The walk back to the Weeping Cottage was a masterclass in psychological warfare. The crowd didn't just part; they recoiled as if Soren was the most diabolic aberration ever recorded in the lores of their ancestral scrolls.
Before, he had been a "Cursed Heir"; a title that felt like the weight of the skies on his frail frame, but now, his entire existence only carried the significance of a vacuum, and somehow it felt even heavier.
The guards didn't even bother to escort him.
How can one guard something that doesn't exist?
Even as he crossed the threshold of the inner courtyard, he could only watch a pair of guardsmen deliberately look through him.
To acknowledge the Nameless was to invite the same erasure upon oneself.
By the time the sagging, wailing porch of the cottage came into view, Soren's legs were no longer his own.
They should have given in long ago, but the subtle jolts of pain the Tranquil Poison sent through his nerves were enough to keep them twitching on, so it was simply a matter of giving them a direction to twitch towards.
Liora who had been waiting for him beneath the shadows of the doorway didn't wait for him to reach her; she lunged forward and caught him just as his knees finally gave way.
She didn't speak until they were safely under the sagging eaves of the cottage. Her hands were small, but to Soren, they were the only solid thing left in a world made of shifting smoke.
"Easy, easy," She hissed, in a frantic whisper.
She dragged him inside, kicking the door shut; the unoiled hinges sounding like the final screech of a dying bird.
"You're bleeding," she whispered.
Reaching out her trembling fingers towards the edge of his tunic where the black ichor of the poison had seeped through, and smelling faintly of bitter almonds and rot.
She didn't lead him to the bed but simply sat him right there on the dirt floor, propping his back against the rough-hewn stone wall.
Soren didn't flinch. He just stared at his hands. The blue ink from the scrolls was still there, but his vision was beginning to betray him again.
Under the dim, flickering light of a tallow candle, the world seemed to warp for a moment.
Colors bled into places they didn't belong, and for a terrifying second, he thought he could see the heat rising off Liora's skin in wavy, sickening pulses.
'Just the hunger.' He told himself, closing his eyes tightly until his head throbbed. 'Just the poison rotting my eyes.'
Then upon refocusing his vision, his memory drifted again.
"He erased me, Liora," He said. His voice was coming in a flat and dry rattle.
"He didn't even deign me significant enough to use a blade. He just... deleted my significance, making me a ghost that still has to breathe."
Liora's frail frame trembled slightly beneath the weight of those words.
A pang of guilt hit her because her naive heart felt she was partly to blame.
But she didn't stop attending to him; she grabbed his hand, her warmth a sharp, stinging contrast to the creeping ice in his marrows, and began to scrub at his ink-stained fingers with a damp, gray rag.
"It doesn't matter what the Shaman's scroll says," she retorted, her eyes bright with a dangerous, tearful defiance.
"I still see you. I still have to bring you water. A 'guest' is still a person, Soren."
Soren looked down at their joined hands and then took his back.
"No Liora, a guest is someone who could be kicked out at any moment, and here, 'leaving' is just a polite word for a shallow grave.
And you... you shouldn't be here. If the Matron sees you tending to a Nameless, she'll make sure you're erased right along with me. Don't follow me into the dark."
"Let them... I've been in the dark since the day the tribe 'adopted' me." Liora snapped back as she reached into her pocket to pull out a small, crushed bundle wrapped in a greasy napkin; a piece of stale honeycake.
"At least in this cottage, I'm a ghost with a friend. Now, eat. I can hear your bones rattling from here." She added, pushing the honeycake into Soren's face.
In such situations, any man with a bruised ego would have broken, and latched onto the opportunity right before their eyes, but not Soren; his ego was bruised and battered, but still standing nonetheless...
However;
~Grrrrww~
His stomach worms rebelled against his misplaced pride.
To the current him, it was just a piece of honey-cake, stale and smelling of the kitchen's sweat, but they were actively refusing him the right to be the judge in this case; and so, with a resigned sigh, he took the honeycake and began to unwrap it.
"They won't kill me today, Liora.
I'm sure they'll just wait for the poison to finish the job while they pretend I don't exist; or simply let some coward come settle a debt I owed their great grandfather and finish the job.
Eitherway, the need not lift a finger anymore, my fate is sealed." He digressed as he took a bite of the honeycake.
But just as the sugar hit his tongue, a wave of nausea rolled over him.
His vision swam again. The gray stone floor turned translucent for a heartbeat, showing those same jagged, violet veins of light deep in the earth before snapping back to reality.
Soren slumped deeper against the wall, the half-eaten cake falling from his trembling fingers as he fought to keep the only bite he had taken in.
The "hallucinations" were getting worse; it felt like the poison was now advancing towards the neural networks leading to his brain, which in a twist of fate helped trigger his memory and return him to the reality of his current plight.
"The Orb, Liora..." he muttered, his vision now present but still unfocused. "It cracked because it was as hollow as I am. We're both just... empty."
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, lines of tears as frail as his own frame streaming down his soot-caked face.
He was a Nameless Guest in a cottage that cried. He was a boy with thirty poisons in his blood and a world that had forgotten he existed.
He didn't feel like an Heir. He didn't feel like someone's child. He just felt a soul-wrenching cold, and as the sun began to set, casting long, bloody shadows across the Ignis estate, he slumbered.
Seeing this, Liora simply helped him to his bed, before returning to her duties.
Alone, cold, and vacant, Soren laid there in the dark, wondering why the heavens deemed such life befitting of him.
Never in his wildest dreams would he have suspected that his "hallucinations" were the first stirrings of something the world had never seen since time immemorial.
Neither would he have known that being "erased" was loophole in the fate the heavens had written for him.
The only thing he knew for sure, was that the honey-cake was gone, the floor was hard, the bounty had been placed, and tomorrow, the hunt for his head would begin.
Then as if responding to his inner turmoil, the Weeping Cottage lived up to its name; the wind caught in the jagged thatch of the roof, wailed a low, whistling moan that sounded like a mother mourning a child who hadn't even died yet.
-------
The tallow candle of Soren's room flickered, struggling against the draft of the early morning hours, just before sunrise.
Soren could be seen, curled into a ball on the dirt floor. He had moved from the bed because it no longer offered whatever little comfort or warmth it once did.
In his mind, he could still clearly hear the Chief's voice: Erase his name.
However, moments later, his inner turmoil was interrupted by a soft creak of the door to his back.
"Hehe, you all couldn't wait a moment longer to get rid of me unh?" He whispered shakily with a bitter smile that contrasted the self-mocking look of horror concealed within the depths of his eyes.
He knew this brand-new day was meant to usher in a new era of brand-new torture and pain, but he would never have thought those who wanted him gone were so determined and impatient.
The figure who had just snucked into the room paused briefly, and before they even made their move, Soren already knew what was coming, but when it arrived, it was just a light knock on the head.
"What in the trash of all craps are you spouting; sit up and drink this, you idiot!" A timid voice whispered forcefully.
Soren, totally surprised, turned around to see Liora kneeling beside him, holding two cracked wooden cups in her hands, with one hanging before his face.
The first seemed to be water for lack of a better word, but from the nose-wrinkling scent wafting off the second cup, Soren could tell it was Liora's unverified brew.
A mixture of numerous non-poisonous herbs ubiquitous by the stagnant water just behind the kitchen, which she believed had some unknown medicinal properties.
Pushing the cup away with a trembling hand, Soren forced down the metallic taste in his mouth which had long turned into something acidic.
"Being here last night is already enough to warrant punishment... but coming at such hours; Liora, If the walls have ears, they'll count it as a crime."
"The walls are made of mudstone and shite, Soren. Let them listen," she snapped, though her eyes darted all over the place for a moment.
Hearing this, Soren's vision blurred briefly; it now happened every few minutes, becoming a rhythmic pulse, timed perfectly with the throbbing of his heart which often happened whenever his emotions stirred.
Sometimes the shadows in the corner would stretch out like long, skeletal fingers, and other times, the floor would seem to ripple like water.
He knew it was the poison, thirty aggressive venoms were finally reaching his nervous system, directing a script of madness to accompany his death.
'I am seven years old,' he thought, his mind clinging to the only fact he had left. 'I am seven, and I am already a memory.'
The silence of the dewy dawn however, was soon shattered by the sound of heavy boots on the porch.
The "sighing bench" didn't just sigh this time; it groaned under a weight it wasn't meant to carry.
The door didn't screech. It was kicked. The wooden latch, already rotted by years of dampness, snapped like a dry twig.
Soren had been anticipating this since last night, and as such was able to pull Liora towards himself just in time for the door to swing wide, barely miss them both, and hit the interior wall with a forceful thud that shook the soot from the rafters.
Bam! Bam!
The sound of heavy boots came to a stop right at the entrance, and standing in the doorway was a man who smelled of cheap ale and unwashed leather.
It was Gary, a low-ranking steward who had spent the last decade as the supposed caretaker of the Weeping Cottage, getting paid to watch the entire abode of the 'Cursed Heir' rot further and further, but now, his face was twisted into a jagged, yellow-toothed grin.
"Well well, will you look at this," Gary chuckled, before stepping into the room.
He didn't hesitate. The fear of the "Badluck Magnet" had been replaced by the intoxicating scent of a victim.
"The Guest is sleeping on the floor. How fitting; saves us the trouble of throwing him there." He jeered boisterously.
Liora stood up, her small frame blocking the path to Soren. She knew this man; after all, there were only two of them assigned to take care of the cottage.
"He is still a Guest of the House, Gary. You have no right to be here."
"A Guest?" Gary laughed, his spittle flying everywhere like an automated garden sprinkler.
"A Guest is someone who brings a gift. This one? He is a Ghost that only brings rot.
The Matron has decided that the 'Ghost' shouldn't be hogging village property.
I'm here for the quilt. And the scrolls."
Hearing this, Soren tried to sit up but his muscles felt like they were being shredded by invisible razors.
"The scrolls... they aren't... property. They are... knowledge." He said in weak protest.
Gary walked over, ignoring Liora, and looked down at Soren. He didn't see a person anymore, He only saw an ink-blot.
Reaching down, he grabbed the moth-eaten quilt, yanking it upward, and because Soren was still partially tangled in it, his frail gait was unceremoniously dragged across the dirt, his skin barking against the sharp grit of the floor.
"Soren!" Liora screamed, lunging at Gary's arm.
The steward didn't even spare her a glance and simply backhanded her with a casual, but brutal efficiency.
Liora crumpled into the corner, her head hitting the washbasin with a sickening clink.
Soren watched it happen in slow motion; Liora eyes dimmed, and his vision flared white.