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| Details |
| Author: | Vond |
| Summary: | What happened with Etone and Satterly immediately after the Scarlet ambush. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
(Takes place directly after A Certain Kind of Instrument)
It had been somewhere on the approach to Zeb'halak that Etone had lost his bodyguard. With his aura abated as well as, finally, his ongoing mumbling about this not being the way to the Stand, Vond had somehow managed to evade the Confessor's watchful eye and had gone. Not only could it possibly be called a very uncharacteristic disregard of his primary duty, but the first time since reaching the shores of Northrend that either had been far from the other's side without very clear plans in place, usually for matters with fellow Argents.
Now Etone was alone near the border of Grizzly Hills, with nothing but a set of footprints in the snow that quickly gives way to muddling grasses as an indication of where the human had gone in a hurry. The clearly addled in some way human. Vond had appeared not only stressed, but distinctly confused in a way Etone hadn't seen before, and couldn't help but draw to memory that conversation in Westguard Keep, after Etone had spoken to Lena.
He had to get him somewhere relatively safe, address this properly - the intention was the burgeoning new outpost, but now Vond seems to have taken off south, perhaps following the river, with no warning or explanation.
The warmth he'd grown newly familiar with's presence - or lack there of - caught the redhead's attention as he stirs from the short rest he'd been forced to take.
He felt cold.
Rolling his shoulders while pinching the sleep from his eyes, Etone calls out softly at first, then - as no answer meets him - with more urgency.
"Vondy..? … Vond?!"
Gathering his wits about him, Etone takes notice of the footprints straying from the area the two had been resting.
A slurry of thoughts ran through the priest's head, "Surely there must be a reason. Vond wouldn't abandon me, would he…? Have I done something - did he get bored of me? Did something happen to him?"
Clapping his hands over his cheeks, the redhead sucks in a deep breath trying to steady his thoughts. After a few moments he's begun to look around the rest site. There are only one set of footprints, nothing looking like a struggle or fight… His cheeks burn with anger as he grips his staff up from where it lay beside him.
The thought of their past conversation slowly creeps into his mind as he quickly stomps in the other's footprints in hasty chase.
Muttering to himself as he starts to lose snowy footprint to grass, the redhead's fiery fury slowly tempers into a cool resolve. He'd find the wayward paladin and get answers. Oh he'd get answers alright…
With the trail becoming harder to track, Etone pauses with a grimace and looks skyward. Squinting his eyes he spies some kind of circling bird of prey - and promptly steals it's vision, coaxing it to fly a bit wider while looking for something bigger than the rabbits and fish it usually would hunt.
The direction of the trail takes Etone further downstream along the river that divides this region from Dragonblight, and the borrowed aerial view surveys further remnants of Drakkari structures in crumbling disrepair, largely abandoned at this point by the troll survivors, some of them Drakuru's compatriots who had followed him to ruin. Beyond, a bit further from the snow line, lay Camp Granite Springs, still populated by a cluster of tiny cabins and tents in a clearing beside a small pond.
A couple of the residents are standing near the central gathering point while warily watching another figure in the far distance who is huddled in the middle of the burn pit that had once been used to destroy substantial quantities of Zeb'halak mummies when undeath had swept through and threatened to create problems of them all. Now it is simply a basin of sodden ash mingling into the earth from months of being rained in and half covered with other forest debris, and the wayward Argent is there, desperately trying to flint a spark into the middle of it in his still bloodstained tabard and with no fuel to speak of.
Gathering a general route from the bird's eye, Etone makes off with great haste toward Camp Granite Springs. It's not an especially long treck, but it takes the redhead longer than he'd like. As he closes the distance to the camp, he's stopped several times by concerned folk to which he vaguely ignores and continues on to his goal, the paladin in the muck.
There's a vague impression, from the scattering of comments and questions that follow the Confessor and just as quickly bounce off his persistant narrow focus, that the camp regulars would care to know if there is some sort of nearby trouble that the Argents have news of, or whether the paladin is the trouble, judging by his odd conduct. When stormed past, they ultimately seem to settle for keeping their distance and letting Etone resolve this, signaling some discontent and urge for hurry with unsubtle discussion among themselves.
Further out from the settlement, when Etone approaches the old pit, Vond is still fully armored and fumbling with the flint, motions quick and tense. The paladin raises his head with oversharp quickness at the approach, all panicked eyes and the worryingly assured expression of someone who has come to a resolve to do something drastic. Luckily there is nothing particularly useful present on which the actual successful sparks might catch.
"I can't let it spread further," is the only explanation Vond hoarsely offers. "I can't…"
Etone offers a slacked jaw, cocked eyebrow, expression as he surveys the muttering paladin.
"Vond." The redhead starts. "The fuck are you doing?" He's out of breath from running as he leans heavily on his staff. "You'd -" he wheezes. "- better have a damn good explanation for this."
He gestures widely and scowls, "Get your shit together and get out of that mud - I have no paitence for this right now. Why would you - how could you leave me like that?!"
He's rather hushed in volume as he orders the paladin out of the pit. "Don't force my hand this way…" He's already begun to hum the song of mind soothe with dominate mind on the tip of his tongue - then pauses to take a less drastic liberty of seeing through him.
Vond does not appear to fully appreciate what Etone might be capable of doing - what he is nearly considering - and the normally quickly responsive paladin, a blank chill where his aura should be, only resists the efforts to dislodge him, the striking scrape of flint increasing in tempo as if that was getting anywhere.
When Etone draws near enough to seize him and take more direct stock of his vision, the priest finds himself looking through Vond's eyes briefly, his perception jumping from the view of his partner's mortified stare to his own perturbed expression - and there is surely something amiss with this mirror. Sunken, hollow, visibly deteriorating into frostburned tatters and rot wrapping deep-shadowed bones. The healthy green of the forest has gone, shriveling before Etone's borrowed view into an endless blighted expanse, as if another Plaguelands had taken root around them, soaked in spores and rust-colored miasma.
Hands - Vond's hands - reach in front of the view, dropping the flint to open in a pleading gesture, and the gauntlets encasing them appear as if they had been left to the elements for years on end, blotched and pitted, leather disintegrated to scraps with shriveled flesh beneath.
Two things are striking: the entire convincing realism of the perceptions, and the lack of any apparent hex or purposeful spell of fear causing it. "It's over," Vond's voice sighs and rattles from this vantage, and it's clear he does not even notice himself breathing, though the overt harsh and threatening nature of the vision dampens slightly when the soothe begins to settle in.
The redhead doubles down on his efforts to remove the paladin from the muddy pit, eyebrows knit as he wrestles with Vond's vision and reality.
"Damn right it's over. - Listen to my voice, what you're seeing isn't real! Come back to me, breathe, you're not in the plague lands, you're not in an imminent danger, see what I'm seeing - " again he tries to impress reality upon the paladin's fractured mind. "You don't need to do whatever it is you're doing, you're safe - listen to my voice and see what I see!"
Etone shakes Vond rather violently before pressing his head against the paladin's, spell softly murmured.
Vond rattles again, less an illusion of clattering bones than his regular equipment jostling around when shaken here and there by the redhead's foreful handling. He half rises from a crouch, staggers a bit in the slippery amalgam of earth, ash, and leaf litter, as the cast of genuine despairing terror in his face flickers briefly toward a disoriented puzzlement, and then the lines of tightknit strain fall, eyes go wide. He gains the look of a spark of desperation and for a moment there can be no question that it is the deadly hope of a man drowning.
He lurches upward, palms seizing the sides of Etone's face and throat as the imposition of a more accurate reality begins to override the skewed perceptions, flooding his view with green and red and breath and life. He threatens to send them both to the ground with another stumble in heavy armor, the center of a rapidly shifting nest of geometric forms transiently tracing the earth and air as his aura reasserts with far more palpable surety than usual. Light flickers and flares from his hands, mouth, eyes, the joints in his armor, undampened and undirected. Moments ago the both of them had been dead and doomed for as long as he could remember, and now they were not, and what was inaccessible in the hopelessness now flooded in answer to the miracle he had just apparently experienced. It would be impressive if it didn't seem so worrying involuntary and labile.
"Etty—" It takes some further moments of the priest's handling for the image of him to stop lurching between the ragged picture of undeath and a dazzling apparition of sanctified mercy dancing between the streaks of molten mana clouding Vond's eyes, to finally be grounded on simply the Confessor himself in living flesh and blood, with Vond still grasping him like a lifeline as the turmoil cools. "Shite, Etty." He looks around, disbelieving.
"Need a cage? We got cages," hoots a distant rubbernecker from the camp, who is then shoved by another one.
The redhead claps his hands about the paladin's head and rolls the poor fellow's head on his shoulders, seemingly unphased by the burst of brilliant Light. "Are you with me?!" One might wonder if that were the best of ideas, what with the other's gauntleted hands caught up around his throat and face.
Etone offers a rude gesture in the direction of the distant caller before asking again, with caution, "Are you with me Vond - we need to get you out of here - can you walk? Light just stay with me until I can get you to Light's Refuge."
Again he offers a shake with a deep sense of urgency as he attempts to help the paladin up out of the mess to stand.
Vond nods his head with vigorous dumbfounded assurance, blind to the onlookers, and shakily finds better footing, pulling them both out of the pit and onto grasses with firmer purchase. "Yeah, we gotta walk," he agrees in a breathless rasp, like he'd been the one to just arrive at this brilliant conclusion.
His reluctance to stop facing Etone and mashing the priest's cheeks between his hands is making progress a more akward sideways endeavor than it needs to be. "Ya got me?" he asks like a plea, as if concerned something tentative could slip between his fingers if he let go any further, and takes them further out from camp toward reuiniting with the road leading east out of Zeb'halak. He marvels at the trees overhead, the signs of erratic invocation and pouring mana overflow subsided to leave only a drench of sweat and hushed panic.
The tall smokehouse of Heartwood Trading Post grows visible with enough progress, new fortifications and buildings nested all around.
Etone seems to bare it just fine as they walk, his gaze flicks from Vond's to the road and back. "Yes, as long as you stay with me - don't wander from my sight…" His voice firm and demanding.
After they arrive in view of the trading post, Etone drags Vond toward the more private scenery of a newly build cabin. "Light Vondy…" He points toward the door and simply orders, "Let's go, get in."
Vond's eyes search the familiar Argent banners lining the breaks in the timber fencing and other areas of the outpost's ongoing expansion, though he had yet to see the place in its current state. He follows along with Etone's urging and does not seem to take any issue with his somewhat direct air of exasperated command.
The paladin knocks on the cabin door and tries the doorknob, tentatively creaking it open and slipping inside, where he peers around in the dark interior in his filthy armor with a look of vague worry. There are lanterns he has yet to find the presence of mind to light, sort of just set with a look of exhaustion, possibly from burning through all of his reserves in a matter of seconds.
Etone follows in behind him with a desperately tired sigh, his jaw tight with stress. "Take that mess off and I'll get some light in here."
He's quick to shut the door behind them and latch it. Just as quick, he rushes about to light several lanterns and find some change of clothes for the paladin - all while making sure to keep the paladin in eye sight.
There is an annoyed huff and puff here and there as the redhead flits about looking for a jug of water, blankets, a pair of cups. Satisfied with his collection of items, Etone turns on Vond and begins to fuss on his armor himself.
He's not said much beyond idle irritations and commands, so when he finally stops and questions Vond, it's somewhere between desperately gentle and hotly rough.
"I have many questions for you, I can't decide which to ask first or if to let it simmer while I figure out where your mind is at…"
Vond once more finds himself in the position of shedding armor grimed with the blood of what had not long ago been the living, among other matter, and allows himself to be dully shuffled here and there, supervised and made to wash. Eventually he is more or less cleaned and dressed, deposited in a plain wooden chair at the small sitting table, and prevented from following his inclination to tend to his grubby equipment by Etone's hovering. He hasn't had much to say for himself aside from his looks that vacillate between elated and deeply worried, periodically seizing at the priest's shoulders or sleeves as if letting go of him too long might make the precious vision of a living present fall away again into a thoroughly Scourged world of desolation.
"Light hamercy," he manages with the cadence of a Fookin Ell, and he regards the other with a look of aggrieved remorse. "This is it, yeah? I'm bloody losin' it. I should never'ave put you in this position."
Etone offers a loud huff before a soft sigh, "Vondy… Look, ah, I've no better way of saying this but you're off the field." He kneels in front of the seated paladin and clasps his hands on the other's knees. "For now." He adds as he squeezes.
"I'm not having you leave my sights until I'm sure you've recovered from whatever came over you… Why — hah" he looks down at the rustic floorboards and shakes his head in confused worry, "I knew you were troubled by the death knights but — how'd it come to that?" he chews on his lower lip briefly before adding, "We can figure this out together… right?"
Peering up at the paladin with tired eyes, the redhead murmurs, "I'm sorry I wasn't enough to keep it at bay…"
Vond looks ashamed without concealment, and disconcerted by Etone's posture of collapse, quickly stooping to grasp his shoulders and bodily lift him into the other chair, not entirely a difficult proposal to shift the slight figure divested of his outsized presence and imposing vestments. He gives the half-elf's shoulders a mild shake.
"There is something sod'n wrong with me, isn't there?" Vond hisses in frustration, rapping a knuckle against the side of his head in emphasis, which probably isn't helping. "Constitutionally? There's somethin' wrong and I pushed to get here anyway. I know it, my squad knew it, Byrne knows it, Black and Hartvigsen probably know it, and now what are you supposed to do, constantly screw my head back on? There's too much shite to do, Etty. There is too much on the line!"
His words are nearly accusatory - at himself? At Etone? While his hands take whole handsful of the priest's robe in a tightfisted grasp, as if terrified to let go. "I didn't think it'd get this bad," he finally ekes in a more tempered quiet, as the only excuse he can think of. "It's… it's like shite sticks to me. Like I leave the blight and it bloody follows."
"Nnnn… I'm not sure - yet - what the best way to tackle this is… First we need to get you to a place where I know you're not going to up and wander off again on me…" The redhead doesn't seem to mind when Vond grabs hold and doesn't let go, perhaps it's reassuring in some sense. "Well of course there is too much to do, that'll always be the way. But I'd rather you not lose yourself completely if I can help it any." He frowns at the thought and slightly bristles.
"I need some time to think, but you know there are others who need rest as well - that were my whole plan for this - haah, I'm going to pray a bit in song over this. For now though…"
He grabs one of Vond's hands from it's tight grip on his robe and squeezes it once softly, then a second firmly. "Do you know breathing techniques…?" He sounds hopeful as he asks.