EXT - Edge of the Seiiki near the forest, morning
A figure lurched furtive into the narrow lane from between the trees, its thin limbs moving more like a rabid scuttling spider than anything human. Wearing the distinctive widow's garb of a certain Lady, a first glance might fool someone into thinking Lady Esher was stumbling through town in some sort of distress, her blond hair streaked in silver and grey left loose and unkempt down her back. Only closer might the unfortunate witness realize how pasty pale the apparent woman looked from under the wide veiled brim of her hat. Blood old and fresh smeared down her chin from bared sharp teeth, her grasping wiggling fingers ending in elongated black spikes, all before the thing sought to lunge and bite its next victim.
The rumors had fast spread through the port of the Lady Esher having lost her mind attacking people. That the constabulary needed to drag her off to be committed. For any that had tried however the crazed figure proved far too wily and cunning to be easily cornered, somehow always managing to slip away in a cloud of confusion and hissing insults. Insults spilled like blood from its lips, harsh sharp tongued hate on a repeating track as if worn like grooves into whatever animated this shambling feral version of Llywellynn. For the moment however it was silent, searching for its next source of power like a scent hound, its head swiveling back and forth as it slunk along the shadow of the nearest wall.
Dorian had worked out a patrol route, he'd been through the Seiiki enough times, searching for the impostor bearing the Widow's form. After his morning ride, he'd moved to take up that path, past the koi pond and down the alleyway to the dilapidated building near the edge of the forest. He'd only recently become familiar enough with that building to enter it, and despite the unease that came along with the locale, he had made his way halfway up the stairs in the dim to listen for sounds of anyone inside. Having thought he'd seen movement aloft from the ground level, it was eerie just how quiet the place was, apart from how his boots creaked on the stairs. Quiet but not exactly empty in the crisp spring day.
Rubbing his gloved hands together against a certain feeling of cold that passed over him, he'd make his way out into the light of day again. When he hit the courtyard he'd begin to whistle the jaunty tune of a swing song in defiance of the creeps he felt that had the hair prickling up on the back of his neck. He walked on out to the thoroughfare, listening in between bursts of notes, and bootfalls, but unaware of what was stalking outside of the ramshackle building.
This twisted thing from Llyw's mind was a concentrated distilled fragment of what she had tried to bury the deepest. Now it staggered on slim legs, wearing the approximate form of the Lady herself, free to rampage loose from her mental grip. This body had its limitations, limbs not quite fully functional, made only of bespelled rotting meat soaked in the mimicry of the seer via a necromancer's magic. The apparent mind motivating it knew only certain things from the widow's limited life experience.
This nightmare of hers didn't know Dorian. The doll twitched heavily as whistling caught its attention, tangled silverblond hair falling free as that thin frame bent backwards from the waist, its head shuddering too much on its axis to turn normally to peer at a potential new victim. Long claws that oozed like black tar flared juddering into the air in anticipation of prey.
The scent of power was there, something golden and warm coming from a tall jaunty figure, tempting the desperate creature into a rapid jerking lurch towards him, slipping free from the shadow of the murder shack's outer wall. Honeysuckle sweet as death wafted on the spring breeze as its face lifted, showing the widow's delicate features transfigured by snarling hatred, eyes sunken and shadowed and black as oil slick filled with flecks of blood. Cherry blossoms swirled on the wind, bright spots of pink fluttering, catching on the black veil and on the long tangled hair as it hissed at him.
"Yyuoo should have never...been born..." Llyw's normally sweet accented tone was a horrible parody coming from the blood stained mouth, repeating the well worn spite over and over that had haunted the poor woman all her life, "They never..wanted you. You should have starved to death...like they wanted..."
Stolen Psychic power was laden into this verbal attack, to sink the barbs deep into anyone unguarded enough, to feel that hate directly sharp and stinging perhaps via vague intrusive memories of neglect to inspire such feeling... Selfhate spelled into the slim widow's form, the creature wearing her face so gaunt and drained of life moved with sudden horrifying alacrity, all wrong angles and crablike, hissing like a fiend, reaching those sharp tarry claws towards Dorian, towards the sirencall of power flowing in him. The doll needed more power to sustain itself, never willing to let its hate die with all the stubborn will of the widow herself it had stolen its freedom from....
Dorian snapped his head toward the moving shadow, with the song dying on his lips. Upon starting to understand what he saw, that it was what he'd been seeking, he'd just set his feet and wait for the thing to come near. The moment of anticipation, short as it was, held a great currency: a time to resolve oneself, to see ahead to what came next according to plan. But his was spent in some way finding the rasping burble of stinging words and what accompanied them hurtful, as they found a target in a man whose (dead of patricide) father was currently a stone's throw from his home.
He meant to step in at the last moment and grasp her from behind, but he was stalled by his own deep and very personal misgivings. Shaking his head against the momentary malaise of self-loathing, he'd reach for the wrists as they got close, informing her in turn in a rather urbane growl, given the circumstances, "There you are. I have been looking for you." His intention once he had her in hand would be to pull her into the narrow passageway between buildings, in a dangerous dance aided by his prodigious strength and superhuman speed.
This was the monster Llywellynn could have become from her horrible loveless beginnings, all except for her stubborn adherence to kindness. This doppelganger of her had no such compunction to hold back however nor any of her caution or reasoning.
The slender horror got too close just as Dorian reclaimed his wits. Its wrists were even more birdbonelike than the real article in Dorian's grasp, eeling surprisingly strong to try to pull free as he easily dragged his attacker into the proverbial back alley, though in true ending up back in the local murder house.
Long oily black claws flailed, straining to still reach his face unless he kept his hold on the assailant far from him, the rest of the thing reacting like a scalded cat scrambling frantic to escape. The vicious doll snarled spitting with bloody lips baring bloody teeth, burning hateful eyes black as pitch, spite animating its expression with mad intensity as its prey turned out to be too strong and fast to pounce upon so easily.
Unable to match its opponent physically, it resorted to its weapon of choice, the man's hands too occupied to stop up its mouth's poison.
"You don't deserve to live! They never loved you!"
The fractured mirror of Esher had only words shaped by a child's despair, words to rake into the soul over and over til no joy was left alive. Sneering with bloody lips, that sweet southern voice sharpening to a blade, lashing out with the powers of the mind it had copied merciless, seeking to claw into Dorian's thoughts again with the harsh refrain. Sought to drag his awareness right into an even worse funhouse reflection of the austere dangerous hellscape of Llyw's inner world where her madness roamed like hungry wolves.
Dorian was probably one scratch on the face away from letting those claws close enough to do so again. After that he'd make sure those unnatural hands were a good distance from all but the hands that held her in place. This afforded him time to really look into the face of the ruined rendition of Llyw, and also a moment to realize he had not thought about what to do past catching her. He was fairly certain he was meant to report back, but he had to first come to terms with the fact that he couldn't just drag a fighting, ill-tempered woman-looking thing across town without consequences, even if it was physically possible to do so.
Adding to addling his thoughts were the doppelganger's forays into his usually buried self-loathing. He ordinarily tried to save that for deep into drinking or while doing two am push-ups when those or other feelings prevented sleep. She once more stopped him from doing much apart from shoving her out of sight along with himself and tightening his grip in a way that would evoke pain in a more ordinary being. Holding her arms out and away from anything on him that could be torn after his cheek, he would give it the old English try and talk it out civilly, albeit through gritted teeth, "I don't suppose you will come willingly when you seem intent on poor behavior, will you?"
Perhaps the younger Windgrace had more mental fortitude than he realized, bolstered by sheer English levels of civil obstinacy. The words hit his sore spots again like darts to a board finding the center ring, but this poor copy of the real thing hadn't the luck yet to drag the man's mind into the horrorscape of its own.
So the creature was left trying to yank free, scrabbling at the blond man with those unnaturally long claws as he pulled them both out of sight back into the rundown blood spattered house. The younger scion would quickly discover there was no reasoning with the thin flailing creature in his grips, its long hair tangling everywhere as it tugged and twisted to break his hold to no avail, hissing like an angry cat at his scolding. Its scent up close was also a horrid darkside of the widow's, that lush sweet honeysucklefire, yet edged in the most sickly sweet cloy of death and rot to clog the nose.
In the dance of abduction however fortune was favored enough one of those inky black talons scored Dorian's cheek in the struggle, freeing a line of that precious substance to spill crimson at last. Exactly what the necromantic construct required to invoke its crudely mimicked necromancy from the seer. Such magic required blood, fresh blood spilled, to summon the dead to its will. The seer's doll was still just an imperfect copy of the woman herself, making up with viciousness what it lacked in true capacity and knowledge, channeling a broken aspect of Llyw's mind and thus confined into its hatefilled pattern of behavior. But this it could do due to its creator as well.
Peering so much closer into the mimic's face might offer nightmare fuel, Llyw's delicate features marred by hideous deadwhite pallor splattered with the blood of its victims, eyes empty of all life but for the hate and rage bubbling out of it. And now it hissed for aid from the restless all around them, the spirits already clinging to this twitching meat puppet. Ghosts whose disjointed gnarled hands oozed out from around the doll's face like a ghastly sea anemone, glowing transparent but visible enough, freezing cold of the grave. Wriggling fingers worming out from his captive towards Dorian to tear at him in the doll's stead as it laughed, gurgling mad laughter as the Windgrace was set upon by haunted hands unless he managed to disrupt this necromancy somehow.
Dorian would let loose of the evil double, in fact seeking to fling the frail figure against the walls of the courtyard rather ungently. This was his primary response to being beset by ghastly hands. His armour was warded against a great number of things, but his riding clothes certainly were not. Though he was strong, and quicker than any man ought to be, he was not particularly adept at fending off magical attacks on his own. Once he had his hands free of wrists he'd reach corporeally for any offending apparitional appendages, even though they be disembodied, and take a step or three back to see if that availed him.
This scrap was already making noise, and neither he nor the Widow Esher needed any scandal that might erupt from the pair of them being seen to be engaged in such unseemly deeds.
Flung hard against the wall as easy as tossing a ball, the doppel's clawing ghost hands flickered disrupted, trailing bony fingers away from Dorian along with the long pale banner of hair, the doll soaring before slamming into the boards loudly and bouncing off to the ground limbs askance like its strings had been cut.
Somehow the thing never lost the veiled hat even now, but now the flummoxed hunter would know for sure this magic runaway had no concept of pain. Far too quickly his foe recovered, shuddering back to the uncanny semblance of life. Moving joints at inhuman angles the thing twitched and lurched back to its dainty boots, its upper body dangling like a wilted flower towards the ground before swiveling upright to glare at him with soulless black eyes.
Not yet deterred even by superior strength and agility, the lure of Dorian's essence proved too great to pass up for the desperate construct. Having no sense of fear or caution, this evil twin of his friend tried once more to have at him. Knowing only what had shaped its existence, hate spilled from its mouth once more as it sought to spring upon him like a ragged jumping spider.
Llyw's doppelganger enacted the gruesome broken record of which it had been formed long ago, a shard of self cast off to be buried in the sands of a mind under far too much pressure. But such appalling memories and emotions refused to stay buried, clawing up from the black sands undying and horrid to ceaselessly attack the one who had so desperately banished them.
"Youuuu should have never been borne." Those cruel words were carved into Llyw's psyche, repeated over and over from those snarling twisted mirrors, now uttered from blood slick lips made real by magic, a perverse echo of the widow's real voice hissing hatefully at him over and over the same cutting words. "They never loved you. You were just a burden they never wanted. They whispered behind your back about letting you starve to death."
Clearly the younger Windgrace needed a plan of action, now stuck with having caught his quarry but no easy means at hand to thwart its powers before the locals might notice the ruckus and cause a scandal. If Dorian didn't keep his wits about him, the seer's doppel would now be snapping like a raging animal at his neck in no time.
Dorian brushed off his hands once more when it seemed the ghostly hands were no longer crawling upon him, and stood watching the equal parts piteous and odious thing to see if he'd done for it with blunt force alone. There was a moment where he was sure he had because it didn't seem like it was going to get up again. But... it did in its inhuman way. And this time he recognized the assault on his feelings as it drew on him more deeply, staggering even his thought processes for a moment. Long enough for the ravening doll to get near again. But with a sorrowful tear just falling from one eye, Dorian moved aside just in time with a dancer's grace from getting chomped, waiting for the creature that lacked his physical capabilities to lurch close, then he'd pivot and reach two hands towards her midsection in order to shove her back again. The Seiiki was busy this time of morning and he was running out of time for not being noticed, especially if he'd misjudged his strength and hucked her into a ragged crumbling wall once more. Giving her more time to draw a crowd.
Having opened up a little bit of space he'd take some more, turning to apparently take a running start, and then climb-leap to the top of the courtyard wall. Atop it, he spared a look back, and a muttered, frustrated, "Bloody hell," then leapt over the wall. He made his way into the forest on foot, running flat out until he got far enough away from town to launch himself skyward. He'd get himself high up in the boughs of a tree and make sure he wasn't being followed before heading home. He needed to let the real Widow Esher know what he'd seen and where once he was there.
Lady Esher's Doppelganger: Thwarted yet again, the hungering horror in the shape of Lady Esher was tossed away against the same wall as before, cracking the panels and possibly its back with a loud dull snap. Considering all Dorian had witnessed it likely wouldn't be long before the bespelled mimic would twist back up on its jittering limbs anyway once more. His timely escape spared him that eerie sight, its frustrated shriek fading from his hearing as he made off into the woods too swift to follow. This hunt had been at first a great success then a terrible failure, but at least the intrepid hunter had avoided this version of his friend's teeth in his neck again. Perhaps now Dorian had a better understanding of why Llywellynn seemed so mortified and worried about the whole situation, once he saw this terrible fragment of herself come to life so hatefully.