"I... don't know," he replies, slowly, with a furrow emerging in his eyebrows.

"The work of a decade, much less a hundred years, and you have, what. A hundred people? Maybe? As the grand result of your efforts? That speaks of a level of incompetence that I don't believe you have, doesn't it. Or, more likely. You're trapped in a loop just like everyone else, and any attempts to spread 'paradise' are dragging more people into this hellhole."

"It's been much longer than a hundred years!" ...wait, that doesn't help his point at all. It has been much longer than a hundred years, hasn't it? So what has... he... been doing... for that time? "I—can't be trapped, too, I, I remember—"

What does he remember?

... She might have just done the exact thing she did with the guy who thought she was Denna. Except this time, she's trapped in a cell when everyone starts screaming and going crazy. She could eat her way out of this magical prison eventually, but who knows how long that would take.

"—Let me out," she interrupts, afraid. "Please. I don't think you're monsters, I think you're victims. I want to help but I can't if I'm trapped in here."

He's no longer paying attention to her, and seems to be muttering to himself more and more agitatedly. His echoing voice makes it impossible to understand the words he's saying, especially as he paces from side to side and loses focus halfway through every sentence.

At the same time, all of the other undead in the city... stop. Stop whatever they're doing, their conversations, their thoughts, their walking. They don't exactly freeze, but they stop, as if they've all been simultaneously interrupted by the same thing.

Avedra grimaces, from realizing the mess she's gotten herself into, and the novel sensation of genuine physical discomfort.

She's never really felt particularly besieged by the Black Mist or anything equivalent at any point. It's just kind of been a thing that's around, that she eats sometimes. It certainly might be bad for her in the long run, but in the immediate sense, it's fine. Now, it is distinctly not fine. There's a pressure, a projection, from this person in front of her that she poked just intelligently enough to send over the edge. His pain and confusion and attempts to find the missing pieces and the intense importance in his task. She understands very much why everyone stops. It's sort of like a wave, crashing into everyone around him and sweeping them up into his charisma. Except this is probably not actually the wave itself, is it, this is the tide retreating from the beach before the tsunami. She's seen how the victims here snap when they get pushed too far. It's pretty clear that's about to happen now.

Her projection of a body, her magical vanity project to remind herself and everyone else that even though she's an amulet she's a person, is dropped in favor of more practical concerns. If she's right, if everything is about to unravel because she couldn't resist tugging at the damn threads, then she needs to protect herself as much as possible. Be her own anchor in the coming storm. Her own voice echoes softly from no obvious source as she puts everything she has into shielding herself, quiet and almost beneath notice.

"...I am Avedra, amulet and half-spirit of protection. I was made to preserve myself, I will not let myself be broken again..."

"No, no, no," Thresh starts saying, more audibly and clearly. "I... he..."

Several things happen in quick succession, then.

First, Thresh returns to his previous form, and wails in a series of psychic waves, his reverberating voices interfering with each other in pulses loud enough to actually physically destabilise the buildings in the little settlement.

In response to that, every other undead starts screaming, too, compounding the effect. If her amulet were not thoroughly protected it would probably crack from the pressure.

And at the same time, storm clouds with green lightning thundering in them appear right above the town, and if Thresh's face can look terrified it's doing that right now.

She is really not in much state to make observations right now. It's rather more important that she put everything she has into staying whole. She will not break.

"I am Avedra, and I can't, I won't—mother died to save me, so I need to, I can't, I won't—"

Thresh recovers enough presence of mind to stop screaming and stagger to his skeleton horse and somehow convince it to let him ride off into the distance. But the magic and psychic event he's caused is still happening even in his absence, the other undead reflecting and amplifying it in all directions. The dead spirits lose coherence and the dead mortals fall to their hands and knees, unable to hold themselves up under the pressure they're helping create.

And just as Thresh's figure disappears in the foggy horizon, the clouds start shooting out green lightning, and at one spot where the ground is hit, a figure appears.

He's holding a large greatsword made of the same magic that feeds the Black Mist, and from a darkly pulsating triangle in his chest emerges a fog so dark and thick it's almost oily. It forms spirals around his body and his sword, and while he looks around it shoots out in the direction of the collapsing buildings and other structures, knocking falling debris away from falling on and crushing the screaming undead. One of the tendrils of darkness hits into the protective wall around Avedra's cell and shatters it like glass, at which point he immediately swivels around and looks directly at the Amethyst of Avedra.

Then he shakes his head, looks at the townspeople, and says, in a tone that brooks no argument: "I am your king and I demand silence."

The screams all immediately stop in response to that, and the leftover psychic waves crash harmlessly against the darkness surrounding him and dissolve into nothing.

One tiny voice does not fall silent.

"I am Avedra, and I will not be..."

She then notices that the barrage has stopped, and trails off. Oh. She did it. Yay. Now she can... do things other than that, she guesses.

".... so you'd be the husband, then?" says the little violet amulet in a sea of green mist.

After another second of making sure the undead are no longer on the verge of collapse, he turns back around to look at her. "So he was here, then," he says in a more normal voice. "...who are you and why are you here?"

"Avedra. Hi. Um. Here in particular because I got thrown in a cage, here on the islands because I'm an incorrigible dumbass who can't resist poking things to see if I can help."

"You are this far in, and yet you have not been corrupted." He looks around at the undead who are slowly coming back to their senses, then at her again. "...I cannot help them. But I believe we can help each other."

"Yeah you seem to be the sanest person I've met so far here so I'm up for teamwork as long as you're not doing something like 'conquer everything."'

"...no. No, I would not say I am."

He starts walking towards her to pick her up, dispelling his greatsword into mist as he does.

"Great! Don't do that. It's dumb, I told Thresh so too."

He is entirely free to pick up the pretty violet amulet. The pretty violet amulet notes that she's maybe lost her word filter somewhere and furthermore is probably rambling and giving a hell of a bad first impression.

"Mmhm," he says, with a teeny tiny movement to his lips that—might be a smile? "—do you, ah, have any companions that got misplaced, or is it just you?"

"No no, just me and my box, purposefully sailing to the Shadow Isles in a way that is in retrospect self-destructive but at least in a way that probably wouldn't bring other people down with me."

Oops too honest.

"Very well."

And they are hit by lightning.

The place they arrive at is in much better repair than the ramshackle town Thresh had been trying to build. It is, in fact, fairly recognisable to Avedra, if she's ever been to the capital, Helia.

They're in a garden, and while normally one would want to add caveats about how gardens are not typically made with (un)dead plants, this somehow actually works. The colours are dark greens and blues and purples and the occasional red, but it is artfully decorated nevertheless, a gloomy aesthetic that is enhanced rather than diminished by the fact that most of the plants are not alive. There is a pond, its waters dark and hard to see into, with the kind of occasional movement that suggests the existence of (probably undead) fish. In the middle of the pond is a tiny isle with a single dead tree planted on it, pulsating ruby veins decorating its trunk and faintly illuminating the surroundings. It's small, probably private, and a little emerald cobblestone walkway leads to the ruins of the palace.

And they are ruins, the walls are cracked and broken, vines crawl along the whole structure, various turrets are held up only by the Black Mist itself. Yet, it seems much more purposeful than the ruins she's seen so far. The village Thresh had been building was trying to carve out a semblance of normalcy out of the chaos; this place is harmonising with the chaos, using the dark magicks that haunt this place to enhance it rather than tear it down. She may observe that actually the roofs of the palace are mostly intact, and the bits that aren't intact seem to have been turned into localised art installations, with magically placed debris forming abstract floating sculptures and evil-looking vines linking them together into something cohesive.

If there is a way to draw out beauty and prosperity out of death and decay, this is it.

".... Oh. Oh, this is gorgeous," she sighs, entranced. Is she too easily distracted by pretty things? Yes, probably. "Yeah okay I would love to help make more of this."

"We tried to do the best we could," and there is something almost like a smile on his face; certainly in his voice. "—ah, do you have a means of independent motion? I do not mind carrying you but I would imagine you'd prefer having control over your movement."

"Oh. Yes, I do, it was just easier to keep only being jewelry after.... well, that."

The amulet floats out of his grasp, and, more slowly than usual, she reforms her body.

"Also I am an obligate manavore and while I have some control over it I don't have perfect control, so, uh. We should keep me away from anything nice and magical."