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Post by Noa on Nov 28, 2021 1:59:38 GMT -6
And after a time, the spasms stopped, and his breathing slowed to something that resembled its normal pace. He sat up, and methodically began cataloguing his other hurts: bruises on his knees, already dark and purpling; cuts on his hands with the glass still embedded in the skin. Grim-faced, he removed them one by one. "Rhys," he said.
The Faeron said nothing, but there was a soft golden glow, and the darkness faded from his skin; the gashes along the heels of his palms knit and became whole again. There was only a little blood, dried in streaks along his arms, to show where the cuts had once been.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Noa sat in the grass with Rhys beside him. Distantly he could hear the sound of birds. The sun was high in the sky now -- noon, when they had arrived in early morning. The same day, hopefully.
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Post by Noa on Nov 28, 2021 2:00:12 GMT -6
Noa had no way to know for sure, but he supposed he would find out once he reached his own estate.
He was about to get up, to brush himself off and make for home, when Rhys spoke up. {Did you...} Noa glanced down at the Faeron, frowning. There was an unusually reserved tone to the Faeron's voice, one that felt strange and unfamiliar.
"Did I what?" said Noa.
{What did you see? Back there,} said Rhys. There was something in the way he said it, as if he was being careful about something. As if he was hinting at something, but Noa couldn't guess what it was. Noa's frown deepened.
"What was there to see? The whole place was a mess," he said, his voice sharp with distaste. "That last room, with the--"
No, no, no. It can't be, it's not--
Noa blinked.
The recollection had come to him, unbidden.
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Post by Noa on Nov 28, 2021 2:05:29 GMT -6
A room, brightly lit, lined with cases filled with greenish liquid, inside which monsters lay suspended -- except the room had been dark, and he had put his hand on the glass -- no, that wasn't right, he'd fallen -- and inside, he saw -- he saw --
He put a hand to his head. The vertigo had returned with force, a pounding pulse in time with his heartbeat. He grit his teeth against it, fought to breathe, fought to stay upright.
{You remembered,} said Rhys.
"What are you saying?"
{It was a mistake coming here.} Noa felt a touch at his temple -- when had Rhys crawled back onto his shoulders? {This was a bad idea, wasn't it?} A chill ran down Noa's spine, though he didn't understand why. There was something important here; if only he could focus... {It's a good thing it never happened, isn't it?}
"What..." said Noa. That didn't make any sense.
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Post by Noa on Nov 28, 2021 2:15:13 GMT -6
What did Rhys mean, it hadn't...? They'd come to the mansion today, because... because he'd been feeling restless, and they'd... He'd seen the flowers... They'd gone up to the door, and...
... and he'd opened it, and seen the darkened room, bare and stripped of furnishings, as though someone had moved out in a hurry. There had been a rancid smell... It hadn't been worth it. He'd left in disgust, and the flowers... He'd found all this strange trash behind the house in a pile of discarded nonsense. Some of it had been interesting. There was a book...
"What was that just now?" he said. He shook his head, then winced immediately as a stab of pain shot through it. "Nnngh."
{You were sick,} said Rhys. {I guess I didn't get the treatment right this morning...}
"Do it again," Noa said. He couldn't go through the rest of the day like this.
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Post by Noa on Nov 28, 2021 2:15:27 GMT -6
{Here?} Rhys blinked up at him.
Noa rolled his eyes. "Yes, here. Where else?"
{Don't you think we should go home first? If you're not feeling well--}
"You want me to make it home in this state? I can hardly focus enough to cast a spell, let alone walk the whole way." Not for the first time, he cursed this thrice-damned body of his. Weak and useless, afflicted with this inconvenient affliction... "What are you waiting for?" he said, when Rhys didn't immediately begin administering the healing energy.
{... No, you're right. Hold on.} As Noa looked on, Rhys began to glow gently with golden light. A warmth spread from the place where he was perched on Noa's shoulders, suffusing his entire body, and gradually the aches and pains began to ebb, until he could only feel them as a faint muttering at the periphery of his sense. Not perfect, but better.
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Post by Noa on Nov 28, 2021 2:27:00 GMT -6
He finally felt as though he could think again. It wasn't the worst episode he had ever experienced, not by a long shot, but it hadn't been this bad in a while. That was a troubling development, though it was still possible that this was only a particularly unpleasant flare up, and not an indication of a more rapid decline... And Rhys had still been able to stave it off, in the end.
Still, it was an unpleasant reminder of the predicament that he was in, the predicament that he had been in since he was born. The illness that had claimed the lives of all his kin, or at least those who hadn't been killed before their time by other means.
He reached inside the bag, relieved to find that he still had it on him. That it hadn't been lost while he was indisposed was a good thing.
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Post by Noa on Nov 28, 2021 2:27:23 GMT -6
He rummaged through the contents until he found the book at the bottom, and pulled it out so he could look at it again. The strange runes stared back at him, though for a moment the lines on the page swam disconcertingly, and he could have sworn that the runes were writhing...
... Perhaps Rhys had the right of it, and he really ought to be making his way back to the estate. He misliked the idea of cutting the day short, but there was plenty of work that could be done at home, if only he could get away from the nagging insistence from Rhys that he should rest, once they were back there. This, more than anything else, showed him just how little room he had for rest. Five years had been his estimate this summer, but now he wondered if he had been too optimistic about his prospects after all.
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Post by Noa on Nov 28, 2021 2:30:30 GMT -6
He could only hope that the book was a lead, and not more junk. Its contents might not even have any pertinent value to him, but if it was a new rune language, then at least it would open up new avenues of investigation, perhaps...
Well, he would decipher it at his leisure from the comfort of his own study.
"Let's go," he said. He could feel Rhys sagging against his neck in relief, and huffed slightly at the Faeron. "Don't be melodramatic. It was just a flare up."
{Well, yes, but... I'm glad we're going back, all the same. This place really gives me the creeps.} Rhys shuddered as Noa began preparing the spell to take them back home. It was a waste of energy, but he didn't want to walk back. Not that he would admit as much to Rhys, but the day had taken more out of him than he had thought...
65 (exit)
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Post by Nadia on Nov 28, 2021 9:03:25 GMT -6
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Post by Noa on Jan 29, 2023 0:16:35 GMT -6
It wasn't that Noa wanted to come to this place. It was that being here was, unfortunately, a vital part of keeping things running for himself and his research. That trader in town often asked for things from this place, and while Noa had had a healthy stock of the items previously, he was beginning to run low. And so... Well, here he was.
Frankly speaking, it wasn't his favorite place to be. Actually, picking things up for the trader wasn't his favorite thing to do in a general sense. It was always necessary, since if you thought about the credit worth of most of this stuff, that business offered a much better going rate than he could get anywhere else. But the things that they asked for were also stranger, and none of them could be easily procured with straight credits in any great quantity, which was the core of the difficulty.
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Post by Noa on Jan 29, 2023 0:16:47 GMT -6
Accompanying him on his foray was, as always, Rhys. The Faeron ought to have been in good spirits. He liked new places, or at least places they hadn't visited in quite some time, and they really hadn't been here since... Noa couldn't remember. That must have meant that it was a really long time ago. And while the Mansion was unpredictable, at least it wasn't a physical slog of a journey the way that mining inevitably was these days. Noa had been taking the gargoyle with them less and less often, which meant that it was up to him, mostly, to provide the labour -- something that Noa was neither used to nor good at. But one did what one had to do to fund one's ventures, and unfortunately sometimes there was nothing for it but to put in the hard labor yourself.
But in the Mansion, you could just pick up what you found.
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Post by Noa on Jan 29, 2023 0:16:57 GMT -6
And the unpredictability wasn't exactly convenient, but it wasn't necessarily bad either. Sometimes it was just strange, in a benign sort of way. They'd been here before too, even if Noa could no longer remember their last trip. There had been trips before. There was no reason for histrionics. But Rhys remained uneasy the whole walk there, and even seeing the place didn't seem to do much to assuage his concerns, though Noa could feel the tension ebb ever so slightly from the Faeron's body where it was tucked against his neck, the weight of Rhys's haunches supported by Noa's shoulder.
"It's not even October. Don't be a coward," Noa said.
The view through the gates was perfectly... Well, 'innocuous' was probably a strong word for it, but it didn't exactly radiate a sense of threat. If anything, it seemed more tailored to inspire wonder in its audience, dazzling them with refracted light.
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Post by Noa on Jan 29, 2023 0:18:24 GMT -6
Wryly, Noa thought Rhys ought to even be able to relate. He had a lot of innate light magic, though most of it wasn't the dazzling kind, and was instead used for healing. Still, if it weren't for the more bluish cast of the courtyard, Rhys might have fit right in, with his soft colors and tinted-glass wings.
And despite the crystalline foliage that now decorated the front yard, the general structure of the Mansion grounds was still essentially unchanged. There was the border of the property, which never did seem to change very much; and there were trees and shrubs, which were still trees and shrubs, if a rather strange looking variety. At the heart of it was still a house, if in a different style than the ones that Noa had seen prior, this time sporting stained glass windows and rather more ornate details than some of its other iterations.
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Post by Noa on Jan 29, 2023 0:19:33 GMT -6
The only wholly new feature visible from the outside were the crystal spires, and it was entirely possible that these were simply overwrought lawn decorations. There was no accounting for taste, but if they weren't harmful, then what need was there for any alarm?
"You see, perfectly safe. The theme this month seems to be crystals. Perhaps the house is jealous of the mines in the mountains," Noa said. He rather doubted that was the case, but there was a case to be made for this place possibly having a mind of its own, so he didn't rule out the idea entirely. That said, he wasn't interested in the specifics beyond how it might help or hinder his goals of finding collectible things to trade to that strange fellow in town, so he wasn't about to devote a lot of his energy to studying the phenomenon or anything silly like that.
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Post by Noa on Jan 29, 2023 0:26:07 GMT -6
If someone else wanted to spend the time, he might have skimmed the ensuing papers, though he was sure any such publication would have been drafted with different goals in mind than what he would be reading it for. That kind of work tended to be done by people with more curiosity than sense -- and if they were publishing something about it, likely with more money and more time too, or at least backed by someone of that nature.
But he hadn't found any literature of the sort just yet, so for now the question went unanswered.
Still, even with that uncertainty hanging in the air, there was no shortage of people who explored the place, hoping to find their own riches, without finding too much of the Mansion's inhospitable side. And oh, the Mansion did indeed possess one; there were more than enough stories to corroborate that sort of thing.
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