His mind was afflicted.
Rhaena Olwak was dead. He had been assaulted, no, judged, by Golben, He had lost days, weeks of his life, maybe even longer. There were memories of a time immemorial that was neither real nor true, no matter how thoroughly he had tried to make it so, no matter how deeply he had tried to defy the labyrinth of his own creation. He had tried to will Audmathus through the crucible along with him and in the end neither of them had truly made it. In the end, he hadn't even had left the power to end the dreamwitch.
And far, far more than that, Rhaena Olwak was dead. He had felt it. Even in Golben, he had been connected to her. She was lost to madness then, far lost, far hopeless, no longer the woman he had loved except for in the broadest strokes but they were still bound, they were still of one heart and of two minds connected as much so as two arms were to one body. This was a rapport years in the making. This was a love that had survived even the very loss of not one soul but two.
She had died and he had felt it. So few people feel death, know it. It did not break even a weakened and brittle Glenn Burnie, but it did deepen wounds that were already existent. It did bleed out strength that was already trickling away.
His body was afflicted.
Months of starvation did terrible things to even the strong. Add in the other afflictions magical and otherwise presented by Golben and he was a wreck. This was Glenn Burnie though. He could be a wreck and it would matter little. Oh, yes, he could only rise out of the bed that Cinnabar Calomel had half carried him into because he was more stubborn that he was human, but the harder he pushed the more he set back his recovery. Keeping food down was still a problem for a stomach that had almost completely devoured itself and his very life along with it. Even so, he would have been driven enough to make none of this matter, if not for his mind. Even his will power could not fully handle the loss of half of everything he had been, especially when much of the other half was in ruins through his own action.
Still, he was Glenn Burnie and he'd reach out to the man sitting beside his bed, determined.
"What's going on out there, Cinnabar?"
It was the first time he could manage so focused a question since his recovery began.
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His body was afflicted.
The young knight did not remember the events of the hour any better than most of Myrken. What he did know was that something, perhaps multiple things, all cataclysmic had befallen him. His armor was partially mangled. Part of it had ended up lodged in his ribcage, metal protruding towards organs and cutting through viscera. What had been meant to protect him, to better his life, had only made him suffer. This was a symbol for far more than just the armor and all of his reading and thinking and bettering himself was starting to make him realize that.
The fevers had been terrible. Bits of metal had still remained in him days later. He had been kind to the poor, the unwashed, the unwanted. They lived in hovels, shacks, tenants of harsh landlords and harsher lives. He had been kind to them, both at the beginning and at the very end when Olwak's chosen beared down upon them. It was never Elliot Gahald that did so. Instead, he shielded them. He worked with them. He gave them of himself, and that was why they drew him in now and protected him from those who might string him up as a symbol of the shattered regime of tea and lace. They were not physicians. This was not the remedium.
His mind was afflicted.
Something else had happened during that hour. Memories assaulted him, memories not his own but instead of him. One after the next after the next, they would grab at him, would make him look at a twisted mirror that showed a past that wasn't real. Who was this stranger on the other side looking back at him? No, looking back at someone else but with his image, with a different spirit, a kindness without a code, a pack mentality that was pure Myrken. It wasn't the arrogant thief of the Inscribed Witch but a shepherd with a maligned sheep.
Even then, these were just memories. These were just images, phantoms. He could push past them were it not for the fever, if not for his infection. He was a strong, young man, one who stood for the weak and for his own beliefs. His mind was honed against such doubts and hesitations. Now, though he could barely rise from the bed. He saw hallucinations and toiled in darkness.
When the figure came towards him, when any figure did, he would say the same thing, thinking the same person before him, his heart in the right place but the rest of him more than lost.
"What has befallen Myrken, Cherny?"