The girl was taken away, and Anmillaen let her be, schooling his face to stony concern and answering the inevitable deluge of questions that he had known would come. What had happened to her? He did not quite know. Who did it? A man that took off as soon as Anmillaen had appeared. When? He did not know how long the man had had her. Would she live? That was up the medicine man, now.
Some told him he was a hero, some told him he was lucky he was alive himself; to one and all, he offered little but grim acknowledgements and solemn thanks, letting his concern visibly linger on the doorway that Yerinia had disappeared through. It was through that same door that Abinon soon emerged, running up to Anmillaen and grabbing him by the shoulders. Something vaguely intelligible as a request to inform him came out in his drunken slur, and a calming hand from Anmillaen lit on his shoulder.
“I only know so much, Abinon,” he explained, locking his golden eyes with Abinon's. “I came too late to head him off entirely, but he looked as if he had no intention of leaving a body to find.” He let that sink in, squeezing down on Abinon's arm. “I did what I could. I pray that it was enough.”
Anmillaen paused for a moment, heaving a deep breath laden with regret. “I fear I will not be able to stay long enough to await her awakening,” he murmured, reaching into his belt pouch and producing a lead stick and a small parchment pad. “When she wakes, please send word to me. I would like to see her.” He finished his scribbling and tore the page off, handing it to Abinon and stowing the writing utensils.
After a short series of sedated, harried farewells, Anmillaen glided out the door and down the steps of the manor. Hearing the door close behind him, he took a glance to assure he was in the clear. The door was closed, the windows had their curtains drawn, the paths were empty, and a lattice archway that led to the gardens on the house's edge was invitingly shadowed. He ghosted into it, slipping around the corner and folding himself into the leafy corner in the foliage.
“Your turn,” he whispered.
“My turn,” he whispered back.
Anmillaen's left eye opened, silver glistening eerily in the darkness as if some light of its own life bubbled within. His iris swelled, those refractive fibers spindling out like dozens of tiny spider's legs, branching out over his sclera and perching on the socket of his eye. With one great heave, they lifted, and his eye slipped out of its socket. As it did, it burst up and left, right and down, angling across his forehead and down his cheek to split his face in two from the top left, across the bridge of his nose, and down the right side under his ear. The silver of the iris spread over that milky white, hardening to what looked like steel but felt like no other metallic in this world. It molded against his face, sealing down over the contours of his cheeks and jaw. From the open edge, a black mesh sprouted, crawling to cover the rest of his exposed face in a spiderweb of steely black veins. The steel half of the mask bore a blackened harlequin's smile that trailed off into the black webbig across from it, and the entirety of that silver was chased in finery that one would expect from a masquerade mask for an upscale ball. The eye somehow glowed without giving off any light, a deep pit of gold that felt for all the world like a cavern one could get lost in—or a pit one could fall into.
All the mask solidified, and from the edges at the sides of his face, he Changed. A darkened gray hood took over the back of his head, spraying itself down his back as a cloak of the same color draped over him. His body was clad in plain gray vestments, even his sword getting a darkening treatment as it was wrapped. The metallic hilt warped into what looked to be a branch of some sinister tree, the pommel growing a thorny-looking spike and the crossguard pointing out with the same. His boots curled up gently at the tip, the rounded brown leather of his boots blackening and narrowing to a pointed-up tip.
Wrapped in his cloak in the corner of that garden, Chaos breathed the first summer's breath he had felt in weeks. The entourage that Anmillaen needed to afford himself for the journey meant he had no time to himself, no time to slip away, and as such Chaos had been pent up in what felt like a pen of his partner's mind. Now, though, he had his freedom. Now, he had his purpose.
The fabric of his cloak seemed to grow into the wall, cloth becoming vine. Soon, he disappeared into it entirely, a shadow ghosting through the vines, around the house, and up. The vines ended, and a swarm of ants crawled up and out of it, slipping into the cracks of the mortar and up the grout lines. When he found the window in question, those black ants flashed clear, glass-like, and crawled onto the sill. Translucent and unseen, they crawled up the glass, into the woodwork, and through the channel, slipping into the room where the medicine man sat over Yerinia's bed.
Chaos watched, and waited. Ants became ink, a thin rivulet of black crawling up the ceiling and perching in the shadowy corner above the bed. More patience. And more. And then, finally, the doctor turned away from her for a moment.
A single drop of black ink dripped from the ceiling, landing in the gap between Yerinia's head and shoulder. It laced into her hair, down the fibers, then into her scalp.
Black touched her head, sank into her skin. Black became nothing.
“Ahhh, yes... The dreams.” Eyes opened in Yerinia's dreamscape, eyes in the sky, on the ground, wherever she turned. “I see this, I see you... I feel this. Your pain. Your pieces, they are scattered. You are broken, and for this I find you, to make you whole again, to teach you control over this body now that it has been broken down for you to reshape.” A hand reached out her from the Somewhere of her dreams, offering her a piece of stability in the roving labyrinth of her dreams. “You are young, and you are lost. But you are not Lost. You are Known, by me. Known not by those who would find you, but those who would Find you. Come..”
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