2021-05-09 - To tilt at autumn

The door swallows August, drowns him in blood and dust and drops him unceremoniously onto the ground a mile or so from his cabin. Ungrateful damned bastards.

He's slow coming to, aching and stiff. It's difficult to move at first; he's worried he might have a break, eventually realizes the problem is he's in a sort of indentation in the ground. It's molded to the shape of his body, almost a sort of impact crater.

He pries himself out of it, wincing against the complaints of his implants. The movement Art tells him where he is in an instant, so he just needs to head towards--

He freezes in places as he becomes aware of his surroundings. The entire clearing he's awoken in is dead. The hollow is charred black (also like an impact crater...); all the grass which had filled the rest of the open ground is a dull, dead gold and gray. The saplings at the edges have all withered and died; most of the limbs and leaves from the surrounding trees that face the clearing are dead too.

"What the fuck," he mutters.

He's come back to odd circumstances, but this is something else. This is more like the shaping run amok--like his body had scoured the area of life until there was nothing left but ashes.

He sighs. Well, that's happened before. He can't in good conscience leave it this way, so he kneels down and sets a hand on the ground. "Sorry, guys," he says, voice low. "Didn't mean for this to happen." It's a simple enough act, to stir up the bioenergy of the area, even add in a touch of his own, redistribute it, kick off a new growth cycle.

Easy...except nothing happens. He stares at the dead grass for several seconds. He hadn't mixed them up, had he? Forgotten push from pull? No, definitely not. Definitely not.

people dying under tons of concrete while he floundered, tried desperately to figure out how to make it stop

He shoves that thought aside, tries again, going slower. Gathers up the strands, guides them, reroutes the energy, lets it flow into the right places.

Nothing. Terror curls in his stomach, a cold, hard lump. Something's wrong. It has to be.He's been using the shaping like this for over two decades. Now he comes out of a construct and it's just off?

He gets up and moves to the edge of the clearing, goes for a sapling that's only half-dead. This time he takes it even slower: a single strand, the barest trickle of energy shifted. The sapling begins to weaken, causing him to jerk back, letting go. The wilting stops the moment he does.

The hairs stand on the back of his neck. It's him. He's doing this.

His eyes slowly move from the half-dead sapling to the dead grass of the clearing, stopping at the hollow he awoke inside of. He'd Dreamed of this when he was just back from Bosnia. The first time he'd met Eleanor, when they'd found and lost one another. He'd killed where he walked.

Several things crowd into his mind at once. This is what he gets for killing that harpy. He should have just let Kelly subdue it, but there wasn't time, and he wasn't going to let Joey Kelly die trying to stop a monster hell bent on killing them from being a problem. Or maybe the Art's shifted again. It's happened before, so perhaps this is just more of the same. They'd lost their ability to heal things, now could only go in one direction.

He scans the ground, eventually finds what he's after: a small rock. Smashing it's easy enough; with a single thought, it's a handful of gleaming gravel.

With another, it's whole once more.

A buzzing sensation sets up in the back of his head in counterpoint to the chill on his neck. Fixing things isn't gone. But plants is, maybe healing. At least for him.

He shudders, remembering when they'd let Megan crack open those black holes Monty Marshall had put in their heads. His Art had been weakened and dim for weeks, only come back after some hard lessons learned, harder truths accepted. Is this more of that? Is he broken until he figures out how to get fixed?

Only one way to find out: he needs to talk to other people, find out if they've changed too. Get looked over. First, though, he has to get back to the cabin; has to let Ellie know he's okay.

Mostly.