(A week he couldn’t remember; falling asleep in the farmhouse, waking up days later in the glade without memory of how he got there or when or what he’d done while the fever shook him)
-The bard swayed where he sat, and Isuma peeped worriedly as Isla rose from their game. The gryphlet padded back to rest a taloned paw on Jigano’s knee, looking up at him in concern, and he absently stroked her head, focusing on the trembling in his hands with fresh intensity. Not the remnants of a fever, but a symptom of the blight that wounded the Greatwood and changed the plants within it?
Would he be changed, too?
But it was Isla’s voice that delivered the diagnosis, and Isla’s eyes that watched him with his friend’s frank compassion, and he didn’t even think to question what she said.
Why,
He had the blight.
But did that matter, in what he did today, or would do tomorrow? Did it change any of his choices, his promises, his mistakes?
“Just because the job is thankless, it doesn’t make it less necessary,” he said quietly, lifting Isuma into his arms to cuddle her gently. ”And I have long been pledged to memory. But death is a part of life as well. For mortals, at least,” he acknowledged with a slight tilt of his lips towards a smile, for Ludo was beyond such, as far as he knew, even though it was Isla's lovely face watching him now. ”Life is a gift, beautiful and full of wonder, and I don’t mean to slight Vi for giving it to us, but we hold to it so tightly, know it for being precious, because it is so short. Because there is an end to it, and to these mortal forms.” He paused, hoping the god would be patient as he tried to distill the feelings in his heart, seeking to put words to what had begun to coalesce into wordless certainty before he had made the decision to seek a shrine.
”But this is not all there is, is it? You have let me help you gather souls before, those who were lost and those who were waiting. When we led them to your realm after Long Night I realized that death is the end of a chapter, not of the book. Dying can be hard, but death? Death, at least on this world, is neither cold nor empty. Vi’s gifts aren’t to be given up lightly, but that doesn’t mean death is something to fear, beyond leaving tasks undone. And even then… even then many of those tasks can be left to those who remain.” He said the last softly, a painful realization he had only come to after passing the kingship to another. Running from it… but being forced to recognize, in the process, that he could not do everything himself. That sometimes he had to trust others to pick up the pieces that he had dropped.
”It is worse, I think, for those souls who can’t or don’t find their way to Mort’s embrace. Who wander lost or forgotten, caught between where they were and where they’ve yet to go. And while life will always have its protectors who recognize the importance of it… there is a balance that I seek, both within myself and in the world as I’ve seen it, in learning to serve Mort. To protect and preserve the memory of life, and to help those lives that have ended to find their way home again, to you... and to him."
