PeculiarChangeling

Daniel could distantly feel himself taking deep, steady breaths, but his mind was lost in the arcane arcade space his coven had built. The girls of his coven loomed around him, working together like a team–and, of course, they were a team. Daniel was in theory also a part of that team, but he didn’t feel like he belonged with them; he belonged below them. Hazel leaned in over the console with an intense expression, almost a glare, tapping away at a few buttons so quickly that the clicks ran together into white noise. Asami, whose controls were lowered so she could reach them while sitting, was in an almost zen-like state, moving joystick and buttons together in a fluid motion. Mathilde, though, sat at a lower set of controls that she could reach comfortably from her chair, watching the screens, only occasionally pushing a button. At first, Daniel thought she might be uncertain, even hesitant, but after more thought, he understood–she wasn’t uncertain, she was patient. She waited

"At the end of the world, there will be neither clamor nor calamity, neither echo nor epoch. It will be mired in silence and sleep, in deliverance and death. At the end of the world, there will be both patience and purpose, both temperance and time. Only then will it be graced with eternity, and from eternity, a chance." -The Source, in valediction Chapter One Ai blinks, but the panic doesn’t set in until several seconds pass. (Where am I?) Sometimes, in the past, she’d woken up in an unfamiliar place. It always disoriented her, struggling in a foreign environment to take it all in at once. Having to piece together her arrival: how she’d gotten there, where she was, all while her body was still sleep-lagged and not fully awake. This isn’t like waking up. She had blinked once and found herself in a new place, fully aware, and the assault on her senses came from all directions. She takes it in, but it’s as though her senses are coming on one at a time,