the lost boy (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} alcuin) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} 4bidden,@ 2014-11-17 21:13:00 |
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WHAT: Cat wakes on the eve of the spell feeling extraordinarily enthusiastic. So, why does it feel like Alcuin has lost something important?
WHEN: Week 9; Sunday, some time after midnight.
WHERE: Jannati City; Scott McCall's apartment.
RATING: Likely low.
STATUS: Pending.
Wind howled ferociously across a vast and empty expanse of frozen wasteland, whistling through a landscape of ice and jagged rock that jutted from the snow at his feet like carnivorous teeth. And all about him was a dense, colorless fog made all the more obstructive by fat flakes of snow which stung at his face like razor blades. Alcuin felt a keen twinge of recognition in his heart of heart's as he plodded forth, his legs vanishing at the knee in the snow, following blindly the sound of bells pealing in the distance. The sound of the bells was at once sublime and dreadful, melodious and discordant, tempting and repellent, familiar and unfamiliar. It danced somewhere on the edge of remembrance and forgetfulness...
… but the closer he came to its source, the louder its cacophonous clamoring, until it felt like he might perish of its weight upon his back, flattened beneath the snow and forgotten by all.
At its epicenter was not a cathedral but the silhouette of a winged man shrouded in fog, standing atop the snow with his back turned toward him. Alcuin clapped his hands over his ears in a vain effort to drown out the terrible call of the bells, yet without his hands his sense of equilibrium was treacherous, and so he was pitched forward into the snow. Alcuin cried out in pain and shock as the snow burned at the palms of his hands, struggling to right himself lest the snow rise up to bury him alive. It was then that he noticed the winged figure in the distance had turned toward him.
Long white hair, plaited with silver cord and hundreds of delicate bells – the bells, those terrible bells! – framed a frightfully familiar face in profile. His eyes, bright as the silver that adorned his hair yet cold as flint, scanned the snowy landscape behind him. Alcuin felt that his heart might stop when the winged creature seemed to glimpse him there, half buried in the snow; only, upon closer inspection, the figure seemed to be staring straight through him. “Bíddu...” Alcuin whispered, his plea lost to the howling of the wind. The figure frowned with displeasure as the iridescent feathers of his wings expanded outward and shivered like those of a peacock. “Bíddu!”
Alcuin struggled forth through the snow, ignoring the ache in his hands and the stinging of his face, but the winged creature had already turned back. “Bíddu! Gjörðu svo vel! Gjörðu svo vel bíddu...!” Alcuin begged plaintively til his voice went reedy with unshed tears and his lungs burned with frozen air, but the winged man was too fast. He moved with preternatural ease across the snow, further and further from him until finally he was gone, swallowed up by the colorless fog.
And then he woke.
He woke to the sound of the wind whistling through the windows of their apartment and the blankets drawn up and tangled round his legs, the entirety of his upper body bereft of their warmth. He raised his hand to swipe at his eyes and hoisted himself into a sitting position on the bed with the other, glancing about in the darkness of the room once he'd finished displacing the sleep from his eyes. Alcuin dimly noted that their master was still fast asleep on the couch through the crack in the bedroom door, his back turned toward him with his arms tucked underneath his head. Had anyone been about to have seen it, they might have noticed with some reserve the eerie flashing of his eyes in the dark before the light winked out of them.
Where had the boy gone, he wondered. And why did he feel so...?