@rohanxpersaudx For as long as he had been communing with the dead, Rohan knew well the suffocating blanket of the grave—the way it could coat a place like a thick, unwieldy muck, heavy and rancid, unable to be shaken off completely. One could only chip away at it, scratch off bits. But a person could never again really own a place with a death in it, no. And for all of them now, not one could any longer call Lunar Cove their own. The wails pierced him to his very core, and the monster of dread, first manifested that February, once again began to claw its way up his spine, digging its nails into his back and refusing to let loose. Rohan wandered from the crowd in something of a daze, then, retreating from the rising chaos. Who is it? Who is it? He considered, then, opening the door, turning on the light in his mind to see who might answer his call.
But he would not be able to raise spirits in this state, no, and in any case, he found himself startled by a voice in the dark. Rohan glanced up at it, blinking a few times, before making out a familiar face. “Oh…uh.” His brow shot up. “Sure, yes. Wait, are you…? Nevermind.” He shook his head, dutifully grabbing the bundle of clothes into his arms. “Do you want me to, like, just throw them in the water? The shore’s rocky. You know what? I’m going to lay them right here where you can reach them. And then I’m going to turn around and stand guard, okay?”
x
Alder could feel the daze wafting off of the man as he spoke and then focused. “Am I – yeah, I’m probably exactly the one you’re thinking of,” he answered. He watched the man a second longer and then climbed up the rocks, peering out from underneath his eyebrows into the darkness. He looked for any auric features in the crowd that might detail what had just taken place – but all he could see was the fuzz, sporadic colors of a crowd moving to disperse.
“Thanks,” he muttered, slipping on his clothes, one leg and arm at a time, standing a guard of his own. “That – that sound, that was a banshee. A fucking banshee.” He might’ve been talking out of a weird sense of shock, having just gone below the water when everything was fine enough, and breaking the surface into a stranger place. “You know where everybody you love is, guy? We should move on. Crowd’s got the right idea even if there’s a bunch of different notions on how to do it safely.”