85th Summer, 512 AV
When he saw the thing tensing up for a charge at him, his second instinct told him to stand his ground, draw on his power, and hurl windy death at the thing, slicing and ripping and carving until it was nothing more than torn-up, bloody meat splattered upon the once-clean floor.
His first instinct, the one that screamed fear into his heart and ears and his entire being, told him to run.
Queue order must be followed.
His little legs dragged him into what was going to be literally the run of his life.
Everything else after came as flashes.
Flashes of rooms, stark and bare, abandoned to the excesses of age and dust. Flashes of corridors, the blur of speeding down their too-long lengths too many times. Flashes of staircases that were just too messed-up to scale. And there were other little flashes, flashes of cobwebs and stray rats that reminded him, at this most unwanted time, that even if the life that was once here had departed the house, others -regardless of the form they took- would invariably come to take it's place.
And then there were flashes of his attacker. He could feel the long, thumping stride of it's powerful legs crashing against the floor as it closed the gap between them. He suspected the narrow corridors and the creature's caution that came with being in an unfamiliar terrain were the only things that had kept him alive for this long, kept the creature below the threshold of it's maximum speed.
And when he snapped his head every once in awhile around to gauge their little race...
More flashes. Clouded by the gloom, allowing only a skewed perspective.
White fur.
Dead eyes that saw nothing.
The vague, predatory outline of a great cat.
There were things that Anton had to look out for here:
A Keyword: Predatory.
And a sentence, from one of the little plays at last season's festival of Illusions, concerning a comedy about a suicidally courageous bat fighting a man who ate gas.
You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it...molded by it. I didn't see the light 'til I was already a man. By then it was nothing to me but blinding!!! The shadows betray you because they belong to me!
And when it's mouth tore open into what should have been a roar...Nothing came out.
Nothing.
He felt the raw, primal hunting screech rather than heard it.
What in the void was that thing?
But even what it was paled in relevance, because his greatest enemy here wasn't the thing...
Lastly, flashes of awareness; of himself.
Of how a boy couldn't run forever.
The hard claps of boots as they trudged on relentlessly. The harsh breath rasping through a throat so dry it hurt just to swallow. Sweat blurred his vision, stained every inch of his uniform, creating more and more of itself as he threw every bit of himself into the run.
Threw every bit and never took it back.
And then threw even more.
The flux came to him as the thing's breath, of ammonia and wet meat, began growing stronger and stronger. He was as far from an expert in the art of magical empowerment as one could get, but beggars couldn't quite be choosers. Especially beggars who were about to be dragged off into the dark by a thing that didn't really look like it knew the concept of a clean, painfless kill. By this point, any attempt at a magical counter-attack would be a fruitless endeavour: Voiding was too slow, res production and manipulation had a high chance of being interrupted by a face-full of teeth and set of claws that looked like it belonged inside an armory, and everything else was just...
Power flooded into his legs, perhaps more slowly than he would have liked, the djed pathways amassing and shaping the djed, converting it into pure, sheer leg strength. Where stamina was starting to fail him, the flux succeeded now, carrying him through, just barely opening up distance between him and the thin-
Just as easily as it came, the energy within his legs had dispersed. The sudden shift in velocity threw him off and...
One wrong step...
One misplaced stride...
And he fell.
A beat later, and the thing was on him.
His first instinct, the one that screamed fear into his heart and ears and his entire being, told him to run.
Queue order must be followed.
His little legs dragged him into what was going to be literally the run of his life.
Everything else after came as flashes.
Flashes of rooms, stark and bare, abandoned to the excesses of age and dust. Flashes of corridors, the blur of speeding down their too-long lengths too many times. Flashes of staircases that were just too messed-up to scale. And there were other little flashes, flashes of cobwebs and stray rats that reminded him, at this most unwanted time, that even if the life that was once here had departed the house, others -regardless of the form they took- would invariably come to take it's place.
And then there were flashes of his attacker. He could feel the long, thumping stride of it's powerful legs crashing against the floor as it closed the gap between them. He suspected the narrow corridors and the creature's caution that came with being in an unfamiliar terrain were the only things that had kept him alive for this long, kept the creature below the threshold of it's maximum speed.
And when he snapped his head every once in awhile around to gauge their little race...
More flashes. Clouded by the gloom, allowing only a skewed perspective.
White fur.
Dead eyes that saw nothing.
The vague, predatory outline of a great cat.
There were things that Anton had to look out for here:
A Keyword: Predatory.
And a sentence, from one of the little plays at last season's festival of Illusions, concerning a comedy about a suicidally courageous bat fighting a man who ate gas.
You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it...molded by it. I didn't see the light 'til I was already a man. By then it was nothing to me but blinding!!! The shadows betray you because they belong to me!
And when it's mouth tore open into what should have been a roar...Nothing came out.
Nothing.
He felt the raw, primal hunting screech rather than heard it.
What in the void was that thing?
But even what it was paled in relevance, because his greatest enemy here wasn't the thing...
Lastly, flashes of awareness; of himself.
Of how a boy couldn't run forever.
The hard claps of boots as they trudged on relentlessly. The harsh breath rasping through a throat so dry it hurt just to swallow. Sweat blurred his vision, stained every inch of his uniform, creating more and more of itself as he threw every bit of himself into the run.
Threw every bit and never took it back.
And then threw even more.
The flux came to him as the thing's breath, of ammonia and wet meat, began growing stronger and stronger. He was as far from an expert in the art of magical empowerment as one could get, but beggars couldn't quite be choosers. Especially beggars who were about to be dragged off into the dark by a thing that didn't really look like it knew the concept of a clean, painfless kill. By this point, any attempt at a magical counter-attack would be a fruitless endeavour: Voiding was too slow, res production and manipulation had a high chance of being interrupted by a face-full of teeth and set of claws that looked like it belonged inside an armory, and everything else was just...
Power flooded into his legs, perhaps more slowly than he would have liked, the djed pathways amassing and shaping the djed, converting it into pure, sheer leg strength. Where stamina was starting to fail him, the flux succeeded now, carrying him through, just barely opening up distance between him and the thin-
Just as easily as it came, the energy within his legs had dispersed. The sudden shift in velocity threw him off and...
One wrong step...
One misplaced stride...
And he fell.
A beat later, and the thing was on him.
