Amaranthine

Nick had never seen the monster inside of him. He’d seen the monster he was, in the mirror. He’d heard people talk about the eye that emerged when he lost control. He could feel whatever it was, raging inside him, against a barrier he was told he had erected, but had no memory of doing so. Or how the fuck he’d done it.

As he shuffled through the veil that separated him from the dark cathedral in front of them, he reconsidered things. This place was desolate in a sense he hadn’t realized was possible. The energy of the Wave flowed in a coruscating river towards the entrance of the church, but besides his friends, everything, everything else, was black.

Normally, he had enough other sensory input that he’d always assumed other things accounted for his baseline perception of reality. He didn’t go around constantly bumping into things after all, he could ‘see’ a table or a wall in front of him. It was something he’d chalked up to vibration sense, or a kind of echolocation. Never mind that he didn’t make any clicks or noises that would suggest such a thing, those kinds of details tended to take a backseat to reality in the World of the Waves.

Now though, he realized he was wrong. He could hear his friends muttering, feel them moving around him, see their brilliant auras. But he couldn’t see anything else here.

This world, this place, this universe, was dead. Stripped wholesale of the underpinning energies that formed his perception of reality. His body’s instincts warred within him. Part of him insisted that by its very definition, someplace like this, bereft so entirely of the soul of reality, should not exist. Another, deeper part of him, part not wholly his own or contained within, felt satisfied.

Nick realized he wanted to scream. He didn’t let himself. He took a breath, hearing a slight whistle of panic leaving whatever passed for his airways. Instantly, Gwyn was at his side, laying a hand just behind his hat and stroking gently. He looked at her, sharp green lines of her aura sparking out in beautiful trails from her forehead, face set in concern.

“You okay babe? That’s your anxiety noise,” she said, and oddly, Nick immediately felt better. How long had it been, since someone knew him well enough to pick up on that? How long since someone who did had cared? Maybe never, for that last part.

-BLIND-, he said over comms, as the rest of the team turned to him. -AND NOT THE NORMAL KIND. I… I CAN UNDERSTAND THAT THIS PLACE EXISTS, BUT WHATEVER I USE TO PERCEIVE IT… WHAT I SEE IS JUST GONE.-

Surprisingly, Willow nodded, gossamer webs of her aura floating gently along the motion. “Mmm…” she said, as that aura did something Nick had never seen before. She directed it outwards, spider silk strands stretching to invisibility as she examined the world, before drawing in a sharp breath. “This place is without Animus Loci,” she said. “That should… well, as is becoming typical during my time with all of you, that simply shouldn’t be fucking possible.”

She punctuated her eureka moment with a resigned sigh, as was also becoming typical.

-OKAY?-

-WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN, AND WHY DOES IT MAKE ME BLIND?-

Willow shrugged, her aura expanding once more, diffuse this time, as she reached for something she’d never find. “My guess? Your ‘Altered Sense’ perceives the soul of a person, Altered as it is by the Waves. It stands to reason you’re also seeing the diffuse soul of the world itself, in the earth or the works of man upon it.”

-I CAN STILL SEE STAPLERS-, Nick said, to a confused laugh from Cait, but utter bewilderment from Willow. -AS IN, STAPLERS DON’T HAVE SOULS-

“Oh! Oh good, I was worried you’d lost your mind,” Willow said, visibly relieved. “We can save the in-depth Eschatology for later, and it is definitely a discussion you and I will be having in light of this conversation, but no, staplers do not have souls. But what they are made of does. Or did. It’s not an area of the field in which I’ve focused study, since the remnant of soulstuff in material removed from its source of Animus Loci is rarely enough to perform any kind of Animantic working upon, but it would be enough for you to see it, much in the same way I imagine you can still see corpses.”

-I CAN SEE CORPSES!- Nick said, thinking he was following the analogy. -FAIR ENOUGH. DON’T, UH, DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH HELP I’LL BE GOING IN BLIND THOUGH.-

“Ah, don’t worry Big B!” Cait said, comfortingly, walking over to throw him up on her shoulder just as she had during her first patrol. “When shit hits the fan, just flail those big grabbers of yours around and make sure not to hit any of us, you’ll still get one bastard or another, I guarantee it!”

The companionship and support was not unappreciated, but she needn’t have worried. The second Cait touched him, it was like someone had turned on the lights of reality. The blank stone of the Cathedral, the dead earth it sat upon, all of it was illuminated now, faintly suffused by the brilliant golden glow that blazed conatantly within Cait.

-WHAT THE FUCK-

-I CAN SEE NOW. PUT ME DOWN AGAIN.-

Confused, but amiable as always, Cait dumped him off of her shoulder. The instant he lost contact, the world went dark again, no remnant of her light remaining save that contained inside her.

-AAAAAND BACK UP?-

Cait swung him back up without so much as a grumble, and the world returned.

-HUH.-

“So, basically, what we’re finding here is that I’m the light of your life,” Cait said, very seriously, “your north star, the sun to your moon, your guiding light ev-mmph!”

Nick wrapped a thick tentacle all the way around her head, making sure she couldn’t get to any section thin enough to bite. He’d learned his lesson awhile ago on that, Cait did not care about the consequences of biting.

-WILLOW?-

-ANY INSIGHTS?-

The witch just shrugged helplessly, and Nick mirrored her sigh, albeit with a little more gurgle, as he released Cait’s head.

“Fah!” Cait blew out, like he’d actually at any point put anything in her mouth, but Nick could hear the smile in her voice as she spoke. “C’mon, my guy, this’ll be fun! Backpack up, we can do this Iron Spider style!”

Nick wrapped himself around her in a make shift harness, and flashed a thumbs up in front of her face.

“Okay!” Cait said, adjusting him slightly for comfort and facing the rest of the group. “Earth shattering revelations for anyone else? No? Then lets go beat some cultist ass.”

Nick extended a tentacle back, taking Gwyn’s hand as Cait pushed open the massive doors to the Cathedral.

It was…. underwhelming was the wrong word, but definitely unexpected. At first glance, it looked like it was a reverse TARDIS situation: much smaller on the inside. That was something of an illusion, however. Instead, it was just a tiny foyer, containing nothing but the door they’d come through, and three doors set into the far wall.

“Fuck me,” Cait complained, “I didn’t think we fought villians that did puzz—”

-ONE ON THE LEFT-, Nick interjected before she could whine any more. Of the three doors, only one was suffused with Cait’s glow, and therefore probably ‘real’. He didn’t know what that meant for the other two, but it seemed foolish to find out.

“Well okay then,” Cait resumed, but hesitated just before she touched the door. “Gwyn?” she asked, “Got any recon ‘bots with you?”

“Always,” Nick’s girlfriend muttered, and pulled up her tablet. The group gathered around, watching as her ‘bots slipped under the door into the next room.

They found another of these same rooms, then another, then another, and they were just about to assume they’d fallen into a Lost Woods style trap when Gwyn pulled out her tablet again to scout one last room.

This looked much more supervillian/cult lair appropriate. Surprisingly normal looking people milled about alongside robed individuals, some relaxing, others carrying out mundane tasks, all in a cavernous area that would have been at home as the first room in any Castlevania.

Gwyn flitted her drone around, and it quickly became clear that either The Council had simply been wrong about the scope of The Coven of the Fall, or these people had been shacked up in this weird, dead, otherworld for a long time. There were clear family units amongst the cultists, some kind of cafeteria, workshops, bedding areas, all set up in this space roughly the size of a city block.

Nick hissed when he saw a group of little cult kids, playing on a makeshift jungle gym. What was weirder still, is that this close, he could ‘see’ all these people. And a lot of their stuff. The faded outlines he got in the real world were here, on most things that didn’t look like they’d been original parts of the castle, and the people themselves varied like they did normally.

Well, not quite normally. There were the ghostly figures of normal people, occasional bursts of color and pattern signifying Altereds, but there was one more concerning variant. A sort of… anti-aura. Like the blackness of this place, this dead universe, had seeped into a mold in the shape of a person. Were it not for their movement, Nick might have pegged them for statues made of the same dead stone as the cathedral.

“Oh fuck,” Cait hissed, her distress pulling his attention back to Gwyn’s nano-display. The drone was focused squarely on a line of cages, maybe 10 in total, and only one was empty. Each one contained a dozen or more civilians, tired, weeping, bleeding and worse.