(no subject)

[wrecking_yard]

There's surprisingly few places in the keep that are dark and quiet during the day. I end up retreating to the small room that's been turned into a study and meditation room; I have a lull in my own duties and as far as I know, everyone else who regularly used the room was busy.

I had, perhaps, made a mistake in accepting Regongar's offer. My head was still a mass of dull ache and stuffed cotton, light hurt, noise hurt, and the only thing I could think of to solve it was hiding with a very large mug of mixed herbal tea.

Jhod doesn't even see me at first when he walks in. The little bit of light spilling in from the hallway isn't so bad - the light spell he casts on the sconce just inside the door, however, drives a few daggers in and gets a visceral wince.

"...Tristian? Are you alright?"

"M'fine, just... still hungover, I think."

"Still?" He dismisses the light spell, striking a match to light a candle instead. "You didn't actually drink the goblin concoction, did you?"

I shake my head. "No - no, I just... took Regongar up on his offer during the victory celebration."

Jhod snorts in amusement. "You let the Khellid-born half-orc with the stomach of a vulture choose your drinks?" He chuckles quietly. "You may as well have drunk the goblin booze."

I shrug weakly. He pats my shoulder as he passes to the other worn chair by the small table.

"Any sign of the nightmares?"

I shake my head to that; there were nightmares last night after Jubilost confronted me, she's still unhappy with me, but it hasn't been nearly as bad as the night we set out.

"I'll take that as a good sign then."

I can't correct him on overestimating the meaning. The nightmares I described to him being visions would be a very rational assumption going by what he knows in the context of my cover story, and I literally can't explain that it wasn't visions, it was the dryad cursed in more than one sense of the word tormenting me because I was testing boundaries again.

There's a few quiet minutes; he's paging through a worn book and I'm curled over my tea.

"It is good to see you doing better. I think everyone noticed you taking all of that exceptionally hard."

I grimace faintly. There is no good answer there, other than the old standby of lying about it to avoid tripping the bindings when the hangover will make it harder to cover for. "That was exceptionally horrible; not just the deaths it caused, but the fear and chaos it caused among the people who were just trying to go about their lives who had no understanding of what was happening or why - and the people who took it as a 'sign'..." I doubt she's done with the 'Kingdom of the Chosen', even if the flower is gone. "It was ... a lot to deal with, and went on too long with too little I could do about it."

And I was the one who created it for her.

The old priest reaches over to rest a hand on my wrist. "Don't beat yourself up so much about things beyond your control. You did everything you could and then some." He looks down for a moment, half-distant. "I found some old documents - parts of journals and letters found in ruins out here. From what they described, it's happened before, but no-one ever was able to identify the cause, so it just ... continued until it ruined anything built in the land."

I know he's trying to make me feel better, and if my cover were true it probably would, but unfortunately I remember the villages and towns that tried to settle. It was usually turned on people who were harder to get turning on each other, which usually meant peaceable villages and people who were trying to do something to improve the conditions here.

"You did everything you could and then some - we wouldn't have found the seeds without your help, and you did all that work tending the victims while insisting on also being in Her Grace's front line party. Stop beating yourself up for things beyond your control."

I wish it were beyond my control, even if I'm not sure what I could have done. She would've kept terrorizing me until I was too exhausted to argue or fight against her enchantments forcing me to do as she wanted...

But if I managed this time to help the people facing it track it down and destroy it, then I could've done it sooner, and Jhod is entirely too like the old priest who led one of those attempts at building a settlement to give some peace to the people.

"I wish I could believe that - if I'd just brought up what I knew about those portals sooner, then..."

Say, a century or two sooner.

"Tristian." He straightens in his chair. "Would you berate one of the others like that?"

"Of course not!"

"Then why are you doing it to yourself?"

Because I'm the one who created the damn thing. "The gods do hold their servants to higher standards..."

"And I think even Asmodeus would expect lower standards than you're demanding of yourself."

Once again, his point would be hard to refute if I were actually Tristian, the temple-raised youth that simply wandered in because of hearing about the curses while traveling. "I have made mistakes before - I don't want to draw Saranrae's ire."

He stares at me, steeples his fingers in front of me, closes his eyes with a pained expression, and inhales deeply. "Tristian. I say this as your friend and someone with only a lay familiarity with your faith. Please, repeat that sentence to yourself and think about what you just said."

As much as I appreciate his advice and his attempt at comfort - I am running out of ways to continue the conversation and still make some kind of sense within the framework of the cover story. "I'll...Try to be less hard on myself."

"Well, I'll make sure to be right there reminding you until you get it down." He almost goes back to his book, then looks up again. "If not for yourself, for the nerves of your friends - you've managed to worry the goblin, nevermind basically everyone else."

If only it were that simple - I'm going to end up worrying or upsetting them no matter what sooner or later.