Welcome to Gaia! ::

All had dulled down to a faint throb.

He still held himself but his voice was silent, phantasmagoric lullabies no longer embarking from his lips. He slowly examined his surroundings, which had been restored from a sea of static to the usual, lonely features of the attic. The back of his head pounded with the other pulses throughout his body, churning blood black as the night and thick as mud. His eyes darkly followed the pale sunbeams shining through the attic's window. All was silent beside the distorted echoes of voices from downstairs.

Something was happening out there. He could feel faint surges of emotion and magic washing over him, but they were not close enough or strong enough to throw his mind into havoc as the previous two times had. He closed his eyes and urged his mind's eye to seek current events. He sat in the corner of that dusty, cold attic, trying to fetch images from afar like before, but he only saw darkness. Frustrated, he sighed and halfheartedly opened his eyes. Perhaps he did not need to acknowledge what was happening outside. The waves of energy were enough to clue him in.

But he sensed something else as well. Through the chills of tainted magic breaking upon him, there was a distortion, an unevenness, as though there were gaps in the surges. He recognized it immediately. He closed his eyes once more and turned his face toward the ceiling, basking in that feeble but familiar aura. She had intervened, the attic-dweller knew. She was here. But he understood she would not be here for long. Her blessings lasted for very brief intervals of time...

And indeed it was quick to dissipate. Perhaps the blessing had merely weakened, but the fact remained that he could no longer sense it.

His eyes opened and drifted to a stray sliver of light glinting off the broken mirror. His hand traveled toward the largest shard, closing pale and bony fingers around the cold object. He gently tilted the mirror shard toward himself and cleaned its dusty and grimy surface with a gold-trimmed, tattered sleeve, angling the mirror to look at himself and the ceiling from different perspectives.

Then new waves broke upon him. He glanced toward the window and set the mirror in his lap, gazing strangely at the light. Something else was happening. It was far away, yet it was powerful enough to alert him. This time his mind did not spiral in several dimensions at once or pervert his senses into other worlds and timelines. The surges, feeble as they were, carried touches of pain and the same darkness he had continuously sensed over the past few days, rattling his body into a weak and uncontrollable shiver. He felt the shadows of rage perch on the fringes of his mind.

The same aura was everywhere. It was in Rei, for he had seen it himself in that vision. It had corrupted the energy signature that Nils exhumed, for Nils had an unmistakable aura. But this corruption was too distant for him to identify. Who now had fallen to this malevolent and near-nameless influence? Who now was soiled by the blood of Asami Meiuqer?

He set the mirror shard back in its place and began to sing again. He sang in a voice too quiet for the attic around him to echo, the melody's notes rippling with sorrow and deceit...