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It’s quiet in Moonrise Towers. There is little after their defeat of Ketheric Thorm, the victory soured by its cost: Dame Aylin sobbing over the body of her beloved Isobel, Jaheira holding vigil for her departed Harpers, the others haunted by the memory of their last party and the absence of so many they fought so hard to save. The sun will come, Halsin knows this; with Ketheric dead, the day will finally break, and life will return to these blighted lands, but the Shadow Curse has not slackened its grip without claiming as many victims as possible.
Halsin knows this too: the weight of his century-long mistake heavier now than since it began, in the silence before its lifting.
So he keeps working. Despite the exhaustion—and he’s been exhausted since Last Light fell, fighting to keep the torchlight burning above Art Cullagh’s body—he collects the corpses of the slaughtered cultists. The soil of Reithwin and its decomposers will need proper sustenance now, not hollow shadows. Putting so many bodies in the ground is long, slow work, but there’s a comfort to the repetitive gestures, and Oak Father willing, one day he will be able to return and see the fruits of his labor. Life, seeded from so much death.
It’s early in the morning when Halsin first sees the tracks: broken cobblestone and rough furrows leading out of the Towers into the gnarled brush of the Shadowlands, fresh marks but indistinct. There are no bits of foliage from a shambling mound, or fur from a shadow-cursed beast, no lingering cold or humanoid footprints, hardly any distinct features at all. The scrapes of claws here and there, a kind of serpentine lash whipping from side to side, the indiscriminate barreling of something massive running into the night.
Halsin sprints inside, half expecting to find fresh corpses to join the mass grave, but everything is as he left it. Tents pitched around a smoldering campfire, a muffled symphony of snores, even the occasional mutter from Gale’s tent as he gives lectures in his dreams.
He thinks about waking someone to investigate with him.
He thinks about how hard-won their rest is.
He thinks about Cyrus, the amnesiac elven aasimar hanging onto his own morality by the edge of a blade— often his own. When the magic between undying father and prodigal daughter snapped, Cyrus’ first instinct was to fall upon his sword, emptying himself of what little vitality he had left to try to bleed Isobel back to life.
Never before had Halsin tended to a wound so stubbornly set against being healed. Blood that would not clot, flesh that would not knit itself back together, and Cyrus who would not look at him, nothing but emptiness in his mismatched eyes. One grey as storm clouds, the other burns scarlet and marks his heritage as clearly as the ruby flecks embedded in his scars or the jagged, bloodied steel of his wings when they manifest. Divine and profane in equal measure.
Let them all rest. Halsin decides to go alone.
But to be safe, he shifts into bear form. His blood bubbles as his skin ripples, swells, reforms, hot and heavy when he hits the ground again. The rush of sensations—the soil damp, the air cool, the scents and sounds sharp—is a pleasure like submersion, sinking into another body with each step and sway of his new form. He stretches, his spine cracking agreeably at an angle he can never quite reach as an elf, and moves into the shadows.
The tracks swerve and stumble, blundering through petrified underbrush and stumbling over stone. The creature leads Halsin deep into the Shadow-Cursed Lands, and even as those shadows part around him for the first time in a century, his fur prickles. He hears scrabbling, thrashing branches, and low whining, all growing louder the longer he follows this trail. As the sky begins to blush pale, he discovers the noises’ source. At the curse’s heart is an oak tree shuddering and howling as if caught in a violent storm.
And edging closer, Halsin sees it: encased in the hollow of the tree’s roots is a monster. It is crouched, its many spine-laden limbs folded in on themselves to fit in such a tight space, and it reeks so strongly of death that Halsin’s hackles raise. Not the cold undeath of the shadow curse, but pure carrion— wet, metallic, festering.
The bear wants to lunge. Dread unspools from his entrails through his veins to his pounding heart, the quick rhythm of a long-dormant prey instinct, but Halsin shoves that beast down. He is better than this body telling him to strike first.
…Though he cannot will his muscles to relax completely, an animal’s sympathetic tension flickering beyond the edges of rationality.
Halsin waits, and he watches, and he listens to the creature keen. It is, he realizes, embracing itself. One set of arms grasps at its skull, a pair of wicked horns and tusks jutting out between its hands. The other pair hugs its torso, and when Halsin tilts his head to the side, he can see the scratches on its back. Ranging from scrapes to gouges, dozens of ichorous black wounds mark where it has dug its talons into its own flesh. Where to hold itself together or tear itself apart, Halsin cannot tell, but he is reminded of a rabbit in a snare, the wire cutting deeper into its throat with every thrash.
Predator or no, this thing is terrified.
Wildshape drops. Still crouching low, Halsin steps toward the creature with his hands raised and his gaze lowered. A patchwork of humanoid and bestial posturing, his best guess at what this creature will interpret as non-aggression.
The trembling of the tree stills, but only for a heartbeat before the thing lets out a shrill scream.
“It’s alright,” Halsin says quickly, first in Common and then in the language of animals. “Can you understand me? I’m not going to hurt you.”
The creature shrieks again and bolts— or tries to, but the ridges of its back are caught in the root system above it, and when it doesn’t move, it just pulls harder, limbs scrambling, skin tearing.
“Stop, you’re stuck! You are going to hurt yourself!” It wails piteously, a set of claws raking up its back like it means to tear its own spine out. “Please, I know you’re scared, but I mean you no harm. You must relax. Try to breathe. In, out, in…”
He demonstrates, and the creature must be able to comprehend because the flailing dies down as it begins to mimic him. Its breaths are ragged but soften with each shuddering inhale until it and the oak tree calm, and then it’s quiet, save for the creature’s heaving and the distant hum of insects returning to this land.
“Good,” Halsin murmurs, “very good. My most sincere apologies for startling you. Are you alright?” The creature responds by tucking in on itself, drawing its long limbs to its chest. “Can you understand me?” A beat, and then it nods. “Can you speak?” It lets out a strained croak and shakes its head. “That’s alright, we can keep communicating like this. May I come closer?”
The creature croaks again, a warble almost resembling speech before it whines and shakes its head.
“You are injured, I am a healer, I could—”
Another sharp, anguished sound, the hands wrapped around its skull tighten, nails biting into its jaw and scalp, and Halsin’s heart lurches. He opens his mouth to protest, but then the creature pulls its hands away, and he sees its face for the first time: a distended jaw, a long forked tongue, a fractal maw of razor-sharp teeth, and a pair of mismatched eyes.
One grey, one red.
“Cyrus…?!” The creature moans in low, somber confirmation. “What happened to you?! By Silvanus… L-let me return to Moonrise Towers, I’ll come back with Wyll or Astarion, you can use the tadpole to communicate with them, and—”
He takes a step back, but those eyes go wide, and Cyrus lashes out. Perhaps he only intends to grab Halsin’s arm, but the claws snag against his skin. Only for a second—no sooner does the blood well up than Cyrus recoils—yet the keratin cuts deep and wicked, slicing through soft tissue down to the bone with just a stray swipe. Grunting, Halsin cradles his arm to his chest and summons up a quick spell. Not enough to heal it, or even ease the pain, but it staunches the bleeding
“Well…” Somehow he manages a dry laugh, even as his stomach churns with that same primal unease he felt in his bear form. He racks his mind for anything he’s encountered in his studies about monstrosities like this, but all he can muster up is that ancient sense of dread. Of predation. “I guess you don’t want me to leave, then?” Cyrus makes a chittering noise like a sob and presses himself as close to the tree as he can. “It’s alright. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”
He also knows that Cyrus won’t accept this comfort yet. The specifics of what happened after Last Light fell are still a mystery to him, but he knows that Cyrus spent a week avoiding Wyll, that his guilt eats him down to his marrow, that there is no simple cure for an infection that deep.
But Halsin is patient.
He pulls a roll of bandages from his pack and wraps them around his forearm. Again, a superficial treatment, but he only has so much magic left. If one strike hurt this much, he can’t imagine how much pain Cyrus is in, still seething in his self-inflicted wounds.
“I’d like to heal you,” he announces as he puts the bandages away, “if you will let me.” Cyrus has slumped down, hiding his head in the dirt. His eyes flicker over to Halsin before closing. “Please, Cyrus, I promised you I was here to share in shouldering your burdens. Help me keep that promise by letting me help you.”
A pause, Cyrus nods, and Halsin moves closer, stepping with gentle deliberation. He kneels in front of Cyrus’ head, and those eyes slide open, half-lidded and heavy. Closer now, he sees the tears that have bubbled up beneath them.
“May I touch you?” Another nod, and Halsin settles one hand under Cyrus’ jaw and one against his cheek, taking care not to catch himself on the teeth or tusks or anything else about this body that makes it hard to hold. “I have you,” he wipes the tears away from Cyrus’ dry, leathery skin, “I have you.”
Every last drop of magic that Halsin has, he pours into Cyrus’ body, reaching out to the nature stirring around them and siphoning off slivers of its reawakening. The ancient roots sinking back into the soil, the leaves seeking sunlight for the first time in a century, the reanimated vascular tissue conducting between them, one harmonious, vital pulse that Halsin weaves around Cyrus. The wounds on his face close over, then the scratches on his sides and finally even the long gouges down his back stitch together and turn pale. As the magic works its way across his form, Cyrus shudders, but by the time it leaves him, he’s sunk deep into Halsin’s touch, curled up almost like a dog instead of a monster.
“There,” Halsin strokes Cyrus under his chin and is rewarded with a content purring sound, “I’m sure that feels much better, doesn’t it?”
Cyrus nods and presses his nose to Halsin’s flank, nuzzling him as best he can without goring him— though the tip of his horn still pokes a hole through Halsin’s shirt. The larger problem of this violent form remains, and Halsin’s thoughts soon turn to what could have caused it. If it was a curse or a spell, he’d need Shadowheart or Gale to remove it. And what could it be if not one of those two?
Unless…?
“You know, I’ve lost the run of myself in wildshape before. If my blood runs too hot with anger or another strong emotion, it can be difficult to find my way back to myself. Do you think it is possible that something like that has happened to you?”
Cyrus lifts himself up to look Halsin in the eye and nod, for the first time eagerly.
“I cannot promise that this will work, but I can try to guide you through what I do in such situations.” Cyrus gives a shriek somewhere between desperation and affirmation, and Halsin rubs the top of his head. “First, you need to relax. Concentrate on your breathing. Clear your mind. You are safe right now, I promise.” Obediently, Cyrus closes his eyes and settles into a rhythm of deep, slow inhales and exhales. “Good. Very good. Now, focus on yourself, as purely as you can. No matter what body you are in, there is a part of you that is fundamentally, essentially you, regardless of your form. Find it.”
Whining in protest, Cyrus opens his eyes again and shakes his head.
“You can do it,” Halsin insists. “I know you are still yourself. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have shown so much regret when you scratched me.” Cyrus bleats louder, nearly yanking away, but Halsin holds him steady. “Easy, easy, I know— but you may not. Hm. You only have so many memories to draw from, don’t you? And the Urge may make it difficult to navigate your sense of self even in the best of circumstances.” A tremble between his hands tells Halsin all he needs to know. “I believe I can help with this too. I am going to tell you what I see when I look at you, and I want you to promise to try to believe me. Every word that I say will come from the heart.”
He waits until Cyrus nods before shuffling closer, no longer content with merely cradling his face. He wraps his arms around Cyrus’ torso as best he can and squeezes, as if he can press Cyrus back into his body.
He whispers, “You are so strong. I have never known someone to have lived so little and suffered for so much of it, and yet you have kept going, not only for yourself but for everyone you’ve met. Your resiliency is second only to your kindness.” Cyrus protests with a sharp cry, and Halsin’s voice raises to match it, praying for the strength of the Oak Father’s roots. “I see you on the battlefield, how you use your body as a shield for the others, and I see you when the fighting is done and you insist that everyone else is tended to first. You give yourself to others so constantly, so thoughtlessly. Give to yourself too— the grace of being yourself. Do not fight your demons so bitterly that you lose sight of who you really are.” Forehead resting against Cyrus’ shoulder, he feels the monstrous form quake beneath him. “Come back to me, please.”
It ripples, flesh boiling beneath the skin before— pop .
Halsin is accustomed to the shower of mud that accompanies his wildshape transformation. What he is not used to is a spray of blood, hot and metallic as it lashes from Cyrus’ recovered body. Freckled, auburn-haired, sculpted to carry the weight of the world but shivering just as badly as the creature was. Cyrus stares down at himself, blinking, like he cannot quite believe that the shape he has taken is his own.
“Th—” The word dies in a ragged gasp as Cyrus looks up and sees the blood splattering Halsin. “Oh, oh fuck, I’m sorry.”
“I have no issue with getting dirty now and again,” Halsin reassures him, wiping some of the blood from his brow. “What matters more is that you are yourself again. It soothes my soul to see you.”
But Cyrus just shakes harder, eyes wide and fixed to Halsin’s injured arm. “I didn’t— I’m— I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
Halsin is quick to hug him again, drawing him close. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
“You shouldn’t…” Cyrus returns the hug, even as his voice breaks and tears well up in his eyes, “You shouldn’t want to be anywhere near me.” Nails dig into Halsin’s back, duller but no less desperate than the monster’s claws.
Undaunted, Halsin pulls Cyrus into his lap. “I have you. I promise, you are safe now.”
“But you aren’t. ”
“I am.” Cyrus buries his sobs into his neck while Halsin strokes his hair. “I can handle you.”
Whether Cyrus believes that or not, he weeps wordlessly until the last of his energy is spent. Halsin keeps holding him close as the dawn breaks above them. Strands of golden light wind down from the sky to suffuse the land. The scintillating threads knit themselves around the tree, stitching across the desiccated roots and wiping away the blood.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Halsin asks softly.
“No.” Cyrus’ voice is deep and hoarse, and he tries to clear his throat with a small cough. “But you should know… When we first arrived in the Shadowlands, I was visited by… something. An entity from my past that encourages my bloodlust. It told me that I had to kill Isobel, that I would be rewarded for it. When I refused, when Marcus kidnapped her, that was why I attacked Wyll. My punishment for failing.”
The memory’s wound is still raw enough that Cyrus stiffens. Halsin rubs small circles into his back until he relaxes again.
“I didn’t want to… I didn’t mean to… but that didn’t matter to it, Isobel was dead, so it came back to… This was its reward. From my past, it said, from my—” He swallows thickly and shakes his head. “The Slayer. That’s what it called it. Snapped its fingers, and something in my blood… I don’t know how else to describe it, it woke up , like it had always been there with the Urge, dormant this entire time in my veins, waiting to— to change me.” Cyrus’ voice cracks, and he pulls away from Halsin’s neck to stare up at him, eyes wet and wide and pleading. “I couldn’t fight it. I tried, I tried, but it broke my body down, molded me into… Gods, I was so scared.”
“Few things are so terrifying as to have one’s body not merely overridden but overwritten.” Halsin releases his hold on Cyrus to rummage through his pack. “To call such a thing a gift is cruelty masquerading as favor, regardless of what it turns you into.”
Cyrus’ jaw tightens, and he glances away. “It didn’t turn me into anything that wasn’t already there.”
“You are not a monster, Cyrus, and you will feel more like yourself once you’ve had something to eat and drink.”
Halsin offers him his canteen and a goodberry. For a moment, it seems like Cyrus is going to argue more, but he pops the goodberry into his mouth and gulps the water down for a long, quiet while.
“…Thank you,” Cyrus says when he lowers the canteen again. “I should have said that first. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t found me.”
“I am more than happy to help.” Halsin has cleaned the blood from his hands and lifts the rag to Cyrus’ cheeks, rubbing at the streaks of dried tears. “And I promise to keep helping, in whatever way I can. I may be able to teach you to master this form such that it cannot be forced upon you again, and the city will have more resources for researching your condition than we have access to at present.”
“The city,” Cyrus echoes dully. “More bad memories, more ghosts, more blood blood blood…”
“This will not be your fate forever.”
“And what about for now?” Cyrus presses the heel of his palm to his forehead, no doubt chasing down that ever-present headache. “S-sorry, I don’t mean to appear ungrateful…”
“It is a fair question,” Halsin assures him. He tries to touch Cyrus’ face again, but the other man turns away. “Tell me what is on your mind.”
A pause, and then, “I keep trying to do the right thing. I want to believe that I can do it: help people, save the world, be a hero, but it doesn’t. Stop. Every time I start to hope, it just gets worse. What if this Slayer is what I’ve always been? What I always will be? And even if it isn’t…” He looks down at his hands, which open and close uselessly in the sliver of space between their bodies. “What do I do now?”
Halsin takes those hands, fingers perpetually stained with a divine crimson glow, and squeezes. “You could help me with something.” That gets Cyrus to lift his head at least. “Come, let us take a walk.”
Cyrus rises like a newborn foal, legs uncertain and stumbling in his first few steps, as if still discovering where his body begins and ends. Halsin has seen many new druids struggle to reorient themselves after wildshaping for the first time— it is a process that one can only ever do alone. But Cyrus is not alone as they begin to walk together. The land takes them in as they take in the land, the green grass that has burst beneath their feet and the blue sky that has blossomed above their heads. Nature breathes anew, and Halsin drinks it deep into his lungs. The fresh flowers, the buzzing bees, the sunlight aching, warm, enveloping them.
“Where are we going?” Cyrus asks.
“I can’t say,” Halsin replies, “we’re looking for a good patch of soil.” He pulls out a pouch and hands it to Cyrus, who peers at the pebble-like seeds inside. “Morning glory. By Silvanus’ fortune, I first collected the seeds from this land to propagate them within the Grove, but when the Shadow Curse fell, I found I couldn’t bring myself to waste them. For a century now, I have preserved them, waiting… hoping for all these decades that I would be able to return here and plant them again.”
“Oh, that’s beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever grown anything before.”
“It is never too late to develop an appreciation for gardening, or any other hobbies.”
“It would be nice to be good at something other than killing.” Cyrus rubs the twinned puncture wounds on the side of his neck. “And dying.”
“When all of this is over, you will have plenty of time to discover what brings you joy. Centuries, even.” Halsin does not know how to impress upon Cyrus just how much living he will have left to do after they defeat the Absolute. At a glance, half a millennia, minimum, with these few agonizing months eventually distant, if not forgotten, but that kind of perspective is hard to grasp with only a few weeks’ worth of memories. It comforts Halsin, at least, to think that time will cure this wounded existence, as it cures all others. “But for now, let us stop here.”
They’ve found a sunny patch near the banks of the river surrounding Reithwin. Halsin kneels to test the earth, no longer dusty and thin but once more teeming with life and ripe for sowing. Cyrus sits down beside him and passes him the pouch of seeds. Halsin takes it and Cyrus’ hand both, pouring half the seeds into his upturned palm.
“Here, we will plant these a few inches apart.”
Cyrus blinks. “Um… How?”
“Dig into the earth a little bit with your fingers, just deep enough to make space for the seed, stick it in, and cover it back up again.” Halsin demonstrates as he speaks, relishing the crumble and squish of the fresh dirt in his hands. His own connection to nature is sustained more through fauna than flora, but to touch Toril like this, to change its face with such small, intimate gestures as this, he feels the land stretching out around them.
Cyrus watches him intently before prodding at the ground. There is a moment as his fingers first sink into the dirt, plunging deeper than he should for planting, and though the rest of his body stills, his eyes widen. He pulls up a fistful of soil, stares at a worm that wriggles out along his finger, and lets it all fall back to the ground in slow drips.
“Okay.” Cyrus copies Halsin now, tucking his first seed into a small divot. He lays both hands over it when he buries it again, as if in prayer. “Okay. This is nice.”
They work silently and slowly. It is simple work, but they each take their time with it. Halsin is reverent as a matter of faith, Cyrus as a matter of imitation, but Halsin suspects it might be deeper than mimicry. Once or twice, he even swears he catches the other man smiling. Still tight-lipped and small—not like that toothy grin Halsin glimpsed only once when they flirted at the tiefling party—but an improvement from the sad frown he’s usually wearing.
“What will these grow into?” Cyrus asks as they’re finishing up.
“Morning glories. Are you familiar?” Cyrus shakes his head. “They are beautiful plants, resilient too, but their flowers are ephemeral things, lasting only a day. They unfurl with the dawn and wither away before the sun sets again. But the next sunrise brings new blooms, and so the cycle repeats, again and again, until the first frost.”
“So fleeting…”
“And yet it endures.”
Cyrus buries his last seed, but his hands remain pressed to the ground, fingers dug into the dirt, eyes fixed to this pinpoint of land where life is taking root. He frowns at it, as if expecting the vine to emerge right then and there to meet his caress. “So what do we do now?”
“We wait.” Halsin takes him by the chin and lifts his head, Cyrus’ breath hitching as he meets Halsin’s gaze. “Sometimes, that is all we can do, as damnably, impossibly hard as it is. We tend, we nurture, we care, but we also wait. And one day, I promise you, something new will grow.”