bolderfell | Prismatica Inbox

I also don't know what a mulligan is.

You're clever enough to work it out from context.

Most of the story I already told you was true. The part I left out is that the demon in question was me.

...If we're being truthful, I wondered about that, too. Then you said the thing about admiring them and it threw me off. In hindsight, I suppose it shouldn't have.

So. A human woman?

I did think my endeavor quite admirable, at the time. In a...self-sacrificing, making myself a martyr sort of way.

A human woman. My mother. She was dying, and I had no means of preventing the progression of her illness — save through the powers of the Forlorn Hope.

So you stole it. Who from?

Ah. The place I stole it from...is not heaven, exactly, but it's close. Imagine something like the gatekeeper to it — the institution whose duty it is to determine where a soul goes after death.

The sentencing judge in the ultimate trial of life, I suppose. I stole it from them.

Sounds like one hell of a story on its own right there, but maybe not the one you want to tell today. Maybe I'll ask another time.

For your mother, you got the mirror from those who guard the gates of life and death. What happened then?

Quite simply, I was prepared to use it. I knew what it would do, what it would ask. My life for the woman's. She would live, and I would not.

It really was my heart's desire, you know. I think it would've known, if I'd been anything less than wholly devoted to my cause.

It's strange. I've never...wanted someone else to live, so much. Not before her.

I wasn't going to ask, but...how did this woman come to be your mother?

Naturally enough, I suppose; I stole her son.

...Forgive me, that's an overly dramatic way of putting it. It's not technically false, but there are some significant bits of the tale left out.

You must understand, in the realm of the demons, I was not simply a fox and a thief. I was the fox. I was the thief. The Spirit Fox, the Legendary Bandit. And my notoriety stretched well beyond that plane of existence — even so far as the spirit world, the gatekeepers of heaven that I was describing to you before.

Eventually, they did as they would any creature they found a menace: they hunted me. A whole band of them, each immensely powerful in their own right — and I was strong, I was good, but even the strong and the capable can still be overrun by sheer force of numbers.

So I ran. I was badly wounded, but alive, and I knew that if they caught me in such a state, I would perish. In a last, desperate effort to survive, I gathered my soul and left my wounded body, leaping across the realms into the mortal plane, where I fused my soul with that of an unborn child.

I was careless with my words earlier, when I said I stole his life. I did not. What transpired was a merger, between the soul of that boy and the soul of the bandit fox.

Remind me I should always go first when we trade stories like this. You're a damn difficult act to follow.

[There's a lot to unpack here, and Therion picks pieces up here and there, one by one--picks them up and then replaces many without comment, without taking them from their setting.]

What was it like, do you remember? To be both. To be a newborn and a fox with a human mother, growing up the way human children do.

It's not something I remember. I doubt most of us do.

I remember every moment. Well — not infancy, of course. But the fox was always there, and the fox's memory was already so long that a little time spent in a human's body was a tolerable probation, if a frustrating one.

Being the woman's child was the means to an end. I was biding my time, recovering my strength. I thought it would take me a mere ten years, and then I would leave. Until then, I was precocious, and terribly advanced for my age. A boy with a demon's intelligence and skills.

I treated her as though she was inferior to me. I can't begin to imagine how it must have felt, raising a son with such a proud, contemptuous nature. I cared nothing for her, not really. She was merely useful to me, protecting me until I was recuperated enough to make my escape.

I remember one day I wanted something on a high shelf in the kitchen. I climbed up after it, fearlessly; the bandit knew precisely what to do, of course, but the human motor skills were clumsy and not equal to the task. All the skill in the world does little without hands and feet capable of expressing it.

I fell, and the glass broke. And that woman, who I had never shown anything but indifference at best and scorn at worst — she snatched me out of the falling glass, suffering cuts all up her arms in the process.

A mother's love, I suppose. I had done nothing to deserve it and everything to disdain it, and still she wrapped me in it anyway.

Unconditional, they call that.

Honestly...I'm jealous.

Are you so eager for unconditional love of your own?

Not exactly. But if I had anyone that felt that way about me when I was small, I don't remember them.

Anyway. You were caught, then, the way a little girl's trust caught me. That moment, the shards of glass that struck her and not you, those aren't anything you'll ever be able to forget, I think. No matter how long the fox's memory.

So what did happen, then? You were ready to use the mirror -- it was your whole heart's desire, saving the woman that did that for you, unconditionally -- but something stopped you. Right? Or it wouldn't be a story.

I told you it was a love story, didn't I? Just perhaps not quite the sort of love you'd imagined.

But yes. It was my wish to save her — my life for hers, a trade a demon would never make, but one that perhaps a son would. I wanted her to live. I thought...

I don't know what I thought. Perhaps it was a sort of penance, for all those years her love went unappreciated. Even now, I'm not altogether convinced that I didn't cause her illness somehow, parasite that I am. But I had the mirror, and she took ill once night, and I set out to use it.

But of course, a theft of something so precious couldn't go unnoticed, and a detective had been sent after me to retrieve the Forlorn Hope and bring me to justice. He wasn't like the hunters, despite being an agent of the same greater entity. He...listened.

I told you before that I was testing you, to see if you'd challenge me when I was hiding something, or misdirecting from the truth. He didn't know the price the Forlorn Hope would ask of me, until I'd already begun to use it. But when he heard it, he —

He threw himself at it, and demanded that it take his life instead of mine. He snapped at me. Threw my folly in my face, made me realize the one thing that in all my great plans, I'd never considered — the human element.

What good would the life I was purchasing do for my mother, if my actions would force her to spend it mourning the death of her son?

[Quiet, for a moment.]

Hope that's a rhetorical question. I don't have an answer.

[The human element. As if there's any one human element, singular, to consider in a conundrum like that. A life you fought for tooth and nail for a life you love, the only life you've ever loved--who's ever loved you?

Therion would still spend whatever meager coin his life's worth for Cordelia, if that's what it took, but Cordelia isn't his mother. Would Cordelia mourn him? Maybe, if she knew. But she'd move on, move past it, and continue to grow into a woman who could shoulder all responsibility, even one as bloody and burdensome as House Ravus's.

What life would Kurama's human mother have had without him? Would it really be so lonely and empty, forever? Is that what that kind of love does--makes of a person a vessel from which care pours endlessly, then shatters them like so much glass when the object of their love is gone?

Would he once have used the Forlorn Hope to save Darius?

Would he have weighed the worth of the life he was buying him, if he did?]

What happened to him? The detective.

What happened to your mother?

They lived. Both of them.

That reckless fool of a detective has a devil's luck. He was ready to throw his life away for me, forgetting all the while that he had a mother who would mourn him, too.

But we all kept our lives. Perhaps the Forlorn Hope settled for a single life between the two of us — half of his and half of mine. Perhaps it waived the fee altogether.

Sometimes I think I must love him, a little. I don't know what else to call the emotion I feel, the one that binds me to him because of what he did for me.

Maybe you do. Love's one of those things humans just can't seem to define properly. Must make for a frustrating subject of study.

Maybe the Forlorn Hope had a sentimental streak of its own. Maybe it was lonely up there, locked up so long in the gates of heaven. Maybe the three of you, doing what you did, gave it something it valued more than a single measly life. How many of those must it have taken in its time?

Maybe, after all that time with only evil inside it, you told it its first good love story. I've known barkeeps to waive prices for less.

You may just be the first person in history to empathize with a cursed artifact forged of darkness, you realize.

...

You sounded like him, just then. Just for a moment.

You've got such high praise for me today. Stop, I'll blush.

You can suffer it, as your sentence for the high crime of not being here to tug on my hair.

Thought pulling was the punishable thing. Real traditional, removing the hands and fingers of a thief. You changing the rules on me while I'm not there to take advantage?

Sometimes the real crime is a rule gone unbroken.

I'd still bite your fingers off. I just also don't think the risk is deterrent enough to outweigh the reward. Not for a master thief.

Flatterer. Damned if I don't, then.

Guess you ought to look out for me once the rains stop. I'll be by.

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