Even Astarion's whip-quick senses can't keep time well enough to track it. He was— gods, his head hurts. His hand is worse, pinned under him and threatening to split itself in half from jagged pain too unfamiliar to make sense to a set of nerves already at their limit. And his first thought is— Cazador. Cazador, because it has to be. No one else brings his world screaming to its knees like this but him. No one else would've torn him from the nightmare of oily wet eyes and squirming tentacles behind a film of keratinous glass just to make a point. No one else would've come for him.
And no one else would make him pay.
Only it isn't.
It isn't....?
His fist (next) blink is stuttering. It aches against the smear of ruddy crimson blotting along the dull edge of his vision, but with it, he sees a sickly blaze of burn-bright green swimming hotly overhead: tearing the landscape— or the sky— right along its middle. Dividing it in the way a portal ought to, but there's nothing here worth recognizing: that arcane outline smells as wrong as it looks. And— ]
—oh, hells.
[What are those things? What are those things? The abhorrent roiling masses lurching just nearby— one of them seeming to notice (he can't tell, it has too few or too many eyes but) enough of a rotted face to make its twist in his direction feel about as deliberate as his own breathless gawking back.
His own—
Fuck— wait— oh, fuck—
(Another flicker of movement. Another glimpse of garnered attention now that he's not painting the image of something dead, most like, no matter how stock-still he's gone on pure reflex alone. Forgetting air again. Forgetting sight. Forgetting pain. The soft twitch of his uninjured hand trying desperately to crawl down slow towards his hip despite the tremor that upsets its path.
The counterweight that is his mind only catching up a full second later when it finally urges: dagger.)
no subject
Even Astarion's whip-quick senses can't keep time well enough to track it. He was— gods, his head hurts. His hand is worse, pinned under him and threatening to split itself in half from jagged pain too unfamiliar to make sense to a set of nerves already at their limit. And his first thought is— Cazador. Cazador, because it has to be. No one else brings his world screaming to its knees like this but him. No one else would've torn him from the nightmare of oily wet eyes and squirming tentacles behind a film of keratinous glass just to make a point. No one else would've come for him.
And no one else would make him pay.
Only it isn't.
It isn't....?
His fist (next) blink is stuttering. It aches against the smear of ruddy crimson blotting along the dull edge of his vision, but with it, he sees a sickly blaze of burn-bright green swimming hotly overhead: tearing the landscape— or the sky— right along its middle. Dividing it in the way a portal ought to, but there's nothing here worth recognizing: that arcane outline smells as wrong as it looks. And— ]
—oh, hells.
[What are those things? What are those things? The abhorrent roiling masses lurching just nearby— one of them seeming to notice (he can't tell, it has too few or too many eyes but) enough of a rotted face to make its twist in his direction feel about as deliberate as his own breathless gawking back.
His own—
Fuck— wait— oh, fuck—
(Another flicker of movement. Another glimpse of garnered attention now that he's not painting the image of something dead, most like, no matter how stock-still he's gone on pure reflex alone. Forgetting air again. Forgetting sight. Forgetting pain. The soft twitch of his uninjured hand trying desperately to crawl down slow towards his hip despite the tremor that upsets its path.
The counterweight that is his mind only catching up a full second later when it finally urges: dagger.)
Dagger dagger dagger dagger dagger dagger, Astarion— quickly— ]