the kids aren't alright

black hearts, the wicked never rest. i curse the day i let you in

so tell me dear,

She hasn’t come sooner, so many things had happened. Guilds handed off, becoming the owner of one specifically after failing spectacularly when it came to it. And part of her was afraid, having spoken to Ronin of it – Safrin’s star had been right in the end. That to fix it was to speak to the cause. But gods how she was so ashamed. Her face, flushed, this time she doesn’t go alone. Instead, she’s asked Deimos to come with her to the Temple, to be her support while she admits her failures into the air.

She doesn’t want to tell Ludo she’s failed. She wants to tell it that she would have rather died there than make that bargain. But she didn’t, and she had made the bargain. Ascended parts for Ru’in’s soul.

They arrive, stepping past the pews as Kiada approaches the shrine, eyes shadowed and haunted as she thinks of LongNight again, as though she hasn’t stopped since it ended. “Ludo. I wish to speak to you of my promise to you?” She almost winces as she says it, a vow, a promise, broken because she’d been too weak, too stupid to think of inviting more than what Ludo had told her to bring.

can your heart still break?

if it's already stopped breathing?

KIADA

not heroes any longer - we are tragedies of firelight and flesh

unholy sacraments of blood and broken bodies

Failure was an imminent portion to their lives – how they grew, how they rose, how they prospered, how they recovered, how they seethed and tormented themselves. Kiada’s experiences during LongNight hadn’t exactly been inevitable, but just one more of those strung-apart calamities where the acrimony, the sorrow, and the anguish stung a little harder, a little longer, a noose, a choking, drowning thing, There would be another time, another LongNight, another torturous divide; and as a supportive means, he lingered nearby too – with her in the hollowed junctures of pain, when she had to arrive at the shrine to describe, to relive, the extended moments.

Of Ru’in, gone and gone still.

A pulsing wake of calm stretched from him and over to her, attuned connections striving to brim and brew in the aching void; his eyes ghosting over the shrine’s architecture, passing offerings of stones and feathers to thread through her hands to place upon the mantle. Otherwise he was silent, waiting, watching, pondering over the wake of results and possibilities – uncertain of the deity’s moods surrounding the circumstances. He remained as a supportive juncture just the same. Should he pray? Should he bow his head and extend assurance towards her, or ask forgiveness from the god for her? Instead, his eyes lingered on prior offerings, still affixed there, extending the slightest of intonations. She tried he wanted to say.

what use have we for feeble hymns of wasted faith;

for sordid songs of glory?

DEIMOS

Perhaps Ludo was sleeping. Perhaps it was busy. Perhaps it was mad. Perhaps it had heard everything that it needed to from Jigano, when the soul shepherd had prayed to it. Whatever the cause, Kiada’s prayer would remain, this time, unanswered.