finalflight | OPEN POST; [ ERIK / DQ11]

Oh--

[ It's soft and chagrined, too quiet to be really annoyed by this change in situation, but to anyone walking this quaint dirt path looking for a mark or just... walking along for the sake of a stroll, there's a young woman in a wheelchair struggling to both get her chair over a deep impression in the path and to pick up a briefcase that had toppled off her lap at the unexpected bump in the road.

What would one do, coming across her? ]

[It’s an ancient stone temple, worn and run-down by the passage of time, corridors vast but relatively empty. It makes him feel small, much like all these old and hallowed structures often do, so it’s all the more liberating to know he can quit this place as soon as he finds the treasure nestled within. The leather sheath of his dagger lightly bumps his hip with each step, and Erik is acutely aware of its presence, not knowing what could be waiting around any given corner.

So far so good, though. No scuffling of monsters, no rival thieves or nosy adventurers threatening to get in his way — not yet, at least. According to the local rumors, this temple of the ancient past was sprawling and many-roomed (and cursed), and Erik doesn’t doubt that’ll mean trouble one way or another. Either he stumbles across it first, or it comes looking for him.

A few winding corridors later, a few dusty rooms, and he thinks he might have found it.

Trouble, that is. He hears the echoing footsteps of someone else, and just ahead, the shape of a young girl comes into view, unfamiliar to him. Well— what to do? If she’s competition, then there’s no point in sneaking about; she’s probably heard his own muffled footsteps encroaching, so he calls out—]

...You lost or something?

[Sometimes, for a thief, it’s safer to sleep outside of the castle city walls. A tall, curving hill that overlooks a patch of cool lake water below, with a perfectly placed tree to nap under, is sometimes better than a warm bed in an inn where someone might recognize your face.

It’s what he tells himself, anyway, before he drifts off to sleep.

He dreams about his sister, Mia; the day-to-day mundane things, running jobs for the vikings, getting yelled at by the vikings, getting yelled at by Mia. He dreams about her scolding laugh and the look on her face as her whole body was engulfed by that damnable golden magic. Her expression frozen into place for posterity, as though there was a chance he’d ever forget that moment.

It’s nothing new. Erik awakens from these dreams the same as always, somehow always a little more tired than the day before, always ready to shake it all off in the early dawn and set out to make another living with a pair of sticky fingers. But when the sun creeps up over the water this morning, something feels different. Off, like the world is at an invisible tilt that he can’t quite explain, but he can feel as prominently as anything. Lights flicker strangely in the horizon’s distance, as though warped into kaleidoscopic fragments, and Erik sits up a little straighter, rubbing at his eyes.]

What the hell’s going on?

no subject

no subject

no subject