abraxaslogs | [ OPEN ] break the earth with your tiny head.

Ronan has done his very best to ignore it. It's not like he gives a shit about Yennefer. She's proven to be a huge pain in the ass and he's reasonably sure she wants to get him out of the way so she can have his man all to herself. Her business is her business and Ronan's business is Ronan's business and they only ever overlap where Kylo is concerned.

But he's noticed. He can't help but notice. He can't believe no one else has noticed, or if they have, they haven't done anything about it, because it's still going on. Why the hell are they letting it go on? Around the castle, okay, fine. But at the Summit? Where the other factions could easily see what he's seeing and figure out they've lost one of their most powerful assets?

He can't keep being quiet about it. If no one else is going to say it, he's going to have to.

When he finally finds her skulking about the halls (intentionally avoiding contact with anyone, he's pretty sure), his long legs carry him to her faster than she can escape. "Hey," he says when he catches up to her, cutting straight to the chase. "What the fuck happened to your magic?"

Ronan could tell something was wrong the moment he woke from the dream.

He'd awoken paralyzed, as usual, which meant he'd brought something back with him. Observing his body from the outside, however, he couldn't immediately tell what it was he'd manifested. His frozen body had looked wrong to him, but that was typical of the waking dreamer, that lifelessness. The dream always takes everything from the dreamer. It's an amputation of the soul, cutting out a piece to create something new from it.

And this dream... This dream took a very big piece of him.

He hadn't realized it at the time, but it also took a very big piece from something else: the Singularity. Ronan's body lay there for over an hour, faded and funereal, and this was wrong because the ambient magic of Thorne was ordinarily so thick in the air that he'd be restored from even the most complicated dreams within minutes. But there was nothing there to nourish the dreamer, and the astral Ronan watched in helpless panic, wondering if that body's heart had stopped beating altogether.

It hadn't. Some agonizing amount of time later, he'd regained the use of his limbs and finally sat up, searching for his dream.

Now, hours later, he still hasn't found it. There's nothing worse than knowing he manifested something enormous without knowing where it went or what it even is. It wouldn't be the first time a dream has appeared some distance away from his body, but it's definitely the first time he's failed to find it. Something powerful enough to have taken a gigantic gulp out of all the magic in Castle Thorne. What the hell could it be?

Drifting through the corridors, trying to investigate without arousing suspicion, his body is still shaky and weak enough that he has to stop now and then to brace himself against the wall. He feels like he's not getting enough air. It's not air he's lacking, though. He knows. He'd tried to create magic out of magic and now he's cannibalized himself. If the Singularity doesn't restore itself soon...

It takes almost a full week for the nightwash to appear. Previously, he might have regarded that as some kind of miracle. Before he was summoned to Abraxas, death had always been just hours away, and the only thing that could delay his impending doom by a few more hours was dreaming or ley energy. But for over nine months in Thorne, he's been able to live a normal life. He's been able to forget the feeling of wasting away, the desperate hunger, the quiet terror.

Now it's caught up with him.

The first time it slips, he's in the dining hall. A drop of inky liquid blackens his stew. He freezes when he sees it, watching it contaminate the food that was failing to satisfy him anyway, his stomach turning with dread. Within seconds, the nightwash is flowing from him like a bad nosebleed, spilling over his mouth and down his chin.

It comes and goes after that, severity rising and falling with the fluctuations of the Singularity. When magic is surging, he's temporarily cured. When it dips again, his starvation returns — and the nightwash with it.

People start to notice it immediately. It's impossible to ignore, after all. When he's walking down the corridor and the black starts to spill from his ears or from his eyes, the courtiers stare and scuttle away from him, whispering to each other about a curse, it must be a curse. When he's in the training yard and he doubles over retching on the toxic stuff, the guards order him away and tell him not to return until he's recovered. When he's in the library, searching frantically for answers in the mages' books, they're snatched away from him after his black tears stain the pages.

As the week progresses, he can't pretend to keep living his life. He's confined to his dormitory because he can't walk, can't see, can barely breathe around the fluid bubbling up from his lungs. The sheets of his bed are stained with it, a black so dark all light seems to disappear into it. The moment it's wiped away, more of it spills out of him. It's a horrible, grotesque sight to behold.

The nightwash is eating him away from the inside out.

When Ronan's condition got worse, Rhy was told he had to stay away. He'd tried to argue, but Ronan has always been so adamant as to the danger he poses to Rhy, specifically; the same reason they can help each other is the reason that he can hurt Rhy more than anyone else can, or so Ronan believes, and thus there's nothing to be done. Rhy waits.

Anxiously, checking in with Kylo when he can't talk to Ronan, trusting everything is being done to help him as much as possible. It is all he can do. Wait.

Eventually, happily, it's over. Rhy doesn't understand the full scope of how bad it was; he doesn't need to. He was plenty worried already.

When Ronan is finally ready to see him, Rhy is there, slipping into the room to look for him, wide-eyed and restless.

"Ronan? How are you feeling?"

closed to yennefer;

open to all; bad moon rising

open to all; nightwash

near the end of the month.