Chapter Text
Day 7: “Watch out!” | Explosion | Crush Injury | Trap
Ashton may be broadly antagonistic even on the best of days, but he’s not cruel by any means. That’s why he chooses to warn the Head Dunamancer and her new team of assistants that probing directly into his broken-ass head is probably a bad idea. Given what almost happened to two of his closest friends when they attempted this particular feat with his enthusiastic go-ahead, he can’t imagine what might befall a bunch of unseen strangers who absolutely do not have his go-ahead—much less his enthusiasm.
Unsurprisingly, Ashton’s warnings are ignored once again. Damn, and he thought he was supposed to be the most reckless one in a room at all times.
When a few of the faceless dunamancers begin to press into Ashton’s thoughts, it feels only slightly less invasive than when Avyl had taken hold of their powers and paralyzed them. They don’t even have a specific memory that they’re trying to concentrate on as the dunamancers’ magic overtakes their mind’s futile struggles with almost laughable ease. They’re simply shoved out of their body’s sense of reality and thrown into a series of familiar images that flash rapidly by their mind’s eye.
Crudely drawn runes and ceremonial headdresses. A portal and rising screams. A trail of dusty footprints among an endless expanse of red sand wasteland. The stark, cold bareness of a barracks built for children. Blood spattered across the dirt yard, matching the pattern painted across clenched knuckles. Moonlight sparkling in the reflections of countless glass shards. Pale mist darkening into dark grey smoke like the night sky. “No, no, no, no, no! I don’t—” An impossibly deep pool of lava. Fire, fire, fire….
There’s a sound like crackling logs, like shattering glass, like something irreparable. Like metal bending and separating and screaming beneath the power of an alchemical reaction the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Calamity. Like losing a best friend again.
Ashton only begins to sense the various presences inside his head after he comes to the realization that he should probably try to wake himself up. The presences feel like little bugs crawling around the inside of his skull, which may be disturbing as all hells but at least means that he can probably stomp them out if he can catch them.
Remembering what Imogen and FCG had told him about getting separated and blocked by crystalline walls inside his head when they had done a deep dive inside, Ashton puts his focus into both capturing the unwanted presences in his head and trying to force them all out at once by waking himself up. Waking himself up hadn’t exactly worked the last time, but it’s the only idea he can currently come up with.
For a moment, Ashton throws all their energy into shoving the flashes of memory away and grounding themself back into their body. They can barely feel anything, not even the background pain that has hounded them for so much of their life. Their limbs and muscles refuse to obey their commands to move. They can’t even tell if their nose is bleeding like it did last time. Well, shit, time for plan B.
They refocus on the little bugs skittering around inside their broken-ass head. With enough concentration, Ashton can tell each of the bugs apart. They count four in total. Four they can handle. Hopefully.
Honing in on one of the bugs, Ashton tries to imagine a pint glass being conjured inside his mind so that he can trap the bug underneath. Much to his surprise, the bug stops moving.
Encouraged by his success, Ashton pins down another bug and tries the same trick. It works just like the last one.
By the time he gets the third bug trapped, however, there’s a sudden spike of sharp pain from where the first bug had been captured. Somehow, Ashton knows that a spell had just been cast against him from that presence inside his head—and not the helpful communication and enchantment spells that Imogen and FCG had tried before. One of the dunamancers is trying to force him to wake up or release them by hurting him.
Unfortunately, even the pain doesn’t help ground Ashton in their body or bring them any closer to waking up. Instead, when they focus back on that first bug, they notice that the imagined pint glass has shrunk and cracked into several jagged pieces, the whole structure seeming close to collapsing in on itself.
More pinpricks of pain start popping up from the other bugs, even the one that remains freely crawling around the inside of Ashton’s skull. The resulting headache could rival even their post-Titan transformation migraines. After all, it’s one thing for their own body to let them know in no uncertain terms that they’ve reached the limit of their exhausted energies and a whole other thing for trained mages to target violent spells at them from inside their own head. They’ve never had more sympathy towards the victims of Imogen’s psychic attacks.
Then, a new yet familiar presence appears among the clusterfuck that is currently Ashton’s head. This new presence doesn’t dive as deep as the four little bugs, but it does tap into something that feels connected to the very core of his brain. Just that context clue alone leads him to the conclusion that Avyl must have finally joined in on the fun.
And to no one’s surprise, Ashton soon feels that familiar tug on his dunamantic powers as Avyl attempts to take control of those powers once again. Just like every other time, it’s frighteningly easy for her to grab hold of the dunamancy, but it’s still just as difficult for her to tame the chaos as it can be for Ashton.
Her hold grows heavy, as if more and more weights are getting added to it in order to drag everything further and further down. The weight quickly grows so all-consuming that Ashton forgets all about the little bugs inside his head and the flashes of memory that linger on the edge of his consciousness and his desperate wish to wake the fuck up from whatever this nightmare is turning out to be.
For one brief, insane second, Ashton imagines the inside of his skull collapsing under the weight, the bugs tumbling into freefall and crumpling with the gravity, the pint glasses disintegrated into crystalline sand. Then, without warning, the building pressure reverses, exploding outward as if from a highly reactive core.