Rowan did his best to traverse the mansion's foyer quickly. It was a gaudy affair of scarlet curtains and gold rimmed furniture, coupled with thick and ridiculously ornate rugs, and marching rows of pedestals housing expensive vases. He didn't give any of it the time of day, climbing the giant main staircase to the second floor in record time.
This despite how his earlier feeling of sickness had only intensified. He still didn't think he was in danger of hurling...but Rowan was keen to lie down before it became a possibility.
It annoyed him that getting his hands cut up had somehow caused this. Rowan by all accounts had a strong stomach.
It's probably nothing. Maybe just a stomach bug.
A part of him still wasn't convinced.
He traversed the darkened hallway, passing his cousin's dark room; Hawthrone was either still out at the pegasus stables, or asleep. Given he often took advantage of his mother-Rowan's Aunt Ayta- being out of town to stay overnight at the stables, Rowan had a well founded suspicion he was the only one in this house right now.
At the time he had felt somewhat glad of this, not wanting to have any more conversations. The one person he might have wanted to see, his seven year old cousin Annad, was currently with her mother on her trip.
Rowan often found that hanging out with Annad cheered him up, especially as she seemed to actually look up to him.
Many times in the next week, he would wonder if things would've been different if someone else had been there.
Or if he hadn't been too stubborn to refuse a trip to the ER.
Instead, he stomped up to his room and went inside.
The space had always felt odd to him.
On a surface level, there were things scattered about within that hinted at the interests of the occupant. Car manuals, a singular computer, some scattered DVDs of horror movies. One illustrated book on demonology.
But ultimately the room lacked the warm spark of a private, inhabited place. Rowan felt more of an attachment to the guest room at Java's house, particularly as a few of his more treasured items were over there indefinitely. Hell, he tended to feel his car was more of a home than this room.
Well. If Rowan was honest about it, most of his favorite things were over at Java's now, including his few hunting trophies…because he very often spent the night at his friend's house rather than coming to this mansion.
One of the exceptions was a small stack of spellbooks focusing on the path of Fracture-god of battlefield, all aspects of combat, and weaponry.
And, most importantly to Rowan, fire.
He'd always wanted to master fire magic. In fact, he'd been told by a school instructors he was pretty good at it…
Rowan wasn't sure he believed that, though. Mr. Fenton could easily have just been trying to bolster his feelings out of pity, being the only teacher who actually seemed invested in his dumb arse.
Other than the spellbooks and scattered manuals, the only thing in the room that Rowan felt much attachment to was the bed, a ridiculously comfortable, possibly antique four poster-the headboard seemed to have been carved with Celtic symbols of some kind that Rowan had never interpreted.
The bed was large, with plenty of space. And it looked blessedly inviting right now.
Unfortunately, the bed was too big to be moved to his friend's guest room.
Rowan vaguely pondered this as he stumbled into the attached bathroom, containing nothing but necessities. He'd never been one for decorating, at least not when it came to bathrooms.
With a wince he unwrapped the hastily applied bandages, stained red with blood that hadn't dried as of yet. Trying not to look at the cuts, he stuck them under the warm water. A dull throbbing had formed at the base of his skull, and he thought his back might be aching a little.
Probably nothing.
After a few moments he peered at his hands, gently rubbing the blood and grit out of the cuts with his thumbs.
Under the current of the water, they didn't look all that bad now. If anything they looked thin in width, much like when he'd suffered cuts from broken glass in the past. It seemed Java had picked out any remnants of the orb-Rowan didn't see any now.
The orb…
He still had no idea what had happened there. Why he'd been overcome with the sudden feeling of being incomplete, and possessing the energy within would…
Rowan groaned and set about truly wrapping the cleaned cuts in his hands, reigning in his meandering train of thought.
It was over now. He shouldn't be thinking of the incident anymore.
Gradually Rowan decided he didn't have the energy to take a shower. Instead he hastily changed into his usual getup for going to bed-loose pants and a plain white bathrobe-and collapsed on his back onto it, not even bothering to get under the sheets.
Closing his eyes, he attempted to sleep.
/v\\\\
Rowan only managed to drift into a shambling half awake daze for a few hours before he abruptly woke up again, panting, his mind's eye full of blurry, indistinct images he couldn't quite make out.
But he had a sense they'd been bloody. And oddly familiar, even if that made no sense. Almost like he'd been there?
He felt no better. If anything, Rowan felt worse-his head feeling ready to split, his limbs and lower back now joining his shoulders in their aching. The area near his tailbone, at the base of his spine, seemed to have joined in now.
Cursing through grit teeth, Rowan clumsily heaved himself into a sitting position, blearily thinking of heading into the bathroom.
Instead, he gasped as a wave of heat seemed to go right through him, setting every nerve on fire.
Clumsily he rolled out of the bed, somehow managing to stand up, world tilting around him. Almost desperately he threw the bathrobe off, and feeling that the room had turned into a furnace, made for the window.
He made it to the sill just in time to keel over. His grip tightened on the wood of it, and at this point Rowan's confusion was so much that he barely noticed the pained response from his cut palms. Slumping against the frame of the window, he heaved a series of hard breaths, dizzily thinking this might cool him off.
Now there was a frisson of fear, trickling in through the confusion, finally making its presence known through all the pain.
Worse, he was starting to hear whispering-and not from outside.
More in the recesses of his mind.
The next instant, he was crippled by a wave of pure agony, racing down his spine, and Rowan felt his legs give out. He slammed harshly into the window frame, sliding downward to the floor. His hands slapped against the wooden floor with a noise that seemed much too loud- Rowan's vision flickered frantically, the world going red, then green, then dissolving to a muddled mess of color.
All the while, he was fighting for breath and had by now ended up in a heap on the floor, dimly registering that he was attempting to dig his nails into the wood, and that underneath his skin, his veins seemed lit intermittently with violet light.
And more green.
Blackness showed at the edge of his sight. A force of some kind-an intelligence, maybe, seemed to be rushing to the forefront, trying to overcome him. Still in agony, Rowan could barely think of devoting the energy to combat it..
Meanwhile, he was sure he felt some of his bones creaking, snapping, maybe even stretching. The hot feeling of blood registered on his face, his fingertips, back, like his skin was ripping-
The coppery taste of it registered in his mouth, teeth abruptly beginning to throb. Maybe move?
Worse was the feeling that aside from the possible sentient thing clawing its way into his head, was the sense that even if that hadn't been the case, his brain was being taken apart and put back together, reordered into…
He had no idea what. It was that more than anything that Rowan carried with him, even as he finally blacked out, the event heralded by a bright green flash behind his eyelids.
/v\\\
Even in the blackout, Rowan could feel a vague sense of continued change.
He felt helpless, and on top of that-like the stupid oaf he had often been accused of being, who should have swallowed his fear and gone to the hospital. Who knew, the more magically oriented healers there might have prevented what was happening now.
Now Rowan seemed to be standing in a kind of partial dream, caught between being awake and complete unconsciousness.
He glanced down at his dream self and was alarmed to see a tracing of marks on his arms. Stripes, jagged and intimidating, his nails seeming darker. Sharper.
Like claws. A wave of cold ripped through his gut at the idea he was somehow catching a glimpse of what was actually happening to him, but in a much less grisly, real way. And he couldn't stop it. Rowan brushed numbly at his arm, anger and fear battling for dominance in his thoughts.
''Yes. It seems you are seeing the changes to my new form in a more…sanitized way.''
Rowan jerked his head up.
Looming above him was a monolith form of what seemed to be black smoke. Nauseous green sparked within it, spidering out from a flickering core of the same stuff. Pinprick eyes of light, the same sickening, wrong hue as the energy, glared down from above, full of piercing distaste.
It finally clicked in Rowan's mind what that sickly green light portended-demon magic. Corrupted arcane that had a mind of its own, and was theorized to use temptation to turn people into its slaves.
His stomach dropped upon remembering that he'd seen that green in his veins, and multiple times before he'd passed out. How had he not remembered that?
''Not that it matters.'' The dark mass seemed to billow, the pinprick eyes flashing with a greedy triumph. ''I am hatred, horror, the end of the destructive thing called life…and this will be my body soon enough.''
For a second Rowan hovered between standing his ground or attempting to run.
Then a second, horrid realization occurred to him, a kind of old memory like a half remembered dream, that steeled him to stay where he was.
''I know who you are.''
Rowan's breathless sentence seemed to hang in the air.
He couldn't begin to explain it, but-somehow-he knew this thing's name, even if the flood of images that had come with the entity clarified nothing about it.
But Rowan somehow did. And that chilled him to the core, given that there was one definite trait about this smoky monster that he could sense.
Pure evil. Emanating from the entity like it-he-was a exposed reactor core.
''Know?'' The thing laughed, shaking the invisible ground. ''How could a measly human boy know me?''
Rowan grit his teeth. He heard his blood pounding in his ears.
''Get out! I'm not letting you-''
His sentence turned to a gasp in response to three trails of burning marks, inflicted across his dream self's chest and throwing him back in the process. Rowan thudded heavily onto his back, three gashes traced across his chest and bleeding not blood, but a violet light.
He observed this dazedly, remembering in the back of his mind some of his earliest school lessons. Rowan was seeing auma, the energy all living beings had, bleeding from what he could only guess was some kind of manifestation of his spirit.
The gaps started to close. Ignoring that the shadow creature could rip his dream self to nothing and desperate to stop this evil thing from taking over, Rowan scrambled to get upright; he'd already decided to damn the consequences and attempt to stop this thing. Before he could come anywhere close to standing up, walls shimmered to life around him, made of strobing threads glowing with the same sickly green demon magic.
Despite the demonic energy, he knew this thing was currently just a spirit. But if he let it take over; that would change, something he could sense on an instinctual level.
''Arochondal!'' Rowan pounded on the walls, withdrawing with a grunt when they burned his spirit hands. Panting and enraged, he paced the prison, the weirdness of knowing this creature's name out of knowhere a distant blip in the face of his larger problem.
A rumble of cruel amusement sounded. ''Little bug. I suppose I can allow you to see the outside world. After all…it will bring me pleasure for you to witness my deeds, and be able to do nothing to stop it. At least until the time comes when your pathetic soul will be fodder for the binding...''
Before Rowan could attempt to speak again, the green walls faded, but not the point where Rowan was under any illusion they had gone. There was a brief period of numbness, a microsecond of darkness.
And then Rowan saw through his own eyes again, feeling a brief thrill of hope…only to see himself move. But not at his will.
At the will of Arochondal.
/
Arochondal could sense the boy struggling.
Not that it mattered much. As surprisingly strong as the child's resolve was, in the face of he-the scythe that had cut down the DeLannan-the effort was a pittance.
He looked down at this new body's hands. The change had completed…at least largely, and with a degree of speed that Arochonal would not have thought possible.
Now he beheld arms with tiger-esque stripes, dark aquamarine fur, fingers tipped with sheathed black claws. The features he was seeing were caked with blood from the change, to be sure…and likely based more off the traits of the boy Arochondal had subdued just now than his own preferences. It was odd, being the basic version of the race he had initially come from, then had elevated himself beyond.
Nonetheless, once he performed the proper rituals and destroyed the soul of this form's previous occupant, regaining his previous power was only a matter of time.
Slowly standing up, Arochondal shook out his new shoulders. Tilting his new head back, he ran a tongue over new, ferocious teeth, slicked with blood from bursting through the gums.
A slow grin crept across his new face. Calling on the lingering remnants of his dark arts, Arochandol spoke a word of power.
Sickly green light engulfed him…
And in the space of blinking, he was gone, leaving behind nothing but an empty room, the space by the window marred with streaks of lifeblood and gouged floorboards.