Haven is not unused to the insidious creep of magic, the way it curls and laps at windows and doors, the way it seeps through old stone like incessant rain. Haven is used to it, has been created to contain these broken-glass people with magic they can barely handle, barely dream of keeping controlled. They are armed with doors that lock, with a dojo clean-bare in preparation of another day's worth of training -- the aerokinetic who has learned to skim a breeze from nothing across the floor and take the day's dust with it, the telekinetic who makes Gryff's fingers throb in remembered kinship and who gets the warmth rubbed through words of praise. They have bowels and belly to take the worst of the lot, those poisoned through by magic, burned up by it until they are ashy remnants of themselves. What Haven is not used to is magic as great sweeping cloud, as storm and malestrom and that church, that spire and small patch of grass and graveyard, not accounted for or considered.
It comes on creeping, magic preys on them sleeping, it finds the lit windows and those dark both at once and indiscriminate. It doles out nightmares to sing into the blood for those who bear them worst, and gives shadow-dreams of being whole and happy once again to those that least wish to wake from them.
And Haven has at its heart so many would-be vipers, so many ciphers for all the evil out there that, that night, it is not expecting the worst.
![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}