#timely conjuration

The woods are quiet here. They bloody well ought to be, given what Laurentius has encountered on his way to this little mound of stone and dirt atop the pond beneath him. It isn't quite Lordran, wherever he's ended up - there are places he recognizes, and he's certain he saw an Astoran coat of arms at one point, but none of them are smashed together correctly. So far, he's done the only thing he knows how to do - head down, fireball up, stay stubborn, don't go hollow. It has gotten him this far, at least.

He's seated at a bonfire situated on his little hill when he smells singed flesh. Given that he himself hasn't burned anything in the last hour, he takes this as a sure sign that either someone has tripped into their own campfire or has engaged in a bit of errant heresy sans the requisite instruction. Either situation merits investigation, and so he straightens from his seat next to the bonfire - a rare pool of safety in these distinctly unpleasant woods - and goes off in search of the victim and-slash-or victor. The scent leads him to a burned out ruin just a little ways away from the bonfire itself. Muted sunlight curves its way through shattered stone ceilings to splash in dull pools across the cobbled, cracked floor; it's in a shadow between these pools that Laurentius spots a man grasping desperately at his smoking hand. He doesn't recognize the fellow, but he's sane enough to grumble about the pain of a seared fist, and so he's sane enough to speak to afore leaping to axe and fireball.

"Hallo - you alright over there?" Laurentius says. "Pyromancy getting ahead of you?"

"Bugger off," the fellow returns. "You--"

When the man looks up, he appears temporarily to have encountered a ghost. His eyes snap wide, his jaw slackens as he takes in Laurentius' garb and equipment. The pyromancer is dressed as he always is: shabby robe tied at the waist with a rope belt, thick hempen trousers, boots that only just still held enough structure to be called shoes, manchettes tied 'round his hands. The perplexed expression on Laurentius' face only furthers the impression that he is a man out of time - somewhere he very much ought not to be, outside of the deep swamp, or some brass-clad bugger's most boring stories.

"You're a conjurator, ain't you?" the man manages, finally.

"I'm a what?" Laurentius returns, tilting his head to one side. He raises his right hand and conjures a tiny bit of flame, subconsciously playing right into the label without ever realizing it. "No, mate, I'm a pyromancer. See the fire?"

The man continues to stare, then looks down at his own hand, then back at Laurentius. There's not an ounce of brass on the "pyromancer," such as he is or isn't. Common knowledge, that pyromancers went in for brass. Even more common was the joke that it required brass organs of an impolite description to engage in such magic, given its wild and unpredictable nature. But the man needed wild and unpredictable. That woman down there in the swamp beneath them was wild and unpredictable - he needed whatever measures of advantage he could get.

"Er, I'm Laurentius," the pyromancer ventures, interrupting the man's thoughts. "Of the Great Swamp."

"Oh yeah? What's so great about it, an--" the man begins, and then descends into a coughing fit so violent his errant flame briefly sparks to unkempt life again in his hand, burning him further, prompting a yelp of pain. Laurentius winces at the display, and dismisses his own fire long enough to make a peaceable gesture with his palms.

"Really it's only a pretty good swamp, if I'm honest," he says, amiably. "Tell you what - you give me your name and I'll help you with your fire there, aye?"

The man stares at him, having finally gotten the fire to go out. This is a gift horse, so to speak, but the man has never met a horse what doesn't bite you the moment you shove your stupid fingers in its mouth. Still - she's down there. He knows she is. Fine. He makes a decision.

"Sam," he says. "Of…wherever you like, really."

"Nice to meet you, Sam," Laurentius says. "What say you walk with me back to the bonfire on that hill back there? Safer to talk, lest something come 'round the corner mid-lesson. Terrible for retention, monsters."

Sam spits on the ground next to him, and gives Laurentius a - slightly bloody - grin.

"I imagine so, aye," he says.

----

Laurentius has tied a spare manchette around Sam's hand before they try again. Once the garment is secured, he sits back and gives the arrangement a once over, then nods at the latter.

"Hold out your hand for me?"

"What fer--oh, fine," Sam grumbles. He shoves his hand out, palm up; he flinches as a bit of fire erupts over Laurentius' left hand. The glow is brilliant and gentle - not like the angry red light Sam had been accidentally conjuring.

"The fire you're trying to hold is wild, hungry - not really fit for someone new to the craft, or really anyone," Laurentius says. He lowers the shard of light into Sam's open palm, where it hovers inches above the cloth of the manchette. "All that flame wants to do is eat. I know masters who would be consumed by that light. You're lucky it only burned you."

"What's this you're doing now?" Sam murmurs. He's too fascinated to continue being irritable, at least for the moment.

"Giving you a part of my flame - to get you started proper-like," Laurentius says.

Sam stares blankly at him. What sort of sod goes around giving pieces of himself to strangers? This one, apparently. Not a hint of guile in that too-kind face, either. How'd this conjurator get this far without something eating him? Was he Unkindled? Undead? One of the two, because he was drawn to the bonfires, but beyond that Sam couldn't figure him out, and that made him nervous - almost as nervous as how gentle the flame in his palm feels, a far cry from the angry thing he'd tried to tame before. This felt like putting your hands close to a campfire, rather.

Come to think of it, this Laurentius reminds Sam a little of a campfire - warm, comfortable to sit next to, and likely entirely too prone to surrounding circumstances, the smiling bugger.

The flame hovers above his palm. Sam focuses in on it - like he'd been taught elsewhere. It grows, whirls into a spherical shape; the surface boils and gleams, but no - it holds its shape.

"I'll be," he murmurs, staring into the light.

The pyromancer hauls the axe backward, then over his head, slamming it into the incoming hollow's skull. Bone gives way with a brittle crunch; something wet spills out of the destroyed head as Laurentius rips the weapon away.

He doesn't recognize these woods - a thin mist clings to the still, shallow waters puddled along the forest floor; a procession of hollows march through the fog, waving ersatz wooden spears in front of them.

This one collapses into the muddy water, and Laurentius casts a nervous stare ahead, where more shadows appear to be approaching.

Panic in the cornflowers: something bright and frightened, her helmet torn from her head, frantically tilting Estus into his mouth - the last of it, even as blood runs thin rivers through the gold crown of her braided hair. She stands above him, swaying on her feet in these awful, foggy woods.

Even in the still-distant fog of his own pain, he can tell she fully intends to spend the last of that precious fire on him, as though her own wound - somewhere on her head, somewhere possibly vital to her wellbeing - meant little next to the godawful gash in his side.

He doesn't fully think about what he's doing, or what's next; that urgent need to see her safe spurs him to action. One hand clasps among the bloody gold, pulls her down to him, and he kisses her, sharing that last gleam of fire between them, the flame still in his mouth, now in hers.

It's just enough - just enough - to close him up, and her too. Enough to keep them held together, if only barely, while they limp back to somewhere safe.

His ailing brain barrels through processing the necessary details: you're in the woods. They've been flooded. You're wet, and cold, but alive. You don't know where you are. This is not the Darkroot Basin. This is not a place you recognize. What you do recognize is that you indignant awakening has attracted the attention of what very much appears to be the biggest crab you've ever seen...

...which is now scuttling toward you.

His hands scrabble through the water for his axe, and discover that he does not have it. The shield, either - not that the cracked thing would do much good against the crab's pincers, which clack eagerly at the prospect of such easy prey. He gets his feet under him, claps both hands together in a bid to try and conjure a flame, gets a sphere alive and gleaming, and then hurls it at the crab, which swerves to a halt in painful surprise - then resumes its advance a moment later.

"Oh, bugger," Laurentius snarls, conjurating another flame.

They're learning about one another - a necessary step of traveling together, though Laurentius finds it more and more perilous as Anri asks more and more questions. He keeps thinking that the next step, the next answer, will be the one that causes her to quietly fetch her things and stalk off into the dark.

He's not sure what prompted this latest question, of course. Maybe some twinge in his voice, or some carefully skirted topic. There had been heartbreak, of course. Plenty of it. Some of it had simply been meeting people he'd never be able to know, because the moment they smelled the smoke they would know what he was, and part ways. Some of it stemmed from exploratory little evenings in inn rooms, knowing full well they wouldn't be there in the morning.

But there's one person - one aching wound in him, that comes to mind above the others.

He can't recall the face, exactly - someone far off and long ago. Longer ago, in fact, than ought strictly be possible; the time in this place is strange, and he knows, in some deep and unsettling way, that the person whose ghost floats briefly to the sputtering surface of his thoughts died centuries and centuries ago.

Started with a C, maybe. A hateful expression. A bruising, angry kiss, pressed into his mouth the way someone might strike him with their fist - the message the same: how dare you, how dare you, how dare you.

The ghost disappears back into the burbling snarl of his mind, dragged back under by distance and time and hurt.

Still: best not to burden his current companion. She seemed - by the sometimes haunted look in those cornflower eyes, when she would stare off into the distance for a long and silent moment - to have enough ghosts of her own.

He had, in fact, burned himself: one manchette is half gone, rendered into frayed ash after he coiled a flame around his fist to shove in knight's blackened visor. The knight in question lay nearby, missing their jaw, the front of their throat, and some of their upper chest - the structure of its body fatally compromised by unintentional and violent internal combustion.

The warrior seemed resistant to fire, and was bearing down on Anri. Instinct took over, prompted by a faint and desperate hope their insides worked similar to everything else. It was impossible to say whether the heat or the force had done the job - but the job was done, and here he stood, trying to breathe through the chilly, stabbing runs running up and down his singed arm.

It's not just the manchettes; the flesh is blackened almost up to the elbow, the sleeve of his robe saved only by the thin layer of wax he kept applied to his clothes to stay dry in the rain. One finger has been consumed entirely, and he can't close what's left of his hand.

Anri's question drifts through the pain, barely recognized amid the bright wall of horrible sensation; he gives her a dim stare before she catches him around the back of the neck to keep him upright and half-shoves her estus flask down his throat.

His mind, still addled by agony and adrenaline, produces the faint thought that he never knows what will remain when the estus finishes its blessed work. Will the finger be returned? Will there be a scar? Does he have another manchette?

The focus sharpens. The look on her face. Something angry, worried. Why is she so worried about a heretic? Isn't she Astoran? Say something, Laurentius. Say anything, you daft bastard. She looks so hurt. She looks so nervous. All on your blasphemous account--

"I'm alright," he breathes. He doesn't watch the way the fire, coursing through him, repairs what fire took just moments ago. He gives it a moment, flexes his renewed hand - finger restored, question answered.

"Please don't look so worried, Miss Anri - I'm alright, I promise," he breathes again. "Don't fret so on my behalf, aye? If anything were to happen, I'd be right back with you in a moment..."

Would he? Did the rules of this place work the same? He didn't know. He didn't care. It had only been days since he met the Astoran - and that was strange, too, hearing the name of the place without anyone seeming to agree that it was the same as he'd known - but something in him aches to see her safe, to see her well.

Perhaps it is the fact that, entirely bereft of anything but sheer concern for his safety, she asked a pyromancer (well, a conjurator, apparently, if he was to understand the local parlance,) if he burned himself. No judgment. No implication of weakness or incompetence - just sheer and concentrated concern for his wellbeing.

The cathedral in the distance might have been beautiful once: the soaring architecture is complex, and well-made, even shot through with cracks and deformations worn into the stone by the march of time. Awash in the silverblue of a high moon, the church looks haunted, a ghostly, luminescent gnarl of towers and arches more akin to a prison than a place of faith. Snow gathers, then falls across the rooftops; a high wind blows past the both of them, wailing into the valley between them and that tomb of a building on the horizon.

He can't imagine what it's like for Anri, knowing who awaits them in that place. He can see the hard line of her mouth, the telltale quiver in the blue of her eyes that precedes some yawning, inward wound reopening itself.

@swordluck: I just want to live a peaceful life.

"You will," Laurentius says, quietly, placing a hand on her shoulder as he steps in next to her. "We will, Anri. One more battle. One more victory - and then it's over. You can rest."

The hand drops from her shoulder to gather her gauntlet into his manchette, where he gives her palm a tight squeeze.

This place is unfamiliar. It has the makings of a swamp, certainly - the yellowed gloom of a place full to the brim with life and rot in equal measure, the knee-high mire choked with mud and whatever else had bled from the innumerable corpses no doubt interred within. But it is not a swamp he has ever seen before, and he is lost in more ways than one.

His companion has proven steadfast, at least - a man who has not yet provided his name, and seems reluctant to do so. Laurentius understands well enough, he thinks. (He does not, not truly; had he known the sort of history with which he walked, he might have been struck briefly, miraculously, dumb.)

He glances up at his companion's entreaty, offers a thin, tired smile. It has been some time since they saw a bonfire last, and the moss has only just begun soothing the radiant pain in his chest and stomach. His colleague seems to be holding up well enough, at least, though neither of them have escaped the swamp's strange inhabitants unscathed.