Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be; any

[Erebor]

some are lost in the fire

some are built from it

He doesn't remember when it started. He simply remembers the pain building in him, sapping his strength, dragging him down, down down.

He does remember the night when he woke, alone, startled to find that he had fallen asleep. He remembers how the pain had twisted him, how it had bitten him from the inside out like a thousand wolves. He'd thought to try to get it out, tried bucking and rearing to dislodge it, tried twisting himself on the ground until a sheen of sweat darkened his black coat and he felt a preternatural exhaustion come over him.

When he started coughing up blood, he'd finally understood.

He didn't really know what it meant to be sick. He didn't really understand illness, not in the same way that a human would. He'd seen it a handful of times – horses do get sick and die, even in this magical land that is Beqanna. But he didn't immediately know what it meant. All that he knew is that, no matter what, he could not suffer it to be transmitted to any other horse in the Chamber.

And so he'd run. He'd run and he'd hidden, actively avoiding any noises that sounded like it might be horses. And blessedly, he'd been far enough away by the time the fever had taken him that he no longer had to run. He didn't know how long it had been. He'd tried counting the days at first, but then all of a sudden he'd found that the days started to lie, and the numbers started to slip away from him. Sunrises bled into sunsets, he'd wake to darkness or light, and it simply ceased to matter.

He tried everything to stop it. He tried to burn it out many times, turning his heat manipulation on himself, trying desperately to think of something, anything. But it had always been in vain. Hot, cold, nothing worked – existence narrowed to survival as his entire world became enduring another day with the pain. He lapsed in and out of consciousness, seeing little and comprehending less.

And even when he saw things, he could never know if it was reality. Things came back to him from impossible times, images of little girls who never really existed (he thinks), images of the burning of the mother tree, the cries of the Gates. And even the face of Lagertha, Amazon queen, swimming in front of him. Malis too, her face always silent, mingling with Killdare and all the others of the Chamber. But he never sees Straia – only the swirl of ravens and feathers.

And then one day (days? Months? Years?) later, as suddenly as the sickness had come, it left.

It left him a shell of what he once was. As he picks his way back to the Chamber slowly, he is barely recognizable. His coat is ragged, stretched loosely over muscles that have almost entirely lost their tone. His mane and tail hang unkempt, with the ragged look of one who is just recovering from sickness. The disease has taken its toll. One day he will recover, in time he will be whole again – and he will be lucky, because he will have no permanent damage. But today he is less than half the creature he once was. Impressive and imposing, no more.

erebor

heat manipulating servant of the chamber

warship x straia

[Kushiel]

If all was right with the world, Kushiel wouldn’t have the luxury of vanity. He routinely singed off most of his mane, and commonly burned too hard the night before and found himself unable to greet the day with the barest of smiles. However, not all was right with the world, and because of that, Kushiel was very, very vain. Not in a way that girls were, no, not in that way at all. He didn’t care if another boy was prettier than him. However, once upon a time, Erebor had been that boy, and Kushiel had tried his best not to let it bother him. Maybe it had, maybe it hadn’t, but when he saw Erebor, he nearly choked on a single, loud bark of laughter. Kushiel knew what bad looked like, and coincidentally, it looked just like Erebor.

Kushiel knew that he should just leave it alone. A part of him wanted to stay out of the other man’s business. Better to let Erebor’s friends deal with it, or perhaps his mother. Kushiel knew, from personal experience, that loving and dutiful mothers could always be counted on to kick you when you were down. If Erebor had been Kushiel’s mother’s son, she would turn up any minute to tell him that he looked like shit. Kushiel resisted for two more, long, unbearable minutes before he ambled over to the horrible wreck that had once been Erebor.

Kushiel flashed the other man a wide, lazy smile, and opened his mouth to make an inappropriate joke when it hit him. The gray stallion grunted as Erebor’s feelings washed over him. It took him a minute to realize what was happening, and then groaned again. It was the empathy. Kushiel was beginning to wonder if Straia had given this ability to him as a punishment, rather than as a tool to do his job. Kushiel tended to offend people about as often as he drew breath, and now he had to feel it. He looked at Erebor nervously, then sighed, a little deflated, and continued. He would just need to become a masochist as well as a pyro.

“You know, I’ve seen roadkill that looked better than you.” And it was true, he had. Kushiel had once seen a deer get crushed by a tree. Erebor looked worse than that deer. Erebor made that deer look like the prime of life.