@witchofwarmth wrote:
Winter was a difficult time of year for everyone on the Zoza peninsula, and a time when magic was needed most. Snow needs melting, homes heating, the longer nights lighting. Simple work in high demand.
It could run any fire-witch ragged. Olruggio tried to let the thought comfort him - that the thinness he felt was shared by his peers, and that they were pushing themselves alongside him. But... he knew his hands didn't just shake from the cold; and that strange shadows on the dark, snowy landscape wouldn't bother others so deeply.
He'd started having that nightmare again.
Blackened, frostbitten, curled up under the newest snowfall... the lanterns cold and dark along the road, and the houses colder and darker still.... small, shining torch wavering in the cold...
One of them.... moves
And Olruggio-
-wakes with a lurch, the ends on a scream tearing his throat. Shit. Where was he? Where? It was dark and cold and damp and... soft. Soft? He holds the ground beneath him and finds upholstery and blankets, a pillow, damp from his own clammy, shivering body.
The sofa...The atelier... I was only asleep.
With a shaky breath, he sits and tries to calm himself, but the sweat is making it hard to pull away from the memory. He's too tired. The heaviness in his body and the lightness of the shaking are disorienting.
If he wraps himself tightly, boils under his covers, he might remember how to breathe.
There's a light in the next corridor that he doesn't notice, the tapping of footsteps...
It’s not entirely unusual for Olruggio to make a little too much noise at weird hours, talking to himself or puttering around the kitchen for a midnight snack. There have even been one or two untranslatable exclamations from his atelier across the bridge while he’s been hard at work, and this is mostly just a normal part of living with him. Quifrey took the liberty of putting sound dampening glyphs on the doors to the girls’ dormitories a long time ago, because he too had a tendency for late night nattering.
But this... This is very different.
Quifrey has no such silencing spells around his own bedroom because he prefers to know exactly what’s going on at the atelier at all times, some might say a bit neurotically. But there are nights it proves useful instead of just paranoid.
He hadn’t been sleeping anyway. He’s lurching out of bed on reflex and grabbing his glasses, already out his door before the scream has even fully registered in his mind.
A scream... with so much pain in it. And horror. Something is very wrong.
His heart threatens to choke him for a few horrible moments, because of course he recognized Olruggio’s voice and Olruggio is extremely important, but he keeps himself steady and measured, and checks the living room first where Olruggio had fallen asleep on the sofa after dinner.
He’s still there, and Quifrey’s poor heart is allowed to fall down a few notches closer to its home ribcage again. Olruggio is sitting up in a tangle of blankets, whole and unharmed, but so very pale, sweat making pinpricks of his black hair stick at his forehead.
“Olruggio...”
Quifrey has a general idea of what this might be, but he won’t get ahead of himself. He steps quietly into the room.