OOC: Dream
In the dim candlelight filling an otherwise dark and dusty room, he could see birds flocking and swirling against an unusual high, convex wooden ceiling, dancing to what he played on the piano in front of him. Birds of every kind. Crows, most noticeably, but mixed in with them were blackbirds, swans, geese, sparrows, finches, even ducks, all moving to the same music in one flock.
For then.
He experimented.
He moved his right hand up an octave and played as normal, and just like that, the flock split in half, one half dark, one half bright, the brighter-feathered birds breaking away, circling the other flock once before mirroring its flight patterns, crossing them midair from time to time.
An improvised high note.
The songbirds split from the waterfowl, copying them ten feet higher.
Another.
In an explosion, the flocks scattered, flying in a sphere of feathers and wings before regrouping into the two separate flocks.
He improvised further and further, until he was no longer playing off the sheet music in front of him - in fact, he picked up a book off a nearby desk and covered it deliberately (by one D. D. Drosselmeyer, he noted, a thick, ornately-bound book similar to the ones crammed into the shelves lining the walls), directing the birds in accordance to what he wanted to see and hear while simultaneously playing off what they surprised him with, watching where each note led them and split-second thinking where that would lead in turn, building and building.
It was no song he'd ever heard or been taught before anymore. Just the dance of the birds. A simple title. Perhaps he could think of a better one later, but that was an easy to remember working title for the time being. The Dance of the Birds. As it took shape, patterns, repeating solidifying verses and themes in the birds' flight, he shut his eyes, sure he was now in tune with where he was conducting them, imagining their dance in his head and leaving them to it, trying to memorize every note as he played it.
In another experiment, guided entirely by feeling his own music, his hand shot aside from the melody for just a moment, playing a single quick, high note. As he predicted, one bird broke off from the flock, a large, glossy black crow, and landed on the top of the piano, tilting its head, red-tinted eyes seeming to glow, catching the light of a nearby candle.
Removing his left hand from the rhythm, he reached out to pet it.
And his hand stopped short a few inches away.
He withdrew his hand and then tried again.
Something was pulling it back.
Something shining in the air right above it like a strand of spiderweb.
A puppet string?
He gasped, head whipping to his right hand. A string attached to each finger and the wrist.
He wasn't truly playing at all?
A harsh, involuntarily-pushed note led to the crow taking off again and joining the rest. With his hands restrained, he couldn't have tried to stop it if he'd thought to.
He jerked side to side. Strings were restricting his shoulders, arms, he even felt them around his waist and his neck. Just like that he felt his throat seize up. The string wasn't even pulled until he unthinkingly started to struggle, succeeding in nothing more but what looked and felt like hopeless twitching, no matter how much force he put into it, held almost in place by what he was trying to escape, the strings squeezing his insides and cutting off his breath fueling his attempts, desperate and terror-blinded.
Then his hands were lifted up overhead. The ceiling opened up, revealing clockwork, thrumming along smoothly, packed just too tight to allow any glimpse from his immobile, panicking position to what was behind them or how high the ceiling actually went. The birds bursting up from their flight pattern into it and scattered, disappearing between and through gears.
Suddenly, he was following them - the strings were pulling him off his seat, up into the clockwork. He started trembling and felt freezing cold all over, breaking out into a sweat and his heart hammering as he saw his writing desk getting smaller and smaller until he couldn't make out anything that had been on it anymore and, paralyzed, couldn't remember, until it disappeared behind a gear. He'd broken through the false ceiling.
There was a clatter as something dropped through the air next to him and stopped abruptly, pulling a string of its own taut. He was still moving up too quickly to tell what it was by looking down. Instead, he managed to turn his head upward. More were falling, and his eyes followed them on their way down. He realized that they were wooden birds, marionettes, the birds that he'd been conducting.
They started coming faster and faster, the music getting faster and losing key as if its player was steadily going insane, getting to be almost unbearable. He ground his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut, whimpering to himself as though it would drown it out.
It didn't. The repeated clattering of bird puppets reaching the ends of their strings was, more and more close together until it sounded like fifty were dropping at once with a noise like one solid wood-carved construct hitting the ground from a cliff.
He cringed.
Once the sound faded, the music had resumed its tempo, but it sounded different somehow. Not piano, but metallic, like a music box. His ascent was slowing as well. Again, he looked up. The face of a clock tower wasn't too far off.
It felt like he'd reached it in the next second, looking outside it like a window.
It was night outside. A moonlit night. He could see a single oak tree off in the distance, not thinking of trying to calculate how far off, not even noticing its surroundings. Just the oak tree, pulling his focus into it and only into it, yet expanding it at the same time. He suddenly visualized it right in front of him, feeling the wind instead of the pull of the strings, closer and closer, drawing him in. It was slightly radiating, most curiously, with a pale green glow, he realized.
Or was it? Just like that he was pulled past the window and snapping into reality so hard he could almost hear it in his head. To the way out, he hoped - he had to check that tree - no, no, not the tree, this tower, where was it, what was going on, where were these strings coming from?
...No, the tree. Something about it - it was important. It was practically calling him over, and, well, he couldn't keep it waiting. He couldn't even try to guess why, but he supposed he'd have to find out, and the sooner, the better.
There was a sharp swooping noise somewhere above him. Shhhing.
Before he could process it, the window had shot back above him, the oak tree snapping out of view.
His insides were rushing into his throat, a blast of air was freezing him and stinging his eyes.
He realized that his strings were broken. No, they'd been cut, that was the noise, and he was freefalling fast down the clock tower.
He could move and get his breath now.
He was free to claw at the walls and scream his lungs out on his quick way down god knew how far to the candlelit room, tiers of the wall and the tower's clock tower rushing past in a blur from their own speed and his watering eyes. And he was about to.
Then he realized he was holding something. A sheet of paper and quill from the stand on the piano.
No time to think what they were for or what good they'd be, just that they were all he had. There had to be something on them - some kind of spell, even, to slow his fall, or reassurance, anything. He twisted himself around in midair, trying to get them in front of his face, quickly, to see if they were good for anything...
They were torn out of his hands by the rushing air, scattering like leaves above him, their own fall graceful and leisurely.
And that was all he'd had.
He didn't know how long he'd been falling or how far. All he knew was how fast the strings had had to pull him to get him to the top. He was falling from the top of a clock tower to a hard wooden floor.
He used the freedom that the cutting of the strings had finally gotten him after all before blacking out.