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Verin woke suddenly and silently, and the first thing he was conscious of was the fact that he was cold. The second was the ache in his shoulders and the crick in his neck.
The third was the shackles.
He bolted upright, chains rattling, and found abruptly that he couldn’t get to his feet or move away from the wall he’d been slumped against, because the moment he tried the cuffs dug into his wrists and he was suddenly choking until he leaned back and the collar- a fucking collar- was no longer digging into his throat.
“Fuck,” Verin whispered under his breath, barely loud enough to stir the air.
He sat back against the wall, rubbing the chains between his fingers, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the absolute, utter darkness.
The sight wasn’t encouraging. The room he was in was practically featureless, walls of blank grey stone bricks, the only irregularity in their smooth pattern the chains binding him and the loop connecting them to the floor. His armor was gone, leaving him only in his uniform black pants and tunic, and most of his braids had been torn out, gently unraveling and leaving his hair loose around his shoulders. That particular realization made him shudder at the phantom feeling of unfamiliar hands in his hair.
There was no door.
Verin twisted around to peer over his shoulder at the wall behind him, studied the floor carefully, even looked up at the ceiling, but nowhere in this cell did he see any kind of entrance.
He wasn’t particularly versed in the arcane despite Essek’s best efforts, so he considered briefly that the door was only covered by an illusion, but something low in his gut told him that wasn’t the case. Whoever had grabbed him was thorough.
Which presented the question of who had grabbed him. The last he remembered, he’d been in Bazzoxan, he and the few soldiers he’d been with pinned down by a sudden attack, swift and silent and nearly invisible in the dark even to his vision. The huffing of battle-rushed breath, the taste of iron in his throat, and then nothing.
Verin breathed, and flexed his wrists. The chains and cuffs had no give to them, and when he shuffled awkwardly to bring his hands where he could see them, they didn’t even seem to have a lock or a seam, as smooth as if they’d been forged around his hands. They were far too snug to even consider trying to slip out of, not that it’d do him much good when he was still collared, in a room with no way out.
He flinched at a sudden grinding noise, and watched in silence as the wall across from him began to… liquefy, almost, soften like clay until it began to peel away, curling back from a swiftly-opening doorway where there had been none before. Verin kept his head down and watched through his lashes as the stone stilled and someone walked through.
“The younger Thelyss,” the newcomer said by way of greeting, and Verin lifted his head to study the man in front of him.
He was elven, with hair as silver as any Verin saw at home, but clearly not a drow. That and the long, ornate robes he was wearing told Verin that wherever he was, it was most likely in the Empire. He forced back a grimace.
“That’s me,” he agreed. “I’d say it’s a pleasure, but…”
The man didn’t smile, not that Verin had expected him to. “I don’t believe either of us need to make any pretenses about that, Taskhand. Unfortunately, you’re only a means to an end.”
Even though he’d already known that, something about the man’s demeanor made him shiver, a cold feeling settling in his gut.
“If you’re hoping to gain something from the Bright Queen, I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” Verin said, unnecessarily. By the man’s slim razor smile, they both knew that wasn’t the case.
He’d called Verin the younger Thelyss. Not the youngest. This wasn’t about his position, or his Den, or even the Dynasty, probably. It was about his brother.
Verin knew about the rumors, even as far out as Bazzoxan- his soldiers were always happy for fresh gossip, and it was hard for him not to find out about what his brother was up to when he was still considered the leading authority on Essek Thelyss, even though they hadn’t spoken more than five times in the last ten years. As far as he could tell, no one knew for sure what Essek had been doing with the Empire mercenaries, or if he had really betrayed his station and their country, or even where he was. The idea that this man might know where Verin didn’t was almost chilling.
“Enjoy your stay,” the man said, hands passing through a series of arcane forms before the wall split before him again, leading out of the cell into depthless darkness as far as Verin could see.
The wall sealed, and Verin was alone.
It took him hours to realize he wasn’t getting hungry.
It took him several days after that- he thought- to realize his captor wasn’t planning on coming back.
The chains allowed him enough leeway to adjust so his hands were in front of him, rather than behind his back, which felt more like a taunt than anything but if it meant his shoulders stopped aching Verin would take it. He considered for a moment attempting to work the loop out of the ground, but when he wrapped his fingers around the chains he could feel them buzzing with arcane energy, just slightly. Enough to tell him it wouldn’t be that simple.
It wasn’t as if getting out of his chains would even help that much, in a room with no door. Honestly, Verin was a bit surprised he hadn’t started to feel the air go stale, but he supposed that if he didn’t need to eat it wasn’t out of the question that he didn’t need to breathe, either.
Between the chains and the featureless room and the isolation, Verin was quickly discovering that boredom was becoming a problem- he’d never dealt well with idleness, and he couldn’t stand not seeing another living being for weeks on end like Essek could. When he wasn’t slipping in and out of an uneasy trance, he counted the bricks on the wall and drew vague patterns into the dust on the floor, and when that failed he sang to himself, quietly- songs soldiers would sing, both those he commanded now and the ones he’d trained with as a kid, and then nursery rhymes when he ran out of those, and then hymns of the Luxon, and then the same songs again and again, just to fill the silence.
The corners of the room started to undulate and whisper around the time Verin had taken to singing even as his voice grew almost too hoarse to hear. He supposed it should have alarmed him, that he was starting to hallucinate, but it didn’t, and he watched as the shadows resolved themselves into spiders, each no larger than a copper piece, skittering down the walls towards him.
He hissed at them halfheartedly, and closed his eyes. The whispers, too faint to make out words, didn’t stop, but he hadn’t really expected them to. He wasn’t entirely surprised when they didn’t leave as he tranced, either, though he found himself dully irritated at them even in the hazy meditative state of his rest.
When he opened his eyes, there were shadows dancing in the corners of his vision, even despite the absolute lack of light in the room. He shut them again, nauseated.
Verin leaned back against the wall, thumped his head against the chill stone, and began to recite the emergency protocols of Bazzoxan.
He saw Essek for the first time well after he lost track of the days, had resorted to spending most of his time trancing and the rest singing to himself, talking, even praying sometimes.
Essek was sitting in the corner, four inches above the ground, his violet eyes almost glowing in the darkness, and Verin immediately knew it wasn’t real because he was wearing all silver and white, the clothing of holy days. He was picking absently at a loose thread trailing from one of the buttons on his cuff, gazing off somewhere to Verin’s right. Verin just watched him tiredly, allowing himself the few moments to appreciate the brief silence.
“Mother would be so disappointed,” Essek remarked, conversationally.
“That’s nothing new,” Verin rasped despite himself. After a few breaths of silence, he added, “You’ve never called her Mother in your life.”
“You finally got yourself killed,” Essek said, as if Verin hadn’t even spoken. “Just like Father.”
“Don’t,” Verin muttered, halfhearted flash of anger warming his throat like whiskey.
In the decades since a messenger had come home in the space their father was supposed to occupy, Verin had long forgiven Essek for any role he had played in it, if he’d even been at fault at all, had forgiven the single screaming match Essek and the Umavi had ever had in the hours after the funeral, the accusations she flung at him, the argument that still seemed to linger in empty rooms in that house. But despite the forgiveness, despite the time between then and now, their father’s death still had teeth.
Essek just watched him, expressionless and still. When he spoke again, it was the voice of a child coming from his adult body as he said, “This wouldn’t have happened if you were careful, Verin.”
Verin remembered when he’d said that for real, vaguely- after Verin had gotten in trouble again for something or other as a kid, broken something or gotten himself hurt, and Essek had been the one to come to his room with both judgement and smuggled dinner, after. The memory, inexplicably, made his chest ache.
“It wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t drag me into your shit, either,” Verin snapped, and immediately regretted it.
The hallucination Essek didn’t react with anger like the real Essek would, didn’t seem to react at all, really. Verin curled into himself, chains clinking softly, childish shame rising in his throat.
“Sorry,” he said, pointlessly, more to himself than to Essek. He turned his attention to the dust on the floor instead of looking at him, fingers tracing out absent patterns in the dust, wandering absently.
“You have those reversed,” Essek said suddenly. “It’s supposed to be Icozrin’s Rune and then the root chronurgic rune raised to the fourth power, not the other way around.”
Verin looked down to find that he’d indeed been sketching out dunamantic runes, one of the basic sequences he’d been taught first in his Echo Knight training and then again by Essek when he was struggling to understand them, until Verin began to flourish in the arcane side of their combat, more than his peers. And, much to his chagrin, they were indeed reversed.
He swept his hand over the runes and redrew them, and then when Essek sighed he smudged out one of the lines in the second rune and fixed the angle of it. Just for completion’s sake, he finished the series before he wiped them all out.
Verin looked up at Essek again, and he was younger and smaller than he’d been moments ago- somewhere in his sixties, probably, the age he’d been when he first began to truly fight with their parents, but before he’d started drawing away from Verin. Still gangly and awkward, with magic too big for his body and budding blasphemy too big for their house.
Verin closed his eyes against the sudden burn of tears, letting his head thunk back against the wall. The collar rested heavy and awkward against his collarbones, and he bit his lip, almost relishing the brief flash of pain and the warm well of blood in his mouth.
“How did we get here, Essek?” he asked. “What kind of trouble did you get yourself into?”
There was no response, not that he’d been expecting one.
When he looked up, he was alone again.
The spiders stopped going away, eventually.
He’d lost the focus to trance long ago- or at least, he thought it had been a long time. Whatever sense of time he’d had had rapidly eroded, and he spent his time now counting his own heartbeats, doing his best to mark out minutes by how long it took him to stop bleeding after he bit hard on his lip again.
He spent more and more time slipping in and out of an uneasy half-sleep, which only left him more and more disoriented. He hadn’t slept since he was a child, other than on rare occasions- usually when he was badly injured or ill, or had been awake for too long to do anything else. This, to be fair, wasn’t much different- only instead of three straight days of combat, it was isolation, stillness, silence.
Sometimes, he couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep- he’d find himself in his office, or his parents’ house, or lying dead in the Barbed Fields, only to wake to find himself sitting in his cell with blood he didn’t remember spilling spattered on the floor around him, only to wake to find himself curled up on the floor, silver chains spilling across the stone like water, his head in his mother’s lap.
“Umavi,” he whispered. “Umavi- Mother.”
“Hush,” she said, her voice perfectly even, just as it always was.
“Mother,” he said again, reaching a hand up. When it was inches from her cheek, she gave him a sharp look, and he let it fall. Still, he was unable to resist the urge to curl his fingers tightly into the loose fabric of her sleeve, and that, at least, she tolerated.
She was speaking, he realized after a few seconds of blankness. When he managed to focus on the words, he realized she was praying, a soft and steady litany he half remembered from when he was a child, still small enough to be held, young enough he still believed he’d prove to be something more someday. The spiders were still crawling, but they drew no closer than the outer reach of his chains.
The Umavi almost shined, white hair and white robes and white makeup, the only clean thing there was. Even the blood from Verin’s perpetually bitten lip didn’t drip onto her as it welled up in his mouth, thick and sharp.
“Mother,” he whispered again, curling even closer to her. The chains slithered over the floor like something living, and blood shone wet on the stone, and the spiders skittered and hissed in the corners, and the Umavi Thelyss kept praying, unaffected.
He only realized that she’d shifted into the traditional prayers for achess when he began to repeat them, return to the Light, return to the Light, return to the Light, and then he was crying, tears and snot and blood running down his chin and still not sullying the Umavi’s gloves.
“I don’t want to die,” he gasped. “Umavi. Mother. I don’t want to die.”
Her praying didn’t pause, but one hand smoothed down his tangled, greasy hair, and then he knew it wasn’t real, because he couldn’t remember her ever being so gentle, so warm, not when he was a child, not when he’d been mourning his father. The Umavi would not be sitting in a dirty prison cell, soothing a man already dead, even if he was her son.
Still, he didn’t have the strength to pull away. It was far too easy to just pretend.
Verin hid his face in his mother’s robes and sobbed until the world faded away again.
He ran out of dust on the floor to write in, so he dragged his fingers through the mess of blood on his chin to finish the prayers he was writing. Then he ran out of floor space, so he used the wall, tracing out more apologies and names and runes, the same macabre portrait of his instability as the half circle spreading around him, abruptly cut off where his chains began to choke him.
Everything tasted like blood. His hands were slippery with it, his chest, his wrists beneath the cuffs, and he found himself with his teeth digging into the skin of his forearms, like some animal part of his brain intended to bite off his hands like a moorbounder in a trap.
The comparison really wasn’t much of a stretch.
His mouth was full of blood that made him choke, and his wrists stung in the distant pinched way that everything hurt now, and there was blood spilling onto his shirt and pooling in his lap and if it spread much further it’d wash out some of the runes nearest to his knee, and he didn’t bother to stop. The blood kept falling.
It wasn’t like there was a point in stopping. He was already dead, there was no point in stopping.
He was getting dizzy.
He blinked, or maybe fell asleep, and when he opened his eyes again he was curled on his side. His hair was lying limp in the puddle of blood by his cheek. He stared at it for a while.
“Verin.”
Blood dripped sluggishly from his lips. Beside his stuttering heartbeat, it was the only sound.
“Verin,” someone said, and he was thirty again, curled into his dad’s side, trying to stifle his giggles as they watched Essek following their father’s echo around the room, trying to tag it with a spell.
“Missed,” their father called smugly, as another Ray of Frost went wide. Essek almost growled aloud before he seemed to remember himself enough to keep at least a semblance of decorum, readying himself again.
“Wanna see something fun?” their dad whispered in Verin’s ear. Verin nodded eagerly.
The next time Essek tried to attack, their dad dismissed the echo and reformed it in almost the same motion, just long enough for the spell to pass harmlessly through the space where it had been. It made a mocking gesture, and Essek turned to glare at them, hands curled into fists.
“That was mean, Father,” he said.
Their dad shrugged. “Should’ve been faster.”
It was kind of a cheap strategy, Verin had to admit, but he couldn’t help but burst out laughing at the look on Essek’s face. A moment later, his father joined him, his chuckles vibrating through his chest under Verin’s ear.
Essek’s face scrunched up in the way it did when he was trying not to cry or scream, and he turned on his heel and stomped off, tossing his braids angrily over his shoulder as he went. Their dad muffled his laughter into the top of Verin’s head as he dismissed his echo, and ruffled his hair.
“I’m gonna do that when I can make echoes,” Verin declared. His dad patted his shoulder.
“It doesn’t work as well in a real fight,” he admitted. “But it’s good for a prank.”
“Was Essek really mad?” Verin asked anxiously. The shoulder he was leaning against shifted as he shrugged.
“You know how he gets,” his dad said. “He’ll get over it in a day or two.”
Verin chewed on his lower lip a bit at that, not entirely satisfied, but he didn’t say anything more. For a moment, they sat in silence.
“Verin,” his father said, abruptly.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Verin,” he said again, except it sounded like he was far away, like he was underwater. “C’mon, get your head together, kiddo.”
Verin’s mouth was filling with blood.
“Dad?” he choked out, and then he was a dead man lying in a cell again, and his wrists were oozing more blood than he could afford to lose, and his father was kneeling over him, long braid over his shoulder, the silver eyes they shared, the same shiny scar on his lip that had fascinated Verin as a child.
“Hey, kid,” he said.
“Dad,” Verin managed, and spat out a mouthful of blood, not that it helped.
“You’ve gotten yourself into a spot, huh?” he asked, fingertips trailing over Verin’s cheekbone lightly.
Verin made a little choked noise, trying to press into the contact, but the collar slid over wounds on his neck and collarbones that he didn’t remember getting and he stopped, unable to summon the strength to lift his head.
“You did good, kid,” his dad whispered. “It’s okay. You did good.”
“I thought I could do it,” Verin mumbled through numb lips. “I thought I c-could, could do what you did, until you came back-”
“I know, kiddo.” A hand carded through his hair, uncaring of how it was tacky with blood. “It’s okay. You can rest.”
“I miss you so much.”
His father sighed, and said nothing.
They stayed there for a while, father and son, the two Taskhands of Bazzoxan, lost to its brutality. Neither one at home, only one ever going to return.
Verin floated there for a while, breathing in the metallic smell of blood, his dad’s hand in his hair.
Eventually, his eyes slipped closed.
Something dragged him up out of unconsciousness again, and he blinked until the bloodstains on the floor resolved into clear shapes again. He still didn’t have the strength to sit up again, but he managed to lift a hand to dip his fingers into the puddled blood and begin to write, one of the stories Essek had read to him as a child.
There was a vague sound somewhere, sometime after he’d given up on writing and gone back to biting halfheartedly at his wrists. He registered, distantly, that he didn’t have the blood left to lose, but the panicked animal part of his brain felt very far away, and he didn’t stop.
Suddenly, the entire world became noise. Verin keened and tried to curl around his head, but found he lacked the strength. The sound- something grinding, deafeningly loud, and beyond that the sounds of shouting- continued, and Verin wondered if it was the sound of death.
He’d always figured it would be quiet, somehow.
He didn’t realize at first that the wall was undulating, moving, in a vaguely familiar way, and then it split open, peeling back from a rapidly-expanding doorway.
Light spilled onto the floor, turning the blood red. Verin would have screamed if he hadn’t lost his voice almost entirely long ago, and squeezed his eyes shut against it, but not before he managed to see the person standing in the opening with a hand out- a human, copper-haired and pale, a twisted expression of shock on his face.
There was more shouting, and the light fluctuated in ways that made his head throb, and Verin didn’t have the energy to pick apart the Common, or to try to pay any attention to whatever vision his failing brain had conjured as he finally bled out. Instead, he just turned his face into the floor as much as he could and waited to die.
The sounds of shouting and footsteps grew nearer, and the light falling across him dimmed as someone stood over him, blocking the doorway. They yelled something, and for a moment it almost sounded like Essek’s name.
A hand touched his shoulder, withdrew when he flinched, and landed on his cheek instead. He ignored it.
“Verin,” his brother’s voice said. “Verin, please look at me.”
Verin tried to breathe, and choked on the blood still pooling in his mouth instead. The hallucination-Essek dragged him up enough to cough it out, joining the pool on the floor, and finally Verin opened his eyes.
Essek looked terrified in a way Verin hadn’t seen since they were small children, and that was strange enough that even in his exhaustion he took notice. The expression didn’t make sense, on an adult Essek’s face.
The smudge of what looked like soot across his cheekbone didn’t make sense, either, or the way his overlong hair fell into his eyes, or the simple clothes he was wearing. Verin groaned, the sound scraping painfully in his abused throat.
“Essek!” someone shouted again, and Essek’s hands fluttered anxiously, landing on the chain. He murmured something arcane under his breath, and looked back over his shoulder with barely-disguised panic.
“Fuck it,” he muttered, and cast something strong enough to make Verin’s teeth hurt, sharp and ozonic. He followed Essek’s gaze, and watched as the chains melted away like mercury, quick and silent, like they’d never been there at all.
“Didn’t think death would be like this,” Verin tried to say, but it came out garbled and incomprehensible, barely even noise at all. Whatever Essek understood from it made his jaw tighten.
“Caleb!” Essek shouted over his shoulder, and the human still standing by the doorway waved to someone out of view as Essek turned back to Verin.
“It’ll be fine,” he whispered, resting their foreheads together. “You’re going to be fine, Verin, you’ll be fine.”
Other humanoid shapes were gathering into the cell, and there were sounds like gasps, and the world was spinning out of Verin’s grasp again but he curled his fingers into Essek’s sleeve and leaned into his hold as much as he could, and the blood was running faster than before as Verin watched with a dull fascination, and Essek cursed sharply.
“Jester- Jester,” Essek said, voice high and thin. “The chains, the chains were keeping him stable, he-”
“He’s bleeding out,” another voice said, and a tiefling knelt beside them, placing glowing hands on his arms. Something, just slightly, clarified in his vision.
“We have to go,” someone said, and Verin felt the shift of Essek’s shirt as he nodded. There was a mutter of arcane words, a twisting of the world, and then suddenly the world was blinding, white and piercing and all-encompassing.
Verin screamed through his shattered throat and buried his face in Essek’s shoulder, squeezing his eyes shut. Something soft settled over his head, and the light dimmed. For a long time, he shook in his brother’s hold, dizzy and floaty.
There was shuffling, and then a hand touched his shoulder. He flinched, and the motion made his head spin.
“It’s okay,” Essek whispered. “It’s fine, I promise, it’s over, you’re safe.”
Verin whined, wordlessly, and the hand on his shoulder- not Essek’s, someone unfamiliar- shifted. The world twisted and tilted beneath him as he was- lifted, he thought. He almost panicked, but Essek’s voice stayed near him, murmuring softly in his ear. Besides, he didn’t have the energy to fight it.
It wasn’t long before he was set down again, on something soft, and someone- Essek- carefully pulled the dark fabric back from his eyes. The room wasn’t the true lightlessness of the cell, but it was still dim enough not to make him hide his eyes again. Essek leaned over him still, and beside him were two people, a blue tiefling and a firbolg.
The firbolg leaned down to place a broad, soft palm on his forehead, and there was a rush of tingling warmth as something seemed to crawl over his skin before it faded. When it did, there was an odd feeling of vacancy in his head, his wrists, his body. It took him a moment to realize that it was the feeling of pain lessening.
Verin groaned, curling half onto the side so he could cough some of the remaining blood from his mouth. A moment later, it disappeared with a wave of Essek’s hand.
“‘sek?” he whispered.
“Hey, Verin,” Essek said, with a relieved grin that flashed his eyeteeth. “How’re you feeling?”
“I want to wake up now,” Verin said plaintively. “I, I want- don’t, please, just don’t do this to me, please.”
Essek’s expression twisted in confusion. “Verin, what- you are awake, I promise.”
Verin whined, and pressed his face into the hand Essek still had near his head, unable to articulate his blurry thoughts and unable to resist the contact.
“Okay,” Essek said quietly. “Okay.”
“Rest,” the firbolg said, deep and resonant, and Verin blinked up at him for a moment uncomprehendingly.
Slowly, he curled his fingers around Essek’s wrist, and Essek’s other hand came to smooth his filthy hair.
Quietly, softly, Verin fell asleep.
He drifted, for a while, never fully awake but often not really asleep. He had the vague impression of magic that felt like it was bubbling in his veins, and someone humming a tune he remembered his father singing long ago. He couldn’t remember the words, barely recalled the tune until he heard it again, but it summoned the feeling of his father’s hands.
It was incongruous enough that Verin struggled back towards wakefulness, even though his entire body felt heavy and useless, and he couldn’t bring himself to move. Eventually, he managed to open his eyes, squinting even in the extremely dim light.
He wasn’t in the cell, that much was clear- the ceiling above him was too pale, the surface below him too soft. And Essek was sitting in a chair beside him, fingertips idly toying with the grimy hem of Verin’s sleeve, staring down at a book in his lap, brow furrowed in consternation.
Verin watched him for a few moments longer, listening to the humming- it was Essek, he realized now, and he hadn’t realized that Essek even knew that song- until the stillness grew too much and he rasped, “Am I dreaming?”
Essek jumped, almost dropping the book before he scooped it back into his lap, and fixed his attention on Verin with an intensity he near-exclusively reserved for dunamancy. “You’re awake.”
“Am I dreaming?” Verin repeated.
“No,” Essek said. “We- the Mighty Nein and I- got you out.”
Verin attempted to process that. It wasn’t the first time he’d dreamed of being somewhere else only to wake up and realize it was fake again, but those, at least, had always been somewhere he knew- his childhood bedroom, or his quarters in Bazzoxan, sometimes. Not an unfamiliar room, with dark red sheets and Essek sitting beside him with tousled hair and a soft sweater he didn’t recognize.
“Verin?” Essek asked, and Verin realized he’d been sitting in silence.
“How long?” he murmured.
Essek sighed, biting halfheartedly at his lower lip. “Since you disappeared… a bit over two months.”
Verin stared at the ceiling for a few seconds.
“Oh,” he said.
“It took a long time to even realize we should be looking,” Essek said quietly. “We didn’t even hear until a month after your soldiers realized you were missing, and they thought you were dead. Even once we knew you weren’t it took… longer to find you than I’d have preferred.”
Verin took a breath.
“The people with me?”
“Dead,” Essek said. “I’m sorry.”
“Is he?”
Essek grimaced at the floor. “No. The man who took you, he’s… a very powerful mage from the Empire. We’ve been trying to stop him for a while now.”
“I see.”
Verin ran his tongue over his teeth for a moment before he raised a heavy hand to rub it over his face.
“My hair is disgusting,” he said eventually. Essek huffed.
“There’s a bath, if you feel up to it,” he said. “You’re not physically injured- at least, not severely- because the Imprisonment spell kept you stable, which means that you aren’t experiencing any muscle atrophy or malnutrition- you were essentially put in stasis, your biggest problem was blood loss, but there’s likely to still be long-term-”
“Please,” Verin said. “Stop talking.”
Essek actually laughed at that, but complied. Verin levered himself into a seated position, brushing off his attempts to help, and looked around the room a little more closely- it looked bizarre, the architecture far from anything he’d seen, though there were familiar shades to it.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“A demiplane,” Essek answered. “We figured it was safest, since that way you can’t be Scried on- speaking of.”
He fumbled in a pocket and pulled out an amulet on a delicate golden chain- a match, Verin realized, to the one Essek himself was wearing. “Put this on.”
Verin tipped his head so that Essek could put the chain around his neck, and swallowed uncomfortably as his fingers brushed the scabs and scars on his throat and clavicle, remnants of the collar he’d been put in like a misbehaving moorbounder. The amulet settled over his chest, and he toyed with the chain uncomfortably as he tried to take a breath.
It felt like the walls were closing in on him again, and he shuddered, fingers curling around the chain until it bit into his skin, and then he yanked it off his head again, the chain getting tangled in his hair but at least it wasn’t touching him.
“Sorry,” he said, quietly. “I can’t.”
Essek’s expression didn’t change, carefully neutral. After a moment, he nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll find something other than a necklace.”
He reached out, and Verin flinched, but all he did was carefully pick the chain from his hair, gentle, ignoring the filth undoubtedly caked in and covering the amulet, now.
“You said something about a bath?” Verin rasped.
He didn’t wait for an answer before he went to stand, and the world tilted around him, his knees almost folding beneath him. Essek’s hands flashed out, and then Verin wasn’t falling anymore, though his head was still spinning.
“Let me go,” he said.
“Go slow,” Essek cautioned, and carefully released the spell. Verin closed his eyes and breathed, waiting for the vertigo to settle.
It took longer than it should’ve, but eventually he ended up in the bath, the water immediately clouding with blood. Verin watched dully as the water turned red, dried blood softening, the layers of filth slowly lifting away.
There was a gentle, tentative touch to his head, and Verin tipped his head back into Essek’s hands, letting him work his fingers through the mess his hair had become and smooth out the tangles.
“I was still out when my braids got undone,” Verin said, a bit absently. “Woke up and they were torn out.”
There was a sympathetic hiss from behind him as Essek lifted a blob of water to run over Verin’s hairline without getting in his eyes. He didn’t say anything, and neither did Verin.
It was a long time before Essek’s ministrations slowed, and Verin stirred from where he’d almost fallen asleep. Essek ran his fingers through Verin’s hair a few more times, then asked quietly, “Do you want me to redo them?”
“Please,” Verin said, a little more desperately than he’d meant to.
When he was mostly dry, wearing borrowed clothes with a towel slung around his shoulders, Essek hovered cross-legged in the air behind him and ran a comb gently through his hair a few times before he began to separate it into sections. Verin was silent as he worked.
Verin didn’t realize he was crying until tears dropped onto his hand, and he pressed his mouth to the back of his hand and squeezed his eyes shut. Essek’s fingers paused as he curled in on himself, shoulders shaking.
Hesitantly, awkwardly, arms wrapped around his shoulders, Essek leaning against his back, chin on the top of his head.
“I thought I was dead,” Verin whispered. “I thought I was going to die there, chained up like a fucking animal.”
Essek pressed his forehead to Verin’s unfinished braids and said, “I’m so sorry, Verin.”
“It’s not your fault,” Verin muttered.
“I think it is,” Essek said with a hysterical little laugh, leaning back and returning to the plaits. “Da’leth was almost certainly trying to get to me, and I… everyone else I’d be sure to come for was already here, and safe, and out of his reach.”
“I know,” Verin said. “I knew it was about you from the start.”
“How?”
“He called me the younger Thelyss,” Verin said. “Not the youngest. And I don’t think I’d be useful to him for much else, anyway.”
Essek tilted Verin’s head to get better access to one of the smaller braids, and took a careful breath, the kind that indicated he was thinking hard about what to say next.
“Do you know why?” Essek asked.
Verin sighed. “I’ve heard the rumors, but- Essek, I don’t want to think about it right now. I just… I’m tired.”
“Okay,” Essek murmured.
He finished the braids and brushed them forwards over Verin’s shoulders, fussing with them for what was probably an unnecessary amount of time. Verin didn’t care- if anything, he was reluctant to pull away too.
Essek leaned over his shoulder again, an illusion hovering in his hand, a miniature replication of the back of Verin’s hair. The braids were nothing fancy, really, though they had the unmistakable patterns of Den Thelyss- just the same everyday braids he did for himself any time he was going to be seen in public.
It was surprising, somehow, how much it made him feel more like himself. He was still shaky, and the world still felt slightly unreal at the edges, but in clean clothes and his hair braided properly he felt at least more like a person, instead of an animal chained up to die like garbage.
“I’ll go get you some food,” Essek said, drifting towards the edge of the bed to put his feet on the ground again. Before he could go more than a few steps towards the door, Verin grabbed his hand.
“Please,” Verin said, quietly. “I don’t… want to be alone.”
Essek softened, and changed directions, heading towards a bell pull that Verin hadn’t noticed until then. It made no noise, but Essek crouched anyway, opening a small trapdoor on the floor.
A few moments later, a small, fuzzy head with triangle-shaped ears popped out.
“Hello,” Essek said politely. “Would you bring us some food? Something Xhorhassian, please. And- some keltaly, if you could.”
The creature mrrowled at Essek and disappeared again.
“What,” Verin said.
Essek stood, moving back to sit on the bed. “Caleb employs cat servants in his tower.”
Verin stared at him for a second. Then, he started laughing.
Somehow, impossibly, the fucking cats made a weight lift from his shoulders, and he leaned back in the bed and and threw an arm over his eyes. Essek, too, started to laugh, a sound Verin didn’t think he’d heard since their teenage years, and laid down beside him.
It wasn’t okay. He wasn’t sure it would ever be okay, when there were still rings of scarred skin around his throat and wrists, when he and Essek hadn’t talked about the rumors of treason, when there were still unnatural shadows in the corners of his vision. None of it was okay, really.
But for now, Verin’s hair was braided, and he was in a demiplane being waited on by cats, and his brother was beside him, laughing like they were kids again.
It wasn’t okay. But maybe, someday, it could be.