Plotted Starter for @overlooksouls - John Constantine & Johanna Constantine
The air was heavy with dust, satured to the point of being almost unbreathable. He might be used to the much more suffocating, toxic fumes of Pandemonia, but that didn’t make every gulp of oxygen he had to take less unpleasant.
John cursed heavily out aloud, which was a mistake because it just triggered another painful fit of coughing that shook his whole upper body for thirty good seconds. Fuck that rotten mine. Fuck the idiots who had chosen it. And fuck them all over again a second time for not having made sure to delete that bloody thing from history’s memory once and for all. If they had done their job properly, he wouldn’t have been standing there now, forced to finish it.
There was a very good reason if Hell itself had decided to lock away those entities. There was a very good reason if the punishment of the one who had been so foolish to open their cage had been one of the harshest in history. And there was a very good reason why the last person who had got their hands on that cursed Box had wanted it forgotten, as were the horrors that it had once unleashed in times far too ancient for their echoes to reach the present.
The magician gritted his teeth, hands uselessly brushing off the soil that had clung to his coat and trousers while he had crawled his way down in the depth of the earth. There it was, encased in a half collapsed wall of rock, its metal surface as shiny and exquisitely carved as if it hadn’t spent the last two centuries buried away in humidity and dirt.
A shiver ran down Constantine’s spine, against his will. During his life he had faced and touched and tasted evil in too many forms to count, and yet there was something in the dark energy that emanated from the Box that caused even the Hellblazer to pause. A part of him felt a terror that was much older than he was or could ever be, a fear that dated before the era of humanity. It made him want to rush back where he had come from and forget about that whole affair. Let someone else deal with it, because his own plate was always too full of shit that demanded his attention anyway.
On the other hand, though, just as strong was the attraction. The dark charm of a power that alluringly whispered tales of both unspeakable horrors and endless possibilities in his ears. It was addictive, far more than the adrenaline that the fear was pumping in his system, and John Constantine had never been good at resisting that sort of tempation.
His palms pressed against the Box’s enchanted surface before he could realise that he had stepped forward. The artefact hummed under his touch, the vibration spreading through his skin and nerves, so deliciously terrifying. What a dangerous high it was, because he knew how to open it and touch its power, but not how to seal it back closed.
His contemplation, however, was cut short abruptly. In his daze and rush, he hadn’t realised that he had cut himself during the uncomfortable journey down to the chamber where the Box was being held and blood had started to drip from his fingers down on the metal. The crimson liquid slipped in the chiseled lines and following them, flowing faster and faster until it reached one particular seal, less perfect and less deeply carved than the others
The next moment, the artefact began to glow, so bright that John felt himself being swallowed by it and then...nothing.
He couldn’t have said for how long he had been suspended in the blinding light, but when his consciousness suddenly came back he was no longer in the depths of the mine. Instead, he was on his hands and knees on a large lawn, spread around a building that, even at distance, caught the eye for the noble, rich elegance of its structure.
The place was completely foreign, even if there was a nagging feeling of familiarity he couldn’t place at the back of his skull. And, even worse, Pandora’s Box was nowhere in sight.
The magician gaped, blue eyes wide as his mind scrambled to try, in vain, to grasp what had happened.
“Woh in th’ bloody Nines...?”
