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“Even by Warlord standards, the man is a monster,” Osiris snarls. He looks at Felwinter, placid in his chair that still looks a lot like a throne, despite having removed the original, and then turns away to begin pacing the room again. “He feasts while his people starve, and still he demands more from them.”
“Osiris.”
“I saw someone whipped half to death outside the rotting carcass of a building he calls his stronghold.” He reaches the edge of the room, turns, and begins to pace his circuit anew.
“Osiris.”
“He uses people as slaves and sells them to raiders and other Warlords and-”
“Osiris!”
The snap of Felwinter’s voice drags his attention back to the room, to his mentor. He looks over at the exo, breathing a little heavily after his outburst. Felwinter seems as calm as always. Intense, yes, his gaze has always been piercing, but calm. Osiris has never managed to attain anything similar to that calm, even when meditating.
“Lord Felwinter,” he says, a hint of apology in his voice.
Felwinter nods. “Did you kill him?”
“Yes.”
“His Ghost?”
Osiris swallows and looks away, revulsion at the idea of the act warring with guilt for letting a monster be brought back once more. “No. Not all of us can so easily break the Iron Decree.” He shrugs. “Or perhaps I am just a coward.”
Don’t people’s lives mean more than his own? But Sagira… He can’t. He won’t risk her.
“It is not cowardice to eschew meting out final deaths,” Felwinter says. “I do what I must to spare others the need.”
“I should be more willing to be ruthless,” Osiris replies. With everything that will come… the visions he has had…
“You have a good heart, Osiris,” Felwinter says.
Osiris snorts in derision. “I barely have one.”
He came here to learn, and he has learned many things and honed his Light. But he has also learned the gulf of understanding that lies between him and the majority of other people, even other Risen. He sees the same gulf between Felwinter and the other Iron Lords. He thinks that’s part of why they get on so well.
“He’s probably taking his anger out on his people already,” Osiris says. He turns away to begin pacing again. “And there are so many of them. Petty dictators who were gifted the Light-”
A hand closes against the back of his neck, gripping lightly, and Osiris stops dead. Felwinter’s fingers are always cool, and they raise the hairs at the back of his neck.
“You’re spiralling.”
He gives a harsh little laugh. He is not exactly subtle with it, when he’s losing himself to endless screaming thoughts that he cannot quiet. “Yes.”
Felwinter squeezes his neck, just hard enough to make him gasp, and for a second, his mind is quiet. His thumb strokes gently at the nape of Osiris’s neck. “Robes off. The rest at your discretion.”
“Yes, Lord Felwinter.” He hates how pathetically grateful he sounds. At least Felwinter won’t mention it, won’t mock him or make pointed comments about him finally learning some manners.
He sheds his robes quickly, and then, after a moment’s consideration, has Sagira remove the undersuit too, leaving him nude.
Felwinter nods in approval, and then scruffs him again. He guides Osiris over to his chair, and then forces him down to his knees on the floor beside it. Osiris goes without complaint. Light, he is tired. The travel, yes, but also the anger, the frustration, the feeling of helplessness. It’s made it difficult to quiet his mind enough to sleep.
There’s another squeeze of his neck, and then Felwinter steps away. Osiris can hear him moving at the other side of the room. He shifts to make himself a little more comfortable on the rug; he’ll be here for a while.
Movement behind him. His shoulders slump in relief when Felwinter kneels behind him, even as embarrassment, no, shame, curls in his belly at the need that he feels.
Felwinter coaxes his legs apart with a hand against one ankle to spread his weight more evenly, and then there’s the slide of soft rope against his skin. His mentor is talented with ropes, his fingers deft with tying knots and picking out elegant patterns with the fibres. A good teacher too. For all of the lore of the Light and Warlock skills that he has learned at the Iron Temple, the more intimate lessons have certainly been the most enjoyable, though Osiris does not doubt they will be the least used when he leaves here.
The ropes wind around his legs, binding calves to thighs to hold him kneeling. The pressure feels good, feels grounding. The sensation of rope against skin is a point of focus, one that he can use to clear his mind. It is almost like meditation.
The brush of Felwinter’s cool fingers against his skin.
The slight scratch of rope.
The pressure as rope tightens around his limbs.
The faint ache of his muscles from kneeling like this.
His breathing begins to even out. His racing heart slows. The tautness of muscle and sinew seeps slowly away as he relaxes.
Felwinter shifts behind him, and Osiris moves his hands from the tops of his thighs to rest at the small of his back. He knows how this process goes. His mentor huffs a soft laugh, and the warm breath brushes against the back of Osiris’s neck. He rests a hand against Osiris’s back, runs his thumb down the groove of Osiris’s shoulder blade, pressing firmly. “Patience.”
“Not my strong point,” Osiris replies with a wry smile.
“You will learn,” Felwinter says, somewhere between a promise and a command. “Lone wolves die, Osiris. You will need patience.”
He swallows and ducks his head, frustration welling up at what feels like a rebuke. How can he be patient when there is so much Darkness ahead? When he wants to meet every trial head-on. When patience means biting his tongue and allowing other people to fumble through things he is more than capable of handling alone.
That hand on his neck again, squeezing until he drags in a rough breath and uses the press of metal and polymer against his skin to force his thoughts back to this room, this person, this moment. Somehow Felwinter always seems to know when he is losing himself. He cannot imagine anyone else ever understanding him so well.
“I worry I will waste my potential with patience. That I will miss some vital chance by being patient.”
Felwinter’s hands splay against his hips, fingers pressing hard into his skin to cut off that train of thought. Right. Not the time. He is here. He needs to be here. He breathes, and lets that tension release once more.
Felwinter’s grip loosens, and then he takes Osiris’s wrists and positions his arms crossed over his back so he can begin binding him. He ties his wrists together first, the rope looping around them several times, before he begins the process of wrapping the rope around Osiris’s chest, back and forth and back and forth, until all he can focus on is the pressure and the brush of fingers and the gentle ache of his limbs that leaves him feeling soft and drowsy. The world is starting to feel very distant.
He doesn’t notice that Felwinter has stopped until suddenly he’s there in front of him, settling onto his throne like a king. He lifts Osiris’s chin to look at him, turns his head from side to side. When he finds no resistance, he draws Osiris forward to lean against his leg, head against his thigh. Osiris goes willingly, body heavy with lassitude now that his mind can be nowhere else. Felwinter rests a hand lightly on his head, the simple weight holding him in place. His eyes drop closed to the sight of Felwinter picking up a datapad to continue his work.
He does not sleep. He is vaguely aware of the movement of Felwinter’s fingers against his skin, the soft noise of the datapad, the shift of his mentor’s body.
He is alone in the void.
Intrusions no more.
He has nowhere to be, and he can be nowhere else.
No decisions to make.
No masks to wear.
No thoughts to chase.
No-one to placate or please or impress.
There is nowhere else but here, no-one else but Felwinter.
He is nothing but nerves and muscle and sinew, the press of ropes into skin, and the ache of limbs. Even that feels distant, a soft, background static which fills his mind, the white noise staving away thoughts that move too quickly, anxiety that runs too deep, strangeness that cannot be changed without unmaking himself.
Time ceases to exist.
He is nothing.
At some point, the ropes around his arms are loosened, and then allowed to fall away. He is vaguely aware of Felwinter’s touch, the ache in his arms as they’re eased down to his sides. He rests his hands on his thighs unthinkingly, fingers curled against his palms.
Sound filters back in gradually; the soft hum and click of Felwinter’s systems and plates moving against each other, faint noises of people in the rest of the temple, the distant howl of a wolf.
Felwinter’s grip shifts to his neck again, a moment of pressure, and then release. A lazy and calming pattern in time with his breath as he returns to himself.
“You have patience, my apprentice,” Felwinter says, his voice soft enough that it sinks through the haze of his mind without breaking him, “you just need to hone it, like any other skill.”
Osiris lets out a slow breath. “Am I a disappointment?”
“Why would you be?” Felwinter replies, and his tone is pure curiosity, as though he cannot conceive of why Osiris might think so.
Another tightening of fingers against his neck, holding him still. It makes it easier to speak somehow, like this. He cannot move, can’t run away. So he might as well submit and speak.
“My lack of patience,” he begins. “My… idiosyncrasies.”
He opens one eye a crack, sees his mentor tilt his head like a bird examining some curiosity. “You would not be yourself without them. I took you as my student because I saw the potential in you, not out of a desire to change you.”
“And this?” Osiris asks quietly, that shame welling up again, frustration and disgust with himself. “The others who have come to study don’t have their teachers force them to submit on their knees to silence an unquiet mind.”
He is grateful for it, and for Felwinter’s discretion. Osirs knows there are enough rumours and whispers about him as it is. He is too much. Too clever for his own good. Too vehement. Too aggressive with his opinions. Too prickly and angry and unpleasant and disrespectful. Too different.
“The Risen are already so different to the rest of humanity, and we two are different to the rest of our own kind. What is one more difference if it helps you become what you need to be?”
He wishes that he could reach the same level of detachment that Felwinter is able to display. But it is a reassurance to hear him speak like this.
“What I need to be…” he murmurs. That is a terrifying concept. There are so many paths that he could walk and finding the right one is difficult.
“You will do great things, Osiris,” Felwinter says. “I have no doubt of that. But make it something worth your Light.”
There is so much more that he needs to know to decide what that is.
He exhales and closes his eyes again, leans his head back against his mentor’s thigh beneath the solid and reassuring weight of his hand. He will have to face things eventually; the world, the future, his own mind. But for now that is mercifully distant.
Felwinter squeezes the back of his neck again, and returns to his reading, a constant, unyielding presence.
Osiris has nowhere to be, and he can be nowhere else. For now, there is just this moment.