#Merry Christmas you all get the greatest gift: Telos finally punching Opal

[shardclan]

The temptation offered to Telos began to break down after mere seconds of her looking at it. As with Ilkilides so many moons before, she was already in the world that contained her ideal, and she was well on the path to it.

She casually tore and tied off her skirts as the facets struggled to produce some deeper desire or alternate interpretation of the contents of her heart. The heavy suede skirts she had favored in her youth would have been perfect, but they weren't exactly appropriate attire for a queen. And those damn merchants were so stubborn she couldn't get out of audience with them. Trouble in the Hewn City, one of the most mysterious places in Sornieth, whose denizens were mentioned in only the most trembling whispers, and their main priority was badgering her to re-open passage through Thunder's March.

It was far from the first time Telos had mentally marked the lot of them as completely up their collective asses.

"Having trouble, creature?" she called into the dark. "Come now, you're many ages old; showing me a glimpse of the exalted realm should be simple for you. My scion was still shedding her hatchling scales when she did it."

A sound like glass crunching and grinding underfoot rose from everywhere, so close she could feel it vibrating the hairs all over her body.

"I don't know what that emotion is, but now I know you can hear me." Telos clenched her fists inside the feathered bracers, willing the light around them to grow brighter and assure her that she was alone. "You're gonna wish Renat had gotten you first."

The grinding intensified, but just as quickly it faded away. No murky attempts at her desired world haunted the edges of the dark. She was properly alone now, and she reached to her hip to make use of it.

"Wake up."

The wildclaw skull mounted where her rapier usually sat didn't answer until she dug her fingers into the empty sockets and rattled it alive. "Alright, alright..." it whispered wearily, and then, as she lifted it to eye level, "Oh? Oh my my..."

It bounced out of her hand, and she lifted the oracle's veil up over hand hand in time to see the shape of the water seer take complete its materialization. He looked untouched, if not even better than when he had been alive.

"A body again," he crooned. "How charmi--" Telos' fist cracked into his face. The scales and flesh parted like smoke and a tooth sailed off into the dark, a deep crack fissuring Opal's skull from where it had been. He screamed and clutched at his face. Though she hadn't technically been able to touch his body, she had touched something far more important, and the ghostly image poured with blood that dripped from his snout only to vanish in mid air. "My thooth!" he groaned between his tiny claws.

Telos clenched her fists, not with anger but restraint. Her eyes glittered wild and merry with how good it felt to know she had finally repaid him even the smallest taste of the misery he had caused her. She could have happily crushed his skull right then and there and sent him to his second death, the whole way laughing about how close it was to the anniversary of his first. She could have turned him to dust beneath her fists, shattered him with a punch for every life lost, every home destroyed, and maybe, finally, she would have been free of the single burning coal of rage that still sat in her heart like a rotted egg.

But she needed him. For now. "You're dead, have some fucking dignity."

He shot her a glare, stregthened by complete loathing but weakened by his bleeding nose. "You weren't concerned with the dead having dignity when you had me pressed into a bucket of shit."

"Ground in under Hart's boot," Telos recalled with warmth in her heart. "Camellia said you screamed like a wounded harpy."

His anger diffused and his fear grew, and the more real he seemed to be. And sure enough the color began to seep back into their surroundings. Murky at first and then taking the definitive shape of some unfamiliar shoreline and of the wildclaw still alive and well in the company of Magdaer and Ascalon. But there was something unusual about it...

"What is that?" the specter demanded.

"A version of reality where your plans were more successful." She lifted the veil to look with one unconvered eye, and didn't see it. "We're in the company of an Outsider. Well, more like inside the Outsider. I brought you here to help me save my son, so don't get any ideas."

Despite what she cosidered an ample warning, the spirit of the seer was drawn almost immediately toward its living counterpart. A rumble shook the entire vision, and it faded rapidly to a single crystalized image. One, Telos noted, while checking her vision with and without the veil, contained an image of Hitth--despite the water see having never seen Hitth before.The grind came back with sadistic speed and enclosed on both Telos and Opal only to stop mere inches short as though repelled.

Opal had chosen. But Opal was dead; a spirit giving itself an intangible shape thanks to the strange energies of the Outsider's domain. If there was anything alive in him, it was Camellia's magic, and that too was an outside force. For Telos, it was quite the proof of concept that the wildclaw had been able to trigger Hitth despite having no brain or heart. But the essence was there, and that was apparently enough. Without devouring anything, Opal’s world shrank down to a single mirror image, and Telos knew that was how it gained facets. 

She also had context for much of the cryptic information she had been given by Techne.

“I kept wondering why it bothered to eat dragons when these are the source of its strength,” she mused as she approached the facet. “ Kept treating it like it had to make sense--maybe it ate our magic, maybe it really needed to eat us for some kind of sustenance. But it doesn’t. It eats us because it’s greedy.” She looked over her shoulder. “Not unlike you, who played with an entire clan’s lives simply because they were there and you were bored.”

Opal’s eyes were unrepentant, but he was a beaten and weary entity. Telos’ fist was merely the most recent shock in the string of punishments he’d received, all of which were paltry against the fact of his continued sentience. Lutia had taken the life from him, but Camellia had forbidden him his proper death. Nothing--not the offal, the spit, or even the shit--had proved to be worse than that.

It was with defeat that he asked, “What do you want from me, Telos?”

“You’re going to help me put this Outsider in its place.”

She gave her full attention to the facet, focusing her full attention on the shape of it. When she touched it, the vision of Hitth inside stirred and hissed. The words on the scroll rose to her mind.

You can never choose a reality that isn’t yours. But if true sight is with you, it is yours to touch.

The punch came as she’d been taught, winding from her leg to her hip to her shoulder and explosively out through the bracer. A brilliant burst of light magic flowed through the twisting wood. Inside the mirror surface, Telos briefly saw the image of the pearlsnatcher scream and distort before the whole thing shattered into a mercurial cloud and fell like cold ash.

“That’s one...” She looked up, feeling emboldened by the success, and was greeted by what looked like a dark sky full of glittering stars. Each one a facet that wasn’t hers. “Next one is on you.”

“I hate to break it to you but I’m not as good at punching things as I am at manipulation.”

She took a deep breath to keep her patience and grabbed him through the eye sockets, dragging the skulls and his half-manifested form behind her. “Just shut up and do what I say.”