07. 🌳

[undread]

This memory, from the start, is a little odd. You're watching it, you can see and hear and sense what's happening, but there's no you. Or at least, you don't see Laudna. Your consciousness is somehow everywhere at once, witnessing this.

What you see is a dark mist, almost green in hue, hanging over the area, with crackling purple light moving through the mist like an aura. The memory shows something like the ruin of an abandoned city, cracked stone and empty, haunted. It looks like a city abandoned after a battle, and then left that way with the blood soaking the streets and cracks in the rocks and houses for a hundred years, letting the plant life grow up around the broken houses and cracked streets.

In the center of the city, a tree rises above all of it. An ancient oak of some sort, impossibly tall, its gnarled branches spreading out around you, its roots rising up through the ground. There are no leaves on the tree; it looks dead, and it smells like rot and vegetable decay.

You see Bell's Hells (minus Laudna as well as the blue guy) standing off for battle against a shape emerging in purple light - the figure of a woman, imperious looking in a gown and high collar, just a spectre, a blur outlined in light.

"Well. Interesting to see you all face to face," she says. "What now?"

They all try to speak to her. The conversation is long, but the gist of it is that they want her to free Laudna from some place she's trapped. Delilah says she hasn't trapped Laudna at all; that her and Laudna's interests are the same, and she wants to help Laudna return with them. And she's happy to grant them power, as well, if they help both her and Laudna.

"See," Chetney says. "The problem is, we want to bring Laudna back, but the only way to do it is if you're not around."

"You misunderstand the nature of our binding," Delilah says. "We are not two being cohabiting a form. We are one being. If you are to bring her back, I am to go with, and if you are to leave her dead, then so to will I fade until I find my next path, and my vengeance along with it. It's not optimal, but I will adapt. She and I are bound together."

"Why Laudna?" asks F.C.G.. "What's so special about her?

Delilah's voice is soft and a little nurturing. "Some children have a gift. I found I had a gift for learning. Her, she was one of the lucky to be born with something. But I didn't see that at the outset. She was useful. I had to prove a point, and she was in the right place at the right time.
Fate, or whatever you might call it, deigned that we meet at that time. Because of that, here we both are." She smiles. "So, she's special because she's part of my destiny."

They try to argue a little longer, but she says, "Either you stand here and die, or bring us back and we both live. Or if you hate me so much that you let her die... the choice is yours."

"You're lying," Imogen snarls at her. "I know you're fading. We don't need you."

"I think you're bullshitting," Chetney agrees. "Let us talk to Laudna."

"Hmm. If you think it will do any good. I've been speaking with her myself for some time. Laudna, darling?"

The dream changes perspective suddenly; you exist in it now as a singular person, a singular perspective. You're hidden behind branches, trapped in a cage deep inside the tree. But the branches part, and you can see your friends, and you feel yourself exist again, abruptly.

"Imogen," you say, your voice hoarse. "I forgot how much I hate it here."

"Can you get out?" Imogen calls to her. "Can you get our of there? I need you to fight her, okay?

"I think that depends on you, darling." You feel weak, groggy. So tired. "I haven't been able to fight her for some 30 odd years."

The branches close, and your perspective doesn't exist anymore. Everything goes dark.