Inspiration: "Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky
Continuity: Prequel to "Dead Man's Party"
Setting: Alternate Reality (Urban/Dark Fantasy)
Characters: Lalli
Relationship: Lalli & Emil; exact nature is open to interpretation
Warnings: Extreme violence - I am really not kidding about this part. Includes onscreen ritual torture and abuse.
Other tags: Ambiguous relationship, can you tell I spent my childhood watching Fantasia on an endless loop?
It was cold, and dark. The wind seemed to blow right through him with the force of a knife.
Lalli shivered. He might have been small and skinny, but his ancestors were made for cold; a mere autumn chill should not be a bother. It was more than just the wind.
He'd returned to their small apartment, looking forward to having a chance to relax after having finally reached the end of the worst season of the year. He'd spent the whole day fantasizing about a hot bath and a nice long sleep, and previous experience said that Emil would have gone out of his way to do something nice—a sweet from the bakery, perhaps, or a hot drink that they would share together before retiring early to catch up on some much-needed sleep.
Instead, he'd come back to a cold wind blowing through the dark and silent apartment. Glass crunched under his shoes as Lalli stepped up to the broken window—broken from the outside. There were signs of a struggle. A chair was overturned. A book and a glass of water alike had been knocked off of the table, and now the book was lying in a puddle, its soggy pages splayed across the damp floorboards.
To anyone looking at the building from the outside, the broken window would look like a Halloween prank, a group of teenagers taking their fun a bit too far when the residents were not at home. To the police, once they got a look at the inside, it would look like an ordinary kidnapping: malicious and to be treated with care, but with nothing otherwise strange or other about it. To Lalli, though, who'd felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end from the second he'd turned the key, it was an omen. Whatever had happened, it was not of this world alone.
He closed the door quietly behind him before racing off into the night.
The traces were thin and wispy, but Lalli had seemed somehow attuned to them, and he'd run, without hesitation, along the path of that faintly glowing trail. It wove through the dark streets and back alleys of the city; obviously the kidnappers did not want to be found. The meandering path they'd taken had led him through a series of dark alleys, the basement of an abandoned building (where some ominously fresh stains were visible on the walls and floor), a long-disused set of railroad tracks with weeds poking through, and finally to the gate that stood before Lalli now.
The Old Cemetery. The one where no one had been buried for ninety years now, since before his grandmother was born.
When they'd been children, Onni had always admonished them never to come here. Even on visitations, when their foster families brought them to see each other and later whenever he'd made his weekly phone call, his first and last words had always been "Have you gone anywhere near the graveyard?"
Then, Lalli's answers had always been "No" and "Okay." His foster family would never have let him near there anyway; they hadn't wanted him going anywhere without supervision, and even then he was supposed to talk or not talk on demand, and keep still, and "Lalli, we don't do that in public, look at me when I'm talking to you, are you even paying attention to what I'm saying?"
This was the first time that Lalli had seen the place up close; the only other times he'd laid eyes on it had been from a distance, from the window of a moving car. What he did know, though, was that the lock on the gate was probably not supposed to be broken, and that the seal some mage had tied around the gate to keep spirits in was definitely not supposed to be broken.
Whatever this was, it was very, very bad.
Call for backup, a voice like Onni's urged inside of his head. There's no time, another, more urgent voice whispered, and it was right: there was no time.
Lalli slipped through the gate.
Immediately, the air temperature seemed to drop. Worse, he was beginning to see ghosts: the shades of humans over ninety years buried, now crawling up from the dirt that covered their bodies to drift inward, away from the gate.
Why had they not yet gone to rest?
Hastily, Lalli whispered a spell to shield himself from the eyes of hostile spirits—not to mention hostile humans. It was tenuous, and would work only so long as he refrained from physical contact and nothing was actively seeking him out, but it was all that he had.
Still humming softly to himself to keep the spell going, he slipped in among the ghosts and went the same way that they were going, toward the heart of the old graveyard. Even with the spell he was careful to keep out of sight, concealing himself behind the trunks of trees and in the shadows of mausoleums. If this was as sinister as he thought it was, he didn't want to take any chances.
The ghosts were getting thicker the farther he pressed on—not to mention older. Many of them were so old they were forgetting the forms that they had once held, instead reshaping themselves into twisted things that vaguely resembled a mockery of horses or bats or other creatures that did not exist in this world. They were also getting more energetic, swirling around in waves of cold wind.
Lalli heard the signs before he saw them: from the heart of the graveyard, someone else's chanting reached his ears—and from the way the voices overlapped and wove with each other, there were many someones involved. No sooner had he heard the voices than he noticed the flickering lights, too unsteady to be electric, that nevertheless did not get blown out by the howling ghost-wind.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
The other voices got into his head as he got close, wove into his mind, threatening to break his rhythm, but Lalli raised his voice slightly and refused to let go of his protection. As he got close, he saw that the participants were carrying torches, and that they were all wearing hooded black cloaks that concealed their faces.
Most of them had their backs turned to him. They were congregating around something, all watching a few in the middle that were performing some sort of ritual…
Then, there was a muffled scream.
Lalli stuffed a fist into his mouth, biting down into the first two knuckles of his hand and determinedly continuing his humming until the pain brought him back to where he was and what sort of situation he was in. Even as he crouched down behind a gravestone, his heart was hammering in his chest. He'd recognized that voice, but he was badly outnumbered and from the looks of it outmagicked as well. He would not help Emil by rushing in recklessly.
Okay, think. He had seen Summonings before, but those had mostly been amateurs, lone teenagers desperate for love or revenge who'd gotten the wrong bottle, the wrong book, and a bad idea at exactly the wrong time. Whoever these people were, they were not a jilted lover or a thrown over best friend. They knew what they were doing, and that made them dangerous.
What were you thinking, not calling for backup, Onni's voice said again in his head, but Lalli ignored it. Going in alone had probably been stupid, but he couldn't change that now. He had to focus on the problem at hand.
Interrupting an amateur Summoning was dangerous enough, but it could usually be contained by a quick-acting mage. If he just jumped into this without thinking, who knew what might happen?
Another scream. He didn't have much time.
Ignoring the increasingly excited ghosts that were swirling around him, Lalli stood, and made a slight alteration to the chant that he had never stopped humming. New perception flooded his senses, his vision shifted, and Lalli's eyes widened at what his magesight was showing him.
This was far worse than he'd thought. Whatever it was they were doing, they'd been preparing for it for a long time. Lines of power spread all throughout the ground, connecting graves and mausoleums, forming an intricate design whose purpose he couldn't even begin to guess. His stomach heaved. Blood had been spilled in order to make those marks, Lalli knew.
"Don't mess with something if you don't know what it does!" Onni's hand swatted his away from a bloody design that had been drawn on the wall of the building they were investigating. "You could more safely defuse a bomb with a pair of pliers than mess with strange magic!"
…if he did nothing, he would never forgive himself.
He pushed his way in among the cultists; nobody noticed him as he slipped into their ranks. When he got to the center of their ritual, he froze, horrified at what he saw.
Emil had been stripped naked, gagged, and tied facedown on a stone bench that sat at the very heart of the cemetery. The bottoms of his feet were red and swollen to almost twice the size they should have been, the backs of his legs sporting a series of raised red weals all up and down their length. Even more horrifying, however, was the state of his back, where one of the cultists who appeared to be the leader was busy carving yet another elaborate design, holding the blade of a ritual dagger to the flame of a nearby torch before bending down to make yet another cut…
He couldn't wait. If he didn't act now, Emil was going to die.
Lalli stopped his chanting, and shot his arm into the air.
Power exploded from his body as a giant, silver-white lynx, the very essence of his soul, burst from under his skin right in the middle of the assembled cult. With a startled yell, most of the cultists scattered and fled. Even as his compatriots were running, though, their leader had zeroed in on Lalli, who, sluggish and weak-kneed from the powerful magic he'd just done, had slumped to the ground and was leaning against the bench. The only warning he got was the widening of Emil's eyes, and then a streak of white-hot pain burned across his back.
The cult leader was enraged; far different from the careful cuts on Emil's back, these were wild slashes made in the height of a towering fury, and Lalli could barely lift his arm to defend himself. Instead, he simply let himself collapse atop Emil, shielding the other from further abuse with the protection of his own body. Emil was shaking beneath him; Lalli only gritted his teeth and made the push to call on his luonto to do one last thing.
There was a flash of white, the sound of a blow, and then a series of curses as a body impacted with the ground. A low growl emanated from above then, and then a set of footsteps beat a hasty retreat.
The lynx stuck around just long enough for the footsteps to disappear from hearing range. Then, there was one last flash, and the light faded.
Lalli already had his own ritual dagger in hand, and was carefully cutting the ropes that bound Emil—in between the knots; even he knew that much about this unfamiliar magic. Emil's wrists had been chafed to bleeding from struggling.
"Lalli," he sobbed as soon as the gag was out of his mouth; tears were running down his face from fear and pain. "I thought… thought I was going to…"
"I know. I got here as soon as I could." Shrugging out of his jacket, Lalli draped it over Emil; the other winced as it made contact with his torn skin, but he had been without clothing for hours, and the night was dangerously cold.
The only question was, what now? It was obvious Emil could not walk, and in spite of his best efforts Lalli's limbs were heavy and his eyes slipping closed. Without his luonto, he could not do more magic or even call for help. None of their allies knew where they were, and as long as they stayed here the only people who did know where they were could come back and finish what they'd started at any time.
You having second thoughts about that backup yet? Onni's voice relentlessly demanded in his head.
Shut. Up, Lalli thought back. You're not helping.
"I failed," he said out loud. "I can't get you out of here."
Emil was not angry with him, and that somehow made it worse. He only shivered, and nodded. "Don't leave me."
"I won't." To illustrate his promise, Lalli climbed up to lie right next to him on the altar, and wrapped his arms around him, and pressed Emil's frozen hands and feet into his own armpits or stomach. He didn't ask himself why he was worried about Emil losing fingers when it was all too likely that neither of them would survive the night.
The ghosts were still thick in the air. Now, though, with their purpose gone, they were drifting aimlessly, once in a while coming close to the pair to peer at them almost curiously. Lalli hissed a warning whenever one of them got too close, but it was an empty threat: he no longer had the strength to drive them off.
Lalli didn't know whether it was the flashing lights that roused him, or the light of dawn slowly creeping over the horizon. For hours he had been drifting in and out of consciousness, pressing in close to Emil, occasionally waking enough to panic at the other's stillness and shake him until he let out a groan or a gasp of pain. Once, he'd cracked his eyes open and thought he'd seen an owl perched in a nearby tree, and though he knew this was important his thoughts had been too fuzzy for him to remember why.
Now, Onni was in his face, grasping his wrists and crying as he begged Lalli to speak to him, and Emil was gone. As soon as he realized this he panicked, and tried to sit up, only to realize that there were other people there who also had a hold on him and were trying to load him into an ambulance, and that he was still too weak to fight them.
"Emil?" he asked instead, desperately, as they strapped him down. His voice came out in a barely audible whisper.
"They already took him to the emergency room," Onni informed him. "He was in bad shape the last time I saw him, but still alive."
"What did they want with me, Lalli?" Emil asked the next time they let Lalli see him, after they'd stitched his back, kept him hydrated until his luonto returned, and the nurse on duty had asked him a lot of weird questions about what he'd really been doing and that if they were manufacturing drugs, it would really go better for everyone if he'd just own up to it now. Then he'd had to answer more questions from the crazy police officer and her partner, who informed him that they were trying to hunt down those responsible but had so far had no luck.
"I don't know," he answered honestly. "That's not my kind of magic."
"They were trying to summon something," Onni interjected; he hadn't let Lalli out of his sight ever since they'd been rescued. "No one has yet figured out what or why. Whatever it was, though, it was something powerful—and dangerous. No one goes to those sorts of lengths to contain a minor spirit."
Emil nodded, and shuddered. One way or another, he was going to carry the scars of that night for the rest of his life.
"Try to get some rest," Onni advised him as he pushed Lalli from the room. "Whatever it was, it's over now."
They looked at each other as they left the room. It wasn't over.
A/N: I threatened to do it, and I did it.
If anyone's wondering why I haven't linked this one on the forum, it's because I judged it too intense for main board consumption and don't yet have access to the Mature board.