1332 AE - Jora's Keep, Bjora Marches

[cryfrustration]

It's cold inside the keep, even when the storms of winter have been driven back and held at bay. Inside the barracks, even sitting right in front of the fire, there seems no way to get warm. The norn in this place feel it too. Despite all their customary resilience to frigid climes, Vrenille has caught more than one stamping their feet and rubbing their arms when they think no one's looking. And it's best, always, not to be looking--not to leave anyone feeling too looked at--not with tempers as brittle as dried out bones.

They've been here ten days. Maybe. It's gotten hard to keep track.

Ten days since Bangar vanished from the All Legions Rally, since Sesyria managed to secure release for Hakkyuu and Vrenille from the Grothmar Valley brig--the two of them along with Polemos, who'd refused to leave their side the whole time. Ten days...or maybe twelve now. The count is getting...strange. It's easy to get confused in this place.

Vrenille remembers clearly things that happened. Remembers sequence. Remembers (mostly) cause and effect. It's only duration that gets muzzy in his head, though muzzy has a way of bleeding through. Start to second guess one thing and you easily feel you need to second guess them all:

There'd been a scuffle. More of that One charr bullshit. A pair of humans drew easy attention, and even a charr companion at their side wasn't enough to take the crosshairs off them, especially not a charr so readily read as Olmakhan, no matter their heritage. Polemos was raised in the Legions, he knew what to do to deescalate, but the renegades egging each other on weren't interested in deescalation.

Maybe if the others had been there--the rest of the guild, their other charr allies--it would have been different. Maybe this all would have been different. But Hakkyuu and Vrenille could hold their own--they did hold their own--and when the guards arrived it was easy for the finger pointing to go the wrong way, make the targets look like the perpetrators. Bangar had stonewalled their release for days, but clearly they weren't the only ones.

By the time people realised how many rogue warbands had followed Bangar north, the whole assembly was in disarray and no one much cared about keeping detainees in the brig anymore.

Vrenille isn't sure anymore whether the call for relief teams in Bjora Marches came then or later, or when exactly he learned Almorra was missing, when he learned of the massacre here at the Keep. He remembers only that the cold had sunk in by then. But the cold, he thinks, started to sink in early.

They'd travelled here through a long alpine climb, the route wending its way north through dwarven ruins still held by the Stone Summit and towards Darkrime Delves along a path deeply rutted by the treads of tank tires. They were on the trail of Steel--tracking Vitrax who, after a drunken disagreement with Ghila and Havoc, had been seduced by prestige and promise (and probably one prototype TT6-B Devourer) into taking a recruitment offer they all suspected would end in his death.

There's no way Vrenille could say now whether it was mission creep or the sound of whispers that got him so turned around on what they're doing here: saving Vitrax from himself and his techno-romance temper tantrum, lending their aid to the relief mission called by the Vigil or to Jhavi in her attempt to pick up the pieces after Almorra's death, or something else completely.

And then Hakkyuu went out into the snow with a Vigil search team heading for the Aberrant Forest and none of them reported back after.

The world turned inside out. A voice slipped into the back of Vrenille's mind.

He lost track of how long they searched, how many times he found a guildmate's hand on his arm steering him back to the path when he started to drift, or how they moved together practically in a trance, snatching at moments of clarity like beacons to follow through a fog.

They had found bodies. So many bodies. The team Hakkyuu had left with, one by one, frozen in the snow, and sometimes worse--sometimes worse than frozen. More than once Vrenille believed they'd found him, thought he saw him there between the trees. He wasn't the only one who ran towards visions--hallucinations that weren't there. Mirages of the cold: he ought to know better. And in the end when they did find him, sunken eyed and cheeks hollowed with hunger, the voice whispered in Vrenille's mind.

He wants to kill you.

That was days ago. And the voice persists.

Hakkyuu's words have been disjointed, seeming nonsense, and now Vrenille doesn't know how many days it's been. But he knows that this morning he heard Kyinnlen and Sesyria speak, heard Kyinnlen raise the inevitable question: ought they not leave? They've lent what aid they can here. Hakkyuu is unwell, his mind assailed, his voice barely his own. Somewhere Vitrax is still out there, yes. No doubt the charr will want to push on. Perhaps, though, the guild ought to withdraw--heal, regroup, reassess, perhaps from back in Lion's Arch.

He overheard, and so did Hakkyuu, who he could hear interrupting them, having none of it. The conviction in his voice carried without Vrenille needing to see his face. He wouldn't countenance a retreat for his sake. (There, at least, he sounded clear--the voice of his old self, no ravings and no whispers. His will was firm: of course he wouldn't leave.)

Now, hours later, Vrenille sits in front of the fire at the Keep, a fur wrapped around his shoulders as he stares into the light dancing in the hearth and wishes he could get warm. It's easy from there, egged on by whispers, for thoughts to spiral, and it's only at several long moments delay that he registers Hakkyuu standing near him, having walked up while Vrenille was lost thinking...what? What was he thinking?

His head swivels towards him, blinking the world back into focus, "Hakkyuu?"

He wants to kill you.

"You all right?"

Comments

[shadowstrikes]

To Hakkyuu, everything makes sense within a state of turmoil.

When Hakkyuu after being rescued from the forest, so dense it felt like night all day around and time ceased to have meaning, there's a disorientation like he'd never experienced. How much time has passed? Where is he? What world? What version of it?

It takes him some time to parse through what's real and what isn't, what's his own anxiety and what is implanted in his mind. It's a frustrating process of unwinding the strands and to anyone on the outside, yes, he must seem deranged and unsettled in the mind, because to a certain extent that is precisely what he is.

On the whole though, to Hakkyuu, he shakes everything into place like sand through a sieve in relatively short order: he's in Tyria. He's in Bjora's Marches. He narrowly escaped being devoured by, or becoming, a Boneskinner. The voice in his head is familiar--Jormag's whispers of insecurity. And, most significantly, he's not in Duplicity.

In point of fact, not being in Duplicity is what causes his mind the most confusion to begin with. To him, he passed out thinking Vrenille has died in the snow and woken up in the keep, then two years were spent trapped in a sex-fuelled city far beyond Tyria's scope and knowledge, and now he's back in Tyria again.

He'd asked Vrenille at some point in the swirling mental haze in an urgent, panicked voice, where Stephen was and almost immediately regretted it; the lack of recognition was palpable and the dread set in colder than the blizzard outside.

Hakkyuu stopped asking questions, curled in on himself and held tight to the realisation that he was alone. Not literally, not in key ways that matter--Vrenille is here. The guild is here. They're alive. He's alive. And, almost devastatingly, Stephen's work had paid off.

And now that he's in Tyria, work needs to happen. There's no slowing down missions for him and his emotional state and there's no time to try and find the right words to share with Sesyria, who needs barefaced facts: yes, Hakkyuu is fine; yes, he can do his job, yes; they should press on; no, he's not a liability.

It's fine. I'm fine.

Except it isn't and Hakkyuu knows they all know that too. It's not the frigid voice in his head causing the paranoia now because he knows this voice well, has spent long enough in the city processing the fact the echoing words in his skull aren't real. Jormag's voice isn't the problem now.

It already feels too itchy though and like he needs to do something with all of this energy that he doesn't know how to manage fully. And there's only really one person he wants and needs to work on this with, the nervousness running through his body like electricity as he approaches Vrenille by the light of the fire.

He just doesn't know what else to do and the protracted pause before he speaks makes that all the more blatant.

"We need to talk."

After his panicked awakening, that's already more words in succession than he's offered in days.