The eye shifted while its veins flopped lazily across the stone, twitching with each microscopic movement imaginable to see. Then it dilated slowly, and deliberately as if recognizing the presence of something alive for the first time in centuries.
It stared at him.
And though Rowel didn't flinch, fear licked the edges of his chest.
It didn't just look at him, it was more of a touch tohis mind, metaphorically and surgically.
The chain twitched, as if it was trying to move… to scream.
Thick, black tears welled in the corners of it. Slow and viscous, like petroleum. The kind of grief that doesn't fall... it drips.
It screamed.
It screamed inside Rowel's mind, A scream so loud, so human, so ancient and raw, it flooded every crack of his consciousness. The scream of a man who had not been allowed to scream for lifetimes. A sound made not from lungs, but from all the years it lived there. Tormented as god-knows-what it is now.
Rowel stumbled back a step.
Behind the eye, in the distant dark, something moved. It sounded like Flesh, dragging against stone, both wet and heavy.
He didn't need to see it to know:
That was Tin Magi's true shape.
And the eye, or maybe this small, helpless thing on the rock was merely what his mind could handle.
She confirmed it with a murmur.
❝That is only what your mind can comprehend of him.❞
She watched him. Silently, as the eye didn't stop staring.
Rowel felt it. That begging. Not in words, but in sensation. A silent plea that pulsed from the retina like a heartbeat.
It was asking him to burn it, to end it, to erase whatever had been allowed to exist this long.
But before he could move any further, the floor beneath him cracked, then vanished into a pitless darkness.
"...!!!"
He dropped like a coin through water, bite before he reached a pit that he didn't know what it was, his hands grasped dirt.
He was clinging to the edge of a cliff, where there was wind to hit him. Real wind. The kind that carried salt with it.
Below him was an ocean, writhing with tides, and above him was a normal sky, shockingly normal, freckled with stars and a moon that hung low, swollen and close. This was not the void anymore.
He let out a yell. Faint. His jests and jokes were no longer there on his face. This was the face of panic, real and never faked.
His fingers dug into the cliffside, with his nails splitting against stone. There was no magic in his limbs. No tricks up his coat this time, Just sheer, human desperation.
But he wasn't alone.
From a distance, footsteps approached. It came right from above him.
Followed by the sounds, came the shape. Tall, Crooked, and wrapped in a long cloak woven from shadow. Its body twitched with every step, each movement accompanied by the crunch of bone bending the wrong way.
Then… its head began to form.
A moon-pale face. Smooth and almost flawless until its features began to shape, it was as if Rowel was watching something born. Its eyes were hollow, too dark to be there, then came a stretch of an arch that was below its small nose, lips stretching in an unfathomable smile, of course that wasn't close to human.
Rowel froze, stopped trying to get back up because he knew that face. He knew it too damn well.
It was from one of the memories he carried that belonged to a man who saw nothing in his younger days other than this thing.
It leaned down, hovering closer.
"He said you shouldn't be here…" the thing whispered, and followed its breathy words with a smile. "So I thought I may as well come to take you."
It crept closer, the closer it got, the clearer the sound of its ribcage breaking. Rowel was in shock. The 'he' which the creature mentioned was the last straw that finally brought absolute terror on Rowel's face. His grin loosened, and his eyes could start to feel a bit watery. Whatever or whoever that 'he' was, it terrified Rowel to the core.
With a sudden turn, It looked behind. The way it froze and its smile collapsed, made Rowel wonder what it was seeing.
Its mask contorted and warped into something stricken. Like a theatre mask flipping from comedy to tragedy in one sudden twist.
Then it shrank and crumbled, becoming lesser than a shadow.
And from behind it… she emerged. With her face still quite unreadable. She was watching him the entire time. Normally, she would have let him fall and let him break, much like what happened to Tin Magi, but the case was much different for Rowel.
❝If you fall,❞ she said, now quieter than ever, ❝you will forget this ever happened. There will be no pain. This is mercy for you, magician.❞
She stood at the edge, watching him and waiting. She wanted him to choose the fall to the ocean, not to the void. She wanted him to see no anguish. Something inside her wanted him to not see what Tin Magi saw.
Rowel's breath was uneven, and his fingers were already going numb. He turned his eyes downward… and there was the ocean. It waited.
He knew gazing into the abyss was never going to end well, eventually it will gaze back and its gaze won't be merciful. Until he remembered something strange, a memory that he didn't know if it was his or someone else's. In the memory he could feel that he was raising his hand up, extending it, seeking help.
Suddenly, he felt his body move against his own will. He looked up, and reached his hand to her. No words were spoken…
His other hand trembled, ready to give in.
She looked down at him, still hanging from the edge. His body trembling, his fingers were torn raw against stone, and his breath rising in short, uneven bursts. Yet it wasn't desperation on his face, no scream or fear of what she was.
It was something else.
His gaze met hers. They were quite steady and unshaken.
He sought salvation.
A flicker passed behind her eyes. It was a memory that didn't belong to the present moment, it felt so familiar to her that she froze much more.
It surged up from some locked place within her. She saw fire first. Then a city crumbling beneath its own, with smoke coiling into the sky, and there… amidst the collapse, a man clinging to the edge of a shattered ledge.
He wasn't Rowel.
His face was blurted, but he clung just the same as Rowel, with one arm stretched upward, the other barely holding on.
His lips moved, desperately but there were no words of sound, she couldn't hear him..
Her eyes narrowed, as this was too familiar to her. A scene from somewhere so unknown that almost drove her to break character. She didn't understand why it surfaced. She didn't question it, because her body had already moved on its own.
She didn't think further, and her hand simply reached forward, grabbing his. At that moment, she could have just conjured a way for him to be back on the surface again, or perhaps have him levitate.
But the fact that her body moved on its own like that, it came with a glint inside the darkness in her… feeling.
It was unexplained, as the notion of feeling was too foreign to her, but she felt. She didn't know what that feeling was but it was what had her reach for his hand.
Flesh met flesh. It wasn't the void that held Rowel's hand, it wasn't darkness being his saviour. It was someone.