Legend of Ransera

Aurin's hand, the one farthest from Sivan, reached down to secretly give little caresses to the tail wrapped around him. Sivan was a soft touch, and Aurin hard. Betwixt them, they had helped Rivin figure himself out. The process wasn't complete, but then, it never was. The hand nearer Sivan accepted the brush, though he frowned at it for a moment. Then he cleared his throat.

"Very well." The bespelled ink was cool, and his strokes were quick. As the ink reacted to Rivin's aether and some of the things Sivan was doing to personally midwife this enchantment into being, the ink grew warm, began to burn, although it was doing something else entirely. If Aurin's calligraphy was sure, it was because he had practiced it countless times so neither Rivin nor Sivan would doubt his competence. Aurin doubted his own competence, but he was the sort of man who could fake it until he could make it in most situations.

The darker of Rivin's magi handed the brush back when he was done. A moment passed in silence, then several. Finally, Aurin loosed a frustrated grunt.

"It should hurt," he muttered. "Pain fuels power. Pain anchors a man in his body." Of course, pain well and purposefully applied could also make a man drift out of his body, but that sort of pain wasn't the sort he was talking about. "Growth hurts. Growing in power hurts. Don't forget the pain, Rivin." He reached into thin air that became a small portal and pulled a scalpel into this place, borrowing it from the Tranquil Gardens or somewhere similar. The Magus had been thinking on this.

Cold metal made quick work on Rivin's back. It was so sharp, so careful, that at first, it didn't truly hurt - until it did.

"It hurts to give power, too. It hurts to share power. Pain can bind men together."

Sivan's eyes were wide, vigilant, but he didn't stop this. He watched as Aurin pulled the blade across his palm.

"Remember my words," he commanded, punctuating them with a hard slap to Riven's bare backside. A smudge of human blood glistened there on stormborn bruised skin. The little bit of violence had the enchantment crackling in the air, along the elegant lines of Sivan's scrivening. The contract was alive in a sense, a pattern of aether that bound to living patterns of aether, to men, together. It recognized the authority of the one over the other that was written into its structure. As Aurin channeled aether through his own rune, the bones of the binding began to grow flesh.

Taberenai in its mindless meandering had drawn too close to the demon, and it sort of skittered away, internal lights shifting color. Whether it was scared or merely mischievous, no one there present could suss. But the edge of revelation threatened to cut the demon and it began to feel the subtle bonds of the enchantment harden into chains like spiritual adamant. Exael made a noise that was glorious and terrible. He was laughing.

"Now, Aurin!" Sivan commanded quickly.

Aurin's hand came down hard on Rivin's back. Before the sensation could register, however - before their blood could mingle - the impact completed the initiation and the blow knocked a part of Rivin out of himself. That part was not the demon, who was now screaming black rage against Exael's bright glee.

No, Aurin had knocked Rivin's astral body out of his mortal shell and the apprentice - for he was now bound in service - had no real framework for understanding how to do anything without the solid substance of his body. He began to drift.

"Don't try to fuck me while I'm not in my body," he warned Sivan with an infuriating smirk. Then he handed him the scalpel and quickly rolled into his bed. As his body came to a halt, his own astral body kept moving. Sivan could sense it, and it was strange and wonderful. Then those essential parts of Rivin and Aurin were gone, and he was left with two inert but living bodies to watch over and attend, as well as an angry demon who had been blindsided by his gambit.

Sivan began to arrange Rivin's body so it wouldn't be more uncomfortable than it had to be when he returned to it...

While Rivin's astral body had drifted lazily like a cloud in the sky at first, he did manage to instinctively slip through the cracks and into the Aetherium. Aurin had completed the enchantment with a bond of blood, which strengthened what Sivan had called his 'thaumaturgical entanglement' that explained how he was able to reach across space to connect with those whom he had initiated into a runic magic. There was a cloudy ribbon of red - or at least his mind parsed it as red because of his associations with blood - that reached from his astral body through the tear in reality. He followed it...

...into Darkness.

There was no light, but rather darkness visible - no light, no aether, yes aether but in no way readable as he was used to. There was no Rivin, and yet he knew Rivin was there somewhere. Aurin vaulted directly to Valencia's safe space. She had been after him to carve out his own place, but that seemed like it would be just another door that needed guarding. From here, he could see the tether between him and his apprentice, but direction was more of a suggestion of the mortal mind than anything else here.

Aurin began to vault from place to place, finding locations he knew to be relatively fixed points, in an attempt to triangulate - or get any sort of a bead upon the slippery blue fucker.

Meanwhile, Rivin remained in the darkness. He couldn't see, and he couldn't sense anything through his runes, the established or the new. But he could feel the cold metal of the examination table he laid upon. He could smell the chemicals and sterilizing compounds. He could hear the metallic click of forceps and scalpels and dishes for catching tissues and fluids, and the familiar, barely audible sounds Dr. Ilex would make when he was thinking or preparing for a vivisection.

As he cast about the Aetherium, he felt a fear bubbling up from within him, but it wasn't his.

"Fuck." He steeled himself against Rivin's growing terror. It would only feed his darkest thoughts and memories, fuel them into power greater even than the demon who was no longer there to protect him with red vision and blessed black oblivion. Aurin vaulted, faster and faster, becoming once again the Bronze Fox. He was hunting. He was clever. He had the scent of his apprentice's blood, his aether.

In another world, words were spoken that he could make out. Sivan speaking calmly about consent, negotiating in bad faith, and such, while the demon whose Name Aurin wanted to know raged against cages that the elf had cleverly set up without even Aurin being aware. He would have questions later, but for now, he afforded himself a moment of pleasure knowing his was the hand that slammed the door shut on whatever prison it was in.

And then he was hunting once more.

Time was more of a suggestion here. While he was more comfortable with the strangeness than Rivin on his maiden voyage, he was not certain how much time passed before he went from some fantastical desert that glittered like crushed diamonds in moonlight to darkness.

No, not darkness... There was the glare of stark, unfeeling light that fell upon broad shoulders in a white coat. Below that, a naked, bruise blue man struggling against harsh restraints.

"Ja, ja... Bring the ovulating female here."

"I have come for my apprentice," said the Bronze Fox, his voice hollow, resonant like the great gongs in the Temple of the Fallen Skies. The doctor turned to look at him. Unlike his assistants, his face was etched with an unreal level of clarity, an attention to detail that forced Aurin to know the man's face with equal familiarity to the back of his hand.

Most everything was stark white: the skin of the doctor and his assistants, their clothes, the light. Only the pair of Lysanrin, one real and one real as any thought in the Aetherium, were colorful. Them, and now Aurin, who intruded upon this private nightmare. He wasn't sure if Rivin heard him, flailing against his restraints as he was. The female Lysanrin straddled him with strange emotion, apparently torn between revulsion and lust. His blue flesh was pricked by needle after needle, cold as shards of ice, pumping ice water into his veins, or quicksilver, or lava. Many forms of turture—as Rivin saw it—occurred at once, somehow an orchestra of suffering even as each one was picked out as a singular affliction.

Perhaps the worst, though, was the small blue boy who stepped up as if upon a stool, patted Rivin's hand and peered into his eyes. They were his own eyes, albeit decades younger.

"It will be okay, daddy..."

His eyes must have been hypnotic, because Aurin was screaming at him even as he stabbed the doctor over and over again. He even bled white—thick and viscous like poppy milk. The man was only as real and as strong as Rivin's mind made him, but if Aurin could get his attention, show him how he was strong enough to battle his demons—those in his mind if not the one left trapped in the material plane—then perhaps they could leave this place for Valencia's haven and finish the ritual of initiation.

"Look at your Magus," he commanded, wishing he had demanded Arry's trick when he gave him one of his. "I am the Bronze Fox. I hold dominion here. Over you. Over your nightmares. There are no restraints. These aren't real. Only I am real. Come to me, apprentice."

He shoved the doctor aside, elbowed his way past the nurses who looked like some of his boyhood fantasies, all breasts and hips and hunger, and grabbed Rivin by the chin, attempting to yank his attention away from the blue boy by brute force if his will couldn't pierce the Lysanrin's horror.

Fighting in the Aetherium could be an exercise in futility when one was but a mortal man. Still, he was able to—in some cases, literally—poke holes in Rivin's nightmare assailants. Then, it was a matter of being close and believing harder than Rivin did. The actors of the Golden Peacock went on and on about working the imagination like a muscle, of being able to hold two realities at the same time—the one they created on the stage and the one they returned to after the curtains closed. It was much the same here.

Rivin may not have believed in Aurin as strongly as he feared his old tormentor and the myriad possibilities that haunted him, but Aurin could believe too that he was the Magus, wise and powerful, and then they were believing something together.

As the restraints began to melt, he reached out and the Lysanrin reached back. They clasped forearms and Aurin offered a proud, pleased smile as he pulled him off of the metal examination table and into his arms. Aurin was bigger here, stronger, sterner, and real. His arm around Rivin's naked shoulders was stronger than any shield of steel.

Then they were somewhere else. They were in Valencia's place, its reality anchored in her will, resistant to Rivin's fear.

"Here now," Aurin said, voice still stronger and more resonant than in life, but he was a hearth fire here rather than a flaming missile launched from a trebuchet. Even as he sat, he pulled Rivin into his lap like something young, something small. "You are my apprentice now, and you are safe."

Despite what he said about the unreality of safety, it was certainly more true here than it was almost anywhere else. The sadistic doctor could not reach them; not even Rivin's fears twisted into his visage could reach them here. Someone with great power would have to even know to look here to find them. Perhaps Valencia could feel Aurin's and the alien presence in her haven, but she was unlikely to investigate. She might ask him about it later.

In this pocket of the Aetherium, Aurin held Rivin, comforted him, giving him as much time as he needed to soothe himself, complete the ritual of initiation, and return to his body where the familiar face of Sivan would be waiting for him and his devil most likely safe on a leash.