[Isaac stirs, lifting his head from his arms at those spluttering gasps, the first signs of life in what feels like days. Squawking, Crimson leaves its post at Hector's side and pads back to its master, cocking its head slightly when Isaac opens his mouth only to cough again, his body still working to purge what's left of the nastiness colonized in his lungs. A long few hours on his own - time he's had to carve fresh tally marks into his arm and watch the bleeding slow to a stop - have seen a slow draining away of abject fear and hopelessness and the return of rational thought, the truth of his reality breaking through and reaching him, finally, like a ray of sunlight piercing a heavy fog bank.
Julia isn't dead.
She never was, because he can still feel her dimly, far to the east, on the other side of the mountain pass they crossed days ago.
Isaac dries his mouth and slides his gauntlet back on over blood-smeared skin with a stiff tug. He catches Hector's gaze a moment while snapping the buckles on, his own red-rimmed and tired, smouldering with powerless anger towards an enemy with no face, no blood. All Crimson had found, deeper in the woods, was a patch of myconid easily set ablaze. The others sucked themselves back into the dirt.
Hector had sensed something awry, he remembers. Something in the air. But not soon enough.]
no subject
Julia isn't dead.
She never was, because he can still feel her dimly, far to the east, on the other side of the mountain pass they crossed days ago.
Isaac dries his mouth and slides his gauntlet back on over blood-smeared skin with a stiff tug. He catches Hector's gaze a moment while snapping the buckles on, his own red-rimmed and tired, smouldering with powerless anger towards an enemy with no face, no blood. All Crimson had found, deeper in the woods, was a patch of myconid easily set ablaze. The others sucked themselves back into the dirt.
Hector had sensed something awry, he remembers. Something in the air. But not soon enough.]