For the prompt meme, Cor and Nyx reunite after time apart, if it strikes you? Congrats on finishing your fic!
Thank you! Have some Witch!Nyx, because I haven't played with that verse in an age!
They meet again in the Nebulawood, exactly two years after the fall of Insomnia.
Rumor has it there’s a witch hiding in the woods, that she trades potions and elixirs for basic supplies. With the King dead and the Prince AWOL, the remnants of the Crownsguard and the mutinous forces from the Kingsglaive do not have the steady access to such things they once did. All the stashes remaining are carefully inventoried and painstakingly dosed out. But still, the rumors remain.
A witch in the woods, who cannot be found on command but who, if actually encountered, will trade a crate of potions for a week’s worth of water.
Once, a fledging recruit from Lestallum’s stronghold comes back with a crateful of elixirs and insists the witch asked for nothing at all.
It the rumor is true, Cor reckons it’s the elusive Witch of the Thicket, who’s been missing ever since Caem went up in flames. But it’s just as likely the rumors are false and it’s just a trap waiting for idiots to fall for it. Well, no bigger idiot than him around.
After a somewhat harrowing hunt – really, a series of increasingly annoying hunts, including what appeared to be a corrupted behemoth – Cor determines the following: the witch is no witch at all, and he is no she at all.
“You put on the ring, didn’t you?” Cor asks, watching Nyx sit back after their initial scuffle, which might have devolved into some playful sparring if not for the fact Nyx ran out of stamina halfway through.
Nyx grins, overgrown hair giving some credence to the misguided rumors, as it hides the bits of his face the obligatory witch-like cloak and hood doesn’t. His skin is charred and scarred, but not healed, glowing still like embers at the back of the fireplace.
“You know I’m a sucker for a bad deal,” Nyx replies, and beneath the ruin of his appearance, his eyes glint with the same stubborn, monstrous light they always did.
“I thought that was my line,” Cor says, offering a hand, trying to reach out.
“You shouldn’t get too close,” Nyx rebuked, but gentle, the way he always did whenever Cor tried to take a bunch of bad habits, some recurrent dates and their insistence to orbit one another, and make it into something approaching a relationship. “I’m due combusting any time now.”
“Combusting,” Cor says, deadpan.
Nyx grins, wide and wild and more than a little bit mad.
“They keep trying to smite me,” he says, eyes bright, “and I keep stealing their magic when they do.”
“Which you then turn into the supplies you’ve been distributing out of this shithole,” Cor surmises, impressed nonetheless at the sheer viciousness of it.
Nyx laughs.
“Hey, my shithole,” he shakes his head. “Fuck, it’s downright homey at this point.”
“You live in the skull of a dead behemoth,” Cor points out, because he can never resist the urge to quip back at Nyx and the reflex is there, like no time has passed at all.
Nyx laughs, a clattering noise, like a magpie but worse.
“I wouldn’t be a very good witch if I didn’t, right?”
Cor knows better than to nurse something as poisonous as hope in his heart. He knows better.
But of course, that has never stopped him before.
