A good night's sleep came infrequently for the barrister of late. Recollections, old and new, real and imagined, dreamt and haunting, invaded his slumber, just as it did his waking thoughts. It was a struggle to try and not drown in them.

Nevertheless amid the maelstrom of memories and thoughts, she was his beacon, his mainstay and he held onto the Priestess and found some measure of control and focus. And this night, he found a rare and restful slumber at the Manor, beside Alysia. For a little while at least.

"Lucky! Wake up! We need to talk.. NOW!"

Kitty's voice smashed through the dark serenity and jolted him out of bed, even before he was fully awake. Her voice reaching into his mind unnerved him more than being startled awake and it took a moment for Lucien to just gather his bearings.

Another moment passed before he realized the frantic pounding that echoed against his temple and matched his racing heart was at the door and not just in his head. Still wresting himself from the foggy grip of sleep he stumbled into his jeans and blindly headed for the door.

"Okay okay!" he groused barely audibly with a gravely voice as he opened the front door. The barrister blinked once, then blinked again, in part still trying to wake and in part, his mind trying to catch up and make sense of seeing Kitty at the door.

A frown then creased his brow as realization dawned on him. "Kitty! What's wrong?"

While the moredhel's insistence hadn't been enough to fully rouse Alysia from the tangles of sleep, Lucien's startled rush downstairs had been.

"Wha-" she mumbled to an empty and suddenly cold room. Through that moment of drowsy incoherence, she sensed Kitty's empathic presence, a frantic warning and hint of some confused danger which reached through the Manor's walls of stone. Her unconscious reaction had been to grab for a dagger upon the bedside table, and she realized that her fingertips were still wrapped around the hilt. The phoenix-rising-in-flame emblazoned upon the dagger was glowing red and smelled of hot metal.

Alysia came fully awake all of a sudden and let go of the dagger, scowling as she shivered into her clothes and padded silently downstairs.