He did not understand why the sky was different when he entered the cemetery.
He did not understand why he felt safer here than outside.
Rumble!
He did not even understand why his stomach kept making that strange noise.
So he walked around, seeing skeletal apparitions form and fade everywhere he went like mirages. Sometimes it was skulls, sometimes arms, sometimes legs and one time it was the upper half of a skeleton.
It had been a grey skeleton, with oozing black sludge dripping from its orifices.
It had looked at him with its empty eyes, before disappearing into the sky.
Rumble! Rumble!
The noise from his stomach continued and it formed an aching sensation, like something was disappearing inside him. His inside were squirming around and doing something he didn't understand, making him crave something he didn't know.
He walked still, wanting and needing something.
Someone
He just didn't know which it was.
That's when he stumbled upon it by chance, in the distance, he saw a girl talking to two things.
They were strange and definitely not the people he'd seen before or the skeletons. He wanted to see better, so he moved closer.
As he drew nearer, the emptying feeling grew worse and he almost stopped to groan in discomfort, but then he smelt something new. In the air, a subtle scent that his nose caught and devoured ravenously. It smelled so nice that before he knew it, he'd raced their at full speed and seemed to appear as from thin air.
He located the smell was coming from the girl and pulled her up, looking her up and down, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from on her body. Before he got to do that, the girl pushed him away and was suddenly tied up by one of the strange things.
Looking up, he saw the other one with four long spikes looking at him with killing intent, and it became clear to him; she had saved him from getting hurt.
She was a good person, he decided on the spot, because now she would die and not him. Choosing to save his life was better than talking to him in his eyes and it meant he'd found someone to help him.
"You." He said to her slowly," You helped me."
She started shouting at him to leave, still trying to save him.
She had to be a good person, he was sure of it now.
He reached over and grabbed her shoulder and as soon as his hand touched her, everything went crazy. A surge of energy raced up his arm like lightning through a conductor and he didn't feel uncomfortable in his mind or stomach anymore, all that was left was a cold calmness.
A numbness settled over his senses as his thoughts became more sharp and cool.
From his back, twelve black oily tendrils ejected out like tentacles from a squid, twisting and piercing everything around them. They moved with unnatural and uncontrollable ferocity, their twists and turns unpredictable, overlapping and paralleling until they had set a fifteen meter cage.
Basviel and Asval both were trapped inside it, for the tendrils had moved faster than they could perceive or counter. At first they had thought the man who appeared was a low ranked Warden, a Dead Squire, since his aura was close to non-existant.
However as they looked around, they realised they had been very wrong.
This guy was strong.
"Flee!" Asval cried as he tried to twist through the gaps of the cage.
Basviel's leaves swallowed up the pitch fork and his arms disappeared aswell, then like a pile of leaves in the wind, he started to flurry through the gaps towards escape. They would regroup and inform the Chancellor of this anomaly aswell.
They didn't get far though.
The tendrils twisted once more, and formed a cocoon around them, neither light nor the wind slithered in now. The tendrils pulsed lightly as the two Wardens looked at the cocoon wall and both brought out their Transcripts once more to attack and leave.
"Er... ERA Codex:{Execution} Pronged impalement"
"That's my Effect!?" Basviel turned around with horror as he looked at the man.
He was on his knees, holding the girl, who lay unconscious in his arms, whilst the tendrils from his back were all pulsing like the veins of a beast. His face was pale as death, and the veins on his arms were an unnatural black like he'd been poisoned by despair and darkness.
However it was his eyes that had changed.
The blue in them had been slashed by an ambiant grey like that of a tombstone.
"Perish." He said coldly and all the tendrils, pulsed once before they jutted out spikes.
Tens of thousands of thin spikes everywhere, like thick long needles, they stabbed the air, the ground and the two Wardens were not spared.
Asval tried to dodge them, twisting his ethereal body as best as he could, but his openings became fewer and eventually he was impaled, pierced through by hundreds of spikes. The same conclusion seemed to be about to befall Basviel, his flurry of leaves only offered him a few seconds more at most.
"Wait! We are not your enemies!" Basviel tried to reason his way out of this," The Chancellor of a New York Ringlet, he has warranted that girl's demise. We only sought to fulfill an assignment, mercy!"
The man looked at Basviel's struggles and then down at the girl in his arms, the bindings had come off and she was free. However, she had passed out when he touched her and could not reply now.
However he remembered that this strange one of leaves had wanted to eat her.
Eat.
Words formed on his tongue as he remembered something else.
"Mercy! I beg of you!" Basviel cried out as a few of his leaves were caught and impaled.
"ERA Codex:{Ritual} Sacral Feasting" He said slowly as the words came to him.
"Nooooo!" Basviel turned around and raced towards him, aiming to use what little he had to kill him!
He wouldn't let this abomination absorb him without a fight!
The tendrils on his back went slack, limp and then snapped off like twigs bent and broken. Then like a busted fountain, every spike and coiled black tendril sent forth a deluge of darkness that spread faster than fire. Everything was engulfed and Basviel watched in horror as his leaves were sapped of energy and like scorched grass in a fire, he turned to ash and crumbled into the dark.
Then as if they had been strands of black soot themselves, all the tendrils crumbled and imploded into dust, vanishing in the breeze.
The young man looked around, and not seeing anything new coming to kill him or the girl, he looked at her and smiled.