When it all fades so abruptly - there's an instant where Claude wonders if he imagined it all.
You have been chosen, an acolyte says, and it takes everything within Claude to resist reacting as reality crashes back in: the altar, their bindings, the dead around them. So much blood and something still threatening to choke his breath deep in his chest. Silence isn't what he would normally choose, but Wilhelm's fingers in his sleeve are a reminder there's more important things here. There's some other intonation that stops his breath for a second when he realizes it aligns with what Sylvain said about the ritual: that they're important. Blessed by the gods. The whole thing makes him ill.
No time for that. His name calls his spinning mind back to his immediate surroundings when their captors vanish, and Claude looks down to see their hands are still bound with thorns present everywhere. A couple flexes of his fingers prove they still have no feeling, that the rest of his hands now don't either, and the advantage to that means that when he yanks his hands free it doesn't hurt when those thorns dig in. It will later, but that's a problem for later as is the panic pressing on the edges of his consciousness he's keeping at bay with far too much practice.
He's bleeding in more places than he wants to think about - more than he even knows - and whatever laceration must be on his back is absolutely throbbing with pain by the time Claude crawls the rest of the way over to Wilhelm, able to grab him by the shoulders now to scan his face. "I've got you, okay? I'm not going anywhere without you."
Whether Wilhelm reacts to that or not, Claude drops his gaze to look at Wilhelm's hands, A couple moments of quick assessing and then he grips the roots, ready to pull before he stops to look at Wilhelm again. "Hold still for this while I get you free."
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You have been chosen, an acolyte says, and it takes everything within Claude to resist reacting as reality crashes back in: the altar, their bindings, the dead around them. So much blood and something still threatening to choke his breath deep in his chest. Silence isn't what he would normally choose, but Wilhelm's fingers in his sleeve are a reminder there's more important things here. There's some other intonation that stops his breath for a second when he realizes it aligns with what Sylvain said about the ritual: that they're important. Blessed by the gods. The whole thing makes him ill.
No time for that. His name calls his spinning mind back to his immediate surroundings when their captors vanish, and Claude looks down to see their hands are still bound with thorns present everywhere. A couple flexes of his fingers prove they still have no feeling, that the rest of his hands now don't either, and the advantage to that means that when he yanks his hands free it doesn't hurt when those thorns dig in. It will later, but that's a problem for later as is the panic pressing on the edges of his consciousness he's keeping at bay with far too much practice.
He's bleeding in more places than he wants to think about - more than he even knows - and whatever laceration must be on his back is absolutely throbbing with pain by the time Claude crawls the rest of the way over to Wilhelm, able to grab him by the shoulders now to scan his face. "I've got you, okay? I'm not going anywhere without you."
Whether Wilhelm reacts to that or not, Claude drops his gaze to look at Wilhelm's hands, A couple moments of quick assessing and then he grips the roots, ready to pull before he stops to look at Wilhelm again. "Hold still for this while I get you free."