As far as plans went, it was deeply stupid. Thurvishar would later admit as much, once his wits were fully about him. Running into Evie Frye as he paid for his coffee was fine, as was starting to accompany her back to the DOA offices, but deciding that the strangely-placed building that most certainly had not been tucked beneath the trees earlier that morning was worthy of investigation? That was dumb.
It was very unlike him. Genuinely so. He was always the one saying “no, think” to his more-impulsive friends, the one who tested nearly every inn room for hidden hexes and traps. Later, he’d grumble that he should have recognized the compulsion magic, that the pull of the hotel was so obvious a first year at the Academy would have known it for what it was: a perilous draw, an invitation through blackened lips and rotting tongue, an illusion hungry for some idiot (himself) to turn to the Assassin beside him and go:
“Let’s see what’s inside.”
...which, sadly, is what he did, already half-through the hedge maze, a moth diving for the light of a bug zapper.
Evie was essentially powerless to do anything but follow, as she’d not heard yet any complaints about waypoints messing up - as they had in the past - but had no intention of going into the strange building that reeked of evil without backup. Jacob, at the very least. She didn’t know Thurvishar well enough to trust him, no matter how friendly and inquisitive he might seem.
But she also wasn’t about to abandon him to the place. So she followed, apprehensive, but feeling no particular pull herself, just a bad feeling of the place. It wasn’t dark, or falling apart, but the ugly upholstery was an assault all on it’s own.
“Locations showing up in Vallo isn’t new, there might’ve been mention of this on the network. You shouldn’t stray too far--” With a sigh, she realized just how far ahead of her he already was. “Mr. D’Lorus.”
“Yes, of course,” he agreed with her, because she was correct, but look, the door into the hulking beast of a building had opened so nicely for them. Practically on his own. The interior was ghastly; all dim greens and retina-blinding oranges, and a sea of doors repeated over and over as they passed through the lobby and into the guts of the hotel. The air was thick with motes of dust. There did not seem to be anybody about - and yet the structure held its breath in wait.
Thurvishar turned back to Evie, frowning. “Something isn’t-- how did we get here?” he asked, distracted, as if he hadn’t gone headfirst into the place but a moment before, as if his memory had been struck clean. “This is magic, the dark kind. We should leave--”
You should never have come.
The interrupting voice itself was a whisper, nearly soundless, like air escaping a tomb that had been slid open after a decade of being sealed. It was an intimately familiar voice to Thurvishar, although not for Evie, but then, it wouldn’t have to be familiar to be frightening and hollow, commanding yet sly. Thurvishar shot Evie an expression of restrained panic, fingers flexing at his side, his voice steady but disturbed:
“This must be an illusion. The owner of that voice is dead.”
...but dead people arrived all the time in Vallo, did they not? His expression shifted as he realized it.
Evie agreed wholeheartedly. We should leave. Her hand was on her cane, clutching it as if it was a lifeline, her senses tingling with each passing moment as she glanced around the room, waiting for a threat to leap out at them.
She hadn’t heard a voice, but it didn’t take a genius to realize something was very, very wrong here. She was good at knowing just went something was about to go sideways, and the hair on the back of her neck was standing straight up.
Evie reached out to grab his arm, gently. She kept her voice level, strained, the kind of voice she used towards children that were stressed and needed a gentle but firm leaning. Not the sort of annoyed tone she used with Jacob. “Thurvishar, we should leave. We can alert the DOA or see if anyone else has had issues with this place.”
“Didn’t you hear it?” Well, that indicated all kinds of hideous things, but he could sort through them all later. She was right; they needed to leave. He nodded, once, and indicated with his chin the door they had come in through. Heading over, he pulled it sharply, but it didn’t budge. Gesturing wordlessly for her to back away he gave it a push with magic, the door jittering in its hinges but holding fast. They were trapped.
“I am so sorry,” Thurvishar said under his breath as he looked for another way out, always good at multitasking. “I believe I was targeted by whatever magic this place has; I’d never come here of my own volition… damn.” The window too refused to budge or break. He inhaled, eyes shifting to other doorways that led deeper into the hotel, but that felt like a poor idea.
He tried to open a Gate for them to leave, but that, too, fizzled out. He opened his mouth to explain, black eyes wide but controlled, when a sudden strange, painful rip went through him and he shuddered into dizziness, feeling as if he had been dropped from a height unexpectedly and landed in such a way that his lungs lost their air. There was no point in questioning what the sensation was; he knew it without question, the splinter of his soul as familiar to him as the dead whisper of the voice that had spoken earlier.
His gaesh had been reinstated. How? It was impossible — didn’t matter.
“Evie,” he said in a clear, low voice. “You need to leave now.”
Kill her, said the voice, just as he knew it would, and to buy her time, he tossed a black, screaming hex her way, deliberately telegraphing the move, knowing her reflexes were sharp enough to understand the path of his arm’s movement, praying she would understand in time.
Evie had waited quietly, doing her own silent reconnaissance of the place with her vision. It was all for naught, as the hotel gave away none of it’s secrets even as Evie looked deeper. She had been looking away when his arm flew out, and turned sharply - just in time - to dodge out of the way of it.
“What are-” At first, she could have convinced herself that he was attacking something behind her. If it wasn’t for this place and his previous warning, and all of her years of training, that’s where her mind would have went. But now, this was different. This was purposeful.
She didn’t draw her sword, not wanting to stab the man for what was clearly some kind of hallucination. But Evie did point the cane at him, moving slowly now in a circle and on guard. “Put your magic away, I’d rather not have to kill you today. Whatever you’re hearing or seeing, it isn’t real.”
“Coincidentally, I’d rather you not have to kill me today as well.” At least Thurvishar’s wit was still intact, and he hesitated for just a moment, trying to determine if she was correct - that whatever was happening wasn’t real, that it was just some sort of clever illusion.
But as had happened countless times, a wave of pain swept through him and he staggered, keeping upright but only just. Dimly he realized that his nose was bleeding. “It’s a compulsion spell,” he said. “If I don’t obey-- it’ll kill me. I’ve been under one before; I know what this is-”
Another wave of agony cut his explanation short and this time he did fall backwards, leaning against the back of a truly hideous couch. What a way to go. Not a battlefield, but an orange relic from an era where no one had taste. He fired off another spell in Evie’s direction to buy him time, the movement sloppy, and barely in her direction. The gaesh knew he’d half-assed it and fired another round of tremors upon his crumbling frame. How had Gadrith done this? They’d destroyed the mechanism that all gaeshes relied on. Unless Gadrith had arrived with the cornerstone intact, unbeknownst to anyone…
...but no, Thurvishar wouldn’t have chosen this way to go, but he’d spent twenty-four years under Gadrtih D’Lorus’s gaesh. He’d spend no more time, he decided, not to save his life for Evie’s, who he only passingly knew, or anyone else’s. He spared a thought for his homeworld and the people in it - he’d really had hoped that he’d have accomplished more to defend it - and let his arm fall as he slid to the ground in a seizure he knew would kill him.
“My god-” Evie was walking towards him, even dodging a thrown spell, but it was obvious that he was fighting it, and that was good, and emboldened her greatly. Evie didn’t have magic, not in the traditional sense, not in the way he did. But she could dodge, and was usually a few steps ahead of her opponent if she could manage it.
She knew there was more going on under it all, that she couldn’t see, and let him work through that before he ultimately collapsed. Then, Evie was there, cane tucked under her arm and head reaching out to hold his head so he didn’t bash it against something hard.
Evie fumbled for the phone in her pocket, but it was useless, there was no service. “Fuck.” Not language she used regularly, but at least Thurvishar’s head stopped convulsing under her hand and she was able to turn her attention back to him and tentatively ask, “Mr. D’Lorus?”
It was a sudden thing - pain, rising panic, assurance that he was at the end, and not wavering - and then… nothing. Thurvishar took a breath, and when that didn’t hurt, he took another and peered at his surroundings, wiping his eyes and noting that blood came off onto the tip of his sleeve. Delightful. There was Evie - he registered that she’d sworn, which struck him as faintly amusing given her general air of polite confidence, until in fear he looked to see if he’d injured her - but no, she hovered over him with a clear-eyed, watchful expression.
“You were right,” he said, saving protests of apologies and self-recrimination for later when he wasn’t still trembling in the aftermath. “It was an illusion. A very clever one that informed itself using past terrors. I’ve not seen its equal,” he observed, for a moment sounding almost respectful, but that was over quickly. “What a fucknut,” he summarized, and grimaced as he realized that his nose was bloody as well. He dabbed at it with his handkerchief, his motions precise in the way that pointed to a half-concealed embarrassment. It was good that he’d been a plaything of some malevolent force in front of someone as competent as Evie Frye, but that didn’t make it any less awkward. “Let’s try the doors again; I’m nearly positive they’ll open.”
She ended up patting his shoulder before standing back, had her canesword in hand once again. She could be all business in an instant, Evie, having dealt with Vallo now for months of this sort of nonsense, not to mention all of the sort that came from home. Before moving to the door, she looked over his nose with a critical eye. “Lean forward, pinch the top part of your nose so it drains out properly and the bleeding should stop.”
There was no second-guessing, though the worry of trickery was there. Trying to get her back turned could be a way to do it, and Evie always kept herself aware of him behind her, even as she turned to the door.
Which did open, with a relief. She took a deep breath of nature before extending a hand to let him go ahead of her. “With all hope this isn’t another illusion, and someone else has reported the same issues.”
Thurvishar could sense her wariness and didn’t blame her for it, releasing a breath as the door opened. With a nod, he accepted her hand and hauled himself up, a little shaky on his feet but recovering quickly. It wasn’t the first time he’d nearly been done in by a gaesh loop, after all, but it had been a few years.
The sun felt solid on his back after the thin light from the hotel. He didn’t speak again until they were well away from the strange building, the foliage animals little more than dots in his side-vision, whatever pull the building had oddly evaporated like fog in a warm mid-morning. He turned to her, his expression frank.
“Thank you for reacting so efficiently,” he said, “and I’m so terribly sorry about what I did. What happened - I believe the magic plays upon dreads one already possesses. A gaesh is a spell that guarantees obedience or death; I was under one for-” he paused, then relented: “years back home. The things required of me are unspeakable. The gaesh was broken, but it’s always been my fear that it would somehow reassert itself.” His eyes narrowed as he took in the cold edifice of the hotel. “I’m not the only one here with history that would lend itself to violence and danger. That hotel could be a real problem.”
Evie hummed under her breath, thinking over a response. Obedience or death - what an option. For someone who fought for freedom every step of her entire life, she did at least admire the conclusion he came to this time, and was glad it still did not come to fruition.
“You didn’t even draw blood,” She shrugged off the worry. Efficiency was what she did best, and growing up with Jacob had trained her for that rather well. Her fears were not a tangible sort of thing, either, and would likely require more than a stranger. Or so she assumed, but assumptions in Vallo could get a person in trouble, especially when the danger behind them was still a relative unknown. “I might suggest you avoid waypoints for the time being, if we can at all help it? Though I wonder if this could be a repeat occurrence. With all hope someone at the DOA office will be able to shut down transportation to the thing.”
He nodded in agreement. No waypoints until the source of this magic was determined. “I realize you don’t know me that well,” Thurvishar said, glancing at her, “but I’m not the type to just… go investigate a strange new building. I’m actually paranoid,” he admitted. “I’m almost certain that there will be repeat occurrences - it lured me. It wasn’t a gaesh command, but I barely remember walking into that place, much less making the decision to visit it.”
That kind of luring magic wasn’t rare back home, exactly, so much as highly sophisticated. The whole thing gave him the creeps - not quite as much as the idea of another gaesh being on him (that was going to keep him up a while) but bad enough. He dabbed at his nose a final time, the bleeding having stopped, and regarded her curiously. “Do you know of something like this having happened here before? And-- if you wouldn’t mind - I know you have some ability to see beyond Tya’s Veil, into the realm of souls. Would you - please - just reassure me that there’s no residual gaesh magic? I know there isn’t,” he added hastily, “but I’d be grateful for the confirmation. I’d owe you a-- coffee, or gift basket, or whatever the going rate here is for ‘I tried to kill you; sorry about it’.”
Evie agreed, eyes ahead and walking as they talked. “There was certainly something about that place that made it seem as if it was controlling you somehow. I don’t know why, but I have some passing familiarity with objects that can do that.” Though she wasn’t about to go into details about the Piece of Eden here, with someone she didn’t know very well - though she also knew he could look the information up, should he wish - and in public.
“It doesn’t work exactly like--” She sighed, and shrugged. Evie didn’t consider it looking into someone’s soul, but then how else would they know the things that they knew? She relented, and looked at him with her eagle vision before ultimately shaking her head. “Your aura seems fine to me. I don’t keep track of magic, but it’s how it was before.” Evie had a wry smile on her face by the end of it. “And I can assure you that you came nowhere close to killing me. But I’ll take that coffee. Sometime later?”
He nodded once, the corners of his mouth drawing into what passed for a smile, but at least he did feel better. Truly an illusion, then. Thurvishar inclined his head in a somewhat half-ass version of a society bow as they passed into town. “Sometime later,” he agreed, his mind already on the magic and what it could possibly be - although not so much that he hadn’t set aside for another time her admission that she had ‘passing familiarity’ with similar objects.. “Let’s report it in. If you’ll handle the DOA side of things, I’ll see if other magic-users have any notion. Acceptable?”
Evie inclined her head in return and was already pulling out her phone, mind moving onto other things. “Acceptable. Be safe, Mr. D’Lorus.”