Private The Price I'd Pay

[Noelle Varanin]

Summoning the dead was unnatural.

Resurrecting them, even moreso.​

Noelle knew the path her family was walking down was a dangerous one. She did not bask in the sacrifices she had made to be in this cave, but she did not shy away from them either. It was all just another step-- tiny in the grand scale of what she would do to protect those she loved. One mother dead, the other... indebted. The answers she sought would not come from this world.

So she would reach beyond it.

Candles sparked to life, illuminating the damp, rough walls. A wave of her hand opened the chest at her side, a bloody organ floating up and thumping into a metal bowl. It still glistened.

She kneeled before it, unclasping a necklace at her throat. The caged stone pulsed ever so faintly, responding to her touch as she laid it besides the heart. She took a deep breath in... and started to chant.

Fire consumed the two objects. Darkmagic twisted and grew around her, dancing to the beat of her words as she spoke in twisted tongues. Darkness grew from the flame's shadows. Fevered whispers crept out of them... turning in to screams... She tried to contain it. It resisted, the power whiplashing viciously against her. She cried out, her back arching, not letting the chant falter as she projected it to the ceiling. She was doing this wrong. She knew it. She just-

Blood vessels popped along her eyes. Blood gurgled up her throat, nearly breaking the chant. She fell braced over the bowl, letting the dark liquid slide past her lips as she kept up the desperate murmur.
She knew... Acceptance washed over her.

She closed her eyes and released the struggle, surrendered herself to the darkness. It surged forward, encasing its willing vessel.

The resistance melted away at once, relief blossoming into strength that steadied her limbs. Her ragged breaths grew easy, the strength entering her chant as she projected her voice over the cacophony of the shadows.

From the void, the Netherworld crystalized. Blood slid down her face. Her nose. Her eyes. And she kept on chanting.

"Mother. I. Summon. You."​

Kal

 

[Kal]

The Netherworld was a vast and tumultuous dimension, stable realms and ever-shifting pockets woven together by changeable borders and a twisting network of paths and shortcuts incomprehensible to most mortal minds. Kal was no mortal, however, not truly; with a foot in realspace and another in the realm of dead men and strange spirits, he had certain unique advantages - among them, unusual ways of travel.

Most days passage was smooth, the predators of that world paying him no heed, but then most days he was not the target of a summoning.

Grabbing ahold of the ephemeral stuff that composed his surroundings even as he realised the futility of that act, he was violently pulled elsewhere.

In a decidedly more solid place, a cave of some sort whose lights flickered and dimmed as shadows condensed and sparks of luminous white burst forth from nothingness, stood a decidedly more solid being. A lithe girl with hair like newly-fallen snow and eyes crying tears of blood.

For the briefest of moments, a nascent presence could be construed to be the being she had sought, if in the right state of mind, but hope doubtlessly waned as the figure condensed into something less than feminine: the shadowy silhouette of a lean man with eyes like luminescent pearls.

"Who are you?"

Noelle Varanin​

 

[Noelle Varanin]

Tears mixed with blood as Noelle watched the figure drift forward. The chant died on her lips, the barest wisp of a word leaving her.

"Mother."

The imagine fell away, a wash of cold shock splashing over her. White hair dissolved to black. Pale features turned pallid. A loving gaze turned foreign. Where her mother once was, a creature of shadows now stood in place. Noelle gaped in disbelief, a spark of despair igniting through her.

"Who are you?"

"You're not my mother," came the forlorn comment back. Her shoulders fell in, the darkness released from her control. The door beyond him crinkled closed. Noelle let out a heavy sigh and clasped the necklace at her knees. With the last of the borrowed power buzzing along her skin, she pulled it to her chest.

A set of twisted words fell from her lips. The stone burned hot, light extruding from it. It reached out for the edge of his ethereal mass, tentacles of power that would tether and bind.

"But you will do."

 

[Kal]

"You're not my mother."

Biting back a snarky reply as the grief-stricken Echani visibly deflated, Kal almost moved to comfort her, though he didn't quite know how. Such thoughts fled his mind the moment he saw the stone in her grasp and recognised it for what it was, however. Soulstone, probably Prosperian. Chit.

"Hold on, don't do anything you'll reg-"

There was no dissuading the girl, however, tendrils of power snaking forth to ensnare his form, dragging him inexorably towards the stone and the prison it represented. Perhaps if he had been studied in the ways of Sorcery he could have resisted, especially against the novice practitioner he had her pegged as, but such was not the case and so - with a final scathing protest - the Shadow was pulled into the vessel she carried.

As convenient as life outside a sleeve was at times, it bore with it certain undeniable risks, this chief among them.

Noelle Varanin​

 

[Noelle Varanin]

The cave fell still, the echoing cacophony of voices, fire, and strife fading out to silence as the Netherworld left them and the spirit's essence slipped away. The stone heated up in her hands. She gasped, sparring her fingers and dropping it. She watch, perplexed, as the black prosperous twisted and melted, revealing a white crystal underneath.

"Huh," was all she could utter, her chest heaving as the bowl's fire died. The cave's chill crept into her bones. Copper linger on her tongue. She grimaced, the damage of her mistakes felt internally most of all. She was going to need bacta. Never mind. She had done it. Spencer would be so prou- she swallowed back the thought, the urge to show her mother going as fast as it came.

Would it ever get easy? Living without her?

Soon, she wouldn't have to. She gingerly touched the cooled surface of the crystal, watching the white essence swirl deep within.

Irritation.

Noelle snapped her hand back, her nostrils flaring at the clear nature of the spirits thoughts.

Well that wasn't suppose to happen. She slipped off her shawl, her bare shoulders left to the air as she gingerly wrapped it around the pendant. Home first. Then she could crack into this conundrum.

"You're lucky," she whispered, clutching it close to her chest as gingerly stood.

"I'm one of the nice ones."