The door shut as sound from the hall dimmed to a quiet whiteness. A soft hum as Arlen sat slowly, grimacing at the wound that was still aching. The beds were comfortable, at least as he found himself dozing off in the slightest bit.
"You have something to say?" Senna told him, she leaned against the wall beside the door frame. Arms crossed as always, but the coldness in her glare faded; this time, it was softened, maybe by the arrival in her hometown.
"Kind of..." Arlen began, before he took a deep breath in and leaned against his knees, arms stretched, unclasping the sheath and sword from his side and setting it behind him on the bedsheets. She stared, waiting, and he grew nervous.
"We don't know each other," he began his sentence, truly this time. "Please don't take this the wrong way, but I only bring this up because I feel I owe you something, you and Vocht, but mostly you. As in the events playing out by accepting me without truly knowing much about me."
"Okay." She said, soft and quiet, following her tone of question and curiosity with the flow of where Arlen was heading with the conversation, still eluding her, but alluding to her.
"I see you have a pained expression," he resumed. "A guilty stare hardening before realizing your defensive coldness humbled. Are you okay, Senna?"
Her eyes widened not much, also noticeably, and in a way that bore the expression of 'what's it to you.'
"Stop spitting out words, Mazandrian," she replied. "And make sense of what you're trying to say, already."
"It's that same expression you gave when I was injured, when I was told about this 'trial', your mother. Are you not fond of your home? And like I said, it isn't any of my business, but if I can help understand and make you open up in any way, I'd like to be there."
"How about you keep thinking about yourself, and stop worrying about others. Maybe then you'll realize you're in over your head, Mazandrian." Senna quickly shut the conversation down, before turning the knob and slamming the door shut behind her. However, the door quickly opened back up slightly, and her voice echoed in.
"You don't know me, stranger." And it shut again.
"That played out exactly as I thought it would." He whispered to himself.
Arlen sighed heavily, cursing himself under his breath before lying on his back, feet still reaching the floor for how tall he was. He took his sword from its sheath and aimed the flat end towards him, observing his reflection. In a way, it almost showed him his progress; the worse he looked, the farther he felt from home. If it was even that.
His honey eyes glossed across the blade, as his fingers traced the minor scrape marks, little enough to count, a novice blade. His eyes trailed back to himself, his grey, weathered hair bloomed behind his head, smattering against the sheets underneath. Before the silence broke.
"Why do you speak of her inclinations as if you'd known her much longer?" It was Had'rial's voice, and he jumped, the sword slipping from his grasp and barely landing point side down, cutting through the sheets.
"Nearly made me take out an eye, bastard!" He told him, reaching for the sword and pulling it out, glaring back at himself in the reflection. And there he saw it again. The ivory surface of Had'rial's cheekbone, only visible just above the left side of his upper lip, and the bottom part of an eye too shadowed to see.
"Find a way to release me." He subtly said, calmly, as if it were in the talks.
"No. No, no no." Arlen replied quickly. "You disappeared twice now, abruptly. If you're in my head, why disappear?"
"You don't want to know," he replied. "Now how about we talk about a way to release me. I might have an inkli-"
He was cut off by the jamming voice of Arlen, who wouldn't let him finish.
"This is my body. Not yours, mine."
"Unfortunately," Had'rial remarked. "Trust me, boy, it's better if you just get out of this place quickly."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Arlen asked quicker.
There was a silence, and then Had'rial returned.
"You're being pursued." He said.
"Pursued?" Arlen returned, and thought for a moment, and Had'rial sensed his thoughts, and didn't respond in the middle of the recurring things Arlen knew.
The idea of the Interior Authority hunting him down, King Lundgren, or some high presence, flared. It wasn't possible, he gathered he'd been south of Eskadar. Far, far away from home. Being pursued this quickly was an impossibility for anyone.
"I wouldn't be so sure," Had'rial responded, startling Arlen.
"How?"
"I don't know, but the idea of someone chasing after you gives me a sense of danger, something I should be afraid of. And in this useless prison, there's nothing I could do but tell you to get out of this place now."
Before Arlen could even begin to wonder how long or how close he was to encountering this pursuer, Had'rial had already replied.
"Not long, but not too quickly. You have some time, time well spent, to not sightsee these places."
"Where would I go, how would I fend for myself? I go, you go, or did you forget?"
Another long silence came, this one longer, and Arlen began wondering if he had disappeared for a third time.
"I don't know what went wrong," Had'rial returned. "I don't. I had it all, invade the body and live freely, but it all went to shit. Now I stand in this darkness as if my position before all this was but a dream drifted into false reality. Do you know how humiliating this is? Do you know how badly I am suppressed? You chain me, Arlen Emundas. But not entirely."
"You killed people," Arlen told him, cold and calm. He knew the Heir was nothing without a body, so he realized being afraid of what was inside him was futile. "Don't forget."
"I told you that wasn't my influence." Had'rial returned. "Take the sword."
"What?"
"I said, take it, inspect the red stone," Had'rial told him.
"Why?"
"Just do as I say, human!" Had'rial's emotions flowed through Arlen, he sensed something similar; it was the burning rage he knew all too well. The burning, crackling rage that cracked the walls around him and the sheets beneath him, tearing as feathers flew all around him in white.
"I knew it." Had'rial said, "So I wasn't entirely incorrect."
Arlen was abashed in silence, the room had been a mess of dangerous foundation, thousands of thin cracks lined the walls and ceiling, the floors, and the bed frames. All emerging from his position.
"Yours is rage." Had'rial said, "You exhibit rage in front of your Gleam."
"What are you saying, Had?" Arlen is growing impatient.
"In Sephelos, the will and power to conceive control over matter and aspects of all that exists comes from the Gleam. It's what holds everything in place, it's what gives things ethereal structure. Without Gleam, nothing truly exists. Your Gleam powers what you would call Flare, through the backdrop of rage. That's the well of your abilities. And I was right to think this, inspect the red rock, boy."
Arlen still hadn't really understood what Had meant by it all, but he did so, still glaring at the room around him. The rock was the same, nothing different, angular and smoothly rounded on the top, and sharp edges on the bottom, embodying the rough shape of a diamond. It was translucent, inside a small wave of moving liquid, and he stared deeply into it before the flashes of that thing he witnessed in Sephelos through Had'rial's memories reappeared and dropped the blade.
"Pick it back up!" The rage in Had's voice grew as if he was on to something before it was severed.
Arlen did so, once again, this time he held the blade out, making sure not to get too close to the rock.
A sharp pain invaded his chest, burning desire destroyed any skin as he began unclothing himself from the top. Looking down, agony seething, he could see the same cracks he caused to everything around him, his skin crumbling, as a red liquid, not blood, as it bore an orange hue, leaked down from a small melting hole in his chest. That similar liquid quickly leaked out of him, not falling but spreading evenly across segments of his body.
Arlen's legs were first wrapped in a hot orange cloth, where molten metal was conceived around his knees down to his feet. The hot liquid rose up to his neck, his torso, before the same color material wrapped itself around him.
He grimaced and twisted in pain before he could feel it fading quickly. Too quickly. On the ground, he rolled before stopping, sweat-ridden as veins riddled his temples. He stood up, slowly, and with an ache.
"So he was right." Had whispered in his head, his tone to himself rather to Arlen. But Arlen was too distracted to care.
Picking up the saber, Arlen observed his reflection, and what he saw was the fading coloration of the seething hotness from his clothes, now revealing armor. Fitted to his body had been the white shirt cleaned and repaired under a foreboding black chest plate, lined with gold emblazoning upwards to his shoulders where it darkened again. And behind him, dragged long strips of tightened and hardened tatters of white material.