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It was for the second time within a fortnight, that Isikoro Delaran sent a call to Alex's cellphone. Upon hearing the cure for the madness-instilling disease on the Delaran house answering machine, Isikoro instantly blessed the good Doctor Kyou and rushed for his cellphone to quickly bring up Alex's number. He left a hurried message that sounded something like this:

"The cure! About damn time! Alex, I don't think I can get Eiry down to the lab, no matter what I try. I've been trying to catch him myself these past two days, but there is simply no way to reign in that boy. I thought he was going to be a lot better after he and Rivener made up, but...I don't know, he just got worse. Anyways. You need to come up here again, Alex! Sorry to make you drive, but this, as you well know, needs to be done before one of us gets our head stuck in the ceiling again."

Click.

Isi looked at the cellphone, momentarily registering its scratched and warped surface from when Eiry threw it across the hallway the first time his madness went out of control. He looked around the house now, gulping, and stuffing the cell into his pocket. He had to find where his raevan was before Alex arrived, lest he pull any more of his dangerous pranks. Aphi was out of the house. It looked like he too, had someone to take care of, and he and Riv left the house in a fury of air. That left Isi alone in the house with a ghost, that he presumed was somewhere, balancing dangerously on the edge of murderous psychopath and creepy prank puller.

Yanking his crutches underneath him, he moved to the bottom floor, glancing about the rooms for a flash of mint and red, or the sound of off-key humming of childhood lullabies.

Isi glanced to the front door from where he stood at the other end of the living room, his eyes widening. At first, he thought it was Eiry, but when he recalled the crunch and grind of tires against the gravel outside, he knew that it was Alex. It was a bit hard to hear the tires amidst all the insane ticking and tapping sounds around the house, created by Eiry's insane machines and gadgets, but he heard it all the same. She had gotten here a lot quicker than he anticipated, but when he realized that she was one of the few people who did know what was happening to his ward, he knew why she had gotten here so fast. There wasn't any time to spare with Eiry. In fact, giving him time, was just about the worst thing that they could do. Relief swelled up in his chest, as he whispered Alex's name underneath his breath, and he tightened his grip around his crutches. Momentarily forgetting his paranoid watch around the Delaran house for the turquoise terror, he started for the door, maneuvering his way around the living room furniture. It was hard to maneuver around it all. The furniture was turned upside down, balancing upon each other in odd angles, carelessly shoved to the side and moved around. It was Eiry who had done it, effects of his bloated magic.

"Alex!" he shouted, the hint of a smile pulling at his freckled cheeks, "The door's open, come on in! Thank god, you're he-"

And it was then that Isikoro felt the cold cold grasp of lithe fingers curling around his ankles. He choked off the rest of his sentence in favor of a gasp and he looked down. In the floor, smiling up at him with an eerie crooked grin, was Eiry, his eyes again wild and rolling with familiar madness. He had his hands firmly grasped around his ankles, and Isikoro could only watch in terror as they clamored up higher on his thin legs. Time. Isi couldn't give him time! Directed mostly by instinct instead of his mind, Isi leaned forward on his crutches, and started kicking madly at the floor, and shaking his legs, but every effort was useless. Eiry was intangible after all. Kicking only made it a titch more difficult for Eiry to grapple on, but as soon as he had a grip on the boy's legs, it was too late.

Isi felt himself getting pulled down into the floorboards. It was that familiar encasing feeling, a cold and odd state of being between states, that started crawling up his legs as Eiry, crazed and mad pulled at him, wrenching him into the floor. Isi lost his grip on one of his crutches and he wobbled forward, held up only by one crutch. The metal contraption fell to the floor with a clatter and, with his other arm free arm, Isi wrapped himself to one crutch, hoping to use his strong upper body muscles to hold him from sinking completely into the floor.

But what was strength, when there was nothing to use his strength against?

"ALEX!"

The crutch that Isi was leaning against was suddenly yanked into the floor along with his legs, and he felt himself pulled waist deep into the floorboards. He gave a yelp of surprise then, and fell forward onto the wood, bouncing his chin against the hard flooring. "GNH!" He only had a moment to gasp, wrench one of his arms free of the floor, before he was yanked shoulder deep into the bowels of the house. He tried to reach his clawed fingers for his crutch, the other one being trapped underneath the floor boards along with the rest of his arm, before he was pulled completely under, drowning in the skeleton structure of the house.

His struggling hand was the last thing to be seen.








...


"Ehahahaaha...ha...ha...he....Haha..."

Isi fell into the dusty dank of the basement below, his back catching most of the fall as he made a wild, struggling Icarus descent into a mountain of crates. The wood of the crates, old and moldy, gave way easily to Isi's body, and he fell into them, amid splinters and jagged teeth of wood. Thankfully, he wasn't impaled, but he was quite shaken, and his slow adaption to the darkness of the basement had him worried. Even then, he was blind to the tell tale glow of Eiry's mutated rune and his awkward angle of being stuck in the crate and he kicked his legs uselessly and swung his arm and crutch as he fought to wiggle his way free.

"Rock a bye-bye, baby...In the tippy tree bough...When the great west wind blows...This little baby will drop!"

Eiry yanked Alex's legs through the floor, dragging her body all the way through until he let go and let her fall into a pile of crates nearby Isi. His red eyes, wide and alive with frenzy, rolled around in his head as he fought to keep his wide Cheshire smile from ripping his face in twain. Little chewed up pieces of paper showed in his smile, caught in his teeth, and the ink stained his tongue black. His hair was once again in knots and wild wisps, stuck up in all directions from his constant pulling of his hair, and twirling around his fingers. As he moved away now, to drift through the collected boxes and ancient furniture, he toyed with strands of his hair, running and pushing his hands through his minty locks until they were messy rat's nests and tangles.

"What, what, what now, prithee, tell me what! Your eyes are set in thy head, bully monster, ahahha, he would be a poor monster indeed if they were set in his tail! Look at these two, fleshy bone and frail, hehe, so little and delicate, let's see which one breaks most easily!" the sigel laughed to himself, a sort of convulsing chuckle that was accented by the sickly glow of his orange rune. He scratched at his skin, exposing more blood spots and freckles on his body, the kind of sickly splotches found on ill leaves, and he slumped off to one side. The sigel, in his illness, had gone completely, and quite dangerously, schizophrenic, laughing and speaking with himself as he wobbled like a balloon caught in a spastic wind.

When Isi heard the collapse of someone in the boxes nearby him, he startled, and looked around, trying to crane his head over his shoulder and chest to see what had happened. His gut and mind told him that it was Alex, that she had been pulled down too, and in a yelp, he called her name.

"Alex! Alex, is that you? You okay?" Isi asked, still straining his body to free himself from the box he was caught inside.

"Eight nails, each six inches long, all for Isi in his coffin, all gone, gone!" came Eiry's sing song voice. "And another eight for Alex, there, but first it would be wise to cut her hair, cut it off, cut it all off, and weave it into a knot fair!"

With the help of Alex, Isi was able to wrestle himself out of the rib-like remains of the box. He moved clumsily, still attached to his crutch which gave him an awkward limb to stiffly swing about as he fought for freedom. But, before he knew it, he was pulled into Alex's embrace and the cold feeling of the basement, the ache in his body from the fall, seemed to disappear momentarily. He wrapped his free arm around her and hugged her tight, choosing the familiarity of her presence as his weapon to combat the helplessness of being caught in the basement, a pit of darkness.

"I'm fine, I'm fine! Jeez, Alex, I'm not as delicate as you would think! Give me some credit for toughing out all the--" in the middle of his butt hurt rambling he felt something warm drip onto his face and forehead and he looked up at her, pulling away to better see what had happened. His eyes focused in the dark on the shape of something protruding from her neck, and he lifted his hand to touch it and when he did, he felt something warm and sticky, the same kind of stuff that had leaked onto his face. It was blood!

"Alex!" the boy gasped, leaning further away from her, "You're bleeding!" At the same time, she was whispering something into his ear and the boy found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. It was jumbled and Isi could only pick out a few words: 'keep him tangible', 'seconds', 'permission', 'without a prep', and 'time'. From what he could make out, he could get the general gist of things, and he nodded wildly.

"Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever! We just need to do something!" Isi snapped, but before he could get any farther, a flash of mint had the boy startling and jumping back.

Eiry, grin tacked onto his face, sped between the two. He suddenly appeared between their arms with gleeful delight wildly painted in splotches on his face. He pulled them in close to his mouth, his cold arms around their necks as he breathed against their cheeks.

"Welcome, welcome, well come, all, you're trapped in Daedalus' labyrinth! One the tortured beast, twin horns and grizzled mane, the other the fair maiden sacrificed to the animal within!"

"EIRDIRSCEOL!" the boy snapped, trying to wiggle himself free from the raevan. One arm he keep on his side, trying to keep himself up with the crtuch, and the other arm, he swung at his raevan, trying to grab a handful of his collar. But as he reached and tried to wrap the fabric up his knuckles, the raevan gave a great laugh, and took a hold of the back of their heads. "What are you--?! Let go, Eiry!"

"AHAHA, like vases, these are, like VASES! If I crack them together what will spill out? Roots and dirt? I think so! And teeth! Teeth will fall out and ROOTS!" With the pump of his arms, he slammed the two heads together and faded away, quickly dodging any of the flailing arms that reached for him.

"Keep him tangible?! Alex, you'd have better luck asking the waves to keep from falling upon the shore!" Isi snapped, worry accenting his voice.

Things were so great down here! Great, they really were, and laughter, it was so loud, but Eiry was sure that he wasn't the only one laughing. He heard many kinds of laughter, all crackling in his head like the cackles of a fire! All these noises, all this confusion! It was so foggy. A pit opened up in Eiry's stomach and he suddenly swung from delirious amusement to momentary pain and sadness. The world he was seeing was see-sawing back and forth, melting and fusing, constantly a whirl, and the things he saw, he wasn't always seeing. For a brief moment, twirling away through the crates and ancient barrels of wine, Eiry felt completely swallowed in a dizzying whirl of illness. He felt sick, and with the heave of his stomach, the raevan paused from his wild merriment, and leaned against a crate, up-heaving roots, dried leaves, and gravel he had eaten sometime in his wild throes. The half-digested mess slopped onto the ground in wet stringy clumps and as he retched, the raevan motioned wildly with one arm. The effects of his waving arm, and the fact that he was dreadfully ill with a virus that amplified his powers, meant that crates and barrels, whatever else was in the basement, was thrown about carelessly in a wild tornado.

As soon Eiry finished retching, the sigel, "stumbled" back, with another careless wave of his arms, and fought to steady himself. He giggled, and with the ease of melting butter, the will'o'wisp raevan slipped back into his hysterics. His smile, dripping with dirt, stretched back onto his cheeks, and he wobbled back, inspecting the rearranged basement for signs of the humans.

Isi, at first sign of the flying objects, was the first to duck. He was still reeling from having his head knocked into Alex's, and he forced his way to look past the pain. What he saw was terror. Flying objects swirled about his retching raevan, and he gasped when he realized that they were heading their way. It was all the ancient filigree of the basement, sending clouds of dust and rot into the air. Used to this kind of phenomenon, Isi let his legs buckle from underneath his body, but not without the swing of his crutch underneath Alex's legs. He forced the woman to fall back and evade a crate that might've swung into her head, and as he did so, he shouted.

"GET DOWN!"

Isi pressed himself to the cold grime and dust of the basement floor as the last of the crates flew over his head and exploded in splinters against the basement wall releasing their contents like spiral guts from their cases. He winced and opened his stormy grey eyes, checking the air above them for any more potential danger, and when he saw nothing but swirling dust, the boy took this time to move.

Alex was right. They had to do something. Anything. That's what Isi told her once upon a time when Eiry was trapped in this very basement, starving and closed up in the walls of his depression. They had to try ANYTHING that they could do to help him now. He forced his knees underneath him and used his single crutch to push himself up onto his feet, his weak legs giving protesting shakes as he straightened his back and set his shoulder wings tight. He didn't reach over to Alex, he just stood, holding onto his crutch, staring at where Eiry wobbled to and fro and giggled to himself.

"Alex," he said, his voice quiet and straight, "If all you need is one clearing. I'll get it for you. You say we need to try and by ******** god, we're going to give it our best damn try."

The boy, after saying that, resolutely moved forward, moving quickly, more quickly than he should with only one crutch. He navigated around boxes, and even shoved some out of the way, making as much movement and noise as he possibly could to draw Eiry's attention. There was one thing he knew that Eiry couldn't resist in the manic feverish state he was in now, and that was: Literature.

Isi opened his mouth wide and recited, "It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye!"

The Tell-Tale Heart. Eiry's favorite Edgar Allen Poe short story. After all his time, hearing that damned thing recited over and over again, reading it even, to Eiry at least four times a week, Isi had gotten quite adept at reciting it himself. He opened his free arm wide, and stared at Eiry, beckoning that he come over, slip into the snare.

Through the melted colors and hazy shapes that clouded the sigel's vision, the only things that remained remotely the same were the shapes of the humans wish-washing against the blur of the dark colors. Eiry grinned, his splitting mouth showing nothing but the white of his teeth and the crumbled and soggy strips of paper. It made it look like he was eating rotten milk.

That's when he heard it. The words. Through everything else, through his hallucinated tick-tocking, the voices and the laughter, all the little things whispering, and all the little thoughts chattering, Eiry noticed the words. He did not notice Zul entering behind, he didn't even notice Alex anymore. He just noticed those words, those hauntingly familiar and beautiful words! They were his favorite words and Eiry wanted to eat them all up.

The small strings around his heart were pulled, making him feel little flutters of sorrow. For a moment it felt like something was wrong. Those feeling were quickly swallowed up, though, for Eiry gave a few flaps to his ethereal wings, sending his sick and wobbling form in the direction of the reciting boy.

"Yes, it was this!" Eiry said in return to Isi, drawing closer until he was inches away from Isi. "One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it." At this line, the sigel reached forward and took Isi into one of his arms, making him lean back like he were dipping him in a dance as he crooned overhead, his Cheshire smile widening. The boy could do nothing but buckle his knees as the sigel dipped him, and Eiry's glee heightened as the boy's grey eyes reflected raw flashes of horror. With his free hand, the sigel, traced his hand up the boy's chest until it rested on his face, covering the boy's eyes. "Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever."

With those words, the sigel's face reached a pinnacle of glee and warped madness, his wild hair keeping all the hysteria within its frame, a perfect picture of insanity. He dug his fingers into Isi's face, as if he were going to reach within his head, and, right then and there, pull Isikoro's eye free. Prickles of blood swelled up from where his nails punctured the boy's skin, scratches into his forehead and cheek, and Eiry chuckled as the boy wiggled.

Isi's vision was suddenly dipped in black when Eiry moved his clawed hand over his left eye, and he felt his body stiffening in fear. He didn't want to move lest he make Eiry fall back again into intangibility. If he were to move now, he would definitely scare away the raevan, but if he didn't move, Eiry very well might go through with his terrible reenactment of Poe's best. Frozen into a state where he could not do anything, Isi flinched as Eiry's fingernails dug deeper into his skin. He grit his teeth. He had to be strong, not just for himself and Alex, but for Eiry.

So he silently screamed with his mind for somebody to do something.

And do something someone did.

Eiry was about to take out the boy's eye, the evil eye with blue film, he was about to reach in and pull out that perfect marble, extinguish that cold terrible gaze, when suddenly, the cold crept up around his arms. Eirdirsceol heard someone shouting at him, someone speaking words at him, but he didn't care for that. What was that cold riding up around his arms? What was this feeling clawing up his skin and freezing him, every cell to the bone? He could feel the frost crawling up and frosting the edges of his clothing.

But most disturbingly, he was caught.

Eiry lifted his hand from Isi's face, unceremoniously dropping the boy to the ground, and gave a struggle of his arms. No use. Stuck. Eiry growled, his red eyes widening. What was this?! WHAT WAS THIS!?! His Cheshire grin flipped upside down, turning into a frothy frown. There was nothing on his face but pure hatred at this moment, and he desperately turned his body into nothing. But it was no use. This ice, this MAGIC had him PINNED, STUCK!

He had never been trapped before. Eiry and never been caught. NEVER CAUGHT.

Eiry struggled wildly, bucking and throwing his head, flickering desperately back and forth between tangibility and curling his fingers into ugly claws. His mouth opened wide in a terrible banshee shriek and his red red eyes lolled back into his head exposing nothing but white. His face twisted into the terrible lines of ghastly anguish and rage. Struggling like a wild monster, an untamed beat of the sea, Eiry wiggled wildly in clutches of ice.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Caught, struck and pinned, the desperately ill raevan, foamed at the mouth, trying to do anything ANYTHING to stop this terrible trapped feeling. He could do nothing else, but scream and rant, his words becoming muddled and confused, but recitations all the same.

"I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why WOULD they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily increased!"

The icy burn of the cold was all that Eiry could feel, he could feel it crawl up with icy claws through his arm like an all encompassing vine. His wild and violent struggled slowed as his skin became freckled with frost, his limbs finding it more and more harder to move and jerk. The ice was within him now, cutting off everything in thin chunks until he felt nothing, nothing at all. Voices shrieked madly in his ears, begging for the end of it.

"O God! what COULD I do? I foamed -- I raved -- I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder -- louder -- louder!"

Eiry tried to scream again, but it came out in convulsing coughs and groans. The numbness swelled up, and yet, even though it meant he couldn't feel anything, he still imagined it's icy burn and frostbite as it ate up his body. The voices in his head were shrieking wildly, but one by one, they were carved in half and froze up into nothing. There was no one else now to pine, just Eiry.

"Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! -- no, no? They heard! -- they suspected! -- they KNEW! -- they were making a mockery of my horror! -- this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! -- and now -- again -- hark! louder! louder! louder! LOUDER! -- "

The world slowly stopped its frenzied dance around his eyes and things came to a halting stop. Everything was stopping. Everything was quieting down.

A weakness descended and wrapped the Sigel up in its arms.

Eiry stiffened up like a plant in winter, his energy and breathing, shuddering violently as the golden antidote raced through his veins. His eyes lolled back into position and he looked about blearily, unable to really move his head except for in twitches and shivering jerks. There was a body behind his, holding him up, and there were bodies nearby, on the floor. His teeth began to chatter, his ears folding low in the cold, and he breathed breaths of fog and ice. Underneath all the flaky frost, was Eiry again, coherent and weak, the sweet mischievous Sigel who enjoyed story and verse.

And still, words dripped from his lips like sticky sap, "Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! --"

The voices were all gone. What was all this? Where...? Where was he? The will-o-wisp raevan tried to curl up, draw into himself as best he could, but, being like that of a plant, he found it hard to even move.

"Ngh...nmh...hn..." Eiry mumbled and whimpered, choking on a couple more coughs. Stark clarity blinded him now and his head rolled back, blackness overcoming the edges of his vision. "here, here! -- it is the beating...of his...hideous...heart..."

Then the Sigel slumped, falling into a pitch more deep than the insanity that bore him through his illness.

He was still.

Isi felt himself swept up from the ground and he struggled to help move his body, even if it meant a couple useless kicks from his legs. He was again gathered up into Alex's arms. He wiggled his chin from her crushing hug and glanced to his ward, watching with terror as the savior medicine did its work, freezing Eiry over with the breath of Jack Frost.

At length, at an impossible length of time, it seemed, it ended. Eiry, still mumbling, slumped in Zul's grip, and became limp, shivering still. The end of his madness had come.

"Oh, thank god."

Relief overwhelmed Isi and he found himself able to finally breathe again, and breathe he did. He released a heavy breath, the own tenseness in his muscles melting away. He looked up to Alex, gently moving out of her arms. He gave a weak smile to her, his brows knitting above his stormy grey eyes as he gathered his legs underneath him and hugged his crutch close.

"So...Uh," the boy said slowly, looking between Alex and Zul, "How about we put the trouble-maker on the couch and I thank the both of you with some mugs of hot coco?"