2 Ymiden 720 | Ulric
One confident specter tried to punish Ulric for his lack of foresight. The sun was setting on the trial and Ulric turned down a dark alleyway that he always cut through on his way back to the inn his old friend was staying at. Suddenly tendrils wrapped around his armored calves, restricting and pulling as it tried to take Ulric off his feet. Ulric's ectoplasm acted quickly, materializing four tendrils that lashed out and grabbed onto the ledges of the two buildings creating the alleyway. As the foreign ghost's tendril tugged at Ulric's legs, the phantom's stronger tendrils held him upright. Ulric's eyes narrowed and he unsheathed his ghost metal blade, severing the tendril from around his legs before turning and leveling it at the visage of a woman with short black hair and makeup running down her cheeks.
"Please..." Her faint voice beckoned, "I need to feed..." When he was a younger ghost, or even when he was alive, the appeal might have struck some cord inside him but he had done far too much now. He had gone too far to come back from the edge. He knew that allowing her to feed off him would end with him withering away. He would not chance it. He would not risk losing everything he had worked for.
"Not for long." Ulric said in a low voice as two of his tendrils released the building and wrapped around the echo before him. They bound her arms to her side and pulled her towards Ulric far more successfully than she'd tried to pull him.
"Please..." Her voice broke as another tendril wrapped around her mouth to silence her. He raised a colorless hand and pressed it against her forehead.
"This is a mercy." Ulric convinced himself, though the fear in the echo's eyes made it hard to be sure. To die once was one thing but to be reduced to a whisper? He didn't know what that was like. He didn't know what was left when the ectoplasm was pulled so entirely from his victims. He didn't care. Not at this time but in the future, in the trials to pass he might reflect on what he'd done and regret it. In time... but it would not save the echo who had chosen the wrong phantom to syphon. "It will be over soon."
It was not the first time he'd done it, but it always made him feel vulnerable. The first step was to open your soul and in doing so, you risked allowing other dead to try and consume you. It was the risk the echo had taken when she tried to pulled from Ulric and it was the reason she would be destroyed. He let his soul open and began to pull her ectoplasm into himself. She screamed a scream that no one would hear. In the Beneath, there was no one but the dead to hear your cries and the dead did not come to the rescue. They came to feed and most of the time they did not stop. Ulric had no intention of stopping until there was nothing left of the echo. It was a mercy. It was a mercy... wasn't it?
This echo of a girl was lucky. Maybe. Maybe not.
Her screams were familiar in a way that tormented Ulric. They pulled at him just as strongly as he pulled at her ectoplasm. While he felt stronger with the bits of her essence that he was able to rip from her, he could also see that it was not all filling him. Even with his decent control over his abilities, he could tell that ectoplasm was simply being lost to Emea. It was rare that it was all absorbed through the connection but he never really noticed it until he'd been pulling it from this echo of a woman. His tendrils had faded away but it made no difference once the contest of syphoning began. His ability to materialize made it easier for him to resist having his own ectoplasm ripped from him, but he discovered he could not maintain use of the tendrils while he was syphoning. He'd syphoned from Arthur while possessing the man, but he couldn't actively possess someone while he was syphoning from a source. Similarly, he could not maintain his tendrils while he tore the ectoplasm from the echo. Because of that, she was free to flail and move but she didn't.
She was just dying all over again.
So Ulric stopped. He didn't know what emotion moved him to stop but he did. He withdrew his hand from her head and left her with some of what made her an echo. He didn't reduce her so entirely. He didn't gorge himself on her ectoplasm. He stopped and he felt... shame? How was he any better than Corvus? He was doing to her what Corvus had done to Marian. He was killing her. That was the thought which stopped him. It was not discipline. It was not control over himself. It was the feeling of shame that came over him when he realized he was not any better now than the man who'd killed him and the one he loved.
Would it stop him in the future? Maybe not. Probably not. He needed to forget such sympathy. He needed to banish it from his soul... but not on this trial. For now, the echo could live.
For the echo's part, she didn't seem to remember where she was or what had happened. Once the pain ended she was left in a confused state and the confusion slowly turned to panic. Ulric retreated from her. A single step back, then another, and another until he was at the end of the grey alleyway. He could escape her by returning to the living world. He could leave her there and use her ectoplasm to traverse back into the land of the living... but instead he watched her from the end of the alleyway.
"Where am I?" The echo said in a low voice as she looked around. She didn't see Ulric. His ectoplasm shook so rapidly that he'd become invisible to avoid another confrontation. He watched her still. He watched her rise from where she was in fear like so many of the newly dead. He watched what seemed like confusion in her eyes as it shifted to something else and she fled. Was it fear? The monster was gone. Why be afraid now? He didn't understand it. He had a hard time understanding most emotions these trials but he knew something was changed about the echo.
She remembered none of it? A side effect of what had happened? The skill could cause amnesia in the victims. He rarely watched the aftermath so he hadn't seen it before but it made sense. Arthur rarely ever spoke of how often Ulric leeched from him. Perhaps Arthur didn't know how often it had happened? Even after all this time, there was still more to learn about being what he was. Still more to discover.
It was not a comforting thought. It was almost as horrifying to him as being syphoned was to the echo. How far could he continue to fall? How far could he devolve before there was nothing left of the man who had once been Ulric? Would he even recognize it was happening? Would he care? He hoped so but hope was in short supply for the dead. Hope did not keep them going. Obsession did.
Fortunately he didn't have to sleep because if he did, he knew he would have no small number of dark thoughts about he'd done.
