The Brightest Light Burns Quickest [Fat Candle, LE0]

[Cyprian Kircheis]

"No!" She directed a muffled shout at him, her fists balled, her tattoo slithering. But no aggression came, she just cast her gaze down. "He had thought so... until he didn't."

He flinched at that. His mind only half present. The rest of him was still processing. A myriad of complex emotions all pooling and circling. Memories had been dug out and cast aside. There wasn't enough time to process one before the other.

Scores of dalliances. Thoughts of Mysti. His fight with Toda the first time, then again the last time. The death of his first love, Mikayla. Then there was that brawl he lost twenty years ago. When the winner took his due and then some. Thirty years ago the first time he played an instrument. Forty years ago when he found a home with those Goat of the Woods cultists. All of them hastily searched. Some repressed, some intentionally buried, some that he wakes and sleeps with. Most of his life laid bare. Then the release before the search could be concluded.

"I'm... sorry." He managed weakly.

It didn't take a great leap to imagine what he'd done, knowing who Strahd was. But what he was capable of? The extent of his sadism? The very thought of that fiend filled Cyprian with vitriol. He wanted to speak prose of hate and malice. But what good are words at this point?

It took a great will but he forced himself to look up at Akh. "His mother is still alive, she's out there. If anyone would know it's her." He said softly. "Gods as my witness I'll help you in anyway I can."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

"Thank you." She said, emulating gratitude as best as she could, imagining what it should be like... recalling what it had been like. "But for me both despair and hope are two sides of the same treacherous piece of jink."

She looked at him, trying to meet him in softness half-way, slowly returning to her usual self. "You know what it's like to be you, and you have developed your own ways to cope. Mine is acceptance that deep time doesn't go backwards and the best I can do is for shards of me to coalesce again so that I can truly die. This task alone may take an eternity. If he has conveniently done to himself in any extent what he sadistically did to me, then a fragment of him lives on, and sunny skies over the Balinok Mountains might turn out to be an episode."

And yet, she had to ask.

"Mother?"

[Cyprian Kircheis]

The memory never jumped out during their bonding. He knew she missed it. Honestly the incident was anecdotal at best to him. So he stood, letting the sheets fall, he didn't care. Instead he offered her his arm.

"Will this be sufficient? I only remember her name, Baba Lysaga. We called her Not-Baba Yaga and mocked her incessantly. At one point we had her at our mercy. Interrogated her..." He sighed. "Then let her go. She's powerful, and likely the one who taught him everything."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

Instead of taking his arm, she touched his face. For salient reasons she rejected all notion of behaving like a damsel in distress. "This may be a real lead then. I have been actively avoiding getting back anywhere near the Domains of Dread ever since I got out but it may be that it turns me away from what I need to accomplish."

[Cyprian Kircheis]

The touch was still warm, comforting.

He breathed tremulously as the memory flooded back in. The crones, horrid and cackling, mocking the party between planes. The binding, the subsequent fight. How close they came to despair, how outmatched they were despite their numbers. If the Abbott hadn't been there, if not for that insane angel's help.

He gave her as clear of a picture of Baba Lysaga as he could. Her crone visage, and the other one - perhaps a conjured image or a picture from her youth. He gave as much as he knew to give her. Every detail regarding their conversations. The price she demanded, the gems and their shape. The deal they reneged on for the sake of the Ravens. All of it.

"I... hope it helps." The playback left him weary and ready to collapse.

[Akh Uur Hoon]

As he had been conveying it, she had been turning it into ribbons of symbols floating in the room, then turning them into a shadow play on the wall they could both observe, making those scenes and events play out both inside their minds and before their eyes. She accepted the stream on face value, just taking it in, for she had no idea about the relevance of particular details.

"It just may. How do you rest?" She gently helped him down onto the sheets again.

[Cyprian Kircheis]

The sheets were soft, welcoming. Her words struck him funny however. He cocked his head to the side with a smile radiating with warmth.

"As a human might. I sleep - more soundly with company." He teases softly, reaching out and brushing a few strands from Akh's eyes. "Is it any different for you?"

[Akh Uur Hoon]

"I don't sleep anymore. I am always conscious. Though I can become lethargic and motionless in a way that is similar enough." She replied with a smile of her own. "I can remain at your side so that you can have a restful time. What I've learned from you requires a lot of unpacking and getting eased into anyway."

After her three most prominent symbols went full circle, she spoke again. "I'll give it to you, Cyprian Kircheis, for perhaps your ego will feel fuzzy because of it - coupling with you has been transformative. I'd do it again once you recover."

[Cyprian Kircheis]

His smile turns to a grin, and an unspoken promise passes between them. Then the curtains close on his consciousness, as he descends into ethereal dreams.

___
Thanks for the RP

[Akh Uur Hoon]

She watched him for a while into the night, finding it comforting. She recalled her earlier conversation with Dare Shah, about the absurdity of halves. Here, there were two creatures in different places along the spectrum between life and death, each leading their own mostly inexplicable existence but apparently not losing potential to affecting the course of each other's lives in the most vital of ways.

Cyprian's revelations had been mentally shattering, and she didn't recover from them. One pernicious thought led her to believe that since Strahd had been proven not to be an indomitable force, she could have avoided her fate. It wasn't comforting for her to realise that she ended up in her condition not because something was fated, but she hadn't found the right agency in herself at crucial moments. She hadn't been raised to exercise it, of course, somehow she might have averted the doom that waited for her in Barovia.

There was no turning back now, however, deep time had one arrow. Still, this renewed awareness of potential agency bored into her. Could she do more to make herself whole rather than waiting for eternity at the crossroads of worlds that pieces would just fall into her lap?

For the first time in a very long time she felt time around her ripple.

/scene

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[Thank you!]