I was nursing my ale when the tavern door creaked open, admitting a woman in a simple, dark traveller's cloak. She moved with a quiet grace, her face hidden in the shadow of her hood.
My internal roommate, Ronan, suddenly went dead quiet. Not his usual 'thinking' quiet, but a deep, absolute stillness that was way more alarming than any of his usual heroic bullshit.
The woman walked directly to my table and sat down, uninvited. Before I could form a protest, the world changed.
It wasn't a sound or a flash of light. It was a cessation. The roar of the tavern, the bard's cheerful tune, the clatter of plates—it all vanished into an absolute, profound silence. The flame on the candle at our table froze, a perfect, unmoving tear of light. The dust motes in the air hung suspended. Time itself had stopped for everyone but us.
The woman slowly lowered her hood. It was a face of impossible, timeless beauty, etched with a sorrow so deep it felt older than the mountains. Her eyes, the colour of a dawn sky, was not looking at me. They were looking through me, at the silent, focused soul within.
"Ronan," she whispered, her voice a melody of pure, heartbreaking love. "My son. My star. Oh how I have missed you... I am so sorry."
I felt Ronan's spirit shudder in my mind, a wave of silent, overwhelming emotion that was not anger or betrayal, but a deep, sorrowful recognition. He knew her. Great. Family drama. And I had a front-row seat inside my own skull. He remained silent.
Her attention then shifted from the soul within to the 'damage' on the surface. Her expression hardened into one of cold, clinical disgust. She wasn't looking at a person anymore; she was a physician examining a tumour.
"You," she said, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "You are not a person. You are a symptom. A fever dream my son's mind created to shield itself from a pain it could not bear. You are the cancer that grew from his grief."
Well, that's a new one. I've been called a lot of things over the centuries, but 'sentient tumour' is definitely a first.
She took a breath. "My bargain with the Ringmaster was precise," she stated, her words cold as the void. "I am forbidden all contact with my son. If Ludo discovers I have broken this pact... he will cast Ronan back into that timeless nothing. The cost to my divinity for this meeting is… considerable."
'Oh, shit. She's a god,' I thought.
Her eyes bored into mine. "The pact, however, says nothing of the disease that infests him. It says nothing of you. You are the loophole, and Ludo for all his flaws would appreciate a good loophole." She leaned forward, her intensity a palpable force. "So understand this, affliction. I am here for a reason, and you are the only one who will remember it. You will not speak of this to him. Your silence is now the lock on his cage."
Her expression turned urgent, her voice sharp as glass. "Listen to me closely. My sight is limited, but it is clear on this. The turning of two seasons... six months. That is the time you have. A hunger from the Silent Places is coming for this city. You will know it by the insects it controls," she warned. "It will wear a familiar face to fool the people of this city. It must be stopped."
Her purpose made clear, she pressed two fingers against the centre of my chest. A shock went through me, a wave of pure, unimaginable warmth. "I am giving him a sliver of my own power, a gift not for you but from my son. It will empower his Art," she whispered. Ludo will not object. He knows that should this vessel be destroyed... my power will revert to him. It is a gamble he is happy for me to make."
A cosmic insurance policy. Smart. Vicious, but smart. A soft chime resonated in my being as a new, intricate pathway of power was etched into my spirit. A second, gentler pulse emanated from her fingertips, a wave of soft fog that washed over Ronan's consciousness. "He will remember nothing of this," she confirmed.
Her voice turned to hard steel for her final command.
"You have six months."
She gave a single, sharp nod, pulling her hood back up. Then she vanished.
Time crashed back in with a violent swoosh. The roar of the tavern rushed into my ears, dizzying me before everything snapped back to normal. A hand was waving in front of my face.
"Sir? Are you alright, sir?" Sandy, the young waitress, asked, her expression a mixture of concern and confusion. "You just... stared off into space there for a good minute. Everything okay?"
I stared at the empty chair where a goddess had just called me a cancer and given me a deadline. 'Peachy,' I thought.
Ronan's presence stirred a faint, unexplainable melancholy clinging to him. 'What were we just talking about?' he projected, his own consciousness hazy.
He didn't remember. He didn't remember any of it. But I did. I was left holding a cryptic warning from a goddess who saw me as a disease.
I forced a tight smile for the waitress. "Fine," I said, my voice strained. "Just... thinking."
I reached for the small coin pouch at my belt to pay her. My right hand fumbled with the clasp, and on pure, unthinking instinct, my left hand came up to steady it.
And stopped.
Sensation. I felt the worn leather of the pouch against... fingers. Nerves that shouldn't exist were firing signals to my brain. Slowly, deliberately, I pulled my left hand away and held it up in front of my face.
It wasn't a stump.
It was a whole, pale, and perfectly formed hand. Five fingers. A thumb. Faint, unwritten lines on the palm. It was weak, unused, but it was mine.
'Murphy? What are you doing?' Ronan projected, feeling the tidal wave of shock that just hit me. 'What's with your hand? You're staring at it.'
He didn't know. The thought was sharp and clear. She must have wiped the memory of the stump.
"Excuse me, sir," the waitress said, her brow furrowed as she stared at my left hand. "I... I could have sworn, when you came in, you only had..."
"... Good day, Sandy." I cut her off quickly, forcing a tight, dismissive smile.
"But your hand..."
"I said good day!"
I could feel a spike of pure confusion from Ronan's side. 'Only had... what? Murphy, what was she talking about?' But his suspicion was hazy, clouded by the lingering fog of the memory wipe. He didn't press, and the question dissolved into the melancholy.
The waitress was still staring, a confused look on her face. I took a shaky breath, opened my new hand, and deliberately used it to pick a few copper coins from the pouch. They felt solid, real.
I tossed the coins on the table, my new hand trembling slightly, and headed back up to the supposed safety of my room, my mind reeling from a terrifying warning and an impossible miracle.
Interlude
To my dear Ronan,
For a being such as I, time is not a line, but a river. It flows, and I can gaze upon any point along its endless course. Yet even in that eternal, shimmering flow, there are moments that stand like adamantine pillars, casting shadows across all of history. You are one of them.
Before you were this pain you have become, before you were a thousand forgotten souls in a thousand pointless lives, you were mine. My Brightest Son. My Morningstar. You were not merely a warrior; you were a song of courage made manifest. Your soul was a sun, so full of conviction and laughter that my own light felt brighter just for being near you.
And I, your Matron, your mother, failed you.
The specifics are a poison I have held in my heart for millennia, the ash of a choice I can never unmake. There was a war, as there always are among gods. But this one was different. A flaw in the very fabric of divine law was exploited, a cosmic loophole that presented me with a choice between two apocalypses. I was checkmated, my power bound by an ancient pact I could not break. To save our realm, I would have had to sacrifice a part of my own divinity—an act that would have plunged my corner of creation into eternal shadow.
You saw the price of my victory. You saw the path I would have to walk and the darkness it would unleash. And you, in your final, most terrible act of heroism, made the choice for me. You stepped in front of my fading light and became the sacrifice that sealed my victory, laying down your own divinity for the people of a world you loved.
Your death was not glorious. It was a snuffing out. A severing. Your luminous soul, tied to my own, was ripped away from me, away from the Aether, away from everything you had ever known. You were banished. Cast out into a small, quiet world in a forgotten corner of the cosmos—a cage devoid of magic, where the very concept of a soul's fire was nothing more than a fairytale.
And upon you was laid a curse. Not of my making, but a consequence of the broken laws, the cosmic backlash of your sacrifice. It was a malevolent gravity, a shackle designed to ensure that your torment would be endless, a curse that ensured any spark of your old heroism would only call down a greater ruin.
The pact that you had died to uphold now held me fast. My role became that of a silent spectator to your slow, grinding damnation. I could not intervene. I could not reach you. I could not answer your prayers. I, the Lady of Light, was powerless to help my own son.
And so my vigil began. An eon of watching you, my brightest sun, endlessly rise in fragile flesh, only to be extinguished by the cruelest, most pointless of nights. I watched you born under a cold sky in the New World offered up to a false god on a stone altar, your still-beating heart torn from your chest by a savage priest. I saw you in a stone cell during an Inquisition, your bones methodically broken on the rack over weeks by men who prayed for your soul while they destroyed your body. I witnessed you in the muddy trenches of a Great War, not taken by a clean bullet, but drowning from the inside out while your lungs filled with poison gas.
After many such lives, you found yourself a child born of a people who had crossed an ocean to escape a conquered land, only to find a new kind of squalor on the streets. It was in that den of thieves where the hero inside gave up. Your survival became a weapon pointed at the world around you, and you learned not to get close to anyone. On and on it went until the day I saw your spirit perform a terrible, necessary act of self-mutilation.
You took every memory of your time in that hell—every lonely death, every moment of betrayal, every second of agonising helplessness—and you tore them out of your conscious self. You ripped the entire chronicle of your torment from the core of your being.
But that immense weight of suffering could not be unmade. Instead, it coalesced and hardened. From the ash and iron of a thousand ruined lives, a new consciousness was forged—a shield of scar tissue, a personality built for nothing but enduring the horrors of a world without light. And you, my Ronan, your original soul, were left hollowed out in its wake—an amnesiac king on a forgotten throne, with no memory of the crucible that had just unmade you.
Your final reincarnation was in the twilight of an age of oil and steel, in a vast and quiet desert. In that life, the new consciousness—the affliction born of your pain—was in control. That life ended as no other had before: with your own heroic nature convincing the scarred shield that held you to sacrifice everything for a single innocent family.
That final sacrifice was the one act of pure, selfless divinity that the curse could not account for. It shattered. Your torment was over, but your soul was lost to me, adrift in the void.
Powerless to reach you myself, I made a desperate choice. I went to the one being I had wronged so long ago, the one who hated me most, and I struck a deal. To bring you home, I had to sacrifice your love. I agreed to never contact you again. This allowed him to take credit for lifting the curse that your own sacrifice had already broken, and to use my silence as proof that I had abandoned you. It was his ultimate revenge, for he knew that making my own son hate me would be the deepest wound he could ever inflict.
But Ludo's cruelty did not end there. He saw the affliction clinging to and offered to make you whole, to scour the scar tissue from your soul. Unmake the consciousness that had been your torment, and you, my noble son, refused. You would not be his champion if it meant murdering the very being that had borne your pain. Ludo, relented with a malicious bargain. He would bring you both back, but he would pour every ounce of his influence into the 'signing bonus' of his Inventory Art, leaving nothing for the vessel itself. It was a cruel starting hand, but you accepted it without hesitation to save it.
And so, you were returned. Not as my shining champion, but as this new, fractured being. My guilt is a starless midnight. I hear you wonder why your goddess forsook you, and the terms of my own bargain force my silence.
You, my Ronan, my soul, still hold the light. A light that can, I pray, one day find the strength to discard the cancerous growth that now clings to you and reclaim what is rightfully yours.
And so I write this letter that you will never read, a silent testament to a love you can no longer feel. May you one day be whole again.
Your eternally watchful, and forever shamed, Mother