bastard john snow. (gargouille) wrote in camulus, @ 2011-06-07 20:43:00 |
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“Hello, John.”
John turned around. Or had the sensation of turning around. He wasn't sure. Sandeep was standing a few yards away in a cacophany of bright silks and robes, his face painted and gold all over his fingers and neck and arms. He looked like a living illustration from the Arabian Nights, except he was staring at John with the same bland look he'd had in the pale white room.
“What are you wearing?” he asked, the first thing he could think of.
“Whatever you've put me in, you incredible racist,” Sandeep said, glancing down at the curled toes of his silk slippers. “Honestly, can't anyone see a brown man in Armani?”
John looked around. There was no ground or sky or walls, and though he was standing upright, he couldn't be sure what he was standing on. His saw his hands—human hands. But he was often human in his head, and then he realized where they were.
“Oh, you're a sharp one,” Sandeep said, flicking something from under his painted nails. He smiled when John looked up at him in surprise. “I'm a high-level psion entering your dream, Mr. Collins. Reading your thoughts is the least of what I'm going to do.”
There was a growl somewhere and everywhere at once, coming from the nonexistent walls and from John himself. He felt his chest and stomach tremble as if knocked off balance, tightening and trying to hold him steady. Sandeep watched him with that blithe, predatory stare.
John's back was on fire. He had had this dream before, but it was so much more pressing now, so much more pungent, like smelling rotten eggs years after forgetting their odor. His body tore itself apart. His arms reached back at impossible angles to tear the skin from his shoulders, make way for the wings that were bursting, like overripe fruit, from his bones. They grew and grew as his fingers stretched, the bones breaking and rebreaking as claws replaced his brittle human nails. He reached up and began shredding the skin on his face and throat, tearing it away in strips, and then bloody chunks, that dropped and splattered on the invisible ground. Noises came out of him he had never heard, not even in his deepest nightmares, roars and hisses and screams and sobs, as if he were a ghost, haunting himself, reliving his own death. His jaw cracked and fangs split his lips. His vision swam.
Sandeep watched him without moving.
The pain was incredible. The wings spread to their full span around him, greater than in waking life. He could feel the gargoyle fighting for control, forcing John's consciousness down so that when they woke, it would not be the man who looked out of his eyes.
And then Sandeep spoke.
“That is enough,” he said calmly, his voice echoing the way it had in the white room—only now it was grander, deeper, a thrumming in John's chest rather than a swelling in his ears. But the change did not stop. Sandeep sighed. “That is enough,” he said, and the echo shook John down to his core, a bleeding noise that pushed all thought out in thick streaks of brownish red from his nose and ears. His wings thrummed. His spine cracked.
His back split in two.
With a sound like a ship breaking, the gargoyle began pushing itself out of John's back. The claws receded from John's fingers and dug into his ribs, providing some small purchase for the great black beast to shove and claw and climb out of some nebulous cavern that had spread across the bones of John's spine. Fangs shrank; taloned feet grew back their toes and bones. The gargoyle roared and John spat up blood and screamed and then the monster clambered, like a newborn colt, unaware of itself outside of the thing that gave it life, out of John's back.
The two were separated.
For a long moment, John sat in his own transformative filth, sucking in air and trying to see. Everything was blurry and dizzying and he felt like he was falling over. He could hear the gargoyle breathing heavily nearby, but the thing was not charging or attacking. John could feel it—feel its confusion, its growing rage only controlled by its similarly growing bewilderment. As one, they looked up at the Indian man not ten feet away.
“Well,” Sandeep said. “That was disgusting.”
The gargoyle hissed and growled a low warning.
“Be still,” Sandeep echoed.
The gargoyle took a step forward.
John looked up just in time to see Sandeep's eyebrow rise, ever so slightly. “Be still,” he said again, harsher. The gargoyle flinched, but kept moving forward.
Sandeep swore, and then the gargoyle was covering the ten feet between them as if they were fifty, snarling and struggling but moving irrevocably forward, the space growing with each step it took. John could not make himself move, only stay crouched, watching as Sandeep raised a painted hand and some unseen force lashed into the gargoyle from all sides. John felt it too, but lessened—sharp cuts across his skin that mirrored his beast's exactly.
“Mr. Collins,” Sandeep said around gritted teeth. “This is not a one man job, you know!”
John stared. “I do not—what the fuck are you talking about? Stop or it will kill you!”
“This is your mind, you insipid little shit!” Sandeep shouted. “Regain control!”
John felt himself hyperventilating. He ached in a way it was not possible to ache when you were conscious. One of his arms fell from under him and he heard Sandeep shriek—looking up, the gargoyle had suddenly bridged the growing gap and was slashing at Sandeep, his claws lacerating the man's fine ancient clothes and splashing red that floated incongruously in slim trails into the air. There was enough space that the gargoyle could not get a hold on him, but whatever control Sandeep had was slipping, and the gargoyle would have him soon enough to rip him in two. He was stronger, and getting even more so, as John could not bring himself to stand. His head pounded and throbbed as Sandeep's thoughts shot out, struggling against the force of a thing he had underestimated. He looked down at his hands, his human hands, as they shrank into boy's hands; he was a child, before all of this had happened, before he'd ever been to Camulus, before his father died, before he'd been changed, and he did not know what to do.
Then—light.
Light swelled within him, lifting him, focusing his thoughts. A slim iron bar appeared in midair, a foot in front of the gargoyle's face. It flinched, and stopped its attack. John could barely breathe. He was watching the bar as if it would fade at any moment—and it might. Sandeep lowered his bloody arm and stared at the boy who was carefully, carefully rising to his feet. His skin was still in tatters on and around him, but as he stood, he grew, until he was his normal height—and then he grew further, now as tall as the monster, now staring down at him. But John was trembling, and so was the iron bar.
“Hold onto it, Collins,” Sandeep said. “You must lock it in yourself!”
John shook. Another bar came tremulously into existence. The gargoyle stared at it in confusion and rage and made a move towards its host—but another bar stopped it, and another, and another. Shimmering like rods of light, they formed a tight square around the thing, squashing it down, limiting its movement, then crushing its arms, its clawed hands, cracking its wings so it could not fly. The gargoyle growled in pain and thrashed in its ever-shrinking prison as the bars slowly forced it to accommodate its own malleable dreamsize; smaller, smaller, smaller. Smaller than John; smaller than Sandeep. Small enough that John could pick the cage up in his human hands and hold it gingerly in front of him.
There was silence. Some hush that worked its way into their gasping throats and the gargoyle's painful shrieks, that settled over them like a shroud.
John stared down at the cage. It seemed so simple, in theory. Cage the monster. Control it.
Sandeep took it out of his hands. “Now, one more thing,” he said, his body already knitting itself up, even as John stood dumbly with his own wounds gaping. Sandeep stared hard at the cage—and it lifted itself out of his hands and into the air. Forming itself out of small metal sheets that manifested themselves in thin air, multiplying over and onto and around each other and then seaming themselves into a single contiguous whole—a small steel cube sealed around the cage, and then another around the cube, and another, and another. The two men watched as a hundred separate cubes encased the cage until it was taller than John himself, and then the whole mass slipped, like thread into the eye of a needle, into a crack in the emptiness around them.
John stared at the space where a year of his life had been.
Sandeep heaved a sigh and placed his fists on his hips. “Well,” he said. “Shall we talk about that exorbitant fee now?”
John woke up.