His spell hits her, settling onto her mind as an odd disorientation that shifts whenever she tries to compensate for it, making it harder to concentrate long enough to do anything very complicated.

Raafi may notice that all his hair is standing up.

Cameron swerves drunkenly and completely fails to dodge Raafi's followup. The blow sends her tumbling into the underbrush like a rag-doll.

Simultaneously...

The sky is dark. Very dark. Dark grey thunderclouds have formed in moments, blotting out the sun. Lightning arcs down charring a circle into the ground around Raafi, forming an instantaneous cage of plasma that lasts just long enough for the massive pillar of water with a dragon's head to spear down from on high.

Raafi may not have the reflexes of someone who got to fifteenth tier by fighting, but he's been in enough fights to get the idea that when a high-tier caster is trying to pin you in place, it's not wise to stay there. He attempts to dodge through the plasma, toward Fouquet.

Blind from the flash, deaf from the thunder, several hundred tons of water falling directly on Raafi's head still probably would've done less damage than leaping through a barrier of literal lightning bolts. Especially when the caster is no longer in a condition to control those lightning bolts and keep them deliberately non-lethal.

Ow ow ow ow ow. He definitely owes his life to the Stone Body spell, thank you Everia.

The water's only a mild inconvenience to him, after the initial battering; he's more worried about Scyelen, perhaps too disoriented to get keep her head above it, and he doesn't especially want Fouquet to die, either.

He casts healing, and - can he see either of them?

Fortunately, the shack was built on convex ground, and the falling water dragon consumed the entire storm-cloud, leaving them in dappled sunlight once more. An entire cloud's worth of water is enough to knock them all off their feet and send them all washing out a fair ways, but it's not enough to submerge them, as the water drains away into the surrounding forest.

Scyelen is waaaaay over there, past the cabin, clinging to a tree root and glaring in their general direction.

Cameron is not visually evident, but there are some gross and disturbing sounds coming from this set of soggy bushes over here.

He'll take annoyed, as long as she's safe.

He heads for the sounds, casting Dispel Water to dry the area out before he parts the bushes to look behind them.

Laying on the ground in a pool of blood is a grotesque mass of twitching, twisted limbs and bleeding, cancerous growths. She writhes, hissing in agony as, with a cry of anguished frustration, she uses her magic to slice off the swollen sack of bone and flesh that used to be her arm, a frothing pinkish water forming a new arm from the stump.

It doesn't have cancerous growths but it materializes badly deformed.

She screams in frustration and agony and switches to one of her legs, severing the mass of twisted growth before generating a new limb.

Her mind isn't merely impaired, it keeps actively twisting, making her do the wrong thing, but she is getting better at compensating for it with every attempt, and what else can she do, not try to heal herself? She's not going to stop just because her failed attempts have her suffering torturous amounts of pain; she can't risk replacing her ruined torso until she can get a limb to come out right.

She is already surrounded by a half-dozen grisly left-overs of previous attempts, a pile of carnage that quickly grows as blood spurts out of her almost as fast as she can conjure/transmute it.

...it is really nice that he physically can't be nauseated right now.

He heals her, first; it won't do anything about the missing limbs or - most of that - but it'll take care of the blood and pain, at least.

Then he casts again, and - well, he's never gotten a very coherent description of what it's like, being reduced to animal intelligence, but it'll let him keep her contained while he figures out what else to do.

The deformed ruin of Cameron's body falls limp, still and quiet.

While he's doing that, footsteps on wet earth approach him from behind, as Scyelen, still naked, makes her way over to them.

"C-Cameron..." she croaks, horrified.

"Yeah." He sounds tired, all the fight gone out of him. "I'll heal her up in the morning, there's not much more I can do right now."

Not much more he can do? As if he hasn't done enough?!

In a soft, but absolutely furious hiss: "Dispel."

Raafi's magic dies, ripped apart at its most fundamental level. His spells and combat enchantments are stripped away in an instant. His magic items also die, failing utterly and leaving only their mundane shells. It rips at Raafi's soul, and for a moment his runes flicker out, burning like when he first got them, like something is trying to tear the runes out of him. He loses his grip on the power, but the runes remain, resisting the pull.

While he's reeling from all that, Scyelen hits him over the head with a rock.

He falls, not unconscious, but in quite a lot of pain. The words of a teleportation come to him on reflex: he's barely aware enough of his surroundings to recognize that he might have fallen on Fouquet; not enough to be sure, or to hedge her out of the spell as it completes.

Raafi vanishes; it's startling, and she's suddenly worried. She regretted it the moment she heard the crack of rock against skull, she... he didn't... he meant well. Raafi always meant well. But he was.... she has more important and more urgent things to worry about than her frustrating familiar.

She casts another Dispel, this one carefully aimed. She has to destroy Raafi's curses, and only Raafi's curses, leaving the native magic woven into Cameron's flesh intact. Cameron explained it to her, how that aspect of her immortality worked. Scyelen is exceedingly careful.

Cameron's mind flares back into existence. It's shaky; she did a lot of damage to herself in her flailing.

But this time, when she tries to fix herself, it doesn't go wrong.

She sheds the overwhelming majority of her existing body-mass, discarding it as beyond repair. Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, a perfectly healthy, pristine Cameron emerges from the carnage and gore.

She absently raises the earth so she's not sitting in blood, and then rinses herself off with a little conjured water.

"That sucked."

Scyelen, weeping, throws herself into Cameron's arms and sobs into her bare chest. "I thought... I thought he killed you. I never thought... why would he... I'm sorry!"

Cameron pets her soothingly.

"No. He wasn't trying to kill me. Neither of us could have predicted... this." She shrugs at the carnage. "He thought I'd kidnapped you, as he was meant to think. He was the one who chose not to question that assumption once he found you. He was the one who assumed he knew what you wanted, so wrongly as to drive you to violence. I'd hoped maybe I could shock him into respecting you, at least, but that failed completely. I'm sorry you two ended up hurting each other, Scyelen. But I'm proud of you."

Pet pet pet.

"That said, let's see if we can't find you a middle ground between defensive Submission and inflicting head-trauma, hm?"

Watery giggle.

"Thank you, Cameron."

Scyelen clings to her, for a good while longer, until well after it is very, very clear that Raafi isn't coming back.

Raafi spends a while on the bare floor of his room at the academy, collecting himself, thinking about what to do next.

He'd gone in wanting to give Scyelen the choice, stay with Fouquet or come back to the school or do something else. And - well - in the end he succeeded, even if not the way he'd meant to. She made her decision. He's done. He's done here. He can go.

He does, eventually, when he feels like he can stand without listing. Back to the clearing near the palace, first, teleporting again, and then onto the open road. It's harder, much harder, with his storage destroyed, but he's got the path under his feet and the sky over his head and Fharlanghn, and that's all he's ever needed, really.

He checks in with Siesta after a month, after two, after three, asking if she's all right, asking if she wants to join him or go back to her family. Sends a message to Tabitha, just once, saying that he's not coming back.

He doesn't go back. He has a whole new world to explore, after all.