An exchange of pleasant dreams for black nightmares isn't uncommon for a sleeping mage--and given the turmoil of Myr's waking life, it was only a matter of time before this brief interlude of calm ended. His expression darkens to match the thunderheads boiling up on the horizon; he quits the bench, rising to his feet and taking up his staff as the first fat drops plummet from the clouds. He shoots the demon an accusatory glance--the first he's looked straight at it--when the wind rises and licks pages from his careful stacks of parchment, sending them skittering away across the flagstones.
The memories they represent are safely locked away, but it's the principle of the thing that has him scowling. "This is petty," he says, knowing his disapproval to be less than worthless. Don't look at it, don't talk to it, don't give it ideas. He wrenches his gaze away from the creature's ineffable smile, from its tempest-voiced murmuring:
"'Though the darkness comes upon me, I shall embrace the Light. I shall weather the storm. I shall endure.'"
Better to act, to bury himself Where he can place his lesser glyphs with a gesture, casting the greater is nearly like a dance, a set sequence of steps as he sweeps out points cardinal and ordinal for a glyph of repulsion. Here and there he works in an extra line, an extra sigil, defining the shape he wants the magic to take so that when at last he completes the design and energizes it, it repels raindrops and retains windblown pages--and forces the demon back.
Unperturbed, it spreads its intangible wings to catch the wind, drifting to the last remaining tree in the courtyard--leafless, snarled, sky-clawing--and roosting there like a puff of thistledown. In the way of things oneiric, the rest of the world's begun to melt away in the rain, the upraised square of flagstones with tree and barrier and mage and pages reduced to an island in the gray-black dimness of the churning, angry sea.
no subject
The memories they represent are safely locked away, but it's the principle of the thing that has him scowling. "This is petty," he says, knowing his disapproval to be less than worthless. Don't look at it, don't talk to it, don't give it ideas. He wrenches his gaze away from the creature's ineffable smile, from its tempest-voiced murmuring:
"'Though the darkness comes upon me,
I shall embrace the Light. I shall weather the storm.
I shall endure.'"
Better to act, to bury himself Where he can place his lesser glyphs with a gesture, casting the greater is nearly like a dance, a set sequence of steps as he sweeps out points cardinal and ordinal for a glyph of repulsion. Here and there he works in an extra line, an extra sigil, defining the shape he wants the magic to take so that when at last he completes the design and energizes it, it repels raindrops and retains windblown pages--and forces the demon back.
Unperturbed, it spreads its intangible wings to catch the wind, drifting to the last remaining tree in the courtyard--leafless, snarled, sky-clawing--and roosting there like a puff of thistledown. In the way of things oneiric, the rest of the world's begun to melt away in the rain, the upraised square of flagstones with tree and barrier and mage and pages reduced to an island in the gray-black dimness of the churning, angry sea.