< The Shattering | Sol Invictus Logs | What We Should Aspire To Be >
Spring finds himself led through a number of hallways, around a large number of bends, up and down and back and forth until he's quite certain that the route he is taking does not, in fact, follow the standard rules of spacial relations... and then, finally, Ae's hand places his upon a hip-length bannister of jade, and then lets him go.
Spring grips the bannister and feels for the staircase with his fet.
It's just foot or so to the staircase, which -- Spring notes -- is smooth and comfortable to walk on, and which curves gently to the right as it proceeds downwards.
Spring follows it, not really seeing another option.
The staircase is long... very long. Spring follows it all the way down, until he feels the smoothness of the floor beneath him... and a slight trembling coming through it from a place right in front of him, as if to suggest that there's something else waiting for him along this path....
Spring reaches out, tentatively...
Spring feels something in front of him... something large... warm... rough.
Spring feels again, with the care of a man who has been blind all his life (even though he isn't, technically, that man any more).
The first thing Spring notices is the sheer amount of Essence underneath his hands, more concentrated than anything else the Twilight can remember, and the second is the intricacy of it, the numerous tiny interlocking vessels and pathways.
The fact that all of this Essence has something... wrong with it, is way down at number 3.
What is under Spring's hands is definitely Yu-Shan-aspected quintessese animated by an immense amount of motonic energy, though the "method of assembly" is some arcane-sounding process Spring has never heard of before.
Spring A motonics virtuoso like Cerin could no doubt examine the underlying Essence particles to classify and analyze exactly what has gone wrong with it. Spring is no motonicist.
Spring Instead he curls his fingers, allowing his Essence to spiral forth along his carefully-aligned chakras and wrap itself around the immensely complex living structure before him, flowing with its breath, and ever so slightly taking on the flavor of its Essence...its power, its detail, and its wrongness, before subliming back into his own.
The Essence flows back to Spring's fingertips, its every surface aspected to carry to him the information that he seeks.
It starts in a tiny trickle... then the force of it hits him, all at once, and for just a moment he feels uncontrollably queasy -- as even the distant echo of the darkness he plumbs causes a feeling of intense dischord throughout his Essence structure.
Working through the feeling and on to the core of the diseased Essence, Spring begins to get a sense of the sheer magnitude of the issue. The motes he sent have become, somehow, necrotic -- their very nature somehow tainted such that the motes themselves begin to go bad and then to dissolve entirely.
Of course, this Essence of Spring's is free-floating, easily replenished from his own stores... but those from which those motes mirrored this condition are intricately wound, embedded with a thousand inconcievably perfect and elaborate connections to their thousand nearest neighbors...
Spring 's knees wobble for a moment under the onslaught, and he nearly falls, nearly loses contact with his patient...but he takes a deep breath, and retains the connection. He takes the motes in question into his system, keeping them flowing, tainted, along lines forged by countless kata, and binds them tightly into his little finger, sealing the Essence flows off so that they cannot escape or be cleansed.
Not long before -- in another life, perhaps -- what Spring attempts would have been impossible for him; the sheer delicacy, the ultimate respect, the complete detachment needed outside his repertoire...
But now, he does not think, merely acts, and a moment later, it is done.
Spring exhales.
Spring considers the patient before him, asking himself whether anything remains to be done, then nods his hooded head slowly, and takes three steps back.
Tags: (:tags :) < The Shattering | Sol Invictus Logs | What We Should Aspire To Be >
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