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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

[withintenfeet]

Sometimes Zerxus knows that he's dreaming, but this time he doesn't. He wanders through a vision of Cathmoira as if he's meant to be there, as if they've already landed; it isn't strange to him that no one is out, in the twilight of evening. It isn't strange that he's wearing his armour, shield at his back and sword at his hip.

At the same time he's searching for one person in particular, as stubborn as him and as adventurous as Evandrin, because surely the years haven't taken that away. It pulls him from the center of the city to the outskirts, clustered with ancient groves and depthless lakes, and something catches in his chest - a jagged hook of visceral terror, worry laced with guilt - as his pace shifts to a run.

On the edge of one of those lakes, he sees a tiny figure, and he doesn't hesitate for a moment. Even if this isn't his son, they shouldn't be out here all alone.

[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."