Work Text:
Emet-Selch is not sure when he lost the ring.
For the first few passages between bodies, he was careful. It was easy to place the ring aside somewhere safe and then return for it, walking through the worlds however he wished. But at some point, in some crisis, he didn't think -- and now it is gone. He has contemplated going to look for it, searching out the last place he remembers having it, but time has begun to smudge and blur, the human pace of his borrowed bodies wrenching his perspective awry for lifetimes.
"All I ask is that you don't forget me," Hythlodaeus had said. He'd smiled, like nothing was wrong, and pressed the ring into Hades' hands. Generally speaking, Amaurotines eschewed any kind of adornment, anything that set one individual aside from another, but lovers sometimes exchanged rings as tokens. Looking back on it, Hades thinks that Hythlodaeus was finally putting a name to what they had, to the potential that had always lain between them.
"I will never forget you," he'd promised, his hand closing around the ring. "I could not."
And truly, he has not. It matters little that he has lost some physical token. Yet it fills him with foreboding all the same -- like it's some kind of symbol, some kind of metaphor, some kind of sign that his steps are bending the wrong way and taking him away from his true goal. The thought is impossible: he has always been clear on his duty, on his goals. Unlike Lahabrea's mad drive and Elidibus' slow fragmentation of memory, Emet-Selch knows himself to be whole and entire, and he knows his destination. Step by step, it takes him toward Hythlodaeus.
"I will not forget you," he says, aloud, looking down at his empty palm. "Hythlodaeus, I will never forget you."
But when did he let it go?
For what moment did it seem insignificant, subsumed by some other goal, some other will?
"I will bring you back," Emet-Selch says, to the world, to Hythlodaeus. "I will never be swayed from this purpose."
When did he leave it behind, and why?