Warmth Long Departed [Merric & Soren]
KEBattlefield2023 starter for @ventusanimae
The cabin: A cabin filled with memories. A friend used to live here, but they lost their lives in this recent battle. Their family became your own, but no one could bear to stay in this house. To be here is to be imprisoned by grief and regret.
In this realm of dreams, this time in his past was bound to surface.
Like then, all sounds faded. No birds singing, no bustle of people out on the streets, nothing. Even the snow which fell in this enchanted place was silent, falling on the shell of a dimmed home.
That’s what it was, just a shell.
Soren barely noticed that he was stepping over dead bodies until he felt his foot catch on something, and then he realized it in full. Not Ike, not Ike, not Ike, he thought, just as he had then. He had no need to stoop down and examine them for currency or spare pieces of food. He was no longer the child from the woods who had to loot the dead for basic necessities. He knew, on some level, that if he bothered to touch them, his hand would catch on snow or earth, not flesh.
His mind was exceptional at recalling every repulsive detail, cursed with an attentive memory he couldn’t cherrypick from. The smell of the dead was almost worse than the sight of them, and by the time he reached the cabin door which sat ajar in the clearing of past death, he was blankly in shock.
He’d seen battlefields, but those had been unarmed civilians. Those were families and killed by a beloved neighbor. As it turned out, one was even a wife murdered by a husband. A mother, whose warmth Soren had never known for himself, but whose effect he’d seen on Ike, Mist, and Greil.
Soren sank to the floor. He felt small, curled up on himself, staring at a cold hearth.
Footsteps behind him reminded him that he wasn’t alone. He knew they weren’t part of his memories, since no one else had been heard that day. They’d either been killed or fled. He’d been alone. Alone, for so many years. Now... he wasn’t. Should he be glad?
“What do you see?” he asked, voice flat and weaker than usual.
