Efrain had not wanted, nor ordered, a pint of ale, and yet the tavern keep of The Reason’s Piece still placed one down upon the warped wooden bar before him with a satisfying clunk. “Thank you, sir,” said Efrain, taken aback, “But I don’t believe that’s for me.” The barkeep said nothing. When Efrain made no move to pick up the ale, and the barkeep made no move to leave or stop staring at Efrain as if he were dismantling his very soul, Efrain smiled. “How are you today?” he asked, voice full of false cheer and true uncertainty.
“Oh, same old same old. As you know, kiddo, it’s the same soup just reheated every day,” replied the man, smile of his own plastered across his face and fixed in place. His expression was like a portrait that someone had painted who had never actually seen happiness, but had had it described to them while inebriated. “How are you?” Efrain couldn’t feel any malice from the man, but something was off, very off, and they both seemed to be aware of it.
If being referred to as ‘kiddo’ was not unsettling enough, the man’s false smile, and general pep would have been enough to send sensation of ice cascading down Efrain’s spine. He knew acting, had seen it in men and women his entire life who wanted something from him as well as on the face of his dearest friend, but this man’s act reeked of desperation. “About the same, I’m sure. My name is Efrain, and you are?”
“Onius Innern, at your service, Efrain!” He bellowed suddenly, throwing his hands in the air as if he’d made a grand statement, and Efrain startled back and off his barstool. Just as he spoke, the clock tower tolled and Onius froze. “Give me a mo, it’s time for a tally,” he whispered and pulled a chunk of cloth out of his apron pocket. Before Efrain could say anything more, the man abandoned him in order to stare at the back wall full of tallymarks, his breath quickening and eyes darting. “Where, where, where today? Where, where, where tomorrow? Always here, always here, but where, where, where…” he said. He shifted glasses out of the way on the shelves in search of an area free of a tally mark, stood on boxes to see higher, and got down on his hands and knees to inspect the floorboards. With each passing moment he became more manic, searching and searching for some open place to scratch a new tally mark.
So engrossed in watching Onius struggle, Efrain didn’t notice the being that had suddenly appeared to his right. He felt the air shift as they approached and jumped back, hand falling to his rapier at his side as he turned to survey them.
Time: The early hours of the morning, October 20th
Location: Dasratsel, The Reason’s Piece
Status: @rxnnxlhylxne
The Reason’s Piece was likely seeing an influx of business it wasn’t accustomed to now that Dasratsel was accessible by the public, but sitting downstairs in the dining area with Nil, Thalra wouldn’t have known that by just looking around. It was nearly abandoned-- even the bartender and owner had left his post behind the bar so shredded with tally marks after he’d given the twins breakfast. Thalra didn’t mind, she liked the privacy, and knew Nil didn’t like crowds anyway. She poked at the food with her fork, fresh eggs and bacon with a side of porridge, which looked delicious but was still altogether unappealing to her. Her appetite had vanished a few days ago, as had her ability to rest. Thalra didn’t know what it meant, that she could look at the food in front of her and not even feel a pang of hunger when she hadn’t eaten anything at all yesterday, but it likely wasn’t a good sign.
Abandoning her fork, Thalra picked up the pen she’d been using before and scribbled another name into the notebook that was quickly filling up with her neat, cursive handwriting. “Lord and Lady Pellezin should be a last resort,” she said, continuing a conversation they’d been having on and off for the last few days. Nil was adamant that he was staying in the town with her when it disappeared, and Thalra continued on making lists of resources he could take advantage of when she was gone. “If you need a favor, give them my name and you’ll have what you need no questions asked, but they’re a conniving pair, so keep your wits about you.” Nil would also always have an ally in Efrain, but she doubted it would be her brother’s first inclination to go to him for help. Or go to anyone for help for that matter, even if his life depended on it, which it likely would. Frustrating as it was, Nil wore guilt like a cloak around his shoulders.
Feeling the beginnings of a migraine coming on Thalra reached for the cup of tea by her plate and took a small sip, hoping the caffeine would banish her headache. She grimaced immediately at the taste. “Of course this place wouldn’t even have good tea,” she mumbled, massaging her temple to try and ease the tension there.
Time: Mid day, October 14th
Location: Dasratsel, near the fountain in the town square.
Status: @pyrope-almandine
Thalra hadn’t managed to get any rest last night, too busy wandering the town and searching for answers that might explain to her why she’d suddenly been thrust into a waking nightmare. What she had gleaned from the citizens of this town wasn’t comforting. They all had a glassy look in their eyes, a fog that they’d grown tired of fighting through, and beyond that? Pity. For her. Part of them recognized something in her and they felt sorry. It scared her more deeply than anything else in this strange, horrid town.
She sat on a bench near the fountain and watched a few of the citizens walk towards it as if in a trance, then shake out of their stupor and scamper away from the large granite figures, fear in their eyes. It reminded her of the look people got on their faces when they climbed stairs in the dark and thought there was one more step than there was. The sudden shock of falling when you were certain your foot would hit solid wood. Thalra didn’t approach the fountain, only sat on the bench nearby and stared. Was this what the rest of her life was going to be like?
She sighed and looked away, out onto the winding paths that lead away from the square. What she expected to find were more dull faces, but instead she saw a familiar figure coming towards her.
“Pyrope!” she shouted, springing from the bench, so happy to see someone familiar in a sea of strangers. It only occurred to her as she stumbled to a halt in front of the woman that this could all be some horrid illusion meant to give her hope so that it might immediately be stripped away. “I’m so glad to see you. You’re real, aren’t you?” She reached out and touched Pyrope’s arm. It was solid, to her immense relief, though it brought more troubling thoughts to her mind. “Did he take you as well? Are you trapped here too?”
Efrain found that he disliked Dasratsel with a passion. Not just because it stole his most beloved friend amongst hundreds and hundreds of others, though that was a large contributing factor, but because it was awful. Every creek could be a ghoul, every person could hold another strange occurrence like books turning to ash or strange story of a locket, and everything, even the very air, felt uncanny and unsettling to breath.
He recognized his own hypocrisy of course given that his own abilities made his very blood uncanny and unsettling, but the looming manor before him and Mareona brought the levels of unnerving to an entirely new height he was not excited to achieve.
In his hand he had the full list of the missing people. A few of them he’d already checked off as being present in the town including Eilla Alloramir, Nork Ickle, and now Sir Ollint, but they had hundreds more to locate. Ollint had been the most pitiable Efrain had encountered yet, his stilted and limited speech making Efrain feel at once enraged and nauseous. They had a job to do, however, so he pushed aside his discomfort. He’d requested Mareona’s company and service because of her desire to aid him and to see just how capable and trustworthy she was. He liked her, he could acknowledge that, but her amiability did not prove her to be useful nor reliable. His instincts, and his cat, told him to believe in her, but he couldn’t without proof.
“Are you ready, Mareona?” he asked his fellow bloodhunter as he stepped inside the door, eye trained on Ollint in case the dwarf tried to step them from entering the strange manor, but all he did was mutter “Loyal to… loyal to…” over and over as he had been doing. Efrain grimaced at the sight, but quickly wiped away his discomfort. Ahead of him the manor stretched off in all directions. At least the entire thing seemed to be dimly lit throughout. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to this part in our exploration, myself.”
It had been ten days. She sat on the bench in front of the fountain and counted her time here on her hands. Ten days. No, eleven? Had it been ten or eleven days in this town? She went back in her memory, a soft fuzzy pounding in her head to accompany her, and tried to separate the days that kept blurring together. When was the last time she’d rested? When was the last time she’d eaten? Where was Nil? What excuse had she given him to extract herself from his watchful and worried gaze? She looked around at the scenery and only saw townspeople buzzing back and forth. Their feet didn’t drag, they marched, like toy soldiers who’d walked these paths a hundred thousand times before. The sun was high in the sky, clouds circling it like water circling a drain. It was unnatural, strange, but she had seen so many strange things these past… ten days? Eleven days?
As if on instinct, her hands went to her bag—the one Nil had given back to her when he’d come to find her, he was here, he’d come here with Efrain—and she pulled out the violin that always made her think of her time with Pyrope in Kaivras. The sun had been so much hotter there. Her eyes had watered in the morning at sunrise, and in the evening at sunset. Her eyes were not watering now. She got to her feet and walked towards the fountain; the neck of her violin clasped in her hand like she might swing it at the stone creatures standing back to back in the center of the pool of water. When she reached the edge of it, for a few moments all Thalra could do was watch the water pouring from the basins, fighting the urge to reach her other hand out and disrupt the stream with her fingers.
Instead, she sat on the stone rim, her back towards the statues. She brought her violin up to rest on her shoulder and her chin found home at its base. Her bow came up in her other hand next and she placed it on the strings of her instrument, pausing to take a deep breath as she did before every performance. There was a sound like stone fracturing and cracking behind her, and she imagined in the back of her mind that the two figures in the fountain had turned their heads to look at her. Thalra didn’t dare look back at them; knew that if she did, she would find something that would change her fundamentally in their eyes.
The song that sprang from her violin then was not one she remembered learning. It started off quietly, sweetly, shy like a gentle breeze rustling the grassy fields of a childhood home she’d never known. She thought of a farmhouse, small but lovingly built by a halfling man’s hands for his heavily pregnant wife whom he cherished. The song became joyful, bright, quick, and when she opened her mouth to sing the words were meaningless to her, in a language she didn’t understand. There was someone drawing nearer, but Thalra’s eyes had been turned up towards the sky, watching the swirling clouds. When she looked back down there was a halfling woman standing before her, eyes brimming with tears. She was just a few feet away. If Tharla got up she could grab the woman by the arm, pull her in, throw her into the-
She kept playing and the music became somber and slow. That childhood home was empty now, the fields overgrown and wild. The halfling woman looked away from Thalra and to the fountain and took a few steps forward until she was looking into the water. Her reflection stared back at her, eyes baring a spark of recognition that had not existed there in years. Thalra’s song was almost over now, the final notes approaching like an arrow splitting the air. She watched the halfling woman reach her hand out slowly to the water and knew what would happen if she touched it. The water was so deep, so murky that the bottom was obscured entirely, but if she looked hard enough there was an image there underneath the water. A brightly lit farmhouse, a mother and father waiting at the front door, surrounded by rows of golden wheat. Thalra could have stopped her from reaching out, it would be so simple, if only she’d stop playing.
But she didn’t. She watched the woman bend over the edge of the fountain, her hand hovering above the water, fingers splayed until—
Thalra opened her eyes as if she’d just come out of a deep sleep. Hours must have passed judging by where the sun now was in the sky. She was sitting on the bench in front of the fountain again, the water rushing from the stone pots just as they always had been. Nothing had changed except that her violin sat beside her on the bench. How odd, she though, as she stored it back into her bag. She had no memory of taking it out to begin with.
The day before this—that was right wasn’t it? It had only been a day ago that Thalra had heard Allyria in her mind, voice determined like it had been a handful of decades ago before her civilization had proved beyond saving. Allyria told her about a plan to attack the clock tower at midnight the next night, and told her to rally anyone she could. Thalra had been sitting at the fountain, as she had nearly every day since she’d arrived in Dasratsel. She considered trying to sway people into fighting back against this town, considered summoning the energy required to do that. Then she’d picked up her violin again, and started to play, and Allyria’s words were washed away by the sound of water cascading out of stone pots and into the waiting basin of the fountain.
Now it was dark, just past midnight, and Thalra could smell smoke. The thick kind of smoke that meant the fire was large and hungry. She turned her head towards a beacon of orange and red and saw that a building was burning. There was a great cracking sound as timber support beams gave way and the roof collapsed, and all Thalra could do was stare, her eyes watering and stinging from the heat. There was shouting, someone was screaming like Thalra had never heard anyone scream before. It was like an animal dying, frantic and terrified and beyond emotion.
How had she gotten here? Why couldn’t she remember?
There was a hand in her hand, gripping so firmly that it could have been just another extension of her arm. Thalra looked to the hand in hers and followed the arm up to a face. It was Nil’s, her brother’s face—but wasn’t he dead? He had disappeared, she hadn’t seen him in so long, and—no. No, that wasn’t right. “Nil?” she asked, confused. He said something she couldn’t hear beyond all the screaming and sounds of windows shattering, but he placed his palm against her cheek and it was warm and real in a way that so little was in Dasratsel.
After that, he pulled her away from the burning building and they both started to run. A memory overlaid itself like a film on her vision, of a much younger Nil, pulling her out of a dark cavern, until they both saw sunlight for the first time. Would they see sunlight again, when they were done running from what was chasing them now? Thalra turned back and looked over her shoulder to see a tower jutting upwards and stabbing the sky. There were huge eyes on the four faces of the tower and the pupils flitted back and forth with an angry, savage energy. She could have sworn one landed on her and lingered, calling her back. But her brother’s hand was in hers and it pulled her along.
Before they reached the edge of town, Nil stopped. Someone else touched her arm, and the grip was familiar. She looked up and saw Efrain looking down at her, face hardened and stained with soot, his sword unsheathed and glowing. He was saying something to Nil and Nil was saying something back, looking tense. Thalra wanted to ask Efrain why he looked so worried, but the words were like molasses filling her mouth, and by the time she’d swallowed the bile in her throat, Efrain was already running towards the clocktower. Thalra watched the shape of his back becoming blurry against the heat of the fires raging, and felt despair solidify like a stone in her stomach. “Efrain,” she said, but he was already gone and Nil had already begun to drag her in the opposite direction.
When they reached the edge of the town, the pain started. It began in her temples, like an electric shock, and she screamed, clutching at the side of her head with the hand that wasn’t in Nil’s. He was still pulling her, but now it felt like something else had a hold of her too, gripping her tightly and possessively. He wanted her to stay. It would be easier to stay. He was offering her a place in the city he’d built; how dare she be so ungrateful? What was waiting for her in the world outside Dasratsel? More rejection, more pain? Her brother would abandon her again, once he saw the truth of her and was reminded why he’d left in the first place. Pyrope, who was just as dangerous, just as ruthless and angry as she was, couldn’t stomach the truth of Thalra. She had failed Efrain and it was only a matter of time before he found a piece of her he couldn’t accept. She’d never have to worry about any of that here, so why was she so eager to leave?
Thalra tried to tare her hand out of Nil’s grasp. “Let go!” she screamed, and her throat stung with the force of it. “Let go of me!” But he kept pulling her towards the edge. It felt like he was about to throw her from the top of a cliff, with jagged, sharp rocks the only thing waiting to catch her. Panic tore at her chest; her heart beating so fast Thalra was sure it would give out. She had to get away from him, she had to go back into town. She would die, he was killing her, he was-
Then, between one step and the next, she was free.
Air rushed into her lungs as she gasped and fell to her knees. Her head turned back to stare at the city, alight with magic and destruction, and she felt the last death rattle of the magic that had plagued her mind for more than a month leave her. It was over. The town no longer had any hold on her.
So why did she feel so empty?
With that last thought in her mind, darkness crept into the edge of her vision. She tilted sideways, and felt arms wrap around her shoulders before she could fall into the grass. Then, unconsciousness took her.
