Pre-Dawn
Moon's Day
1st of Mayen, Year 824 of the Silent Age
PROJO'S QUEST LOG:
+ [ACTIVE] Understanding the Curse: Work with Falira to uncover the nature of your powers.
+ Repay Bram (Owe 24 Gold)
+ Return to Mira
PROJO'S INVENTORY:
+ Money: 19 Gold, 14 Silver, 18 Copper
- (Previous: 17G 14S 18C + Job Pay: 2G)
+ Weapons: Iron Longsword, Gideon's Iron Dagger
+ Armor: Crude Leather Cuirass
+ Supplies: Flint & Steel
----
Projo awoke in the pre-dawn chill of the tower, not to an ache in his neck, but to an unsettling sound that shouldn't have been familiar.
His eyes snapped open, and from behind the curtain of Falira's alcove, came a soft, breathy murmur. The memory of the last time he'd heard it sent heat rushing across his skin. He lay perfectly still, his heart hammering.
The blankets rustled, followed by a low, drawn-out moan—pure, uninhibited pleasure, echoing in the quiet stone room with impossible intimacy. Her silhouette shifted, arching under the wool blanket.
Last time, it had been a shocking anomaly. This time, after a week of shared space, quiet conversations, and shared meals, it felt different.
It felt... closer.
He knew he shouldn't be listening. He knew he should be feigning sleep. But his body wouldn't obey. A strange warmth stirred low in his gut, heavy and insistent. The air in the tower felt thick, charged with the scent of her and something else, something he couldn't name.
Another sharp cry cut through the dark.
Projo knew she would wake soon.
With a silent curse, he rolled onto his side, facing the wall, forcing his breath into a slow, false rhythm. A final, shuddering sigh whispered from the alcove—and then, silence.
Projo lay frozen in the dark, his body knotted with tension as he waited for the morning to begin. The usual sounds of the tower—the bubbling cauldron, the distant crash of waves—felt muted.
Then blankets were thrown back, bare feet hit stone, and water splashed hard against the basin with an almost aggressive energy. He could almost feel her scrubbing her face, trying to wash away the illogical heat of the dream, to impose the cold, hard reality of the morning onto her skin. The rustle of her robes was so quick it was almost violent.
Then, the final, familiar sound that signaled the return of the researcher: the small, sharp click of her spectacles being put on. The mask was in place.
He heard her footsteps, measured and controlled, approaching the bedroll where he lay. He could feel her presence, her gaze, a tangible weight on the back of his head. The air thickened with things neither dared say aloud.
"Projo."
Her voice was sharp, clipped, too loud in the quiet. The voice of a researcher addressing a component of her experiment. "The sun will be up within the hour. Your fishing engagement requires punctuality. Rest is over."
Shit—she's right.
The thought jolted him through the fog of embarrassment. He scrambled to his feet, avoiding her gaze.
"Morning," he mumbled, grabbing his sword belt and fishing gear. He didn't wait for a response—he just snatched a piece of bread on his way out the door, desperate to escape the charged air of the tower.
The sunrise was a slash of orange and pink across the grey sea when he reached the outcropping.
Kael was already there, a silent statue against the waves. They fished in companionable quiet, and Projo found a meditative rhythm in the casting and waiting. His hands, once clumsy with the line, now moved with the subtle language of the water.
He returned to the tower a few hours later, a wicker basket heavy with his own catch and a small, honest pride warm in his chest.
He pushed the tower door open, ready to show her his prize—but stopped. The room was still, the curtain to her alcove drawn back. The cot was empty and neatly made. A prickle of unease crawled up his spine.
She had never been gone before.
He called her name, but only the bubble of the cauldron answered.
Shaking off the feeling, he set to work scaling and gutting his catch, salting the fillets for preservation.
When he was done, his hands and tunic were slick with fish slime, and he was suddenly aware of how ripe he was. A week of sweat, training, and now fish guts had left him smelling fouler than any goblin cave. With a grimace, he decided his coin could be put to better use than sitting in a pouch.
In town, he stopped at a tailor's stall, trading two silver for a simple grey tunic and sturdy brown trousers—roughspun but clean.
Then he walked to the bathhouse. The silver he gave the attendant felt like a key to another world. He sank into a tub of steaming hot water, the heat a profound luxury that leached the ache from his bones. He scrubbed away a week's worth of grime, watching the water darken, feeling as if he was washing away more than just dirt.
By the time he walked back toward the tower, he felt like a new man.
The clean linen sat comfortably on his skin, the air cool against his damp hair. But as he climbed the winding steps, the atmosphere shifted. The sky bruised purple as stormclouds boiled over the horizon, swallowing the afternoon light. A low, distant rumble echoed across the sea.
The tower, silhouetted against the darkening sky, looked like a lonely, watchful spire, and the prickle of unease from the morning returned, colder and sharper than before.
A gust of wind shoved the door open with him. He shouldered it shut against the first blankets of spattering rain. Inside, the hearth fire was stoked higher than usual, casting a warm, dancing light that made the shadows in the cluttered room leap and sway.
Falira was there, but not at her workbench or her reading chair. She moved through the room with quiet purpose—shelving a stray scroll here, adjusting a stack of tomes there.
Projo watched her for a moment, his brow furrowed.
Something was different.
Her movements, usually stiff, carried a surprising grace, and the usual tension that radiated from her was gone, replaced by a quiet stillness.
He tried to push past it, though his new, clean clothes suddenly felt comfortable and unfamiliar all at once. "Hey, it looks like a violent storm is inbound. How does Shattercoast usually fare during a rough thunder—"
His breath caught in his throat.
He hadn't been able to place it—until she turned.
It wasn't just her movements.
Her hair, usually bound in a braid, was loose and slightly damp, falling around her shoulders in a soft blue cascade. The air, normally thick with dust and herbs, carried a faint, clean scent—soap, with a whisper of something subtly floral. Even her robes seemed different, hanging softer on her frame.
She had bathed.
For a heartbeat, the mask on her emotions wasn't up. A flicker of something raw crossed her features—vulnerability, maybe—before she smoothed it back into neutrality.
"The cliffs hold," she murmured quietly, a stark contrast to her usual academic tone.
Projo stood rooted, his own clean tunic suddenly feeling too new, his skin still tingling from hot water. He was no longer looking at a researcher in her laboratory. He was looking at a woman, warm and unguarded in her home, while a storm gathered outside.
His gaze was stuck on her, long enough that she finally asked, "What is it?"
He shook his head trying to snap out of it, but he couldn't tear his eyes away. He stepped further into the firelight, brow furrowed.
"I don't know if it's… my nature, or abilities, or…" He hesitated, heat rising in his chest. "You smell amazing." He felt a physical swell, as the heat in his chest pushed lower.
The words left Projo's mouth before he could stop them—simple, honest, and utterly out of place. The air in the tower, already heavy with the storm, thickened until it felt hard to breathe.
Falira went completely still.
Her breath hitched, a small, sharp, sound in the quiet room that betrayed what she tried to keep hidden. A faint pink flush, far deeper than the one from his teasing, started at the collar of her robes and spread up her neck, into her pale cheeks. She stared at him, her mouth slightly parted, the analytical fire in her eyes drowned beneath raw, bewildered confusion.
Something low and unfamiliar coiled in his gut—a physical warmth echoing the dream that morning. The linen of his new trousers suddenly felt tight, an undeniable pressure building from within him.
This wasn't the desperate surge of life-or-death. It was a slow, quiet, hunger that had been building for too long.
"Soap," Falira finally managed to say. "It is a saponification of lye and fat. The scent is merely a... a residual chemical property."
She retreated a half-step. Her hand came up and tucked a loose strand of damp, blue hair behind her ear.
"It's not... it's not the soap," Projo murmured. His voice was rough, his throat dry. "It's you."
Thunder rolled outside, low and endless, shaking the stone beneath their feet. Rain lashed the windows in sheets, a sudden, violent drumming that sealed them inside.
Falira flinched at the sound, seizing the distraction. "The atmospheric pressure is dropping rapidly," she said, her tone snapping back toward the safety of analysis. "A significant electrical discharge is imminent."
She turned, shoulders stiff, and busied herself with a beaker at the workbench, polishing it with jerky, unfocused movements.
Projo stood in the firelight, the mingled scents of rain, fire, and her all mingling in the air. The ache in his gut was a dull, constant thrum, a physical manifestation of an unspoken question.
He realized, with redefined clarity, that the most dangerous variable in their experiment wasn't magic.
It was him.
He cleared his throat, forcing out words in an attempt to push past it.
"I um… I got a pretty good haul of fish this morning. So… if the storm lasts a while, at least we won't go hungry." He moved to the hearth, stacking driftwood, clinging to practicalities like they could drown the tension.
"Yes," she answered tightly. "The salted fish will keep. The firewood is… adequate." She seized on the mundane topics like a drowning woman grabbing a piece of driftwood. She was trying to rebuild the wall, brick by logical brick.
A deafening crack of thunder exploded overhead, rattling so loud it seemed to shake the very foundations of the tower. Falira jolted, knuckles whitening around the beaker that didn't need to be polished.
"I'll check the shutters," Projo muttered, glad for the excuse. He wrestled the iron latch, wind clawing at the gaps.
As he swung the shutter closed, a spear of lightning split the sky. For an instant, the tower blazed with blue-white light, and in that flash he saw her face—not the mask, but the truth. Pale. Lost. Torn open with conflict.
The latch slammed home, plunging the room back into the warm, dancing firelight. The storm pressed on the tower walls, a muffled roar of wind and rain. Inside, the room felt small, intimate—a fragile little island of warmth in a world of raging chaos.
Projo turned from the window, the practical excuses gone. Falira was staring into the flames, her silence a tangible weight.
He paced the cramped room, fire in his veins, the storm pressing closer with every rolling crash. Distance was impossible here. The air was thick, humming, alive. He stopped at the hearth, shut his eyes, and drew a slow breath.
Beneath the clean scent of soap and the damp smell of rain, another fragrance lingered. Like honey and lightning—a sweet, electric musk that was sharp enough to raise the hairs on his arms.
It wasn't a perfume. It was something deeper, more fundamental.
It was the scent from that morning—from the dream he wasn't supposed to hear.
Now that, he thought, his heart beginning to hammer. That definitely has to be some demon ability.
It was like he could literally smell the arousal rolling off of her in waves.
His eyes snapped open. Her posture was a fortress, but the scent told another story: a body betraying a mind desperate to hold the line.
He had to break the silence. But how? Accusing her would be cruel. Ignoring it felt like a lie. He chose the only language she would understand.
"Falira." His voice rumbled through the storm.
Her shoulders went taut. "What is it?" she asked without turning.
"Another data point," he said.
That made her stop. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned.
"The air in the tower," Projo said, choosing his words with care. "It feels... charged. Like it did on the road, right before the lightning blast."
His eyes were locked on hers. "Do you feel it?"
A flicker of panic was quickly buried. She pushed her spectacles up like armor sliding back into place. "The storm. Rapid shifts in barometric pressure and atmospheric ionization. A common phenomenon."
Projo took a step toward her. "No," he shook his head. "It's not the storm. It's us."
Her composure finally cracked, and the flush flooded her cheeks.
"Your conclusion is based on anecdotal correlation, not empirical evidence," she snapped, her voice a little too high. "You are projecting a subjective emotional state onto an explainable physical event!"
She turned back to her workbench, movements sharp and frantic, grabbing the beaker and the polishing cloth again like a drill she could hide inside. "The subject is becoming unreliable, contaminated by his own illogical hypotheses—"
CRACK.
The beaker shattered in her hand. Shards rained to the stone, a bead of blood welling bright on her thumb where glass bit too deep.
Falira froze, mouth slightly agape, staring down at the cut.
The fortress had collapsed from within.
The tension broke.
Projo crossed the room in three long strides. He didn't reach for her, or mention the argument, or the storm, or the scent hanging heavy in the air.
He just looked at her bleeding thumb. "Are you alright?"
The question hung in the air, human and disarming.
Falira flinched, cradling her hand to her chest as though he had caused the wound.
"It is a superficial laceration," she said, her voice a tight, clinical wire. "The beaker had a flaw in the glass. Thermal stress from the fire and the sudden drop in ambient temperature from the storm... it compromised its structural integrity."
Retreat. A desperate grasp at a world of physics and variables she could control.
Projo exhaled softly. "Glass doesn't just break, Falira."
"It's been known to!" She squealed, turning stiffly to a small cabinet.
She fumbled one-handed at a cabinet, pulling out linen and a vial of clear astringent. Her fingers shook so badly she could hardly uncork it. Frustration flashed across her face, shame following close behind.
"Here," he stepped closer. "Let me."
She tensed when he took her wrist, but this time, she didn't pull away. Her pulse thrashed beneath his thumb, frantic as a trapped bird. He dabbed the cloth with the sharp-smelling liquid and cleaned the cut in silence while her eyes remained fixed anywhere but his.
He was about to reach for the bandage when he looked up, and their eyes met.
There was no challenge or demand. Just a quiet moment of shared space, of one person tending to another's wound.
And the forge ignited.
A golden-green glow bloomed from her thumb, soft and warm as spring sunlight. Falira gasped. Projo's eyes widened as the light pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat, the skin knitting closed before his eyes. In seconds, the cut was gone—no scar, no trace, just smooth flesh where blood had been.
It was faster and more complete than the desperate healing on the cliff.
The light faded. Projo, shocked by the unintentional magic, let go of her wrist like hot coal.
She stared at her unmarked skin. The fortress of her logic had been breached by a simple act of care.
Projo found his voice first, an awestruck whisper in the sudden silence.
"So… it's not the touch." He lifted his gaze to hers. "It's the reason for it."
Her lips parted, but no sound came.
"Even a small act can be… intimate," he said.
He saw her swallow, her mind reeling, the new data point too undeniable to dismiss.
And then, for a moment, his brain worked like hers, and a thought struck him sharp as lightning.
"Falira. Your side. The wound—does it still hurt?"
Her eyes widened, the same impossible hope dawning. She pressed her hand to her ribs, fumbling with the ties of her tunic. The fabric fell back, baring pale skin and the angry red scar, still ringed in bruising.
Her shoulders sagged. She let the tunic fall, a shudder running through her.
"It's... unchanged," she said, her voice a mixture of disappointment and academic bafflement. She looked from her own healed thumb back to his face. "The catalyst was sufficient for a superficial wound... but not for a significant trauma."
The implication pressed down with the weight of the storm.
A greater healing would demand a greater catalyst.
Something more intimate.
And they both knew it.
Projo struggled with the entire setting, the entire interaction. "This is… difficult for you," he said carefully. "I can see that."
He took a small step to the side, not retreating but easing the pressure. "I'm not exactly an… expert. Myself. So, um…" he created a little more space. "I'm just going to… go read. To give you some room to breathe. I don't want to make you uncomfortable."
He turned, fully intending to retreat to his corner, to give her the space she so clearly needed.
"Wait."
Her voice was quiet, but it stopped him cold.
He turned back slowly.
Falira hadn't moved, but her expression had changed. The shame, embarrassment, the fortress of logic—they were all gone. What looked back at him now was sharp, almost fearful focus—an academic staring down a paradox in human form.
"I have a… hypothesis," she said carefully. "One I haven't… told you about yet."
She took a shaky breath.
Her gaze drifted to the forbidden iron-bound tome, Liber Daemonum, sitting on a bookshelf. "Incubi, in the texts—they do not prey on their victims through force. They prey through seduction. They possess an aura, an ambient field. It may be magical, possibly pheromones, but it… it supposedly erodes inhibitions. And amplifies latent desires."
She looked to his face, then to the charged air around them. "I have been dreaming of you, Projo. I can't seem to stop. And I have been... uncharacteristically emotional. My logical frameworks are being compromised."
The implication slapped him in the face, and Projo's heart went cold. "You mean I'm… manipulating you somehow?" His voice was horrified. "Without even meaning to?"
The idea was poison. He stepped back, palms raised as if to ward her off. "Then we stop. Right now. I can't... I won't be that."
"To stop now would be to abandon the experiment at its most critical juncture!" she snapped, the scholar's fire flaring through the cracks in her fear. "We have a primary theory and a series of undeniable phenomena. To retreat now—out of fear of an unproven variable—it's illogical!"
"Do you even hear yourself right now?!" He shot back. "You've been fighting against this with every fiber of your being and now you're fighting for it? It's not a variable, Falira—it's you!"
His voice cracked under the strain. "I won't be a part of something that takes away your choice!"
"And what if it isn't?" she challenged, stepping toward him. "Did you only hear half of what I said?! It amplifies latent desires. It does not create them where there are none!"
Her eyes burned, brilliant, terrifying—alive. "If the aura is real, then it's an amplifier for what is already there! What if I'm simply using the possibility of being influenced as a justifiable pretext to get what I actually want?!"
She stopped directly in front of him and looked up. And in her eyes, he saw both the scholar and the woman fused together, her fear transmuted into steel.
"What you want?" His whisper was barely sound.
Falira didn't look away this time:
"What I want."