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The heat of the warp sigil on the dirt beneath Arion’s back scorches his wounds, cooking the blood against his skin with an audible sizzling sound. He cries out, seizing as Altena’s face fades into red and the dark prince’s hair whips around them both. The boy is cackling now; rejoicing over the sound of wind and the thundering pulse in Arion’s ears.
The spell deposits them somewhere brighter than the wyvern lord expected; his dizzy gaze meets the high, painted ceiling with great effort as he continues to lay on his back, nerve endings misfiring every which way. He groans with the last of his energy.
It seems as though Altena is more than a match for him after all.
“Don’t just lay there, Prince Arion,” a voice, young and mirthful, remarks nearby. “Father will be upset if you stain the carpet.” The red returns to his vision, dangling in his face as the eyes of a demon come into view. Julius squats down, grabbing Arion around the torso before beginning to haul him across the floor.
“S-Stop!” He twists in the boy’s unnaturally strong grip as lighting lances through his body; torn muscles straining even further as they are dragged across the ground. “I can stand… please-”
“Hah!” Julius laughs as he continues to tug the man away. “I doubt you can crawl, nevermind stand. Falling from that height has some awfully bad effects on the legs, you see…”
The short distance to their destination is enough to leave Arion winded and weak; even more so than when Gáe Bolg had first sliced into his body like a hot knife through butter. His vision takes a spinning turn as he’s unceremoniously tossed onto something soft and flat.
“Where…”
“Castle Velthomer.”
Arms take hold of his legs, and Arion jerks upwards with a gasp as shattered bone shards scrape against each other beneath his skin. The mangled limbs are tossed carelessly onto the bed after him, landing in unnatural, bent positions. The younger prince brushes off his hands with a cough, blood smearing on his palms as Arion twitches on the bed, mouth agape as the pain surges. He shakes hard enough to make the bedposts rattle, but Julius does not care. The boy tugs off his companion’s boots and armor with the gentleness of a landslide, a small grin plastered carefully on the corners of his mouth.
“L-Lord Julius-” Arion gasps as a hand claws its way into his wound on its way to removing his coat. “P-please- stop-”
“Don’t struggle so much. You’re only making this more difficult,” Julius warns, yanking Arion’s arm out of his sleeve with a flick of his hand. “The healer will be here soon enough, so don’t whine.”
Finally... Finally the hands disappear, leaving the older prince to enjoy his suffering alone. Julius drags a chair to the bedside and sits down in a huff, cracking open a thick tome on his lap and settling into it with ease.
Confused and in pain, Arion refuses to leave him to his reading. “Why… have y-you brought me here..?”
Julius mumbles his answer without looking up, turning each ancient page of the book with a delicacy he seemed to not possess when handling Arion’s wounds. “Simple. It was just not your time to die yet.”
“Wh…” Arion’s voice faces with a wheeze as Julius glances up at him, head still angled downward.
“You are a powerful ally. It would be a shame to lose you to a band of children, don’t you think? You should be grateful.”
“I-I am… grateful, L-lord Julius,” he gasps in response.
“Good. Then stop talking. I’m trying to read.”
Incredulous, Arion falls silent, instead focusing on trying to ignore the agony of two broken legs and the steadily increasing threat of death by blood loss.
Thankfully, he doesn’t have to wait long.
Julius perks up at the sound of a doorknob twisting, putting his book back into the holster on his belt. “Finally, I was wondering if you had left.”
“Of course not, My Lord. I am at your command as always.” The old man, swathed in many layers of deep purple robes, bows in the doorway.
“No time for delay, Manfroy… My dear guest has suffered enough.”
Arion takes an agonizing breath as the old man approaches. His gaze wavers and sparkles at the edges- unconsciousness barely held back as the blood loss becomes critical. He can’t even mumble a greeting; jaw refusing to move from its stiff position. Manfroy’s beady eyes meet Arion’s, and the wyvern lord can’t help but tense under the priest’s Jormungand-stained gaze
“Do not shy away from me, Prince of Thracia,” the old man says, holding a staff aloft. It’s a knotted tree branch of a thing, remarkably spikey and weapon-like, but the healing light that comes from it is familiar. Slowly, the pain ebbs away, and Arion’s muscles relax as the tension leaves his body.
“There. You are whole again,” Manfroy says with a satisfied nod. The ache is still there, but Arion bends one of his knees as a test and it does not collapse, despite its shuddering.
“Thank you…” he answers breathlessly, heaving himself upwards onto his elbows. The new skin plastered across his back stretches and tingles, still crusted with dried blood.
Julius tuts loudly as Manfroy offers Arion a slight nod of acknowledgement. “Manfroy, you are not done with him! Look, you have forgotten something.”
Arion turns to the prince, confused. He doesn’t feel any unattended injuries…
“Are you quite sure, My Lord?” Manfroy asks, leaning against his staff. When hunched like this, he looks like just a strange old man rather than one of the empire’s dark priests.
“I… I feel fine, Prince Julius. What do you mean?” Arion asks. The prince grins, waving his hand in response.
“Something to take the edge off, friend. Manfroy, if you please?” Julius smirks
Manfroy puts aside the staff with a smile. “With pleasure, my prince.” He approaches the bed with open arms, and Arion does crawl back this time, distrust building as the pressure of black magic begins to accumulate in the room.
“Wait, wait- What are you doing?” Arion slides off the other side of the bed, relieved to find that his legs, while shaky and weak, are capable of holding his weight again. He backs up until the wall presses against his shoulders.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Julius leans back in his chair, pulling the tome out again and putting his feet up on the side of the bed. “Just a little insurance to make sure that you’ll arrive at your next battle without any second thoughts.”
Manfroy is faster than he looks, and Arion finds himself pressed against the wall in an instant as the man breathes down his neck, hands reaching toward his head. Magic crackles between his fingers and Arion gasps, trying to dodge out of the way only to trip over one of the sorcerer’s legs. He hits the ground with a thud, and the purple mass is on top of him in an instant with hands on either side of his face.
“Do not resist. It’s for your own good,” a voice hisses in his ear, before clouds overtake his thoughts, drowning him in darkness.
---
“-ion! Listen to me!”
A woman shrieks nearby. Wind whistles in his ear. His arm swings downward, something heavy guiding his motions.
“Brother, get a hold of yourself!”
Something collides with his shoulder, knocking him off balance. He’s holding something in his hand, but gripping it tighter doesn’t steady him as he leans forward.
“ Arion! Please! ”
He shakes his head, finally clearing the haze from his mind. Who is calling him? It sounds like…
His body catches up with his brain a moment too slow. He doesn’t realize he’d been atop his dragon until such a statement was no longer the case; his legs jerking out of the saddle in confusion as he realizes that he has no idea where he is.
He tumbles through the air with a yell, letting go of the lance in his hand as he reaches upwards, too late to grab onto the beast but not lacking in effort for trying. He panics as the ground becomes more and more visible through the cloud cover; the harsh side of a mountain promising instant death below him.
A roar sounds from somewhere nearby, and a moment later he hits a new scaly surface with a gasp and a loud smack. A hand curls itself into the fabric of his coat, tugging him further onto more solid ground. The “ground” in question hisses and spits, and the sound of wingbeats batter his brain as he struggles to reorient himself to the rapidly changing environment around him.
Brown hair dances in his vision as he swings his leg over the side of what was now identifiably a wyvern. The red gauntlet that had caught him was still gripping his shirt roughly, threatening to choke him, so he wraps an arm around its owner’s middle instead, pulling at the fingers with a shaking hand.
“Altena…”
“Are you alright?”
“What… what’s going on?”
She glances over her shoulder at him, incredulous. “I was hoping you could tell me that.”
They land on a nearby mountain ridge, and Arion’s own dragon follows soon after, sniffing the air around its master curiously. He pets its muzzle with an absent mind as Altena berates him for attacking her, expression wild and furious as she gestures to him, then his dragon, then upwards to the rest of his squadron who circle above them like hawks. His stomach sinks as he realizes that he doesn’t remember entering battle, wracking his brain for an explanation. Last thing he remembered was… Altena beating him to a pulp… being healed… and then…
Altena retracts her accusing finger as Arion looks up from the ground, expression hardened.
“Where are we?”
“... Grannvale..? We’ve both been here for days; abet on opposite sides of the battlefield…”
Arion sets his jaw as Prince Julius’s cruel smile flashes in his vision. His priest’s hands on his face- the hum of magic…
He’d kill that boy and his foul sorcerer if it was the last thing he did.