10 Ymiden 719 | Ulric | Outside Darington
The first anchor he'd discovered himself bound to was Corvus himself. The revelation had been shattering and if Ulric had been a ghost of any more significant power he would have lost himself to his emotion completely. He distanced himself from the anchor that could make him the most powerful and instead focused on the other anchor, his sword- and it had been stolen.
He discovered his sword in the possession of a bandit hiding out in a small shack just a break or so run from the walls of Darington when he manifested to his anchor. At least Ulric thought the distance looked about that far from what he could see of the grey Beneath. Ulric peered in the window of the shack as he walked around to find an entrance and saw the sword sat against the far wall. The bandit who had taken it slept on the other side of the shack by a fire he had started to warm himself. Ulric closed his eyes outside the shack and slowly raised his hands in front of himself.
He'd traversed from the Beneath to Idalos once before to speak with Arthur Thorn- the man currently running around Darington looking for the sword that had been stolen from him. Ulric thought back to how he had done it then in order to guide himself now. He pushed with his hands gently against the air in front of himself and as he did so he let his mind slip back to his thoughts of the living world. He thought of how the sun felt on his skin and how the wind rustled his hair. But when he thought of the wind rustling his hair the breeze was replaced by a hand. Marian's hand. He saw himself in a grass field laying with his head in her lap while she stroked his hair. His memories of the world at large became harder to focus on when he thought of her.
Ulric finally opened his eyes to find he was still in the Beneath and shades of grey still dominated his color spectrum. Ulric laid down on his back and closed his eyes again.. He pressed his hands against the ground, searching for the membrane dividing the Beneath and Idalos. The membrane he needed to break through. Ulric cast his mind back to the field of grass again but this time he left Marian out of his mind. He put her by a tree reading rather than with him in the grass. He focused on the feeling of the earth against his back and the sun washing over him from above. Then suddenly he began to feel as if he was sinking into the ground. The sinking was replaced with a feeling like suffocating that spread over his entire form but Ulric didn't focus on the pain. He focused on where he wanted to go.
When Ulric opened his eyes again the world held some degree of color it had not before. He rose against the aching protest of his ectoplasmic body and looked towards the shack that held his sword. Traversing to Idalos had taken so much out of him, he wasn't certain he could do anything about his sword, but he had to. The bandit had left the flimsy door open so Ulric was able to walk in. The echo stepped through the doorway towards his sword and reached out his spectral hand. He wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the blade and pulled at the sword only to watch it slip through his ethereal fingers. The echo looked at his hand and then at the blade again. He had felt it but he could not move it. Just like when he was in the Beneath.
The bandit still had not noticed him. He still slumbered by the fire as if he'd not taken the specter's most prized possession. The echo's visage twisted at the thought and he stepped towards the bandit. Ulric reached his hand out towards the sleeping bandit but stopped a few inches from the man's face. For a moment he reconsidered what he had thought to do but when he looked back and saw his mistreated sword sitting on the wall, Ulric steeled himself.
Ulric lowered his fingers to touch the man's face and as he did Ulric began to syphon the strength he could from the man. The process began as it always did, Ulric's hand began to shimmer where he was touching the bandit with a sort of black light as Ulric opened his soul. In the next few bits Ulric began to draw in the bandit's life force and the bandit remained soundly asleep. Had the man been awake he might have noticed the slight discomforts that Ulric leeching his energy caused but he was not awake. A trill passed and Ulric pulled his hand from the bandit. He didn't feel restored to new but he felt better than he had after traversing into Idalos.
Ulric turned and walked back over to his sword. He wrapped his hand around the hilt and focused on the way that it should have felt in his hand according to his memory. He thought about the weight of the blade that he had felt every day that he unsheathed it and he remembered the lives he had saved with it. In doing so he tried to cast out the memory of the lives he had taken but he couldn't completely and Ulric felt like it made the sword heavier. Ulric squeezed down on the hilt one last time as his right hand solidified and then he pulled the sword off the wall.
Ulric reached over with his left hand and wrapped it around the sheath. He took a deep breath and tugged gently at it but it didn't budge so he took a moment to do as he had done before. Ulric remembered the sound the blade made as it slipped free of it's prison and the sound it made when it slid back in. He wanted to hear the sound, he needed to, he would. Ulric pulled again and this time the sheath and blade were separated. Ulric dropped the sheath to the ground, lacking the strength to keep holding it. He could feel his form shaking to stay together.
Unfortunately dropping the sheath created a thud that woke the bandit who was beginning to stir behind Ulric.
"What? What are- put down my sword!" The bandit cried out as he put his back against the wall. Ulric stumbled, his throat tightened and dried a little and somehow he knew why.
"It isn't yours. It never was. The sword is mine. It has always been mine. It will always be mine." Ulric began lumbering forwards with the blade in hand. The bandit began to stand but Ulric reached him before he could defend himself and drove the sword through the bandit's chest. Ulric tried to wrench the blade out but it slipped through his fingers as his hand shifted back to its incorporeal state. "No!" Ulric shouted as the bandit fell to the floor with the sword sprouting from his chest. Ulric shook his head in disappointment, thinking he'd just wasted all of his effort with syphoning the bandit when he suddenly had an idea. Perhaps he didn't need to syphon the energy of the living. Perhaps he could syphon the energy of a life lived- or at least the emotions related to it.
Ulric gripped the hilt of the sword and his hand began to shimmer with black light as he tried to leech emotional energy from his anchor. The response was immediate and nearly overwhelming. His sword bombarded his mind with visions of battles long since ended. It showed him every time he'd unsheathed the blade and it showed him every time he had buried the blade in another. One vision in particular took prominence in his mind and it was that vision from which Ulric syphoned enough emotional energy to restore his ectoplasm and turn himself into something a little bit more... twisted.
