Chapter Text
The Imagination was a dangerous place. Roman was thinking about this as the air whistled in his ears and he fell from a rather impressive height into the territory of some rocky mountains. It was impossible to die in the Imagination, but you could get seriously hurt, and if he didn't genuinely try to survive, it would be a very boring adventure. So, Roman was feverishly trying to figure out what to do.
He only had a sword in his hands, but this was enough for him. When he fell close enough, he pressed the tip of his sword against the sloping surface of a rock and... thereby slowed his fall... achieved a cushioning effect... damn, he would have to ask Logan if he ever wanted to write a scene like this. Which was unlikely. The most important thing now was that he tumbled down onto the bottom of a small, sandy, horizontal area surrounded on all sides by mountains, getting away with just a couple of bruises and a ruined costume. He got to his feet and looked up: the tail of the Dragon Witch, who had thrown him off their back a couple of minutes ago, was disappearing behind the cliffs. They had vanished somewhere in the direction of Remus's territory, judging by the smog-filled sky there. Oh well, not his problem anymore.
Roman looked around, deciding to inspect the place he had ended up in. The sand was very beautiful and shiny, and something was scratched onto the cliffs around him, as if he was far from the first to visit here. Which meant the adventure might not be over yet!
He took a closer look at the inscriptions. Some of them were in a language unknown to him and may or may not be translatable. "Do not enter the cave! Beware the curse!" read one of the inscriptions he could understand. Another stated, "And only thanks to you, O Craving Cave, was I able to fulfill my wildest dreams." The other inscriptions contained similarly mixed signals. Roman turned around, searching for the cave.
There was indeed a crack in one of the cliffs, wide enough to crawl inside if you bent down. Roman immediately crawled inside, because of course, in his mind the part of the inscriptions that promised him something good overshadowed the part that warned of a curse.
He had definitely not created this place consciously. Perhaps Remus had created it, but so far, he hadn't noticed any obvious signs of his brother's work. Actually, the Imagination was somewhat autonomous, and sometimes things just appeared here on their own. The twins' job was to refine, sort, and combine ideas into narratives because otherwise, everything would be too abstract and unstructured. However, both he and Remus had often stumbled upon things that neither of them had created, yet they were quite detailed. They had no idea if this was one of the features of the Imagination or remnants of the original Creativity. Usually, such creatures and locations were not particularly friendly towards them. The Dragon Witch was like that, and until recently, Roman had even thought they weren't sentient! But after he was accepted, Remus mentioned in passing that you could communicate with them, but they weren't the most pleasant or polite conversationalists.
Actually, Roman was glad that Remus was hanging out with the main group and with Roman himself more often. Although he would never say it out loud. He hadn't realized how much he missed having someone who, to some extent, shared his experience. It was great to spend time together, and with no other Side did Roman feel so... Oops. His thoughts were starting to wander again, and Roman shoved the reflections about Remus far away. Lately, he had been trying to reflect on this as little as possible.
Roman examined the cave. It was well-lit; the light came from an unclear source and refracted through a complex system of numerous transparent crystals, taking on a sort of blue-green hue. Perhaps these crystals somehow passed through the inside of the rock to the outside, and this was refracted light, or perhaps it was simply magic.
The cave floor was also covered in sand, and as Roman walked, barely noticeable but still present waves rippled out from his footsteps. Roman was sure that sand doesn't work that way. So, magic it was. He walked around the cave looking for anything else, but there was nothing particularly special about it. Yet, there had to be something here! Roman flicked one of the crystals and flinched from the sound. It seemed he had activated some kind of mechanism, because the ringing didn't stop, growing so intense that Roman had to cover his ears with his hands. The sand also became restless from this sound; waves ran across it in all directions, folding into a pattern in a strange and completely unnatural way. Only when the ringing stopped did Roman see that a short quatrain was now written in the sand...
You will not speak, you will not write,
Untill you spend with Remus night.
You either lose your dear voice
Or fuck your brother- That's your choice!
As soon as Roman finished reading, he wanted to exclaim aloud. To ask: "Are you for real?" But his tongue felt weak, and he couldn't produce a single sound even remotely resembling a word. Because, of course, the curse had to turn out to be a real thing. Just his luck...
Without much hope, he dragged the tip of his sword through the sand, trying to write his name, but by the letter "R" he realized he was just scribbling.
Alright, with a condition like that, he was sure the curse was actually Remus's work. Only he would think that something so... scandalous had any right to be voiced, even within the Imagination.
Fine, he had to admit it: he had fallen for the promised dream-fulfillment and walked right into a curse. Since when was having sex with Remus his dream? Roman preferred to leave that undoubtedly rhetorical question unanswered.
Now he needed to lift the curse. Remus had clearly broken every rule of decency, so Roman made a couple of abstract passes with his hands, trying to imagine the curse evaporating on its own. He felt nothing. And attempting to say "hey" only confirmed further that his attempts to lift the curse had failed.
His heart beat faster. Okay... he could just go to Remus, right? Not to fulfill the condition—he wouldn't even think of that!—but to force his brother to remove this affliction from him.