Celyn and the Cursed Room

Celyn suspected it was probably fortunate that he was, at least a little, thinking about his sanity when he got up on Robin’s shoulders to push open the trap door. Of course, he was thinking about it in comparison to other people, mostly, because he was pretty sure that reacting to the walls that displayed gruesome deaths with an internal “Oh, is that what that does” was probably not something everyone else would consider normal.

If it had had the frisson of prophecy he might have worried about it a little, but then again he might not have, particularly not after the second image, which was different. It was just there to be an irritating illusion and he refused to gratify whoever had made it by being irritated by it. Which was the sort of thing that if someone called it crazy, he wouldn’t argue with it, he just thought of it more as the Wyrdling’s protection from his madness.

It had been a bit since he had climbed up onto someone’s shoulders, but he still knew how it worked, and the steadiness of Robin was, as always, a comfort.

It made the wave of despairing self-destruction come with a sharper contrast, and it was one that he found himself intensely annoyed by, even as he ducked down to get the lead box from Viepuck.

This is not my madness. This is not how my madness goes. How dare you.

Box in hand, he summoned up fey magic, magic he had learned as a distraction from a madness he did not yet understand, and jumped through the mist, closer to the orb, pressing through its wall of hatred of life to try to catch it in the box. When it dodged, he cursed at it, and Izgil and Robin appeared at the gateway, and Izgil did something to knock it out of the air so it could be caught.

This is not my madness. My madness does not intend harm, even when it causes it. This is alien to me, it is not of me, it is not mine. It can fuck off.

Putting it in the box did not stop the battering, and Celyn continued to be peeved by it as he jumped again, and dropped back down the hole, and called up to say that it was the room, not the box, that was doing it.

That was not my madness. It didn’t even rouse my madness, which would have been an actual problem. All it could do was hurt me.

He should have extended the Wyrdling’s fate-averting protection to Robin, is what he should have done, but he was too annoyed in the moment with the existence of that alien madness to remember that other people might be afflicted by it.

“Are you all right?”