lostcarnival | ⇨ FAERIE TALES

Rita can’t help but crack a smile at her moment of triumph. She did it. She got him!

But hearing Ignatius respond calmly... almost fondly, her smirk fades and her focus returns. It’s not over yet. She stabbed him, but that’s not enough to kill him.

Still gripping the sword plunged in the fae’s chest, Rita demands, “Release Strange from his contract! That’s the only way you’re walking away from this.”

"I don't think that's going to happen," he says, his gaze falling from her face to her feet. "So much for 'negotiations'." His somewhat grim smile returns, and he's obviously still in pain, his thoughts beginning to wander.

"When I met you... was that even real?" The smile fades again. "I'm still not sure. I didn't understand anything in that place. I was looking for a solution... and you ended up being part of it, anyway. In an entirely different way than I expected..."

"Maybe I don't understand anything anymore."

The leeches bubble out of the waters while Lambert uses clawed hands to clamber up the side of the earth pillar as rapidly as he can, adrenaline from the fight making it easier to ignore his injuries, for now. He keeps his mind on his goal: Strange, who he assumes must be on top of this platform, because if there’s one thing he knows windbag magicians need to work their magic most effectively? It’s air.

Too focused to pay attention to whatever negotiations are going on below, Lambert bursts from the water and onto the edge of the platform like a sodden, scorched avenging angel. This time, he learns from the mistakes of the past, and the first thing he casts is a purple circle around Strange’s feet to keep him corporeal.

Luckily? That spell doesn’t require words. Meaning that he’s absolutely free to yell as he hurtles towards Strange.

“If the lord wouldn’t return him, the witcher knew one sure way to break the fae’s hold! One the magician taught him!” A step more and he’s grabbing for Strange’s arm, his stupid armor, anything he can reach to grab ahold of him and yank him around. If this works, it’s going to be terribly awkward, if it doesn’t, it’ll at least shut Strange the fuck up for one second.

“True love’s kiss.” And he tries to kiss Strange. Well, more like tries to punch him in the mouth with his mouth, really, for the way it bangs their faces together.

Wow. Uh.

That sure is a thing that is happening, right now.

Rita’s look sharpens into a glare when he refuses, but as Ignatius goes on to reminisce, she frowns, uncertain. Is he really asking that?

Her grip doesn’t budge, but her gaze wanders, avoiding his eyes. “It was real,” she says after some hesitation, though her tone is firm. “But it wasn’t me. Not at first.”

"I wonder who you are, then," he says, closing his eyes. He tenses his muscles, like he's waiting for something.

"I can't give him up to you. So... you'll have to take him from me." He keeps himself still. "If you can. It's all I can do, but it will be done, none the less."

The main problem here is that kiss magic is a narratively sensible solution to Strange. After all, he's specialized in disenchantment via his mouth. So probably to everyone's surprise, Lambert's smooch attempt slightly works. Of course, the key word here is slightly.

Now Strange has two competing influences in his brain: most of him wants to stay with Ignatius, while a tiny part of him wants to go back to the carnival. Something's definitely shifted in his posture. He's still tense, but it's more like the tenseness of a cornered cat than the battle-ready tenseness he had before.

He's certain of one thing, though: he is way too straight for this kissing nonsense. So, Strange attempts to bite down hard on Lambert's bottom lip while trying to push Lambert's face away with his hands. This means that Lambert's getting some claws to the face as Strange does so.

This is now officially a kiss fight, and definitely probably not what Strange had in mind when he asked Lambert to kill him all that time ago. While Strange might be bringing claws, Lambert is bringing claws and fangs, which he reminds Strange of forcibly when the kiss turns more violent and he bites back, sharp points slicing in hard enough to make the magician bleed. The taste of iron floods their mouths, while Lambert blindly grabs for the magician's wrists in a crushing grip, before he yanks his mouth away.

He's dripping blood from his mouth, staining his fangs as it runs from his lips.

"By your blood I bind you," he spits. "To stop fighting and shut the fuck up!"

Unfortunately for Lambert, Strange doesn't shut the fuck up. Blood contracts don't work that way, idiot! He spits out a mouthful of blood before grinning madly at Lambert. "And I was starting to think you were too scared to even scratch me."

Because unlike the rest of the team, Strange has taken a surprisingly small amount of damage so far and it's mostly been caused by friendly fire. "Come on, you cowards!" he yells, hopefully loud enough for Rita and Syrlya to hear as well. "Let's make this a real fight!"

There's still a shit-ton of leeches and, as one bites into the bare flesh on his leg, Strange remembers that they exist. Lambert's got his wrists and that glyph on the ground is keeping him solid, but what Ignatius has in sheer power, Strange has in versatility. He mutters a few quick words before pursing his lips slightly as he sucks in some air. The air around Lambert's head gets lighter and it becomes harder to breathe as Strange continues to magically remove the air from Lambert's vicinity.

Surpriiiise, Strange learned more fun ways to murder during his magical training montage from hell.

Real fight his ass. The magic of the Athenaeum might not respond to Strange, but he's smarter than the specters and ghosts of it as well, which makes him less susceptible to having bullshit thrown at him if he can think his way out of it, which is mostly why Lambert was hoping to accomplish. Hitting Strange too hard and fast to give him time to come up with anything was mostly the strategy here, or maybe dumping him in the water -- but moving him out of the glyph would just give him a chance to turn to smoke, and the leeches can't keep doing their job.

As his mind's racing for another story, the witcher abruptly finds he can't breathe.

Could Strange do that before? Lambert sure didn't know he could do that before. It would be pretty impressive if it also wasn't trying to kill him. Unfortunately, while Lambert has many talents, breathing when its actively being restricted from him isn't one of them. You also kind of need air to speak, and Lambert discovers it's a pretty bad time when he reflexively tries to breathe and it feels like daggers knifing his lungs. He should be able to hold his breath for longer, but with the magical inducement his vision starts to darken in little enough time, perception narrowing to the band of heat around his arm.

Peridot's gift, still charged from Ignatius' attack before and crackling with magic energy Lambert hasn't drawn from. He could pull from it now, turn into dragon form, something with more of an advantage --

Lambert is straight up swinging his arm around to beat Strange's face in with that bracer instead. Fuck magic, physical violence is where it's at!

Ignatius' stance is about what Syrlya expects as he wades over beside Rita. His fingers curl around the rose and sword both before he glances up at the pillar that extends over the surface.

"We'll need a little more than that." He points his blade at Ignatius, although the motion isn't firm enough to be a real threat. "If you are going to force our hand, then I will hear what it will take to forcibly remove your claim of him... unless you would like this torment to continue until you relent."

"You'll not do worse to me than I've already suffered," he says through his teeth, not looking up to face them. Considering he's staying this with a sword already stuck through his chest, he might be kind of serious.

Strange's yelling from above is answered with nothing more than rolled eyes. Rita will go if she feels like it, but right now, she's more interested in what Ignatius has to say. Besides, it's not like they can just leave him unsupervised, even if he is bound like this.

Rita frowns at his answer to Syrlya, wondering if it could really be true. There's always worse, isn't there? But it's not like Rita's all that interested in exploring the various ways a fae can be tortured. "If we take him, and you go free, will you pursue him?" she decides to ask instead.

Because if he will, then Rita's not too interested in pulling this sword out anytime soon.

Edited 2018-06-04 18:07 (UTC)

"If I must," he says. He isn't going to lie about that, and it isn't really anything to do with personal interest at this point. Sure, no fae likes having things stolen from them, but he cares far more about his duty to his Queen than he does about having an extra wizard.

"As long as your home is an enemy of the Summer Court, I will be sworn to use what methods I must to ensure you cause them no harm."

Alas, poor fictional leeches. Zangetsu is sure that if Pickles had sapience, he would be in agony right now.

But he’s also sure that Pickles has the personality of a hungry piece of cardboard, so.

Crawling over the toasty corpses of their kin, the leeches keep coming, and more and more latch on with almost painless bites, quickly growing fat on Strange’s abundant magic.

Wham, there's a punch right to the nose. Turns out your strategy of 'turn to smoke' is a bit shit when you're standing in the middle of an anti-smoke glyph. Strange stumbles towards the edge of the platform but remains upright as blood just gushes from his nose. The impact of the bracer has left a large burn on the side of his face, almost like a skid mark from his nose down to the top of his jaw.

Thankfully, Lambert punching him frees up Strange's hands. Strange is still keeping the spell going as Lambert finds it harder to breathe. At the same time, Strange tries to brush off or yank off as many leeches as he can. His concentration is focused almost exclusively on the leeches and trying to murder Lambert.

Well. Zangetsu had seen enough. Lambert's kiss didn't work, the leeches were too slow for his tastes, and now the Nightrider was choking to death. He doesn't know if Lambert has an extra life, but he knows for sure that Strange does.

In a split second, Zangetsu is gone from his perch in the air. He reappears on the earthen pillar in the next millisecond, then moves imperceptibly fast.

And Strange will find himself with a bone-white sword sticking a few inches out of the front of his pretty little roman outfit, just slightly south of his breastbone. Zangetsu stands behind, expressionless mask staring, and twists the blade.

As Strange staggers back, so does Lambert, that last attack throwing him back with its inertia. He'd be cursing if he had the breath to -- but he doesn't.

Unfortunately, as close to the edge of the platform as he is, a couple of steps is really all it takes to meet the edge and pitch backwards as his vision finally blacks out.

Lucky for him, that means he doesn't have to see Zangetsu straight up shank his friend in front of him. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean he can catch himself from falling in time. The Nightrider drops back into the water with a splash, sinking head-down fast, unconscious ... for now.

At least with Rita taking over the reins of the story earlier, the Earth Spirit's grip continues to hold Ignatius fast.

Syrlya is about to say something more to Ignatius, but Lambert calls back through the water and that's the first sign he has that something's not going right.

Rita already has Ignatius down, so he nods to her. "Handle him, I'll help Lambert."

With that he starts to swim up, as fast as he can to try and grab Lambert and hold him from sinking further. He's not sure if Strange will follow, so his gaze continues to flicker around, tense.

He doesn't even notice the blade until he feels it pierce through his chest and sees the tip of the sword coming out of his body. Well. Fuck.

Strange won't go down without a fight. With what remains of his magic, he calls forth fire, which shoots out of his hands in a vain attempt to take Zangetsu down with him. But those leeches have done their job: Strange was hoping for fire closer towards Ignatius's level. Instead, the fire's more like second degree burns. It hurts, but it's survivable.

The flames still burn around them as Strange becomes limp and only Zangetsu's sword holds him upright: if Syrlya surfaces, it's obvious that Strange is dead.

Edited 2018-06-04 18:55 (UTC)

More fire. It can't possibly be worse than Ignatius, and it isn't. It stings, and it burns, and if he weren't already used to agony from earlier, he might have even done more than flinch and hiss through his teeth.

But he holds steady, and Strange slumps over. He simultaneously pulls Tensa Zangetsu out and catches the body with his free arm. He lets the corpse down easy, into an almost comfortable position.

Then, in a scene out of a nightmare, Zangetsu extends his left hand. The flesh bubbles and grows and turns into, yes, that same horrible giant worm-like appendage that he ate Tyki with back at the Manor, complete with disturbingly human teeth. It's a good thing Strange is already gone, because this would really just set it off into pure nightmare land.

With a slick and horrifying chomp, Zangetsu swallows Strange's body whole before the wisps of blueish soul can escape. The mouth licks its lips with a grotesque blue tongue.

Zangetsu pauses to look below, wondering what might become of Ignatius.

... Not his problem.

With Strange's body and soul in tow, he flees the coliseum as fast as he can, back to Carnival grounds.

Edited (AND THEN I DIDN"T FINISH THE SENTENCE) 2018-06-04 19:36 (UTC)

Ignatius feels Strange die, and he can't help but feel like it's a shame. They went through all this fuss to get him back, but in the end, they went and killed him themselves. He'd like to be able to reach out and snatch back that soul before he goes, but it doesn't look like he'll get the chance.

And there's his reason for being here, officially gone. He doesn't yet know about any resurrections happening on the Ringmaster's side, so as far as he knows, that's that.

He looks up towards the rock where Strange was floating, before turning back to give Rita a resigned look. Now what?

Syrlya catches Lambert easily enough, the water's buoyancy making it slightly less like having to maneuver a brick shithouse. Luckily, the blackout is temporary -- after a few seconds of holding him, Lambert shudders back to consciousness and takes a deep, ragged gasp of air.

Water. Water that is air right now. Whatever. He's not sure exactly who's holding him, but considering his last memory was of Strange still trying to choke him out, what he says first should be obvious.

"Get Strange." He brushes Syrlya's hands off him, coughing, to sink down back to the Coliseum floor.

Rita scoffs as Syrlya takes off after Lambert, but it's not like there's any other way of doing this. She waits, at the bottom of the sea, wondering what the hell to do about a high fae who's almost certainly going to come after them when this is over. Should they try and kill him...?

There's definitely something going on above surface, with Lambert falling in, and after catching that look from Ignatius, she has an inkling of what it could be. Still, she'd rather not guess. "What the hell's happening up there!?" she yells at Syrlya.

Lambert manages to push him back, and Syrlya watches him continue to sink for a moment before following his order and swimming up to the surface. He peeks up slowly, still anticipating Strange to lash out at the next person he sees.

Rita doesn't get an answer at first, because there's a moment where Syrlya is stunned by the carnage before he crosses to the edge of the pillar, short if the flames. "Is he already dead?!"

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keywords. :c

RIP strange. zangetsu did say he'd kill you one day

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