Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was just such a boy, nay, that very same boy, which skirted the edge of the small crowd before the masked figure. His hands were clasped tight to his chest, holding something precious and small close to the flash of his neck, and he wore a deeply concerned expression. In fact, one might call it panicked, for the lids of his eyes were red and his mouth stretched into a haggard gasp as if he had been running for some time and just recently realized that his small body couldn't keep up the ground-breaking pace he had set to bring him thus far. Glancing down, he paused for breath, skipping to a stop, just several yards away from the lurking shadow. He uttered something, cradled the precious item in one arm as he adjusted his clothes, which were damp and still dripping, and pulled them up around his thin waist, speaking again in soft whispers. It would look like, to anyone else, that this boy was just on the cusp of madness, speaking to himself for lack of companionship, when, in reality, there was someone there.

...A little body, also damp, giving great shudders and gasps.

Little Clurie, who was every bit the trouble his earlier incarnation used to be, had recently been swept up by the waves. A journey to the ocean's beach, a place of comfort and peace to Chauhn, had been turned upside down when Clurie, traversing the driftwood, was caught and yanked into the ocean by a rogue wave. It was thanks to Chauhn's quick movements that he was saved from being drug out to sea, but there was nothing more that he could do than that. Water, as he just recently discovered, had the most adverse effects to the ash-based plague, and there was nothing but panic screaming in Chauhn's mind to find some way to save his little brother.

"Clurie, jus' hol' on, okay? Jus' hol' on...Ah'll get you t'somewhere warm...Ah'll get ya t'someplace wit' fire! Okay? Tha' shoul' make ya bett'r..." Chauhn murmured, speaking each portion of words between gasps for breath. He tried his best to look comforting, though it was quite obvious that he was anxious beyond reason, "Can ya make fire? A spark? Anythin' at'all?"

The small Plague in his arms, wilted and shuddering greatly, slid his hands against one another, striking as quickly as his weakened limbs would allow. Usually a spark would emit, some smoke, something, but there was nothing but a sound of wet palms sucking against one another.

"....Chauhn," the ash Phasmas muttered, "...Can't. Can't do it. So tired...I wanna sleep."

"Ya can't sleep," Chauhn said sternly, his voice giving a crack. He gave a jostle to the small figure in his arms, "Stay awake! Ah'll get you to fire..."

It was after this brief discussion that Chauhn started hopping forward again, launching himself into another run. He had to get to the Council! Someone!

Clurie gave a great shiver, a kind of body-convulsing shudder that even distracted Chauhn from looking about with frenzied face. He looked down into his palms where the little Plague curled up as tightly as he could upon himself, like paper curling up and blackening in flame. His cheeks, which were normally colored and sometimes bright with ember were dull.

"Oh g'dness, health, someone...Someone..." Chauhn blathered helplessly, pausing in his run to seek out a lonely corner, he knelt upon the ground. He very carefully deposited the comatose Phasmas on his lap and then proceeded to take off his hat, which was the driest thing on his person by far. The rest of him was still wet and stiff with the salt water of the ocean. It was the next best thing to do, the only thing he could think of to do before he was able to find help. Clurie needed to be dry! Carefully, he folded his hat and made the flimsy thing into the best kind of knapsack he could make with the thing before he carefully folded his wet Phasmas within. "Clurie, you gotta ge' dry, stay wit' me, alrigh'? You hear me? Stay awake!"

After tucking the little limp body safe into his hat, Chauhn lifted up with a wobble onto his feet to find himself face to face with a dark and towering figure, bedecked with black robes and an avian mask.

Desperation is a silly thing.

It's a blind fold, a rush of energy that scours good sense and common judgment. If Chauhn were in any other frame of mind, he might have been able to feel the threatening illness of the individual before him, sense the overall 'wrongness' of the person, but alack for him, he was, of all things: desperate.

What he wanted to see was someone that had the power to help him, and that's just who he saw. He saw a person painted by rumors, and it all seemed to make sense. The stranger before him now was tall and dark, swathed in robes of black with a mask like that of a long beaked bird. It looked like, for all Chauhn knew, the Plague Doctor, of whom he heard about on the tongues of those associated with Plagues. His stress bound heart gave a choked gasp of joy. This individual could help!

"Are you the Plague Doctor?" the panicked lad blurted, his hands were shaky as he cradled the hat to his chest, "Ah need 'elp...Ah need 'elp!" He held out his hat, keeping Clurie close to him, but out enough so that the onlooker could see. The Phasmas was limp and dim, wet and soggy in the hat with as much life as seaweed out of water. It was a pitiful sight and Chauhn held him out with the movement of one who expected the other to utter a magic spell to cure the ill. "Please 'elp 'im, 'e's wet 'n' col'! 'E's all ah 'ave lef' 'n' ah need the Doctor t' save 'im!"

As if a light had been turned on in his face, Chauhn immediately felt the angry knot of worry in his stomach drop out beneath him. The stranger was, indeed, the Doctor, but, there something in his intimidating and lanky form that bespoke something else to Chauhn. As a lad of the street Chauhn knew that suspicion of the unknown, and even the known, was a basic law of survival, but, trapped in a state of hysterics, the internal red alarms were muffled by the overwhelming need to save Clurie. It isn't to say that the moment the dark robed figure reached for his little brother that Chauhn simply let him take him. He retracted for a moment, hesitated, but after an endearing gaze of worry upon little Clurie's motionless form, he relucantly let the slender fingers enclose and lift Clurie away from his palms. Almost immediately afterward, Chauhn felt sick.

If the unsettling sickness in his gut wasn't enough to tell the better part of his mind that something was terribly wrong, the red alarms seemed to increase in intensity at the sight of the "Doctor's" oddly disturbing cradle rock. And even more so when he seemed to ignore him. The felled knot in Chauhn's stomach returned again, this time, as a sickly ocean swell, a kind of thick ooze that muddied up the walls of his core. When the "Doctor" clutched his hands about little Clurie, though, the thick ooze welled up like oil and suddenly, with the turning of the "Doctor's" back, burst aflame as if a lit matchstick were carelessly tossed inside.

Shock was momentary, for, in the moment that it took for Chauhn's green eyes to widen, he was already on the run, barreling after the fluttering dark robes of the stranger. As if his throat had been cut, Chauhn gasped and garbled on the pulse of hope that was steadily draining from his body. Clurie, in just a split seconds, was gone. For the first time in years, Clurie was away from him, separated, not even touching him anymore, and it felt, to Chauhn, as if he had been stripped nude. Worry and rage, the latter of the emotions a strange thing unbecoming to Chauhn's little form, swelled up and rattled his form, and hot tears sprung to his eyes with the first choked screams of demand.

"Wha' are you doin'!? Stop! Stop! Please, stop!" his voice wailed, the heat of anger scratching the edges of his words, "Ge' back 'ere! 'E's my brother! My brother! Stop! Please!" But the figure raced on, swiveling and diving through the crowd. Chauhn had an edge in this chase, he was youthful, he was driven by raw anger, and, he was an urchin. Streets and their crowds provided no obstacle for Chauhn. He knew the ways of weaving between their bodies, pushing himself off blockades of individuals and diving underneath their legs. It wasn't hard for him to keep an eye on the black-robed figure, especially when he was so clumsily diving into crowds, shoving and throwing away people in his path. He was heading towards the coast line, and, as they both broke free from the confused unmoving crowds and barreled out of sight down the cliff sides and vacant fields of travel along the shallow cliff sides that marked the Imisese coast, Chauhn screamed and hollered at the stranger, his fingers just barely grasping at the hem of the wildly spluttering robes.

"Give 'im back t' me, ah swear ahll gouge your eyes 'n wit' tha' mask if'n you don't give 'im back t' me! PLEASE! He's m'brother!"

Quick fleeing was the thought that Chauhn would be able to confront his sudden enemy the moment that the dark robed Obscuvian twisted and rocked back on his heel with an opening of his arms, suddenly enveloping the boy in a swath of pitch. Of course, Chauhn wasn't precisely thinking. He only had one resounding echoing screaming thought in his mind that yelled in all manners of anguish and rage, and the moment he crashed into the sickly twig of a body, he did his best to clasp his hands in the fabric and pull, tear, anything that would get him to his brother. He couldn't see him anymore, the Obscuvian wasn't holding him! He had to be somewhere in the robe, in a pocket of some sort, someplace being withheld from him and Chauhn was going to get to his brother whether it was the last thing he did!

Blade or not.

"Clurie! Clurie! Come back t'me! CLURIE!"

While he raked his cracked fingernails at the front of the man's robe, yanking on whatever he could get his hands on, he realized that there was an arm tightening about his neck. In the span of a breath, Chauhn felt his windpipe effectively crushed in the tightening of the man's arm. His eyes bugged out as he realized that the cold he felt in his throat wasn't from the sudden strangulation of air but rather the cold tempered steel of a dangerously placed edge against his jugular. With the mere flick of the wrist, the Obscuvian could twist the edge of the dagger and press inwards, spilling out whatever chance Chauhn had at rescuing his brother and escaping back into the trade city. With a knife so precariously cradled against his neck, there was little Chauhn could do. He was forced onto the balls of his feet, his legs quivering as they fought for a firm hold against the earth, and his hands were clutched tight into the fabric of the Obscuvian's robes.

Still...It was now or never. Chauhn had nothing else to live for.

Growling, Chauhn focused his gleaming eyes at the Obscuvian bent over his shoulder, and choked out his stubborn demand, "Give...me back...my brother."

The world seemed to be dragged underneath his feet too fast for him to keep up. Chauhn's little worn boots dragged, skipped, and hiccuped across the ground barely able to get a hold. But, struggle as he might for a firm stance on the ground, it didn't change the fact that hsi throat was still caught fast in the grip of an enemy. It was with slow recognition that he realized just how dark the situation he was in, and his eyes steadily welled and grew round with fear as it sunk in and poisoned his system with a kind of fear that gripped a person who felt the itch of a rope around their neck. Helpless and peering with his marble eyes at the meager passersby who lifted nothing but their chins and brows at the situation, Chauhn gasped and struggled to spew threats in hopes of diverting the man's attention, loosening his grip, anything!

"Lemme go! Let m'brother go! The Council will fin' ou' 'bou' me missin' 'n' they'll come after you! They will!" But his pleas were nothing to the Obscuvian's deaf ears. He dragged him along just as easily as he would a sack of roots. And Chauhn dared not push as much as he wanted against the cold steel blade perched against his skin.

When the other masked individual revealed himself from the boat side, hailing them over, Chauhn's panic increased tenfold. With a hoarse scream that was literally cut short by the press of the dagger against his frantically pulsing throat, Chauhn clawed uselessly at the heavy bundles of black fabric swathed about his form. He felt like he was drowning in the man's black robes, quite effectively submerged in a sea that he didn't know how to swim in.

The appearance of the other masked individual struck something a little more than terror, though...There was something, just beyond the arm that wrapped around his gaze, that Chauhn could see. He wasn't sure just what it was about this new intruder that ensnared his attention, but something was calling out to the urchin. Something that he thought he should know. But with a mind as crazed as his, Chauhn could do little more than stand outward, pressed tight to the cultist's body with his nose red from sniveling and his eyes blushed with anguish.

Others?

From peril into mortal danger, Chauhn was sinking ever deeper into a darkness he couldn't escape. There were kinds of danger Chauhn had been through before, kinds of situations that seemed as black as pitch, where he had clung onto pure luck and skill in order to escape. He had been ganged up upon by thugs, pulled into dark alleyways, chased upon rooftops, and bullied by his fellow urchins. It was only a matter of a few months before that Chauhn had been kidnapped and nearly thrown into an icy river if it weren't for the intervening of Sloane, and now again? So soon after?

And these, Chauhn was slowly coming to realize, weren't like the dim-witted evil that the three kidnappers were. These were...These were Obsucvians. They were an entirely different kind of evil, a malnourished and starving evil, like a rabid dog, unthinking and quick moving. He had only heard whispers of them before, never seen them, and he certainly didn't know what they looked like before this day. Wraiths of black that meandered during the day, buried in crowds, invisible to all who weren't victims of their eyeless stares. They moved like rats, skittering and fast, wary and clinging to shadows. Chauhn knew their movement well, the movement of one who was backed into a corner, who had nothing else to lose. He moved like that too.

It was with that kind of desperate quick moving jerk and kick of his legs, that Chauhn was reluctantly pulled along after the fake doctor's body. The skin of his neck was pulling tight against the blade, threatening to break and he didn't care. He was breathing fast and hard, and with each breath he took, the closer he got to the ship, and the closer he was dragged towards the ship, the louder he became.

"No...No! NO. NO! Le' me go! Le' me go, jus' le' me go! Clurie! CLURIE! Can you hear me? Clurie, please, wake up! Don't leave me! Wake up, Clurie! CLURIE! Give him back to me...Clurie!" the urchin shrieked and kicked, alive with the kind of rage that only brothers possessed with love could give. He gave another last ditch effort of struggle, throwing back his elbows and jumping, doing anything he could to try and dislodge himself, but he was held tight. He could not break free. He ripped and clawed at the black fabric, trying anything he could do to get to Clurie, but it was not enough. He was but a boy.

For the Obscuvian, the new struggle from Chauhn was nothing but a momentary distraction, a minor upset in dragging the small boy onto the cultist's boat. His feet went from tripping along the dock, to kicking at the air, to getting dragged along side the boards of the ship all in a frighteningly quick span of moments.