"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Harrowed had woken to the sound of a scream in a copse of trees that he did not remember stumbling into. By the time his red eyes open there's no one around and an unsettled feeling rises up, coating his body in an uncomfortable coolness that cannot be shaken.
It remains as he stands. His body feels… different. Like he is still inhabiting another shape that isn't his own.
When he tries to shape shift into the canine beast, nothing happens. There isn't even an emptiness, really, and he would have expected there to be one if he were somehow no longer a bodach. That was who he was — who he had always been. It was part of his identity. He was a bodach.
Perhaps he is just too weary? Even that short nap hasn't made up for the hell his body and mind have gone through in… well, he no longer knows how many days it has been or for how long he was trapped inside that other world.
There is enough energy, at least, for his brain to remind him of all his worries about his family. He needed to know if those were just echoes of them used to torment him or if they were trapped somewhere too. So he makes his way to the forest, knowing Torryn can often be found haunting here. It's as familiar to him as the Dale and the comfort of the shadows does a little to soothe that chill clinging to him.
It feels foolish to call out loud when just wandering will do the trick. Either he'll pick up Torryn's scent or his dad will pick up Harrowed's. The white stallion is trailed by a bank of shadows, though this is not entirely out of the ordinary for him, and his expression is sour with exhaustion and anxiety.
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
Of all the things his curse has taken from him, the ability to be a good father is the one he regrets most.
He thinks often of Ether, and how his father had fought his own demons. It was his love for Briseis and the family they built together that kept him anchored to the light. For Torryn it does not come as easily. Every tie he has is eventually cut loose, and he tells himself that it is to save them, though that is only a half-truth. If he is honest with himself, it is so that he does not have to constantly face his short-comings, and the way his hunger makes him go nearly blind to other’s suffering. How long had he kept Despoina around so that he might feed from her despair? That thin thread of humanity that he clung to told him it was wrong—no matter how willing she had been, no matter how much the normal parts of him loved her, he could not keep her.
Yet he still tried, always, to be the father he thought he might have been before his world was plunged into darkness.
He stayed present if the mother’s allowed it, and in Harrowed and Evade’s case Beyza had nearly insisted. When both boys had been born like him, he’d had to swallow away the disappointment—not in them, but in himself—and yet the only thing Beyza had seemed concerned with was that he taught them how to survive.
And so, he had.
He taught them the way Torryn himself had learned to navigate the world without causing too much of a disturbance. He taught them how to siphon emotions discreetly, or how to take advantage of events that would cause widespread distress, making it easy to feed without being noticed. He tried to teach them how to find their place in a world that was not really meant for them, in hopes that they would find it all easier than he did. When they grew older and a distance naturally developed between them there was still that thread, that fatherly bond, that kept them tethered, and he was always relieved when they would follow it back to him.
When Harrowed finds him this time, though, he can sense immediately that something is different, wrong. He can nearly taste the emotion before he ever sees him, and though his jaw aches a little and that gnawing pit in his stomach clenches, he does not react to it. Instead he follows until the pale form shrouded in shadow comes into view, and Torryn peels himself away from the darkness. “Harrowed,” he greets his son quietly, watching him with glowing red eyes, trying to decipher what has changed. His shadows don’t seem to be as prominent, but because they are still present he is hesitant to believe his first suspicion, the one that comes with just a flicker of hope—that his son is no longer a bodach. “Is everything all right?”
Relief hits the white stallion so hard his legs threaten to give out beneath him when he sees his dad. If Torryn is okay than surely the others were as well. Harrowed moves to take a step towards Torryn before hesitating, his relief highlighting the other, worse, thoughts and emotions roaring through him. He becomes awash in shame that he may be overwhelming Torryn right now simply by his presence and his turblulent thoughts. "Oh god I…" The intoxication of being around someone in distress is something still fresh in his memory. It was the last time he had felt the bodach, on the mountain with the other puppets, and the memory lingers with a white-hot presence. "If you're hungry…"
"We can talk and eat." He says and although he means it, is absolutely sincere about the offer, the laugh that escapes him is hollow.
So much of his world has shifted these last few days and he most definitely hasn't made any progress on processing it.
He begins to explain why the answer to Torryn's question is a resounding no. "I was pulled to the Mountain. I thought… I thought you were all dead or trapped in that horrible world. You, mother, Evade…" His rich red eyes are brimming with each emotion that he is feeling. It is all there, shining on the surface. The memories of those twisted nightmares, the way he had to kill or harm each of them in order to pass. "And I… I changed." He is not worried about Torryn being disappointed by this change, he knows enough to know that this should be a relief, but Harrowed feels the disappointment anyway - the ache over something so familiar being lost and something foreign left in its place.
"It's gone." The thing that tied him to his father and brother. The only thing that Harrowed knew how to be. Every instinct and lesson now defunct, leaving him confused and shaken.
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
He listens, keeping his expression steady. He won’t let his own thoughts show, not when his son is already struggling to hold himself together. But the parallels to their stories are undeniable; the strange world, the hallucinations, the betrayal and violence from your own family. He thinks of dark labyrinths with undulating walls, he remembers his family’s haunting, distorted voices as they taunted him into insanity.
He remembers going in as a plain, unremarkable boy and emerging as he is now,with that insatiable gnawing already in his gut.
“I understand,” he says, voice quiet, heavy. “Perhaps more than you realize.” He has never told them the story of how he became to be; not in such detail. He is sure that when speaking of his own family he mentioned how out of place he felt, as being one of the only of Ether and Briseis’s children to not have been born with an affinity for shadows. He was sure that being changed into a bodach was a punishment for his longing, for not being content with what he had.
“Whatever happened in there, Harrowed, you must remember, that parts of it were not real. They knew your family was the way to tempt you. And even if now, you are irreversibly changed…” he trails off for a moment, jaw clenching, before offering his son a smile that is mostly hidden by his shadows. “You will overcome it.”
