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For the better part of his forty-odd years on this world, Kattigan Vale had been known to put his face to the flames. He kept dangerous company, the kind that would burn you from the inside out and leave an empty husk behind. Part of him did this because he was dangerous. Part of him wanted to be a husk. A hollowed out tree, bark encrusted with ash and soot, ready to disappear at the slightest breeze. He wanted to be dry timber, a forest that had not seen a drop of rain in decades. He wanted to burn.
In his younger years, he turned his yearning for self-immolation outward. It wasn’t like he had anyone who would care what he got up to, what scrapes he got into, there were no bridges to set alight. He liked it that way. He liked what he did, and he was very good at it. The fighting. It quickly turned to hunting, taking coins and scraps for bigger targets with the hope that one day, one, glorious day, he would fail. That Kattigan Vale would finally fail and find an end to it.
Except he didn’t.
His last target, his final one for some years, would be one Thjazi Fang. Hardly a surprise, there was a rich bounty out for his head and practically every thieve’s guild on the continent had heard of his exploits and wanted him dead for some reason or another. Even a person without Kattigan’s skills in tracking would have been able to find him, he kept a colorful retinue with him.
When he did find him, he was nothing like what Kattigan expected. He didn’t even draw his blade. He just took one look at this wild, reckless man, cocked a smile and offered him something beyond just gold and table scraps.
He offered Kattigan a true battle.
There were other things attached to said battles, some glorious revolution to rival the destruction of the Shapers, and all the glory that came with it. Long after it ended, Kattigan would wonder if Thjazi knew that heroics meant nothing to Kattigan, or did he know something that Kattigan did not?
Regardless of his true intentions - something that Kattigan wouldn’t be able to find out even if he wanted to - Thjazi was true to his word. They were damn good battles.
He’d stand in the corner of the war room, or tent, or whatever tavern Thjazi had cooked up some hair-brained scheme and listen, swirling around the shitty ale in his flask. Unfortunately, revolutionaries did not get access to good alcohol. But it was strong enough to dull the pain, to keep him warm. Keep the fire in his stomach raging.
And then, he started falling into it. The camaraderie, the family. It was hard not to. Teor and Azune and even that little pixie Thimble, and all of his brothers and sisters in arms. They did become brothers and sisters, for a time. In the trenches, with the mud and the rain and the rats. He touched their blood and flesh and learned how to mend things and not just destroy. He learned how to make things just a little bit better for a time.
“Come sit with us, Katt!” Thjazi called one night, during those first few weeks when Kattigan did not make himself at home. He had a bright smile and a mug of something that probably shouldn’t have been brewed. And Kattigan slunk out from wherever he had hidden himself.
“Looks warm,” he grunted, accepting the drink and sitting down beside Thjazi.
They asked him once, what should be done with his remains when he died. It was always when during those times, never if. It felt so hopeless some nights that the offer of death before surrender was a comfort. Kattigan said cremation, and for his ashes to be scattered to the wind.
He didn’t tell them that if he was captured - that was an if because if he wanted to disappear, no one would find him - he wanted to be burned alive. Let his howling screams meet the wind as his flesh melted from his bones, until he mixed with the embers. A fitting end, he felt. For someone not born with magic, yet still able to practice it with herbs and tinctures and desperation.
But things were better, for a time. Fire was no longer just to destroy, but to comfort. For drinks and food around a campfire, surrounded by people who were better than you. For celebrating your meager victories and those you lost along the way.
Time, though, would always pass. And Kattigan would fight to forget what he did, what he left behind. What a coward he was, though at least the Torn Banner would see it before he went up in flames. Better them to know that he was dry timber, something you shouldn’t build with, only burn down. But he was out of the rebellion, and no one on the other side bothered hunting for him. He would almost be offended, considering how many of their men he killed. He would not be executed, there would be no wanted posters for him. And that hollowness in his bones crept back in.
Kattigan found other ways to fill it. Alcohol, drugs, sex, letting the matches he used to light his cigarettes burn down to his fingertips. He didn’t go into town anymore, other than to continue his cycle of self-destruction. No one bothered finding him to pay his tab, because one glance at him told you he would be dead in a year because of his liver alone. And Kattigan wanted that, he needed that. That final escape he so craved, because that was what it was about. Everything in his life was so cold - he was so cold - and the only way it would stop was if it finally burned completely away. No more cold nights, no more cold hands.
No more Kattigan Vale.
And yet, for all his efforts, he just wouldn’t die. And the world kept on trying to give him reasons to live. Little fishing villages or agricultural hamlets in need of someone to drive off bandits or kill some beastie. It paid for his habits, so Kattigan didn’t mind. He refused to let himself sink into it. Any conversation with the people he helped was short, any intercourse deeply impersonal. He drank late at the bar, offering stories of his supposed heroics so people wouldn’t get too concerned, then he’d stumble off into the woods to sleep.
On one of those nights, he found it. A young wolf pup, whimpering by the corpse of its mother. As Kattigan approached, he thought to put the thing out of its misery. Its mother had been caught in a bear trap, and one of the pup’s front paws along with it. It cried out into an uncaring world because it didn’t know better. It had only known the comfort of its mother, of potential playmates that were no longer there. Kattigan had drawn a dagger, to send the pup back to its mother and its siblings and wherever the hell wolves go when they die, but something stopped him.
It reminded him of Azune.
It had been such a long time since he’d thought of that boy - he must be a man now, surely, if he hadn’t died prematurely. He was left to their mercenary band by his father, so Kattigan had heard. He’d never pried, partially because Azune never spoke on it, partially because that would open himself up to unwanted questions, and while Kattigan lacked most social graces, he understood talks of family usually involved a give and take.
The wolf pup whimpered up at him, scared, golden eyes locked on the dagger in his hand.
Those were Teor’s eyes.
Kattigan felt the dagger drop as he fell to his knees in front of the pup. He pounded his fist into the ground, screaming out in sorrow. They were gone, he had left, why had they followed him here? Why were they here, why were they here?
The wolf pup whimpered again, bringing Kattigan back to the moment. He should still kill it, it would hardly lead a long life missing a leg and a parent to show it the world. He was reminding himself of that as he prised open the bear trap, as the wolf pup wiggled free, as he used his meager healing magic and potions strapped along his chest to clean and cauterize the stump of a leg. As Kattigan scooped up the pup into his cowl and went looking for that healer in the next village over who knew far more magic than he ever would.
He named the pup Wulfric as he left the healer’s house, with a magically created paw for his new companion. He was a good dog, and despite Kattigan being a bad man, he could raise the pup until he was ready to leave.
He would not begrudge the pup leaving. He was hardly one to talk.
Perhaps, looking back, Kattigan could point to this as the start of his climb out of his pit of self-destructive habits. Maybe he wouldn’t, considering that he kept drinking, kept smoking, kept letting the fire singe his fingers. But Wulfric was there now too, sneezing at every sniff of snuff and licking the burned callouses of Kattigan’s fingertips. Wulfric always seemed to know more than he ever would.
It would be the wolf that brought him into the city that day. Kattigan had heard of Thjazi’s imminent execution, but Wulfric had nudged at his leg when he lingered outside of the gates of Dol-Makyar. It was Wulfric who kept him from leaping up onto the gallows and doing something truly stupid, no matter how glorious of an end it would be. Redemption, Kattigan thought, surely would taste sweet. But Wulfric had not left him behind, despite probably being full grown, so he could not leave yet.
He drank and laughed and tried to be helpful those next few days. It was only fair, considering he stalked his old friends to a hideout he was not supposed to know about and hung around despite probably not being welcome and ate their food - the best food he’d had in years, by the Shapers. But he would leave. He would leave, he kept telling himself. Even as he showed up uninvited again, and learned what happened, learned that someone betrayed Thjazi and Thimble, that tiny pixie, started burning up herself.
Kattigan didn’t know why he offered to take that noble son into the woods. He didn’t know why he swore to help Thimble get revenge. Perhaps it was that fire again, calling to him. Crackling, snapping, flicking heat at his eyelashes and cheeks. Thimble was offering a way for him to finally burn out.
“What about you, big boy?” A gorgeous dwarven woman called to him as they made plans to leave the city, stroking her fine chinstrap beard. “You got my back?” It was a tease. A promise to share space and their bodies, but not their hearts. Something Kattigan could appreciate. But he had a feeling that, at their parting, they were not speaking of the same thing.
“Partin’ is such sweet sorrow,” she drawled, words like honey wine. And there was that fire. Not the one Kattigan put his face to, but the one he was welcomed to. With roasting meats and songs and a stump for him to sit on, to knock knees against another person. And perhaps that was not what Murray was talking about, it almost certainly wasn’t. And it wasn’t what Kattigan expected to get from her, nor did he want it.
The words he spoke were not initially for her. And he knew, in retrospect, it was hardly charming. But it was the only thing he could say.
“You look warm.”