[log] Imaginary Time [open]

[snowblindmods]

Characters: anyone
Location: in dreams
Date: nighttime during the event
Summary: A place to post your character's dreams.
Warnings: general horror warnings; please include more specific warnings in subject lines as necessary!

Comments

cw: death, blood, child death

[bywolves]

The wind blows icy and cold through his hair, ripples the ragged edge of his cloak sharply - the sound is what gets him to start moving. He couldn't, for a good while. He just stood still, staring at the wreckage around him. This used to be New Percepliquis. Used to be.

Now it's rubble, ashes - half-rotting corpses and collapsed buildings. The middle of town, where the fountain once stood, the center point between the schools of magic and combat - it's shattered, devoid of water and barely recognizable, just like the buildings it had been surrounded by. There's nothing. There's nothing left but a flag stabbed into the stone, the emblem of Ferrol, god of elves, stamped proudly on the fabric.

Modina, Arista, Myron, Mauvin, Allie. Hadrian. Hadrian. They're dead. All dead.

At first he thinks maybe Norfinbury's effect is still on him. He's numbed out, icy, unable to comprehend. But he knows what happened, it just takes a while for his emotion to catch up. And when he just slowly sinks down to the ground, in the middle of the ash and cracked cobblestone of the destroyed courtyard of the palace, it really hits him. Suddenly, Royce can't breathe. He wheezes, curled up, letting it kick the wind out of him - the elves took over. They did what they came to do, and they didn't have Royce to stop them.

His mind blanks out when he pictures Mercy. He can't. The image nearly kills him right where he sits. Royce can't think about his daughter, with her long curls and almond-shaped eyes (like Gwen, just like her mother) can't think about Mercy in her bed in the palace in Estramnadon, with a sword through her chest. There was too much blood for him to remember. All of this is too much.

The elves chased him out of Erivan. He does remember that. They chased him all the way here and then - he thinks... he thinks he lost them. Not for long. They'll come look for him again. They can't have the king be alive. They'll chase him.

Royce has nothing left. The world has nothing left. And honestly? Royce doesn't see the point in trying to fight for a world that doesn't want him. A world that has nothing left for him to protect.

He sits. He sits in the remains of the fountain, and waits. No food, no water, nothing, not until the elves find him, on their brilliant white steeds, spears at the ready.

"It's good to see you again, your majesty," one of the elves says, a sneer in his voice. The other elf laughs. Royce just looks up at them.

He doesn't have anything to say, he thinks as the spear in the elf's hand rises; he doesn't want to speak his last words to them anyway.