Chapter Text
Rayla's legs gave out from under her, and she fell back down the wall into the pile of shed tools below. Her entire body was shaking uncontrollably, and she couldn't really get a grasp on it. She muttered to herself as the frustration built within her. Her head was still thumping, switching between feeling like an extreme heavyweight and as light as a feather continuously, creating an awkward and unnatural sensation that continued to roll through her stomach.
She crawled forward toward the exit door and coughed hard onto the floor, desperately trying to regain control of her legs.
What… What even happened last night?
Bits and pieces of her memory were coming back to her, slowly, but the struggle to form any kind of coherent picture of the past was proving more difficult than she anticipated. She knew she had gone into the lodge during the daytime… and now she was in the tool shed. What had happened in between? Only brief flashes existed. Callum's room… Ezran's room, but she couldn't form any sort of connection between them.
She shook her head, which was a mistake; it sent her already fragile sense of balance, which had been slowly recovering, into a complete frenzy, and she lost virtually all of her orientation. Her body, which she had only been supporting with her arms so far, fell back to the floor.
She lay there for a while, breathing deeply, trying to keep her food down and waiting for the shed to stop spinning. After she started feeling a little better, she grabbed the doorknob with both hands and pulled, using it for support as she worked her way up to her feet. Finally, it seemed her legs had regained some strength and were once again able to support her weight, just barely.
She managed to open the door, stumbling through it and making it only a couple of steps into the open air before she collapsed to the grass floor and vomited.
Wonderful…
She wiped her lips; she was gonna have to find a way to get that taste out of her mouth now. Apparently, despite what she thought she could do, she had been a little too hasty getting back up. She stayed on the grass for about a full minute now, breathing in the freshness of the summer and allowing the warm sun to beat down on her head as she tried as hard as she could to recover.
From the looks of where the sun was, it seemed to be the middle of the afternoon… somehow, she had been sleeping the entire morning. Not exactly common for her, she was always the early riser of the bunch. Finally, after she felt stable enough, she was able to reach a stand once again, this time under her own power, but she still decided to take it slow for at least the next half hour while she waited for everything else to settle into place.
She patted herself down, making sure she still had everything, and that's when she realized… her blades… they were missing.
Shit!
She had probably left them in the lodge. And as her eyes wandered to the large building in front of her, an icy chill shot down her spine, the memories all coming back. That history spell she had watched with Callum, her run through the different rooms of the lodge… she couldn't form any connections in her head between the rooms she ended up in because there were none. She remembered that now… she had just been walking through doorways and ending up where she wasn’t supposed to..
The rest of it all returned too; the fact that it had suddenly become nighttime in the blink of an eye despite her entering the cabin when the daylight was just beginning, her weird run-in with her… past self? And finally, that figure… staring back at her before everything went dark.
She didn’t remember too much about it, having only seen it for about half a second. She just remembered the pale white head that seemed to tilt slightly to fit under the entrance arch to the dining area as it stared back at her. And the face… was there a face?
The more she thought of it, the more she realized that her not being able to remember one wasn't a gap in her memory; it was the simple fact that… whatever she had encountered… it didn't have one.
And that did things to her thoughts she wasn’t really expecting.
She knew she had to go back into that stupid lodge; she really didn't want to. In fact, she felt herself inching forward, slower and slower, the closer she got to it. The lodge was where that thing was, where it had played with her, broken her psychologically until it had finally had enough and… decided to let her go. She really never wanted to go back there ever again, or at least not alone.
She now truly understood what Callum had felt like in the days leading up to his disappearance, to the point where he didn't even want to walk back to his room without being accompanied by someone. And she had only been under this thing's influence for what, two days or so at most? Callum and Ezran? They’d been dealing with it for months. Who knew what it could've done to them or what they experienced at that time?
Yeah, she wasn’t stupid enough to not put two and two together. Everything she had experienced over the past two days, the coughing, the nightmare, the exhaustion, seeing that… that thing.
These were all of Callum and Ezran’s symptoms… which meant that… somehow, it was coming after her now too. And well, if that was the case, then she wasn’t exactly safe anywhere, was she? It wasn't the building that did that to her; it was that creature. And lodge or not, it would always follow her.
That's what it did, right?
“FOLLOWING!” As Callum’s drawings had put it…
With that in mind, she put on a determined face and made a beeline for the lodge door. If that thing wanted to fuck with her again, it was going to do so regardless of whether or not she did or did not go, so might as well take the chance and reclaim her stuff before she figured out what to do next.
She didn't even need her keys to open the door this time; it had still been unlocked from yesterday. She vaguely hoped nobody had broken in during the night, but given the shit that she was now dealing with, it wasn't really the largest of her concerns.
She took a timid step into the cabin, half expecting to end up in some unknown location, but no, there she was. Right where she should be, in the living room, with the birds from the still sunlit sky twittering behind her. Not only that, but the dining room, where that thing had been standing earlier. It was empty. From where she was, she couldn't even see a hint of evidence that anything had ever even been there.
She breathed a sigh of relief…
Oookay… Seems it’s not messing with me… for now…
And there were her swords, scattered right behind the front entrance. She raised an eyebrow, timidly bending down to pick them up and push them back into their holster before she stopped and checked the still very full sack of moon opals she had on her person.
She didn’t remember anything about what had happened after she lost consciousness, of course. Maybe… maybe she should take a look…
She was probably going to regret this, but she needed to know something about how she ended up in the tool shed after falling just in front of the entrance.
With that in mind, she pulled out an opal and started the spell. Not to see what had happened to Callum and Ezran this time, but to see what had happened to her.
And what she saw made her stop dead in her tracks.
The spell was flickering wildly, but she still saw herself, leaning against the front door of the lodge, one arm gently wrapped around her legs as she held them close to her chest.
She wasn’t unconscious at all.
In fact, she was wide awake. She was looking up at that thing as it appeared to slowly stalk closer to her. She didn't know if every now and then it teleported a few inches or if the spell was just fizzling in and out so much that a few seconds were being cut. Her eyes… They were completely lifeless, locked in a trance-like state, but nonetheless slowly tracking that thing's movement as it continued to inch closer to her, her mouth hanging open very slightly.
She could get a better look at it now. Yeah, there was definitely no face, and it was unnaturally tall, way taller than what would ever be considered normal for a person. It had clothes on too, draped in… something black, but it was a style she didn't recognize or had never even seen before on anybody.
That thing leaned down to meet her, getting just about eye level before the history spell cut out. And, she was left alone in the quiet lodge's living room once again, her heart thumping out of control.
That… Why didn’t she remember that? Why didn’t she remember any of it? She was awake. She was probably awake until the point where she fell asleep in the tool shed; in fact, looking at the evidence, it was now a possibility that she was never even brought there. That she might have walked there herself before collapsing. Which was a thought that was more chilling to her than if she had just been teleported.
Forget what I see… She remembered. Callum’s drawings were warnings, warnings about all of this. And now, they were finally starting to make sense. If this thing could just tamper with her memories whenever it wanted, then what falsifications would it be able to plant in her mind going forward? What would it be able to do with that?
She held the moon opals tighter. One thing was sure now: these opals weren't just a tool for filling in the gaps in the Callum and Ezran timeline anymore. She still needed to use them for that, obviously, her objective hadn't changed, find Callum and Ezran, more than ever. She needed to help them. And since she was inflicted with this thing too now, maybe the three of them could find a way to stop it, to get things back to normal. But also, these moon opals were now her lifeline. Her grounding in reality. She was going to need to use them more frequently to fill in gaps she didn't remember, or she was going to lose herself to delusions before she could even do anything.
Going back to the castle was no longer an option, either. She didn’t know precisely how she caught it, but if what Callum said that night, when he was yelling at Ezran, was anything to go by, this thing was spread from person to person. And she did not want to be the one to start an epidemic.
She laughed to herself, gently. So… you want to come after me now, huh? She said to herself. Fine… but be careful what you wish for.
Bring it on.