Ya. Can’t. Leave. There’s a split second of brutal, searing relief as Akiran’s sharp voice seems to distort across from him; as the edges of Ascian’s vision begin to fade and blur. He takes a step back, expecting the sensation to continue - for the others to blink out one by one until he’s carried away to Shadowfell, mercifully away from the fury and confusion and panic. But he blinks and Katrin is still there, trying to diffuse, and the dragonborn is still yelling, and there’s Thezra and Ember and the wizard and Lilli – Lilli, in the cave with two legs and his wrists at her throat; Lilli, with a look of trust in her eyes before they roll back at his touch, empty and gone. Gone, gone, gone. Gone like he should be. Gone like he needs to be. Gone like he can’t be, because Akiran will hate him and then the others will too. …we went out there just for him… The relief crystallizes, each jagged edge a knife as a chest that has long since stopped moving grows impossibly tight. He swallows, as if ingesting the wavering edges of his vision might force them to close and grey around him until the cathedral has faded and he’s carried away from here by forces outside his control; forces Ana wants to take from him, and that deacon likely wants to take from him, and simultaneously a force he simply cannot lose. Gone, gone, gone. Casimir, where are you? The world warps, and leaves Ascian in it. …he called in a favor an’ we came running to back em up… Akiran’s voice reaches him as if he’s still on the bottom of the lake he’d fallen into just a few hours ago, garbled and distorted by a pressure he can feel in his chest but can’t see. He takes another step back on reflex, nearly tripping over Ember glued to his side, the wolf’s whining sounding even further away than the dragonborn. There’s stinging behind his eyes and a churning nausea in his stomach, rising and rolling through him to leave blistering cold in its wake. The overwhelming desire to run fissures with the fact that he can’t, and as Ember’s cries combine with Akiran’s yells Ascian feels that cold inside him reach his stomach, his chest, his throat; claw its way down his limbs and out of his mouth in an ancient shudder of pale, familiar mist. He watches in horror as the smoke peels from his bones, slow and lackadaisical as it coalesces for the first time in the shape of something vaguely humanoid, a semi-opaque shadow beside him that he knows without knowing how is trained on Akiran and the damning finger he points. …if he runs I know what the score is. “No.” The word comes thick and panicked, as blurred around the edges as his vision has come to be; a tunnel of a syllable that seems to be the only one left he knows. He reaches toward the mist with limbs that don’t feel like his, a body that is both too heavy and too light, fingers dragging through what he had both somehow summoned and yet cannot control. At his touch the mist abruptly dissipates, splitting into half a dozen bolts that hover beside him like points on a compass, lifting into themselves before they suddenly rocket toward Akiran of their own accord. “No!” The thought comes in a flood of pure panic, his fingers spasming in the place where the fog had just been. He doesn’t know if it’s his doing or theirs that causes the bolts to skirt the dragonborn, thudding one after the other into the floor at his feet - only that once they’re gone the world doesn’t sharpen, and his body doesn’t strengthen, and Casimir doesn’t come. Is this what Ana wants for him? Gone, gone, gone. He looks up at Akiran from where his gaze had been trained in bald horror on the floor where the mist had disappeared into, the words a protest as weak and shaky as he is. “I don’t want to hurt you. Please.”
