I wasn’t talking to you and you weren’t asking me much. You just sat there in a hoop in one of my ears, swinging along serenely as you watched me dig up those pieces of a blade. Yeah, I had hidden them somewhere remote, packing the dirt hard so that no one or nothing would accidently stumble on it. I don’t know what it was about that sword that made me want to sweat and work a whole bunch--whatever. I worked in silence anyway and you understood it enough to keep silent too, because things were passing between us whether we liked it or not and there were deep things in me that you knew I wasn’t ready to talk about.

The sun was setting before I had finally succeeded in gathering all the pieces again. I bound them together with some shitty wire I had found laying around somewhere--and with that, I draped the whole bundle across my back and set out south again, faking you out when you thought we were going back to the forest that you loved so much--but it turned out we were going somewhere else a lot more mystic.

A lot more scary.

The last time I had come here, I was with Leos and we had been shouting at the top of our lungs and it was a blast of awkward forgetfulness. That passed, though, just like every other bout of forced amnesia that I’ve ever made myself go through. I was gonna have to get out of that horrible habit of mine: that habit of willful ignorance. My eyes were open and even though my sight was still kinda blurry, that didn’t mean I had an excuse to miss the things sitting right in front of me.

I wasn’t expecting perfection. I mean--I’m me. But I gotta start somewhere.

Your little black eyes were probably sparkling with the delight I was feeling from you as you gazed at the shimmering blue fire that swirled around us. I was feeling things that were a lot more sober--memories of a tirade that I said we weren’t gonna talk about anymore, so we ain’t. But I came upon the broken stones that I had lounged sloppily over once before, about two years ago. Except now I was standing tall and--well, not proud, but my eyes were steady even though you were scurrying down to my brow to get a better look at what I was looking at.

I’ll admit: I got stuck.

You can’t just say sorry. You can’t just look your Pa in the eye and say “lol sorry bro that was weird”, like someone totally didn’t die because of it. ”Sorry” don’t mean shit, and it never will if it only ever comes out of your mouth. And boy, it had come out of mine so many times, spilling onto a crystal floor and a tangled white mane. I took a deep, heavy breath, slowly exhaling while I dropped the complexity of my worries in my head--and let my tongue do all the work for me.

Three things.

“I get it,” I said in a low, somber voice; you wiggled a little bit with the vibration of it reverberating around the inside of my skull. I get it. I know now; I know better, you had told me so but I was still thick enough to mamby-pamby my ass around the bush instead of getting shit done. I get it. I understood what you meant by darkness you couldn’t penetrate, a darkness I had seen, a darkness I had the power to help you intercept; I understood what you meant by the balance of the gods, and what it meant for you to be shackled to an ancient promise made thousands of years before anyone even had the thought to create this place, much less me. I understood what my place was supposed to be.

I didn’t know what that meant for the future. I just understood now.

I lowered my head and you scurried down from the bridge of my nose and onto the cold stones that was the broken shrine. I smiled down at you, the curve in my mouth damn-near painful, because it always almost hurt seeing you so small and bursting with light and curious and paddling your little feetsies all over the rock--

“...Thanks, Pa,” I breathed. And that was my second thing.

With a grunt, I rolled my shoulders, shrugging the metal blade-plates off my back. They fell with a clang! and a clatter and I swore I saw your tiny body jump once or twice, but it didn’t fall close enough to you to be a danger. I closed my eyes for a minute--confused a little bit, and overwhelmed, too, with this…thing I was working on asking. I chewed on it on my tongue before I let it flutter from my lips, and it was a lot stronger than how I felt at that moment:

“I found this up north, locked in a glacier,” I explained, my voice still low, haunted, like my tongue knew I stood on hallowed grounds and hushed my voice because of it, “I don’t...I’ve never seen anything like it. Could...Would you tell me what it is? What it was?”

I fell silent; I opened my eyes finally, because I wasn’t trying to look away from him when he inevitably showed his ass. He was gonna show. He owed an ass-whoopin’.





[If possible, I would like this to take place before the events of “The Last Sacrifice”

Using Roskuld’s COTM VOTG pass to quest for the restoration of Sparkmarrow (in other words, to enchant the Decrepit Old Sword she found).

[Random Event] @[God of the Spark]]





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