Chapter 81: His Adoration
Dion dismissed the longsword and the blade split apart into red flakes that swam back through the air and under his skin, and the bone ridges came up out of his palm along with them, dragging through the cuts on their way out.
The faintest hiss went out through his teeth, and he shut the hand, the blood running down through his fingers and dripping off them onto the concrete while he walked.
People pulled themselves out of his way as he crossed the floor, pressing back against the walls and against each other, and a man who was slower than the rest of them got hauled aside by somebody standing behind him.
"Let him through, would you? Let him through!"
"Madeline, Basil, I need as many people as possible checking every room on this floor. We’re looking for anything that looks wrong."
Madeline had already been walking toward him from her position nearer to the wall before he had finished saying it.
Basil pushed himself off the wall as well with the flat of his hand and came after them.
"You should be sitting down," Madeline said to him.
"I’ll sit down when the rain stops," he muttered, though his eyes stayed screwed half shut as he braced against what looked to be a headache. "Don’t fuss over me, girl."
For a few moments, she didn’t respond, and eventually glanced over to Dion who had stopped before them.
"What... what are we even looking for?" Madeline asked. "Sorry, I mean, do you actually know, or are we just..."
’The birds didn’t come here for us.’
They were sixty people in a dark building with the windows already broken, in a city with so many other thousands of easier prey to find.
’They were coming specifically to this building. Something in here must be drawing them here.’
"I don’t know," he confessed, shaking his head a little. "Honestly, I don’t. But you’ll know it when you see it, I think."
A man near the stairwell got his feet under him and stood up.
"I’ll take the far side," he said, "where the offices past the toilets are. I’ve been sleeping outside those doors since the first night, I’ll know if something’s moved."
The woman beside him pulled the blanket off her shoulders and let it drop where she had been sitting.
"The storage rooms down the hall, then," she said. "None of us have opened half of those since we came in."
Somebody further back said he wasn’t going anywhere near those windows again, and nobody standing near him argued about it.
Five got up, and then seven, splitting off toward the corridors and the offices along the floor’s edges, moving as quickly though as quietly as they could, with their shoulders pulled in as though another huge raven would tear through the ceiling and lunge for them.
Madeline took the offices along the east side, and Basil took the ones nearest the stairwell, and doors banged open and banged shut one after another underneath the noise of the rain.
"Empty!"
"Nothing in here but chairs!"
"Check the desks, and make sure you look underneath them properly!"
"There’s nothing under the bloody desks!"
Madeline leaned out of a doorway down the east side and shook her head at him.
Basil came out of the supply closet by the stairs and dragged his wrist across his forehead, and his hand was shaking when he brought it back down.
"Nothing," he said. "...God, my head."
Dion stopped in the corridor hearing all of this, and made himself stand still.
’Adored by Prana... it should help, right?’ the thought lingered in his mind.
In the first place, after feeling the rain, he understood that it was saturated... or perhaps even made by prana.
And now, he considered that maybe, at the same time, the whole reason that he had been able to tell that it would rain soon wasn’t fully because of his sense of smell.
This very attribute should have contributed a lot to him being able to tell.
And thus, once more in search of some kind of help in their search, he closed his eyes and tried to focus as if he was trying to concentrate his bodily senses.
Madeline had stopped a few steps short of him, her mouth already open.
"Is he... what is he doi—"
Basil’s hand came up between them without him even looking at her, and she shut her mouth.
Surprisingly, within moments, Dion was flushed throughout his body with what felt like a soothing gust of wind.
It had felt nothing like this just earlier when he had done something similar to test out the rain. But for whatever reason, in this moment, he felt such... warmth.
The sensation of prana coddling his body hastened the process of him bringing his body back to a more manageable calm, his breathing easing that little bit.
This great awareness of it had a colour. Green, ethereal spiritual streams flowed all through the air. He could feel it billowing off of each droplet of rain within the building, on the people, and if he really tried to stretch his awareness, he could feel it beyond the walls. It threaded through everything without the slightest obstruction, caressing each thing it passed through.
’Focus... if there is something that the birds would want, it would have to be something natural, caused by either aetherel or prana.’
Dion had his awareness begin with following the green streams of prana that were nearest to him. He swam through the area with them, and noticed how much thinner the prana in other places of the building on their very floor was. It was to the point where even with him focusing it was a little hard for him to tell that there was even prana in some areas, while everywhere that had been in more direct contact with the rain was growing in the presence of it.
And soon enough, combing through the floor, he noticed how there were many streams that were going the same way.
They bent toward one point down the corridor on the far end of the floor, feeding into something that felt so dense with prana that his skin tingled.
Dion’s eyes pried wide in that moment and he immediately turned on his heel, "It’s this way!"