last_adam | (no subject)

"I've been called that, among other things."

Another stone, bright and smooth.

"I learned my manners from my father, Mrs. Rowlands."

"Did you, now?" The high light voice is soft and musical.

She looks at him very carefully indeed. Such an unassuming young man he is, and yet so confident-- and so clearly aware of her nature, it does seem likely.

And there is something else about him, some nagging deeper sense...

"Who is it that your family is, then, bachgen?"

Teeth again.

"Nobody you need worry about."

"Why, is it that you are concerned?"

Lightly said, almost amused.

"So many are, I do suppose."

The teeth are gone once more, replaced by that innocent smile.

It might be his recent visit, but there's something about her he can't quite place that makes him think of his father.

"Concerned with you? I should hope that more people were."

"Now whyever is it that you would say that, dear?"

Just as lightly as before, and truly amused this time.

"Because it seems you've concerned yourself with an awful lot of the people here."

Lighthearted, with almost a laugh behind it.

"My goodness me," she tells him. "So many it is who have concerned themselves with me and my affairs first, you see."

A beat.

"Are you to be another such?"

"Afraid so."

He has the decency (or something, anyway) to look ashamed.

"A pity, that."

The temperature over the lake seems to be dropping, and cool air fans out from the water toward them.

"Whyever should you care, dear?"

He bends over and picks up a dandelion, having put the stone back in his pocket. She loves me... she loves me not. she loves me... she loves me no-

"Seems you've had run-ins with a few of my friends."

"Have I really?"

Her smile is gentle, but ice-blue eyes are bright as frost on snow and just as cold.

"Goodness me, but so many people there are here -- whoever is it that you mean?"

Adam's own smile and eyes are warm, but the flicker of flame behind them has nothing to do with kindness.

The petals of the flower are gone and he tosses it half heartedly to the side with a she loves me not.

"Oh, you know. Nobody important."

Another dandelion, and he picks one petal.

"Caspian."

"The Seafarer, is it?"

Her gaze is colder now, and a mocking lilt enters her tone-- which otherwise remains as sweet as ever Anghared's voice had been, as her accent subtly shifts.

"Why, my lord, but you have not the sound of Narnia on your tongue; I pray you, tell me if it is that you are one of those who knows the tale of the White Witch and fears her so?"

He turns his head slightly, narrowing his eyes at her at the sound of her voice.

"I know of the White Witch."

A light snarl crosses his face.

"I do not fear her."

One more petal.

"Suppose you assume, then, that I know Lucy, as well."

"A pretty lady," she agrees, the light soft voice lilting still. "A queen, she was once-- so unfortunate it is, that she has not the honor of the Seafarer."

Blodwen smiles at him.

"She is forsworn to me, after all."

A flash of light behind his eyes, nothing but the quickest of glances would have caught it, and he takes a deep breath as he manages to school his features.

"Lucy is, in fact, quite honorable, oaths or not."

Something is happening.

The breeze dies, although the chill remains, and there is a distinct sensation of some dark undercurrent crackling in the slowly thickening air, something not unlike the humming buildup before a lightning strike or the breaking of some giant storm.

The White Rider does not glance away from him, although there is a new tension about her as well, for this is not all her power-- not in the least.

"Is she, cariad?" Softly, almost poisonously so. "So dear she is to you, then-- and her so close to Caspian Seafarer."

There had been anger, percolating in the back of Adam's mind. Anger and fire and those voices that Alanna had so observantly noted.

But they're quieting now as he smiles at her and plucks another petal from the flower.

"No, I've another."

A cruel smile.

"But that does not make her unimportant."

Her smile matches his, taunting and full of malice. Ice-blue eyes are gleaming.

"But of course, dear. So important they all are, for so many reasons, is it not?"

A single, poised beat.

"Another it is that you have, you say? Like a pet, is it?"

"We have each other."

And it's not the same at all, but the mark on his arm burns lightly.

"I doubt you'd understand such things, when you go around taking without consent."

"Oh, but consent it was that I had, dear, and that twice over, until the Seafarer and Lucy interfered," she says softly.

"Dear Rilian -- so kind he was to me, and not a thing had I done to harm him, not a single thing. But oh, what I am was enough for them."

She smiles at him, does the White Rider, and there is nothing of the soft Welsh farmwife left about her.

"Lucky you are, to not be hated for your own nature, now aren't you, dear? Unless it is by sufferance only that they bear you."

His soft blue eyes are warm and calm even as the air crackles and pops around him.

"You know nothing of my nature."

"Do I not, cariad?" The high light voice is thin and with quiet sibilance underlying it like a hiss of winter wind.

"Oh and to be sure it is that you are not from my world, goodness no-- you are not one of the Lords of the Dark that I know there... but something so very intriguing about you there is, after all."

A beat.

"And nothing of Light."

"Perhaps not, and perhaps you ought not make assumptions quite so freely."

A light wind picks up, breaking the uneasy calm of the early evening air and pulling the dandelion out of Adam's hand, up into the sky. A whisper starts, bringing to life the birds, the bugs, the trees, and at the center of it stands Adam, calm and distant.

"That-"

He points to her neck-

"is not yours."

The sound of her laughter is chill and mocking and slices through the air like a blade, cutting across the sounds of bird and insect with brutal clarity. The wind rises, widening its spiral to circle around the both of them, and begins to grow colder.

She cups her hand protectively around the small glass globe that hangs from the white silk ribbon around her throat, and it seems to shimmer into the size of a crystal ball instead of a simple pendant. White smoke coils lazily within it as she says,

"Oh, but it is, dear. Mine it is, by right of the finding and the claiming--"

A tinge of blood-bright pink threads through the white as the Rider finishes,

"--as is this, as well."

Adam watches, his eyes following the pink through the haze of white, watching and waiting, for what he's not sure. Shaking his head, the rush of the ocean roars in his ears, and he takes a step forward, around, through away from the wind even as it grows more fierce and the light fades.

"What's taken once can be taken again."

"The first you would not be to try, cariad." Soft amused malice is clear in the light voice.

A strange grey mist is spinning into the wind around them now, and whispers of madness begin to float through the air, murmuring of temptation and possibility, power and control. The globe at her throat gleams with odd brightness in the rapidly-dimming light as white smoke boils inside it.

"Do you think that you can?"

"That's all I have to do."

There's no light to speak of surrounding them any longer, but Adam doesn't seem to notice as he steps forward again, and again, his head lowered as the wind seems to split for him.

Narrowing his eyes, he reaches out.

And as he does, everything around them freezes into utter perfect stillness. The whirling wind stops, and every single image carried or reflected in the grey mist is visible, as though it were carved from ice or shaped of shadow.

Adam's will lashes across the space between him and the White Rider of the Dark, carrying with it an implicit command. She is still, frozen as though held, as her power is struck by his--

--and then there is nothing but a void within her, a black pit of emptiness that is the chaos of the Dark itself and which draws hungrily upon whatever it can claim.

The frail human shape that is the vessel for the Dark seems to grow taller and thinner, gleaming with eldritch light as she hisses at him, and the moment is broken. The White Rider slips to the side, vanishing from beneath his reaching fingers as though she were but illusion, and the intensity of the storm around them both doubles with the backlash of force.

Adam feels the pain physically, a blow to his chest as his knees weaken from under him. His mouth opens to ask questions that won't be answered as he struggles forward against this new wind.

Finding a bit of solid ground, he steadies himself, closes his eyes and reaches out into the dark, hands clenched at his side.

From somewhere above and beyond them a deep roar of thunder rumbles, but within the whirling wall of the storm it is eerily muffled.

As he reaches out, as his own power builds, the clouds around Adam begin to stretch and thin, twisting into unpleasant forms that have never before been seen in any world. The ground beneath him groans, as small cracks begin to radiate out from his feet, splitting the earth apart.

And all around him, everywhere around him, there is simply nothing and Nothing, a chaotic yawing pit of emptiness that seeks to draw him down into madness. The Rider is not there, not visibly there, only the Dark is there--

(only the Dark can destroy the Dark)

-- seeking to claim him although he is not truly of it nor of the world from which it has been cast out. Ever jealous, ever hungering, it is trying to make him part of itself, to call out to that within him as it rises, to steal his strength into the emptiness and chaos of the void.

And off to one side, wrapped in the howling mist, a feeling of something else can be sensed.

(fluttering wings beat wildly against poisoned glass)

Dimly visible in the darkness, the gleaming white shape that holds that shining glass prison in its hand still has mortal form... and can be hurt as mortals can.

Lightning flashes across the sky, ripping it apart with light and hanging there, casting shadows that echo its eerie white light among the branches and leaves. There's a moaning that finds its way into words, voices, screams as Adam fights against, across the chasm.

Then the light is gone, along with his breath, and all there is is black, and he reaches out for the globe, closing his eyes against the dark and the storm he can't feel or see or hear. And all that is left are the thoughts of freedom, and destruction, and he isn't quite sure they aren't the same thing.

He reaches for the globe, with hand and mind and will together, struggling to grasp, to take, to hold, to seize--

(to take control - to destroy)

--and after so long, on this day, this sixth day of June in the year 2006, his twenty-first birthday, something begins to slip.

(I am the destroyer and the adversary. The prince of darkness, and the spawn of Satan. Nothing will ever change that)

He reaches, and the White Rider shrieks, high and thin and wild-- she is there before him and no longer concealed as ice-cold, inhumanly strong fingers wrap around Adam's wrists and hold with bone-cracking strength. Around them, the wind howls as the will of the Antichrist clashes with the power commanded by one of the Great Lords of the Dark.

At Blodwen's throat, the glass globe begins to flash wildly with pink light, seen as though through an oily sheen over the glass. It pulses like the beat of a heart -- or of wildly beating wings.

His arm goes limp under the Rider's grasp.

Angel of the Bottomless Pit

He gasps for breath and takes a step forward.

Great Prince that is called Dragon

He can feel her power pushing against him.

Father of Lies

He is what he is, and nothing can change that, not even him.

Prince of this World

His legs go out from under him as he tries to move closer.

Lord of Darkness

He closes his eyes and all at once the wind is gone, and there is nothing but a cold, deep quiet.

Destroyer of Kings

And he wishes for nothing else but the utter destruction of Blodwen and her charm.

(nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time)

For a single endless, timeless moment, nothing happens. All the world -- or is it worlds, here Milliways, at the end of of the universe, at the end of everything? -- seems to hold its breath.

(but what comes after the apocalypse?)

In the sudden ringing silence, an awful force builds swiftly to some incredible peak and there hangs poised. At its center, at its heart, Adam Young and the White Rider stand, locked in silent battle with each other, each striving desperately for control, for power, for survival, for existence, for something to tip the balance.

(fire to burn away the Dark)

And then, into that frozen coiled tension, a sudden burning blood-pink light flares violently between them.

(the Wild Magic is meant to be free)

not you
not here
not this

A soundless explosion rocks everything, shaking the earth and the heavens and racing from its epicenter outwards across the ending universe like the waves of some unimaginable earthquake--

--and when the world rights itself once more, neither Adam nor the White Rider are anywhere to be seen, any longer.