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31_days2006-05-23 01:16 pm
mythicbeast.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2006-05-23 01:16 pm
[May 22] [Original] The Birth of Flame
Title: The Birth of Flame
Day/Theme: May. 22. in the gate of broken seals
Series: Original [Illusion of Memory -- Valkyrie Profile IF]
Character/Pairing: Judas, Raeger
Rating: PG-13
Summary: While exploring the overgrown ruins of a lost jungle citadel, a young girl gets a little more adventure than she bargained for.
She squatted in the dust and traced the sigils with the tips of her nails, marveling, not for the first time, at the uniquely human ability to expend effort on the most utterly useless things. Raeger recognized the sigil's names, and the lines that connected them; dandelion to burdock, burdock to fox, fox to bear. It was protection of the oldest kind, chiseled painstakingly into stone by the hand of an artisan long-gone from this world.
The ruins were old; too old for any man to remember and too young for any text to care. It wasn't crumbling, not yet, though by all rights, it ought to have been. Sequestered as it was in the darkness of a damp, musty enclosure created by far too many trees planted in far too small a space, it was either divine benevolence or sheer devil's luck that the moss and fern hadn't crumbled the stone into dust. Then again, perhaps the ruins had been here before the trees had overgrown them.
Half-imbedded in the gnarled bark, fragments of ancient stones gave the trees the illusion of being frozen in the act of bursting from the cobbles, and their trunks rose in eerie unison from what might have once been, in better days, a glorious walkway. It was almost too easy to see what it might have been like, in the past, before the trees had run wild. It certainly would have made a very good picture. Perhaps its current state was a fitting punishment for the arrogance of its makers, if the stories she had heard of this place had any truth to them at all.
Raeger wasn't here, though, to contemplate the concept of nature reclaiming its due, fascinating as it might be. She was far more interested in what remained of those who'd looked at the expanse of fern and forest as a challenge, and chosen to defy it. She let her fingers linger on the concentric grooves in the floor for one last moment before she rose to her feet, dusting her hands off briskly on the front of her novice robe.
"Magic seals," she said, satisfied that her assessment from the papers alone had been correct. "Third-level stuff. Pretty strong for the state this place is in, too." Raeger spoke aloud more for the comfort of hearing a human voice than to reconfirm what she'd already known, and to hell with looking like a lunatic. It wasn't as though there was anyone around to gawk at her, anyway, and shouldn't she be allowed her little indulgences, if it helped her keep that extra bit of level-headedness that might be the difference between her life and death? You never knew what you might find in places like this.
In truth, that element of uncertainty was what Raeger was relying on to make this venture count.
She'd scoured the ruins from top to bottom over the course of two days, and this was the only place she'd found a single trace of protective measures. There had been stone shelves in other rooms, but their contents had long decayed, or vanished -- or been moved elsewhere. While Raeger might not have been the most adept of history students, she understood the precise sort of mentality that would rather die than see its lifetime's work destroyed. She didn't mind those kinds of people, since it made it easier to recover intact artifacts, which were the only things that interested her about ruins, anyway: the stories they had to tell her.
The only minor setback was, of course, the measures such people were quite happy to go to in order to protect their prized possessions. Raeger had come close to losing limbs on more than the occasional intrepid exploration, and experience had brought with it a degree of wariness for the unknown. This place had been a magician's haven, once. It would not give its secrets up so easily, not even to the pervasive undergrowth.
Stretching to ease a kink in her back, Raeger looked around wryly. The spells here had been cast sloppily; plain as it was, the room would have been unremarkable in a functioning house, little more than a roofed passage from one section of the compound to the next.
This very bareness now distinguished it from the rest of the ruin: it was the only place where the vegetation hadn't encroached, and roots and vines grew up around it in a semi-circular fashion, held away by an invisible barrier. Not too subtle, that. Still, it was hardly Raeger's problem, and with the original owners long gone and unlikely to return for their possessions, it wasn't as though the barrier's obviousness to would-be thieves was a particularly concerning issue. She'd simply have to be grateful that the spell had kept the artifacts here in good condition; it meant that she'd be able to get in and out of here in an instant, relics in tow, without having to worry about them being fragile enough to crumble at a touch.
If she was lucky, there'd be texts too, along with the trinkets she'd been sent to retrieve, but the likeliness of that wasn't something she cared to bet on. Magicians didn't like to write their knowledge for just anyone to pick up. If there was anything inside to read, it wouldn't be in plain sight. Twirling a lock of hair around one finger in irritation, Raeger sighed. Well, she wasn't getting anything done just dithering around here. It was time to try her luck at opening the door.
Raeger's magical focus of choice wasn't a rod or a staff, both of which she considered to be far too obvious declarations of her occupation for other pedestrians, casual or otherwise. Instead, she favored the use of an artifact she'd come by as a birthday present -- a chunk of stone and gold fashioned into the likeness of a blue rose, small enough to hang from a slim gold chain she kept hidden underneath her shirt. She fished the chain and its pendant out with the crook of her little finger, then knelt in the dust again, the rose clasped in one cupped palm. The other hand rested on a sigil at the edge of the main seal, a particularly aggressive-looking mark made up mostly of sharp points and fanglike serifs.
The magic was, as always, right beside her the moment she closed her eyes. Her master had told her to think of magic as a well from which she could draw power from, deep but not bottomless, but she'd always thought of hers as a tree whose fruit she simply had to reach up... and pluck. The more delectable the fruit, the higher it was, and the greater she had to strain for it. Still, she didn't think she'd need much for this first probe into the seal's defenses, so she nicked a fraction of magic from one of the 'tree's' lower branches before dropping back into her own body.
She could feel the power she'd drawn pooling lazily in the rose, ready to flare to life at her command. She let her eyes flicker open to judge the sigil's position again, keeping the magic firmly in hand.
Satisfied with her judgement, Raeger closed her eyes, then opened them again, and barked a single word, a gutteral vocalization of whipcrack consonants.
The seal's backlash nearly sent her flying into the opposite wall, and she reeled back, catching herself from an ungainly sprawl with the heel of the hand that had rested on the sigil. The marks in the stone glowered at her sullenly, as though affronted.
"Okay," she panted, the heat of the spell causing her to sweat even as it dissipated in the air. The rose had reabsorbed most of the magic that had rebounded, and it crackled with static, prompting her to let it fall from her hand and thump dully against her chest. "Let's... try something else."
Beyond the glassless windows, a shadow stirred in the leaves.
It took her three days to work around the seal's many nested traps. Whoever had designed the thing was a sadist she decided, in the worst sense. She'd been shocked, soaked, and at one point, very nearly skewered as she worked through the seal's locks with trial and error. In the end, either her determination or the seal's age won out. It quite literally broke underneath her hands, and she had to backpedal nearly to the wall to avoid falling into the enormous pit that yawned open beneath her, releasing a cloud of spinning motes as centuries-old dust met fresh air.
The seal's protection had extended underground, as far as she could see, and there were tightly-wound networks of tree roots visible where the barrier had hampered their progress. There was a flight of solid-looking stairs that led down into the gloom; it was too deep for her to see the bottom, or even an inkling of a bottom, in the dull afternoon light. Still, she judged that there was enough time for her to take a quick look around before true night descended, and it would be a good idea to descend now and take note of which parts of the atelier ought to be prioritized in the morning.
There were, of course, equally persuasive reasons not to go down into the darkness, but then, Raeger wasn't nearly as interested in listing those, and so they remained steadfastly ignored as she began her descent.
It was easy enough to keep her balance on the steps, even without the aid of a convenient handrail on either side; the stone was hewn into large, solid blocks whose surfaces were rough enough to keep her from sliding off. Once the natural light had grown too distant to see by, Raeger hesitated, then sat down on the stairs to rummage through her knapsack for a lantern, tinder, and flint. The atelier looked fairly innocent so far, but if she ran into any more seals like the one that had kept this passage shut, she might as well conserve her magic for later. She knew enough about magical ability to understand that the atelier's seal had been something that mages two classes below her could have broken in a day.
Luckily for her, the little snots were far too pretentious to be caught traipsing around in the big ucky jungle, which meant that search-and-retrieve missions like this generally fell to her lot. Her advantage over the other mages, if not in sheer ability, was her cheerful willingness to go into areas even the junior classmen considered beneath them. It mattered little if it damaged her dignity; so long as it kept her research funds stable, Raeger would have jumped off the world's edge to conduct an interview with the Midgard Serpent itself.
Besides, it was a free ticket to see ruins firsthand. Flenceburg Academy cared little for artifacts and history that did not pertain directly to magical theory. Raeger considered the patchwork histories she'd scavenged out of numerous archaeological jaunts to be payment enough. Stories were, after all, all that really mattered: it was the only thing of substance which people ever left behind.
Raeger pointedly ignored the coldness that enveloped her as she plunged further and further down. The drop in temperature, after all, could only be a natural result of the drop in altitude.
Nothing unusual about it at all.
She reached the bottom of the cistern eventually, the central chamber small enough for her lantern to illuminate comfortably. Patches of deep shadow to the left and immediate front indicated passageways into other rooms. The light glinted off of what appeared to be an alchemical setup frozen mid-experiment, and it took Raeger another pass of the lantern to realize what felt so unsettling about the tableau. It wasn't just the liquid and the pipes that had been trapped by dust and time, but even the researcher himself had been caught up, the mummified corpse still spreading the pages of a book open with one hand and clutching a vial whose contents had long evaporated in the other. His empty eye sockets would forever be measuring the correct ratio of quicksilver to myrrh.
The cold feeling deepened, and Raeger sketched a quick bow of respect for the magician who had died in the pursuit of his research. She was, after all, technically invading his property. Fortunately, he didn't look like he'd been murdered -- perhaps he'd simply gone underground to complete an experiment and just hadn't ... come up again.
Or perhaps he'd been sealed in. A shudder raked her from head to toe at the thought, and she wished she could banish it now that she'd come up with it. The idea of being buried here with Mr. Happybones was an idea about as appetizing as raking her eyes out of her head with a fork, and she reflexively cast her eyes skywards. The atelier's entrance was too far now to judge whether it was open or not, and enough time had passed so that it was probably already dark outside.
She pushed away thoughts of traps and seals to devote her attention to searching for artifacts.
The sooner she managed to work out whether there was anything here worth keeping, the sooner she could return to the surface.
If she could return to the surface.
Searching for a distraction from her increasingly morbid thoughts, Raeger shuffled quickly into the lefthand room, raising her lamp to cast light on the objects within. Everything here had obviously been meticulously kept.
As she'd thought, there wasn't much in the way of textual material, but there was plenty of the sort of treasure that the academy would find rather interesting. Despite the thick layers of dust that coated everything, tell-tale metallic shimmers still glinted promisingly from corners, and she stepped towards a table to examine its contents, setting her lamp down on its edge. Eventually, she settled on a ruby-studded silver cup, picking it up with the intent of giving it a quick burnish.
The moment her fingers touched it, she knew she'd made a mistake.
The warmth of magic swelled down to her palms, to the tips of her fingers. Then it was was more than warmth; it was fire, hot and relentless, searing her veins from the inside out as it ate through flesh and bone and sinew. Her hand spasmed with the pain, and the silver cup fell from her nerveless fingers, twinkling in an almost balefully amused way before it clattered to the ground.
Distantly, she thought she could hear someone shrieking. After a moment of struggling to focus her hazy, detached thoughts, she realized the sound was coming from her own throat.
It hurt so much.
Pain threaded relentlessly throughout her body, but the incessant thrumming of her skull was nothing to the shrieking pulse in her right hand, whose every nerve felt wrapped in flame. It wasn't actually on fire, she could discern that much, but her eyes were squinched nearly shut with agony, and the sensation of overwhelming heat felt real enough. Her fingers, she could see, glowed with a ghoulish red light, like wakened embers. Raeger almost expected to hear her flesh blistering and puckering before her, the scent of charred flesh filling the air as the supernatural flame crept down her arm to the rest of her body.
She couldn't stop screaming, any more than she could stop breathing, but it was some small relief that she wasn't staggering around like a lunatic, as her sister had once done after a tiny pinprick from the needle slipping in the middle of her dainty embroidering. She'd certainly kicked up a scene about that, and Raeger was grimly pleased that she wasn't acting even half as infantile, but she did think, hazily, that she might well be drawing someone's unwanted attention with her shouts. After a moment, she shrugged the matter off without a second thought -- forcing herself to keep this degree of anguish inside her would probably make her implode, and goodness knew--
Raeger was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that when a cool hand clamped around her wrist, abruptly shutting off the sensation of being burned alive, her shrieks continued for a few more moments before she ran out of breath, and sputtered to a stop.
She felt the unmistakeable sensation of eyes raking over her critically, and despite her best efforts to will her body otherwise, Raeger felt herself, undeniably, blushing an appalling beet-red.
"Little girls," snapped a cool voice, contempt harsh in every syllable, "Should know better than to play games in places like this."
She looked up with the strong desire to tell whoever it was that was speaking that he could shove his friendly advice right back up where it came from, he wasn't the one practically retching with magical burnout, but somehow, the sight of her accoster stopped her very nearly dead.
A strange man, not much older than she was, glared at her with slightly canted eyes set into a pale face that, she guessed, would be handsome -- if it wasn't twisted in disdain, and framed by lank hair that looked like it had seen better days. Her hand, barely visible past the one that gripped her arm now, still smoldered with the fine, intricate tracings that echoed the designs on the goblet on the floor, but she noted that everywhere else, the fire-red lines were beginning to dissipate from her skin, taking the pain with them. The sensation left her feeling curiously empty, and she sagged.
Raeger saw the man's eyes widen a fraction of a second before her knees buckled and she toppled forward. An arm clad in black leather arrested her fall, and she felt it hook firmly around her waist as she draped across it limply. The sharp impact to her abdomen, in the end, proved too much for her fragile stomach to bear, and with little grace, she threw up in thoroughly spectacular fashion -- all over her purported rescuer's coat, no less.
That was all she remembered before she fainted: that, and the sound of someone cursing.
* A/N: Written purely for the sake of writing about the sensation of casting magic. That is, really, all. Possibly influenced by Full Metal Alchemist in a sense, because shiz, I'd love to have some of the arrays on that show tattoed onto my back, yo.
* This is also known as the fic which proves why I should stay away from writing fantasy mechanics, like, for the rest of my lifetime. The end.
* And yes, this is probably all I'll ever write in this AU. XD
* Approx. 3000 words, this is the longest thing I've written in, well, a while. :P It's quite repetitive though. If parts seem disjointed from others, it's because I wrote them weeks apart.
* There are no words for how much I love the original quote source for this prompt, you know.
Day/Theme: May. 22. in the gate of broken seals
Series: Original [Illusion of Memory -- Valkyrie Profile IF]
Character/Pairing: Judas, Raeger
Rating: PG-13
Summary: While exploring the overgrown ruins of a lost jungle citadel, a young girl gets a little more adventure than she bargained for.
She squatted in the dust and traced the sigils with the tips of her nails, marveling, not for the first time, at the uniquely human ability to expend effort on the most utterly useless things. Raeger recognized the sigil's names, and the lines that connected them; dandelion to burdock, burdock to fox, fox to bear. It was protection of the oldest kind, chiseled painstakingly into stone by the hand of an artisan long-gone from this world.
The ruins were old; too old for any man to remember and too young for any text to care. It wasn't crumbling, not yet, though by all rights, it ought to have been. Sequestered as it was in the darkness of a damp, musty enclosure created by far too many trees planted in far too small a space, it was either divine benevolence or sheer devil's luck that the moss and fern hadn't crumbled the stone into dust. Then again, perhaps the ruins had been here before the trees had overgrown them.
Half-imbedded in the gnarled bark, fragments of ancient stones gave the trees the illusion of being frozen in the act of bursting from the cobbles, and their trunks rose in eerie unison from what might have once been, in better days, a glorious walkway. It was almost too easy to see what it might have been like, in the past, before the trees had run wild. It certainly would have made a very good picture. Perhaps its current state was a fitting punishment for the arrogance of its makers, if the stories she had heard of this place had any truth to them at all.
Raeger wasn't here, though, to contemplate the concept of nature reclaiming its due, fascinating as it might be. She was far more interested in what remained of those who'd looked at the expanse of fern and forest as a challenge, and chosen to defy it. She let her fingers linger on the concentric grooves in the floor for one last moment before she rose to her feet, dusting her hands off briskly on the front of her novice robe.
"Magic seals," she said, satisfied that her assessment from the papers alone had been correct. "Third-level stuff. Pretty strong for the state this place is in, too." Raeger spoke aloud more for the comfort of hearing a human voice than to reconfirm what she'd already known, and to hell with looking like a lunatic. It wasn't as though there was anyone around to gawk at her, anyway, and shouldn't she be allowed her little indulgences, if it helped her keep that extra bit of level-headedness that might be the difference between her life and death? You never knew what you might find in places like this.
In truth, that element of uncertainty was what Raeger was relying on to make this venture count.
She'd scoured the ruins from top to bottom over the course of two days, and this was the only place she'd found a single trace of protective measures. There had been stone shelves in other rooms, but their contents had long decayed, or vanished -- or been moved elsewhere. While Raeger might not have been the most adept of history students, she understood the precise sort of mentality that would rather die than see its lifetime's work destroyed. She didn't mind those kinds of people, since it made it easier to recover intact artifacts, which were the only things that interested her about ruins, anyway: the stories they had to tell her.
The only minor setback was, of course, the measures such people were quite happy to go to in order to protect their prized possessions. Raeger had come close to losing limbs on more than the occasional intrepid exploration, and experience had brought with it a degree of wariness for the unknown. This place had been a magician's haven, once. It would not give its secrets up so easily, not even to the pervasive undergrowth.
Stretching to ease a kink in her back, Raeger looked around wryly. The spells here had been cast sloppily; plain as it was, the room would have been unremarkable in a functioning house, little more than a roofed passage from one section of the compound to the next.
This very bareness now distinguished it from the rest of the ruin: it was the only place where the vegetation hadn't encroached, and roots and vines grew up around it in a semi-circular fashion, held away by an invisible barrier. Not too subtle, that. Still, it was hardly Raeger's problem, and with the original owners long gone and unlikely to return for their possessions, it wasn't as though the barrier's obviousness to would-be thieves was a particularly concerning issue. She'd simply have to be grateful that the spell had kept the artifacts here in good condition; it meant that she'd be able to get in and out of here in an instant, relics in tow, without having to worry about them being fragile enough to crumble at a touch.
If she was lucky, there'd be texts too, along with the trinkets she'd been sent to retrieve, but the likeliness of that wasn't something she cared to bet on. Magicians didn't like to write their knowledge for just anyone to pick up. If there was anything inside to read, it wouldn't be in plain sight. Twirling a lock of hair around one finger in irritation, Raeger sighed. Well, she wasn't getting anything done just dithering around here. It was time to try her luck at opening the door.
Raeger's magical focus of choice wasn't a rod or a staff, both of which she considered to be far too obvious declarations of her occupation for other pedestrians, casual or otherwise. Instead, she favored the use of an artifact she'd come by as a birthday present -- a chunk of stone and gold fashioned into the likeness of a blue rose, small enough to hang from a slim gold chain she kept hidden underneath her shirt. She fished the chain and its pendant out with the crook of her little finger, then knelt in the dust again, the rose clasped in one cupped palm. The other hand rested on a sigil at the edge of the main seal, a particularly aggressive-looking mark made up mostly of sharp points and fanglike serifs.
The magic was, as always, right beside her the moment she closed her eyes. Her master had told her to think of magic as a well from which she could draw power from, deep but not bottomless, but she'd always thought of hers as a tree whose fruit she simply had to reach up... and pluck. The more delectable the fruit, the higher it was, and the greater she had to strain for it. Still, she didn't think she'd need much for this first probe into the seal's defenses, so she nicked a fraction of magic from one of the 'tree's' lower branches before dropping back into her own body.
She could feel the power she'd drawn pooling lazily in the rose, ready to flare to life at her command. She let her eyes flicker open to judge the sigil's position again, keeping the magic firmly in hand.
Satisfied with her judgement, Raeger closed her eyes, then opened them again, and barked a single word, a gutteral vocalization of whipcrack consonants.
The seal's backlash nearly sent her flying into the opposite wall, and she reeled back, catching herself from an ungainly sprawl with the heel of the hand that had rested on the sigil. The marks in the stone glowered at her sullenly, as though affronted.
"Okay," she panted, the heat of the spell causing her to sweat even as it dissipated in the air. The rose had reabsorbed most of the magic that had rebounded, and it crackled with static, prompting her to let it fall from her hand and thump dully against her chest. "Let's... try something else."
Beyond the glassless windows, a shadow stirred in the leaves.
It took her three days to work around the seal's many nested traps. Whoever had designed the thing was a sadist she decided, in the worst sense. She'd been shocked, soaked, and at one point, very nearly skewered as she worked through the seal's locks with trial and error. In the end, either her determination or the seal's age won out. It quite literally broke underneath her hands, and she had to backpedal nearly to the wall to avoid falling into the enormous pit that yawned open beneath her, releasing a cloud of spinning motes as centuries-old dust met fresh air.
The seal's protection had extended underground, as far as she could see, and there were tightly-wound networks of tree roots visible where the barrier had hampered their progress. There was a flight of solid-looking stairs that led down into the gloom; it was too deep for her to see the bottom, or even an inkling of a bottom, in the dull afternoon light. Still, she judged that there was enough time for her to take a quick look around before true night descended, and it would be a good idea to descend now and take note of which parts of the atelier ought to be prioritized in the morning.
There were, of course, equally persuasive reasons not to go down into the darkness, but then, Raeger wasn't nearly as interested in listing those, and so they remained steadfastly ignored as she began her descent.
It was easy enough to keep her balance on the steps, even without the aid of a convenient handrail on either side; the stone was hewn into large, solid blocks whose surfaces were rough enough to keep her from sliding off. Once the natural light had grown too distant to see by, Raeger hesitated, then sat down on the stairs to rummage through her knapsack for a lantern, tinder, and flint. The atelier looked fairly innocent so far, but if she ran into any more seals like the one that had kept this passage shut, she might as well conserve her magic for later. She knew enough about magical ability to understand that the atelier's seal had been something that mages two classes below her could have broken in a day.
Luckily for her, the little snots were far too pretentious to be caught traipsing around in the big ucky jungle, which meant that search-and-retrieve missions like this generally fell to her lot. Her advantage over the other mages, if not in sheer ability, was her cheerful willingness to go into areas even the junior classmen considered beneath them. It mattered little if it damaged her dignity; so long as it kept her research funds stable, Raeger would have jumped off the world's edge to conduct an interview with the Midgard Serpent itself.
Besides, it was a free ticket to see ruins firsthand. Flenceburg Academy cared little for artifacts and history that did not pertain directly to magical theory. Raeger considered the patchwork histories she'd scavenged out of numerous archaeological jaunts to be payment enough. Stories were, after all, all that really mattered: it was the only thing of substance which people ever left behind.
Raeger pointedly ignored the coldness that enveloped her as she plunged further and further down. The drop in temperature, after all, could only be a natural result of the drop in altitude.
Nothing unusual about it at all.
She reached the bottom of the cistern eventually, the central chamber small enough for her lantern to illuminate comfortably. Patches of deep shadow to the left and immediate front indicated passageways into other rooms. The light glinted off of what appeared to be an alchemical setup frozen mid-experiment, and it took Raeger another pass of the lantern to realize what felt so unsettling about the tableau. It wasn't just the liquid and the pipes that had been trapped by dust and time, but even the researcher himself had been caught up, the mummified corpse still spreading the pages of a book open with one hand and clutching a vial whose contents had long evaporated in the other. His empty eye sockets would forever be measuring the correct ratio of quicksilver to myrrh.
The cold feeling deepened, and Raeger sketched a quick bow of respect for the magician who had died in the pursuit of his research. She was, after all, technically invading his property. Fortunately, he didn't look like he'd been murdered -- perhaps he'd simply gone underground to complete an experiment and just hadn't ... come up again.
Or perhaps he'd been sealed in. A shudder raked her from head to toe at the thought, and she wished she could banish it now that she'd come up with it. The idea of being buried here with Mr. Happybones was an idea about as appetizing as raking her eyes out of her head with a fork, and she reflexively cast her eyes skywards. The atelier's entrance was too far now to judge whether it was open or not, and enough time had passed so that it was probably already dark outside.
She pushed away thoughts of traps and seals to devote her attention to searching for artifacts.
The sooner she managed to work out whether there was anything here worth keeping, the sooner she could return to the surface.
If she could return to the surface.
Searching for a distraction from her increasingly morbid thoughts, Raeger shuffled quickly into the lefthand room, raising her lamp to cast light on the objects within. Everything here had obviously been meticulously kept.
As she'd thought, there wasn't much in the way of textual material, but there was plenty of the sort of treasure that the academy would find rather interesting. Despite the thick layers of dust that coated everything, tell-tale metallic shimmers still glinted promisingly from corners, and she stepped towards a table to examine its contents, setting her lamp down on its edge. Eventually, she settled on a ruby-studded silver cup, picking it up with the intent of giving it a quick burnish.
The moment her fingers touched it, she knew she'd made a mistake.
The warmth of magic swelled down to her palms, to the tips of her fingers. Then it was was more than warmth; it was fire, hot and relentless, searing her veins from the inside out as it ate through flesh and bone and sinew. Her hand spasmed with the pain, and the silver cup fell from her nerveless fingers, twinkling in an almost balefully amused way before it clattered to the ground.
Distantly, she thought she could hear someone shrieking. After a moment of struggling to focus her hazy, detached thoughts, she realized the sound was coming from her own throat.
It hurt so much.
Pain threaded relentlessly throughout her body, but the incessant thrumming of her skull was nothing to the shrieking pulse in her right hand, whose every nerve felt wrapped in flame. It wasn't actually on fire, she could discern that much, but her eyes were squinched nearly shut with agony, and the sensation of overwhelming heat felt real enough. Her fingers, she could see, glowed with a ghoulish red light, like wakened embers. Raeger almost expected to hear her flesh blistering and puckering before her, the scent of charred flesh filling the air as the supernatural flame crept down her arm to the rest of her body.
She couldn't stop screaming, any more than she could stop breathing, but it was some small relief that she wasn't staggering around like a lunatic, as her sister had once done after a tiny pinprick from the needle slipping in the middle of her dainty embroidering. She'd certainly kicked up a scene about that, and Raeger was grimly pleased that she wasn't acting even half as infantile, but she did think, hazily, that she might well be drawing someone's unwanted attention with her shouts. After a moment, she shrugged the matter off without a second thought -- forcing herself to keep this degree of anguish inside her would probably make her implode, and goodness knew--
Raeger was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that when a cool hand clamped around her wrist, abruptly shutting off the sensation of being burned alive, her shrieks continued for a few more moments before she ran out of breath, and sputtered to a stop.
She felt the unmistakeable sensation of eyes raking over her critically, and despite her best efforts to will her body otherwise, Raeger felt herself, undeniably, blushing an appalling beet-red.
"Little girls," snapped a cool voice, contempt harsh in every syllable, "Should know better than to play games in places like this."
She looked up with the strong desire to tell whoever it was that was speaking that he could shove his friendly advice right back up where it came from, he wasn't the one practically retching with magical burnout, but somehow, the sight of her accoster stopped her very nearly dead.
A strange man, not much older than she was, glared at her with slightly canted eyes set into a pale face that, she guessed, would be handsome -- if it wasn't twisted in disdain, and framed by lank hair that looked like it had seen better days. Her hand, barely visible past the one that gripped her arm now, still smoldered with the fine, intricate tracings that echoed the designs on the goblet on the floor, but she noted that everywhere else, the fire-red lines were beginning to dissipate from her skin, taking the pain with them. The sensation left her feeling curiously empty, and she sagged.
Raeger saw the man's eyes widen a fraction of a second before her knees buckled and she toppled forward. An arm clad in black leather arrested her fall, and she felt it hook firmly around her waist as she draped across it limply. The sharp impact to her abdomen, in the end, proved too much for her fragile stomach to bear, and with little grace, she threw up in thoroughly spectacular fashion -- all over her purported rescuer's coat, no less.
That was all she remembered before she fainted: that, and the sound of someone cursing.
* A/N: Written purely for the sake of writing about the sensation of casting magic. That is, really, all. Possibly influenced by Full Metal Alchemist in a sense, because shiz, I'd love to have some of the arrays on that show tattoed onto my back, yo.
* This is also known as the fic which proves why I should stay away from writing fantasy mechanics, like, for the rest of my lifetime. The end.
* And yes, this is probably all I'll ever write in this AU. XD
* Approx. 3000 words, this is the longest thing I've written in, well, a while. :P It's quite repetitive though. If parts seem disjointed from others, it's because I wrote them weeks apart.
* There are no words for how much I love the original quote source for this prompt, you know.