Welcome to Gaia! ::

The ever-shifting warren of corridors and pockets of peace and terror were pockmarked with a dim blue glow covered over and concealed and sometimes when that glow flickered up into being, welling up in the contours of the runes like blood in a fresh wound, Taym felt for an instant a sense of what came close to but wasn't quite hope.

At some point he'd started equating that light with the idea of home. He made another, and smoothed a handful of damp earth over it, and achingly got to his feet to find a place to scrawl another.

After the encounter with Qarah he'd grown desperate; after a day of silence he'd grown reckless. He could not endure another day of Lurks stroking his hair and cooing in his ear. He could not tolerate another day of watching Waits, aloof and self-possessed, calmly dispatching orders to things that looked like him but weren't. He could not tolerate another day of knowing that somewhere in the world a thing that wore his face was wearing his voice and might one day in some disgusting parody of life wear his relationships.

He carved deeply. Thurisaz flared into life, blue in the pale gold of Fiona's own runes, and Taym knelt and he did not cover it immediately. He held his shaking hands over it as though it were a fire, as though he could soak up comfort from it the way he would heat from a flame.

Uruz:
Regular: 6
Superior: 3

Thurisafjasfdsja
Regular: 4
Superior: 3

He paused, tense, his skin rising into goosebumps under someone else's sleeves. He put the tip of the blade back into the ground.

Every time but especially the first time you traced the shape again and again and again. In the labs they had computers that spat out complicated codes in fractions of the time it would have taken a human to do something considerably less impressive, but the old ways, the learned ways, still worked. Shaking, he traced the shape (the shape itself a vessel for power that he did not understand and whose purpose was unknown) he'd committed to memory before he'd erased it for good, and he tried not to think. Fiona gently, nervously, began to recite for him: there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer--.

He dreaded her arrival, and could not wish it fast enough.

He traced the shape, again and again, and Fiona's voice was in his head more firmly than the whisper in his ear, her lilting and musical intonation as she tread and retread the familiar words for him.

When light welled up it was achingly brilliant, it was perfect, it was sharp, it was clear.

He had time to consider the question. Far too much time. He'd chased down a number of replies and tried to hold them but only one had ever truly managed to stick. The answer caught in his throat but he delivered it and nothing he had ever said terrified him more.

"All of mine, again and again, as many times as you need it," he said, and this was the easy part. "But I won't kill another man's child--because we are all someone's child--to save my own."

He realized he had not been expecting her to disappear in some satisfyingly dramatic fashion. He hadn't been anticipating a scream, or a boom. He hadn't been expecting anything at all except what had happened: the rune flickering up and Taym left there with a being that frightened him more than anything ever had in his life.

Death was pre-emptive. Death was intel. Death paved inroads for others to use later. He did not know what paths he had made or eyes he had opened. Maybe none: maybe he had failed. It didn't much matter.

"I don't know," he whispered, and he closed his eyes, steeling himself, refusing to scrabble for safe ground that he knew would only elude him, refusing to ask whose blood was on his lip, refusing to give her the pleasure, because that, too, failed to matter.

Move.

It was Fiona, again, because all Taym wanted to do was to lie down and let the floor fall away, to die again, and maybe this time Waits would have the other things distracted so that nothing would pluck him out of the water.

But that was all it took: Fiona's urging and the memory of his lungs filling up. He did not want to die gasping. He had not wanted to die starving, either. What he wanted, and it seemed like such a small and simple desire, completely reasonable, was to die quickly.

Something long and thin wrapped around his throat and yanked him backwards, dragging the hunter back into the darkness of the lair even as it tightened and choked.

That he wasn't going to get the one without the other quickly became apparent and soon the question was whether or not he would even live to cross the lair's threshold once more. It was answered when more vines shot from the entrance, wrapping around arm and wrist, alleviating the pressure, allowing slack, though the pain remained to him.

Through it he may notice the change in the air, the thin traceries of Deus-blue lighting coursing along the ground, racing up the walls. The taste of ozone filled his mouth and a keen, snapping static met every bit of exposed skin. Several moths appeared to be fluttering hastily toward the exit, but they were swallowed whole by a brilliant shaft of light.

Throughout the lair, seven shining bolts of power shot up, destroying everything in their path and spreading wider and wider, swallowing the lair whole. It happened quickly, just a few quick seconds and Nest and her wandering desert maze were gone, leaving a massive chasm in their wake.

And once again, Taym found himself falling.

The drop would have definitely killed him. The vine turned noose that stopped his fall still might. Just the barest foothold, a few inches at best, kept it from strangling him quickly.