Vivid and overwhelming and familiar and ordinary, like thumbing the smooth smallness of a worry stone with your whole heart in your throat. Kahl hates Asmodeus exactly the same way he hates everyone else, the way that's just envy when you scratch the paint.
He was never unlimited potential. That is the province of the Maelstrom - and mortals, in their way. Kahl was born, formless and unknowing, but already, his nature was waiting for him, already, he was placed in the grey hole. The closest he ever got to it was when the God Mask was eating through the top layers of his face, rendering him down into new potential, chewing him up to spit back out.
Kahl has never had an us worth saving. His mother, his lying father, his hordes of useless clueless brothers and sisters. Could he have met them in secret? Could he have told his name to Lil, or Kitr, or Nsana, or Nemmer? Role? But none of them would have protected him from Yeine and Nahadoth, not the lady of mercy, not even the lady of secrets. He had felt her hunting him, in fact.
Even on the barge, people flicker past like dragonflies, with only a fraction of even a mortal's lifetime before they slip away again. Porthos, Nokov - Nokov, who was a god, who was perfect and endless night, gone back to his death like a stone sinking into water. Harry gone to his perfect life, satisfied with a single blessing, relieved not to see Kahl again.
Astarion, who does not want the aid of gods, Dark Urge who still loves his useless father, Corvo who didn't even want to say his name. Kahl leaves no more mark on them than a rat scratching at the door. Jamie won't stay, either, even though he's held Kahl, has opened the door and fed him scraps. Zerxus thinks he'll stay, but Zerxus is here, not making promises, because he's been someone else's all along, and Kahl always knew it.
He hates Asmodeus for being such an ungrateful, spoiled brat who doesn't even know that a gift it is, to have family that would fight you instead of putting you down in a day like a rabid animal, and with less mourning.
He wants Nadia back, with a soul-deep howling longing, Nadia who didn't want anything from him as a god, the only sibling who ever knew his name, his human half-sister who brought him candy and read him books and brushed his hair, in another crushed childhood trapped in another tiny, drab, sunless place, a life that never was, his sister for only six dreaming days.
He wants it so badly his form starts warping, not with the smooth, instant shifting of his deliberate changes. He stretches and twists like taffy, the world bubbling and contorting around him. He's younger, too, although not as young as when Zerxus tried to help him escape, ten or eleven, his hair long and voraciously curly, his legs a twisted mass beneath him that's hard to look at directly.
He wants to scream; he wants to cry; he wants to claw Asmodeus's stupid faces until he hasn't any left. He wants to disappear into the dark.
He doesn't do any of those things, though.
"Someone has to do it, apparently," he chokes out, voice thick with everything he does not give voice, everything that has no place here.
Re: Narrenschiff, Day One
Vivid and overwhelming and familiar and ordinary, like thumbing the smooth smallness of a worry stone with your whole heart in your throat. Kahl hates Asmodeus exactly the same way he hates everyone else, the way that's just envy when you scratch the paint.
He was never unlimited potential. That is the province of the Maelstrom - and mortals, in their way. Kahl was born, formless and unknowing, but already, his nature was waiting for him, already, he was placed in the grey hole. The closest he ever got to it was when the God Mask was eating through the top layers of his face, rendering him down into new potential, chewing him up to spit back out.
Kahl has never had an us worth saving. His mother, his lying father, his hordes of useless clueless brothers and sisters. Could he have met them in secret? Could he have told his name to Lil, or Kitr, or Nsana, or Nemmer? Role? But none of them would have protected him from Yeine and Nahadoth, not the lady of mercy, not even the lady of secrets. He had felt her hunting him, in fact.
Even on the barge, people flicker past like dragonflies, with only a fraction of even a mortal's lifetime before they slip away again. Porthos, Nokov - Nokov, who was a god, who was perfect and endless night, gone back to his death like a stone sinking into water. Harry gone to his perfect life, satisfied with a single blessing, relieved not to see Kahl again.
Astarion, who does not want the aid of gods, Dark Urge who still loves his useless father, Corvo who didn't even want to say his name. Kahl leaves no more mark on them than a rat scratching at the door. Jamie won't stay, either, even though he's held Kahl, has opened the door and fed him scraps. Zerxus thinks he'll stay, but Zerxus is here, not making promises, because he's been someone else's all along, and Kahl always knew it.
He hates Asmodeus for being such an ungrateful, spoiled brat who doesn't even know that a gift it is, to have family that would fight you instead of putting you down in a day like a rabid animal, and with less mourning.
He wants Nadia back, with a soul-deep howling longing, Nadia who didn't want anything from him as a god, the only sibling who ever knew his name, his human half-sister who brought him candy and read him books and brushed his hair, in another crushed childhood trapped in another tiny, drab, sunless place, a life that never was, his sister for only six dreaming days.
He wants it so badly his form starts warping, not with the smooth, instant shifting of his deliberate changes. He stretches and twists like taffy, the world bubbling and contorting around him. He's younger, too, although not as young as when Zerxus tried to help him escape, ten or eleven, his hair long and voraciously curly, his legs a twisted mass beneath him that's hard to look at directly.
He wants to scream; he wants to cry; he wants to claw Asmodeus's stupid faces until he hasn't any left. He wants to disappear into the dark.
He doesn't do any of those things, though.
"Someone has to do it, apparently," he chokes out, voice thick with everything he does not give voice, everything that has no place here.