FENRER

I consigned all those souls to the oblivion of the Echo Obscura, didn't I? The one thing that isn't a lie, clear as the day — or else Derelicts wouldn't exist. Fenrer dragged his fingers around his temples to release the pressure behind his eyes which viewed the flow unto its entire truth. Eyes of crystal magick. In the crimson bulb, the darkness swallowed and set his soul on fire, burning at his hip. The dawnblade sat on the weapon rack, undisturbed. His Aeoniir, silent and nonexistent. How many lies have been told over the course of history? Aeoniir come from the Otherworld — but that has to be a lie if the Ancients are as well. Despair filled his chest with none to address the imbalance of his soul, but he held his stomach and tried not to puke at the quiet breeze outside his window.

Father's large shape bowed to falsity and died to a tyrant's decree.

His necrotic growl echoed through his ears for any sense of release, and Fenrer dug his fingers deeper into his chest. Ornaments which carried the tales of make believe, those who prayed for any sort of peace and tranquillity from the endless depravity of the Derelict horde. He spotted a couple of Storm Wardens slip into the prayer rooms, the smell of incense burning deep in the back of his throat. His statuettes to their likenesses remained on his bedstand, haphazard in their proper places, facing away from the sliver of world represented by a silver candle. Fenrer dragged himself off his bed to take them, one by one to wrap them in cloth, out of sight and away from his mind in an abandoned cupboard.

Reyn's letter remained — a call for assistance — his one route away from a flowing mendacity. He tucked it off to the side with the intent to answer its call, but his fingers drew over Ojain, the Echoniic Gatekeeper, she who gave herself to close the Infernal Gate, a cyclic sacrifice. Questions raised on his tongue for the supposed deity of the Otherworld, Evyriaz's reality too clear to deny, he who travelled between planes behind a shield of a sung name. Euron Traye. He tucked his fingers against the core of the small statue until the wood bent and splintered in his grip. Jaw malformed, paws split, the surge of molten rage sent his arm down to crack open the truth no one deigned to tell him.

It shattered in faith.

What did I believe in? On his knees in the ruins of ideology, he listened to the activity outside, the preparations for the Cleansing March on the Burning Abyss proceeded without him. Through the mirror, Sungrove, Father's housecarls wheeled wagons full of supplies into caches, and training exercises heightened in number. I was always uninformed even when the truth was right in front of me. He cupped the broken pieces of the statue in his palm, a precious gift given to him by Neven Lotayrin. A sense of comfort in an upturned childhood. Born a Hanekan noble and raised a Warden to fight the dark, he pressed his back against his baseboard. Auras dripped through his walls, a bleeding pus until he tried to close himself from it all, the band around his forearm constricting his own flow.

A maelstrom of ice overtook his senses, and he tore open his eyes to judgement, though he remained solitary. His teeth dug into his lip at the echo of Yuven's shriek through an unfathomable, cold distance. Him, bedridden while Yuven Traye suffered under Auric Extraction. We toe the line, the dark and light not so different when seen through crystal eyes. He pushed his thumb into his own to wipe the exhaustion away, on his feet to flee the blizzard's presence. Nothing makes sense anymore. He held on tight to the broken pieces, trying to sort out his questions to find the truth, the real truth and not the one hidden behind the shield of lies.

Neven. His gut instinct led him closer to his Guardian, wherever he found himself within the safety of the citadel. Back then, when I looked through the rivers of his mind and found muck... the soul always knows though the consciousness will never piece it together. His boots shuffled along the marble floors of the citadel, swept clean by Trainees on their daily chores and Wardens with their own while off-posting. I was too stupid to ask before, but I know better now. He went up the staircases to the middle rung of the citadel towers, where Neven claimed a temporary space of his own. Ojain suffocated in his hands when he came across the white-lacquered door, blended in with the corridors and high class arches which let the sunlight in.

An echoed voice rang out, a shiver down his spine when he pressed himself against the icewood while the ascendant hum continued.

"In the eye of devotion, space and time remains in an eternal spiral," Neven's soft, melodic voice rang out, and Fenrer slipped open the door to investigate. He sat at his desk, back to him with his foot against the edge while he held a lute close to his chest to pluck the same strings which set his mind to a sleepless sea. "Hark he who raises a silver blade, trapped forevermore in ice."

"Neven."

His pale-gold feathers slammed upwards and he twisted around. "Ah, Fenrer, I was just going to see you to talk about..." Fenrer held out the pieces of his previous faith. "What happened?" Lute off to the side, Neven stole out of his chair to face him and took his tantrum away from him.

"I broke it," he said, nothing more than a child.

Neven's pupils thinned into vertical slits, but he put a smile on his face and headed to a travelling bag to drop it in. "That is fine," he said when he tied it up. "I'm sure Kemal can fix it." A misty sigh escaped his nose when he returned to him. "You should be resting though."

"I want to talk to you about your posting."

Neven's pupils thinned further, though his passive expression refused to break. "It is worrisome that both you and Yuven have questioned me upon it though my answer will not change since the last." His winter breath of an aura solidified around himself when Neven folded his arms. "I shall tell you what I told Yuven, I do not want either of you to concern yourselves over it. You are needed for the operation at the Burning Abyss, along with what happened at Dyrin awaiting the ripple effect that is sure to follow." Neven switched on his heel, but Fenrer clasped onto his sleeve.

"Except I'm not Yuven and I can't not see what I do," Fenrer bit, but sucked in the rage when Neven widened his eyes. "There is no point hiding it with me, no point lying to me. I can see it." He dug his fingers deeper, though Neven remained unmoved, frozen as his sapphire irides flicked to him, feathers thinned in preparation. "Back during that situation with Kayal, I saw the rivers of thought within you. Polluted." Fenrer shook his arm when the maelstrom shivered with his irritation. "Neven, what happened at Asairai? What is happening on the other continent?" He drew closer to his truth. "It's related to what happened in Azahama. You know something — or if you don't know you're connecting dots. Stop lying to me and yourself." If I have to wake up, so does everyone else.

"Nothing apart from what I've told you." Neven drew out of his grip. "Storm Wardens patrols are going missing. Entire villages wiped out in an apparent Derelict attack with no signs of it—"

Fenrer drew closer to the door, but the nagging sensation on the tip of his mind begged him to come closer, to find the truth for himself. "What else happened?" He waded through the field of snow to come closer to his Guardian. "There's still something you're not saying. All of that doesn't explain the pollution within the river of thought." He resisted the urge to jump into it once more, to find the source, but he found himself small when Neven gazed at him. "I-" He raised his hands and retreated back to the doorframe. "I'm sorry, I-"

"I read an Obscura Text."

Numb pinpricks swept up his arm and he studied Neven, whose aura relaxed from its attempted duplicity and the maelstrom thickened in his head. "What? What drove you to do that?"

Neven lowered his gaze to the floor and turned away from him. "Because I was sending all those people only for them to never return. I was having to send letters to families so they weren't left wondering, but still..." He clenched his nimble fingers until his shoulders shook with his pained aura. "I owe it to them to find the truth, and that is all I can tell you at this time. I read the Obscura Text because nothing else was getting answers."

One part of him wanted to shake Neven out of the wrought despair, but another hungered. "What... was in it, Neven?"

The blizzard froze in its own time and his breath along with it.

"Images," Neven whispered. "It implanted images in my head that I came to forget what was real and what was simply being shown to me. On the edge of the Obscura Madness, I was close to something and so the sensation worsened," he explained. "It first led me to some abandoned ruins where we found..." He faltered, then frowned at Fenrer. "I can't explain what we found, some thought it was a Corruptor within the transformation... but that didn't feel like the answer, or at least, not the full one." Neven rubbed his thumb. "One... it could communicate. While in the transformation, Corruptors can use magick, but they cannot communicate. This one did, and why was it there? When we first went to that posting we swept the area clean of any points of interest. It was like those ruins came from nowhere." Neven turned to him in full, his words breathless from containing the truth. "Villages kept disappearing — but nothing ever appeared save those ruins, that is where the Text led me." Neven hugged himself with a small shake of his head. "We were stumbling in the dark... so my leap of logic was to simply... look deeper into said abyss even if it meant my mind as the cost for answers."

Fenrer swallowed on information. "It left a mark on your mind, Neven..." He came closer. "It's still polluting you. I suspect it a temporary thing but you never saw an Aurus Healer, did you?"

"I didn't."

"Why?"

"Is this not a consequence of reading those infernal texts?" Neven asked. "I would not curse an Aurus with it when they feel the effects in an arguably worse way."

Fenrer drew his hand back from taking the darkness onto himself, into his own soul, to redress the imbalance in Neven. "Why did you not tell us?"

"Because it is not your duty," Neven said and faced him. "Fenrer... in a couple days, I am leaving back to Asairai because I have a job to do. I'll tell you what I told Yuven." He bridged the distance to squeeze his shoulders. "You're my family, but I can't always be there to mediate between you two. I'll get the affairs in order, try to point you both in a good place to start but, Fenrer. Molvei'saliz." Neven grasped his face. "I'm not the only one lying to themselves, and the more you bottle up a volcano, the further the pressure builds."

Fenrer slipped out of his grasp. "Be careful when you go back,"he mumbled when he left Neven's room, whose occupant followed him out with a frown. "Thank you for... telling me the truth."

"I don't think you should be thanking me."

Out of Neven's stable presence and aura, he drew through the corridors until everything fell quiet. 

Arms folded, he huffed. "Satisfied?" he questioned the pulsating maelstrom once struck with crimson lightning when it wriggled around him. "It must not be pleasant... having someone hide things from you because they think they're protecting you." He drew out of the tempest's ice-cold touch though it struggled to follow until it released its grip on his mind. "There's a reason he didn't want to tell you," he said to the whisper of distorted magick. "There it is. Too bad you couldn't tell me yours when it mattered." He whipped down the staircase to flee at the quiet footsteps leaving the nearby wall.

Back to his prison of endless, emotional colour.