Event: Winged Comet

[Indivar]

It didn't start off as a dangerous situation. At least, not anymore dangerous than normal.

The Winds weren't something Indivar frequented, typically not worth the exertion and the turbulence of use. But he was tired, and his wanderings -- the search for his siblings disguised as helpful meandering across Askavi -- had lead him farther afoot than he'd anticipated. He was aching and wanted very desperately to go home and bathe and make further inroads with his neighbors.

So the Winds it was.

The few times he'd had to use them had made him roughly familiar with what to expect: the choppiness, the nausea, the feeling like he might rattle apart at any moment if he changed any part of how he was handling the Green. Barely dark enough to risk it in the first place, it was sure to leave him wearier than when he'd started, for all it got him home faster.

Maybe, if he had been more focused, he would have sensed the pulling, rippling cascade that rose up behind him and overtook him, maybe he would have been able to drop free before he was subsumed. But he wasn't, and he didn't, and instead a seething wave of power crashed against him, picking him up and flinging him along the Wind. It was instinct that tightened his shield around him, that threw up further layers beneath the shaking Green as he struggled against the power -- so much of it, and terrifying -- fighting to descend.

It was like falling from the air but a thousand times worse, mind reeling, senses straining for anything that might mean 'freedom!' in that moment.

He drained his Green to half before stowing it, falling back into Summer-sky. The transition rattled his teeth in his head so hard he bit through the skin of his cheek, mouth full of blood as he was flung and spun in the nothingness.

The wave subsided, Indivar left in a disoriented free fall while he struggled to breathe, exhausted.

A free fall that he didn't realize was real until the whistling of actual air by his ears and through his hair pierced the swimming fog in his brain. The sky swung around him as he tumbled, city above, blue below, blue above, city below, and he thought he was screaming, crying out across the psychic threads of the Green in terror but he couldn't be sure. Summer-sky shuddering with exertion, he wrapped one last shield around himself before he crashed into the closest building.


Yelling. A language he didn't know. Common, with an accent he hadn't heard in a century. Panic rising up in him, visceral and numbing. The world swum as he stood, figures barely distinguishable from rubble. One arm and the wing on the same side limp, unmoving. Panic rising to a fever pitch.

Something reached for him, and he was slicing through it before he could think, blinking at red wetness fanning across his side. Screaming then, and the mobile wing mantled. There was blood in his mouth and down half his face, and he tried to send across the Summer-sky but he only succeeded in worsening the drumbeat in his own head. The ring of people around him shifted and wavered, and more cries of pain, more aggression, and the Green was back on his hand, responding to his fear, the disorientation. Something cracked, rubble fell, and at the same time pain shot up his back, staggering him to kneel.

*Stop, please!* Ripped from him, wide and hurting, but the pain didn't recede even though he could feel responding cries from the people around him. There were more strikes, in front of and behind him, and more cries that he caused, attacking out without accuracy, before exhaustion and blood loss washed darkness across him.



Psychic pain rushed from the Territory Seat, reaching for miles. Those close spread word quickly of the calamity: a surge of power so strong it had shaken homes apart and rippled the roads like waves, toppling businesses, trapping families, starting fires; a dark figure that appeared in the sky miles above the hill and its unmitigated decent until it hit the uppermost building. Further spikes of psychic rage and mangled cries from the crash site as, mangled, the buildings collapsed.

Along the border the rippling earth spread, sending the lake into a frenzy, shredding farms and homes, turning roads jagged and treacherous. The farther from the border the less the overall fluctuation appeared; instead sinkholes began to open intermittently in the farther reaches of Dhemlan, large enough to swallow a person or destroy a building. Meanwhile, passage through the mountains strangled to nothing by fallen rocks and debris clogging passage ways. All eyes turn toward the smoking Territory Seat.