Winter's Fist

[Hurik]

10th of Winter, 517 AV

The cold fist of Winter gripped Alvadas in a merciless onslaught. Mounds of snow taller than two Akalaks stood atop each other, forming valleys and mountains where once there stood streets and buildings. One could, if one flew over the city, make out the taller buildings and even most of the roofs of the two-story buildings, but ten days into this unusually harsh Winter, there was barely the beginnings of paths for Alvads to use to make their way from one place to another. Avalanches and cave-ins were commonplace, and many people still remained indoors, not willing to risk the icy peril of the outdoors.

It was because of this reluctance to go outside, that nobody was present to greet Hurik upon his return.

The mist materialized in a trickle at first, in one of the newly dug and recently abandoned pathways, where one could barely make the cobbles under the ice and packed snow. It was so cold out that the mist actually crackled, crystallized, and seemed to freeze up. A kind of pressure began to build up, and there was an incorporeal effort of will building in intensity. A few frozen moments passed, glacial in their length.

CRACK!

Churning forth, the mist no longer seemed to be affected by temperature, and it flowed as fluidly as though it were part of a Taloban river on a Summer day. It was a matter of seconds before Hurik's soulmist drew itself up into his recognizably human form. His amulet glowed faintly at his chest, and he stretched languidly. A stiff breeze blew through the path he stood in, the snow passing right through him, and the wind gently rustling his hair. He noted that the breeze that affected his soulmist was significantly weaker than the corporeal wind, which he could hear howling like some sort of monster.

In this weather, Hurik found himself to actually, blessedly, be lacking any imminent triggers of his memory. He decided to walk along the newly carved pathways, and see if he ran into anybody interesting. It wasn't that Hurik wouldn't interact with a boring person, but more that he guessed anybody who willingly chose to come out in this miserable weather must be interesting. The path he took had ended near an alleyway between two snow-buried buildings, and seemed to angle, as best as he could figure, toward the Alvadas' centre. His footsteps were unhindered, and his skin no more chill than the day he reincorporated, over a year ago now. And yet, he reflexively hunched against the wind, holding himself against a remembered cold. Hurik had known something akin to this, when he was alive. That much was obvious.

Hurik hummed softly, his mind providing a wordless tune that rang in a hollow sort of way. The notes that whispered from his throat echoed the wind's whistling, and he started counting snow flakes that flew through his chest.

"One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven... eight, nine... ten, eleven..."

[Jomi]

"Steady, steady."

The ghost quietly hissed his mantra as he floated above the icy city streets. The whitewashed landscape proved to be a convenient camouflage for the dematerialized ghost as he struggled to lift a lump of snow above the door of the Sanity Centre. He had gathered his soulmist to create a dense barrier, allowing himself to push the snow up against the pull of gravity. It looked to all the world like a sheet of snow was returning to the sky.

"Steady, steady."

As Jomi and his icy passenger tottered precariously over the doorframe, a harried looking man dressed in stately grey furs sped-walked towards the Centre. His portly face was flush and sweating despite the bitting wind. The hem of his ankle length coat was torn in several places and shallow claw marks had dislodged clumps of fur, ruining the otherwise elegant craftsmanship. When he turned his head one could see a suspicious red welt swelling above his right eye. Which he did often as his wide, nervous eyes darted around the streets, almost as if searching for a pursuer, or waiting for the cobblestones themselves to jump up and bite him.

Jomi waited until an exhale of relief escaped the mans pursed lips as he reached for the Centres doors before unceremoniously dropping to the ground like a weighted stone.

The mans gentle exhale turned to a cry of shock as he was hit with the clump of icy snow and the prickling sensation of a rapidly materializing ghost. No longer having to focus his energy on keeping the snow aloft, Jomi drew his soulmist back into his core. The swirling mist condensed and shifted inside the stunned man, forming his preferred shape of a youthful black haired man, as waves of stinging energy passed through his unwitting victim.

A disembodied, barking laugh echoed off the glittering white pillars of snow as the damp and furry man collided with a good half dozen of them in his hasty escape back the way he came.

"Welcome to Alvadas, jakri!" the ghost roared gleefully.

Jomi watched him flee with a grin on his face, revelling in his triumph. Suddenly a soft glitter flashed in the corner of his eye. The ghost of a man with an impressive amount of ginger face fur and a solemn look drifted into his view. He had the lost look that was common on the restless dead, a kind of aimless dead eyed stare of a man that searched for life's gas leak with a lit match. Jomi knew that look all too well, and he also knew of a pretty effective distraction from those creeping morbid thoughts. So armed with a cruel and shining grin, Jomi sidled up to the new ghost to offer the only type of help he could.

"You look like a bloke without much to do, why don't you help me petch up that guys day?"

[Hurik]

10th of Winter, 517 AV

"Seventy-four, seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven..." Hurik trailed off, his eyes refocusing even while yet more snowflakes passed through his mist-filled being. Some part of him in the back of his mind kept counting, utilizing an instinct he hadn't realized he'd had, while the breadth of him paid attention to what he'd come across.

A dark-skinned man, with long silky black hair and strong arms. He stood in the pathway to what appeared to be The Sanity Centre, barely recognizable underneath all the snow. The ghost came up to him, and presented an offer to share in another being's suffering. "To petch up that guy's day," this ghost had said. His smile was a knife, deadly and shining with a light that reflected icicles on the eavestroughs, waiting for the slightest breeze. To catch, to cut, maybe even to kill?

Hurik didn't know what to think at first. Was that something he would've done, when he was alive? Was it something he could do now, now that he'd died and been denied whatever lay beyond? He had to be honest with himself; he had no idea. He'd had enough sense to gather that he had indeed been a man acquainted with violence before his death. He knew that his own death, had itself been a violent end. He wondered at what sort of consequences could even befall a spirit like him, whose punishment of unlife was categorically impossible to make any bleaker.

The only possibility Hurik could call to mind was perhaps to be made to subsist on a very low quantity of Soulmist, the substance that he'd learned made up his body, and fuelled his actions and interactions with the world, so far as to dictate in what manner he could manifest on the mortal plane. For whatever gods-forsaken reason, that eventuality did disturb him. Even in a staggeringly evident state of non-life, his mind or spirit or whatever it was that allowed him to persist retained a powerfully strong impulse for self-preservation, which Hurik had to chuckle at. That sensation, the panic, the thrill, the terror of it had been something that he had known like the back of his hand when he was alive, and of that he was absolutely certain.

The man the dark-skinned ghost had indicated was definitely feeling that impulse, Hurik noted. He was running in the opposite direction from Hurik and his newfound companion down a different path. From what Hurik could tell, the man was in a state of distress. Of course, that man hadn't been through hell. Hadn't the slightest idea, what it meant to die and not be granted peace, a new state of existence, or even oblivion. Hurik had never truly given much thought to the unfairness of it all. He still hadn't found out why he was like this, and maybe he never would.

That thought chilled him more deeply than any bite of frost.

He looked back to the dark-skinned ghost, with the cruel eyes and the glistening hair. He clenched his fist, and grinned. It was the kind of smile a fellow wolf might give to a member of a different pack, were they both to come across the same deer on a trail, bleeding out. It was a smile that said, "Right now, we are of one purpose, but that does not make us allies." Hurik decided then and there, that for his own peace of mind, he would try to make this man of flesh and blood understand what plagued him. He would bring to this man a sensation of what lies beyond, of what non-existence felt like, and a sense of how painful the denial of that could be.

His leads had all gone dry. Hurik's fate, his unresolved problems, all of the shyke that kept him bound to his miserable existence. He forgot all that for the moment. He threw it into the cold wind that blew down the path, filled with flakes. One hundred and thirty-one, one hundred and thirty-two...

A singular memory clung to his mind, like a stray leaf caught against a window in a windstorm. I promised her I wouldn't kill anymore. Hurik's smile widened, even as he forced down a choking sensation in his throat, and felt his chest contract in pain. No, he supposed he wouldn't let this dark ghost whom he'd found kill either. Had Hurik been found? Or had they found each other? Hurik didn't know, and the time for thought had passed.

"Alright dark one, lead the way."


One hundred and fifty-eight, one hundred and fifty-nine...

[Jomi]

Jomi's mist danced excitedly as the new ghost agreed to play along.

"Excellent, well met-" Jomi paused and gave the broad ginger ghost a once over "-Whiskers. You can call me Jomi".

Beckoning him forward, Jomi started off down the street the man had sprinted down. Despite the furry mans head start the footprints in the snow as well as the fact that nearly everyone else had been snowed in made him absurdly easy to track.

"I've been following this arsehole for the last bell. Rode in from the port like a king, all pomp and prestige, with his line of servants and horses." Jomi's voice grew hard as he continued. "Petcher saw fit to talk down to me, to wave me away like a pest, I'd say he needs to be brought down a level."

Jomi rose up over the snow stacks as he chattered away. Above the colourful snow covered houses into the grey, ashen sky letting his legs swing absentmindedly as he scanned the world below.

"There he is." Jomi exclaimed brightly, pointing to a point just around the corner from where they were floating. The man had taken a regrettable turn and was now trudging through thigh high snow. Separated from his party and tormented, he man gave deep, sob like breaths as he willed his body to move faster. Desperately searching for an unobstructed door and someone to shelter him.

Jomi's spectral form began to descend, coming to a rest on top of a seemingly crystalline roof above the street their mark was struggling down. The dark haired ghost brought the soulmist he had allowed to relax during their trek back toward his core. Bringing definition to his features and a touch more colour to his body. "How would you like to play a game?" Jomi turned to address Hurik with a cheeky smile as he bent down and began to gather up a mound of snow.

He focused on his hands and the soulmist that swirled languishingly around them. Using the energy his soul could create, he pushed the snow together and up taking his time to pack the snow with his spectral hands. Forming a small lop-sided sphere.

"The first one to hit him gets to wear his body first."

[Hurik]

10th of Winter, 517 AV

One hundred and seventy-nine, one hundred and eighty, one hundred and eighty-one...

Hurik barely registered the name in his mind as he followed Jomi, his mind clouded as the windy and snow-covered path ahead of them. He was similarly distant as Jomi explained the reasons for why the man needed to suffer. There didn't need to be a justification, Hurik thought faintly, when such an injustice dominated the world as it existed.

Jomi flying gave Hurik pause, at first. Hurik couldn't fly. But Jomi seemed to expect him to follow along, and so Hurik did. He climbed the steps that his mist seemed to crystallize in the air, frozen shelves of the misty body of his essence. And he kept up once they were of a height, and though the wind up here was violent, enough to batter many more snowflakes through Hurik's chest, it was barely strong enough to stir his ruddy beard.

When Jomi pointed out where the man had fled to, Hurik looked down and felt something he recognized intimately. It was a feeling that he had always felt when he came across somebody too weak to survive, too put upon by life's turmoils to stand up straight. It was the self-same feeling he'd felt for himself before when he'd started fighting, started struggling to rend and tear and maim.

Contempt, acidic and potent, surged in him, and the ugliness of the emotion was felt in full force. Something in Hurik seemed to push back against the feeling, to nag Hurik that he'd forgotten something important. Hurik shoved that feeling down and descended his misting steps down to the roof that Jomi had chosen. It was just above the petcher who was too ignorant of the gift he'd been given. Hurik watched as Jomi formed a snowball that floated in the air, slightly malformed but recognizably spherical. The dark-skinned ghost, Hurik realized, had been misjudged by him. That smile was not one of a person who'd killed. Not for lust anyway, not for the sheer unbridled ecstasy of combat. That smile, and those eyes, were borne of somebody who had been hurt maybe, but was still whole. At least, that was what his expression conveyed.

In the back of his mind, Hurik thought to ask what Jomi thought was keeping him in the mortal plane, to find out more about the person, and to maybe leave the man they were terrorizing to his own devices. In the back of his mind, Hurik recognized he'd fallen by accident into a very dark, dangerous frame of mind. Hurik was scared of what he was capable of, and wanted it to stop. Of course, since when has the back of a person's mind ever held the reigns?

The first one to hit him gets to wear his body first? Hurik scoffed, his contempt in turn beginning to spread to Jomi as well, though tempered by the knowledge that the boy shared in their miserable state of existence, and that he wasn't a warrior like Hurik was. Hurik hadn't seen the upper limits of a ghost's abilities, but even lacking strength as he did, he was well-acquainted with environments choked with Winter. He also knew that he could accomplish one very particular action, and that was all he needed. Plenty enough, for certain, to teach the lesson he had been goaded into giving.

With a massive surge of soulmist, enough to make Hurik's form quiver and fizzle, Bloodmane surged his tendrils of soulmist deep into the shelf of snow, down to the roof underneath, and he PUSHED. He couldn't push with enough force to move the entirety of the roof's packed snow, which might've weighed literal tons, but then, he didn't need to. Hurik had seen entire mounds of snow collapse after moving just a small portion. The reaction was a cumulative one, where every bit of snow that moved caused another to move, which caused another, and so on. The Bloodmane's mists sizzled, crackled, and he felt lines of pain rush up along the tendrils to tear at him, and he withdrew his mists immediately. They wouldn't see the effects of his Push, not for a few more moments at least.

Hurik stepped up onto his shelf of Soulmist, a short height above the snowy roof itself. He looked to Jomi and without much of an expression said, "You clearly haven't been thinking big enough." And with that Hurik turned to watch what he'd been expecting, as the object of their torment came underneath the eaves of their building, looking for some form of salvation.

And the entire roof's contents of snow fell down on top of him.

Two hundred and sixteen, two hundred and seventeen, two hundred and eighteen...

Hurik imagined that the poor petcher trapped underneath that mountain of snow and ice would probably be counting as well, though his count would more likely involve breaths taken, as opposed to snowflakes, since the one was so much more sparingly kept than the other...

What the petch is wrong with me?

[Jomi]

Jomi regarded Hurik quizzically as he poked at the snowpack with his mist. The Kelvic stood silently and practiced tossing the snowball into each hand. He used the dense mist in his right hand to create a sudden burst of energy to toss the icy ball in the air catching it with the solidified mist in his left as he regarded his ginger companion.

The new ghost was an odd one, not that Jomi had ever met one that wasn’t. The people who linger after death tend to have some rather significant issues. But something about this one had the badger in him want to raise its hackles preemptively to protect the territory he no longer had. Something about the way he moved, like someone thats used to watching his back, or the steely glint in his eye. He was a warrior with nothing left to lose.

A tick passed before a cascade of thick wet snow slid off the roof, the furry grey man didn't even have time to react before the snow smothered him. Leaving no trace he was even there.

But before either ghost had time to react a high feminine scream pierced through the stillness of the streets. Jomi's form rippled in shock as he turned to the sound. A young woman sat atop a bay horse at the far end of the street the man had run down. Her hands covered her mouth, but Jomi recognized her. She had been part of the furry mans entourage, a servant perhaps, she must have been following her masters footprints in the snow like the ghosts have. turning down the street just in time to watch her beloved master being crushed beneath a mountain of snow. And her eyes, wide and glassy with horror, were fixed directly on Jomi and his fully materialized form.

"Oh shyke, get down. GET DOWN."

Jomi dropped like a stone into the building they were atop of. The crisp white landscape blinked away only to be replaced by a wave of nostalgia. Junk and knickknacks glittered atop every flat surface of the tiny front room of Matilda's Jewels. Oil lamps stuttered merrily in their glass cases filling the entire room with light, despite the front windows being completely blocked with their ghost-made landslide.

Jomi's soulmist churned around him as he turned to regard Hurik, pulling the raging mist into his face so the ginger ghost could clearly see how angry he was and how badly he messed up. It was one thing to kill a man, but if Jomi learned anything from his time a a spirit it was to never ever kill in view of others. Spiritist generally didn't go out of their way to deal with a irksome ghost, but they would hunt a violent ghost to the ends of the earth. And those ghost were the ones that end up in the sealed basement of the Craven manor.

"Way to petching go, Whiskers. You'd better start praying to Ionu that man survives this, or we might be spending the rest of eternity in a pill bottle."

[Madeira Dusk]

"Survives what?"

Madeira's voice was soft and controlled as she stepped out from behind a tall glass cabinet. With her hair braided in a halo around her head and her heavy grey cloak sweeping the floor around her frail body, she looked much the same as always. But the pale eyes locked on her servant burned hot and electric, and waves of something barely suppressed filled the room like a thundercloud. She had felt the presence of ghosts on the roof of Matilda's Jewels, but didn't think anything of it. Not until she saw the panicked man through the frosted windows, and a tick later the avalanche that covered him. But to know it was her ghost, the creature she was responsible for, that did it...

From the other side of the wall of snow covering the door and windows, a girl was screaming for help. A crunching of disturbed snow and a grunt of exertion indicated that at least one person was heeding her call. Shadows moved across the blue-white veil over the glass, casting flickering shadows of lumbering, distorted figures on the wall.

"Survives what, Jomi?" She repeated, dropping the ring she had been looking at on the counter the titular Matilda was cowering behind. "Did you do this? Did you hurt that man?"

As she stepped closer, her eyes slid from Jomi to the spectre beside him. And something about it was immediately familiar. Taller and broader than Jomi, he didn't have the sharp, malevolent look of the Kelvic. His face was pale, covered in corse red hair, and his round eyes were drawn and cold...

"Hurik..."

Madeira was struck dumb for a moment as she recognized the ghost she had not seen for nearly a year. Last she saw of him, she was running for her life as the ghost was being shredded my a Myrian spiritist. She never expected to see him again.

Her eyes widened, and her lips parted in disbelief. From inside her cloak she raised her hand as if to reach out and touch him.

Then her fingers pulled back, and a souldart shot from the bracer bow under her sleeve.

”WHERE WERE YOU?!”, she roared.

From the other side of the shop Matilda gave a tiny shriek of fright. Madeira was already reloading, her eyes never leaving Hurik's to check wether the first even hit the mark.

"You vile... you evil...", she was gasping for breath, trying to keep up with the memories and betrayal running through her. "I looked for you! I petching looked for you! I thought- I thought that Myrian had you! I felt so guilty, and the whole time... The whole time you were out here, and this is what you were doing?!”

Nostrils flaring, eyes overbright, she snapped the second willow bolt in place. Pulling back her sleeve, she aimed wildly for the thickest concentration of soulmist.

OOC :

I’m jumping in. Cheers.

[Hurik]

10th of Winter, 517 AV

Hurik had followed Jomi down into the Jewels shop without thinking about, and a frown deepened his face when he heard Jomi's rebuke. After all, the dark-skinned ghost had been the one to suggest to petch up that man's day. Hurik couldn't think of something that could petch up a person's day more than being caught up n an avalanche. He opened his mouth to say as much when a voice spoke out. A voice that he recognized.

Despite the frigidity outside, that voice was what finally seared down into Hurik's essence causing him to begin shivering uncontrollably. He turned to look, and knew what he'd find. Beauty, pale and yet transcendent. A gaze like liquor that burned him where he stood. Deep below the drifts that blew through his being, Hurik felt something wake, and try to shrug off the ice. A thawing warmth seeped out, looking for a way to break through and-

A fury cold and brittle bit into him. Hurik was flung back against a wall, the impact feeling as though he'd been run through by a spear. The worldly objects barely shifted, a couple glass pieces tinkling gently on the counter next to the wall where Hurik was pinned. Another spear of force crippled him, however Hurik could almost suppress the sensation of his Soulmist crackling, and the haunting loudness that rushed in his ears. What he couldn't banish to some other part of his awareness was the hurt in her voice. He somehow heard it, above the loudness, terrible accusation after accusation running him through just as sharply as the Souldarts. Those two missiles were lodged in his torso, one where his heart might be, another lodged solidly in his gut.

Hurik gurgled, his voice sounding wet and as though he were choking. His mind remembering what battlefield injuries did to a man it seemed. Most significant of all, he felt a wetness on his face, dripping down off of him. His hair slick with blood, as had only happened once before. A small pool of it fell before him, head hung low, taking in the sensations and feeling mercifully alive. Dying yes, but very much alive. Madeira always had a way of doing that. Maybe that was why he felt the way he did, at the strangest of times...

He couldn't face her. Not like this, not after what he'd seen, what he'd felt. Not when the most terrifying of implications lay behind what he hadn't seen and hadn't felt. A kind of broken whimper slipped out of his lips, and he felt the strings that held his mind together tense up. The chill of Winter, and the heat of battle, all of it fell upon him and deafened and dulled him. Where he'd emerged raw, stinging, naked in his vulnerability, now he hung limply. Covered in blood, his and others, Hurik couldn't summon up an excuse. He was what he was, and maybe this was his punishment. It made a twisted kind of sense after all, having been the dealer of death so many times, only to have that very thing denied him in the end, when his violent past finally caught up to him.

His voice was steady, when at last he managed an answer. It came to him unbidden and unforgiven, though Hurik imagined that perhaps it was Madeira's fault, for instilling him with her own sense of responsibility, duty, and care. That at least, would let him live with himself. Or not live, being a ghost. If he'd been the person he saw in those visions, those memories, it made sense that the only good he could do would come at the behest of another. After all, how could Hurik be anything remotely human, let alone decent, after the things he'd done?

"Madeira. That man still lives. Your body is weak, but strength is not required to save him. Underneath all that snow, the only thing that can save him is what put him there. Use me. Let me wear your body, and I can instruct you on where to dig, how much to dig, and you can save him. I cannot properly gauge the situation without... Without a body. I wish there was another way, but you have no time," Hurik paused, realizing he'd kept up his internal counter despite leaving the outdoors with its snowflakes that passed through him. ...Three hundred and one, three hundred and two...

"You must choose now. I'm damned either way, so I leave it to you. By my count, he'll be dead in at the most three chimes. I... I hope you can make the choice I never could."

Three hundred and six... Three hundred and seven... Three hundred and eight...

[Jomi]

“Survives what?”

The voice was quiet, gentle, and sent a chill straight to Jomi's very core. Madeira breezed out from behind a glass cabinet like she had been lying in wait for them, depositing a ring on the counter as she turned to regard the two ghosts. A dark thought seeped deep inside Jomi’s mind at the sight of his waif like master. Would Madeira’s loyalty to her family outweighed her personal attachment to her servant. Would she dust him if the Cravens ever asked it of her?

"Survives what, Jomi? Did you do this? Did you hurt that man?"

The tiny porcelain doll of a woman wore a mask of composure and social decorum as would be expected of a ward of a noble family, but cracks were appearing around the edges as she stalked closer. Panicked thoughts raced around his head, torn between his instincts to flee or fib and the thought that maybe, just maybe Madeira might listen to him. Any other Craven would have shot them both by now, without thought or remorse. But Madeira was different, she knew him, she would give him a chance to explain himself. Jomi stilled his erratically twisting mists, steeling himself to confront the raging spiritist and beg for his soul.

"Hurik..."

“Who?”

”WHERE WERE YOU?!”

The tiny silver bracer flashed under her sleeve as the first of the soul darts struck his etherial companion square in the chest. A fountain of soulmist erupted from his back as it dragged him into the wall, pinning him.

Jomi jumped back in shock as a cowering whimper floated over the counter Matilda was crouched behind. Apparently Madeira knew the ginger ghost, and there relationship hadn't ended on good terms.

"I looked for you! I petching looked for you!"

For a single precious tick a thick layer of uncertainty clouded Jomi's eyes. Madeira was targeting Hurik with a seething bitter tirade and had let the store and the horrified onlookers fade into oblivion. If he wanted to make his escape unscathed he'd have to haul ass now while she was distracted. But the roar of pain that tore from the lips of the ginger ghost, and the projectiles that protruded from his chest gave him pause. Madeira was his master, they had lived together for the last year, he was in a better position to try to calm her and advocate for her victim. But in doing so he's have to risk having her turn her anger, and weapon, to him instead. The mist surrounding his form stilled as the ghost turned inward and contemplated his morales, ethics and motivations. He asked himself if he could really leave this man to suffer such a cruel fate, just to save his own skin?

Yup.

Jomi softly faded from sight, letting his soul mist dissipate until he was no more than a shadow, before sliding through the wall and into the bright street.

[Madeira Dusk]

There was no pity in Madeira as the ghost of Hurik materialized the state in which he had died. She had seen it once before, and it had been shocking to see the skull cave in and the blood leak in torrents from his hairline. But that was a long time ago. Now she waited for his episode of grief and torment to pass with her bow aimed steadily at his chest and her jaw hard and bloodless.

His voice was steady when he finally spoke, but it rang strangely hollow. He hung there defeated and heavy with memories she couldn’t understand and gave her exactly one option. He wanted to use her body. He wanted to dig that man out himself.

She studied him coldly. Had she had any sanctity left in her soul she would have laughed in his face and shot him again. But much worse creatures than Hurik have worn her body. Touching souls with this lying murderer isn’t the worst thing she had ever done.

As she was watching Hurik, trying to see his intentions through his flickering form, something drifted from the corner of her eye and faded through the wall of the shop.

"Oh no you don’t!"

The Spiritist stabbed her thumb on the point of her arrow, and dragged the bleeding finger in gory lines across the pretty flowery wallpaper. She slapped her hand in the centre of the sixteen point star, and focused on the onyx ring on her forth finger. The ghost wasn't far, but it didn't matter. Distance was no help or hinderance with this spell. She concentrated hard on her servant, and used the drop of his soulmist in the hollow ring to drag him unwillingly to her.

There was a crackle of electricity and a wash of cold. As soon as his flickering form blinked into existence, Madeira raised her right hand and stapled her wayward servant to the floor with a bolt through the foot.

"You don't get to back out of this, Jomi." she hissed. “You’re both coming along for this ride. This is your fault and you will fix it.” She reached into Hurik’s chest and yanked the bolts out of the wall, then kicked Jomi’s restraint out from the floor.

“This is your second chance, Hurik.”, she warned, and held her arms out as if to invite them inside.