Chapter Text
“Oh, poor Tango. What a way to go.”
“Impaled by his own blade. He knew he’d messed up, before it had even happened! You just heard, ‘oh no!’”
“Oh, dear. Poor guy…”
Tango’s ears ring in the silence of the void. He’s still shaking, adrenaline in his veins, and he wants to laugh, hysterical, incredulous, but laughing requires breathing.
Tango isn’t breathing right now.
Oh, not because he’s dead. Had died. Whatever. He’d respawned, not on Last Life or Hermitcraft but in the void somewhere above the former, and unlike most players, Tango is capable of breathing in the inky black nothingness just fine , thank you very much.
No, the reason Tango isn’t breathing is because of the magic coiled around his neck, clogging up his throat, keeping him silent by keeping him breathless. He chokes, and he would be clawing at the magic, fruitlessly trying to pull it away, but he can’t move, either.
He settles for glaring as best as he can at the ball of wings and eyes and steel-grey magic that is Orez. Orez does not seem perturbed.
“Tzatzl,” they greet.
Tango does not reply, because Tango can’t breathe.
It’s beginning to get to him now, the light-headedness, the oxygen deprivation, fingers gone numb and vision going black at the edges. The ringing is beginning to fade, the disorientation from his death, and the panic is beginning to set in, because this—
This is bad.
He tries, once more, fruitlessly, to suck in a breath, and it catches against the magic in his throat, and he wants to whine but he has no air with which to make the sound. He needs to—to move, to get out, to—to find his friends to rescue them—
(The plan’s gone wrong, because the plan always goes wrong, because Tango did not stop to consider what a code that hides players from Watchers would do when applied to a Watcher and had had to spend half the game undoing his own work and ruining the plan further.)
(Tango was supposed to come in for a sneak attack, to lure them in with the game and take out Quoroth and Orez while they were distracted, only for his elaborate rube goldberg machine to blow up in his face and Orez to capture him while he was too busy reeling to flee—)
The spell around his throat snaps and Tango sucks in an ugly, shuddering breath, choking on bile as he convulses, still frozen in place by strands of Orez’s magic, wrapped around his joints like marionette strings and holding him unnaturally still. Orez watches, disdainful, as Tango gasps for air in the airless void.
“Coward,” Tango bites out when he catches his breath.
“Watch your tongue,” Orez snaps.
“Fight me,” Tango croaks. “If you weren’t afraid, you’d—you’d fight me, not—”
Orez sighs. “I’m simply saving us time,” they say. “If we fought, you’d lose, and we’d end up right back here.”
Tango glares. “Fight me,” he snarls.
Orez stares at him for a long moment, many-eyed gaze impassive, unreadable.
At last, they say, “Fine.”
The magic holding Tango in place snap . He yelps as he nearly falls down into the void, his formerly-dislocated wing still screaming at him. He catches himself, and glances up to see Orez hovering in place, unmoving, watching him.
He grits his teeth. Calls his weapon to hand.
This was not the plan.
But it’s the only choice he has.
He lets out a wordless scream and lunges.
Still, Orez does not move, does not make to call their own weapon, even as Tango careens through the darkness towards them. As he grows close, they simply lift a wing, moving out of Tango’s way, and turn to face him once more as Tango skids to a halt and spins back around. Tango scowls, going back in for another blow, and this time as the wing he’s aiming for lifts it hits him around the head, sending him reeling across the void.
“Good going, Tango,” he mutters to himself as he turns back towards Orez once more. “Fight the guy who barely has a body, that’ll go well.”
He lifts his gaze towards Orez, raises his sword—
And freezes.
He doesn’t mean to. He doesn’t particularly want to. But…
Orez’s mass of wings has opened up, like the petals of a flower or the maw of some terrifying void-creature, and every eye is staring right at Tango like it can see into his soul. Like it can see straight through him. At the centre of the mass, dripping in Orez’s magic, is a body: a humanoid shape, unrecognisable for the steel-grey sheen and void-rot covering its skin. It has eyes, too, inlaid into the skin where they shouldn’t be, glowing bright and staring. Watching.
This isn’t right.
That’s the only thing Tango can think: Orez doesn’t look anything like any natural-born Watcher or human convert Tango has ever seen. Even Xyrstad, in all their terrifying glory, is nothing like the abomination hovering before Tango now, and the wrongness makes every fibre of his being scream.
And he can’t move.
At first he thinks it’s the magic again, that Orez has grown tired of their fight, but when he tears his gaze away from Orez’s he can’t see any trace of their magic on his skin. He swallows, tries to force himself forward, but he can’t. His body won’t listen. Why won’t—
“Are you done?” Orez asks.
Tango opens his mouth to reply. Nothing comes out.
What is wrong with him? Why won’t—
Orez huffs. “Next time,” they say, “I won’t bother to humour you.”
The wings close up around their body once more, and Tango finds himself frozen for real this time, Orez’s magic cocooning him once more. At least he can breathe this time, as hard as it is. His heart is pounding against his ribcage like it’s trying to escape. Is he dying? Is he having a heart attack? Has Orez done something to him? Why—?
Orez drifts closer, through the void, an obsidian knife summoned into a hand that pokes out between feathers. They circle him, and Tango wants to run, to scream, to fight—
Orez comes to a halt behind him, their hand (wrong wrong wrong wrong—) ghosting over his shoulder blades and down to touch his wings. “I’d tell you to stay still,” they say, “but I don’t think that will be a problem.”
Their hand clasps down on his wing, gripping it tight enough to hurt, and a small, pathetic sound tears itself from Tango’s lips.
And it’s in that moment that he realises what’s happening.
Fight, flight, or freeze.
Tango’s scared.
And then he’s screaming, ugly and ragged and agonised, as a blade comes down and saws through bone and skin.
And then, with a flick of Orez’s wing and a sliver of magic, he’s silenced once again, choking on void and pain alike as his wings are cut in half.
Quoroth is in the library, preparing some materials for his next lesson with Quinzi, when Orez finds him.
“You’re back,” he observes flatly, glancing up at the mass of feathers and eyes that is his ally. “How was the game? Since I didn’t get to see the end, and all.” He’s not bitter.
“Disappointing,” says Orez. Then, “I brought you a gift.”
Quoroth blinks. “A gift?” he echoes, confused, because that wasn’t really Orez’s style at all.
Orez nods, and hands Quoroth a large, oddly-shaped parcel wrapped in paper. “I trust you’ll find value in these,” they say, and then they’re gone, drifting back out of the aisle and leaving Quoroth alone between the shelves.
If Quoroth were more patient, less suspicious, he would have waited until he’d returned to his room to open the package; as it is, he tears into the paper where he’s standing, revealing the blood-splattered black skin and severed bone beneath.
He freezes.
These are wings.
These are Tzatzl’s wings.
He should feel smug, probably. Satisfied. Tzatzl had got what was coming to him. But all Quoroth feels is cold, stark horror.
Orez had torn off Tzatzl’s wings.
And they’d delivered them straight to Quoroth.
A gift, they’d said, but Quoroth isn’t stupid. He knows what this means. He knows why Orez had given them to him rather than keeping them as a trophy for their own.
This is a threat .
Quoroth swallows down bitter dread and banishes the wings to his inventory. Even when he doesn’t have to look at them, he can feel them weighing him down. It takes all of his willpower not to wrap his own wings around himself in a desperate reminder that they’re still there.
Tzatzl will never fly again.
And Quoroth will make sure the same fate doesn’t befall him.