Of all the things his curse has taken from him, the ability to be a good father is the one he regrets most.

He thinks often of Ether, and how his father had fought his own demons. It was his love for Briseis and the family they built together that kept him anchored to the light. For Torryn it does not come as easily. Every tie he has is eventually cut loose, and he tells himself that it is to save them, though that is only a half-truth. If he is honest with himself, it is so that he does not have to constantly face his short-comings, and the way his hunger makes him go nearly blind to other’s suffering. How long had he kept Despoina around so that he might feed from her despair? That thin thread of humanity that he clung to told him it was wrong—no matter how willing she had been, no matter how much the normal parts of him loved her, he could not keep her.

Yet he still tried, always, to be the father he thought he might have been before his world was plunged into darkness.
He stayed present if the mother’s allowed it, and in Harrowed and Evade’s case Beyza had nearly insisted. When both boys had been born like him, he’d had to swallow away the disappointment—not in them, but in himself—and yet the only thing Beyza had seemed concerned with was that he taught them how to survive.

And so, he had.
He taught them the way Torryn himself had learned to navigate the world without causing too much of a disturbance. He taught them how to siphon emotions discreetly, or how to take advantage of events that would cause widespread distress, making it easy to feed without being noticed. He tried to teach them how to find their place in a world that was not really meant for them, in hopes that they would find it all easier than he did. When they grew older and a distance naturally developed between them there was still that thread, that fatherly bond, that kept them tethered, and he was always relieved when they would follow it back to him.

When Harrowed finds him this time, though, he can sense immediately that something is different, wrong. He can nearly taste the emotion before he ever sees him, and though his jaw aches a little and that gnawing pit in his stomach clenches, he does not react to it. Instead he follows until the pale form shrouded in shadow comes into view, and Torryn peels himself away from the darkness. “Harrowed,” he greets his son quietly, watching him with glowing red eyes, trying to decipher what has changed. His shadows don’t seem to be as prominent, but because they are still present he is hesitant to believe his first suspicion, the one that comes with just a flicker of hope—that his son is no longer a bodach. “Is everything all right?”

He listens, keeping his expression steady. He won’t let his own thoughts show, not when his son is already struggling to hold himself together. But the parallels to their stories are undeniable; the strange world, the hallucinations, the betrayal and violence from your own family. He thinks of dark labyrinths with undulating walls, he remembers his family’s haunting, distorted voices as they taunted him into insanity.

He remembers going in as a plain, unremarkable boy and emerging as he is now,with that insatiable gnawing already in his gut.

“I understand,” he says, voice quiet, heavy. “Perhaps more than you realize.” He has never told them the story of how he became to be; not in such detail. He is sure that when speaking of his own family he mentioned how out of place he felt, as being one of the only of Ether and Briseis’s children to not have been born with an affinity for shadows. He was sure that being changed into a bodach was a punishment for his longing, for not being content with what he had.

“Whatever happened in there, Harrowed, you must remember, that parts of it were not real. They knew your family was the way to tempt you. And even if now, you are irreversibly changed…” he trails off for a moment, jaw clenching, before offering his son a smile that is mostly hidden by his shadows. “You will overcome it.”