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The first time Castorice touches him, it is by accident.
Mydeimos’ people have settled in among the Okhemans and their coexistence has so far been uneasy, but peaceful enough by Kremnoan standards. He cannot ask more from them, even though he sometimes would like to.
It is hard to be a refugee. He knows this, for he has been one for almost his entire life, but this is rarely so clear as when food and drink are passed out. Okheman healers and volunteers are directing people in lines to get their portion, a young woman about his age with pink hair directing them.
Still, he can see her notice the clenched fists, the angry, uneasy looks. But they cannot help it — the people of Kremnos are proud, and for every grateful person, there is another still reeling from the loss of their home to the mists of the Black Tide who will lash out. Displacement and grief do strange things to a person.
… Enmity that has existed for ages between two city states will do worse. He will have permanent worry grooves on his forehead before the week is out.
Still, Mydeimos is Kremnos's Crown Prince, and he will protect it until his undying body is too broken to rise anymore. And Kremnos is, first and foremost, his people and not the place. Okhema is the lesser of two evils, for the taint of the Black Tide would have killed them all.
Still. Mydeimos himself has been quite welcome here, so far.
As if summoned by his thoughts, he sees a little redhead weaving through a crowd of people, lighting up when she sees him. "Mydei!" Trianne calls out.
The expression of a nearby Kremnoan elder curdles at the disrespectful address. Mydeimos tries not to laugh in the face of it, but it is hard.
Trianne tugs at his hand. "Come on! I have to introduce you to the other Chrysos Heirs! There’s Snowy and Cassie and Agy and…" She rambles on as she all but drags him into the halls, and Mydei lets her, because he can’t keep a chuckle in for a moment longer.
He is his people’s prince. He bears responsibility for them, and will uphold his duty, for all he might be starting to think that will take a different form that they themselves might want and — it is good to laugh sometimes. He needs it badly at times. And if following Lady Trianne is diplomatically advantageous, then surely it is not too bad if it is also amusing.
Trianne, meanwhile, is happy enough to steer him wherever she wants to go. When they’re in a quieter hallway, she lets go of his hand to run ahead and open a door. She makes a sweeping gesture. "Welcome to the Chrysos Heir apartments! We have a common room and an apartment for you, too, but Agy thought you might not want to leave your people yet."
…Mydeimos doubts he’ll ever leave his people for the rooms here. Still, he is glad Aglaea thought of that — having to tell Trianne that to her face would have felt awful. So instead, he pats her on the head, and she beams up at him.
Trinnon and Castorice, whom he briefly met yesterday, look up as they come in. The room is bright, as all things are in Okhema, in a way he’d forgotten a place could be, given how many years the Tide had already been encroaching on Kremnos. Trinnon pouts when she sees them.
"No fair! I want head pats too!" She hops off the couch and runs towards them. Castorice, decanter full of water still in her hand, flinches away from her, even though there’s still a handspan of space between them. Mydeimos frowns at the strange reaction, but then she wobbles, and he’s across the room within two strides to steady her.
Castorice’s eyes widen. "No," she gasps, but in her haste to get away while losing her balance, her ankle goes sideways and she falls directly against him anyway. The decanter shatters on the ground with a great crash, water and crystal everywhere, but Mydeimos hears it as if it is happening to someone else, far away. There is a ringing in his ears.
Her hand is warm on his chest, which is all he can feel for a moment, before he starts losing strength in his legs. He falls straight into the shards, but no piercing pain comes, and as he stares up at her standing above him, he thinks Oh, so they meant ‘her touch brings death’ literally.
There is despair in her eyes.
And then he dies. It is a pretty good one, as far as deaths go.
She’s by his bedside when he wakes, a sewing project in her hands. For a second, he thinks it’s morning, but then recalls that no, it is always dawn in Okhema. Mydeimos’ eyes are still heavy, but he watches Castorice in the quiet calm of what seems to be a healing ward. She’s trying to thread a needle, but her hands are trembling so badly that she ends up pinning it in the project — some kind of small stuffed toy? — before covering her face with her hands. She looks fragile, like she might shatter like the decanter did before he died.
"Are you alright?" His voice is supernaturally smooth for a man who just woke up. His deaths work like that, restoring him to optimal condition after.
Castorice immediately drops her hands into her lap, turning to him. "Mydei?"
Mydeimos blinks at the name, but before he can comment on it, she’s already continuing. "I… I must beg you for forgiveness. If you had not had your gift—"
…He is not sure he would call it a gift, but the undying is certainly an asset in many situations. He’s died of accidents before, but none so pleasant. "It’s fine. It was painless, which means it was a better death than many."
She looks at him, as if trying to ascertain the truth of his words, and then, when he firmly nods, lets go of all the tension in her body, like a puppet cut from its strings. Tears slide down her cheeks, collecting on her chin. She clutches the stuffed toy to her chest.
"Thank goodness," she says, crying. It feels like a release of something that must have been pent up somewhere very deep inside, now overflowing and finally seeing the light of day.
It takes a while for her to calm down, but Mydeimos has never minded waiting when people need time. He might not know her, but it is clear she needs it, and though they are as different as can be, he thinks this is a funny connection: a maiden of death and a man undying. It sounds like a joke, or a friendship from a spoken epic.
When she has finally dried her tears and put aside the sewing project — thankfully, he was getting worried about the needle still stuck in it, poking through and evoking a new wave of tears — she smiles. "Thank you, Mydei."
"What’s with the ‘Mydei’?"
She blinks, her cheeks now dry, but her eyes still red. "...Is that not your name? Trianne has been running around calling you by it and then Hyacine came and she too— I. Oh goodness, I made quite a fool of myself, didn’t I?"
He considers her, head cocked. Did she?
It is tiring being Mydeimos, for all he loves his people. Perhaps for now, here inside this quiet healing ward with Castorice and the other Chrysos Heirs, he can be Mydei for a while. A ridiculous thought, perhaps it will grow on him.
"It’s fine," is what he says, in the end. "Call me whatever you want."
"Good!" says Trianne from the doorway, where she stands with crossed arms. "Because they stole my nickname for you, De! I had to come up with a whole new one! Trinnon and Tribbie had to help me think really hard and we’re the only ones allowed to use it now, hear me?"
Castorice starts giggling at her peeved expression, and Mydei can’t help but chuckle either. "Alright, alright. Now, lead me outside before my people start crying assassination?"
"We can’t have that, not two days after you got here!" Trianne takes him by the hand and Castorice demonstratively does not, but they walk together and it suits them just fine.
Perhaps Mydei will find a place in Okhema for his people after all, if there are people who can embrace him.
Leading the way. Leading by example.
Years later, it happens again. Battle is always chaos, even when it involves only combatants, but there had been civilians they’d been trying to rescue. Mydei doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the scared eyes of the little girl he snatched out of the jaws of death, but then again, there are other horrors she has to compete with. As she cries, he throws her at Phainon.
"Go!" he shouts as he moves to collapse a pillar right in front of the group. "We’ll block the exit here and defend your retreat!"
Phainon doesn’t ask if they’ll be alright. He knows better than to question Mydei in situations like these, and they have fought together long enough to know each other’s minds like the back of their hand.
He would protest, given the time, no doubt, but that is exactly why Mydei has already blocked the way: it would take time to get around it again, and Phainon won’t run from his responsibility to the innocents who are fully reliant on him now.
Mydei is the Undying. This is a harsh truth, but he’d rather die again and again than let his comrades fall. So when he turns and sees Castorice still on this side of the pillar, he curses. "What are you doing here?!"
She raises her scythe. "You, too, are worthy of defending, Mydei. Whether or not you’ll get up again after death — no one in this world deserves to die alone!"
God fucking damn it. Of all the times to stand fast when it comes to her convictions! But at least it’s her. He doesn’t think he could take this from any of the others.
And it does come to death. Because of course it does. Mydei had known it would. They were outnumbered already while the rest of his fellow warriors had still been there. It is a miracle as is, that he and Cas had managed to defeat the Furiae.
Still, he got a spear through the gut for his effort, straight through some of his internal organs. It won’t take long for him to die now, he knows. It hurts terribly.
He groans, and Castorice gasps when she sees the state of him, going to her knees beside him. "Mydei!"
He grimaces. "Mind carrying my body back?" he says. "I’d rather not wake up here alone, among the dried blood and corpses."
"Of course."
Mydei tries to get a good grip on the spear to yank it out and speed up the process by bleeding out, but the blood is too slippery and the pain too bad. "A hand here, too?"
Castorice freezes. "...I might slip."
Mydei chuckles and then flinches, holding his gut as if that might keep it together. "Can’t get much worse than this." The pain is searing.
Her hands flutter above his arms. "Are you sure?"
"Of you? Always."
She hesitates for a moment and then nods quietly. "I grant you a painless death and a safe return, then."
Her hands are warm, in a world so cold, her embrace tentative, and then so, so tight as if she cannot believe she’s allowed this, as if she’d meld herself to him if she could. His friend, who cannot be this close to anyone else, lest it mean parting forever.
His pain fades, and on the breeze is the scent of lilacs.
She holds him as he dies.
He wakes up in an almost eerie recreation of the moment that once initiated their friendship: in the healing ward of Okhema, the light almost too bright in the mainly white room. Cas is seated on the chair beside him, with her latest sewing project untouched in her lap. Unlike the last time, however, her hands are not trembling.
They are clenched into fists.
"...Castorice?"
"Mydeimos." The full name is like a slap in his face.
"I— are you alright?" He frowns in concern. He’s never seen her angry before and he’s not sure what brought it on.
"I’m more concerned about you!" she says, stiffly. She sounds almost like Aglaea, in a way Mydei isn’t sure how to feel about. "Now you’re not in pain anymore, I think we should talk. Death is not a thing to take so lightly."
Mydei blinks. "I don’t die for my amusement, Cas. And I come back, you know that."
Her eyes flash. "You have to rage against the dying of the light!"
"You think I don’t do that already? Cas, you don’t come back from a spear through the gut. I’ve died enough times to know when I’m too far gone."
She’s biting her lip to the point he’s afraid it’ll start bleeding now. "What if you don’t come back next time you decide other people’s lives are more important than your own?"
She sees the answer on his face and starts crying. "That’s cruel, Mydei! To your friends and your people and to me! I don’t want to be an instrument of death! I may be an executioner, but I refuse to execute my friends!"
It is a shock. Death is part of his life. Has been since he was first drowned in the Sea of Souls as an infant, still wet with the blood of the womb. Dying is painful, but to him it is akin to a wound that will heal with time. Upsetting to see for other people, sure, with its gore and viscera, but not the end of the world. The first time someone close to him died, he hadn’t even quite understood until later.
Since then, he has become terribly familiar with the pain of loss, but it is hard to think of himself in such a manner.
"I’m sorry," he says. "But Cas, I need you to understand — to me, that wasn’t an execution. It was a kindness. Bleeding out and organ failure are terribly painful. And — do you think we can’t see how much you long for human connection?"
Her hands are trembling now. "Just because I have this— this skin hunger doesn’t mean you ought to die for it!"
He longs to take her hand and squeeze it, but he can’t. "But I can, if I’m already beyond saving. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Cas, you could even follow me along the river of souls to see where it leads. Thanatos has to be at the end of it. I might not remember, but if I die by your touch, I might still leave a trail."
He had known that as a child, that absolute need to get close to someone. It is a pain so unlike the agony of a wound, and yet enough to make a person fall apart, all but shake out of their skin. And Castorice is someone who cannot touch anyone unless it means the end for whoever she touches – or at least, for anyone who is not him.
He does not die every week, but he would gladly grant her what he can give.
Castorice closes her eyes. "That, too, is an unkind thing to ask," she says, "when the price is so high and I want it so badly."
It isn’t clear if she’s talking about touch or finding Thanatos, but the difference does not matter. Not here, not right now.
"I know," he says. "But I’m still asking."
She stares at him, and the torn look in her eyes breaks his heart.
She takes so little for herself. Even when it would hurt no one. "Castorice," he says, "it’s okay to be selfish sometimes."
This is a hard learned lesson, but an important one. And Mydei says this as someone who was once almost buried under the name of Mydeimos, Crown Prince of Castrum Krenmos, even when he carried that burden so gladly. He loves his people. Loves them to death and beyond. He would have suffocated for them over and over again, but doing it more than once doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt, that he didn’t get a little smaller as a person every time.
Castorice, Tribios, Phainon and Hyacine, they’d rescued him one Mydei at a time. He doesn’t know how to tell her that raging against the dying light can be done in more than one way.
He looks at her and wills her to understand.
Castorice looks, examines, with those eyes that are so often gentle and flitting anywhere but anyone’s face. But she is looking today, just as she does for every man, woman and child her touch has ever killed, looking through to the soul beneath.
She looks and takes a shuddering breath at what she sees, closing her eyes.
He wonders what she saw, but when her eyes snap open again and she gives a single, curt nod, he knows she understood.
She has been witness to him as he has been, so proud and so loved but also lonely among people who love him but put him on a pedestal, and to him as he is: still too proud, and still so loved, but more balanced, given leave to have both the Crown Prince and the dreamer live side by side.
He still dreams of a future in which his people will be free of the yoke of violence, a laughable idea for a man born and bathed in blood and then in souls, but with every stride forward, he believes in it and himself more.
He wants that for her, too. He wants to hear that impossible, beautiful dream and see it become reality. The world ought not to be without death for her to be able to live.
One day, Castorice will be able to touch another without causing harm. He has to believe it with all he has in him, so she’ll gain the courage to believe so too. And until that day is there, well. He can give her a hug for the road.
"Thank you," he says.
She can’t say it back yet, he can see it in her eyes, but that’s okay. He’ll embrace her dream for her.
This will take time, possibly much of it. But even though they are sitting carefully apart, as careful as Castorice always is, Mydei feels like the distance has been closed.
They will walk this road together with their companions, be there for each other in the way they need the most. All of them have been terribly alone one way or another, Mydeimos, the Maiden of War, and all the other Chrysos Heirs besides. Clasping hands, physically or metaphorically, is what makes them strong.
The Flame-Chase Journey is about traveling together, at the end of the day.
And they will. Oh, they will, until their legs give out and their souls are worn, and still will that embrace be tight.
In life or death, they will rage against that dying of the light.