RP:A Long Walk Home
Part of the The God of Undeath Arc
Part of the You Must Have Been Human Arc
Summary: After the events of The Cost of Kindness, Kanna and Shishi walk back to Vailkrin with an unconscious Leralynn in tow. Kanna reveals that her connection to the necromantic arts may have been permanently severed with the destruction of her heirloom koto, and Shishi lends an ear in an attempt to distract himself from the ominous prophecy the onniont cast.
Dusk had already come and gone for the group of misfits by the time Camina had regained enough strength to get them all back home safely. “Shishi.” It was the first thing Kanna had said since their encounter with the onniont, and the first thing she said when they returned to the Ginger Snapped Bakery. She knew he would take Leralynn and leave with the same magical energy if she did not call out to him. With her eyes swollen and red from crying, and her hair having been let down, she lacks all the ferocity and malice he’s seen her with before. Instead, she sounds and looks resigned. “Can we walk back?” After bidding their goodbyes to Khitti and Kailani, Kanna awaits Shishi and Leralynn so she can follow. Strapped to her back is the warped wood of her folded dragon-zither. To anyone looking at it not trained in music, there is nothing obviously wrong with it. But she knows, and the other five present today know, and it is only a matter of time before everyone knows.
Shishi, after Khitt was kind enough to pop Leralynn’s jaw back into place, carries his unconscious daughter on his back, the teenage witch’s arms draped over his shoulders. The Titan of Winter is covered and soaked in bear blood and has made minimal effort to clean himself up. Following the vision the onniont presented to him Blue has not said very much out loud either, perhaps just a ‘thank you’ to Khitt and an ‘aye’ here or there. He had been hovering high above Lithrydel in the waking dream, crimson threads exiting his right eye socket and flowing down to the lands below. There were four: -One falling to the top of Frostmaw’s mountain…- “Huh?” Shishi snaps out of his trance of deep thought, “Aye, Kanna…” She’s unaware, but the act of using his family’s curse to teleport long distances is only a safe method when the entry point is an overly stable one. So traveling to Cenril using Vailkrin’s dark portal was a relatively simple task for The Blue Demon, but he had always planned on heading back on foot. -The second thread fell towards Vailkrin, to the wreckage of a mansion that once stood in The Dark Forest.- He huffs and shrugs up his shoulders, adjusting Orange on his back. How long had they been walking in silence? The vampire looks back towards Kanna, surely staring too long at her chest where there was once a hole through which he removed the former ghoul’s heart. -The third thread winded down towards the heart of Gualon.- The reverse-enchanted enoki cloak that Kanna still wears makes sure his one open eye lingers even longer. “Are you alright?” Unclear which traumatic event he’s been present for in her life that he’s actually asking about.
A soft smile tugs at the corners of Kanna’s lips when he calls her by her name, though it fails to manifest into a full smile. In all their brief encounters, she had yet to hear him acknowledge her aside from an ‘aye’ or ‘hey’. As they walk, Kanna’s eyes flicker up to Shishi, and she traces his gaze to... Kanna hugs the cloak closer to her body despite the sticky summer evening air, averting her gaze and deciding not to speak of it one way or the other. She was unsure of how Alithyk Caluss’ magic had restored her stolen heart, and she avoided thinking about body horror as it pertained to her as much as she could. Attributing the gaze to something less macabre was the easier route. There’s a moment after Shishi’s question where she looks at Leralynn’s face, now turning different dark shades from the bruising. Looking back down at the ground, she says simply, “No, I’m not. Are you?”
-The fourth thread was lost into a shroud of darkness with ever changing form between Gualon and Milous. Though obscured from even the superhuman senses provided by the vision, Blue knew it led to a place he vowed never to enter agian.- Shishi is not okay. “Aye… I’m fine.” He’s distracted still, to say the least, as they continue the lengthy walk back to Vailkrin’s dark portal, but his single eye gaze follows Kanna’s towards his daughter until he can turn his head no more to face the girl on his back, “I know better than to try and stop her.” He puffs out his cheeks and frowns, an expression the former ghoul is surely more familiar with coming from The Orange Witch by now, “I don’t understand a single thing she can do, but I know she’ll push herself as far as she can to prove she can live up to the expectations that were placed on her. You’ve seen it. That’s when she is happiest.” The one oceanic blue eye drifts back onto Kanna, “You’re losing so much…” he’s at least partially to blame for that and maybe he’s subtly owning up to that here, but he’s quick to redirect, “Why’re you doing it? Just proving yourself isn’t enough if it makes you miserable.” The fourth thread flashes in his mind again and The Titan stares right through the bard, praying her response snaps him out of this terrifying trance…
Kanna reaches out with one hand. Shishi is too tall for her to reach Leralynn’s face, so instead she places a hand on her upper-back. “I wish there were ways to make her happy that didn’t involve hurting herself, though, but even as her friend, I don’t think I would be able to stop it.” Kanna withdraws her hand, and looks down at her palm. The nails of her left hand are cracked and bleeding in several places from where the sharp edges of the petals fought against their removal from the dragon-zither, only barely concealed by a layer of Khitti’s specialty bandages. “How could I, when she sees me doing the same thing?” Kanna takes a few steps forward, reaching the city gates, and spins on her heel to look at Shishi to answer his question with a question. “Have you ever tried to keep track of the mortals you killed? Whether for food or for sport.” If the Blue Demon was looking for a light conversation, it seems it would not be found here. “Two hundred and twelve. That’s how many souls I stole from Vakmatharas, and the number of lives destroyed because of me are likely astronomically higher. I got sloppy after the tenth kill. It mattered less whether they assaulted me first, and more whether it looked like they might, or had any affiliation with the slave trade. Then, it was anyone that I perceived to be looking at me in that manner.” As the clouds part over the city, Kanna’s eyes appear empty as she looks directly into Shishi’s one good eye. “I am not a good person. My happiness is irrelevant in making up for my crimes.”
Shishi nods once, losing Kanna as she walks into his blindspot that she had her part in creating. “This is what she loves. She’d probably be more hurt if you had refused her help. She doesn’t want to be coddled. She wants to be admired.” His expression goes flat for a second, wondering if he’s describing a character flaw in his daughter. “You know what I mean…” He hedges his bets. Then they approach Vailkrin proper and Kanna asks about his body count, in the murdering sense. He doesn’t flinch hearing the bard’s number. “I never had a count going…” He doesn’t hesitate to give away this story about himself. His goal after all is attempting to cheer the bard up. “Shortly after I was turned, my sire was killed.” Fangs flash as he speaks, almost out of habit when discussing this topic, “I was wild. Before I came to Hollow I terrorized villages. There were folktales written about me. The shadow monster on the mountain that would come down to eat the people in the valley.” He shakes his head, “I was raised to be an assassin and I’ve been one here in Lithrydel. I’ve been a mercenary and a weapon for clans, and houses, and Vailkrin alike. I am not a man,” that one blue eye meets her stare now, “I am a calamity to be pointed in a direction and set loose. And calamities don’t keep count. You at least can show a reason for those you’ve killed, but I’m sure the number doesn’t matter. You’re here. They’re not. It’s done. You have life again. If you spend all your time trying to balance your books to -become a good person-,” there’s venom in those last words, “then you’ll never get a chance to live it.”
The bard only answers the Blue Demon with a tilt of the head at first. Shishi was from another planet? A different realm? Her eyes flicker down at the cobblestones. “I suppose an upbringing like that is why you’re the Titan of Winter too. But given that, I understand why the morals I try to hold myself to might be off putting to you. We were just raised differently, and yet we both turned out to be monsters.” Kanna carefully takes down the shoulder straps to her portable instrument and holds it to her chest. As they cross the great Cenril-Kelay bridge that spans the canyon, she holds the damaged wood to her chest and walks backwards so that she can continue to face the Blue Demon while they walk. “Maybe I’m just naive. I want to find a way to ‘balance my books’ while still living my life. After all, I’ve never had one before.” She looks down at her dragon-zither and turns her back to Shishi and Leralynn. “Maybe I can do that now that I’ve lost my ability for necromancy.” She pauses, letting the statement sink in. “I didn’t feel it until the ritual had passed. Those pearls of the onniont, I think they were my conduit to channel necromancy…. What Alithyk Caluss did to me just unlocked the ability to use it. What would you do if you lost the ability to kill?”
Shishi is slightly more likely to not understand geography than be from a different planet, but who can truly know for sure. He flinches slightly when she calls herself and him monsters despite it being his own description for himself a moment before. The vampire is staring again at the enoki cape covering Kanna’s back as she turns away from the pair of cursed beings. He doesn’t understand anything about the magic Kanna or his daughter employ, but he has experience with going without the shadowy abilities that enable his infamous lethality. Losing the ability to kill for an extended period of time would likely mean the end of his life as a creature that must feed on others to survive, but that’s surely not the question that the bard is truly asking, and in a perhaps surprising show of insight, Blue seems aware of the meaning behind it, “I’d rest. I’d probably leave Lithrydel again. I wouldn’t be useful to anyone here anymore.” He catches himself too late and cringes before fervently adding, “Gwah~! I don’t mean you’re useless without necromancy. You can still do plenty here, I’m sure!” He glances over his shoulder again, recalling his daughter performing a ritual on her former necromancy teacher that served to restore a set of lost powers. While not completely analogous to the current situation, he does wonder if Leralynn couldn’t come up with a way to do something to help Kanna reclaim some of the magic she’s just lost access to…
Kanna is silent for a moment as Shishi stumbles over his attempt to cheer her up. When he is done, to likely anyone’s surprise, she bursts out laughing. It is a genuine laugh, but one full of the self-hatred and guilt her humanity had been hiding away for all the years she had been a ghoul. She clutches at her sides for a moment as she recovers. When her head lifts again, her face is wet with tears. “That’s the thing. I -am- useless without necromancy. And even if I wanted to have it back, if I shattered the jar right now and put the pieces back together, what good would it do me? All it does is put me in a position to abuse that power again, and I just don’t trust myself enough to not do that.” The bardess takes the enoki cloak off of her shoulders, and carefully folds it as they continue to walk. “I need to tell Quintessa what I did in the Chaos Realm. It's my fault she’s in the position she’s in. If the monster that took me hadn’t given me her as an option, maybe it would even be Leralynn that would be hurt because of me. Then I’m sure you wouldn’t be trying to comfort me right now.” Kanna clutches the folded cloak to her chest. “I need to get away from Vailkrin to think.”
Shishi puffs out his cheeks and shrugs up his shoulders, annoyed that he seems to have made things worse, or at best not helped at all. He raises the eyebrow above his open eye when Kanna mentions that Leralynn might have suffered the same fate as Quintessa if not for the choices the bard has made. He’s relegated himself to the sidelines in this fight against and with The God of Undeath, mostly because he has thus far been unaffected. Orange being taken would surely change that. It’s possible his limited involvement is by the teenage necromancer’s design, as delivering a vampire to a master of the undead might not exactly be the best strategy. “Aye. I wouldn’t be…” he finally says before adding, “...but you didn’t do that. That’s what matters.” He’s less fixated on Kanna now that the cloak is removed from her back, and he finds looking away easier, letting his one open eye drift out in the direction they’re heading, the desolation of the path to Vailkrin’s portal spreading out before them, “Where do you think you’ll go..?”
As the haunting portal to the city of nightmares comes into view, Kanna looks out at Cenril’s lights again, wiping the tears from her face. “I’m not sure what I will do or where I will go right now. There are a lot of things I wanted to do since I got my memories back from the God of Undeath. I suppose first I will tell Quintessa about the development, without telling her why, of course. She’s the one that found me and brought me into the Necromancer’s Guild to begin with.” Kanna moves towards Shishi and gently places the cloak between Leralynn’s leg and Shishi’s arm so that it does not fall the rest of the way to the Thorne Estate. With her eyes still red-rimmed and puffy from crying, she adds while looking up at him with a smile that betrays how heartbroken she is, “And if you ever want a replay of my favorite part of our duel, you always know where to find me. Leralynn will, too. It was fun, right?”
Shishi looks down at Kanna with that perpetual wink that she is partially responsible for putting onto his face. He puts on his practiced Titan of Winter fanged smile for her, but surely the bard can see her pain reflected back on his face through it all. “Aye. It was fun…” He doesn’t have anything else for her, and he knows Leralynn won’t be happy to learn that the former ghoul is leaving Vailkrin for the foreseeable future, so that forced smile degrades into a little frown. “Be safe, Kanna. You know where to find us too if you need anything.” With that, he leads the way into the dark portal. Depending on how quickly the former necromancer follows behind him, she might catch the void essence of the magical gateway clinging to him like a veil as he exits into Vailkrin, forming most noticeably the silhouette of satyr-like horns on the side of his head, that fade away as quickly as they came. He’s changed since their Titan fight, in more ways than one. How much of that is owed exclusively to Kanna is yet to be seen. The monster that tore into those bears in the bard’s homeland just a few hours ago is still there within him, but there is a levelness to The Blue Demon now that certainly wasn’t there before. The turn into the Forest of Abyssal Darkness is not far from the portal, so there won’t really be that awkward part of the stroll after they’ve said their goodbyes and before they actually part ways…