[grimli] white silence [dash]

continued from here

Niska sat behind his desk, his scruffy face illuminated by the flickering flame of the single candle sitting to the left. He reached across the table to his mug of tea, taking a sip and leaning back in his chair. He often worked late in the shop dealing with the surprisingly amount of paperwork and boringness that came with running an illegal fight club. But tonight he felt particularly inclined to stay downstairs because there was a small person sleeping in his bed and hovering over her while she slept was all kinds of creepy. This wasn’t the first time Niska had given up his bed to a house guest, but something about it felt different than letting Amaranth stay the night if she didn’t want to go home or letting Cassia lick her wounds after a fight. Dash was…different. Softer. Niska wasn’t used to soft and it made him feel like he had to tread lightly, like he might break her if he so much as talked too loud. No, it was best he keep his distance as not to scare her. It was just until tomorrow.

The quill in his hand was making loud scratching noises as he sifted through large pile of betting stubs and personal IOUs from the last bout. All of the names and numbers went into Niska’s large black ledger that he kept locked away in the bottom drawer of his desk. Niska hadn’t been a particularly careful man before he started the fight club, but after a year running the fights, he learned how important it was to keep track of very knut and person who came through the arena. The raw data by itself was difficult to sift through, but by analyzing every factor he was often able to track patterns and find discrepancies where he needed to. Information was power.

He was going through the last of the betting stubs when a chill ran up his spine and the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood on end. What the hell? Niska looked around, his eyes glowing amber as he activated his magus. He only got a feeling like this when something really bad was about to happen. His eyes scanned the shop and the pitch black street outside, not even getting a whisper of ill-intent. All he could sense was imminent danger and some very powerful, very old magic.

It was coming from upstairs. Dash. He shot out of his seat and jumped over the desk, quickly making his way up the steps two by two. He burst into his apartment and looked around. Dash was still on his bed, but it looked like she was engulfed in flames. Before her magic had been a gently, sweet peach color that flickered weakly around her, but now her magic surrounded her in a roaring inferno with long tendrils that snaked out and whipped around the room like it was searching hungrily for something. The hurricane of sensation was too much for Niska. Dash’s magical flames were blinding and the noise was deafening to his magus and he desperately wished he could turn it off.

Niska lunged forward just as a tongue of flame snaked toward him and pierced his heart. The sensation was unlike anything he had ever felt before, like his magus going into overdrive and alarms were going off everywhere. It was like he was burning, electricity shooting through his body as Dash’s magic begun to swallow his very existence. He could feel the foreign magic in his veins and he had to use his own magic to force it back. What the bloody hell? He looked over to where Dash was on the bed, turning feverishly in her sleep and making scared noises. Did she know she was doing this? Her magic was filling up the room, suffocating him and seeping out all over the neighborhood as it seemed to latch onto every other living being. Was this how Dash got her visions?

The heat from her chaotic magic felt like it was going to burn his face off, but he surrounded himself with a quickly-disappearing layer of blue-black smoke. Despite feeling like he had been harpooned through the chest with a hot-poker, Niska stumbled forwards toward the bed. He needed to stop her before something bad happened, like accidentally killing him. White lights flashed in front of his eyes and deafening noise echoed in his ears, his magus going crazy the closer he got. The magical wound in his chest stung painfully and he felt warm blood running down his nose.

Once he was close enough, he reached out and roughly grabbed the sleeping Dash by the hand. Before he realized what he was doing, he pushed his magic out through his hand and it surged through the girl’s body, extinguishing the fiery inferno with a loud hiss. The noise quieted almost immediately and the pain was replaced by the cool feeling of Niska’s magic engulfing the two of them in fluttering smoke and dead silence. Letting out a breath he dropped hard on his knees and ran a hand over his face, still holding onto Dash. This looked bad and he was fully aware of it, but he didn’t want to risk what might happen if he didn’t keep pushing his magic into her or he let go of her hand.

Niska took a harsh breath and looked wryly at Dash, shaking his head. “I think we need to talk about these visions of yours.”

Curled in a comfortable ball atop the blankets, Dash felt her thoughts drifting away as she slipped into an exhausted sleep. There were ways that she could have gotten home. She knew that there were ways. Ruari didn’t have a fireplace that she could have used to get home, but with magic, anything was possible. Despite this, however, the brunette was exactly where she was supposed to be, and she knew it. Regardless of whatever consequences her actions would later bring – to herself or anyone else – Dash was relieved from the pressure of making decisions because she simply had to be here. It was simple.

From the blurriness of these weary thoughts, Dash felt herself awaken into a crisply defined world of impossible detail. It was hyper reality. The girl knew that she could never experience reality with such harshly defined lines, such clear colours and smells in any sort of awake state. Indeed, when she had visions it was as if a thick, blurry veil had been lifted from every one of her senses. She breathed the experience in with every body part that could experience sensory information, relaxing into her vision and allowing it to take her where it would.

Piece by piece, the situation unfolded before her. She experienced every smell and sound in its pure form, unhindered by the burdens of existing in actual reality. She wasn’t thinking. Wasn’t needing to process the information she was receiving. It was as if every sensation was injected directly into her brain. The smell of smoke and salty sweat. The crackle against her skin of spells fired. Little shattered pieces of glass scattered as they fell to the floor and the sound that each tiny piece made as it hit.  For Dash, this was more real than reality.

Then… something happened. She could feel herself receding from what was happening all around her, but it wasn’t immediate like the draw of waking up. Everything was darkening. Rather than feeling like her senses were closing the world out, however Dash felt like she was opening her eyes into darkness. Like she was waking up into nothingness. She felt like she was suddenly able to hear, but that there wasn’t a single sound to be heard. It was suffocating.

She opened her eyes again.

An uncomfortable shiver pulsed out from the base of her neck down her whole body, from her collarbones to the tips of her toes. As usual, she awoke with an overwhelming flood of sensory information; some real, raw and some completely fabricated. A hand much larger than hers was clasped tightly around her fingers, and she noted the pressure. It helped her brush away the imagined texture of cold glass chips.

Dash recoiled immediately, pushing herself up and away from the figure hunched beside the bed and wincing at the rough texture of the sheets against her palms and legs. Her hands were shaking. For a moment her eyes were very round, wide like she’d just been shocked back from death, but once she realised she wasn’t in immediate danger, the brunette wrapped her arms around herself to keep herself steady. Her gaze drop to her knees. It took her a moment to process what he’d just said; she felt like she was going to throw up. She still felt the sickening choking sensation of breathing in smoke, but there was something more. He’d done something that had woken her up in the most… unusual way.

“How do you know?” she asked, glancing back up at him, a small frown appearing on her pretty face. For the first time, the brunette realised that he was bleeding. She swallowed hard. Calm down, she told herself silently, you’re not there anymore. The smell was imagined. Dash raised a hand to her own upper lip, indicating that he had something there on his face. “What did you do?” she asked softly.

Watching Dash skitter away from him with a shocked, fearful expression contorting her delicate features filled Niska with a very strange, very guilty sensation. Had he done something wrong? Well yes, he had manhandled a small sleeping person. But it was to help her! Help her what exactly? For the first time in a long time Niska found himself panicking. This was the sort of thing he beat miscreants up in bars for. Laying a hand on a lady when she wasn't willing was one of the cardinal rules he had always followed. Well, that was not including the lady mercs or criminals he had come into contact with. They was as fair game as any male when it came to competition.

“I, uh, there was—this looks bad, I know! Don't—don’t get all streaky—” He held up his hands and backed away just a little bit, to show that he wasn’t about to hurt her or anything. “I was downstairs and—I didn’t mean to hurt you but there was a fire—you were tossing and turning and you looked like—”

He stopped, realizing he wasn’t making it any better. “I, uh, sorry about that,” he said awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. “You okay?” What Niska was really wondering about was whether or not he was okay. Dash looked mighty shaken up and sorta confused, but he was the one felt like there was a still a rod of molten metal stuck through his heart. What had she done to him? He pressed a large, flat palm against his chest and felt around where it felt like he had been pierced. There was nothing there but it still ached and burned. Was this all his magus’s doing? His eyes slid once more to Dash and his face set in a very confused frown. How was he going to explain this without sounding crazy? Should he tell her?

Niska let out a heavy sigh and got up from where he was kneeling on the floor. He brushed off his dusty pants and hauled a nearby chair opposite of where Dash was sitting on the bed, then dropped himself in it, still rubbing his chest painfully. “You… you aren’t the only one whose life has been touched with a little more strangeness than they bargained for, Dash. Just like you can see into the future or somesuch, I can sense people’s magic. I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but I can see and hear and smell it. I can pick magic folk out of a crowd in less than two seconds flat and I can tell what sort of magic they’re used to doing. I don’t much know how it works but it’s kept me alive all these years so I trust it as much as I trust the sun will rise in the morning.”

“So believe me when I say I’ve never seen magic like yours before. When I was downstairs, something happened. It felt like an earthquake was shaking the store and when I came up here you were engulfed in some kind of magical fire. I felt your vision, I felt it reaching out and intersecting other people’s lives and I felt it harpoon me right through the heart.” He looked at her carefully, trying to gauge whether or not he was about to get a slap in the face. “I had to push my magic through you to sort of… put out your vision cause it looked like you were having a rough sleep. But I felt something hit me, and I’d wager my life savings that the vision you had was about me, wasn't it?”

She shook her head as he spoke. He wasn’t answering her questions. Dash wasn’t asking why he’d grabbed her hand or appeared by her bed. He’d misunderstood. She didn’t answer when he finally calmed down and asked if she was okay or not, because she didn’t know what to say. Her visions could really throw her around sometimes, but that wasn’t what had happened this time. Something strange had happened. Finally, he started to explain. 

“That makes sense,” she replied simply, in a soft voice. For some magical folk, hearing things like that might be a shock, or sound too fanciful to be believed. Aside from the fact that nothing like that could really shock her; having known at least one other seer and having had prophetic dreams for all of her life, it just felt right. Maybe she’d known this already, somewhere in her subconscious.

I had to sort of… put out your vision

She shuddered at the thought. That was what it had been. The sudden dark, the confusion. The feeling of wrong. He’d interrupted her vision. She hadn’t ever heard of something like that before. The girl kept her arms tightly around her legs as he spoke, nodding when he mentioned trusting his senses despite not really understanding how they worked. She felt the same about her powers. Why else had she taken herself to his house? Why else would she feel safe falling asleep in a stranger’s bed?

“It was about you,” she confirmed with a slight nod. There was a pause as Dash tried to find something to say. How could she explain? He seemed more receptive to actually believe her this time, though. She decided to try to explain her reaction.

“When I wake up,” she began, “I feel like I can’t sense anything. Like there’s a… veil between me and the rest of the world.” Like everything was muffled. The brunette sighed, turning her hazel eyes to her upturned hands. She traced the little folds and crinkles of her palms with her gaze. “At the same time…” Dash touched her fingertips to the sheet and ran her hand along it, resisting the urge to squirm at the sensation. “…At the same time, all of my senses are heightened; I can feel the material like little hooks tugging at my skin.” She pulled her hand back, rubbing her fingers with her other hand like she’d been stung by something.

“It’s intense. I can smell everything.” As if to demonstrate, the girl took a little sniff, wrinkling her nose at the result. “But I somehow feel like I’m half-blind, half-deaf compared to when I’m dreaming.” She felt a little nauseous from the smells in the room and the intense taste in her mouth.

“I had a dream that you were being attacked,” she told him finally.