22nd trial, Vhalar, 719
Continued from here
He didn't need to sleep to know something had changed. But he didn't know quite what that was until the second night.
The first, it had been a scratching, a tickling in his head, like the name for a face you just can't grasp until trials after you meet the person. The dream in the Stormwastes ended not long after his minor revelation, and while he remembered it, of course, he couldn't piece together what it meant. But like storm clouds and distant thunder, he knew it meant something. It was a sign. A portent. That first trial, however? Nothing seemed unusual. His dream was not even lucid, just another black and blissful seven or eight breaks of oblivion while his body rested and healed itself.
The second night was different. The scratching grew claws, not fingers. The tickling poked and prodded deeper. Kasoria could not ignore it anymore... nor the fact he was feeling this while he was awake.
Which ain't the way this is supposed to work... right?
Kasoria cursed in the backyard of his home and wished that he had Llyr to talk to. He should have brought it up when they met, two trials prior. But he'd other things on his mind and being around the younger man again... well... other things. The Raggedy Man had frowned long and hard at that afterwards. Never was his way to be distracted by sheen and glamour; all that did was make him suspicious. Llyr being Llyr did not excuse it, either. He suspected there was something more to it, but didn't quite want to believe the boy had been so foolish and borderline-suicidal to use wyrd on him.
Why not? Everyone else seems to be slinging it around, these trials.
He sighed into the frigid air. No point whining about it now. The feeling would not go away, and he knew that night would be when he confronted it. He couldn't place it, nor understand it, but... he felt it. Like an idea, a notion, a concept planted into his mind and he simply knew it. Like being told the name of something and then, forever after, you don't need to think about the name anymore. The thing and the name, the name and the thing, one shapes and molds the other. Inextricable. So what did he know now?
The Raggedy Man stopped in the middle of the yard and closed his eyes. The whistling of freezing wind above the walls chased out all other sounds. Save for the pulse of his heart and the slow heaving of his lungs. What was it saying to him?
You can go somewhere, in your dreams.
But he already knew that, so what did-
No. Not your mind. You.
Kasoria swallowed and let the feeling grow words and whispers. Surely he'd misheard it. Surely it couldn't be true, and yet... yet he remembered how he'd come to be on that ship, with Zarik (as he was then), seasons ago. He hadn't traveled through munadne means; hadn't even used a Rupturing portal. Iy had been magic, starting in the dream the Dreamwalker had found him in. Back in the infant trials of his lucid time in the Emea. What had the mage called it? Kasoria frowned and when he spoke-
"... Crossin'."
-his eyes snapped open. Thing and name, concept and label, practical and abstract. They seemed to click together in his mind, and Kasoria understood. Possibilities unraveled from that epiphany like a vast web from a single egg of intellect. With some effort, he reined them in and kept it single. Crossing. Which allowed him to... move his body, into the Emea. He remembered how Zarik had done it, in the confines of his lodging in Yaralon. He'd opened a portal, for want of a better word. He'd been the portal, though. Kasoria had taken his hand, and it feel like the weight of a mountain had yanked him into the Emea, then spit him out half a continent away in the Orm'del Sea.
So you can open it yourself. Just need to find the right way.
The Raggedy Man faced a wall. He walked towards it. Once he was close enough to feel the frosted stone in front of him, smell the ice-encrusted rock smashed into bricks, he stopped. Then he closed his eyes. He thought of all the doors he'd seen in the Veil. Submerged just under the surface of his mind's understanding of that realm. Countless thousands, more than he could explore in a hundred lifetimes. Some carved with runes in languages from the other side of the world, in places he would never step. Some from the countryside, the cities, the plains, high in trees and under the waves. There was always a doorway. Always a place of transition. Between one thing and the next.
Kasoria reached out with his hand... and he placed it against the wall. The stones that were no longer quite stones. Still solid, still real, but now infused. His body, the power beyond the ever-growling Spark that he possessed, coming out now into the Waking World. Like a pot bubbling over, it had spread from the Emea and was now at his call in reality. So he put it to use. He focused on making his own portal, his own Crossing into the Emea. The wall was no longer just a wall, the stones no longer stones. They shimmered even though his eyes did not see them, but he felt them. He could feel an almost-liquid sensation, then the charge, and then-
Then that weight grabbed him, flowing ether pouring across his arms and his eyes snapped open, he saw bright light and a burning, blinding hole-
-the cat around the corner heard the strange, ripping, popping sound. Scabby and emaciated, it hobbled around just in time to see a boot vanish into... something. It hardly had a language for magic, after all. It blinked bifurcated eyes and lo, there was no... something. It was just a stone wall. The cat shivered and scuttled on. Vhalar had come; food and somewhere warm to eat it was more pressing that human foolishness.
