The first thing Zerxus does, upon finally waking up in a room that doesn't truly belong to the Hells, is pray to Kahl.
There's a desperate undercurrent to it, a dread he could have extinguished with a glance at his warden item, but he’s not in the most rational of mental states.
He wakes up and comes shooting out from under Zerxus's bed in an orange yowling streak, hitting Zerxus's chest just a little bit like a bowling ball with knives.
Kahl's claws shred right through the infernal silk of his robe and Zerxus doesn't care even a little. He distantly registers that he's bleeding a little, but that doesn't stop him from gathering the furry little maelstrom in his arms and pressing him all the closer.
"I'm sorry." It's somewhere between a hoarse gasp and a repressed sob. He hasn't cried in so long. "I didn't want to go, I - "
He remembered everything, this time. He remembered everything and it didn't matter.
"I know," Kahl grumbles, clambering knifily onto Zerxus's shoulder and licking his cheek, then his hair, raspy and possessive and warm, a soft heavy weight, heavy and yet so light.
"Good." He shudders, a little, overwhelmed with guilt-edged relief; when his hand reaches up to trail through Kahl's fur, it radiates more warmth than it used to.
Less out of actually wanting to kill everyone personally, and more because with sulking, self-indulgence is the point. And distanced from the agonies of execution, the broad sweeping bitterness of it appealed. Everyone. All of it.
He shifts back into a boy, draped against Zerxus's side instead of perching on top of him, and bites the heel of his thumb, bringing up a few drops of blood with catlike needle teeth.
"I'm glad you didn't. I'd never hear the end of it." He'd care more than that, he's sure, but at the moment it's just not the sort of earnest empathy he can grasp. More than ever, fundamental parts of him feel scorched and barren.
"...I don't think I want to feel nice." That's his own brand of self-indulgence, really, and there's at least a level of wry awareness in his gaze.
Kahl makes a soft yowl-grumble noise in his throat, the tiny punctures healing over as he forces Zerxus's body to heal instead. It stings, the way Kahl does it, harsh and brutal, like being scraped and scoured and stitched, in one bracing slap of a moment. Kahl twitches slightly - not quite enough backward motion to count as a flinch - because it hurts him, too.
He tells himself that Asmodeus wouldn't like it, Kahl erasing his handiwork. He tells himself, truthfully, that he isn't actually fixing any of the hurts that matter. He tells himself that he will come for Asmodeus someday, and that all helps a little. It doesn't feel like a wrenching body blow like trying to bring Una back did. It's just a kind of pain he isn't used to.
He takes Zerxus into his realm, among the brambles and the howling winds, cold implacable rivers and innumerable hidden places. This one is in an odd oxbow lee of a swift dark river, soft deep silt heaped up against a jagged curve of rock, a dark quiet close place. The air is full of salt and iron and ozone, but the little alcove is rough and warm. It is a place - the place - for safety in bitterness, for licking one's wounds unseen. The shush shush of the river it passes nearby feels almost like a great, giant, surrounding purr, not quite in the range of mortal hearing.
Then don't feel nice. And I will be here with you.
The discomfort makes it easier to accept, and the straightforward sincerity grounds him in the present - not entirely, not yet, but enough that he feels a little steadier. Enough that he can release the remnants of stubborn tension with a shuddering breath and settle into the quiet shadows, leaning heavily against the stone.
I've missed you so much. I'm so proud of you. I love you. The words tumble into each other, as if he's used to saying them in a desperate rush.
A patter of cool rain stings slightly as it falls on him, trickling down the grooves in his horns, soaking through his hair. It doesn't do him any real harm, but it stings like ocean spray, or vinegar, a faint acid that would sear in any nicks or cuts, except that Kahl's furious healing didn't leave any.
No! That's nice! Be angry! Be bitter and miserable! You're terrible at this.
Kahl's mental voice is earnest and grouchy, a hissing-cat scrape of a sound, rather than real anger. He wants to be the cat, to hold Zerxus inside his heart and be held by him, too. And he's older, in some ways, than he was on the Narrenschiff - there's a soft rustle, and there are birds, or something like birds, smudgy agglomerations of feathers and soot and tar and shadow, fuzzy-edged and smearing, except for steel beaks. They're definitely not ravens; they're smaller, closer to crow size, with crow shaped beaks, crow feet. They settle on him like a blanket of shadow: they aren't really living things, and they aren't Kahl, and they are Kahl, in exactly the same way the stone and the rain are Kahl.
He grins at the rebuke, broad and ragged and fond.
Oh, but he'd hate it so much.
It's argument and acquiescence at once, because with the gentle warmth comes something searing and spiteful too. He'd worry about scorching the crows' talons with his skin, if they were real; instead he can just enjoy the strange shifting weight, and the knowledge that this god hasn't shackled himself into stagnance.
One of the shadow-crows pecks him in the horn with a loud tok; the rain falls harder, in steady plops, running over his skin, warmed by it, stinging like sweat, or tears, implacable and constant, soaking him to the skin despite the heat, soaking him in spite of the soft steaming that ensues, more cold water endlessly raining down.
He's not here, Kahl points out. You don't have to deny your pain just to deprive him anymore. He's already lost it.
Isn't he? It's been difficult, lately, to feel like anything more than an extension of his god's wrath. The moment he thought he could reach for something more, that it was finally time for something, anything, to change for the better -
It's difficult to dig in his heels on that, though, carried away on the steady rhythm of the rain; he can feel it wearing away layers of numb dejection and vicious despair, anguish calcified into callousness.
He won't know I was gone. I hate that, I think. Make him stew in that. Make him wonder if his champion is gone for good, even though he's chosen him so many times, because not everything is in his control.
He wants to destroy everyone who's ever loved him so fucking badly. It's pathetic.
Yes. It's as much a growl as it is a word, as his hands clench against the shuddering stone. For a few moments he just breathes with it, letting Kahl's anger pass through him and meld with his own.
Then, far more softly but no less furious, They're different. It doesn't have to be like that, if they don't let it, if they don't want it. She tried so hard.
Zerxus's anger is his own, just as his pain is his own. In this, it is given to Kahl to champion the anger of others, even as the acid of his nature erodes Zerxus's built-up defenses of callousness and acceptances, giving breath instead to dwelling brooding resentment, and makes all the pain and misery fresh and raw again.
But still, it is his pain, and Kahl will defend his right to feel it with the fierceness of a pouncing predator, will lay a wound open rather than let it rot, hidden and denied.
She? he asks. He is there, in the wind and the stone and the stinging rain. He listens.
Pain is an old friend; validation is something else.
It's not that others have never tried to grant it - Evandrin and Elias are ever radiant with righteous fury on his behalf - but there's always been...a dissonance there, a gap in understanding or acceptance on either side, barriers of guilt and disappointment.
Raei. This is a whisper, and for all that it's frayed with the same heart-stricken fury it resonates with a very different warmth, one that eases his shoulders just slightly. He never would have guessed, before, that gods had nicknames just as so many other siblings do; he never would have thought, of all of them, the Lord of Torment and the Redeeming Light -
She tried to do the same thing I did, but she is redemption. She knew him when he was something else. He told her that he missed her, he told her that he would try.
And the Hell of it is, Zerxus is damned sure that only one of those was a lie.
Kahl is not, in this moment, enraged, aside from passing flares of bitterness, firy comet-tails in the wake of his own stony brittle jealousy. He's not even surprised. Kahl knows what to expect from Hells. He is cold-eyed, if not truly cold-hearted.
Zerxus's anger can have the space and time to emerge, to disentangle from his weariness and pity and defensive pride, precisely because Kahl is not, himself, radiantly angry on his behalf. Kahl is not radiantly angry that Asmodeus has hurt him, or even that Zerxus has continued to let him. He doesn't like it, but he already knows this is what both of them would do; they have not promised him to do anything else. Kahl has not decided in advance which horrors Zerxus ought to be angry about - only that the anger he has deserves the space to burn.
So she was a real threat, Kahl understands, instantly, brutally. She had a real chance, where Zerxus does not, of effecting a change he wished to refuse. And he reacted as he would to a threat.
In other words: yes. He remembers, on the last day of his life, Nydas chiding him for having the wrong priorities, for overstepping in a way that wasn't productive, and backing down in an instant.
(He remembers the cold steel of his brother's blade, so ready to smother the flames if he would just let it - )
In this place, in Kahl's domain, there is no one here to see. In this place, even if the world were here, still no one could tell, as the salt tears mix with the acidic rain already on his face. Here, he can cry, and nothing breaks but him.
The truth of Kahl, the the truth of the world: under fury, pain. One of the brushes against Zerxus's cheek, as soft and dissolute as wood ash. Others gather in his lap, a blanket of velvet and mist.
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There's a desperate undercurrent to it, a dread he could have extinguished with a glance at his warden item, but he’s not in the most rational of mental states.
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He wakes up and comes shooting out from under Zerxus's bed in an orange yowling streak, hitting Zerxus's chest just a little bit like a bowling ball with knives.
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"I'm sorry." It's somewhere between a hoarse gasp and a repressed sob. He hasn't cried in so long. "I didn't want to go, I - "
He remembered everything, this time. He remembered everything and it didn't matter.
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"How long has it been?"
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He picks one of the chairs near the fireplace and slumps into it, knowing Kahl will keep his balance.
"Okay. That's - " That's good, it really is, he just...has to square it in his head. He's done it before. "Did anything important happen? For you."
The ship itself - he can check back on the network, reach out to some others. Everyone is probably still here. Gods, they're still here.
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If it had more than a week he wasn't ruling it out.
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"I appreciate that." Then, carefully twisting his head so he can glance up at Kahl without knocking him with a horn, "...Everyone?"
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Less out of actually wanting to kill everyone personally, and more because with sulking, self-indulgence is the point. And distanced from the agonies of execution, the broad sweeping bitterness of it appealed. Everyone. All of it.
He shifts back into a boy, draped against Zerxus's side instead of perching on top of him, and bites the heel of his thumb, bringing up a few drops of blood with catlike needle teeth.
"Drink," he orders. "You'll feel nice."
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"...I don't think I want to feel nice." That's his own brand of self-indulgence, really, and there's at least a level of wry awareness in his gaze.
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He tells himself that Asmodeus wouldn't like it, Kahl erasing his handiwork. He tells himself, truthfully, that he isn't actually fixing any of the hurts that matter. He tells himself that he will come for Asmodeus someday, and that all helps a little. It doesn't feel like a wrenching body blow like trying to bring Una back did. It's just a kind of pain he isn't used to.
He takes Zerxus into his realm, among the brambles and the howling winds, cold implacable rivers and innumerable hidden places. This one is in an odd oxbow lee of a swift dark river, soft deep silt heaped up against a jagged curve of rock, a dark quiet close place. The air is full of salt and iron and ozone, but the little alcove is rough and warm. It is a place - the place - for safety in bitterness, for licking one's wounds unseen. The shush shush of the river it passes nearby feels almost like a great, giant, surrounding purr, not quite in the range of mortal hearing.
Then don't feel nice. And I will be here with you.
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I've missed you so much. I'm so proud of you. I love you. The words tumble into each other, as if he's used to saying them in a desperate rush.
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No! That's nice! Be angry! Be bitter and miserable! You're terrible at this.
Kahl's mental voice is earnest and grouchy, a hissing-cat scrape of a sound, rather than real anger. He wants to be the cat, to hold Zerxus inside his heart and be held by him, too. And he's older, in some ways, than he was on the Narrenschiff - there's a soft rustle, and there are birds, or something like birds, smudgy agglomerations of feathers and soot and tar and shadow, fuzzy-edged and smearing, except for steel beaks. They're definitely not ravens; they're smaller, closer to crow size, with crow shaped beaks, crow feet. They settle on him like a blanket of shadow: they aren't really living things, and they aren't Kahl, and they are Kahl, in exactly the same way the stone and the rain are Kahl.
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Oh, but he'd hate it so much.
It's argument and acquiescence at once, because with the gentle warmth comes something searing and spiteful too. He'd worry about scorching the crows' talons with his skin, if they were real; instead he can just enjoy the strange shifting weight, and the knowledge that this god hasn't shackled himself into stagnance.
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He's not here, Kahl points out. You don't have to deny your pain just to deprive him anymore. He's already lost it.
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It's difficult to dig in his heels on that, though, carried away on the steady rhythm of the rain; he can feel it wearing away layers of numb dejection and vicious despair, anguish calcified into callousness.
He won't know I was gone. I hate that, I think. Make him stew in that. Make him wonder if his champion is gone for good, even though he's chosen him so many times, because not everything is in his control.
He wants to destroy everyone who's ever loved him so fucking badly. It's pathetic.
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Spoiled, Kahl sneers.
He can't be here, not in me. One of us would have to be dying. All gods are anathema to each other, this close.
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Then, far more softly but no less furious, They're different. It doesn't have to be like that, if they don't let it, if they don't want it. She tried so hard.
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But still, it is his pain, and Kahl will defend his right to feel it with the fierceness of a pouncing predator, will lay a wound open rather than let it rot, hidden and denied.
She? he asks. He is there, in the wind and the stone and the stinging rain. He listens.
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It's not that others have never tried to grant it - Evandrin and Elias are ever radiant with righteous fury on his behalf - but there's always been...a dissonance there, a gap in understanding or acceptance on either side, barriers of guilt and disappointment.
Raei. This is a whisper, and for all that it's frayed with the same heart-stricken fury it resonates with a very different warmth, one that eases his shoulders just slightly. He never would have guessed, before, that gods had nicknames just as so many other siblings do; he never would have thought, of all of them, the Lord of Torment and the Redeeming Light -
She tried to do the same thing I did, but she is redemption. She knew him when he was something else. He told her that he missed her, he told her that he would try.
And the Hell of it is, Zerxus is damned sure that only one of those was a lie.
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Zerxus's anger can have the space and time to emerge, to disentangle from his weariness and pity and defensive pride, precisely because Kahl is not, himself, radiantly angry on his behalf. Kahl is not radiantly angry that Asmodeus has hurt him, or even that Zerxus has continued to let him. He doesn't like it, but he already knows this is what both of them would do; they have not promised him to do anything else. Kahl has not decided in advance which horrors Zerxus ought to be angry about - only that the anger he has deserves the space to burn.
So she was a real threat, Kahl understands, instantly, brutally. She had a real chance, where Zerxus does not, of effecting a change he wished to refuse. And he reacted as he would to a threat.
Interesting.
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In other words: yes. He remembers, on the last day of his life, Nydas chiding him for having the wrong priorities, for overstepping in a way that wasn't productive, and backing down in an instant.
(He remembers the cold steel of his brother's blade, so ready to smother the flames if he would just let it - )
He's not sure when, exactly, he started crying.
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The truth of Kahl, the the truth of the world: under fury, pain. One of the brushes against Zerxus's cheek, as soft and dissolute as wood ash. Others gather in his lap, a blanket of velvet and mist.