As the angel spoke, Lhirin listened closely--very closely, his eyes extremely wide as he stared at Caleb. The divine's words washed over him and he took them in, tasted them in his mind...sampling them almost like a connoisseur until he was satisfied with his understanding--it only took a second or so...but as he finished, Caleb said one last thing...and this
this stuck in his mind
“– has a spirit in it. Destroy me if you want, but please do not trap me like that again.”
Lhirinthyl's eyes narrowed.
“...do not trap me like that again.”
The deigan's gaze flitted to the strange book. In the very center of the only proper
pool of blood in the room. The rest, he noted idly, were from being tracked or smeared about…or on occasion dripping. Pawprints, footprints and the like had likely tracked them, a body or piece of worn clothing sending droplets to the floor. His eye twitched and again the angel’s words surged back ,but now only one of them as his mind
focused--fixated–on the detail.
“...again.”
“I see,” he replied, his affect so flat that he sounded almost monotone, and certainly disinterested.
He wasn't...not really, but his attention was very far away from things like expressing the proper set of subtle sounds to accurately convey his internal world for other people. His eyes darting away from Caleb and to other details in the room. The way the blood was splattered about, any disarray he could perhaps try a reason for. Almost at the same time, Lhirin considered the various conversations taking place.
Caleb’s strange…emotionality, Freagon’s reticence and general lack of engagement with the others. Irah’s wrath, then sorrow. Yanin’s somewhat detached…morality?
“Mmm…” he uttered, an almost-hum of consideration. Other pieces of potentially interesting–if not immediately–relevant information snagged his mind even as he thought through the euphoria of his piaan high.
Raising a single feathery brow, the deigan swiveled his head back towards Freagon as he heard the angel…
“Mmmh”--he made a slightly annoyed sound as he corrected himself mentally
‘Caleb’.
“A mundane,” — “It feels... odd. Undead, yet not. Very powerful.”
What a strange impression to have of a soul. Still…perhaps ‘Caleb’ himself was more strange. After all, his earlier impressions of the Angel were…significant. The divine had roughly twice his own soul’s capacity, which is considerable given that ‘Caleb’ was apparently Fallen. However, while he’d detected waning traces of divine energy, which surely would have wiped away or converted any mundane power that might otherwise have lingered, the truly surprising thing was when his senses had grazed over Freagon and his sword. By happenstance, Lhirinthyl’s awareness had touched the sword first, verifying–and adding to–what ‘Caleb’ had said later on. He’d sensed what was most certainly a full soul with all its complexities, housed within the blade. What was more significant though, was the sheer intensity of energy he’d detected though…the soul was not just double his capacity as the Angel’s had been, no it was greater even than that.
Thinking on it brought a frown to his features, but it only lasted a moment before Lhirin’s eyes grew somewhat wide as he detected Freagon’s soul. It was earth affinity and…surprisingly sparse in energy, smaller than that of most of his kind…smaller even than those of them who did not use magic. Perhaps a minor curiosity on its own, but something else caught his attention instead as the nightwalker’s soul was utterly unlike anything he had sensed before.
Most souls were…cohesive. Their flows and patterns changed and shifted…alternated and perhaps wove about in often chaotic patterns, but they had few, if any gaps in their makeup. They were a solid mass of churning energies. Some souls were larger, some smaller, some calmer, some more frenetic. Others still felt controlled, while others were…oddly still. This wasn’t like any of those, not like Irah’s unique soul, not like what Irah had told him of his…certainly not like any non-mage he’d ever seen–not that any mage’s soul he’d detected compared in the least.
No, Freagon’s soul was like…cottage cheese. No…it was like a threadbare cloak that had long ago fallen almost completely apart, before being woven together by shaky, broken, inexperienced hands without the slightest measure of sense to guide them. If a normal soul was like a river, then Freagon’s soul was–Lhirin cut off the thought, the simile dying in his mind before it had had a chance to even be terrible (he knew it would have been).
Before he’d been…focused elsewhere, more distracted by the still somewhat new onset of euphoria from the drug, but now that the tension had died and he only needed to
absorb and process with no need to act in the immediate moment, Lhirin found that there was indeed much to consider.
Running his fingers over a feather in his head…then another almost as if he was pruning himself like a bipedal, humanoid bird, the deigan felt his eye twitch as his gaze again drifted to the book.
He took a step into the room, his eyes fixed on the tome. When no one stopped him from moving further, the mage pressed forth–almost in a rush. He knelt before the book where it sat at the center of the room–at the center of the macabre scene. He reached out, hesitated for half a second and then touched the book.
Suddenly, the instant Lhirin's skin touched the bloodstained book, the world flashed before his eyes. For a split-second he was in another place, a darker place where the sunlight flowing through the windows was absent.
He was sitting in a chair at a table, with an open book in front of him; the very same book, he would realize, that he just reached out to pick up. His left hand held the book in place, while his right was carefully pressing the claw at the end of his finger into the page. His hands were slender and feminine, and in red fur.
Past the book, on the other side of the table, sat a large, robed figure with another, much larger leather-bound book in its clawed, red-skinned hands. Green eyes glowed within the shade of its hood. Familiar eyes.
And then he was back in the room with the others, as if nothing had happened. He felt a little faint, as if he had dozed off for an instant, but other than that the memory of that very briefest of glimpses was the only evidence that anything unusual had occurred.
For a moment, Lhirin remained where he was, slightly dazed–though that was fading fast. He had kept his balance despite his crouched position as he was surprisingly stable like that–which was in itself an oddity. Most people would not have been comfortable, let alone stable in the position he was holding. Despite the vision, the memory–he figured–Lhirinthyl, after only a second brief hesitation, scooped the book up and rose to his feet.
Frowning as he very carefully handled the tome, Lhirin walked over to the desk, not seeming to pay ‘Caleb’ any mind at all as he did so. Gingerly, he glanced across the table’s surface, found a place free of blood and then lightly opened the book…face down before he settled it on its blood-dampened pages. Lightly removing his hands from the tome, Lhirin began to weave runes in the air above it, channeling a tiny amount of magical energy as he did so. Once he was satisfied with the construction, he
held it with his will and quickly invoked the necessary incantation for
Call Water.
His feathered brow creasing, the mage reached out with his will as he controlled the flow of magical energy he was releasing and gently pressed that energy with a feather-light touch through the spine and center of the book’s pages. Slowly, still holding the spell, Lhirin spread his energy out in as thin of layers as he could manage. Finally, he let the spell activate, its effect channeling into the energy he’d prepared even as he concentrated to control its precise function. Kneeling down below the table so he was eye level with where the book’s bloodied pages met the wood of the desk, Lhirin began to quickly draw the liquid out along the paths of the energy he’d laid even as he
pulled the strands of energy towards his palm where it was placed–fingers open, its flat aimed towards the edge of the table.
The result allowed him to pull all the moisture from the book’s pages and towards his hand. However, the liquid components of the blood of course did not defy gravity, but instead flowed off the side of the table and to the ground a foot or two in front of him. It only took perhaps four seconds as he carefully regulated his energy use, then he shot up from his crouch and to his feet in a sudden–probably startling movement.
Heedless of anyone’s reactions, Lhirin observed the book for a moment, before he picked it up where it felt most sturdy (at the binding)–after a few prodding, extra light touches. Raising it gently from the desk, the deigan then began to very lightly pat the spine of the book as its pages fluttered downwards, pulled by gravity, to hang from what could barely be called its spine. Light puffs of reddish grit and dust began to gently rain down from between the book’s pages and on its cover. Satisfied that the pages weren’t incredibly brittle…or still soggy and likely to tear, Lhirin lightly jostled them back and forth, gently shaking free more of the detritus. After perhaps thirty seconds of this he was satisfied. Holding the ‘book’ shut, Lhirin turned it right side up so the front faced him.
Exercising what Irah would consider an
incredible amount of discipline, Lhirin
did not open the book in that moment and begin to devour its contents like a thirsty man in the desert might water. Instead, he clenched his teeth for a long moment, scanning the room with his eyes again. He noted a leather wrapping–slightly bloodstained–by the northern wall of the room. Smiling slightly, seeming pleased, Lhirin made a beeline for the wrapping, gently scooped it from the floor, cast his spell again after a brief consideration, then shook any detritus free of it. He was less careful with the wrapping, but when he was done he checked it for damage, then promptly placed the woven together pages into the leather covering.
He then tucked the book, spine facing down, against his wrist, held in his left hand for the moment. Pausing, Lhirin stretched out his magical senses once more and let them flow over Freagon. After a moment of staring openly at the knight with an incredulous, confused expression, Lhirin shook his head, turned away, and then promptly walked towards Irah. When he reached her, he turned on his heel so he faced back toward the room. From that point, unless he felt drawn by a particular happening or detail, he’d remain firmly at her side. Like a lapdog…or a protector…or a man who was trying very hard
not to walk out of the mansion, sit on their wagon, and bury his face in the strange tome.
As he stood there, he considered–silently, not passing the information on just yet–on what he had seen in his little vision-memory. It appeared to have been the dead melenian…and ‘Caleb.’ That was strange…hadn’t the woman
died to summon him?
Frowning, Lhirin lightly flicked Irah’s hip to get her attention (he did not find this the least bit rude or improper). He used their sign language to indicate ‘the angel,’ then ‘the melenian.’ He made a series of signs that when combined would roughly mean ‘something doesn’t add up’--though its literal meaning was more like ‘things’ ‘no’ ‘add’. Once he was satisfied that he’d conveyed at least enough that she would be paying closer attention to the divine, Lhirin lowered his hand and widened his eyes as he stared about the room, his gaze bouncing between speakers and taking in every individual action he could.
Member
Snowdrops
Fallenreaper
Taka
Dark Jack
Crimson Flame
Danyel
Kalas
HeMandaddy
Lord Zee