time immeasurable, and the scent of regret and loss drives her through the snow, through the woods, and through the fields, for weeks and weeks she follows that shimmering trail, until she finds the black crevice that opens up into the earth, a bright and iridescent tether leading her from the cold open skies into the dark of the earth.
16th Feburary - Yesterday.
He should not see the stars. And yet he has watched with dread as the sun crept across the sky, watching its dull glow pass behind clouds that had hung stoic and stalwart for years immemorial.
By the time it had begun creeping westward and sinking towards the treetops, he had moved to gather the things, knowing that his watch was ending, and the time for action was nearing. The seals were not meant to be broken - something must've happened outside to drain them of their power.
The old Vampire treks through snow and underbrush, gathers the things in his arm needed, as per the old Witch's orders. Like a whisp of wind he darts about the perimeter of the space, setting down the appropriated trinkets as anchor points as the withered old tome cradled beneath his arm instructs. The sun is setting now, and the dark of a new moon is billowing out of the eastern sky. He must hurry.
These caverns are no longer untouched. There are dozens of craggy rifts and crevices that lead into them though, and the silvery undulating shape that squeezes through passages and caverns to small or two wide or too deep for the mortal creatures who now use these caves makes deft usage of its formless shape in staying unseen.
Before long it finds the end of it's tether, traced to the center of a glistening room.
It waits, motionless and hidden, for hours, until it is certain it will not be seen or heard. When safety is assured, it drools and crawls down the glistening walls towards the crystalline shape in the center of the room. She is crying, it senses, crying without tears, trapped in this shimmering form, immortal and omniscient and horribly alive. It wasn't what I desired, the crystal woman's thoughts weep into its mind. It's misery! It's endless misery!
The shape slithers on unknowable limbs around it's tether. This one will make it better. It reassures. Be at peace and now we are better.
17th Feburary - The New Moon
The Ancors are set, and now comes the danger. He flies through the woods, the old vampire, under cover of night, a small sack in tow, until he spills frantically out onto the shores of a placid lake, one whose surface is like that of a mirror. The Witch sits where he always has, body little more than withered leather on dry bones, husked in clothes worn ragged by the ages. Across from him sits another withered husk, more wolf than man, bones crested in frost. To their side is another mummified husk, its skin dotted in strange tattoos, and across from the old hunter sits the Vampire's spot, empty, for it is time for him to fulfill his purpose.
The Seal must be reinforced.
Wolfblood, Inked Skin, Magical Blood and..."
The Vampire puts the first three into a pot before he painfully pries his last fang free, grinding them together into a foul paint.
Between the four of them it rests, the old human bones, mortal and untouched by innate magics, formed into a seal. He needs only re-apply the runes as written to reinforce the seal.
The Crystal figure's protesting thoughts are silenced as she's torn apart, shattered under the uknowable thing's weight, it is all at once muscular and flabby, all at once spindly and rotund, all at once shadowy and solid. Amidst the crystal it finds a mote of glowing glimmer inside what might have once been a heart or a mind or a soul, and it crushes it, snuffs out that spark, and watches as that glistening glimmering tether draws it to the source, and in a silent, strange absence of light and sound, it takes on its fated shape.
Apsara rises from the space. She rises. She is Apsara.
The creature feels its ephemeral form fading, becoming Apsara. Feels mortality warming its existence. Feels taste and touch and hears sound and feels the wonderful buffet of potential that true existence offers. Feels magic.
Apsara smiles. There is one last thing she must do, before she has fulfilled her duty and can simply exist.
The horrid paint applied, the Vampire begins walking the edge of the mirror and speaking the chant. Words he has been practicing for countless years. His steps are slow and deliberate. He is tired.
At a quarter of the length of his walk, he sees something that stops him and creeps cold dread up his spine; footsteps lead from the surface of the lake.
Fear dawns with the realization that he has already failed - they've already escaped.
He follows the steps with his eyes to the treeline, and then back to the lake, and then he sees another set. And then another. The thought draws his eyes to the lake, and he sees now, the stars in the lake's reflection are not stars, but eyes - an easy mistake to make, as they are similarly uncountable.
The wind blows now, for the first time in his long memory, since the sealing of this lake and its clearing, and it brings with it snow. The surface ripples and he sees something mercurial step onto the surface. It is him, except not. There is something horrific about it that makes his mind begin to wither and scream.
The Vampire rushes back to the bone seal, tarred together with its new coat. He flips through the old grimoire and begins to trace a different set of sigils into the sealing paint, his eyes drawing towards the horrible self that stalks toward him only long enough to gauge the proximity of his doom.
The whirling gyre of existence slithers around him, hands that aren't hands wrapping around him as he finishes the old Witch's alchemical rite.
The seal is broken, the Mirror Lake open to the world. But all around Port Leiry, something expands until it traps everyone and everything inside.
