we are crooked souls trying to stand up straight || any

[Warrick]

there was a heaven in you
but god there's a devil in me

He can still taste it.

It’s on his breath with each shuddering inhale and exhale, lingering like bile or rot on his tongue with each gurgling cough that quakes his lungs. It’s in his muscle and bone; buried deep in tissues and joints, attacking each part of him with a salivating hunger. It’s beyond a sickness, beyond a disease - it’s a curse, bred from hatred and dark magic, coiling itself into his chest like a viper, dripping poison into his veins.

It’s killing him and he knows it.

It’s killing him and they know it.

Carnage’s request would not come without repercussions - this, Warrick knew. Even so, he still obeyed like the dutiful son he was always meant to be to a once nameless father and his starry-eyed mother. His quest had not been about him (is anything ever?) and even now, as a cancer seeks to destroy each part of him, he is worried for his family and his people.

Not anymore, he corrects himself with a tightly closing squeeze of his oceanic blue eyes, pain burning deep within his soul. He has lost them (though they are not truly lost, his people) and it is because of Carnage.

“And because you were incapable of protecting them in the first place.”

The voice is not his own, one that has only started after his few days in his coma. It’s never left him since that moment - a sickly sweet voice that plagues his inner thoughts, droning in monologues when his mind decides to be quiet, a darkness that seems to be its very own entity. Perhaps it is Pangea herself.

He had awakened to stern faces - those of Marble and Tangerine, and those of two he did not know. The strangers had roused him back to life, allowing their abilities to keep him lingering on the dangerous precipice of life and death, despite never knowing him or his family. They are saints that he did not deserve and he hopes that if (“when!” the voice corrects him in protest) he passes, they would not take his death upon their own conscience.

They are stricken with grief and uncertainty, those faces around him. He does not get any better, and soon his fevers are accompanied by his own wails and nightmares, calling out for his daughters and his firstborn son.

I must see them, he had told his caretakers, told Tangerine.

“Before you die like a dog with your mind and body riddled with disease and blood,” the voice chirrups back.

So at the once-Overseer’s pleading requests, the navy-winged stallion leaves Tephra for Hyaline. It is at the border that he stops, breathing heavily and lifting his chin to stare up at the cloudy and windswept sky that is opened before him, inhaling deeply of the salt and smoke that has always truly been his home. There are no words spoken in this quiet moment, but there is a solemnity in his eyes as he stands in awe beneath the Tephran sun with his wife and his caretakers that is anything but unclear -

he does not plan on being able to return.

WARRICK

This is for anyone who is staying in Tephra and would like to say goodbye to Warrick before he heads to Hyaline. He wants to see his daughters and his son, and does not plan on being well enough to return from the trip!

@[exist] and @[leliana] and @[Tangerine] are here to escort him, but they are not truly a part of this thread unless they want to be! <3