The Chained Watcher

Backstory: A Wrong Turn

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Not Xel's perspective this time, cause I wanted to paint him as cooler than he thinks himself to be. Entirely unapologetic about this, cause it's fun freaking random characters out when I know he's not gonna do what they think he's gonna do.

Gonna gloss over most of how the Hero in this one ends up sneaking through a Watcher facility cause it's more fun to write about other bits. The Hero is here to rescue someone who got captured, and they were sneaking through the facility when they went into the wrong room.

Sometimes you just gotta remember to write for fun, instead of trying to force it to fill a mold, even if it's a mold of your own making.

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He swiftly ducks into a side room, steps light and fast. The Watchers haven't noticed him yet, but a single slip-up could spell the end of his admittedly reckless intrusion into their lair. He can't give up though. Not when they have Aliyah.

The room he slipped into is dark, and his first impression is that it's empty, but his heart freezes in his chest when he spots the Watcher sitting in the middle of the room. How he didn't notice it earlier, he doesn't know, but that doesn't matter anymore. What matters is-

Its head turns slightly, just enough that he would be able to see one of its eyes if it wasn't wearing a mask, and his blood runs cold. He can feel the weight of that gaze, and his thoughts tunnel as his awareness narrows down onto the Watcher before him. Before his utter stillness can suffocate him though, it turns away, and he remembers to breathe.

His feet won't move from the spot, rooted by the lurking remnants of the fear that had struck him, but the Watcher ignores him, focusing instead on something floating in front of it.

A clear sphere, untouched by gravity, floats in front of the Watcher with arcs of violet magic darting across like not-so-miniature lightning bolts. It resembles a crystal ball, and that resemblance only grows as the magic seeping into it starts shifting in a pattern that makes his brain hurt to try to comprehend, weaving a smoky mist into existence within it. Fractured images begin to form beneath the mist, and the sphere gains a strange weight to it, like the importance of its existence is enough to lend it physical weight.

Eventually though, the sharp violet magic settles down, ceasing its intricate web weaving and no longer playing across the surface of the sphere. The fractured images within seem to draw his gaze into them, but before he can make any concerted attempt to make out what the images show, the Watcher sets the orb delicately upon a large pedestal he'd failed to notice earlier.

And the Watcher looks at him.

It looms in the room in a way that outdoes any of the other Watchers he's seen, and while it's hard to tell with it sitting on the ground, he has a feeling its head would almost touch the ceiling up above. The lair of the Watchers, intimidatingly large as it is, clearly was not built to house a Watcher like this. His eyes move to its face.

The mask covering the upper part of its face doesn't shimmer like a normal mask. No, it's a strangely matte color, though the lack of lights in the room means that only the dim light from the cold violet wings sheds any illumination.

The oversized Watcher rumbles softly, "One would think you would have fled while I was preoccupied, rather than wait for my attention." That would have been the smart thing to do, yes. "That, or perhaps make the foolish mistake of trying to strike me while I was busy."

Is it a good thing the monster sounds slightly intrigued, or a bad thing? With Watchers, it's hard to tell. Being interesting could keep you alive, or being interesting could get you experimented on or tortured for fun because they want to see how much it takes to make you scream. Sometimes, death isn't the worst option.