Quest Dark Compulsion (Victor, Seven)

[Victor Lark]

Unbreathing lips met on the brink of water and air, but Victor found little comfort in the kiss. He swallowed as much spit and sadness as ocean, left coughing and reeling and no less confused. He gasped at the suffocating rain, caught between the feuding desperations for life and for emotion, clinging to the arms that held him. He could not know Seven’s efforts in that darkness, or the true dangers that plagued them both. In the chaos of the external his mind caved into itself; he knew only his own body, his own cold, his own fear.

Still the frantic guidance of familiar hands led him over slippery splinters and for an instant he was within the security of the little dying rowboat. He grasped it dutifully, shaking his head of unrelenting wetness, too shattered by the bedlam to understand the strange voice that raged around them. No matter how Victor tried he could not breathe, each inhale shorter than the last and never enough to fill his lungs. He found himself gripping his chest, hating and loving the flesh that prevented him from stilling his own pounding heart.

And then the boat broke like a terrible crack of wooden lightning, and Victor’s hands were slipping from the same edge that had knocked against his chin. Embraced again by water and wet djed, he opened his eyes to the stinging blackness and saw nothing. At first he tried to resist, to swim upward against that impossible force, but when that did not work he tried to defy it, pulling on his own djed to create a pair of gills on his neck. Before he tried he knew that his energy had already been spent. Flaps of skin flared up and dissolved again. A great bubble of precious air escaped his mouth. His empty, aching chest lurched within him.

As much as Victor hated helplessness, there was a shred of lucidity in the corner of his mind that saw what it did to him, how it filled his life’s emptiness with roiling terror. It was everything he thought it would be, and yet nothing like it. It was gut-wrenching hollowness and yet it was soul-churning everything.

It was thrilling.

Victor’s fingers calmed. Salty bubbles tore at him, fleeing his descent. The promise of death loomed on pains he could not understand as an invisible dark threatened the edges of his vision. He shook and seized and curled, listening to the heartbeat the grew irregular in his ears. And he smiled.

He could die, if it meant an eternity of this.

[Paragon]

Victor's realisation came as he plummeted through the dark water. His life had been so veiled. An inability to feel, had rendered him so very capable in other ways. When you lost a hand, you used the other one a little better. You learnt to adapt. Something otherworldly pressed at him, and he began to feel it. He began to understand it. When he had morphed, he had used the very same energy - though the pool from which he had pulled his djed had been much tamer. This was baleful, untamed, and feral. A wild spirit, forcing, pressuring. On the boat, Seven's fears became reality. He begged of the being, offering his own surrender for the life of his love. It was the fear that made it stop. The fear it had been begging for. "Ah... I see your heart. I see your fear. Tell me how you feel." It stepped closer to Seven, studying him, willing him to talk. The black rose was held in its hand again. Beneath the waves, a single black rose petal floated past Victor's eyeline. If he could regain some composure, the answer would be there. But both of them would have to fight the wild djed first...

[Seven Xu]

“Victor’s still down there,” Seven spluttered, mouth slick and numb from cold rain. Brine weighed the crippled boat, and it lurched and forced Seven closer to stay afloat. “He could—he could be—” still alive, still there, still …

“Tell me how you feel.”

The halfblood choked and tore his eyes from the black water as if by command. His disquieted heart beat against his chest. The colour had washed from his wet face and oily tendrils of white whipped his forehead. Fear remained, and it had left little room for anything else. As Victor needed Seven’s fickle temper to emulate fanged smiles and genuine frowns, the Ravokian’s presence did as much to inflame them. Apart, they could be nothing.

And nothing was so resolute.

A hand crossed his chest to scrape over the quicksilver mark beneath his ear. So long as it remained, Victor could not be gone. In their mutual nothingness, they fought.

“I feel it.” Fear. Raw, terrible Fear.

He simply could not be gone.

“It hurts.”

What she saw in his floundering heart was determination. Determination was sewn as deep as the fear that churned in his bowels, begat of a life only a half-widow stranded on the Star of Kalea could know. It budded and flourished beneath his dread and took hold as a spark across a sea of crimson. It drew his mind from his suffocating terror.

“Tell me who you are,” the demand was thrown back at her, playing as a request on his shaky cadence. He balled his fists and curled his toes against sodden boot soles. His gaze fell to the rose in her hand, wild and black as the night. “To whom do I answer; to what have I sworn myself? Tell me.”