weak.

A nearby voice warns him of searching for a pulse, but he does it anyway. Fingers against his jaw. Against his chest. His wrist. Nothing. He rolls over to drag himself up onto hands and knees, but the face he sees on the other side of the room is his own.

“What the he—“

Shock causes him to choke. The sound that vibrated inside his head just then wasn’t the same one he’d always known. It couldn’t possibly be. He looks down at gloved hands, then scrambles up onto his feet to assess the rest of him that isn’t right.

“What the hell…” he starts again, this time listening for the voice. It isn’t his, but it is, because it comes when he tries to make words. Bewildered, he turns his hands over again, examining the armored gauntlets, the clawed fingers, the red palms extending up past the forearms, and then as if in afterthought, looks back at— yes, that’s him. That’s his body, at least. When he raises one hand, it doesn’t raise one back. Not a mirror either.

“This some kinda trick—?” His foot crunches over glass as he steps closer, half-threatening, and draws his attention back down again as he lifts his heel to examine the pieces of a shattered jar.

Not until moments later, when Thrasir is forced to watch her face shift into an expression that renders it near unrecognizable. She blinks once, twice-- feels the skin of her borrowed face wrinkle as brows knit together in something like disgust.

Of all the things she might anticipate out of a mortal's mouth in response to their current predicament, none of them would have been that.

"Beat yourself up?" As though reiterating it will make such a bizarre statement sound any less so. It had to be a joke, surely, and yet Thrasir gets the distinct impression that it is precisely the opposite.

She looks her own body over once, lips thinning into a line. If that is what is about to happen, she can't imagine her opponent will have too much luck. She had never been built for martial combat; born and raised for magecraft, always so frail. Death had offered her what life had not in terms of strength, and yet even that was not exactly impressive.

But then, what limit did a body incapable of sensation have? Her jaw tenses. It has been years since she has known what it's like to bruise, to bleed. She is unsure if she is keen on remembering.

‘Again? Really?’ How many times would this be happening? Most people fixed their mistakes after the first try, and yet whatever professor had been in charge of magic class continued to attempt to use the strange Warp Powder…with similar results as before, given the fact that Tharja was once again faced with an exact image of herself. No— the first tell was not what she saw when she awoke, but what she felt—

Nothing.

It was as if a void has swallowed her whole. Even the sensation of drowning had just that— a sensation— but nothing about this body felt real. No different than dissociation, Tharja felt as if she was simply outside of her body rather than inside of another. And yet when she finally looked down to see just who she was, there was some semblance of a body attached to her consciousness.

“…What…is this?” Whoever this— whatever it was— they were far from human. No longer did they possess flesh and blood, replaced instead with a red substance that she couldn’t recognize.

She fights the immediate urge to reach out and touch it. For now.

Thrasir chokes on her first breath, heaves the second and third. Every sensation overwhelms more than the last -- fabric against skin, the weight of a beating heart in her chest, of saliva in her mouth. It's nauseating, and that itself only adds to her troubles.

"It's a corpse," she spits, breathing still haggard. Between the strain that came with remembering how it felt to live again and having to constantly explain her situation, Thrasir thinks she might have to give this idiot professor a piece of her mind.

But that will be for later. For now.

"Hex it however you'd like, you are the one trapped in it." There is the thought to smooth her clothes, to straighten her spine and try to reclaim some sense of dignity, but the stranger's hand pauses before it can reach her body.

She does not yet wish to revisit how it feels to touch, to be touched.

So she stands, somewhat uncomfortably, with arms away from her torso and fingers apart. It is only marginally less miserable than being forced to witness her own body and all of the places where the girl still lingers, those final scraps of humanity so few.

Not since there wasn't much she could take joy in around here, without her Lord Sombron to serve.

Well, this part technically isn't, but it beats a classroom full of kids. Or it did, anyway, before she had visitors.

But the longer they face off, the more Thrasir realizes that the other has no intention of backing down. She turns away, scowl deepening. There is a rustling and a soft chitter, sounds made by that stupid little wyvern as it noses happily against the warm body that holds it.

Witch grimaces. Disgusting. What was the point to nurturing a creature of war, born and bred to fight and to die? That tiny thing was just another body to bury some day, another thing to mourn.

Witch raises her hand in a gesture to stop. If irritation shows on her face at all, she makes no effort to hide it. Her obligation is to get along, not to pretend in any capacity that she enjoys it.

"And you thought I was the ghost, yes." It isn't like she is all too far from, anyhow. "Veyle, was it? Let me tell you something."

It is not by her command that a distant door creaks, nor that clouds part outside, letting moonlight drench her figure in an eerie white.

If there was anything that she would be devastated to learn about upon her return to the academy, it was to know how rough of a winter that the wyvern stables'd had. She would have hated, if she had been here, for her dear little Cherche to get caught up in all of that. For once, she can understand other people's feelings regarding the death of another being.

But her thoughts are not on death today, but rather the birth of a bunch of new wyverns into the stables. For a woman with a terrifying face, she looks surprisingly giddy as she walks down to the stables. She wouldn't tell anyone if they asked, but she was terribly excited to see the darling little wyverns and hear them squeak happily up at her like she was their very own mother.

The stables are near empty as Zephia arrives, other than another woman. Zephia strides over to her, picking up one of the baby wyverns along the way. She smirks as she towers over the woman, a heel clicking softly against the sandy floors of the stables as she taps it absentmindedly.

"Are you here to see these little ones as well, dearest? Or do you have some other more... pressing motive for being here?"

She was able to do it unbothered.

But no amount of glowering seems to dissuade the stranger from stepping further into the stables. Worse, it doesn't seem to do absolutely anything for keeping her at least a reasonable distance from where Thrasir has chosen to take her watch.

She shifts her weight beneath the other's gaze, taking a measured step backwards. "I work here," comes her answer, dry and short. If she cared about the wellbeing of these creatures, she probably would have taken the time to bother looking at one before now.

And if she's honest, the bundle of scales in the woman's arms is really quite ugly.

"They were short on volunteers." It's all the context she feels the need to add, but enough to (ideally) convey her disinterest. Anything that will give this woman the hint that she does not want to talk about it.

Fingers curl around the weapon she has been given: a crescent-moon blade with leather wrapped around its dull end. She thinks it a crude imitation of Death's own. Yet another part of this grand scheme that the witch finds unsavory, the combat. Hers were hands never trained in the art of martial weapons, forged by blood to bear tomes.

But she does not bleed now, so she supposes it matters not.

Her steps echo, each one towards her opponent. His is not a face she recognizes, though it matters little. There is no world in which she cares who stands opposite her on this stage -- they are but obstacles, stacked in the way of the future that was meant to be hers.

She would defeat them all if she had to. This stranger, this boy, would be the first. Whatever it takes, she will do. Anything if it would mean seeing her brother once more.

"I am Thrasir," her voice cuts across the stage, a formality only given per the opera house's own rules. There are a hundred ways she could introduce herself, one for each life she has lived and let die. Witch offers none.

"You should consider yourself fortunate that this fight is not to the death."

"easy veyle… it's not a ghost. it can't be." veyle whispers to herself as she wanders the monastery's halls in the dead of the night, looking around cautiously for any unusual sights. rumors had come out about a woman haunting the monastery, but she was never able to get an exact location out of more than one student. "it's probably just a cat. yeah." she continues to try to reassure herself as she rounds the corner, gasping as she bumps into a solid figure. she fumbles over her feet thanks to her nerves, her butt landing on the cold hard ground. "ow ow ow…" she mutters, rubbing her head. and then she finally looks up to see what she had bumped into.

"hm?" the fell dragon blinks, staring up at the tall figure that she had bumped into for only a quick second. the feeling of death surrounds the figure, veyle's vision obscured by the darkness of the night. the ghost!

Thrasir feels her own glower as she focuses on the mouse of a girl before her. She had known her appearance unsetting -- the corpse she inhabited one poorly disguised as living -- and yet never before had someone expressed fear of her eating them.

"I imagine you taste rather bland," she says flatly, smoothing where their impact had wrinkled her clothing. There's no need to remark on how Thrasir could not eat her if she wanted to.

But there is something unmistakably painful that comes with the feeling of being feared. There is so much of this girl that reminds her of all that she has lost, of all that she has grown to despise. To hate is easier than to mourn, and yet grief wells in her hollow chest as the girl in the mirror cowers in the face of her reflection.

Thrasir blinks and the mirror is gone, leaving only that trembling child whose name she has forgotten.

There is a sound like someone being strangled, their body's desperate cry for air, and all Thrasir can think is how greatly she would appreciate if they would just save themself the trouble and asphyxiate already.

Only when she opens her eyes, finally irritated enough to consider lending a hand towards expediting that process, she finds herself blinking back at... herself.

It comes like a wave, then, the flood of sensation -- the feeling of the old classroom's cold stone floor, of cloth against her skin, the agonizing pain in her chest.

She is the one struggling without air.

Fingers wind thoughtlessly around her throat, trying to find the muscle memory that she has gone so long without needing. This pathetic flesh body won't last if she doesn't, she knows, and it's not like she cares, really.

But she is in it, and for all of the ways to go, this is not exactly among her favorites.

With an ugly croaking noise, air begins to trickle its way back into her lungs. It's such a foreign feeling that she thinks she may just be grateful for her lack of a need for it. Breaths come shallow and ragged, but they come at all, and so that is enough to allow her attention to refocus on, well, herself.

It's easy enough to figure what happened, logistics aside. Shattered glass lays between them, some obnoxiously vibrant liquid speckling the floor. She can see how it soaks the bandages that are wound around her body, and with some moderate amount of alarm, realizes that she can feel where it has done the same to those of this stranger's.

She frowns, making something of a shaky attempt to rise up from the ground. "Do not bother feeling for a pulse," her voice is so foreign, far too deep to even remotely consider her own, "you will not find one."

@ifvaria

The dead witch's anger is amusing at first. Triandra doesn't even bother to hide her amusement.

And then she makes the mistake of threatening Lady Freyja and Triandra's smirk turns into a snarl.

Triandra slaps the dead witch across the face, anger coursing through her blood. Her long nails break skin and that poisonous miasma that surrounds the dead ones leak out.

There is nothing to cushion her back as it crashes into the wall, but she feels no pain. It's almost laughable, how useless her undead body renders Triandra's assault. Witch grits her teeth, closing clawed fingers around the wrist that has been aimed towards her.

Magic creeps up her assailant's arm, burning everywhere it touches before Thrasir shoves the other away. "You waste your breath," she chides. "Nothing you can do to me will change what I will do to you."

Every corner, no matter how dimly lit, buzzes with the life of this place. It is the closest she has been to how it felt before her heart had stopped beating -- a time when the hearts that beat around her were not an objective, not something to destroy.

Only then hers had been one of them. Now it is as lifeless as the body that she stands before, her only company in this twisted afterlife.

Thrasir frowns, but not at him. Her eyes linger on the dusty window, watching as it filters in moonlight. There had been no easy way to answer questions about personal quarters. Neither of them required sleep, nor even half of the maintenance of mortals, and yet that is what they were making a miserable attempt to pass for.

So they stand, with no material possessions but their weapons and the clothes on their back, in a room that has been deemed theirs.

"It's better than..."

Witch shuts her eyes, paces towards their empty dresser, and feels her frown deepen. She doesn't have to say it, doesn't need to scrape at old scars with the word home and the reminder of what it meant for them, now.

Even if the swell of life here is something made foreign by time, even if this is all they have left to make of themselves. It could be worse. They're together still, the only mercy that death has continued to afford them.

Fingers knead the fabric at her palms. What other choice did they have?

"...we will make do."