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WHO: Cassian and Sanzo in one, Cassian and Amberdrake in another
WHAT: DINNER TIME and A brief material run
WHEN: Shortly after Christmas, before the shops in Fayren close.
WHERE: Everglade and Fayren
WARNINGS: Gore, violence, mentions of cannibalism

4 SANZO
He'd gone too long. He knew he'd over extended himself, the gift he got from Tannusen could only last so long. Wheezing, stiff, the faint sound of flutes beginning to sound in the back of his mind, tonight had to be the night. He wasn't going to risk it all again, he couldn't. He couldn't keep relying on someone else here to patch him up every time he fell into shit.

He was a grown man. He could take care of this.

As it had been for two thousand years, the hunt was on. As it had been for two thousand years, the iron dagger found its mark, the husk soulless yes, but oh how they screamed like any real living thing would. Once, perhaps, he would have shrunk away from the sound. A long time ago, he'd be frantic to silence them, clumsily slashing at vocal cords and sobbing in fear and horror-

He knew how to work now, and the screaming was quickly silenced to pathetic, wet gurgling as the cloaked man snapped ribs with ease, feeling the rippling sensation of that thing pulsing in the back of his head, feeding his meager strength. Peeling the membrane off the heart. Sinking his teeth in and silencing the husk forever.

Blood everywhere. It stank of it, but the pain in his body and his lungs faded with every bite, even if it couldn't fully sate the beast. Just another bandaid.

But for now, it would do.
4 Amberdrake

Of course, Everglade wouldn't have the materials he needed. No one would stock in the type of silver he required, and he didn't even ask any shops there. Seemed like a good way to get a lot of unwanted attention. So, wrapped up in fleece and wool, cranky and miserable and cold, headed for Fayren.

They'd have what he needed, or at least part of it. He could always return home and finish blessing it all later. He had some energy in his step now, so the little man was going to be quite the obnoxious terror in Fayren, picky and fussy with everything he picked up, viciously haggling every single object down.

"I'll only be takin' pure silver, and not anything else. I don't want any steel or nickle in any of this- What else is in this mirror? Oi! Tis a real question, does it look like I'm foolin' with ye?"

Yeah. Not a good day for Fayren.

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Amberdrake laughed at that, just a little. He was so used to sour patients, honestly...

"Your accent is terribly charming," Drake could compliment anyone until the sun burned out, and with absolute sincerity. It was part of his gift as a kestra'chern.

"I'm a hick, mate." DENIED. If he was charmed, he'd decided to bury it for now until he figured out if he liked being healed or not.

"I thought this would hurt more, honestly..."

Amberdrake was undaunted. And pleased, by that little spark of a charmed feeling, however fast it was buried. "I can turn individual nerves off and back on as easily as twitching a finger," Drake said, finishing purging out the pneumonia virus. "And there's no pain receptors inside your blood stream."

Was the Gift a little bit terrifying when one thought about it? Why yes. Yes, it was.

"Well I know that." He'd read books before okay he's been around a longass time-

"So far this is pretty fairly decent. Not even a tingle."

"I haven't started on the damaged tissue yet," Drake warned, but then added, "but it shouldn't be much different. I wanted to halt the ongoing damage, first. If it comes back -- you are more prone, after all -- just come to me and I'll purge it out again. I just finished with that."

It really wasn't that big of a deal to play temporary immune system.

Now, for the older damage.

He'd picked his spot, somewhere where Cassian would get the most immediate benefit from having it fixed. Neighboring against healthy tissue, old scarring was only going to restrict that healthy bit of lung from doing what it could do.

Bit by bit, he started unraveling and re-purposing old scarred tissue, growing new lung in its place. Done in such tiny increments that the body would have naturally tried to grow it back, like muscle fibers repairing over time, but sped up a thousand fold by Drake's energy and guided by his Gift.

"Aye, well. I'll keep it in mind." Might not be a bad idea, if it continued to just crop back up. Which it would, he was sure. It wasn't like that hadn't been his life up until this point after all.

Didn't even hurt at all, to his surprise, he imagined repairing about two thousand years worth of scarring would be a little more traumatizing or something but-

The room flickered.

Cassian suddenly stiffened, his breath catching for a moment-

And the entire room plunged itself into darkness, pitch black and impermeable for seconds at a time-

Distantly, something seemed to rumble, or rattle, and the distinct sound of what sounded like bones starting to grind began to fill the room.

"Drake-"

The darkness was lost on Drake, but not the feelings involved. Cassian's reaction, and the frog's, both pinged off his Empathic shields and that alone was enough to make him withdraw the Gift, having regrown his current sliver and been about to move onto the next.

"What is..." okay, the sounds made him shut the Gift down the rest of the way, so that his eyes would come back to seeing the surface of the world.

Sanzo had told him about the presence he'd felt, of course. And the hearts. Whatever that thing was, it clearly wasn't anything good! Drake's shields snapped up to full strength, blinding his two Gifts in the process but also blocking the outside from getting in.

Again, the room was hurled into darkness, followed by not sound, but the absolute absence of it. Not even a breath, not even the thump of the pulse of ones own heart might be heard in it, as if for just a moment, reality itself was shut off.

Oh, but when light and sound returned, grinding had turned to screeching, what had once sounded like just distant squeals now changing to the violent wailing of flutes. It would feel so tight... so very tight in that room, as something, something big, something very, very angry, seemed to try and force its way in, unseen on a physical level but one could almost feel the sensation of millions of thick, fat tendrils trying to coil around everything.

Cassian, on his part, couldn't tolerate it. His eyes had rolled back, and he'd collapsed in a heap, even as a blazing yellow light rolled through the limp body, as if attempting to force each limb to move on its own accord.

The beating of massive wings, the sound of a voice, horrible and vile, whispering blasphemous, violent promises in a tongue that should never have been uttered, beings beyond time and space hammering against a wall that somehow would not break.

The room was being sucked into chaos by this entity, now barely seen in stuttered flashes as it tried to claw its way past the veil, blood colored wings attempting to stir a howling gale.

Even in the midst of this, while blood drained from Drake's face and his heart tried to escape his chest, Drake at least made sure the collapsing priest didn't go toppling off the couch and onto the floor. He could feel... something brush against him. Tentacles?

Really?

The King of White Gryphon hissed out a curse in his own tongue, and pulled the shielding ring from a hidden pocket in his robe, sliding it onto his finger hastily. Just a little Gods-crafted shielding to go over the top of his own. His body was in peril too, but it could be fixed easier than his mind!

He gripped his leg with one hand and the back of the couch with the other, knuckles pale under the strain, and just... endured. The instincts in all humans that told them to run from such horrors had been beaten out of him a long time ago, so he just stayed where he was, observed, and tried to keep the bile down.

Drake was one of the Star-Eyed's people. He would not be swallowed by the dark.

Wings beat against the air, seemed to beat against that barrier, and glimpses of the King in Yellow grew greater, grew longer, a massive, towering entity in yellow robes and an iron crown, its six wings spread and filling the room, the face hidden with a mask of clockwork and ivory.

The flutes, for one wild, terrifying moment, swelled to a thunderous crescendo, the horrific being almost seeming to linger too long, grasped too tightly to this veil...

Before with a scream, crumbled again. Those tendrils, invisible as they were, retreated, like a thousand slimy worms back into the hole they'd crawled from.

Back into the motionless, and once more wheezing form of the priest. Yellow light pulsed and thumped through the limp frame, searing light seeming to eat through the flesh of the left palm, before that too slowly faded.

Too much energy at once, it couldn't breech the barrier.

Though seconds might have felt like hours, it was gone now.

Amberdrake stayed frozen in place for several more, long seconds. He'd stopped breathing, but he hadn't closed his eyes. Information was too important to the kestra'chern! Against every instinct, it was too important.

Some time after things had returned to normal, he let out an explosive, shuddering breath, and drew another. Star-Eyed.

He checked Cassian over, half-expecting the pale priest to be dead. Pulse, breathing -- it took that long for him to register the sound of wheezing. Amberdrake allowed a spark of annoyance to burn away some of the cold dread; had that... thing just undone his work with its bluster and clawing?

Indeed, wheezing, a faint gurgle heard. Not only was the fluid back, but there might be more of it now!

Great.

Good.

Cassian was alive, but as gray as a corpse, maybe less to do with the fluid and more along the lines of shock itself. The room was clear again, at least. It had retreated back into the body it had claimed.

A tick that wouldn't be so easily removed.

Drake cursed and pulled off the shielding ring and -- yep -- immediately dove back into the priest's lungs to purge that fluid out! He chased after the effects of shock, while he was at it, and popped re-broken ribs back into place with new splints. Fuck you, monster.

As he'd learned from knowing Sanzo for nearly a decade now, anger was a great coping mechanism. Whatever that thing was, it was a serious asshole.

"You would think that a parasite would want its host in good health," he complained under his breath, "but no, this one has to be an idiot."

A terrifying, too-powerful idiot. If Drake's hands shook a bit while he worked, he couldn't really be blamed for it, surely.

At the very least it didn't look like there was gonna be a round two here. The fluid was purged, the bones reset, the shock tended to. Cassian might take a moment or two to come around, but at least he didn't look like he was quite so dead anymore.

The entity, despite all the horror it had caused, had nearly left the entire room completely untouched. As if there had never been anything there at all.

Save for one brilliant, deep red feather, far too large for any normal bird, resting on the floor not too far from the two of them.

As for Cassian, a spit, a curse, and he slowly started to return to consciousness, trying to grasp at something, anything, either for comfort or for just stabilization.

Amberdrake had pulled Cassian into his shoulder while he worked, and he offered his hand for grasping as the priest woke up. The other... well, its arm was around Cassian's shoulders, bracing. Drake was not touch-adverse, and he also wasn't scared of Cassian despite what the guy apparently had riding piggy-back inside him.

"Easy, now," Drake murmured, "it's passed."

For now.

New for Cassian. No one had ever witnessed Hastur reacting so violently of course, but there had been those who'd fallen victim to the outer god before.

The reaction had never been pleasant.

He gripped the hand offered, squeezing tightly as he worked to ground himself again, from whatever nightmare he'd fallen into before, and come back out of.

"... Didn't think... that would happen again, actually..." The wheeze was more out of surprise than actual lung problems right now, at least.

"Is everything here? It didn't touch ye-" He struggled to sit up through the wave fo dizziness, trying to get a good look at Amberdrake's face and body.

"It did, but I'm fine," Drake would have a lot to process later, but, he was okay... for the moment.

He... might have a breakdown later.

But right now, he was a kestra'chern. And he was fine.

Totally fine.

Fuck.

"Try to relax, I just pulled you out of minor shock."

Fuck is a good word for this.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know it'd do anything like- It didn't react when someone else helped, I didn't-"

Man if he accidentally mind fucked this guy he was just going to go jump in the ocean and hope a shark ate him.

"I gathered that you didn't expect it," Drake allowed himself some mild amusement, which made its way into his tone. "Calm down. Relax. It's fine."

It sooo wasn't 'fine' but that would be for later.

Edited 2017-01-01 06:19 (UTC)

"It is not fine!" He was trying to get up, which was an impressive feat, considering he actually did it and almost totally made it away from the couch before having to grab something to stay up.

"I don't know what that thing is, or what it could do to ye, or why it's here or-" Or anything other than-

"It's dangerous!"

Drake let him go, settling back into his half of the couch with a sigh.

"Avoid that feather," he murmured, "it wasn't here before."

Its size didn't even make him blink; his brother was a gryphon whose primaries were longer than Drake was tall. But he didn't want it trampled... there might be information to be gleaned from it, once he could stand to study it. Drake did know a thing or two about feathers, at least.

"Come on," he unfolded himself from the couch and got up, "I'm making tea."

Tea, yes. Good plan. Somehow he managed to stay steady on his feet as he walked around the feather and into the kitchen.

Feather? He looked slightly grayer to see it, and made it a point to avoid it entirely when it was mentioned. The sight of it alone just seemed to shake something else in the smaller man, and he was quick to stumble after Drake.

There was something already visually wrong with it. On some basic, simple level, something didn't seem right with it. Too sharp maybe? Too bright? Like that color didn't quite belong here?

In any case, for once he'd take tea.

"Aye... yes, somethin'.... to settle down a bit."

Amberdrake pointedly pulled one of the worn, cloth-covered chairs away from the table inside the kitchen for Cassian, and then went to make the tea. The feather wasn't visible from the kitchen, at least.

Back when this had been an office building, and his work-rooms had been the actual offices, this kitchen had been a small break-room. So, it had a little space, if not a ton. There was no canvas hanging from the walls, unlike in the lobby, but the loathed drywall had been painted in colorful designs instead. The lighting was more of those floating mage-lights, nothing so harsh and sterile as the original over-heads. Brighter in here than the lobby, but still warm.

He selected a calming tea from a cabinet that was full of too many types to easily count, and started the water. His hands were steady now, at least.

It was less 'sitting down' and more the physical dropping of a bag in the rough shape of a human into a chair.

THUMP. It occurred to him shortly after to arrange his arms and legs thusly to at least get... comfortable.

The feather was like a stone in his head.

Out of anything more to say to the man, he'd fallen deathly silent, staring at his hands and listening to the sounds of the tea being made, as if the ground process still wasn't entirely complete.

"One of my past clients... three or so worlds ago, was a Buddhist God," Amberdrake sat down as well, while the water warmed. Usually he kept warm water on hand at all times, but for some reason it had gone cold on him. "My brother is a gryphon, and his creator was my client as well, back on my world during the war. I've met the Star-Eyed Goddess of my people."

He folded his hands together on the table.

"The point is, power tends to trip over me at some point whether we want it to or not. This... is the first time something that strong has been that malicious, but... as a general principle, I'm used to it. I may not be thousands of years old, but I've had quite the varied existence so far."