Chapter Text
Trees. There were so many fucking trees here.
Cobalt smacked the third branch in the past minute out of his face and yelled out for Toby again. He felt like he was going in circles -- the forest he was stuck in seemed endless, and there was no evidence of any sort of disturbance so he could track where he’d already been. Every single tree he’d seen so far was in some state of decay: rot made the trunks squishy and soft, leaves curled up and fell limply off their branches, ivy choked the life out of what was left while fungus took advantage of every dying piece of wood it was able to reach. Frankly, it was a mess.
He’d tried making a mark on one of the trees, but rot had rapidly overtaken the scar until it was a gaping hole. It killed itself to hide what he tried to change. Cobalt made a face at the tree. He didn’t like that at all.
“Toby!” He called out again, getting more frustrated and worried by the minute. He stopped, tilted his head back, and let out a bone-weary sigh. He told him not to just go in without a second thought, and what had he done?
Cobalt put his hands on his hips, tapped his foot. He needed a strategy, some sort of plan that would actually get him somewhere that wasn’t just yet another mess of foliage. He could . . . leave something behind, maybe. He knew he couldn’t change what was here, but perhaps he could add to it, create a marker with some sort of item on his person that would let him know where he’d already been.
He checked his pockets. A knife, another knife, a switchblade, a lockpick, another knife . . . Cobalt sighed. Did he have anything on him that wasn’t used for murder or burglary?
Likely not, he thought. He only carried the essentials, and he tended to get everything he needed by taking it from someone else. They deserved it. Usually.
He huffed. He needed something, anything else that he could leave that wouldn’t decrease his number of useful items by one. He checked yet another pocket, and pulled out the tiger’s eye. It was warm, even here, and when he opened his hand to look at it, the stone warped in shape until it became yet another knife. He spun it on his finger, then held it up to the light filtering through the trees. It was translucent in some places, opaque in most others. Pretty , he thought, then slid it back into his pocket. It shifted back into a rock, the patron responsible for its transformation recognizing that she was not needed right now.
That wouldn’t do, but what else did he have? Other than the things in his pocket, all he had were the clothes on his back. Cobalt touched the bandana tied loosely around his neck, fingers tightening around the hem of it as he considered tying it to one of these branches. He really didn’t want to leave that behind either. He wasn’t sure if the forest was going to give it back.
His thumb brushed his ring, and he almost flinched. Absolutely not. It didn’t work here -- he’d tried locating Toby almost immediately after realizing he wasn’t anywhere near him when he’d stepped through, but the ring stayed dull and dormant. His stone was the only thing that showed even a bit of magic, but not the kind that would help in this situation. All it would do is probably make him accidentally commit arson again, and he did not want to think about the kind of damage that would cause inside of someone’s psyche.
After another minute of deliberation, Cobalt finally made a decision and untied the bandana from around his neck. He slipped it off, and ran his thumb over the embroidered name along the edge. He wondered briefly if anyone else knew what Toby’s last name was.
Just get it over with , he thought, leaning over to tie the bandana around a broken log jutting out of the ground.
He froze, his ears perking up at the sound of something nearby. It moved slowly, clumsily as it tried to make its way through the tangled mess of rotten forest foliage. Cobalt turned his head ever so slightly. It could be Toby, or it could be some warped freak of nature conjured up by whatever was controlling his body right now. He remained very still, not wanting to alert whatever it was of his presence, and waited.
A familiar-sounding “there you are” answered his unasked question after a few moments.
Cobalt let out a breath. He was glad the druid was okay, but he had also been more worried than he’d cared to admit and it had worked his nerves. The combination of feeling lost in this overgrown hellscape, not having a clear way out, and losing his impromptu tour guide had frayed the edges of his composure ever so slightly. Instead of responding right away, he focused on untying the bandana from around the tree as patiently as he could.
The man of the hour craned his head to look around at what was keeping his rogue occupied. “What are you doing?”
He didn’t respond to that either. At least, he didn’t answer the question. Cobalt slipped the bandana back around his neck, his movements deliberately slow. “Didn’t I say to not just go jumping into things?” He asked as he pulled the knot tight, glancing at Toby out of the corner of his eye.
Toby frowned, leaning back a little bit. Cobalt had a particularly lethal stare of disapproval sometimes, and Toby never liked being caught at the receiving end of it. Arguably, it was ridiculous to feel that way about someone who was (probably, he didn’t know) younger than him, but the half-elf had a way of carrying himself that was, at the very least, pretty damn terrifying. “I thought you were behind me,” he said, his voice a little quieter.
“I was,” Cobalt said coolly, then turned his head so he could look directly at the other man. “But when I stepped through, you’d already gone off somewhere.”
Toby’s brow furrowed. “No, I didn’t. As soon as I crossed, I stood there and waited for you.” He found a small mushroom to poke at a couple times while he continued. “After a bit, I thought you’d psyched yourself out or just decided you didn’t want to come with me, so I tried to go back and see where you were. But it wouldn’t let me out.”
Cobalt crossed his arms, his eyes shifting to some other subject while Toby kept talking. “I pushed against it, tried to pry it open, threw things at it . . . nothing. Once I was inside, I couldn’t get out. I decided to just wait, but after a few minutes, maybe, of sitting there and not seeing you, I decided to see what the hell I’d gotten myself into.”
Cobalt’s expression soured -- he didn’t enjoy the idea that this place might intentionally be trying to separate them. They could be wandering around in here for who knows how long if they were on their own. He’d figure something out so they didn’t risk that happening. “And?” He asked rather than voicing that concern, “do you know what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into?”
Toby’s mouth pursed in thought. “I believe we are in the only part of my mind that retains memories. This area feels oddly familiar, like I’ve been here before, but I of course have no idea why. The darkness, out there,” he replied, pointing in the direction of where the trees supposedly ended, “is where the rest of my years of memories should have been, I think.”
Cobalt nodded slowly. “And the reason you can’t get out is . . .?”
Toby shrugged. “I don’t know that yet. Could you get out?”
He admittedly hadn’t even tried. “I immediately started looking for you, so I didn’t exactly get around to it.”
“Well,” Toby said, his gaze sliding from Cobalt back in the direction of where the trees might end, “I did figure something else out. The . . . bad news, more or less.”
Cobalt raised an eyebrow. When was there ever good news?
“This circle of light is shrinking,” Toby said, the expression on his face much more serious than it was a second ago. Cobalt suppressed a twinge of fondness at his scientist side making an appearance. “When I was trying to break through to find you, I noticed that the light wasn’t stable. It was . . . frayed in some areas, like it was falling apart a little. And it was ever so slowly creeping in on the plants here, and I realized after a moment that the entire thing was slowly collapsing.” He turned his brown eyes back to the half-elf, whose skeptical expression had shifted, now mirroring Toby’s serious one. “If it’s been shrinking the entire time we’ve been wandering around here, and it was just pure nothingness on the outside of the circle . . . then that means whatever passed through that light didn’t make it to the other side. I don’t want to know what would happen to us if we didn’t find a way out of here.”
Cobalt hummed. “We might disintegrate, or be crushed to death, or simply cease to exist, or-”
“ Or we can make it out alive and not worry about any of that,” Toby interrupted.
“-get strangled by a plant monster, or become part of this fucked up forest, that would be fun, or-”
Toby huffed. “Weren’t you grouchy like a minute ago? What happened?”
Cobalt took his shades off, cleaning them with the hem of his shirt. “I can go back to being grouchy if you’d like.”
Toby grumbled something under his breath that Cobalt pretended he didn’t catch, and turned away. It made him smile a little. “I’m going this way,” Toby announced, starting to walk in another direction with a lot more ease than Cobalt had.
Said rogue, usually adept at navigating over uneven terrain, swore as yet another branch nearly slapped him in the face. He grabbed it, intending to snap it in half, but stopped himself with a sigh. “Why does this damn forest keep attacking me?”
Toby glanced over his shoulder and smirked. “Maybe because you’re not being very nice to it.”
Cobalt made a small, offended sound. “The trees hit me first!”
The druid snorted, making Cobalt frown when he realized how ridiculous that sounded. “I think they just believe you’re intruding,” Toby said as he faced forward again. “That would explain why we got separated almost immediately -- you’re not supposed to be here.”
Cobalt ducked before his forward progress could be interrupted by something else. “Could you maybe tell it that I didn’t decide to come here? That I’d actually love to leave?”
Toby’s expression changed a little. Was it really that bad? He supposed that to anyone that wasn’t him, the answer was probably yes. “I would, but I’m not in control right now.”
The half-elf had been preoccupied with pulling his foot out of an unfortunately placed hole -- he had stepped directly onto the softest part of a rotten log. It had seemed solid at first, but his foot had gone right through with the most sickening wet sound. His face twisted in disgust, and he’d started tugging against whatever sticky substance had his shoe almost glued to the ground before he heard the shift in Toby’s tone. He sounded . . . sad, almost. Cobalt’s brow furrowed, and he tilted his head. He gave his foot one last tug, and the log released him so quickly that he nearly fell over. He caught his balance, then hurried after the druid.
He opened his mouth to ask him if he’d said something wrong, but Toby continued before he could. “Look,” he said, pointing ahead of him.
Cobalt did. Ahead of them was some sort of clearing, a strange but welcome respite for the rogue in this seemingly endless dying forest. They made their way towards it, both of them visibly relaxing as they were free to walk on more even ground. Toby closed his eyes and stretched his arms & neck, rubbing the back of it as if sore. Cobalt straightened, his back hurting somewhat from ducking and crouching to avoid getting bombarded by random branches and vines.
Toby opened his eyes with a grateful sigh, then paused. “What the . . .”
Cobalt came up behind him, taking in their new surroundings. He spun in a slow circle, brow furrowed in confusion as he assessed the area warily. “. . . where did these buildings come from?”
Toby shook his head, slowly approaching one of them. “I’m not sure,” he said quietly, coming to a stop. “Why is there a church here?”
Cobalt looked at the other structures around them. A crumbling church, then something that looked like an oversized birdhouse, an inn, perhaps, and gates that usually led to a garden of some kind. Cobalt couldn’t see clearly past those gates, as there was a dense fog spooling out of the bars, dissipating into nothing before it could travel very far. “These are your remaining memories, right? So . . . maybe you were religious at some point?” It was very hard for Cobalt to picture this being a reality, though.
The druid frowned. “I doubt it,” he muttered, thinking back on the few churches he’d seen post-memory wipe. Some level of revulsion deep in his gut always stirred whenever he was near one, though he had no idea why. He turned on his heel and faced Cobalt again, hands on his hips. “We should look around. I can look in here, and you can look in another one. We’d probably get answers faster that way.”
The half-elf considered this for only a second before he remembered what Toby had mentioned offhand about this place trying to intentionally separate them. He shook his head. “Nope.”
After he didn’t elaborate, Toby lifted an eyebrow. “That’s it? Just ‘no’?”
Cobalt nodded once.
Toby sighed, though he was a little amused. “Alright.”
He waited for Cobalt to approach the building before turning back to face it. His eyes scanned the looming, decrepit steeples and cracked window panes before landing on the pair of doors, one of them forcefully broken off its hinges. “Should we . . . go inside?”
Cobalt pursed his lips, then shook his head again. “I’m gonna look around first.” He stepped around the smaller man and started to wander around the outside of the church. It really was falling apart -- bricks and stones that were supposed to be holding walls up had fallen off into piles on the ground, leaving small holes and gaps in the walls. There wasn’t a single steeple left completely intact, and all of the stained glass was dusty, broken, or a mix of both. They were way too dirty to clearly make out what the panes were trying to depict, but Cobalt decided to shelf that mystery for now.
One of the panes was more broken than the others, with gaping holes much larger than the other three of a similar shape and size. Cobalt lifted his glasses, squinting at it a little. His eyes trailed down to the grassy floor below it, noting that some of the shards were scattered and wedged in the dirt. The panes themselves were red, and if he hadn’t been paying enough attention, he might’ve missed the darker red stains around the edges of the glass. Small specks of it littering the grass and stones nearby confirmed his suspicion: there was blood on these. Whose blood, he didn’t know.
He put his shades on and turned slowly, scanning the area for any other sign of life that may have left this here. The blood had already dried, so whatever happened here occurred a while ago, but there wasn’t any sign that something had taken place out here. Either the culprit (culprits?) cleaned up really well, or . . . it happened inside. Cobalt frowned. He didn’t like the thought that there was something or someone else here, but it would make sense. He took one last look, and then continued walking.
Tucked away along one of the corners, hidden well enough that if you weren’t looking for anything you wouldn’t see it, was a small chisel and hammer. Cobalt squinted a little at it, then scanned the stones to see if there was any evidence of carving or making some sort of mark with the chisel. There wasn’t. He wondered why it was here -- this wasn’t a set of tools used for destruction, especially not on this level. He’d expected to see a sledgehammer or something of that nature, but these were the only tools around. He thought it wise to leave them be.
He hadn't seen anything else that he would semi-professionally deem suspicious, so he came back around the other side to where Toby was. Or, where he should've been.
Cobalt froze, his eyes widening as he scanned the area to try and spot the druid. He saw him sticking his little head into the gap made by the broken door, and let out a quiet, frustrated sound that was both exasperation and relief.
Toby jumped a little when Cobalt grabbed his arm, pulling him away from the door. “What are you doing?”
Toby looked down at his arm, then back up at the half-elf’s mildly irritated expression. “Nothing now,” he mumbled.
Cobalt scanned his face, trying to interpret the expression there. His thoughts flashed back to the argument that had landed them here in the first place, and he exhaled slowly, carefully choosing his next words: “I know you don’t need a chaperone. But I don’t want something to happen and I lose track of you, alright? So please, do me a favor and be a little more careful.”
Toby stared at him silently for a moment, then nodded, looking back at the broken door again. Cobalt wasn’t sure he’d completely gotten through, but he’d take that for now. “Did you find anything?”
Cobalt wasn’t sure if Toby would somehow know if he was lying, since this was all technically happening inside his own head. He risked it. “Nah, nothing worth worrying about.”
The druid nodded, and didn’t ask anything further, so either he bought the lie or figured the truth would come out eventually. He reached out and brushed a hand along the fractured wood on the broken door. “There’s some really violent gashes on these doors. Mainly this one, so whomever was trying to get in had more success with this door than the other.”
So Cobalt didn’t need to tell him that something else was here with them. Good. “Think they’re still around here?”
Toby shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
Cobalt realized he was still holding Toby’s arm, though a lot looser than before. He let his hand drop, but before it could land by his side again, Toby caught it in his own and held on to it. Cobalt’s eyes widened a little, and even more so when the man intertwined their fingers. He looked up, but Toby’s back was still turned.
“So you don’t lose me,” he said quietly.
Cobalt blinked, then let his grip tighten around the other man’s hand. So he had gotten through. He stepped over the destroyed wood, following the druid into the dimly lit church.
xxx
Outside of his head, Toby’s body twitched. He was lying as if crumpled on the ground, his face contorting slightly in a bit of pain. Vines protruded from his body like extra appendages, their dried brown color making it unclear at first where they ended and his skin started. They warped and twisted around his body and neck, loosening and tightening as his mostly-unconscious body breathed.
Four of the aforementioned vines were much thicker than the others, and one of them snaked over the ground and led directly to a sleeping cat several feet away. The vine split into dozens of much smaller tendrils upon reaching his figure, weaving themselves around and over him and forming a green, leafy cage. Bailey’s face was a lot more peaceful than the plants’ host as he slept dreamlessly, completely unaware as tiny mushrooms sprouted from the ground and latched to his fur and skin like suction cups, slowly pulling him down into the dirt. One of his arms was lazily outstretched in the direction of his axe, which was lying discarded just out of reach. The plants ignored this, focusing all of their energy on consuming the paladin with as many of themselves as they could. He sank just a little further as poppies and lavender sprouted quietly around his figure to keep him under, the vibrant red and purple providing jarring contrast against the mostly green landscape around them. They bloomed and spread the further he went down, as if being directly fed by him. The cat’s breathing grew shallower, but still, he slept.
xxx
It was uncomfortably warm in the church, like it was trying too hard to be welcoming. Toby stopped pulling Cobalt along when he reached the first pew. The gashes he’d seen on the door were scattered along these as well, not leaving a single one unscathed. There were eight pews here, and two of them were split in half, the jagged edges of the broken wood sharply contrasting with the suggested peacefulness of the church. Toby noticed more of the gashes along the walls and on the platform, where a podium had been knocked over, the book atop it torn to shreds and its papers scattered carelessly all over the floor. An altar sat behind the podium, the once imposing structure covered in dust and several red stains that Toby didn’t want to think too much about. He let his gaze drift up to the walls around the platform, where four tall stained glass windows sat. They were all dirty, all broken in some places, but the sunlight coming through them -- from what sun, Toby wasn’t sure -- helped illuminate their subjects more clearly. One of them, a red one, was more severely broken, the figure in the center of it almost completely shattered.
Toby wanted to look at them a little closer, but he turned to Cobalt instead. The elf was looking at the other panes, his face a little paler than before. Toby’s eyes went to those, and his mouth opened just slightly as he stared.
The figures in the panes of glass were moving . It wasn’t as natural or fluid as a typical creature’s movements, but they were in fact walking or talking or something of the sort. There was no sound as the figures moved, and it was like watching a zoetrope: the motions were stiff and stilted, and they weren’t very detailed. That didn’t stop Toby from recognizing the subjects in them.
“Bailey . . .?” He asked quietly, though there was no need for an answer. Every single one of the panes had the cat in it in some fashion, and each one of them was from Toby’s point of view: Bailey spoke to him very seriously about not trusting Strahd, though there were interruptions in the playback for when Toby’s attention lapsed due to exhaustion; watching Olive yell at him before she walked off, leaving him sitting solemnly in the snow before getting up and walking out of frame; swinging his axe at Doru, an otherworldly light radiating from him as he did so; and others that were just snippets of Bailey looking at him to make sure he was okay, or extending a paw for him to use as support or stability.
Toby turned away from them and back to the platform. Why was Bailey in all of these windows? They were the only memories he had of the cat so far, but why here?
Cobalt looked down at Toby when he turned away, watching him struggle to figure out what was going on. The rogue was mostly certain that he knew what was happening, but he wasn't sure if he should interfere. He let Toby pull him in the direction of the platform, stopping short of going up the stairs. Cobalt studied the altar, the blood stains littering it. He wasn't certain what happened here, but he thought he knew whose fault it was.
Toby was looking at each of the stained glass windows, these four much taller than the others in the rest of the church. Their frames were identical: massive pointed arches with fractured, colorful images inside, each one once again depicting Bailey in some way. The only difference was that these weren't memories Toby had, at least, not ones that he recognized. He carefully stepped up onto the platform to get a closer look, trampling the book’s ripped out pages, stopping when he was standing right in front of the altar.
Cobalt trailed behind him, deftly stepping around the pages and eyeing the altar warily. He did not like how much blood was on it, but Toby seemed to be dutifully ignoring it.
“Bailey’s in all of these,” Toby was saying, and Cobalt’s attention snapped to him, then to the windows. There was a purple one, a blue one, a green one, and a red one, which was definitely the one that Cobalt had seen from the outside. He thought about the bloodstained shards he’d seen on the ground, and his eyes went to the pile of broken glass underneath the window. The others were mostly intact, but that one . . .
Toby continued speaking. “In that one, he’s a king,” he said, facing the purple window. Bailey was indeed depicted in fine robes, if he was interpreting the glass correctly. Bailey wore a crown and held a staff in front of him, the sun forming a sort of halo around his head as it bowed in humility. “And there, a . . . knight? Or a soldier?” he said, pointing to the blue window. Bailey had armor in the same gold color as the sun halo from the king’s image. Instead of a staff, he held an axe, his head held up with more pride than the previous window’s depiction. Something about that armor felt oddly familiar to Toby, but he couldn’t quite place it.
Cobalt’s ears perked up, and he turned his head slightly to listen. He didn’t say a word, letting Toby’s mumbling fade into the background as he focused his attention on the sound he thought he heard behind him. It was subtle, and gone now, but Cobalt could’ve sworn he heard a chain-like clink .
Toby was looking at the green window now. Unlike the others, this one wasn’t symmetrical -- Bailey’s head was tilted to the side, arms and legs bent awkwardly and fractured in a way that made him look more like a doll than a person. “Is . . . that a puppet?” Toby asked.
Cobalt took another moment to listen for any other sounds, then looked back at the window. “Seems like it,” he said, some deep-seated worry stirring in his gut. They weren’t moving like the other ones. There was no way Toby could remember these versions of Bailey, since he didn’t know about Bailey’s life prior to meeting him now. That was something only Cobalt and Olive knew, and even they didn’t have all of the information.
Clink.
Cobalt’s head whipped around, eyes scanning the pews and seemingly empty space behind them. Someone, or something, was here. His fingers instinctively tightened around Toby’s own, but the druid remained completely oblivious, too focused on trying to figure out what he was looking at. Cobalt tensed, his hand hovering over where his dagger rested on his hip. He would prefer to use both hands, but if letting the other man go was the reason they got separated again or worse, he’d never forgive himself.
Toby’s gaze slid over to the last, most damaged window. Angry red glass jutted out of the frame and lay in ruined pieces on the floor. “I . . . don’t know what that one is,” he said, his brain trying desperately to fit the last piece of the puzzle together with limited information. He stepped forward, placing his hand on the altar to guide himself around it as he zeroed in on the broken image on the floor. “It looks like a-”
“Watch out!” Cobalt yanked Toby out of the way just in time as another figure leapt past them, aiming straight for where Toby just was. They landed in a pile, Cobalt recovering faster and going into a defensive crouch, putting himself between the smaller man and whatever had just tried to attack them. He narrowed his eyes at the figure, even as he didn’t quite understand what he was looking at.
Toby watched from behind him as it stood. It was . . . flat , Toby’s mind suggested, and it took him a second but he eventually agreed. The figure wasn’t three-dimensional in the way that he and Cobalt and everything else was, instead seemingly made of large panes of glass in varying shades of red. Toby swallowed thickly, trying to calm his racing heart as he watched the figure straighten, turning towards them with an obscene amount of rage in its eyes.
Cobalt faltered. “ Bailey? ”
It was indeed Bailey, or at least, the stained glass version of him. Toby’s eyes darted between him and the pile of red glass, quickly finishing the puzzle he was trying so hard to put together earlier. His eyes widened, trailing back to the cat, who looked more terrifying this way than he’d ever seen him. While his entire figure was fragmented due to the nature of stained glass’s construction, parts of his panes were fractured, distorting the light he was reflecting onto the walls and floor. It bathed everything around them in a deep red, and his eyes were glowing a deeply unsettling white. Toby looked at his paws, where his claws were unsheathed and much longer than he’d remembered, and dripping blood endlessly onto the floor. Toby couldn’t spot where the blood was coming from, but there was so much of it, and it started to make little puddles around his glass feet. A realization hit him -- the gashes he saw everywhere were claw marks. “Is he -- is he a monster ?”
Cobalt narrowed his eyes and straightened, both hands holding daggers that he would use at a moment’s notice. “No,” he said, quiet but clear, “a prisoner.”
As if in response, glass-Bailey rolled his shoulders and neck, the movement as broken as his body was, making the shackles on his wrists and neck clink in that sound Cobalt could now place. His paws flexed, making his claws gleam in the light, and his eyes zeroed in on the half-elf in the way of his target.
Shit was the only thing Cobalt was able to think before Bailey lunged at him, and Cobalt barely dodged out of the way in time before Bailey landed on one of the pews, using that as another launching point to throw himself at the rogue again. Cobalt gritted his teeth and stayed out of the way as best he could, but Bailey was much faster and more agile than the one Cobalt was used to dealing with. This version of him wasn’t worn down a bit by age, and moved truly like a young, lithe cat would. He swiped and bit, catching air each time, but only by millimeters. Cobalt jumped and ducked out of the way, trying not to get caught by either one of those and also by the sharp edges of the glass jutting out of random parts of Bailey’s body.
He only caught a glimpse of Toby, who had wisely moved into the shadows, and was doing . . . something? He didn’t know, and couldn’t figure it out in time before Bailey was in his view again, teeth bared as he snarled. Cobalt glared right back, changing tactics mid-dodge to figure out what he could use to smash the glass cat into pieces. He leapt out of the way again and towards one of the walls, ducking to avoid a swipe aimed for his face, and grabbed one of the cobblestones that had broken off of the wall. He hurled it at Bailey’s head before he had time to recover, and the rock smashed right through his face.
Bailey stopped moving. Cobalt’s breath came in wild pants, but he kept his eyes trained on the cat as he slowly crept backwards. Bailey hadn’t exactly fallen over, as he expected. Bailey was just standing there, perfectly still, only half his face intact. His eyes still glowed, and they focused on Cobalt as he put distance between the two of them.
Then, to his complete horror, Bailey bent over, picking up some of the glass off the floor. He lifted it to his broken head, and after a moment, the glass fused back into place as if Cobalt hadn’t hit him at all. He was jarringly reminded, then, of the tree he’d tried to leave a cut on in the forest. He couldn’t truly change anything here.
Bailey looked at Cobalt again -- it was his turn to freeze in place -- and then his attention pivoted to something else. Cobalt didn’t have enough time to register what he was looking at before Bailey hurled himself in Toby’s direction.
“No!” Cobalt cried out, scrambling off the floor to chase after Bailey, before he saw Toby come out of the darkness with what looked like a stone statue in his hands. The druid swung it with all his might at the paladin, who had too much forward momentum to react in any other way than his eyes widening in shock before he was a pile of much smaller, glittering shards.
Toby let the statue fall from his hands -- a figure of Pelor, Cobalt realized -- and coughed, blood shooting from his mouth and trailing down his chin. Toby touched his stomach and pulled away, staring at his stained hands with unfocused eyes, and barely heard his name come from Cobalt’s mouth before he collapsed.