Beyond the city of Rharne lies the Stormlands, which is home to a number of farms, forests, fields, Lake Lovalus, and the River Zynyx. This subforum also includes the Stormwastes to the south.
The world of dreams had been…interesting. While she visited countless times within her arcs, that night had been a first – for many reasons. Upon the promise of helping her find clues about the mysterious necklace that had hung around her neck since her abandonment, Balthazar had found his way into her dreams. What had started out as a nightmare had turned into something much, much more. As Elisabeth found her way back to the waking world, she lingered in the cozy warmth of the -not-quite-awake state for the briefest of moments. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to wake up – well, maybe it was. Maybe she wanted to hang on to the dream as tightly as she could. The reason was obvious…
He was there.
The fuzziness of what was real and what wasn’t stayed with her as she rolled over in bed. She knew what had happened but what if she opened her eyes and it really had been a dream? To be fair, it hadn’t been the first dream that involved Balthazar and she very much doubted it would be the last. But he had been there, with her. He had branded her so he could always find her dreams. And then…everything else.
But what if he hadn’t been? Could it truly have all been a figment of her imagination?
Sighing just a bit, Elisabeth knew there was only one way to find out. She had to wake up.
It was still dark outside when her eyes opened. The moon was on a slow descent but its light still illuminated the small window of her room. Quickly leaning up into a sitting position, she let her eyes adjust to the relative darkness and cast her gaze about the room. Please, please…tell me it was real she silently thought to herself.
And then she saw a figure in the corner, just sitting in the chair.
Last edited by Elisabeth Black on Sun Dec 20, 2020 4:14 am, edited 2 times in total. word count: 330
Crossing out of a dream was easier to Balthazar than he thought it would have been for most people. He had a unique understanding of distance that few others who were not Rupturers had. However he also has the magical ability to walk through anything he wanted to, and it was that which Balthazar thought gave him an edge. Crossing was never the same. It often functioned the same way and mechanically nothing was really different, but there were so many ways to do it that Balthazar could not describe the ability to anyone. When he crossed out of Elisabeth's dream and into her room at Storm's Edge, he had done so my pushing through one of the walls of her dream while she woke up.
He emerged into cold room and immediately his Attunement spark went about soothing its unruly siblings. The etheric cracks faded from his hands and face, returning the flesh to a relatively normal standard. Then he sat in a chair and waited for the only person who could explain his arrival to wake up completely so they could talk... Immortals that was going to be awkward. You could blame a lot on a dream but there was something about seeing Elisabeth in person that made him feel nervous. Fortunately he knew how to handle nerves. Deep breathing and a clear mind. So while he waited for her to wake, he tried to keep his mind clear of what had happened in the dream. He'd taken off the pieces of his armor that he'd put back on after... Elisabeth's dream. They sat, piled neatly, beside the chair he was sitting on.
"Good morning." Balthazar said when he saw Elisabeth's head perk up slightly. She was awake. "Interesting dreams?"
Last edited by Balthazar Black on Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:37 am, edited 1 time in total. word count: 301
Visible Mutations/ Marks
Mutations
Defiance: Skin always glows faintly and he is warm to the touch. His is also the center of a field of static electricity so people get shocked touching him on occasion. Rupturing: Orange etheric cracks spider-web up his arms to his elbows. His eyes and the glowing cracks going down his cheeks glow dark blue. Transmutation: He has a series of emerald, glowing cracks on his right pectoral.
Marks
Bellinos: His fingernails are always black. The color fades into his fingers. Celarion: A dim glowing ring surrounds his left forearm. Palenon: A silver lightning shaped mark about the size of a hand stretching up towards his torso.
Scars
Oops, Oops, Ouch: Balthazar Black has twenty scars across his back from a lashing as well as scars on his hands and arms from jagged rocks on Faldrass. There are two scars on the sides of his abdomen from being stabbed and a slash across his back which blends in with the whip scars.
Well, that answered that question. His comment made it clear that what happened, had happened. Leaning fully up in bed to a sitting position, she arched her eyebrow gently and replied in a sleepy, teasing tone. “I’m fairly certain you know the answer to that question, Balthazar.” Pushing the bed covers back, Elisabeth realized at once that she was only clad in a nightshirt. Laughing at herself a bit, a soft blush formed, and she realized just as quickly that it really didn’t matter anymore.
She had nothing to hide from him – figuratively and literally. More to the point, she didn’t want to. Elisabeth had chosen to bind herself to him in a myriad of ways and keeping secrets wasn't part of that plan.
Bare feet hit the floor as she rose from the bed, stretching her back just a little as she strode over to where he sat. Elisabeth noted immediately a small, almost imperceptible uneasiness to his demeanor. It was easy to understand why although she had no idea why she wasn’t affected similarly. Reaching him, she carefully slid into his lap and let her lips find his again, caressing his face softly. His lips were familiar now and she couldn’t deny that the more she kissed him, the more she wanted to kiss him.
However, that hadn’t been the reason he came to see her. They had detoured enough for the time being. Reaching up, she grabbed the chain of the necklace around her neck and pulled it over her head. The movement of her long, dark hair scented the air with gentle notes of orange and lavender. “I believe, good Sir, that you wanted to take a look at this.” The necklace was the only clue to her past and it seemed fitting that out of all the people she knew, it was him that would be with her on the journey.
She continued to be astonished that she wasn’t more rattled by what had happened. Nothing about the situation seemed uncomfortable to her. He was there with her and that was all that mattered. He wouldn’t always be, nor did she expect him to. They both had work to do and often it would take them to different sides of Idalos. That was fine with her. Time with him had been and always would be a gift and she would treat it as such.
Balthazar grinned at Elisabeth's response and answered only with a shrug of his shoulders from the chair he was sitting in while she stood and stretched in her nightshirt. Whatever nerves he had been feeling about her dream seemed to begin slipping when he saw her moving nearer to him. He wanted to get up but he didn't, he stayed in his chair watching her move through the room towards him. He sat up slightly as she slipped into his lap and pressed her lips to his. One hand wandered to her back to gently guide her closer and his other hand slipped around her thigh to keep her from slipping off of him as he kissed her back. It didn't feel nearly as strange as he'd been expecting it to. It felt good. Real. Nice. When their lips parted again and Elisabeth slipped her necklace off from, Balthazar was pulled back to the reality. He was here to help her.
Well... helping Elisabeth had certainly been a good decision. He caught the small but pleasant scent when Elisabeth's hair was lifted and dropped by the chain of the necklace coming off but he couldn't linger on it. He took the necklace into his hand and looked down at it. He had hardly been thinking about the necklace when he emerged from her dream. He was thinking about her. All of her. He was thinking about the difference between how she'd imagined herself in her dream and how she really was. How it felt... how it could feel. She said that he'd wanted to take a look at it and he smirked. "I suppose I did." How could he think about the little heirloom in light of everything that had happened and that he wanted to happen again? Best to get it out of the way then. "So... let's see what we can find."
Balthazar looked at the necklace in his hands and turned it over a few times. His sparks went to work on the piece of history in his hands. His young transmutation spark perked to life first reached out to identify the materials that had been used in the construction of the locket. His thumb ran over the surface of the locket a few times before he shifted his ether focus and began attuning to the locket. The glow in his eyes grew a little and shimmered while he looked over the locket in his hand but Balthazar did not seem pained by it. He didn't seem particularly distracted by attuning either. His eyes shifted to Elisabeth who was still sitting on his lap and he smiled. "This must seem like an incredibly boring magic to you. It's not as flashy as the other ones but it is useful." Balthazar said while passively listening to the frequency of the necklace, trying to figure out what notes he could recognize.
word count: 496
Visible Mutations/ Marks
Mutations
Defiance: Skin always glows faintly and he is warm to the touch. His is also the center of a field of static electricity so people get shocked touching him on occasion. Rupturing: Orange etheric cracks spider-web up his arms to his elbows. His eyes and the glowing cracks going down his cheeks glow dark blue. Transmutation: He has a series of emerald, glowing cracks on his right pectoral.
Marks
Bellinos: His fingernails are always black. The color fades into his fingers. Celarion: A dim glowing ring surrounds his left forearm. Palenon: A silver lightning shaped mark about the size of a hand stretching up towards his torso.
Scars
Oops, Oops, Ouch: Balthazar Black has twenty scars across his back from a lashing as well as scars on his hands and arms from jagged rocks on Faldrass. There are two scars on the sides of his abdomen from being stabbed and a slash across his back which blends in with the whip scars.
She hadn’t wanted the kiss to end. Why on Idalos would she have wanted that? His hands felt warm against her chilled skin. In the dark, quiet of night, it seemed almost surreal to her that he was actually there. For a split-trill, Elisabeth feared they might still be in the dream but no. She knew she wasn’t. There were a million little details that screamed at her that she had emerged into reality.
With the necklace safe in his hands, she marveled at the very thought that someone else was holding it. It had been around her neck since being abandoned in Viden at an arc old. Standing in the snowdrifts outside the gate, that’s where Vin and Rilith had discovered her. The only possession she had been found with was the strange little necklace, and now she had trusted it to him to help her find a clue to her past.
The past was a funny thing. Elisabeth had long thought she had put it behind her…but in looking to the present and future, the past had demanded its share of the spotlight.
His smirk caused a grin to slip upon her lips, following by a soft laugh. “Don’t be like that. You were the one that wanted to help. I was just the one that gave you a mystery you couldn’t pass up. All in all, I think things worked out very well for you.” Kissing him again lightly, she gently wrapped her arms around his neck and watched as he went to work. If Elisabeth were being honest with herself, she would have preferred to set the necklace mystery aside for the moment and focus all her attention on him.
From the moment they had met, everything about Balthazar had fascinated her. It had only been recently, at the Ball, that she learned of his magical abilities. While she had been happy that he shared that part of himself with her, it wasn’t all that he was.
He was more than his magic.
She had cared about him before knowing what he was. When he was just a man fighting in a pit, that’s when she had started caring. Nothing he told her or could tell her would change that. Of that, she was certain. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything….
Watching him closely, a soft smile formed when he teased about the ‘boring magic’. “Not at all. It’s intriguing. I’ve only ever seen Defiance up close before. Which discipline is this?” While there was a lot on her mind and more she wanted to say to him, she had no desire to distract him from what he was doing.
Leaning her head gently against his, she simply watched…and learned.
Normally, Attunement really was boring to watch when compared to other, more visually flashy magics, especially when used on inanimate objects. Normally, the object just sat there and didn't react to the magic at all. They just passively sat there through the process and let it happen, since they lacked any agency to do otherwise. This time, however, things did not go as they normally did.
Instead, Elisa's necklace grew hot in Balthazar's hand and then jumped up out of it, floating in the air for a second. Then, a blast of pure force knocked Balthazar back, knocking the chair over if he was still sitting in it. Then the necklace fell to the floor, unharmed and looking for all the world like a harmless piece of jewelry. Indeed, if either of them went to pick up the necklace, nothing unusual would happen. However, in the few seconds he'd been attuned to the necklace before it actively rejected him and broke the connection, Balthazar had been able to feel a few notes.
Unfortunately, none of them were notes he recognized, beyond that the necklace and locket were very old and that it had been handled by many people over the course of its existence had handled it, though there were three repeated frequencies that suggest that three people had carried the necklace multiple times. However, these three frequencies were incredibly muddled and unclear, as if something were interfering with the frequency. There were also gaps in the sequence of previous handlers were there was a frequency that was just plain unreadable. Finally, just before the connection had been severed, Balthazar would have picked up a single, intense frequency, one of pure defensive reaction.
If he tried to attune to the necklace or locket again, the same pattern would repeat.
Well Balthazar knew when something was not going the way that it was supposed to go. The necklace heating up was the first sign that something was going wrong and when it jumped from Balthazar's hand the mage realized something was going very wrong. It was floating. He did not have a chance to answer Elisabeth, reacting quickly and rising quickly from the chair with her in his arms. He only held her for a moment before tossing her back towards her bed with a small guiding wind to keep her from crashing into anything just a moment before the blast of force knocked the mage off his feet and across the floor. Unpleasant, but he'd had worse.
With the impact, he lost the frequency. That was remarkable to him. He'd never had an object forcefully stop him from attuning and he had attuned to a few possessed things before. He heard notes but nothing familiar which was somewhat hopeful. Most notes he knew related to his work and crimes. Hopefully that meant the necklace had passed through more wholesome hands. The final note was the one that surprised the mage the most and it was the one on his mind as he slowly lifted himself off the floor and back onto his feet. He dusted himself off and looked over at the necklace sitting on the floor.
"Well... I know it isn't a spirit." He said with a small smirk. He'd learned by attuning to Fuego that spirits made him feel... warm. Fuego wasn't bad but Balthazar was afraid to go bigger. "That was Attunment but it is normally less... explosive." For a short moment, Balthazar wondered if he could do it again and weaponize it. He'd spent a long time with alchemy trying to create the perfect explosive for a Defier but he never really taken the time to make good progress. However if he could find a way to harness that final frequency... no... he'd stick to his fire bombs for now. "I did not learn... anything really. It's old and it has been handled by many people." He did not mention the part about the three repeating frequencies because he was not quite sure what to make of it and figured it would be better to investigate after looking for other notes. "I'm sorry I was not more useful."
word count: 406
Visible Mutations/ Marks
Mutations
Defiance: Skin always glows faintly and he is warm to the touch. His is also the center of a field of static electricity so people get shocked touching him on occasion. Rupturing: Orange etheric cracks spider-web up his arms to his elbows. His eyes and the glowing cracks going down his cheeks glow dark blue. Transmutation: He has a series of emerald, glowing cracks on his right pectoral.
Marks
Bellinos: His fingernails are always black. The color fades into his fingers. Celarion: A dim glowing ring surrounds his left forearm. Palenon: A silver lightning shaped mark about the size of a hand stretching up towards his torso.
Scars
Oops, Oops, Ouch: Balthazar Black has twenty scars across his back from a lashing as well as scars on his hands and arms from jagged rocks on Faldrass. There are two scars on the sides of his abdomen from being stabbed and a slash across his back which blends in with the whip scars.
Balthazar may have had an idea things were about to go wrong but Elisabeth had no clue. Not until she found herself being thrown across the room onto her bed. To be fair, it was a good toss and she landed safely. Watching him thrown across the room wasn’t fun, but she imagined it was far better than some of the punches he had taken at the Copper Prince.
Blinking after the ‘dust’ settled, she stayed sitting on the bed, eyes a bit wide. “I’m assuming you didn’t expect it to react like that?”
While Elisabeth wasn’t afraid of the necklace – she had worn it since being abandoned in Viden – but she wasn’t in a hurry to grab it off the floor either. It could stay there for the time being unless Balthazar wanted it for something else.
So, it was old. That was the extent of the information he could find. It was a piece of information she didn’t have before. “Thank you for trying. I guess I will have to keep looking for clues then. It took me all this time to find even that piece but at least now I have a reference point.”
Gazing at the necklace, she began wondering if she would ever know about her past. It wasn’t a part of her. She had grown into an adult without knowing where she came from. Many people did. It didn’t have to define them and she wasn’t going to let it define her. It was a puzzle and she loved puzzles. It just happened to be a puzzle that was a bit more personal than most.
Elisabeth could not deny, however, that she wanted to know. And because of that desire, she was going to keep digging until she found something. The necklace and her - they had been through a lot together.
"I haven't attuned to anything that did react like that." Balthazar said as he moved slowly over to the necklace and picked it up. He was both curious and apprehensive of it now. He wanted to experiment further but he didn't want to damage it. He had felt it heat up in his hand and he was worried further testing might yield worse results. They'd need somewhere more isolate to experiment with it if Elisabeth wanted to take that risk. Somewhere that they would not get in trouble for repeated magical explosions of force. "Throwing you was fun but it was not the plan." He said with a small grin as he turned the locket over in his hands a few times. He wanted to try again, he wanted to try any other magic he had... but he did not.
"There are other things we could try but I'm not sure it would be safe here." Balthazar admit to her. "I'll keep an eye out for anything like it. If it is old, other people are bound to have seen it at some point." His mind began to turn with the possibilities that the age indicated. A fairly new object could probably be traced to the craftsman but an old object was more likely to lead you to someone who had it before or someone who knew the previous owner. However if Elisabeth had it for her whole life and no one had said anything... then perhaps she was looking in the wrong place? There was also the issue that most people who saw the necklace and knew Elisabeth would think it was hers but they could work around that. He held the necklace out to her with a final remark, "Whatever it is, it's special."
word count: 305
Visible Mutations/ Marks
Mutations
Defiance: Skin always glows faintly and he is warm to the touch. His is also the center of a field of static electricity so people get shocked touching him on occasion. Rupturing: Orange etheric cracks spider-web up his arms to his elbows. His eyes and the glowing cracks going down his cheeks glow dark blue. Transmutation: He has a series of emerald, glowing cracks on his right pectoral.
Marks
Bellinos: His fingernails are always black. The color fades into his fingers. Celarion: A dim glowing ring surrounds his left forearm. Palenon: A silver lightning shaped mark about the size of a hand stretching up towards his torso.
Scars
Oops, Oops, Ouch: Balthazar Black has twenty scars across his back from a lashing as well as scars on his hands and arms from jagged rocks on Faldrass. There are two scars on the sides of his abdomen from being stabbed and a slash across his back which blends in with the whip scars.
Smiling at him as he told her he had enjoyed throwing her, Elisabeth noted the grin and fascinated look on his face. At least she had given him something to ponder – he loved a good mystery just like her. Considering everything that had happened, the result, while not optimal, had told them something. She was eager to see what more they could find out…just not right then.
She concurred that waiting until another time and place would be the most prudent course of action, saying as much. “We have a first step. I’m content with that for now. The rest will have to wait.” Taking the necklace from him, she simply set it on the bedside table and turned her attention to him. Kneeling up on the bed at the edge, Elisabeth reached out and pulled him closer to her, arms wrapping around his torso. The necklace had simply been a formality, something they had agreed to work together on. There were bigger issues hanging in the air.
“So, that dream. Was what happened after I became lucid real?” The grin on her face betrayed her curiosity but his answer didn’t really matter. The world was still dark, and she had him with her. Reaching out, she touched his face gently, searching it to see if she could figure out what he was thinking. Balthazar had a mind like hers – it was always working and usually on multiple things.
The trick was giving him only one thing to concentrate on.
Leaning in, she let her lips find his again. The world was dark and there was unfinished business.
