Chapter Text
Andrew had thought he knew pain. It seemed that ever since his birth, it was destined to follow him to the ends of the earth. It went with him from one foster home to another, showing itself in the form of stinging bruises and aching hunger and burning scrapes. It creeped on him in the dead of night when mother was asleep and brother was left to do as he wanted. It clung to him as he hid the imprints of fists under his clothes. It sat with him as his chest caved in with the loss of his first home. He knew pain from the way it danced along his skin and pressed against his muscles and burrowed in his mind. He had tried to master it, to take back that control by carving himself open before anyone else could, chasing away the ghost of soft skin with a hurt that was entirely his own. But that had lasted him only so long before the hands became too unbearable and control too much of a farce, and he had needed to substitute knives for a shopping trip Cass was never supposed to have been on.
Andrew had thought he knew pain, but the pain of the past was nothing like this.
It was a rhythm, frantic and pulsing and echoing. It was sound made physical, armed with a hundred knives and a thousand flames. It rubbed over his skin like sand paper and pulled threads through his muscles like needles and spread through his skeleton like ants. There were waves of liquid pushing at his organs in a way that had him intensely aware of the acid creeping up his oesophagus. The pain was at once visceral and acute, deep inside him and right on top of his skin and the only way he could track its origin was by the pulses reverberating around him.
There was no way to think, no room between the rhythmic waves for him to string together phrases or words or letters. There was no order to the chaos he had found himself in. There was no light to fix on, no sound to hear, no way to feel beyond the confines of his own skin.
Andrew was trapped in his own body, with no way out.
He did not know how long he was like that, deep in the throes of pain, but he doubted it mattered much in the end. Whether it lasted seconds or years or millennia, his traitorous mind would always remember it for him, like it did all the other times before.
The first thing that broke through, was a sickly scent of roses, cloying and pungent and rotten. It was easy for it to become overwhelming and it felt as if a flower was growing in his trachea with every breath he took. But it was a distraction from the pain, and Andrew would take anyway to get out, even if it meant facing the death that clung to these flowers.
He chased it, chased it until the agony was replaced with sticky glue, needles getting stuck, flames dying out, liquid falling still.
There were more sensations here. Andrew could feel the twitch of his fingers and the movement of his ribs expanding under soft fabric. Distantly, there was a voice, singing or chanting in a soft murmur and he tilted his head towards it before opening his eyes.
There was almost no difference between the darkness behind his eyelids and the darkness that filled the room if not for the white ball of light that hung in the middle of the space. It was a strange light, completely white, to the point that everything it touched was illuminated in some shade of grey.
The light hung above a stone table that looked similar to an altar or a coffin. The sides of it were obscured in shadow so Andrew could not see if there was any relief to indicate which of the two functions it served. From the foot of the stone bench, Andrew tracked dark, snake-like tendrils to the wall, where they bunched up into bushes, crawling up and spilling over to the ceiling. Although there seemed to be no pattern on the wall, the tendrils on the ceiling all appeared to lead to one point, right above the light where a single vine stretched down and reached inside the globe.
Andrew was too low to see if there was anything on the table, but the shadow of a figure stood at the foot of the table. To say it had a body would be a blatant lie, as all it seemed to be made of was the shadow of one. It had blurred edges and no features or depth, yet it still took up space the same way a normal person might and there was no doubt about the fact that it was looking down at whatever lay on the table.
Despite its lack of defining features though, Andrew knew this shadow. It had followed him for days, watching, hiding, tracking. Knocking him out and kidnapping him to vine-filled cellars apparently.
He moved, arms bracing against the ground he lay on and pushing him up. That small movement seemed to be too much for his upset stomach as bile rushed up his throat and he just barely managed to avoid throwing up all over himself.
He shook from the force of it, arms almost threatening to give out from under him. His eyes teared up and his stomach was starting to cramp by the time it finally stopped. He spit out the last dregs of it, attempting to get rid of the disgusting acerbic taste clinging to his teeth, and then another time for good measure. Shifting away from the puddle, vines tore at his clothes from where they had caught themselves in the threads of his shirt. He looked back, only to find the dark silhouette of a rose staring back at him, fully blossomed, yet rotten at the same time. He jerked away, smell hitting him in the face and threatening to set off his gag reflex. He whipped back around, shuffling away before looking back up at the shadow figure.
Its attention had shifted from the table to him. In the back of his mind, that paranoid feeling of being watched reared its head again but he pushed it away.
Instead he glared at the shadow as hard as he could, waiting it out while a thousand questions vied for first place in his mind. "What did you do," and "Where am I," were the loudest contenders but he doubted the shadow was interested in answering those. Fear was a familiar companion that demanded he ask "Did you drug me?" but he was starting to doubt whether a figure made out of shadows needed drugs to bring him anywhere. In the end, memories of that moment in the bathroom were too strong and he demanded, "What did you mean Kevin is alive?"
His throat ached as if he had spent hours screaming himself hoarse. He might as well have. There was no way to know what had happened in the time the pain had held him, his mind drawing a terrifying blank.
The shadow cocked its head. Or the part that was likely its head. It was difficult to distinguish between it and the shadows behind it, lines blurred. "How interesting," it crooned, voice…distant, not quite there, yet audible the same way his own was. "'Stranger to lands' yet we never thought to seek beyond." It looked back at whatever was on the table. "I suppose that was why it went beyond one hundred roses. 'Emptiness wakes the seeker of hope. One hundred roses from the holder of death,'" it chanted again, in that same rhythm as before. It walked around the table, along the other side where Andrew could barely see it. It stopped right by the light, and its lines sharpened, became more distinct from the darkness behind it, an entity that existed on its own. "Always those powerful ones to mess everything up. Always these ones to mess up the timeline. Idle, arrogant megalomaniacs. Oh, how they disgust me. But—that is what we are for. Here to fix the world. Enforce the rules, remember the words, gather the people. Right time, right place, right way. Only way."
Andrew thought perhaps the shadow had spent too long in solitude or around people who knew exactly what it was raving about. It sounded as if the shadow had just escaped the criminal psych ward to go around kidnapping people to bring to rose-filled dungeons for human sacrifice.
The shadow walked around the table to Andrew. It crouched beside him at what would have been eye level had it had any eyes. "You ask how Kevin is alive, but I already told you: he has always been. He just stopped being alive in your world once we brought him over."
Andrew wanted to throttle it. He despised the way they talked in riddles but with the tone of a patronising elementary teacher. "You killed him," he said through clenched teeth, nails digging painfully into the ground beneath him.
The shadow shook its head, sighing. "No, no. No, we did not kill him. We simply brought him over. That the body died is not our problem, we needed to follow the words and that was what we came up with—not that it helped much." It glanced back over its shoulder at the table and Andrew had a sickening feeling about what lay there.
It took a herculean amount of effort to suppress the urge to kill this shadow. The smell of roses did nothing to help, flashes of a stand-in gravestone and vegetables tearing at his control. "Then why did you take him," he hissed.
"Because we tried to follow the words of course."
"What are those words?"
That seemed to surprise the shadow somewhat. It froze, head cocked in confusion, before it burst out into raucous laughter as if Andrew had just told the best joke.
"'What words,' he asks. Oh, I forgot—I forgot! 'Stranger to lands,' I should have known better. Well," it said conversationally, leaning uncomfortably close, "you see, there is a prophecy. It is an old prophecy—very old. Old enough that the people have given up and forgotten about it. But we have not, and your friend Kevin just so happens to be part of this prophecy. The only problem is that prophecies can get difficult when it comes to powerful people—probability, you see; it becomes hard to discern the right path for the oracles—so that is where we come in. We remember and make sure the prophecies are followed, whether people remember them or not. But we ran into some…problems and we thought we had the right solution—we did not, as you may see on the table—so we sought to find another way and that is where we ran into your prophecy."
It sounded so satisfied, so ridiculously cheerful, as if everything was right again in the universe and nothing could ever go awry. Andrew paid little heed to its words, however, as it continued to prattle on, showing no intention of ever telling what those 'words' entailed. He stared at the table, the earlier dread waking up to become a raging monster in his chest as his mind started to put the pieces together.
The shadow was still talking when he leaned over to stand up. His legs were too weak though, so he stumbled, crashing back to the ground. Undeterred, he grasped the edge of the table, using it as leverage as he got his legs under himself again.
Andrew was not prepared for the sight that lay there.
There was a body, clad in clothing so black that it stood out starkly against the dark grey of the table underneath. There was barely any skin visible, some fingers on the right hand, the upper part of the neck and the face—at least, the right side of it. The left side was covered in black lines, dark as the rose vines creeping around the room and equally tangled up, forming more of a single black spot of twisting and turning branches that reached up towards a closed eye.
Kevin's closed eye.
Despite the horrible lighting and the creeping darkness obscuring almost half of his face, it was unmistakably Kevin. There would never be a moment where Andrew did not remember what Kevin looked like. He had spent too many years tracing the contours of his face—the mole under his left eye, the upward slant of his eyes, a chickenpox scar that sat by his temple (the endless moles down his spine, the surgery scars on his chest, the trail of hair leading down, down, down)—committing every detail to memory. It was the only virtue of his near-perfect memory, and now it had come to stab him in the back as well, serving as a stark reminder of how alive he had once been and how dead he looked now.
There was no air left in Andrew's lungs as he stared at the man he had come to know and understand in the last five years. His life had gained a purpose the day he had met Kevin in that hospital room, two broken wrecks paired together in a California psych ward, one intent on starving himself to death, the other willing to let his own misfortune do it for him. It had been Kevin who was admitted unwillingly, Kevin who had fought the orderlies tooth and nail, Kevin who had sulked in silent protest. It had been Kevin who was released first with a plan for recovery and a person to help him get there. Andrew had done nothing but follow.
It had been Andrew who suggested making a deal, born out of a wretched desperation for the drop of colour Kevin had brought to his life; it had been Kevin who had turned it into more than that. "So long as you do your best to keep living, I will be there with you. And you will do the same for me in exchange."
And yet, in the end, Kevin had died anyway. The shadow said that he was still alive. However, as Andrew stared at him, he looked worse than those days they had shared a room. He was skin on bone, all hollowed out features and cutting tendons, pale face crowned by obsidian hair carefully groomed back.
His skin was cold as the stone he lay on when Andrew pressed careful fingers against his temple. They trailed down, pausing above the stain of black tendrils that covered his cheek. He steeled himself and went on. As his fingers touched the darkness, Andrew almost pulled away instinctively. There were no tangible bumps or ridges, however, underneath the skin, the black mass moved. A shifting, swirling, swarming motion, curling not as the vines did, but like how the wind blew the sand in a sandstorm, or a tornado blasted the water out to shore until it crashed against the rocks, intent on pushing forward with an uncaring violence that could not be anything but painful.
Andrew pressed the flat of his palm against it, wanting to feel where it came from, trace it back to its origin and rip it out. It pulsed, storm winds tearing up towards closed eyes, through muscle and veins, which meant it had to come from below.
His hand slipped further down, cupping the jaw bone lightly, as if it would crumple to dust if he placed any more pressure on it. The black spill swooped down the neck, disappearing under the high collar. Andrew tugged the collar up with his other hand, but the light did not reach inside and left him unable to see how far the damage went. He would not undress Kevin, not with the shadow here, not if he had been on his own, so he tried to see if there was any sign he could spot over the clothes.
It was not made any easier by the light that refused to reflect any colours whatsoever, rendering the room entirely in black and white, but Andrew saw the first sign of something out of place on the shoulder, where the fabric had a ripped hole in it. Fingering the edges, he saw something had pierced through multiple layers of clothes, one even padded, until it dug deep into the flesh right beside where the shoulder joint began. There was no sign of blood, no flash of bone peaking through despite the depth of the hole, no wetness coating the fabrics. Just a black hole of violence.
His muscles shook, jaw clenched with anger, but he forced it down in favour of looking further. Following down the left arm, he found a similar hole in the elbow and then another one in the wrist.
It was not the hole that had him frozen, though. Just below the wrist lacerations lay a mangled hand. It was entirely black like the other wounds, the ink spill likely trailing up from here. But that did not make the exposed bones and crooked fingers any less visible.
Anger swept through his system, whiting out his vision, and he abruptly pulled his hands back, swivelled around and sent his fist crashing into the rose vines with a force that had them imploding underneath his fist. He wanted to kill whomever had hurt Kevin. Skin broke open around his knuckles and thorns tore it further as he pulled his hand back out. Wanted to return the favour and rip them apart from the inside out. Welcoming the pain, he punched his other fist through the thornbush, skin and muscles tearing, letting it ground him as an old satisfaction purred at the pain.
He pulled it out again and was ready to ram another fist into the vines until he reached stone when the shadow spoke up.
"Please refrain from damaging the roses any further," it said in an icy tone that brooked no room for argument.
Andrew would have ignored the implied warning if it weren't for the tendrils of agony trailing up his wrists. It was nowhere near as bad as before, but even that featherlight warning was enough for his heart to surge up and have him rip back his fist to press against his stomach protectively.
He glanced at the shadow beside him, then over his shoulder at the table, letting his eyes trace the contours of the man that lay there before his eyes were inevitably pulled back to the hand. He took a breath to steady himself, shoving down the anger to where only he could see it. He would not break down in front of this insane shadow. "Who did that to him," he did not quite ask, gesturing with his destroyed hand. It hurt, but Andrew ignored it with practiced ease.
The shadow hummed. "Hm, the sleep or the curse or the wounds? Because those are three different things, yet two of them will be called the same. 'Two of a whole made complete in the end,' you know."
"Any," Andrew growled, fed up with the quoting of a prophecy it had not told him. "The sleep, the wounds, the—curse," he spat.
"Well, we gave you two already, we suppose we can give you the last one," it said. "The problem is that there isn't really a line to describe it. I could take the 'one hundred roses from the holder of death,' but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. Unless… No. No, no, no, we have defined all the roles, we cannot be wrong. Sleep is for stability, so death would not take him, that is all I will tell."
"That is not an answer," he hissed.
"It is, you are simply ignorant," it answered lightly.
Andrew thought his jaw would pop from how hard he was grinding his teeth. "Then enlighten me."
"'Enlighten me,'" the shadow echoed. It moved around the table to the other side of the room, not quite walking, not quite floating. "How could we? We are but a mere shadow, after all."
"Then how do I wake him up?"
It barked a laugh at that, a single, loud sound immediately swallowed up by the roses. Andrew could not see its features, but he heard the mocking smile all the same. "You can't!"
"But you said I would only have to—"
"Oh that was then," the shadow said with a wild movement of its limbs as it circled back around to him. "This is now. You could not even handle the curse. You would have died within an hour if we hadn't extended the warding spells to wrap around you. Even now we feel it as your body begins to break down. No-" it stopped right in front of him, "-you will have to learn to bear it before you can wake him. That and a new language. This 'Engle' of yours is truly horrid to learn, all empty words and phrases."
Andrew began to take a step back, but was frozen in place by an icy hand on his shoulder. He glanced over at the table and Kevin, burning every inch of him into his mind before the shadow could do anything.
The shadow chuckled, low and mocking and more present than any of its other words had sounded. "Remember this place, Thief," it whispered. "Universe be willing, you will play your part and find the promise you are searching for."
And with that, Andrew felt the cold on his shoulder spread throughout the rest of his body, burning as the shadows swallowed him whole.
…
Andrew was coming to despise waking up, because for the second time, pain awaited him at the bend of consciousness. It was the same as before, a deep beat resonating throughout his body, an army of needles puncturing him skin to bone, a flood of acid racing its way through his system as if it were blood. However, at the same time, it felt different. There were still the waves shifting through his organs, yet it felt more distant; there were still needles, but this time they did not pull along threads of thorns; there was still acid, but it did not feel as if it were eating him alive from the inside out. The loudest pain was in fact the headache that blossomed on the sides of his head, right above his ears.
Opening his eyes was a horrible idea, as bright light filtered through the cracks of them and burned right through tissue and bone to set the nerves of his brain alight with new fire. He hissed, hands coming up to protect his eyes from the light's assault, the sound of rushing blood welling in his ears as colourful spots danced behind his eyelids.
He took a moment to breathe, searching for the heartbeat that spurred his blood on with one hand, while he kept the other firmly pressed against his eyes. His fingers were cold against his neck yet simultaneously felt like they had suffered first-degree burns, but he dug them in nonetheless, right between his oesophagus and the tendon that ran from the curve of his jaw down to his collarbone.
His pulse beat as if he had just run a marathon full sprint, but Andrew tried his best to count along to it anyway. He lost the count somewhere after five, the rhythm in his gut making a nauseating loop that had him pushing down a rising bout of stomach fluid.
The phantom heat of fever and old nightmares danced over his skin, clawing to drag him down into a panic, but Andrew ignored them, pushed them down and dug his fingers into his pulse until his nails left crescent shapes behind.
The pain was grounding, familiar in a way the rhythm was not, a stinging pain so close to the artery it should send alarm bells off in his brain. He focused on it, focused on the acute sting on his skin as he forced air down his lungs. He held his breath for a few seconds, even as his muscles started burning in protest far too soon, then released. He tried to control the flow of air but lost control halfway through, air whooshing out in one big sigh. The loss of control irritated him but he just tried again, pushing air through the spiderwebs in his trachea, then holding it, then carefully releasing it.
His focus shifted from the nails digging into his neck to the pulse that lay under it. It slowly evened out into something calmer and he counted the length of every step of breathing along to his heartbeat. From there on, it became easier to resettle back into his body, awareness spreading out from the sting of his nails to the expansions of his ribcage, down to his legs until he felt the numbness of his toes inside his boots. There would likely always be a dissonance between his mind and body, history too deeply embedded to ever feel like he could trust the feel of it again, but there was a quiet satisfaction to be found in snatching back control before instinct could take over.
The pain had not dissipated, but it had not increased either, currently sitting at a shakily comfortable level that allowed him to keep a hold on his senses.
He did not pull his hand away from his eyes, but he did open them, slowly, to let them get accustomed to the light without starting a second headache. There was a scent of old wood and dust. The sandpaper running against the sensitive skin of his hands and cheek were the rough grains of a wooden floor. Distantly, there was the murmur of people and laced throughout it were light chimes of bells.
Andrew tried to listen again, pushing through the cotton that still blocked his ears to hear more closely, but the clear ringing of small bells did not disappear.
His eyes had adjusted by the time he pulled his hand away and, although the pulsing ache above his ears did increase somewhat, his headache remained reasonably tame.
The room he found himself in was empty, old, wooden flooring covered in dust, glass stained with time and frost, but unbroken. The room was chilly, but not freezing, especially where the sun cast long shadows through the four-by-nine sectioned window.
Sitting up was unpleasant with his muscles still burning and the rhythm stirring at his insides, but Andrew managed. The sounds of his clothes ruffling and boots scraping against the wood were the only sounds coming from inside the building.
A glance at the world outside the window only showed him the slanted roofs of houses, so he figured he must be on the second floor or higher.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, letting his other hang outstretched over his knees. His skin hurt, his muscles ached and his insides cramped in pain, but he was still alive. Distantly, he wondered if the dispersed cramping was the same as what Kevin had complained about whenever his uterus decided to turn itself inside out.The abrupt emptiness in his chest had his heart rapidly carve its way down his body, and he frantically reeled his thoughts back in with a speed that caused him whiplash.
Deciding he needed to find a way out was an easy target to use as distraction, but thorny memories carved bloody paths through his train of thought, too stubborn to leave him in peace just yet. He forced the barbed thoughts down, knowing what would greet him behind his eyelids if he let them grow any further.
His train of thought was interrupted when a loud thud sounded from somewhere in the building and Andrew flinched, turning around to look at the place where the sound had come from. Behind him was an open door, leading to a dusty hallway where the dull thumping of footsteps came from.
Getting up was pure instinct, the same way the curling of his fists and readying his stance was. His nerves still shrieked a banshee's cry, but the pain was manageable, nothing like the overwhelming agony of the—Andrew was still in control. Punching would likely send his nerves alight all the way up his arm, but he would not be caught off guard.
The footsteps came louder and louder, trudging up stairs and pulling open doors on the way to Andrew. Looking around the room showed that there truly was nothing other than the walls and the dust that coated them.
By the time the footsteps had reached the front of Andrew's door, his heart had sped up to an anticipatory drum, beats echoed through tensed muscles and quickened breaths.
The door was thrown open, crashing against the wall and almost smashing in the window. In the doorway stood a figure—a man, Andrew realised after a second look—but he had to have been the most strangely dressed person Andrew had ever seen. He was wearing a cloak that went down to around his mid-thighs, the front parts wrapped around the body and fastened with a belt. Underneath that, Andrew could spot hints of a dark grey fabric and hanging down to around the man's knees was a dark grey skirt, or perhaps a dress or tunic. His shins were wrapped in a dirty, beige-white fabric, like bandages that lacked any function other than covering up the red trousers that were visible here and there between the ribbons of wrapping. His feet were tucked into leather shoes that Andrew did not recognise, but also did not need to, to know that they were at the end of their lifespan.
The man was almost on his way back out the door when he froze, eyes fixated on Andrew with something bordering on surprise, which then morphed into a mix of confusion, annoyance and a hint of disgust. It did not suit the man's face, long and thin with deep set eyes that had heavy bags running grooves into the pallor of his skin.
He did not look even remotely ready to fight Andrew despite his decently sturdy build, rocking on his feet from the simple act of throwing the door open.
He was staring directly at Andrew, but not at his face. Instead, his eyes were focused on his body, and before Andrew could unfreeze and give him a fist to look at the man opened his mouth and sneered, "Why the fuck are you dressed like a child?"
Now, normally Andrew would have responded with an equally appropriate question regarding why the man looked like he had just woken up with a hangover from a too crazy night at a ren-fair, if it had not been for the fact that the man had not spoken in English.
Andrew felt something in his brain error and crash as he tried to decode what language he had just heard. It sounded like an unholy combination of an East Coast American accent—Bostonian or New York, or at least the one with the hard consonants made in the front of the mouth—some version of Italian, and the sing-songy lilt of Kevin and Kayleigh's accents. It sounded utterly foreign and wholly familiar at the same time, as if he had had amnesia and recognised the sounds but not the words, except Andrew still understood what the man was saying.
"Fuck you," Andrew said, more out of instinct than true offence, mind still preoccupied with the language.
The man's gaze shot to his face, earlier annoyance now taking over and twisting his features even further. He groaned in irritation, head thrown back and body shifting with it. "Those fuckin' pisprick bastards," he cursed. "Always whining about their fuckin' 'prophecies' and 'destiny' and 'obligations', but can they make it easy for one time? Noooo, of course not, they got to leave the problem for us to fix. Always sittin' on their lazy asses letting us do the dirty jobs while they don't even fuckin' pay us for this shit."
The rest of his complaints faded into unintelligible mumbling as he must have realised he looked like a lunatic talking so loudly to himself. He reached under his cloak around to his back, pulling out a bag Andrew had not seen before.
Andrew took a step back, not knowing what the man would pull out, but also having no way to threaten the man into slowing down and keep him from reaching for anything that would leave Andrew dead in a matter of seconds.
Mentally, he tried to decipher what the man had said. It was as if his brain had learned to speak an entirely new language without his knowledge, allowing him to only understand the speech, but unable to recognise the words on their own, or accurately translate them into English. All he had was the memory of foreign words that held no value to him as he repeated them in his head.
He pushed his translation attempts aside as the man pulled out a piece of coarse looking paper and a stick from his bag. It took only a moment for Andrew to understand that the stick was some kind of writing utensil as the man placed the paper against the doorpost and started scratching at it with the stick. He scribbled something down—a symbol of some sorts—on the upper half of the paper, then something smaller on the bottom half, then tore the piece of paper apart between the two symbols and held out one half towards Andrew.
Andrew flinched away from it, not trusting it or the man.
The man wiggled the paper impatiently at him. Andrew looked between the paper, the hand and the man's face but he did not hold a tension that betrayed any aggression, only exhausted annoyance.
Carefully, with only one hand, Andrew reached for the piece of paper, taking it between two fingers and quickly bringing it close to look at what was written on it.
The man had given him the larger symbol, a crudely drawn, double-rimmed circle with strange runes on the top and in the centre an ugly scribble that Andrew thought may have been a bird, but could just as likely be a strange-looking devil or goat. He looked at it, not knowing what to do with this bird-devil-goat symbol, then glanced back up at the man, who looked at him expectantly.
Andrew felt as if there was some sort of joke the shadow had failed to inform him about. Clearly, the man was starting to understand that too as his face turned from expectant to frustrated once again. "Oh, come on," he crowed at no one in particular. "Are you being serious here? Is it funny watching me fail at this? Huh?"
Andrew had no idea who he was talking to, maybe some kind of ghost he was hallucinating, but he had no interest in watching any of it. The memory of Kevin's pulse thrummed under his skin, endlessly slow in comparison to his own heart jackhammering in his chest. He eyed the windows, wishing to see how high he was or if the building provided any easy ways down that did not require him to break five limbs.
"Do you seriously not know what a speech charm does?" the man asked, almost hysterical and Andrew realised a second later that the man was now addressing him. "You talk into it!" He mimed the motion with his own piece of paper, holding it before his own mouth before spluttering some gibberish at it. Then he motioned at Andrew.
Andrew raised one unimpressed eyebrow at him and gave him a sceptical once-over, curious to see what the reaction would be.
As was to be expected, the man did not take too kindly to the look, face turning dark. He stepped towards Andrew, one hand grabbing for the arm that held the piece of paper.
Andrew took a step back, pulling his arm behind him with the paper and when the man took one step too close for Andrew's comfort, he punched him.
In Andrew's defense, the man should have really known better than to step closer to a person ready to jump at any sign of danger. In the man's defense, Andrew could have simply offered the paper back. Also in the man's defense, Andrew had been trying to goad him, ready to punch something since waking up in the dungeon crypt.
The feeling of fist connecting with skin, and the subsequent cry of pain sent Andrew's body alight with thrilling satisfaction, feeding into his speed as he bolted around the man to the open door. The following pain in his knuckles was a familiar annoyance, but the spreading sensation of tremors running up his arm was not. It sent him off balance, careening into the wall as his bones shook within his arm. He clutched it to his chest protectively, vision whiting out for a second as his nerves lit up with pain.
Cotton in his ears muffled the furious cry that came from the room, but not enough to keep from warning him. He collected his wits, forced air down his throat and blinked the spots out of his eyes, before pelting farther down the hall.
About halfway through, there was a staircase down. Behind him, Andrew heard the man's crashing boots as he came running after him. Andrew didn't look back as he threw himself down the staircase, hurtling down with barely controlled speed.
Andrew had reached the first landing by the time his pursuer had started his descent. He flung himself around the bend, using one arm to grasp the railing as leverage.
He crashed out onto another storey and one look around showed it was the ground floor, with the door situated on the other side of a sparsely decorated dining room. He ran for it, dodging around a table and chairs when he felt a sudden crackling by his ear. He jerked back, just in time for a bright light wrapped in black tendrils to pass by.
It did not touch him, but it was as if the air around it was charged with lightning, first numbing the right side of his face, then exploding into a fireworks of agony, exploding along his skin before racing over his scalp to his neck and spine. His ear went deaf and his nerves crackled with pain as the light exploded against the wall by the door. Andrew's knee went weak under him and he collapsed against the chairs and table.
He tried to scrabble up before the man could reach him, but he was too late. Rough hands pulled at his shoulder, turning him around to face the man. Too-long features were pulled back into a furious snarl, left side red where Andrew had hit him. A hard shove had Andrew's wacky balance give up and he was sent crashing to the floor. He tried to scramble away, kicking at shins with his boots, but the man simply collapsed on top of him, hands immediately reaching for his throat.
Andrew knew how this next part went, but tried to fight it every step of the way despite his right side blazing with agony. He fought the hands reaching for him, kicked his legs, bucked his hips to get the weight off of him, scratched bloody lines into face and arms as fingers closed around his throat.
The fingers were a familiar shackle around his neck, but where previous hands had only tried to silence him, these ones were filled with lethal intent. It felt as if his windpipe was getting crushed. His heartbeat was so loud it could almost function as the timer on a bomb waiting to explode. He tried to keep fighting, tried to keep resisting, but the rapid lack of oxygen supplying his brain made his movements sloppy and weak until he could do nothing more than scratch weak fingers at the hands holding him down.
It was alarming how fast he went from fighting to begging, but he'd never had a full man's weight bearing down on his throat. The corners of his vision started fading, but even with that, Andrew could still see it as the man bent down to get right in his face.
"You don't know who the fuck you're messing with," the man snarled, tiny droplets of spit landing in Andrew's face. "You can't fuckin' run—this is Dragons territory, you get that?"
When Andrew didn't show any sign of answering the man shook him hard. Andrew's head slammed against the ground, sending sparks through his vision. He hissed through clenched teeth at the pain it sent through his skull.
"You fucking get that?" the man screamed in his face again.
Andrew still had no way of answering him in a language he understood, nor any breath to voice it so he settled for glaring the man down, even as his vision started to blur and blacken.
The man did not seem to like the silent defiance. There was a burning on his neck, where the hand sat before the man lifted one hand off his throat to backhand him across the face.
The pain was expected, made ten times worse by the frayed nerves that sat under his skin but it was all worth it for that final breath of air as the pressure on his trachea was finally released.
Andrew choked on the first breath, the force of his coughs wracking his entire body, pinned down as it was. The man let him get his breath back, though likely more out of seeing the need for air if he wanted a response, than true sympathy. The other hand still remained on his throat, a silent threat.
Once he deemed Andrew had resupplied enough air to his lungs, the hand moved from his throat to the side of Andrew's face and pushed his head into the ground as if he wanted to crush his skull underneath his fingers.
Leaning forward, the man hung just above Andrew's ear, hot breath blowing against tickling baby hairs as he spoke. "Now, I will ask you exactly once: do you, or do you not understand me? Yes, or no."
Andrew wanted to laugh at his words, the meaning of them, the echo of a sentiment this man had likely never learned to respect. Flashes of another man sitting on top of him were unwelcome, but inevitable, the ghost of skin under his lips and shudders under his fingers. Andrew wanted to laugh and cry hysterically at this comedy his life had turned into. He wanted to disappear in those memories and tear out his heart at the same time so it would just stop hurting.
The man must have seen the manic tug pulling at Andrew's lips because nails dug into his skin. "Do you understand? Yes. Or. No," the man repeated, enunciating every syllable as if Andrew was a dumb child he was teaching new words.
But Andrew supposed the man was teaching him new words. 'Yes or no,' the man had said. 'Vey li nime,' Andrew had heard. Easy enough to understand, easy enough to replicate.
"Yes," Andrew spat, breathless from the weight on his chest.
Instead of a response, the man gave Andrew's head a last shove before he got off him. Andrew let him, curling up to cradle his right side that was still pulsing in pain while he caught his breath.
He cursed not having placed some distance between himself and the man when he heard the sound of a belt buckle getting undone. He flinched, violently, instantly losing any air inside his lungs to the spiders rapidly spinning their cobwebs inside him.
He got to his knees, ready to go at it again when the buckle hit him in the face, followed by a fabric getting thrown over his head.
"Put that on," the man ordered as Andrew scrambled to get it off his head. "Don't want people to think I'm with some kind of child freak. It's bad enough I have to look like a fucking dostret attacked me, even more and folks'll start seeing me as bad luck."
Andrew had no idea what a dostret was, though he could guess as to what they did to a human face. The man really did look as if he had been mauled by an animal, bloody lines streaming down his face. There was one beside his eye, close enough that just half an inch to the left and Andrew would have clawed his eye out. Disappointment at that near miss simmered inside him as he tried to figure out how the cloak worked.
Contrary to what Andrew had thought it would look, it was a simple rectangle with a hole for the head in the middle and a cut going from the hole down to one of the shorter sides. Remembering how the man had wrapped it, Andrew placed his head through the hole and the side split by the cut over his torso, then wrapped it around before realising he had no hands to tie the belt anymore.
Glancing up, he saw that the man was sitting on the table, looking down on him with contemptuous amusement.
Andrew caught his eye, before throwing the cloak off again and chucking it at the man. He would not sit there while making a fool of himself. If the man would be seen as a child freak, that was not Andrew's problem.
The man spluttered, yanking the cloak off his head. Andrew stood up as the man did, but when he took a step forward in an attempt to intimidate Andrew, Andrew stayed rooted to his place, unimpressed stare boring into the other's eyes.
The man seemed to think better of it, likely unwilling to start another fight when Andrew had just stopped. It was only a guise of obedience, a willingness to listen only because the man had said he worked for people with prophecies and Andrew needed to get his hands on that shadow again if he wanted to find out what the fuck was happening.
It could be that this was all a dream, but although Andrew's dreams were filled with whatever horrors his mind could twist into nightmares, he had never truly experienced pain the same way, nor had he ever had as much control as he did now. If this was a dream, Andrew wondered how long he had been asleep. If this was a dream, then Kevin would still be dead and under the ground in the waking world. If this was a dream, Andrew wondered if he wanted to wake up.
The man got his cloak around him again and headed for the door, Andrew following behind him.
Stepping outside was like dunking himself in a pool of cold water, cold winds tearing through all the layers of his clothes and digging down until they reached bone. An involuntary shiver wracked his frame but a glance at the man showed he hadn't noticed.
Despite the cold, though, the streets were filled with people. If the man had been an indication, it seemed as if Andrew really did find himself at some kind of ren-fair, more elaborate and expensive than any other that existed. Every person on the streets was wearing some kind of a cloak, some of them the same as the man's, others different types, though most did allow for movement of the arms, and most had some sort of belt tied around the waist. The cloaks made it difficult to see exactly what lay underneath, but at least the shin wrappings and shoes were largely the same, for women, men and children.
The one thing that did differ from Andrew's assailant was the hair. Where the man had his hair cut short, perhaps an inch or two long, most men had hair going down to at least their shoulders. Some of them had it styled up in several variations of a half-half updo, others in different types of buns, others yet again had it braided back in a single braid.
The only men who had short hair like the one walking in front of Andrew were clumped together in groups of two and three, hiding in shady corners of buildings and watching people pass by with menacing authority. The people on the street mostly pretended they were not there, going wherever they were needed, but there was a certain tension in the air. People chattered, but not loudly, nor did they dare come close to the clumps of men, hurriedly walking around them while keeping cautious eyes on them. Even within the middle of the pedestrian crowd, people were aware enough to part around the man and Andrew, and he could feel their eyes staring at him almost more oppressive than the shadow's presence had been. Andrew figured that is what the man referred to when he'd yelled at Andrew that this was 'Dragons territory.'
That suspicion that these short-haired men were members of some kind of dragon-associated gang was what finally brought reality down. Although Andrew did not think highly enough of ren-fairs to believe no crimes took place there whatsoever, he did not think there was much gang-related activities—at least, not in the form that was shown here: obviously subtle, and in full costume. That people seemed to fear them made it all the more likely that this had to be something else.
Andrew was not someone who often went around lying to people, including himself. The truth was often harder to accept than lies, and instigating people into the fight he wanted was easier done with a well placed reality check than ungrounded falsehoods.
That said, if this place was what he suspected it was, he did not know if he was ready to face it yet. Hearing that other universes existed was not necessarily the problem—Kevin had talked about the possibility here and there and Andrew had had no choice but to remember his words forever. The problem lay with the possibility that the explanation for the black tar that had curled under Kevin's skin, or the deathly sleep that had overtaken him, or the searing pain that had run through his own body, could be magic.
And Andrew did not believe in magic—did not want to believe in magic—because magic in the hands of humans could lead nowhere else than planetary scale annihilation of the entire species.
Yet, the shadow had spoken so easily of 'prophecies' and a 'curse' and 'warding spells' that the chance of this world simply having developed very different technology seemed more a hopeful delusion than concrete truth.
But Andrew did not know how to face that truth.
Looking around himself, Andrew did not see any obvious signs of it. Instead, the only part that seemed out of the ordinary besides the unfamiliarity of the buildings were the decorations that hung around the place. The buildings themselves were predominantly made out of wood, with many having a ground level covered in some type of white plaster that had streaks of greyish brown and black where filth had gathered. None of the buildings were higher than three storeys, all of them having slanted roofs and gaps between them. Most buildings had windows, albeit small ones, and it was in these windows where most decorations could be found.
What appeared to be garlands of flowers had been gathered and hung around the window frame. In some houses it looked more as if the flowers had been stuck between the window and frame, looking rather pathetic, while others had entire curtains of flowers woven together and placed over the window like outdoor curtains. All of them were yellow and white, with some green and red interspersed throughout. Most doors had besides the garlands around the frame some kind of wreath hung on them, this one including other decorations too such as ribbons and small bells that chimed every time the door opened.
The decorations weren't limited to houses only though. There were street lights—four wooden poles spaced equidistantly and gathered together in the middle with rope that held boxes made of paper and wood on top of them—adorned with yellow, all of them having at least one bell hanging underneath where the poles crossed.
All the decorations reminded Andrew somewhat of Christmas back in the States, or some of the busier streets and squares in Dublin, with the red and green having been replaced with yellow, and without any of the mind-numbing Christmas Carols playing on loop.
It was a garish display all things considered, though Andrew figured they could have used something worse than yellow. Any indication of what the decorations were for were left to what he assumed to be common knowledge in this world, leaving him only with guesses based on the little bits of information he knew.
It could be possible that these people were preparing for some kind of end-of-winter festival. There was no snow and the temperature could not be below around fifty degrees Fahrenheit, but the wind had the same not-quite-freezing quality to it as the late winter weather of Ireland. It did nothing to lessen the lingering ache pulsing in his muscles, but Andrew pushed through teeth clenched against the cold.
Andrew kept up pace behind the man as they wove through the streets, most of them wide and seemingly more commercial, but sometimes ducking into smaller lanes and alleys. It wasn't long before the buildings started to become more spaced out, glimpses of unbuilt land and trees spreading out behind the houses. They had to be reaching the edge of town, messily placed cobblestones underneath becoming increasingly more hidden by dirt and mud.
The pulsing in his muscles became heavier, louder, sharper; an internal heartbeat that pushed at the confines of its shell. His thoughts turned sluggish, the easy clarity of before getting gently ripped to shambles with every wave that washed through it.
Andrew wanted to slow down, needed to return back to the streets where the pulse had been lighter, nothing more than aching muscles, but every time his step started to slow, cobwebs formed in his throat and dread seeped down his spine and he found himself forced to keep walking.