Port Jericho, 10, 000 ft above the Aeryth Ocean, Year of the Jade Bull, 2365 CE
A part of me- a bigger part than I cared to admit- felt ashamed about what was happening to me. If it weren't for the fact Zeke experienced things too, I'd be worried I was losing my mind. Don't get me wrong. There are certainly strange and unusual things out there. No denying that. Hells, ask any Jerachi about the statue in East Ward. The one of two men, one with dragon wings. They'll tell you of the Wraith of the Labyrinth, the sacrifice made by the Dragon, and Jericho's salvation by the misfit god who would become the skycity's Patron.
It wasn't just the fear I might be losing my mind. It was a bit humiliating that me, a soldier, should find myself afraid of random noises. Shameful that my common sense couldn't shake it off, ignore it. It was especially frustrating that Terren seemed immune to the scratchings and hisses that slithered through the walls of our home, chasing Zeke and I from room to room. He wanted to hear none about it.
I was afraid to talk to Dame Eliza about things either. Like Terren, she felt nothing from the house. What did the two of them have that Zeke and I didn't? It would be a few months more before I would meet one I felt comfortable sharing these experiences with. Margrave Emersson was an eccentric Argosian with a passion for the preternatural. He was a professor at Argoth's prestigious Proctor-Severn Academy, where he taught folklore and cultural studies.
Turns out, Margrave was seeking out, and tracking to ground, stories similar to ours, specifically linked with certain unusual artefacts, all of which had one thing in common- feathers. Feathers like, or similar to, the artefact Terren had claimed for his own. Margrave even had two similar ones himself, stored in a magick- shielded pouch. If I could but coax it away from Terren, I'd happily let the professor add ours to his collection. This case was the first active one Margrave had come upon. He'd sought me out, after asking around about Jerachi lore, and would go on to spend many nights at our house 'hunting', much to Terren's annoyance.
Margrave's acceptance did wonders for Zeke and I. He felt and heard things his very first visit to our home. While he enjoyed the chance to learn and explore, Margrave strongly encouraged that we seek professional help in dealing with the presence, either magi assistance or Technomancer.
Not long after Margrave's fourth visit, the events in the house just seemed to stop. It proved to be short-lived though. Zeke and I had both learnt not to trust these unexplained lulls. When the activity started again, as it invariably did, it was always worse than before. Weeks passed like this, with lulls and activity. One year became another. By this point I had graduated to learning wind-dancing, and a little of the behind the scenes options available to the clients of the Vault.
My first love was still tending the gardens, both ours and the Vault's. It was my beloved garden that suffered the first truly physical manifestation of the energy plaguing us. I had gone out to work for the day, and when I returned home, Zeke in tow, we made a beeline for the roof. A fierce windstorm was coming, and we needed to make sure things were secure. What I found was disturbing.
My precious trees bled amber from deep parallel gashes that marred their trunks. My newest acquisition, a young sugarpear uniquely tailored for life on a skycity, had been rent nearly in two. Inside the smaller of my two glasshouses, the devastation was just as bad. Seedling plants had been uprooted and shredded, tables smashed into kindling. Our shoes crunched on broken glass that littered the floor, mingling with the wood and plant debris, and wind howled through the empty frames that once held the shattered panes. It took Zeke and I the better part of two hours to relocate the surviving plants. I bandaged the sugarpear and moved it inside as well. Thankfully, the beehive was still intact.
I had no explanation. Zeke and I had been at the Vault all day, as had Terren. I seriously doubted either would so willfully destroy my gardens. From there, things would only grow more active. One evening, a few weeks after the garden incident, Zeke woke me screaming. He'd woken to find a glowing blue ball hovering in our room. Bleary-eyed as I was, I got a glimpse of the light before it abruptly winked out. Terren was at the Vault that night, lucky him. Zeke and I spent the rest of the night in the study. Neither of us got much more sleep that night.
Soon after that, Zeke reported hearing snuffling growls in our room, and witnessed dents in on his bed as something large jumped atop it. Days later, I would witness the same in Terren's room. Margrave, too, saw lights and heard claws on our wooden floor. Our periods of peace grew farther and farther apart as the manifestations grew stronger. The worse things got, the more insistent Margrave became that we should bring in professional help. It would take a truly terrifying encounter to push me to accept his offer of calling someone in.
It happened late one night when we had Margrave's company. We were sitting in the study when all of a sudden there came the most gods-awful racket from the kitchen. From the root cellar. It sounded as if someone... something... were trying to get out. Claws raked against wood. It reached a crescendo and ended with an eerie howl that echoed through the house long after the incident ended.
While we were still trying to make sense of the terrifying experience, there came an urgent knock at the door. I thought it was a concerned neighbour who'd heard the noise. It wasn't. It was worse. A Firefly from the Vault come to tell us that Terren had been badly injured. An off-city patron to the establishment had tried to have his way with one of the Vault's dance-only female Fireflys, a serious offence. Terren, as a guard for the night, had stepped in. The altercation escalated, leaving the offender dead and Terren with serious knife wounds. It would not be til much later that I would learn Terren had used the claw weapon to despatch his assailant.
Terren came home from the physicker's, and Margrave set about arranging for someone to visit us. As expected, Terren thought we were nuts when we described the otherworldly experience. During the weeks it would take for Margrave to coax his specialist out to Port Jericho, Terren became increasingly moody and ill-tempered. It certainly made for a tense environment, but Zeke and I gave him his space. He was still recovering from some pretty vicious wounds after all.
Four days passed in relative peace before Zeke confided in me that, since that night, he'd begun seeing things. He described balls of light that would dart around the ceiling, and an ominous figure that seemed to most often be following Terren. Terren himself seemed oblivious and we dare not ask him about it. Not long after Zeke came to me, than I saw the figure for myself. It was like black smoke, standing some seven feet tall and having an uneven length of some five feet. In the front the top was elongated, in the back, it was the bottom that was elongated. Accompanying the misty shape there came the faintest tick and scrabble of claws against the floor. I saw it gliding past the study door just after Terren had passed on his way out. It seemed to me that the figure paused momentarily, and the top portion turned, as if it were looking at me. The encounter left my heart hammering in my chest and the fine hairs on my arms raised.
Needless to say, it was with immense relief that I greeted Margrave's return. The professor brought with him a person whom he introduced as Master Cressa. She was a Technomancer, trained as an esper architect, with an interest in such phenomena. She was also even more eccentric than Margrave, something I hadn't thought possible. Terren growled and grumbled at Cressa's declaration that she needed to set up shop in our home, to monitor things for several days straight. He finally threw up his hands and snapped that we could do what we wanted, but to leave him out of "all that nonsense." It didn't escape my attentions the veiled, calculating looks Cressa gave Terren.
He didn't get left out of it though. Cressa interrogated us all, and that was when I learnt Terren has used the artefact during his knife fight. When she demanded to see it, he stormed out and didn't return home until Master Cressa has departed.
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