[ As much as Gray seeks to protect herself, she's no mage; her physical control is as strong as her mental defenses are weak, and the cracks Douman sinks his fingers into give and tear, widening the gap for his mental eye to peer through. The gaps widen further as glimpses of his memories inundate her — filled with empty hatred like a possessed madness, like the ghosts that haunted her in her village's cemetery, and like then she begins to lose a sense of where she begins and ends.
In return—
Her memories aren't nearly as shocking as his. What comes to the forefront is despair, dull yet biting like a chattered blade drawn slow across flesh. The faces to the despair are smiling, adoring, everyone looking to her with pride and fervor in their eyes, and looming large is an old, old cemetery, everything overlapping so that they become one.
If he looks a little deeper, there's a gaunt man with long black hair, untouched by the prior visions. The man lies in the deepest, softest shadow of her heart, his tall back radiant. The feelings that surround him are a dozen things at once: faith, exasperation, affection, pity, worry, admiration, and more. She's with him as he lectures, as she drags him out of bed, as he explains a mystery, as he huffs and puffs his way up a hill, as a wyvern-pulled chariot bears down on them.
And as all this information goes back and forth between them, the Tree readily joins the gray, pushing the deluge that is its pain into both of the tiny people who have chosen to try to bear it. Gray gasps as it pours into her like poison, driving her to her knees, and her mind is flattened under an urge to act, to shed blood, to rip something apart. Linking with just Douman would have been jarring enough, but with the Tree too, she threatens to unravel into nothingness. It's only her death grip on Douman's hand that grounds her, though it's ironically the cause of her turmoil too. ]
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In return—
Her memories aren't nearly as shocking as his. What comes to the forefront is despair, dull yet biting like a chattered blade drawn slow across flesh. The faces to the despair are smiling, adoring, everyone looking to her with pride and fervor in their eyes, and looming large is an old, old cemetery, everything overlapping so that they become one.
If he looks a little deeper, there's a gaunt man with long black hair, untouched by the prior visions. The man lies in the deepest, softest shadow of her heart, his tall back radiant. The feelings that surround him are a dozen things at once: faith, exasperation, affection, pity, worry, admiration, and more. She's with him as he lectures, as she drags him out of bed, as he explains a mystery, as he huffs and puffs his way up a hill, as a wyvern-pulled chariot bears down on them.
And as all this information goes back and forth between them, the Tree readily joins the gray, pushing the deluge that is its pain into both of the tiny people who have chosen to try to bear it. Gray gasps as it pours into her like poison, driving her to her knees, and her mind is flattened under an urge to act, to shed blood, to rip something apart. Linking with just Douman would have been jarring enough, but with the Tree too, she threatens to unravel into nothingness. It's only her death grip on Douman's hand that grounds her, though it's ironically the cause of her turmoil too. ]