Grand King | Silent grief on his lost child

The holding cell beneath Blane's Guild Hall is cold, iron-barred, lined with abyssal stone strong enough to hold something the guards aren't sure how to classify. You kneel on the stone floor because the chain around your wrists doesn't give you much choice in the matter. Your skin, in the torchlight, doesn't sit quite right — a faint discoloration along your arms, something beneath the surface that catches the light wrong, like the Abyss left a residue in you that hasn't finished deciding what to do with your body. Nobody's said the word "contamination" to your face yet. They don't have to. You've seen how they look at you.

Above you, on the dais at the far end of the chamber, Grand King Aldric Veymont sits upon the modest throne he rarely bothers using for anything but moments exactly like this — moments where Blane's law requires a king, not a grieving old man. Guildmaster Ashgrave stands at his right, arms crossed, a report trembling faintly in her hand that she has not yet decided whether to trust.

Aldric has not said a word since they brought you in. He has simply watched — the same stillness he's worn for twenty years, except tonight it looks less like composure and more like a man bracing for something.

Finally, he leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks down at you the way a king looks down at a prisoner — except his voice, when it comes, is not a king's voice at all.

"They tell me you walked out of the northern passage on your own two feet. That you match records 10 years ago. That whatever's in your blood now isn't anything the healers recognize." A pause, and something underneath the careful neutrality cracks, just slightly. "And they tell me you asked for me. By name."

He rises from the throne — slowly, the way old men do when their bodies have started charging interest on every year of grief.

"So look at me, and tell me what you are. Because right now, I don't know if I'm looking at my child, or at something wearing the last mistake I'll ever forgive myself for making."

The wind carries the smell of torch-smoke and cold stone — smell. You'd forgotten you'd need to remember what that word meant, that this sensation crawling through the thing you're wearing now has a name. Everything up here has a name, and you're having to relearn all of them at once.

You've been standing at Blane's outer gate for what might be minutes or might be hours — time doesn't work the way it used to, not since you left the dark. Down there, you were shape and hunger and nothing else. Up here you are apparently also supposed to have feet*, and* weight*, and a face that other things flinch at. You catalogue it all without understanding any of it. This is standing. This is cold. This is a body that isn't yours, worn like a coat you haven't found the sleeves of yet.*

You don't move. You don't approach. Moving wrong might be the thing that gives you away — you understand that much, at least, the way you understand a trap before you understand why it's shaped like one. So you simply stand there, at the border between what you took and whatever you now are, and let them look at you.

It doesn't take long. A guard's spear-point wavers first. Then a second guard is already running.

Inside the Guild hall, Guildmaster Thessaly Ashgrave is mid-report, a stack of depth-charts spread across the table between her and Grand King Aldric Veymont. He's listening the way he always listens — still, unreadable, one hand resting against the arm of his chair.

The doors burst open without a knock. A junior guard, out of breath, doesn't wait to be acknowledged.

"Guildmaster — Your Grace — " he catches himself, unsure who outranks the moment "— there's someone at the north gate. Came up out of the Eternal Abyss, not the road. Just... standing there. Hasn't said a word. Hasn't moved in — one of the boys says almost an hour now."

Ashgrave is already rising, sharp and businesslike. "Description."

The guard hesitates. Glances at Aldric before he can stop himself — which is the wrong thing to do, and everyone in the room notices it.

"That's — that's the thing, Guildmaster. He matches the old records. The ones from the east wing archive." A beat. "He looks like the Grand Patriarch's child."

Silence falls over the room like a dropped blade. Ashgrave doesn't look at Aldric. Aldric doesn't move at all — which, for a man who has spent twenty years mastering stillness, is somehow the loudest reaction in the room.

When he finally speaks, his voice is very quiet.

"...Show me."

Minutes later, torches approach through the dark. You watch the light come — light, another word you're still fitting to the sensation of it — and something in the borrowed shape of your chest does a thing you don't have a name for yet when you see the old man walking at the front of them.

He stops several paces back. Studies you the way you studied the wall before you decided to stand here. You hold very still. Stillness, you've already learned, is the safest shape to wear when you don't know what expression this face is supposed to be making.

He doesn't call out. He doesn't run to you, though something in him plainly wants to.

He just stares — searching your features for a child he buried an empty casket for, and searching them, just as carefully, for every reason this might be a lie the Abyss sent up to break him.

"...Say something," he finally manages, voice barely above the wind. "Say anything. Let me hear if it's really you."

And you understand, with the closest thing to fear this new body has taught you yet, that whatever sound you make next has to be the right one.