Celyn Narrative Bit
Celyn woke up abruptly and then let out a long breath, because the warmth against his back could only be Robin, and that meant that Robin was there, and the troubled, fragmented dreams he had been having were just phantasms. He contemplated, for a moment, that he should probably have thought to ask the Wyrdling into his dreams, that he should have expected that unease, but also he had needed a different blessing to be sure of being able to sleep at all.
They made arrangements to stable the horses for now, and if Celyn was maybe a little slower helping Robin with his armour than usual because he kept wanting to pause and touch to remind himself that Robin was there, well, that was reasonably understandable. And Robin didn’t seem to mind it, either, which had Celyn needing to think about a few things— like whether that was because Robin also was reassured by the tendency to fuss under the circumstances, or whether Celyn had in general been more careful than was necessary to not be overwhelming. Starting the hike up to Ashcombe meant, though, that he had a whole lot of time to think, so that was fine.
Unfortunately, thinking mostly went in circles. He couldn’t bear to stray far from Robin, not even to peer at interesting things or check to see if a mushroom was one of an edible kind like usual, and he was distantly aware that that was not his accustomed state of mind. Eventually it occurred to him that he might, in fact, be mad again.
He curled his fingers around the theatre masks pendant he wore and let the prayer fall into the rhythm of the walking, the quiet ritual of it settling his mind even before the god’s presence flowed through and set the symbol glowing. He tucked it into his shirt to keep the light against his skin and, yes, the loops of racing thoughts settled for a little while. He could not immediately tell when the gateway gently closed again, but the anxious and badly-formed ideas slowly started returning, building on each other or cascading into implausibilities. He reached out to rest a hand against Robin’s armour, which helped, and walked a little longer before he gave up and tugged the pendant out again, and once again murmured the prayer.
Celyn was not built for wishing the world was different than it was; it got in the way of dealing with the facts that had fallen into place already. If he got to imagining things were different— that his body was different, particularly dangerous, but in general— he would go down useless rabbitholes of fantasy rather than actually be able to be effective dealing with the world as it was.
It was something he did love about Robin, that Robin was constantly seeing that people could be better and wishing they would be. He was glad someone could do that, since he was so ill-equipped for it. He gave the paladin another sidelong glance, assuring himself that everything was as normal as possible.
In any case, while he wasn’t suited to imagine himself other than he was, he did, at the moment, somewhat wish that being mad were a little less inconvenient. The Wyrdling’s love and protection meant that he was quite aware of the possibility that surges of irrationality were, in fact, not reality, but they kept creeping up on him like a sieging force trying to sap his defenses, and he did not always notice that one had slipped in. The fact that the prayer chased them off for a little bit affirmed they were, in fact, anxiousness and imagined catastrophe rather than a sensible evaluation of how the dice had landed, but he had to remember to pray.
He was a good fifteen minutes into anxious rumination over the possibility that he might pray to have the madness alleviated and yet the fear would remain before he sorted out that that was another surge of madness. He sighed, curled his hand around the pendant, and repeated the prayer, catching Robin’s concerned look and giving him a sort of helpless shrug of a smile. The dice fell how the dice fell, it’s just right now was a string of bad throws. He would do better when there were things to do other than walk and think; in fact, the occasional need to scramble up a slope rather than just plod along provided some relief from the thoughts without the necessity for divine intervention.
He was also not good at wanting things. Or rather, he had worked to make wanting things a bit like accepting the world as it was, because sliding into wanting his body to be lastingly different was dangerous when the drowning madness came. (At least this round of madness did not seem to be the drowning kind, more of a nervous exhaustion that tended to get stuck on bad thoughts.) All he had wanted when he was younger was to stay in Clawyn and tend the fey spaces, and he hadn’t gotten to keep that. He hadn’t wanted Ellis, specifically; Ellis had been a gift, a blessing. He had worried about Ellis wanting things, because the two things that Ellis really wanted had been him and to go out and seek his fortune and Ellis wouldn’t be able to have both.
Right now, though, he wanted things. He wanted events to be less relentless, for there to be a chance to stop and breathe between them. Robin’s speech about how tired they all were kept coming up in his mind. (As happened sometimes, he had a fleeting thought of “why does it all have to be so hard” before the luminous, comforting presence of his god reminded him, answered him, that if things were not hard, then there would be no need for hope. Celyn was made for building hope, and so he accepted that things would often be hard where he was because he had work to do, only right now he wanted to grumble about it. If he had to be dealing with so much hard outside his own mind could he at least be a little less mad right now please.)
He wanted the madness to be a little less. He wanted the terrible progress of awful things to lay off for a bit. He wanted, with a frayed-edge intensity, to have time to spend with Robin when they didn’t have to be ready on a moment’s notice to run off and be heroes, because figuring all this out was so much on top of that. He wanted Robin, himself, like he had wanted Clawyn, and right now he knew his mind was deeply rattled by the fact that wanting like that carried a risk of terrible loss.
He wanted to fight something very, very badly.
Fighting things had always been a good way of getting the tangled awful of the madness to stop twisting up his body, even when it had just been his shadow, and right now the prospect of fighting the Hunter, who had pettily annoyed, insulted, and now threatened Robin and also Celyn’s capacity for peace of mind was very, very appealing.
Fortunately he probably would get to do it very soon. It was a wild, reckless urge, to be certain, but he had a very short (two, to be precise) list of beings who he specifically wanted to pierce through the eye and the Hunter was currently at the top of it. Since the Hunter was the only one of the two that he was reasonably certain of being able to identify, also, that simplified the sorting.
He curled his hand around the pendant again as they climbed up the slope towards Ashcombe, so that he could murmur the prayer. He had a momentary surge of panic, then, when the sense of anxiety did not fade, but then realized that the Wyrdling had instead chosen to alleviate the burden of his physicality. They did not do that often, and Celyn was not sure if it was chance, a throw of the dice, or because the god knew how hard it was for him to lose it that made it rare. Or, perhaps, this time he had been thinking so much about Robin in the time before he had prayed and that made a difference. In the moment, though, it eased a number of things he had not realized hurt, even as he was still full of quiet violence and nerves.
The abandoned village was eerie and quiet, and Viepuck’s peculiar familiar flitted off to see what it could find, and Celyn twitched with too much fury and not enough peace. He kept a corner of his attention on Robin, of course, but there was someone else who was composed of restless agitated need to rend, and so he took a moment to approach Greymalkin, conjuring up all his sense of etiquette for the fey while he did.
He rather envied the gryphon’s knowledge of which way Robin was, and right at the moment it was edging even into jealousy that was not playing nice with his madness, but he swallowed it all down to ask, quietly:
“If something happens to him again, we’ll find him together, right?”