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[howtheyshine]

There's a break in the howling darkness. It's all he knows or needs to know. There's a break in his endless, roiling, bleak existence, a crack of light under a door that shouldn't exist, only exists because it's been forced.

There's a break in the darkness, and He leaps for it with abandon. Even oblivion would be better than the harrowing monotony of nightmares. He leaps, and plunges into cold and silence.

For a moment He doesn't know where he is, or maybe more accurately he is nowhere that should be. It's paralyzing, skewering, a death-beyond-death nothingness pain that lasts only for a breath--

--and then his consciousness careens into a field of firefly minds, bodies and beings, places to hide from what follows.

What follows?

He doesn't remember.

All he knows is that one of the fireflies is laced with starlight, and he streaks toward the beautiful shimmer of it without a second thought.

Comments

[howtheyshine]

Inhabiting the hodmedod is hard. It's not much more than cloth and materia with rigid internal structures covered in spells, which is fine, it's set up much like a short human would be, but possessing the thing and getting all the limbs to move in concert isn't as easy as everyone around him makes it look.

In the end Zerxus ends up carrying him part of the way back to the tower, balanced in his arms like a toddler as he turns the head this way and that to both get used to the motion and also take advantage of being able to turn the head himself and look at whatever he wants.

His voice is slightly muffled, like he's wearing cloth tied over his mouth. In a way he is. He squirms in the knight's arms with zero concern for dignity.

"Wait, why are we going back? Why are we going straight back? I want to explore."

[withintenfeet]

It's thrusting him back over a decade, but fortunately he's blinking in the midday sun anyway. Everything is so vivid.

He can't imagine how much that compounds with time, which is why he's doing his damndest to balance keeping his grip and maintaining the view. Maybe, if he just doesn't think about how easily he's fallen back into this sort of thing, about how rusty he isn't -

"I know, but you need practice and I need food." Warm and stern, one more habit he hasn't lost. (But then, being a city's knight isn't entirely different than being - ) "The city will still be there."

Besides, he's only avoided setting off arcane alarms because his friends are being extremely tolerant and helpful. Probably because they think he's having an emotional breakdown.

[howtheyshine]

Oh right, food. He forgets about that. Taste is a sensory input this body doesn't have, but he's too distracted by all the senses it does to be disappointed or jealous at the moment.

As evidenced by the fact that he's using the hodmedod's stubby hand to pat first Zerxus's cloth tunic and then any metal he's wearing, over and over and over again. He's focused enough on that to sound slightly distracted.

"When can we go out again?"

[withintenfeet]

Zerxus has to bite his tongue on "you're going to hurt yourself"; this isn't a human child's flesh, easily bruised and scraped. (Really, it's more like the youngest dragonborn kids at the Sorcerer's University, when he steps in to tutor those born with divine magic.)

"That depends. Do you ever get..." Would tired even sound like something vaguely familiar? "What does it feel like, possessing something like this?"

[howtheyshine]

He considers that, flexing the structures inside his cloth fingers so he can watch the hands move. "Strange. Difficult. It requires... focus. Delicacy."

He's pretty sure he couldn't manage to walk and touch things at the same time, not yet anyway.

"It..." What's the right word. "It aches a little."

He has no way to compare it to sore muscles or physical fatigue. 'Aches' is the closest he's got.

[withintenfeet]

It's certainly enough to get a thoughtful nod from Zerxus.

"This is only a guess, since we...inhabit our bodies very differently." One of his bigger understatements. "But that could mean you need to rest, until the soreness fades."

Now, whether that simply means remaining still as the hodmedod or retreating back into Zerxus, he really doesn't know.

[howtheyshine]

He growls.

"I don't need rest. I never have."

He will NOT take a nap!!!

[withintenfeet]

Uh-huh.

With a wry arch of his eyebrows, "You've never been a hodmedod, either."

[howtheyshine]

It's probably hard to take his glare seriously.

"I am still a god. Whatever form I take."

[withintenfeet]

Zerxus at least manages not to grin back. All those years of barely smiling, finally paying off!

"Yes. I don't see how that changes anything."

[howtheyshine]

Zerxus might recognize the feelings pricking at the entity's being, even from the outside. Anxiety, self-consciousness, fear.

"I'm not that weak."