2024-04-24: Flee From What You Do Not See
- Log: Flee From What You Do Not See
- Cast: Loren Voss, Isiris Shango'Ra
- Where: Bledavik - Noble Quarter
- Date: April 24, 2024
- Summary: After the events in Energy Nede, Loren has an unexpected visitor. Things quickly take a turn from there.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
In the end, it's a surprise they didn't hold him longer. Or at least, that's the way Loren feels about it, flat atop his bunk in his quarters in Bledavik. Runeberry the cloudbear is asleep (or at least he assumes that Runeberry sleeps) somewhere at his feet but Loren, despite his attempts to do similarly in the course of one of his last days off from his duties, has found sleep elusive to him.
At another time, he might have thought to get up and wander the halls, or dig through studies on his tablet, or disassemble and reassemble one of the model kits on the shelf. Or do something, anything, other than lie here and fail at getting any sleep.
But the tablet's not close at hand, and moving would disturb Runeberry, and really...
...he doesn't feel like doing anything.
His gaze remains fixed where it feels like it has been for ages. The soft light of the lamp on the side table is the only thing that serves to cast differentiating shadow within the confines of his quarters. Without it, the room would be pitch-black: there is no light save the subtle illumination coming through the cracks under the doors in this part of the installation underground in Bledavik.
Some of the stories say these used to be storage for the rulers of Bledavik, before Solaris had hollowed them out and inserted their own infrastructure. Others said it was a part of the canals. Someone else had thought it must have been the catacombs -- for the city or for the rulers, they hadn't been sure.
Loren hopes this isn't the case. Even if there's not even a scrap of bone remaining, their spirits would probably be angry.
It's an unorthodox thought for someone from Solaris, but he's been full of unorthodox thoughts for years now.
There's certainly no escape from them now.
He'll really kill you!
...They were just kids. And he would have killed them. And it's not as if he can say he wasn't in control.
And... ...no one made him do that. No one made him take that. He decided that, on his own--
Closing his eyes tight, he rolls over onto his side and wraps his arms around his head as if he could drown out the sound of his own thoughts. Runeberry squalls in protest over getting jostled and he can feel the cloudbear's sulky departure. Curled up on his side, Loren doesn't move.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
It begins as the sound of a razor run along a filthy, dripping wet string.
The sound isn't loud, and farbeit to be disruptive enough that it would cause much of an alarm once noticed. Maybe a ventilation system failure, owing to the still air and cramped sensation of the too-small room. But the sound is there, plain as the harsh day to hear. A tight, reverberating sound that would almost be pleasant, were it not so clearly distorted with grime from the world that has always existed below.
In times like this, even light can be an annoyance, the electric light's small circuit vagaries causing it to lick against the gunmetal grey walls. Most lights in Solaris were not so soft -- clean, pure electric Ether light had a higher color temperature, closer to a plasma flame than a campfire. But filters compensate, where some researcher or another concluded that eyestrain in the pilots caused some percentage higher of lethal and ignoble crashing incidents. So there is such a thing as 'soft' in Solaris, when the alternative is disgrace.
That curated light dances off the bolts holding the ancient metal together worn with corrosion, thick unkept drools of dingy moss green running down from the iron fasteners like tears from an old metal eye. The unclean surface is thick with the corrosion if studied, flecked with small flakes of mint white where water with slightly lower pH had built up.
The razor drags for what seems like forever. That sound really is grating.
It's hard to imagine a place like this, a place looked after by the technical teams in Gebler, to be so out of repair so as to have basic fasteners almost rotten with rust, threatening to reveal what lays underneath. Perhaps it could be something to do with the history of the facility. The prior owners. Perhaps it was the prior occupant here whose fingernail marks drag in the corrosion, scraping off the corruption bit by bloody bit. It would be easy to think him a prisoner, some criminal or capital murderer, locked in a cell that is growing increasingly tight by the moment. But the work is insistent, and though ultimately ineffectual, done with care. There is a shape, etched out in the rust.
A cartoonish, mad little smile, that spreads a few inches too wide, and can be seen even when you close your eyes. Because it is infinitely easier to see when everything is pitch black.
And why shouldn't they have been killed...
The sound of labored breath from the soldier at his boots, crimson slick coating the curved razor edge of his saber. His boots resound over the floors as he stalks the once-imperial halls, the transit of the harsh light over the mirror gleam of steel being the lantern that lights his way. The crisp swish of a grey coat in the hall. Creatures, beings -- perhaps human, once -- who accept his grace, those poor souls whom look him in his eyes.
That inviting, abominable blue glow staining his cheeks pale.
'Were they not the most innocent of us,' he asks wordlessly. The sound sinks deep into the back of the skull like a dagger slipping through bone and hitting meat. Indulging in the sensation, the spread of a dark glove pressing into the walls as he passes. As he passes, they shiver and rot with the kiss of Ether. Rotting eyes, aching to pour out of stone, out of steel, just beneath the surface. That sound is everywhere, now.
Is that not the glorious charge of the great nation in heaven...
He looks up.
...to show mercy to the lost?
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Something is broken, probably in the ventilation system. Maybe that's why he can't sleep, though he knows better. Even if he were to stifle the sound somehow, it wouldn't change a thing. Instead, it's just one more thing -- one more thing sawing away at his unquiet mind.
Back home, the lighting is largely all or nothing, brilliant illumination or pitch darkness. The exception comes only for a spare few applications. Someone had indeed done a statistical analysis at one point about the efficiency loss induced by eyestrain among not only pilots but even researchers: the time they spent recovering was time wasted. So of course, 'softer' illumination became standardized for researchers as much as it made its way into use by pilots and soldiers.
This illumination that licks against the wall in a way that reminds Loren, slightly, of a candle's flame, makes him think of his father. It's the sort of light his father would be using -- perhaps -- even now. What time is it back in Etrenank? Is his father asleep?
Is he even back at home, or is he spending another night at the facility? Is Mirza still the only one darkening the halls of their home?
He wants to go home.
He knows why he can't go home.
He must be imagining it, all the scratches and scrapes that only grow in intensity. He must be imagining the falling flakes of rust from the wall. He must be imagining that scratched out shape of a maddened smile along the wall,
The same way he's imagining the voices in his head.
And the figure that, in the darkness of his skull, he knows is standing at the case of his bed.
Loren doesn't move. He certainly doesn't open his eyes. The only change is in how his breath grows ever more shallow. If he stays still, perhaps he can convince himself that this, too, is also only a product of his own mind.
But even this can't hold. Loren tenses as the figure doesn't speak, the outline of his words, instead, carrying ahead that message. No, this isn't his own secret madness. In the darkness of his mind he can see what is unspooling without.
It's all the more reason not to look. ...Leah had said that his Ether was uncontaminated.
It must have been wrong.
They were children! I wasn't --I'm not a monster, rises his own thought in protest.
But even that is followed from within: ...Am I?
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Let me ease your troubled thoughts. 'Is this possible,' 'perhaps if I keep my eyes closed,' 'but I am uncontaminated,' 'they were children,' 'am I a monster...'
The sound of his gloves traversing the cold metal is almost a cover for that discordant, razored sound, thick against the wire, and agonizing peeling back the skin of swarf with its sharp gleam. Curls of grime flake off to the ground, only to be crushed by a boot underfoot as he steps towards an agent who sorely wishes they were anyone else.
You know the answers to all of these questions.
The poison is swallowed in deep, greedy gulps, the dry walls filled and rippling with merciless, incessant, oasitic life. For each breath that boy takes, the walls just past his eyelids take half, a slow, reverberating breath, the world tilting slightly as it breathes in deep. The sursurrus sound of his gloves ends as he reaches the boy's quarters, ending the tiny mercy of that sound's buttress against the razored sonata. That sound is omnipresent, like the tilt in the air, the claustrophobic sense of a sky that has been caught in a spider's web.
'Yesterday has already passed us by, and what we did, what we can do, never mattered. Just because the belly of a beast is empty, does not make it any less of a beast. But...'
And yet, he smiles so gently. Never a kinder soul in all the world.
'....Animalism is the inevitable nature of a cruel world..'
The thick gulp of black water flows just behind the steel, rendering it slick and wet like an animal's throat. The seam splits right along the edge of that smile scratched into the rust, tears weeping into the seam, salt and water giving evidence of what happened a hundred, a thousand years ago. The sound of a thick, rheumy split, the little crack of flesh and lash to show the slick pool of a bloodshot sclera, just outside of the soldier's perception. Wet, insatiably alluring sound pours against the senses as that prodigious eye rolls in a socket that isn't, eyelids of iron fluttering until the white fixes in space, a cold blue iris sliding into view, broken in revelation. A single blink clears the ancient rust from the cracks.
'Mercy is the ultimate civility. Is civility not what that poor, lost city's people yearned to bring to the savage world beyond?'
A moment ago, that boy's arms were wrapped around his head. Where are they now? It wouldn't be hard to imagine -- to feel the eclipse creep of leather through blonde strands, the soothing touch of fingertips weaving all the way up his forehead. The splinter of the boy's hair in his grip, the spread of that man's touch through his scalp, planting that leather sussurrus deep into every sense he's ever had.
'and...'
There is a ring to his tone, the darkest lilt of obscene hope spreading wide permissively as the world breathes in pained labor around him. He can feel the blood dripping from that man's blade. It is softer, now that it is closer.
'What is mercy? All you have to do is open your eyes.'
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He needs to get out of here and get help. He needs to find Leah and tell her--
...What, precisely? That the same thing she'll kill Lan to prevent harm to the world is present within him? That she should unleash her judgement upon him as well? No, even if he could escape the abyss his room is assembling, he can't tell her a thing about this.
He can't tell her she was wrong. He's never been able to tell her that she's wrong.
He doesn't move. Not as it seems a bitter sea begins to rise and the tang of corroded metal invades his nostrils. All he wants is for someone, anyone, to give him a better answer to all of this. But it is a mercy that cannot be delivered. In his heart of hearts, he knows that as much as he knows the answers to the questions he poses to the universe within and without.
But all that answers him is the drowning glug of water and the assurance of the blade's edge. If he had his eyes open, he couldn't have seen the impossible tableau any more clearly. ...This can't be real. This has to be a product of his mind.
But this is real. He knows it, as surely as he knows the answers to his heart's questions.
Regret is futile. And...
'Homo homini lupus'. 'Man is a wolf to man.' This is the nature of the world, and, there was never any difference at all between Solaris and the people of the surface, and, to be human is to be just another animal, and...
The beast's belly is empty and he's still hungry. Hadn't he liked it? He had liked it, hadn't he! To have people cower before him instead of treating him as a joke -- as someone to brush aside! To be someone, to succeed!
They were children, a part of his mind persists as he feels the pressure of that eye's piercing blue gaze upon him. There's nowhere he can hide. It's like the eye of God. They were children and I would have killed them if I could have.
Is this not civility? Is this not how mercy is bestowed?
"Not like this--"
His lips move at last, too late.
Where are his arms? His hands? Are they still wrapped around his head in a desperate attempt to quiet what cannot be silenced? It feels like they're not there at all. Instead, it seems to him like another's hand has invaded his senses, sweeping a gloved hand across his scalp. Loren shudders. The sensation is too much. He tries to recoil and twist away. He can do neither.
But he can smell blood. Grimacing, he tries to at least turn his head.
There is nowhere to go. Even that much is banned.
Here at last, afraid of what he might see and make real when he does so, Loren slowly opens his eyes.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
They were children.
They do not deserve the fate that befalls them. They are deserving of more. They are deserving ... of you.
The audible creak of wet leather is easily conflated with something vastly more organic in the dark. The sound of flesh moving is infectious, and in motion, the liquid sound of sclera rolling in its soaking orbit, the shiver of individual striations in the iris broken like mirror glass, of small muscles tightening.
It's easy to conflate the bite of leather in the scalp as something broad, thick, muscular. Powerful, constricting, viperine lethal. An intent pulse, inimitably dangerous, in the primal way that all men are trained to hear. A reptilian hunger, vast and alien. A gaping mouth of dark, opened wide, with fangs slowly unfurling...
They are yours.
Opening eyes like this is hard. There is not a droplet of light in the tilted world, at least none that does not craze off of the ground in artificial candling streaks. As that great eye slides open, tears well to behold the tiny room, shot through with slices of open air. Like strings pulled to their limit, everything stretches harshly on a miserable chord, bleaching the room away with every heartbeat. Beyond it, a blasted, torn landscape, littered with wreckage and ruined machines.
A vast graveyard, where the sky is still grey and purple from the smoke, where the air still tastes of oil and blood. That harsh brightness is like looking into a dawn that was never meant for men. And yet he smiles so gently.
"We cannot change a world that is abandoned and damned. We can only help it along, and bring peace to those who are forced to live in it. This world is living a meagre existence, not understanding why you are suffering. Suffering without meaning, starving without purpose.... is that not a true worse, than every loving cruelty rendered by reasoned hands?" He stands there, perhaps ten paces away, turned away. A Solarian saber run red in one gloved hand, the other buried into his face, covering the obscene blue glow.
If so.... why do you suffer without meaning?
...when you know the truth||||| |||| |||| ||
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
This isn't happening, repeats the thought like a desperate litany. This is an illusion -- an imagining. He's safely tucked away in the bowels of a Solarian stronghold in the depths of a palace in the heart of Aveh. This isn't happening because it can't be happening--
But he knows that this, too, is a lie he's telling himself. And though a lie can be a powerful thing indeed, it becomes as tatters before the full might of reality. However he might try to hide away in the dark corners, wherever he goes, there the light finds him.
He can no more look away than he can slip the hand that grasps him now. Held by the same biting grasp that seems to have been born from the depths of his own heart, Loren opens his eyes to find darkness.
If what could be termed a howling void could be called darkness. His eyes burn and he gags on the stench of it -- but isn't this the scent of the battlefield? Of what's left when the fighting's done and there's nothing left but to scrape a few broken soldiers off rock and sand?
He's not alone here. He'd already know that, and yet, his heart still skips a beat at the sight of him.
She was wrong, she was wrong, she was wrong ...!
Or, perhaps, Leah Sadalbari had not quite been completely honest with him in the first place.
Still, she'd been the one who had told him that it wasn't all in vain. That it was possible to save the world. "Are you saying there's no way in which-- but she told me how!" Loren belts out. His body, can he move his body? His attention has already turned to that red blade in the man's hand.
Yes, she'd told him. She'd told him a fairy tale and he'd latched onto it because it was better than the alternative. He's still jumping to turn his hand to every task and assignment and mission she gives him because he wants to think that she,
that someone,
knows the reason why--
There is no difference between the people of the surface and Solaris. All the First Class represents is centuries of careful breeding for Ether manipulation, all to serve the aims of their enigmatic masters.
--She'd promised a paradise--
The road towards it is paved in bone.
Yes, she'd told him how.
"There... is a meaning," he echoes, almost as if he could believe in it if he said it loudly enough, long enough. "There is a reason--"
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"Shhh."
A droplet of soothing sound, amidst the ever-grating cicada buzz, the tilted world merciless with every sense beyond that. It imperceptibly lowers, leather to lips, quelling the itinerant mind.
As if he is far closer than he should be, and yet so far away he should not be heard at all.
The insensible power of true ideal is omnipresent, detectible not as itself but as an otherworldly 'everywhere' into which the senses are intractibly steeped. The war-blasted landscape that lays serpentine grip over the mind has the sensation of 'after' to it, after everything had inevitably gone wrong, and before the pieces left could be picked again, wildflowers in a field of ragweed.
His boots are loud, even in the howling, baling wind that shrieks somewhere high in the sky. The sound rolls against the wardrums even at the level of earth before heaven.
The man's blade drips as he approaches, leaving a trail of spattered melee from the passage of the tip, leaving shadows in his wake. "There is a meaning," he confirms.
"But the world in which it mattered has passed us by."
The boy grapples with that memory, with the memory of the one that promises, that promised him meaning or a swift death. The contours of that memory are traced by leather, the man in grey's fingertips evoking her silhouette plainly in his passage.
The one who existed after, she who leaves no footsteps in the mud.
"Paradise was another bygone age. Lost beyond a gossamer curtain."
The power twists, tightens, stretches as he draws near. The paint of his obscene eyes are nipping just at your shoulder. When did he overtake you? From whence? The saber hovers at your side, as he leans in, insatiably close.
- But you can still help them taste it. You can still bring them. -
The elder of the two smiles kindly.
"There was a meaning. Then we died."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
This isn't happening.
It's less than a whisper on the wind, far less than the voice that speaks to him now. Little more than pitiful dying gasp, it's there and gone, there and faded away, the last bastion of his defenses sheered away and leaving Loren mercilessly exposed.
But then...
...he hasn't seen anything like 'mercy' handed down in quite some time, has he? Not in a way that changed anything. Not in a way that matters. The world is broken--
That was a familiar refrain, repeated once upon a time. The world was broken, and the Shepherds of Solaris were the only ones who could fix it. Except, there is no difference between the people who walk the surface and those who watch from above. He'd realized that a long time ago, in truth, and he'd been lying, pretending that it was otherwise ever since.
Leah had made him look at it. He'd been forced to realize it -- that there was no meaning or purpose behind anything he's endured. That there's no higher order or purpose at play. And then, she'd offered the balm, the way by which everything could still be set to rights.
He feels like he's going to choke on it. The smoke, the stench of metal, yes. But also, what Leah had offered to him.
Can he move? It doesn't feel as if his body is his own. He stands here, impossibly, in the middle of a warzone's aftermath, and it feels like all he can do is watch the man's slow approach. Ether itches at the back of his skull, nearly begging to be used, and yet, he knows it wouldn't do a thing except drag out the inevitable. Without the drug, he's nothing.
Leah had promised him a paradise. Even then, he'd known it was a lie. What is gone is gone. The dead remain dead.
(Right?) (And yet.)
(He's seen what has died walk again.)
But the man is close to him now, and such musings can only scatter in the wind.
"Then-- what's the point of it?" Loren whispers, looking and not looking at the man and his blade. There had been a meaning once, and then he'd died.
"What are you-- what am I doing... now?"
His head feels like it's full of wasps. He feels like he wants to scream, or cry out, or... something. Anything but this, as he feels himself die inside.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"--the reality that has so plainly betrayed you.."
Each fragment happens in a heartbeat, endlessly shuffling together his words with Loren's own. Hearing the traveller's words are like hearing a painfully familiar echo, a coda that has been seen before, a page that has been turned before. To stand this close to him, to feel the lick of cold cerulean along your shoulder is to become plainly aware of a vibration that has existed since ancient times, a troubling frequency just beyond the range of all but the most abstract and ambitious.
That frequency is somewhere between the flutter of a dying heart in fibrillation and the flutter of eyelashes of a young maiden courted.
-- paradise is something that has long since left us behind --
His silhouette paints the ground dark and ink-black ahead of him, the dirt itself livid and rotted with silicon trails and infested by circuit wire. Even now, that silhouette is in half eclipse with Loren's own body. At first, moving will feel like trying to lift the hammer of God. But movement can occur -- in staccato starts and stops, between thoughts, between the harsh little notions.
-- but it is still there. --
"Why shouldn't you be the one?" that silken dark asks succinctly, the dusky skin of the killer in grey not twisting at all with the ambition of his insinuations. "Why shouldn't you be given the opportunity ... by any noble means?"
-- to be a savior --
Loren can feel the weight of it. The sword in his hand, dripping dark crimson, whose blade flickers and shifts, unwieldy and wandering in mad hunger. And when the man in grey appears before Loren, his hands are empty and at his sides. Those eyes, inviting and obscene, with every gravity passively pulling the gaze towards an abominable crystalline fate. Dangerous, as ever.
"I am going to give you a gift," he tells him. "The power of 'mercy.' All you have to do ..."
-- is reach out and take it
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Everything runs together, a moment that clips into the next and the next like the pages of a book flipped past too fast to know the contents of each and every page.
And yet, he still knows their contents as surely as he knows what lies on his own heart. Involuntarily, Loren shudders.
Paradise is dead. Reality is but a traitor. And here he is, standing alone, with no one in his corner.
Why shouldn't he be the one?
Why should I be the one?
He'd hoped to, once. He'd wanted to! But all dreams of heroism were dashed out of him years ago. His brother was the heroic one: his journal proves it. Lan had been right about him, on the other hand: he's just a coward. He's too afraid to take up one position fully or the other. He can't cast away what he ought to and take a side.
Instead, he's going to end up bowed under the weight of it until he can't help but make a choice. Isn't that the reason why he's using the Drive?
He can't even stand tall under his own strength.
Here in this anti-world, he sags under the stress of it, his knees buckling. And even so, even as he approaches and stands far, far too close to his side, he doesn't run. He barely even turns his head to meet those eyes.
To be a savior, like he'd wanted to, once upon a time! Wouldn't that be nice.
"Why... should it be me? What have I done...?"
Why is he the one who's still alive? Why is it him, and not his brother-- why can't it be someone who can make the right decisions?
He swallows, hard, and speaks to the shade that stands before him the thing he's kept hidden in his heart all these years. "All I wanted was to... all I wanted was to be good," he says, and when he breathes out it feels like he could scarcely take a breath again. "I tried to do the right thing! I really did!"
But--
It wasn't, was it?
His gaze might as well be fixed on an impossible point a million miles past the Stranger. He'd tried. He'd played it safe. He'd been smart about it, he'd picked his battles, he'd thought.
But what has acting rationally gotten him? What has playing by the rules gotten him? All he's ended up with is this impossible situation. If he can't shirk the lead that binds him, if there's really no way out...
...Then why not?
Then what does he have to lose?
"I really... did try..."
This is a bad idea. He knows this as acutely as he knows the contents of his heart, but it seems like all he's faced with lately is bad and worse ideas.
"So this... is your idea of mercy..."
Loren closes his eyes, hesitating that one last second more on the threshold before he takes that last step.
"...Alright."
Opening his eyes, he reaches out his hand to take it.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Mercy is not what the choristers sing of.
The silhouette of the man in grey is hard to pick details out of, beyond the diffuse glow of his eyes reflecting off of his face, the mad power in his cool, calm expression. But the notion -- that mercy is not what they say it is -- is distilled in every feature.
How can it be, when everything that was kind is long dead? The logic twists into a circle until it lifts and tilts the entirety of the land into an unbalanced, unmoored stage, a stage upon which it is almost impossible to tread, a stage on which only he seems comfortable.
"The preconception of 'righteousness' is a fable written by the subjective hand of creatures who have never known compassion."
And who are we to make a moralistic judgment based off of failed impression alone? To prostrate yourself before nobility is to know you are powerless to determine what is right and what is wrong. That you are only a creature in service of an incomprehensible Greater.
That Greater is a song, howling across the world, an ancient, wordless, underwater lullaby, distantly heard the further the world tilts, heard just on the edge of salient comprehension with each step the medic takes closer to the agent. A leather glove opens as he approaches, displaying an icy white mote of a crystal, reflecting some mad course in its facets, the depths of which extend far past the rational boundaries of the jewel.
"I have kept this, all of this time."
An old, secret power, hidden deep. As Loren reaches for it, he can feel the black threads of madness worm their way into his veins. Black thoughts and knowledge that turn the veins grey with polished despair. It is different from the trite malaise of the mundane world. To know of the world that passed us by --
And she, who sleeps --
-- is a perspective that makes a brother's fate seem pleasant when compared to being an afterthought...
By the time reality reasserts itself, it's in the steel plunge of the blade deep into the man in grey's belly, the slender man doubling over the stroke. The hilt in Loren's hand, and with it, the secret of Solaris that only Isiris Shango knows now, as the stranger burns.
As the agent invites him to do worse.
The flames split, and spread along shear lines, like tiles of a puzzlebox falling out of alignment. Then they shift again, splitting anew. Over and over again, does that nightmare future shift and scramble out of place, the gravity of truth slowly giving way to reasonlessness as what is 'real' reasserts itself and leaves that medic knowing far more than he did when he first turned the lights low.
"Trust in me. I will be there to witness your glory."
Loren has never left his bed.
But he has been thrown over a cliff all the same.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
What is mercy?
Is it a kindness to extend a hand to those who needed help? Or, does that only extend the duration of their suffering? Like so many things in his life, Loren once thought he knew the correct answer. But now his mind grows weary at the idea of even attempting to sift the correct answer from the dross. Everything is wrong, and he scarcely has the energy to lift a hand to attempt to challenge it.
That's right. He's a coward. He's a failure. He's nothing compared to who his brother would have become. Someone else deserves the right to be the 'hero' more than he ever will.
And yet, his heart is not so dead that there's not the smallest piece of treacherous hope remaining in his breast. He still wants--
if this could all somehow be worthwhile, even in spite of everything--
if he could just make it right--
He can finally move. He can take each and every one of those heavy plodding steps towards the Stranger's figure. It feels as if he is trying to walk through a storm, as if the entire world is fighting against him every step of the way.
But he crosses the distance in spite of everything that seeks to stay him, and he reaches like a man possessed for what lies in the palm of that leather glove.
...Didn't Leah herself say that this same power was something that she would kill Lan over, if that's what it came to? But Leah has said so very many things, and while none of them are wholly lies, he thinks, her interests remain something else.
...Hadn't Lan expressed her fears to him about this power, not even all that long ago? But they are not the same: but she keeps trying to steer him onto a path he knows he cannot tread.
And in any case, he scarce has the will to draw back his hand anymore.
It's cold in his hand, this jewel that has no substance.
In his hand it burns and he cannot drop it.
In his hand there rests the reassuring weight of that blade. Slowly his blue eyes widen as he takes in the figure doubled over the sword he now wields. Ah.
He ought to feel disgusted, some part of him realizes. He ought to be horrified. Instead, calm blooms from within his chest, the first real calm he has known in quite some time. In his ears, there is a song as the world comes to pieces.
He never moved an inch from where he lies coiled in his bed. Yet, as he turns his gaze up towards the familiar ceiling of his quarters, he knows how far he's fallen.