+ Guilt Runs Deep

[vitaelamorte]

Who: Everyone!
Where: The Mansion
When: Feb 23-25
Rating: Please warn in top level subject lines for potential triggers/NSFW
Summary: Various residents are trapped in their own guilt, watching their guiltiest memory play on a loop.
The Story:

Welcome to the gathering post for the event. Please see the plotting post for more information + the bulletin board link. Have fun!

Comments

Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy | OTA

[mandrakes]

[He's watching from the sidelines as a man in armour, with white hair and a silver sword, fights a monstrous creature in the overgrown courtyard of a long-ruined castle. It's night, but he follows every movement keenly, every slash, every swing of claws and the glint of the wicked-sharp sword. The first-drawn blood hits him like a wave, his resolve against it already weakened by recent exploits, and he grips the top of a nearby wall so firmly that the stone crumbles to dust beneath his hand.

Regis is already injured. He's healing quickly, but his aching body shows multiple bruises cycling quickly through the black-blue-green-yellow of healing to leave no sign that they were ever there at all. The battle before him escalates, the creature being fought pushed to such heights of rage that it knows nothing but the desire to destroy. He sways on his feet, back and forth, torn between helping (ah, but helping whom?) and turning away.

The white-haired man emerges victorious, leaving the creature crumpled, bleeding and broken on the ground. Broken, but not dead. No, already the bones are realigning, the flesh knitting together, the severed pieces pulling back together with the magic that keeps them alive - keeps them all alive - until certain conditions are met.

He moves forwards. The witcher is reaching for his sword again, but Regis raises a hand to stop him.]

Leave him to me. Begone. [There's a protest, but--] I insist.

[His friend - a good friend, to trust him so readily - leaves without looking back. Regis looks down on the creature crawling helpless on the ground in front of him. Helpless only now, only like this, and not for much longer.

He won't stop. He'll never stop. Not until there's nothing left here to destroy.]

... I'm sorry. [Regis says, and his features twist into far more feral, bestial ones as his hands are suddenly tipped with sharp, eight-inch claws. He surges forwards, ripping the throat out of the other vampire, claws sinking in and teeth tearing into flesh again and again...

Until it's done, and the mangled, brutalised shape of a dead man is all that remains. Regis falls to his knees in grief, in guilt, leaning forwards and pressing his hand into the blood-soaked dirt as nausea floods through him.

It begins again, and Regis knows there is no way to save Dettlaff. He always knows.]

((a handy video!))