[center][img]https://i.pinimg.com/564x/4a/21/ee/4a21ee936abcb82390a3a31ddc4512cd.jpg[/img][hr] [b]Event:[/b] Tall trees and long shadows [b]Location:[/b] In the forest close to Loriindton [h2]Into darkness[/h2][/center] [hr] Otios was never to find out the true cause for Lyen's death, but instead believed that the friend he had gotten to know in the Battle for Relouse had fallen victim to the very battle he himself had arranged for. He strolled through the woods around the smoking city menancholically and wanted to be alone with the emptyness he felt inside him. An emptyness that very much also felt like a battlefield between two different stances: The one being that the whole operation had been totally worth it, the other that this was absolutely not the desired outcome. Never before had mourning about the death of someone he had gotten to know personally while not mourning about the death of many more anonymous people felt so absurd and so justified at the same time. Otios was not even aware of just how much he was merely dancing on the top of a volcano with his thoughts. Neither did he know that Lyen's death had actually happened a lot differently and that he was not to blame for it, nor had any news reached him about just how much a certain Lady Talit weighed the loss of one of her own legs higher than the potential death of people who had been dragged into her personal plot of revenge. She had tried to suck him into it, too, and the only reason this had not succeeded was the fact that the Eskandr army had marched a significant tad faster than anticipated. He didn't even know how much he should have thanked them for that. And, had Otios been able to eavesdrop on the events in the timewalker's hut, he'd by now have had no doubt about Lady Talit happily taking the praise all for herself should there be any in the future. It was him who had both engineered and executed this plan, having a vague and abundantly abstract idea about that something had to be done could hardly count! History, given how things looked right now, would just forget about him however. [hr] [i]Muffled shouting. Boots running over something different than forest floor. The general feeling of panic.[/i] Otios stopped dead in his tracks, convinced that he had heard something. Yet there was nothing but birds chirping and some leftover dew dropping to the ground around him. And the smell of burnt wood. Maybe this all had just been too much for his nerves right now ? He walked on not really caring about directions. [i]'Where did this come from ?' one voiced asked. 'I don't know! Something punched a hole in the wall!' another, female sounding one added. 'We must seal it!'[/i] He stopped again, this time much more startled. What wall ? What 'something' ? Was his overstrained mind now playing dirty tricks with him or was there actually someone hiding in the woods doing that ? The thief took a much more thorough look around and also craned his neck to look for anyone up in the trees, but only discovered something eerily familiar hovering a tad over his head: The pitch black thing that looked like one of his lightning bolts, but wasn't moving like one. Otios remembered: The fight in the wagon where the timewalker had surprised him. She had done this to his attack, something he had never witnessed before. It seemed the aftermath of it was still resting in place like an immovable object, waiting for eternity to finally become a thing of the past. At least that was what Otios presumed, given that absolutely nothing seemed to have changed about it the slightest. Now however he had the opportunity to look at it in all calmness. And the more he did, the more it mesmerized him. [i]'Too late. Nothing is going to stop it once containment has been lost!' a more elderly person added, almost sounding as if already having yielded to some kind of fate. Then there was a hissing noise as if air was trying to escape from something under immense pressure, quickly followed by what must have been a deafening explosion had it not been muffled like everything else.[/i] Was that thing making these noises ? Now that he was so close, even putting a small log in place to stand on so he could actually reach up to it, the sounds and voices appeared to be louder, but still they were nothing but a low whisper in total contradiction to the kind of event they appeared to carry over. A brief silence set in, then the faint echoes burst out again and repeated the catastrophe that appeared to happen at their origin. The very verb 'to walk' implied some sort of movement. So if somebody was called a 'timewalker', then said somebody had indeed some potential to move along time if language was supposed to have some logic to it. So... had she sent his lightning strike to another point in time indeed ? And what point in time then... had she even had any time to take aim or had she just defaulted to some random destination not caring about what the bolt might hit there ? The idea felt quite a little frightening. Still, Otios reached out with his large hand slowly. He wanted to touch it, yet the moment he did something else came to haunt his mind. [i]History might forget you, but your reward is here, in front of you![/i] A different voice. It didn't match any of those already heard and didn't sound panicked either, but had an enthusiastic tone to it. Otios identified it as his own. [i]You can't undo what has been done, but you can make the echoes stop![/i] Otios' hands were itching to reach out to their fullest extend, grabbing the whole of what was before him. This was beyond mesmerizing, this was tempting. [i]The fabric has been torn and lies bleeding like a wounded tree. Its sap is bitter sweet, but it has no equal! Your deeds have made yourself equal that inequality! It belongs to you![/i] Otios' mind was on rails. He did not even truly know what he was doing, he just did it and started drawing from what had felt like the least preferable thing to draw from just moments before. A patch of nothingness so devoid of matter, energy and just even the bare potential to be understood truly, yet now it produced a surge of energy the thief had never felt before. Part of him wanted to let go of it for it just felt not right and dangerous, but things were descending into a state of craving faster than that part of him could cope with. At some point there was nothing but sort of a scream to be heard in the forest. The voices, the noises, everything had stopped. The black entity was no more as he collapsed to the ground, releasing what little food he had eaten previously onto the forest floor the front way out. [hr] Otios was not another Eskandr army approaching Loriindton, but he felt like having the mood of one. His hairs were halfway standing upright and seemingly hating each other as static electricity had built up in them. His eyes had not so decorative rings around them as if he had either been in a fist fight or no real sleep for quite a while, and he had figured already that whenever he touched something wet or metallic connected to the ground, a punishing amount of current would flow through and out of him. An electromagnetic hangover asking for a particularly thick pair of leather gloves! The Yasoi didn't want to see anybody right now for he'd see all of them early enoug on his way back. He just wanted to leave. Yet as he had finally prepared his bags with far less patience, but a lot more headache than he was used to, his horse evaded his touch even before it could happen and refused to be mounted. When had that happened before ? Stupid beast, now he'd have to walk for a while or what ?! And of course it was all the fault of this wierd, black, floating piece of shit he had gobbled up! Strangely enough, while at one point he had started calling it 'black shit', at the other end he also felt all the more intrigued about it. Were they all the same ? Did they all exhibit this weird form of communication if one could even call it that way ? And... just how rare were they actually, given he had never seem something like it before ? Stumbling upon another one would have been a nice diversion from war! One could argue that Otios no longer was dancing on a volcano, but had become the volcano himself.