♢*   —    @natterghast ​ /  𝐆𝐎𝐃 𝐎𝐅 𝐖𝐀𝐑: 𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐍𝐀𝐑𝐎𝐊 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐒 

❝ you feel it in the air, don’t you? the anxiety. ❞ (from solar for vis <;3)

        〈 ♕ * 〉 ┊  "I believe-- I am feeling--- quite a bit more than-- anxiety," Visal wheezes out in response.

     Doubled over and visibly quaking from head to toe, the prince clutches a heavy tome to his chest as though its bulk could squeeze more air into his heaving lungs. After a few more arduous gasps, he manages to straighten up. The hood of his traveler's cloak drops from the curves of onyx horns framing either side of his head, revealing how the deep brown of his skin runs ashen beneath the pale glare of the setting sun. He winces against the harsh light before glancing back down the craggy slope. Where a great library once stood is now little more than ancient debris. The ward formerly obscuring it as nothing more than a tangle of roots from long-since felled trees flickers uselessly. With nothing to conceal anymore, the magic from the ward seeps out into the air. Its essence batters against his already hypersensitive body. Were he alone, he's certain he would have collapsed by now.

     'No; I would have fallen back in the library were I the sole enactor of this fool's errand,' he acknowledges with a troubled furrow in his brows. From beneath sweat-soaked bangs, he shoots a searching look towards his unlikely companion. The magic sustaining the library had been old and wily, like a serpent connivingly coiling around its prey. Every ward and stronghold broken had sapped away more and more of his already minimal energy. He had come dangerously close to needing to burn through the reserves flowing through his veins as blood-- and that, he knows, would likely have brought the entire building down onto their heads. Yet, blessedly (and quite curiously), it hadn't come to that. For whatever reason, the other's very presence had seemed to sustain him right at ground state. Odd... and entirely untrustworthy.

     "We don't have much time," he warns, packing that observation away in the back of his mind for now. He unceremoniously shoves the tome into the patchwork satchel hanging from his shoulder (a traveling doctor's bag, he had called it earlier). "With all those wards destroyed, whatever beings left behind to guard the secrets stored here are surely waking." He takes a box from his bag, removes something shimmering in the shape of a six-pointed star from it, pops it into his mouth, and swallows with a grimace. "All hells below know what time and decay might have twisted them into. Better to run than--"

      The ground rumbles and groans underfoot. Birds burst from the treetops, cawing frantic warnings as they fly away. Not even a second later, the steeple of the ruined entryway splits in half. A tentacle textured like the false image of the gnarled roots lurches upward, blotting out the sun and casting a shadow across both individuals. A seam on its underside tears open into ghastly rows of teeth that chew and gnash against each other. Oily spittle oozes from the crags of incisors, bubbling and hissing as they splatter against the ground only a short sprint's length away from Visal's feet. Emaciated arms break out of the miasma, the oily surface bursting open like an embryonic sack, dragging twisted bodies with the same hungry maws splitting across their limbs. He vaguely recognizes the once-lustrous, now rusted and charred, armor clinging to the skeletal soldiers. Legion of the Abandoned Apocrypha. Doomed servants of all dead and forgotten religions, laid to rest to guard the scriptures of their dearly departed gods and oracles.

      How unfortunate that he'd had to reclaim one of his own peoples' sacred texts from this forsaken mausoleum.

      "--fight," Visal finishes on a weary sigh. He resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose and swear. "Go," he urges, uncompromising but not unkind. "This is not your battle, stranger."