👁️???
Aleister awoke to light piercing through the dark of his lids. On a typical morning the hunter would have risen with the sun, but the night prior had been anything but ordinary.
The bird jolted up and instinctively brought his palm to his side to press against the gushing wound he was sure had merely gone numb. No pain ignited from the area and when he pulled his hand back to inspect the aftermath there was no telltale blood staining his fur. Peculiar, but welcomed. It didn't take Aleister more than a few blinks of his two familiar eyes to realize that what had transpired had been nothing more than a sickening nightmare.
The void very well may have twisted his dreams, but it had been benign in its fruition. A bad dream he could handle. The seal of the Inkwell being broken, he’d learned, he could not. The hunter grunted as he pulled himself to his feet and walked from the tree he’d tactlessly fallen asleep under. He wasn’t far from the actual well itself and as if he were being piloted he hastily made his way to the pit to confirm it had remained sealed.
What shocked Aleister was that others gathered around the well with looks of trepidation painting their faces. It was a worrisome replacement to the wonder and curiosity that normally was coupled with Candeblight. A strange surge of empathy flooded the bird and he bowed his head to keep eye contact to a minimum with the patrons. The bird searched deep inside himself for some semblance of relief that the site was still sealed but…everything had felt so real and not only to him from what he could sus out. Adversely the proximity to the void just made the Hunter’s hackles rise. He felt watched, like something was appraising him.
Aleister’s eyes shifted from the edges of the Inkwell and its deep orange foliage towards the inner depths of the site. He hadn’t initially wanted to stare into that void, not that morning, for he knew that something always looked back. But that had been why he’d taken up the mantle in the first place, to guard against such hells and its spawn breaking loose. The Inkwell both humbled him in his intent as well as fired the hunter up. His dream, or vision or whatever it may have been had felt like a warning more than a conjuring of his imagination in that moment.
The bird glared at the swirling blackness that was both nothing and everything. It twisted as if it were laughing at him. The night replayed in his mind as if he’d been trepanned and the chaos was forced through the injury to sit behind his eyes. Aleister turned abruptly from the Inkwell, bristling at the threat and the mockery.
He would not let such nightmares become scribed into history.
