When Cillian had held the flower right into his view, there first had been no visible reaction from Othen. He had just stood there, still holding Emmett at bay at the other end of his arm. His head had started to lean sidewards with noone knowing if he had been doing this on purpose or not. Then there had been seemingly random jerks occurring accross his face.
Why ? It wasn't even that much about Emmett himself. In fact, one could be glad about having found a physical reason for his strange, violent behaviour just as well as one could be enraged because of it. It was about all of it having been uncovered so late. Shouldn't someone who had been so proficient when it had come to unraveling Othen's secrets had been even more successful when it had come to his own nephew ? The last word was the keyword in here. The rather close relationship between their lead explorer and their lead troublemaker did trigger some suspicions, but the berserker was far from speaking about it. To add to all of this, he had a gut feeling that something else was wrong. Something about the stories Cillian and Grace had told him just didn't fit, but he had not yet been able to identify it. It had been a displeasing night after all and if the searing heat did impair someone's ability to memorize things as easily as otherwise - that someone wasn't alone.
Now he had been selected to serve as a mobile prison for a cocky boy that was suffering from withdrawal symptoms. Othen had spent some thoughts about his own 'addiction, though one couldn't really call it that. The stuff he used was a bit of the inverse of ordinary addictives like the desert flower. It was dangerous while in use, not while not using. How would the party react when someone discovered this ? The thought made him pay more attention to his belongings, especially his backpack...
Sometimes it had been him dragging Emmett behind, other times it had been Rook's nephew trying to drag him behind. Othen wasn't a fast walker, a fact that easily could be attributed to his stature that took several aspects to the very extreme. On occasion, he diverted his steps from a straight line in order to pick up a large stone he could use for training while walking. Then, seemlingly out of the blue, Othen found himself being consumed by the collapsing desert floor, taking Emmett wit him into the darkness.
When the war-painted man got up again, it wasn't from a more or less deep dent in the soft floor, it was from half a crater. A familiar voice was advancing to his ears even before he was able to get a clear picture of his surroundings. It seemed everyone had survived the fall without major injuries to their bones - a rather astonishing and strange fact in itself -, but: blind ? How the hell did Emmett manage to loose his eyesight ? Othen attempted to blame the sudden fall for this as he did not straightforwardly believe that nonsense a probably hallucinating Emmett was talking about. When he realized how much their environment was like death and decay, the rope was immediately loosened. A calculated risk if one took the boy's recent unpredictability into account, but he could ill-afford to be still tied when there was combat. And he had a feeling that there could be. Othen grabbed one of his enormous axes and his shield, then started to advance forward slowly. They could discuss things while on the move! The earlier they attempted to get out of here, the better.
"Emmett! What happened ?"
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