that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
He has been putting off this encounter.
Not because he did not want to see her—he did, oh, he did—but because the pain of it was more than he could bear. Even when the curse bled from him. When the magic filled his lungs. When he became bent under the weight of a gift that cost him with every use. None of it rose to the agony he felt when he saw the pain in her eyes before the quest. The way she had looked at him as realization set in.
His magic had peeled back the film of his memory so he had to live every moment in stark relief. He had to remember the way she had seen him. The horror. And each second of it burned into him, tattooed onto his very underbelly—a brand he would never escape. Because his curse had never only harmed him.
How he wish that it had.
How much easier he might have borne it.
Instead, he was left with the knowledge that it had harmed those around him worst of all. His mother more than most. So you can understand why he avoided this confrontation. Why he shied away from having to relieve it in real time, having to face the angelic one of his mother when this demonic power now flowed so readily through him. How he would have to explain to her that his curse had left.
And he was damned instead.
But Firion, for all of his faults, is not entirely a coward and he does not simply run from it forever. He wakes one night, the sunlight-induced headache barely beginning to fade behind his eyes, and he opens a portal to Hyaline. He steps through with his shadow companion barely a step behind, the darkness pulling tightly over his shoulders in a nearly defensive maneuver. His aim is, for better or worse, impeccable, and as he steps forward, he feels the painfully bright glow of her and without meaning to, he flinches.
When he blinks away the strobing light, tinting his own vision to bite back the headache that threatens to form, he realizes the light is coming from his own mother and something in him twists in reaction.
But the only thing he says is a single word.
The word of a young boy, not a demon.
“Mom?”
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
@[Ryatah]