Chapter Text
Viren sits on the wooden bench with his eyes shut. Not quite asleep, not quite awake. He is half conscious of the icy bite of the dungeon’s air, the cold iron of the manacles bound tight around his wrists and the steady, hot pulse of pain from the arrow wound above his knee.
He considers his options once again, they look pretty dire. He imagines Opeli, already preparing the noose, the look of satisfaction that will be written on her face. He finds that he doesn’t much care.
Since the night that Harrow died everything seems to have slipped beyond his control. At first it had seemed simple enough, secure the throne, make the other kingdoms see the danger at the border, secure the border itself. A series of simple, logical steps that anyone could see the sense in, but no one had.
His hand had been forced and forced again, he had made choices, difficult choices that no one else seemed willing to make, and now he sits shackled to the consequences of them. He isn’t even sure how long he has been here, how many meals of water and bread have been shoved through the prison bars and removed again, barely touched.
For a moment when he was fighting the guards he had felt so powerful, as if all the magic he could possibly imagine had flowed through him, an unbounded, ethereal energy. He had no longer felt at all like himself, had felt completely invincible, as if the whole of Katolis could be his, as if the world itself was suddenly within his grasp. It had faded though, the way magic always does, drifted out of him and left him just a husk, a brittle autumn leaf barely clinging to the tree, all the vigour and life sucked out of it.
He lifts one hand, runs it over the withered flesh of his face, his skin is hot to the touch and he feels nothing but emptiness, as if he has become lost in the wide expanse of the midnight desert and is waiting for the vultures to come and pick away at his bones.
“Viren.”
The odd caterpillar is crawling from his ear and he shudders, doesn’t open his eyes, but he can feel the way it moves, feet sticky against his skin. Down his neck, along his arm, out onto his manacled hand.
“Viren?”
His voice comes sharp and deep and Viren opens one eye, observes it sitting there head slightly to the side, watching him like some cognizant being. He closes the eye again and Aaravos swims into his vision, the face from the mirror, watching him, always watching him, like some shadow of himself that he can’t escape.
“What is wrong with you?”
He hears the words, they ring around in the silence of the cell, they mean nothing very much at all.
“Wrong with me?”
It is an effort to talk to him, he has no idea what he should want anymore. There is a blank space where the sting of his betrayal ought to sit inside him. All very well for the elf to say he would not abandon him when all he had done was send his creature burrowing inside him. He cannot forget that. The way it had squeezed its body into him, the terrible pulsing feel of it becoming a part of him, even the memory of it makes him want to scream. Perhaps he would if he could feel anything other than this feverish apathy.
The caterpillar shifts then, he forces his eyes open to watch it as it moves along the fabric of his trousers, until it disappears into the bloody rent the arrow has left and then its voice returns to him, muffled.
“The wound is festering.”
“Oh.” Viren half shrugs, as if he didn’t know that already.
Possibly he shouldn’t have pulled the arrow out. At the time he had hardly felt it, it has just been a minor irritation, the bite of a fly at his skin. Now it throbs with a dull burning pain that sears at the edges, and the burn seems to spread with the lines of his corruption, through his blood, into his heart.
“Viren.” The voice is a little more urgent now. “You need to remove the bandages so I can see.”
Of course, they had thrown some bandages as an afterthought into the cell with him. It wasn’t as if anyone would want to touch the Dark Mage of Katolis with their hands, they all shied from him now like he was some terrible horror arisen from the grave.
He moves slowly, feels the fever in him, the waves of his own exhaustion, rolls up the right leg of his trousers again and exposes the bandages which are now soaked with blood. In the semi-darkness they look darker, as if a slick of ink has stained them black. He bites his lip as he feels the agonising pain of a wound run deep. Should have pushed the arrow right through, it would have been cleaner perhaps. Still, what does it matter now? Nothing matters.
For a moment his hand pauses and he gathers himself before he begins to unravel the damp strips of cloth. He hadn’t really bound it tightly enough, the blood has seeped out, spilled over everything. He swallows, takes a slow shallow breath as the pain cuts through him. He can feel that at least.
He exposes the wound, drops the bloody mess of bandages beside him on the bench and stares down at the jagged edges of his own darkened skin. Funny how such a little thing can cause his heart to quiver in his chest. The blood has dried thickly on his leg, the congealed tracks of it dribbling down towards his boot and the puncture wound is a gloomy, gaping hole in him. For a moment the caterpillar pauses on his thigh before pulsating its body to the edge of the wound, he watches as it seems to peer into the darkness there. It looks up at him again, mandibles twitching, then it burrows right down into the tissue with an undulating wave. He feels the sheer horror of it, the sharp edges of the pain and his vision goes red.
Viren.
He isn’t sure if it is the caterpillar he can hear now or the echo of the elf from the mirror, Aaravos, Aaravos, Aaravos… he too seems to be burrowed deeply in his brain.
Breathe, breathe…
The voice feels as if it’s inside him, he isn’t sure if it is real, but he lets out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, it shudders out of him with a gasp.
Viren, I need to fix the wound, clean it and stitch it.
There is a slight urgency to the voice and he wants to speak, but his jaw is clenched tight. The vision of maggots comes to his mind, white bodies oscillating, multiplying endlessly over blood red flesh. He feels the insect digging within him, the peculiar sensation of this alien body inside his own. He can hardly bear to imagine it, he almost thinks he would rather rot.
What has he done to himself to bring him to this place?
Viren.
It sounds almost like Harrow and his voice cuts through him like a razor. How far has he fallen? How had it spiralled and slipped? He is no longer a man, he is just the worst parts of himself and they fester, decay and burn, white and hot behind his eyes.
He had failed in the one thing he needed to do, he had lost his king, he had lost the one friend he had left in this world and there is nothing to hold him back from himself.
He is covered now in other people’s blood.
Viren.
Of course it is Aaravos. Harrow is just the fragment of some shattered dream. The pain burns.
Stay with me Viren.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He spits the words out as his head spins. “In case… you h-hadn’t noticed.”
He hands shake and the shackles clink against each other and leans his head back against the cold stones of the dungeon wall. Time slips by in odd fragments, there are moments when he’s hardly aware of it at all. He is vaguely aware that the burrowing inside his leg has switched to something else. The sharp bite of the caterpillar’s mandibles gouge away and he tries very hard not to think about that, to ignore the heat of each bite.
Then another feeling comes to him, completely alien and it forces him to look. The insect has emerged and is casting a thread from its own mouth, it is joining the jagged edges of the wound together. He clamps his jaw to the hot ache of every stitch.
Mage.
The voice is sharp but he lets it drift over him, slips in and out of himself.
Come on, don’t pass out. You need to fight the fever.
“Wha’ d’you care…”
The words slur out of him. The odd vision of the elf inside his head is no less irritating than the caterpillar. It swims behind his eyes, reaches out its hands to him, he gasps at the touch of them. Feels them as if they are against his very skin, this being is in him, a part of him, he has given it his own blood, something powerful, personal and deep and he has no idea what Aaravos will do with it.