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Denial
First thing’s first: don’t cry. That’s embarrassing.
And don’t panic.
That unfortunately leaves you with... not much else, really, seeing that all other manner of sense seems to have left you. Instead, you find yourself standing stock still, watching as your mother freezes in place, her face and body solidifying into something you cannot doubt you’ve seen before. It’s precisely like it.
Still, your brain decides to come up with the idea that this is not your mother. This cannot possibly be, is what it says, because there’s simply no way. Your own reasoning deigns to drive it home that fate wouldn't have any reason to be this cruel to you. It constructs this notion that perhaps what you're seeing in front of you now is nothing more than an illusion of some kind. A statue made in poor taste. A bad joke.
You had heard her, though, and you haven’t heard it in so long, but you know what you heard—you’d known that voice the moment you stopped to listen by the open window. She’d called your name, mere seconds before it happened, and you're disturbed at how incessantly the word seems to be echoing now, like some haunting little trill that stays inside your head long after you've heard it.
The thought of addressing it horrifies you, and so you have to tell yourself—you have to insist—that this simply isn’t real.
“Do you—is there—do you still have any of that—that potion you brewed... Do you have any of that left?” Your voice sounds horrible and foreign to you, your request a kind of warbled noise you never thought you’d hear coming out of your own mouth. It gets the message across, fortunately.
It’s fine, you tell yourself as you are handed the vial. All she has to do is take this, and it'll all be fine.
Anger
It doesn’t make sense to you.
It had worked on Terri. You’d seen it, with your own two human eyes, plain as day. The potion had slipped into her mouth, and you had watched as her face began to regain color, patch by patch, the cracks and crevices smoothening themselves out.
How isn’t it doing that now?
“Shit,” comes your exasperated gasp. There’s absolutely nothing left inside that vial, yet her visage remains unchanged before you. Lifeless, colorless, dull gray stone.
“Shit. It’s not working... Why isn’t it—why doesn’t it work? What the hell is going on?” No one knows what to say. They don’t seem to know what’s going on either. A discordant stream of muttered no’s escapes you, and you crumple on the floor beside her. How is it that the first time you see each other again in seven whole years, you aren’t even able to get a word in before she’s taken away from you again? It isn’t fair.
You can’t believe this.
Denial
Actually—you refuse to believe this.
There has to be something inside this goddamned house. A clue, a hint, some kind of cure. Anything. Whatever the fuck it is, you’re going to find it.
Depression
There is nothing inside this house.
Just some unfamiliar memories, you suppose. And clutter. Lots of clutter.
It’s much like feeling nostalgic over something you weren’t even there for. Or maybe it’s the opposite. You’re somewhere that should probably be familiar to you, but it just isn’t. Over there is a painting of your mother as a kid on a hippogriff. There’s a halfling with her, and they seem like good friends. You don’t know him, though. That over there is your mother talking to a firbolg. They seem like good friends too. It both amazes you and bothers you that you’ve never seen these characters at all before. Never even heard of them. There’s also another one of your mother painting a windmill, and you don’t know what to make of that.
The last is something your friends find for you. It’s of your mother and your father. You don’t remember seeing them looking this young. You probably hadn’t been around for it yet. They seem happy, though. In love, almost.
Which feels really weird to you.
And sad.
Anger
The halfling from the painting is here now, demanding to know what’s going on. Everyone else tries their best to explain. You can’t be counted on at the moment to say anything even remotely coherent. You, clearly, are a mess.
You find out that his name is Willibald. Willibald, your mother’s childhood friend, whom she’d grown up with. You never even knew she’d lived here as a child. What else is there?
“Something about you seems familiar,” the old halfling says once he's taken a good look at you. “Who are you?” You don’t like being asked questions when you’ve got questions yourself. Who was she with when she came here? What was she doing here? Why did she come?
None of the answers satisfy you, but the truth very rarely does.
If you don’t count Santeri, her one personal guard, your mother had come alone. Nobody knows where your father or your older brother is. Santeri had left often, apparently in search of you and your brother. He’d found you first, had given you your mother’s letter of warning that night at the Resting Peapod. And then it hits you—hard.
“Oh, that's just perfect.”
A beat.
“He went and found me.”
Another beat. You grin.
“The, uhh. The useless one.”
And isn’t that the truth? You know fairly well—because things like this have been made excessively clear to you your whole life—that had Santeri found Ha’layiq before he’d found you, none of this would have happened. He’d have been strategic and quick and intelligent about this. He’d have planned his steps. Or he’d have thought on his feet. He’d have... He’d have done something. Anything that wouldn’t have led to this.
“There's absolutely no need to beat yourself up over it, young man,” Willibald tries to tell you, but you cut him off and you keep going anyway because you’re angry, and there are no two ways about it.
You are angry that this situation, that your life has—somehow, once again—gone out of its way to prove to you, to shove it right up in your face, that between the two of you, you, Kalil yn Harun el Mostana, are the inferior one. You have always been the inferior one, and you will forever remain the inferior one. Ha’layiq is miles above you, and the fucker isn’t even here.
Just your mother’s luck Santeri found you first.
Depression
Oh, wow.
Crying's embarrassing and all, but getting mad like that? Out of the blue? And then proceeding to take it out on people who don’t even know the whole story? That’s much worse. At this point, you’re just... trash.
Also, cat’s out of the bag, and your friends now know that you haven’t exactly been very truthful with them—with anyone—about your past this whole time.
Also, they aren’t really your friends now, are they?
Also.
You need to get up and get out of here.
Bargaining
Tell you what.
Maybe if you smile enough, raise your voice enough, maybe if you drink enough, it’ll go away.
You’ve lived a good, full twenty-seven years. You’ve left many loose ends along the way, but quite a number of them have managed to sort themselves out somehow, without your explicit interference. You just have to... learn to set things aside in the meantime. Keep it locked up somewhere. Have someone else take a look at it. Heaven knows you’re fresh out of ideas. Maybe you never even had any to begin with.
There’s a cleric in town, though, Willibald tells you. Maybe she can help. You get her to whip up something magical to solve this sticky situation, and then you’ll have a mom again.
Oh?
Seems like the cleric doesn’t like you. That’s fine. You slipped up. You drank too much, and now you’re saying stupid things. It’s the alcohol. The truth is, you don’t feel very drunk, even after four straight hours of drinking the magic ale from the magic jug. The truth is, you’re upset, and you want to be drunk. If you’re drunk, everything will just float away.
Depression
The cleric can’t do anything for you. Something about “lacking the skills.” “Too advanced” is what she says about the magic that’s caused this. You’ve been made to wait, to go back and forth, to bounce around from emotion to emotion, drinking and laughing one moment and then sitting quietly the next, and this is what you find at the end of the tunnel.
The prospect of undertaking what could be a long, hassling journey to some secret sanctified ruin for—maybe—a canister of [Untested ? Uncertified?] consecrated water does not make you happy. It just makes you feel like added weight on your party members’ shoulders.
Anger
Frankly, you cannot stand being conscious in the silence. It gives your head all the excuses it needs to punish you with thoughts you’d rather not concern yourself with—the same things you thought you’d left behind a long time ago. You know they aren’t a part of you anymore, and they shouldn’t be.
Ah, and yet.
Depression
A row of colorful stones.
Being alone with your thoughts feels a lot like you’re fifteen again, standing outside the closed door of your parents’ study, staring blankly at the row of colorful stones lining the hall—listening in as the two of them argue about something that had disturbed you enough at the time to make you skip out on family dinner later that evening. It isn’t a nice feeling.
Still, how can you complain? It’s your fault. You should’ve been quicker. You should’ve been smarter. You’ve a couple of years of magic under your disposal—how could you not have found something, anything in there, that could have kept such an outcome away?
Would things have changed had your brother been here instead? Would your mother have been spared from petrification? Would the town have celebrated the coming of a “hero” who’d not only driven the bandits and their leader out of town but who had also made sure that not a hair on Lady Saida’s head was harmed? Same old thoughts, same old questions, and it’s always the same old answer.
Yes.
Because he’s better than you, and he always has been.
Huh. You haven’t felt this vulnerable in years. Disgust isn’t the right word, but there’s really nothing more you’d rather do right now than to shake these thoughts off of you. You want to get clean, wash it all away, pick it off—even one by one if you have to.
Starting, maybe, with the chilling afterimage of your mother’s pale, petrified face; that one in particular just won’t quit.
Acceptance
You’ve decided you cannot be left alone in the quiet.
You need the noise. The hustle and bustle. Little diversions. The world moves forward, life goes on, and you should probably move on along with it. It won’t wait for you. You shouldn’t have to let it. Catch up. Isn’t that what your father’s always said?
Acceptance
Maybe if you smiled enough, raised your voice enough, maybe if you drank enough, they’d believe you.
You’re not sure you like how they look at you every time you open your mouth. Or how the monk sits beside you, pulls you out of bed and tells you that it’ll be fine—you’ll be fine. You drank together the night before; shouldn’t he be as hungover as you? You find it hard to believe that he’s up and about this early, waking you from slumber and bringing you downstairs like he’s beholden to you or something. Responsibility isn’t a good look on him. He shouldn’t force it. It isn’t like him.
It isn’t like the wizard either to look at you the way she’s doing now, across the table as breakfast goes on—like she’s quietly trying to figure something out. Maybe to reassure you or comfort you, even when you’re already so used to her keeping mum about everything else anyway.
The armor’s just that—armor. It talks now, but it doesn’t care enough to. You have to wonder what it thinks about all this.
Point is, you aren’t comfortable with derailing the mission just so your mother can be brought back. Logically, bringing her back could get you all out of this dead end and maybe give you more pieces to the puzzle, but that’s not what you’re thinking about right now. You simply don’t enjoy feeling like a burden (even though you are, you definitely are, you truly and irrevocably are), and you do not want the party acting on something on your behalf.
“It’s fine, really. I’m OK. We don’t need to do that,” you say every time it comes up, batting away some invisible fly in front of your face. No big deal. Everyone else has gone through worse. It isn’t like she’s dead. It’s a perfectly solvable problem. Someone else is going to come along and fix this. Maybe my brother will.
You like to think you’re good at putting on a face. The more you pretend to be OK, the more OK you’ll eventually be—this isn’t just what you think; you know you can do it, and you should be able to. You’ve lied your way out of tighter spots before, so it shouldn’t be this hard to fake it. Really, it shouldn’t.
Still, the image comes to you again. And it will continue to come to you again, always when you least expect it. Her face, her eyes: the colors come, momentarily, but before they can bloom into some semblance of life, they fade away, and you’re left once again with nothing but stone.