damned_institute | Night 64: Sun Room

The first blood into the room, lights signalling their presence as if the first step over the threshold were not enough to bring them into her domain. Full attention was on them, indeed, the air in the Sun Room smelling stale and musty despite the amount of use it saw during the day.

Dusty, too, as each movement stirred up thicker and thicker clouds the deeper they ventured into the room. Dust motes glittered, trapped in the beams of their flashlights, and made the room seem less well-lit than it should have been, more impenetrable. The doorway to the library was obscured in shadow.

In that darkness, something stirred.

Skulduggery didn't need to be warned to move quietly, though his body wasn't quite as cooperative as he might have wanted. Quiet by normal standards, perhaps, but he still internally winced at every footfall where the noise wasn't completely absorbed by the carpet, every slow breath he was forced to take and the steady beat of the heart in his chest practically deafening in his ears. It was frustrating.

The atmosphere in the room was very different from earlier. It smelled dusty, unused for ages. Almost calming, if it weren't for Rita's warnings, the darkness, and the fact that Skulduggery knew the room was perfectly clean and full of people just an hour ago. Even as he managed to move at a pace quicker and surer than the night before, Skulduggery had his hand warily out, and he came to a sudden stop when the air suddenly shifted against his palm.

"Wait," he cautioned, eyes trained on the dark library door. Then, realizing that his abilities weren't completely understood, he belatedly added, "I think you're right. Something is hiding in here."

The old man stopped suddenly, and Rita paused too. She wasn't sure what tipped him off, but just as he voiced his warning, Rita also detected a presence. Something was moving in the darkness, but she couldn't tell what or where.

"Damn it," she hissed. Just when it looked like they were going to make it without much trouble. Still, Rita had enough experience with the monsters of the institute to understand their patterns of behavior. "They don't usually follow us from room to room. If we just make a break for it..."

Then we'll be home free, was the implied end to that sentence. When Rita focused her light on their goal, however, it failed to illuminate the door clearly. Was it the dust...?

It didn't matter. It wasn't far. Rita could make it easily. The mage took a deep breath, then broke into a sprint.

The patients were running, but the darkness around them was patient. As they passed out of the slants of moonlight slicing into the Sun Room, the darkness around the door palpably grew. It spread in tendrils, thick, writhing, slow-growing without the comfort of being truly slow, and at the bottom of the doorway it melted into the thick pile of the carpet and panelling of the floor.

The floor -- which came alive even as they came close enough that the door should have been visible. Dark strands reached up, almost languid, and snagged at feet, ankles, shins, coiling around the one in front before yanking.

They don't usually follow us from room to room.

"Ah," Skulduggery murmured. "Usually." Of course. Things, monsters attacking at night. As if the experiments and radical change of torture during the day weren't enough. It was nice to know that even when Skulduggery was tossed into an alternate reality, he could pretty much count on some kind of normal monster to continue making his life a misery. Ghouls, ghosts that created houses in caves, the Hollow Men, the Grotesquery. Dusk and his Infected.

Don't be a vampire, Skulduggery thought as he ran after Rita. Anything else is fine. Hell, I'll be grateful for another Faceless One. You can hear them. And they don't drink your blood before they kill you.

Something was wrong with the library door, with the darkness surrounding it. It was too... thick, too solid. Solid darkness. Years of war-honed instincts told him that when darkness was moving like that around a door that should really be visible by now, it usually meant Bad Things Were Happening. Like Necromancy.

But before Skulduggery could pull Rita back, something wrapped around the bare skin of his ankle and pulled it down, right as he stumbled into his next step. Already off-balance from running, Skulduggery crashed down onto the floor with a cry that came partly from the pain, and partly from the shock of how much pain there suddenly was. He could feel pain as a skeleton, sure, but falling and hitting his head had never dazed him, and certainly not for this long. It was a good few seconds before Skulduggery could even sit up.

What the hell was this? The door should have been visible by now. It was as if it were being shrouded by something…

By the time Rita realized that there was indeed a ‘something’ between them and the door, it was too late. With the first tug, she was yanked off her feet and onto her back. An indignant shriek escaped her throat as she hit the floor. The bladed whip around her waist dug into her skin, pressed inward from the awkward fall. Her flashlight slipped out of her hand, and she instead tried to reach for anything to old onto – the old man, the floor, something!

But Skulduggery went down too, and she couldn’t grip anything well enough to stop herself from being pulled away. What was she being pulled towards, even? Rita didn’t want to find out.

The mage rolled to her side, propped up painfully by her injured arm, while her functioning arm unhooked the whip and pulled it away from her waist. The sharp, awkwardly-angled motion caused the blade to scrape against her skin, but she didn’t have time to worry about that. She desperately snapped the bladed whip down below her feet, hoping to slash and cut away whatever was pulling her.

Both of her toys for the night fell, landing heavily on a mixture of carpet and hair that muffled the impact of flesh and ground. Even as the girl struggled the dark masses clutching her legs seemed to multiply -- but the blade sliced through with the distinctive snikt of knife on hair, and for a moment the strands around her slowed, paused.

And then attention redirected: or rather, focused. With a thick pulsing ripple the hair around Skulduggery expanded, multiplied until there was enough to wrap around every limb and constrict around his neck. Slowly, he was borne off the ground altogether, ever more darkness crawling onto his body to counter any fight he offered.

Sensations against his skin were something Skulduggery still had to get used to, but when the shadows around his ankle didn't disappear and more seemed to come out of nowhere, the one hectic thought he managed to grab onto was that shadows shouldn't feel so soft. And you shouldn't be able to cut through them with a knife.

Not Necromancy, then. Not shadows. Was it... hair?

He instinctively reached for a gun that wasn't there before his arms were covered in what was almost definitely hair now, and no amount of struggling could so much as dislodge it. Skulduggery felt the ground lift away from underneath him, and his already uneven breathing became harsh and painful. Despite the pressure on his neck, it still surprised him to realize that he was, in fact, choking.

What purpose did lungs serve?

When he could no longer draw in even a little bit of air, Skulduggery snapped the fingers of his right hand to summon a flame. He didn't need to look to know that it had worked - it was draining his energy again, for one thing - and he used the last of his physical strength to press the flickering fire against as much of the black stuff as he could reach.

"This can't be happening...!" Rita gasped, still hacking away at the tendrils that grasped her legs. They were brittle, and split into smaller threads as they broke, almost like hair.

It couldn't really be hair, could it...? That was just too ridiculous. It was impossible.

There was a flicker of light from where Skulduggery was, and Rita looked to see he was almost completely covered in the stuff. Fire was a good idea, though it looked like it wasn't going to be enough for him. Rita wasn't particularly attached to the guy, but she sure as hell didn't want him dead, either. She took a few seconds to lash out at the darkness surrounding him, though she could only reach one side of his body.

The floor around Skulduggery writhed, gleaming darkly in the swiping glances of the patients' flashlights, glinting here and there where a long strand caught the light. Hair streamed around his neck, ears, face -- tips stealing across his eyes and around nostrils and mouth as if trying to choke him by crawling into him.

But fire -- fire worked, it seemed. Where the flame touched the darkness sizzled, fritzing into the distinct smell of burnt hair and falling away from his body. Rita's blade sheared through more, thick hanks of hair slithering to the floor to melt into the living mass below.

And then, beneath the smoking hair on Skulduggery's body, a hand appeared. Blue-pale and bloody-nailed. It pressed up his side, fingers digging in seemingly for grip. A shudder wracked the darkness, and with a heave it lifted him higher in the air still.

If the sensation of hair against the skin on his ankle had been disconcerting, it was nothing compared to having his face covered with it - like the difference between dipping a toe in the water, and diving straight in. Skulduggery's vision was blocked off, his only means of gulping air forcibly taken away. He could feel the hair writhing across his jaw and trying to shove its way into his mouth, and quite frankly, it was disgusting.

The fire seemed to be working, though, and confirming Skulduggery's theory when the crispy smell of burnt hair filled the air. Burnt hair, he decided just then, was a good smell. With the small flame and Rita's help, Skulduggery managed to get most of his arms free, and he immediately reached up to rip away the strands at his neck and mouth.

For one glorious moment, he could breathe again, and he sucked in a lungful of delicious air before something suddenly gripped his side. Unfortunately, it wasn't Rita trying to pull him down - it was a creepy, bloody hand, digging in painfully and hoisting him higher. With the flame still lighting up his own, non-creepy hand, Skulduggery pressed his palm against those pale blue fingers and tried to prise them off.

Whatever was attacking them, its focus had been diverted from Rita. The mage used that opportunity to chop away what was left tangled around her leg and pull herself up to her feet. She wanted to turn and run, saving only herself, but her conscience wouldn't allow her to abandon someone on the verge of being killed.

While Rita could have contributed her own fire, there was no way for her to do it without burning Skulduggery. For the time being, she could only help by hacking away at whatever she could reach.

But the bizarre mass only seemed to grow, and before she knew it, the entire floor beneath the man had become a writhing heap of black hair. Still, Rita kept trying to cut it away... until she caught a glimpse of something emerging from the mass.

... Hands...?

Hands!?

Face pale, Rita slowly stepped back, away from her companion. That urge to run was stronger than ever, but for the moment, she was too busy trying to make sense of what she was seeing to make any sort of movement.

Skulduggery's flame landed against skin and flesh and seared there, roasting the dead flesh with a mixture of sweet burnt-human smell and the pungent scent of something long-dead. Unlike the hair, however, it didn't fall away, instead clutching more deeply at his ribs until blunted nails pierced through to skin. Tattered flesh tore away as the fire continued, smearing onto his shirt in a gruesome trip upward.

Another hand thrust out from amongst the thick strands even as both patients continued to struggle -- this one higher, grabbing onto the side of his face with a wet slap and scrabbling blindly for purchase around one eye socket. A nail, loosened with old black blood, scraped loose and stuck to his cheek.

Below, the hair continued to multiply faster than Rita could cut it, entwining into a thick trunk that lifted her fellow patient nearly level with the top of the room. And from within it: slowly, quietly at first, there rose a steady, guttural rattle.

Skulduggery had seen and experienced a lot in his time, up to and including zombie hordes. But, he had to admit, zombies that controlled massive amounts of hair hadn't ranked anywhere on the list. He was having a hard time believing it even now, but the fire that caught on the pale, creepy hand was burning away strips of rotting flesh in a way that didn't seem to hamper whatever the hand belonged to. In fact, the hand just dug in deeper, until Skulduggery realized with a pained shudder that the bloody nails were raking along his skin.

The fire catching onto his shirt and spreading quickly up his side was simply adding more insult to injury. The flames should have been perfectly under his control, barely even grazing him with heat. But they were beyond his control the moment the fire left his palm, and the intense heat against his skin was starting to hurt.

With zombies, you had to aim for the head. Whatever this was didn't seem to have one. Destructive fire, however, could be just as useful if you knew what to do with it. The dead hand might not feel pain, but the hair was receding from fire, and from Rita's blades. And there was still a writing heap of hair below him. With a determined heave, Skulduggery pushed himself over to face the floor - trying to brush as much of the hair around him with the burning shirt as possible - just as a second dead, clammy hand slapped onto his cheek and made for his eye.

This wasn't amusing. It had stopped being amusing a while ago, but now every single last drop of humor value had been sucked away. Skulduggery's anger lent him the strength to ignore the cold flesh against his eyelid, grip the hand still digging into his ribs, and displace the air around his own hand to shove it away with the force of a particularly nasty slingshot.

This was getting too weird. Way too weird. Maybe Rita was just hallucinating it all. The hair, those hands, that chilling sound, it was all just… impossible! Like a living nightmare.

Against the twisted pillar that seemed to defy all logic, the mage didn’t even know what she could do. The old man was still struggling, so he wasn’t dead yet. She couldn’t just walk away.

The raised, thickened pillar may have been harder to cut, but by pushing Skulduggery up and away, it made itself a relatively safe target for Rita’s magic. Upon realizing that, she immediately began a chant. “O flickering blaze, burn…!” Red-hot drops of light began to surround her, and from the space between her hands, a ball of fire formed. Once it grew to about the size of a person’s head, Rita let it fly, hurling the flame at the hair-trunk’s base.

“Take this, you freak!”

As if in response to the struggles of its captive, the hair seemed to multiply, the column of it thickening and more strands extending from the very walls to join in supporting Skulduggery's weight. The hand he grabbed to force away snapped back with the force, hair trailing it in a shape reminiscent of a real human's and dead bones snapping with the ease of rotted joints. It loped drunkenly backward for a moment even as more hair began to smoulder around him, then arced back to latch onto the other side of his face.

Both hands pulled, sharp strong yanks as if something were using him to pull itself free, and in counterbalance the hair rose. Skulduggery rose far above his companion, level with and then higher than the balcony ringing the Sun Room on the second level. With him travelled the endless death-rattle, slithering up the length of the hair until it centred below his body.

Then -- fire from below, Rita's spell striking dead-on and cracking to life as the hair burned. The writhing trunk of hair glimmered with eerie, uneven light as the fire worked its way through hanks of hair, casting the room into unsteady lighting.

However unsteady, it still revealed their surroundings: hair covered every wall, reaching toward Skulduggery and sparking as it caught ablaze. Around their intended exit, bloodied handprints smeared a counterpoint to the door frame, fresh and nearly black in the firelight.

And in every picture frame the silhouette of a woman, hair tangled over her face and obscuring all but one staring, malevolent eye.

[ from here ]

Silence came to accent the darkness, and the boy's expression didn't change, didn't show a thing but bland focus. Nigredo was beneath his feet, and Albedo needed to reach him. That was all there was. His hand shifted on the shotgun in his grasp, the knives resting gently in his belt against his hips, and Albedo thought, perfectly and precisely.

How if that man did anything to his brother, Albedo would leave a trail of blood.

[From here]

Hakkai paused right inside the door. It sounded like there was fighting again, and he could see flashes of flame-bright light further in. He gave Gren a quick glance.

"Should we risk it?" He kept his voice as low as possible, not wanting to attract attention to themselves.

"Unless you want to try another way around," he offered. He wasn't spoiling for a fight, but he wasn't sure they had any better options.

"Maybe whatever it is will be distracted?" He tried to sound optimistic, but it came out a little less confident than it could be.

Distracted, perhaps. But the rage that dwelt here was all-consuming and all-encompassing, and the presence of one victim did not nullify the threat to others. Even as the new intruders debated their path, thick vines of hair crept from within the doorframe they had just passed, covering the wood beneath.

Half-covered in clutching dark strands, the doors pulled shut with a sudden slam.

A trail of blood he might be willing to leave, but perhaps he was not prepared to find: as Albedo strode through the darkness, there rose a faint hint of scorched wood (and beneath it, for those who might know, burnt flesh). Beneath his feet the carpet rustled quietly, and should he care to look there were first droplets, then thin smears, and finally a thick pathway of blood extending beneath his feet.

But perhaps the boy would be distracted. From the distance, the recesses of the room untouched by light, there came the patter of footsteps, the quick bare-footed run of a child.

Hakkai did jump, this time, the sudden noise behind him coming as more of a surprise than he could cover. He swept his flashlight around to see what had come up behind them, and saw only inky tendrils of darkness.

He gave Gren a nervous smile. "I don't think we have much of a choice tonight, it seems like." Whatever had trapped them in here was likely looking for a fight. He tried to steady himself, prepare for whatever form the attack took so he could counter it with his chi.

It wasn't long before both hands had clamped back down onto his face, and Skulduggery's subsequent groan was more due to how weak his manipulation of air had gotten, rather than how desperate his situation was becoming or how clammy the rotting flesh was. The doors to the chapel from last night and this morning were visible now, peeking out through the bars of the second floor railing, but Skulduggery was too far away from the railing to make any kind of a grab for it.

Rita, down below him, seemed to be on much better terms with fire than Skulduggery was right now. The flames she summoned caught and grew and lit up the room, and it briefly occurred to the former skeleton that if he fell from this height, especially without his usual increased air to cushion the impact, he'd very likely break a bone. Possibly more than one. The thought was strangely comforting.

He was too high up to see much more than the fire, but when he caught a glimpse of a larger picture frame further up on the wall - one that he knew had a boat in it just a few hours ago - Skulduggery took a chance and punched down into the hair, over and over again, aiming for where the creepy sound was coming from and hopefully where the head would be.

Gren cursed, and stared back at the abruptly closed door. Well, that wasn't good at all, was it? If they couldn't get out that way, there was really only one other way out of the room.

"Want to make a run for it?"

He was really only half-joking. Even if whatever it was caught up with them, they'd be closer to their destination when it did.

As the patients debated their course of action, the darkness around them deepened, the moonlight seeping through the windows with less and less strength. Even the glimmering light of fire from the other end of the room seemed to fade with time, each minute seeming to pull it further away, making it dimmer, separating the living breathing humans from one another.

Behind Hakkai and Gren, the force that had pushed the door shut had vanished -- closer inspection would show nothing but a door they could not pull open.

But deserving of closer inspection still was Gren: for between his dark hair drifted hair still darker, pitch-black and not of his own. It lengthened slowly, brushing down his shoulders to his back and lower still.

Hakkai still wasn't sure what it was they were up against, but he could see the gradual dimming of the light - both from outside, and from Gren's flashlight. Whatever it was - it was trying to split them up. And that would be bad for both of them. Hakkai concentrated, pulled up a small ball of raw energy, and threw it at the darkness growing between them, even as he shoved forward right behind it.

It almost seemed like an optical illusion, the way the room seemed almost to fade into blackness. It took a moment for his brain to even register the change, and by then, he was more concerned with the creeping sensation that was almost like wind, or the way the sand on Titan had tickled at the back of his neck like a multitude of tiny insects.

"What the--"

He was cut off as Hakkai moved suddenly and acted on instinct, throwing himself back towards the wall.

Though Rita's spell was reasonably effective, it left her drained and fatigued - even more so than usual, with her injuries complicating things. She staggered back, away from the writhing trunk of hair, but the flickers of light illuminated more of the thick locks draped over every wall.

And that face, staring out from the walls, its skin deathly pale...

It was like something out of a horror novel.

Rita didn't have enough energy to keep fighting that thing. Every lock of hair she cut or burned was just replaced by more. She had to get out of here. She couldn't take any more of this. Wobbling on her feet, the mage ran to the Library door. The bloody handprints only gave her momentary pause before she reached for the door handle.

As long as she was in the Sun Room, there was no getting away from that... thing. She didn't want to leave Skulduggery behind, but she wasn't in any position to get him down, either. Her tolerance was already past its limit, and her mind had gone into panic mode. She just had to get away!

The ball of energy rent the darkness at first, shadows tearing apart as if Hakkai had attacked sheets of black fabric instead of something intangible. As they ripped apart to reveal the two men to one another with greater clarity, there echoed a faint rattling that seemed to emanate not from a fixed point but from around them in every direction. Almost a death rattle, for those who had heard one, it continued longer than any natural breath could even as it faded closer and further.

But the shrouding darkness did not return between them: it had already done its work. The hair drifting amongst Gren's own had lengthened enough to reach his waist and wrists, and there it suddenly stopped its lazy progression and whipped out in a sinuous curve to bind his arms to his torso and press him into the wall.

Hakkai bit back a swear. He didn't have any physical weapons on him to cut Gren free with - he didn't even know if physical weapons would work on whatever it was that had Gren trapped.

The sudden noise, soft as it was, chilled him to the bone, and made him pause as his first blast of chi faded away. He'd heard that sound many, many times before - the last few dying breaths of an enemy, choking on the blood in their lungs. But there was nobody he could see, and the sound came from all around them.

He tried to push that aside, and moved in for another blast of energy, aiming at the wall just to the side of Gren, hoping he wouldn't cause too much damage to the structure behind the darkness.

The sound was a terrible one, calling to mind too many memories he preferred to keep well buried, but he didn't have much chance to dwell on it, or react at all as he was bound and pinned in place.

He would have cursed, had not the combination of the impact and the wave of sudden panic at being restrained--not again--taken the breath out of him. He recovered only enough to struggle, instinctual more than any planned strategy, nerves not at all helped by Hakkai's attempt to free him.

[I'm not a week late....]

Speak to a weapon of blood and fire, and it will know them as well as any other--know it better than bonds of love and joy. The scent perforated his being, and brought that aspect to awareness. Abstractly aware of it but nothing further, he continued to move forward.

Footsteps running beckoned nearby, and the Variant halted finally, eyes searching the room. Blood and fire, and now small footsteps. It was as if the Conflict had come back to haunt.

He couldn't think of it. He couldn't think.

The wall cracked on impact, hair writhing around the ball of energy before some strands gave way. Behind the thick coat of black the plaster shuddered, fragments scattering around Hakkai and Gren and leaving a visible hole behind them. The death-rattle coalesced, echoing around the room before finally something became visible in the wall: an eye, wide and staring in a pale face mostly obscured by ropes of hair. Malevolent and furious, its gaze fixated on Hakkai --

Even as a hand parted through Gren's hair and landed on his face. Smooth, pale, and icy, it pressed against his cheek and pulled: and slowly, he began to sink back into the hair, into the wall itself.

Skullduggery's fists pummelled into the hair, the shocks of each blow absorbed by soft thick tresses until, suddenly, something shattered against his knuckles. Brittle and yet fleshy on impact, it gave way with the momentum and a the sound of something tearing split wetly through the air. The binding of the hair paused, then slowly parted to reveal a head-sized lump that in turn lifted out of the dark strands: the same enraged eyes that stared out from every portrait in a white face, splattered with black and foul-smelling blood.

Beneath those same eyes came a white nose and then -- the remnants of what had once been the lower half of a woman's face. Skullduggery's blow had torn her bottom jaw away from its tenuous hold to her skull, the rotting flesh weak, and it hung loose now against the pale neck that followed the head. A tongue, swollen and blackened with decay, lolled with sharp jerks as she yanked herself up his body, the hands on his head pulling him down and into her.

Below, on the ground, the hair holding Skullduggery continued to blaze, lighting Rita's path to the bloodstained door and snowing burnt flakes of hair throughout the room. If she chose to open the door, there would be more hair behind it, a thick curtain she would have to fight through before she would be able to escape to the next room.

Those childish footsteps crossed the room in the distance, where the shadows of the room hid their owner -- then silence, absolute and breathing -- and then the same light, playful susurration in the carpet came behind him, approaching at an unusual rate. A small hand, pale enough to be marbled with blue veins where the skin was thin, reached out to tug on a corner of Albedo's shirt.

The hand led to a child, very young, with a bowl cut and wide eyes, the irises so large that the dim lighting nearly didn't catch on the whites at all. Silent, wearing only a thin T-shirt and shorts, the boy stared up at the patient.

Hakkai recoiled from the face half-hidden beneath the hair. This was like nothing he'd fought before - it was something out of a ghost story, almost. He realized a moment later that his pause had given the spirit an opening to grab closer hold of Gren. It was becoming clear that his chi attacks weren't doing much good - instead, he dove in, trying to grab at Gren's shoulders and pull him away from the wall.

It was like every bad nightmare he'd ever had, on Titan and beyond, trapped and unable to do anything to free himself while a voice in the back of his mind that he hadn't heard in quite awhile now was telling him to just give up. He'd suffered enough, hadn't he? He'd almost had peace once... before waking up here, why not go back to it?

But he was still stronger than that voice, just barely, so he tried to flinch away from the corpse-like hand, tried to kick at the wall he was pinned to as if it would do him any good... struggled as much as he could to keep from being dragged away into that darkness.

And this, Skulduggery realized, is why I don't usually have a plan. Strategy hadn't seemed to do much apart from set his shirt on fire, but several desperate punches into the soft black hair had finally managed to tear through something. Not that it seemed to do much good, just like practically everything else he and Rita had thrown at the thing. All it seemed to accomplish was sending an unfamiliar shudder down Skulduggery's spine as his fist sank through the rotting flesh.

"I feel I should warn you," he said, watching the owner of the rotting hands rise into view before him, "that I once met someone whose face was inside out. Compared to that, you're downright charming."

He wondered for a moment if the enraged woman would answer - or if she was even capable of understanding - but the far more immediate concern of being dragged down into the writhing mass of hair with her presented itself. Skulduggery had only recently acquired a throat and lungs, so he was by no means an expert, but he didn't think suffocating on hair and dead flesh was going to feel very good.

Although he would never have admitted it, Skulduggery was hoping this night would be as short as the last. Because without the static that seemed to precede every intercom announcement interrupting them, he really couldn't see a way out of this.

Hair swept and snaked over Gren's form, tangling with itself and his clothes to grasp him with an ever-firmer grip. The face in the wall pushed through, borne on a column of even more hair, bobbing with loose -- almost mechanical, unnatural -- jerks as she rested her chin on his shoulder. Almost affectionate, close enough for the rot and the death-rattle to ingrain into his senses, she tilted her merciless stare as if to watch Hakkai's efforts.

One dark eyebrow quirked: the expression shifting nearly to confusion for just a moment. Then another hand burst forth from the masses enveloping Gren and wrapped around his torso, clutching with dead flesh against the living, sinking his shoulders and back into what should have been soothingly-patterned wallpaper.

And the hair continued to wrap him in a living cocoon -- crawling with a life of its own, it wound around Hakkai's fingers where they touched Gren and then coiled up around his wrist, threatening to bind them together for good.

Just when Rita thought she was home free, the door she tried to escape from led only to another thick curtain of hair. Having been so focused on getting away from the mess behind her, Rita didn't notice until she took a step forward, her hand and face brushing against the wiry strands that dangled in front of her.

She screamed. All productive options had been tried and had more or less failed. There was no dealing with this rationally, she just had to get away somehow. In her panic, she backed away, tripped, and continued to scramble away in a half-crawl. There had to be something. Another exit. She couldn't be trapped in this nightmare!

Trying to pull Gren out wasn't working, and at the rate this was going, he was going to get trapped too. He tugged one hand free of the dark wisps - which, he was starting to realize, was hair - and aimed a quick punch at the face in the wall. Hopefully it would be enough of a distraction for Gren to pull free.

The face that approached Skullduggery now was as incapable of understanding his words as it was of knowing any imperative but vengeance; vengeance not upon any specific targets but for the blood soaked into this space, the nights of fury and torture, for an old crime saturating the air with the rancid reek of hatred and the subtler stink of fear. There was no fear left in the eyes that regarded him now, but there was something almost questioning in her gaze --

But that was likely to be of little concern as her hands smoothed over his skin until her torn fingernails brushed his lips. Then into his lips, or through them, dead flesh travelling through living with neither blood nor wound, but undeniably landing in his mouth. Old blood scraped onto his teeth as she reached for a hold on his lower jaw in turn, pulling it down hard enough to dislocate.

The narrowed focus on Skullduggery had one beneficiary: Rita, whose exit had been blocked by living tendrils of hair, had in her panic pushed some of it away. Beyond the curtain of black were the tall bookshelves of the library, calm and unmarred by what lingered here.

"Get out of here, Hakkai." He didn't raise his voice, but he was resolute.

It was no use. Just no use. He could keep struggling, but he could hardly move, and at this point, they were both going to be dragged away if Hakkai stayed and tried to free him.

It was as if death and the weight of all his past sins were dragging him down into darkness, into an oblivion that part of him still craved after all this time.

His eyes continued to trace the sound blindly in the distance, only to freeze when it halted and instead came from behind him--quickly, too quick-- Two? Were there more? What kind of enemy--

Ah, but that... Was thinking too much like the weapon he once was, and yet still would forever be.

Albedo shifted his weight, turning his body to the side to glance backward, only in time to see the child behind him (close, too close, how--), staring in a way Albedo would describe as haunted. This boy, too, had seen much and many (wondrous things, horrors untold), and Albedo, Albedo would--

He swallowed against the reaction even as his hand move to detach the child's hand from his shirt. "...Why are you here?"

Night 64: Sun Room

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time skipping for simplicity!

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