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Nikola’s attention slides off of Jon, her face shiftingー her face? Her... She’s emoting, maybe.
Tim starts to look too, or at least it looks like he’s trying. His body moves like a loosely-stacked pile of bones, like he’s unraveling, like the only thing forcing all his disparate parts to move as one is the sort of hatred that drowns out fear.
Jon turns his head and finds it’s remarkably easy, almost nauseatingly so. His head? His...
It doesn’t matter.
He can see what’s caught their attention.
It’s the clearest thing in the unraveling world around them, a silent figure amongst the chaos. Humanoid, maybe, tall, nothing more than a silhouette. There’s a head, and shoulders, and maybe even arms, held open at the sides. Supplication or demonstration. It’s hard to say.
Below the waist there’s nothing more than flowing fabric, or limbs, something strange and creeping. A pitch-black wound in the world. There’s flashes of gold light across it. Static electricity sparking off fabric in a dark room.
Nikola screams. Like a bomb going off inside a piano a chandelier crashing upon the audience a whisper of the name you must not sayー
When she speaks, it is pained. She doesn’t want to say the words, but there is nothing she can do to stop them.
“You, sir, should unmask.”
The response is a low, dark voice. Sourceless. Powerful. The sort of thing that just Is.
I wear no mask. That’s your line.
“Whー” The voice that responds is gentler, bewildered.
Just say it, Arthur!
“I... I wear no mask,” says Arthur, who has a pleasant enough voice.
“No mask?” cries Nikola, and the chorus of those doomed by the Unknowing echoes her. “No mask?”
And then there is the awful sound of countless bodies thumping limply against the ground and the world is the world again and Nikola is broken on the ground andー
And the man who had ended it is standing in the perfect center of the room, a tall, thin man in a slightly ill-fitting suit and a tan overcoat, hands folded nervously in front of him.