Chapter Text
The lighthouse was rotting into its own light, silver and violet bleeding onto the graves below. Flins stands amongst it all, taking in the familiar smell of salt and damp stone, lantern's blue flame biting into the shadows.
He was not alone tonight. Leaning against a tomb stood a man— a creature— whose bandages slipped like withered second skin across unfathomable imagery. Rerir. More ruin than man, in truth. A caricature of corrosion whose skin writhed with something beneath bandages, fattened on the darkness that swelled within that man's very being.
Despite all known Ratniki protocol, Flins remains still. Instead of defense, or even offense, he observes. Fascination is akin to hunger, and Flins feels no different than the corruption feasting on the Sinner's unnatural body: the unquenchable hunger for discovery, no matter the price.
"You keep the dead well, little lamp," split lips crack open, peeling into half-wound half-smile. It reveals a voice frayed at its edges, thick with a contempt that stirs something within the Lightkeeper's chest. "Tell me, do they whisper when the lantern dims?"
"They know me well." A simple response. Yet the words left an ache in Flins' throat, lingering unnatural in the space between them.
Rerir moves closer. His body streeled spidery shadows along with its terrible mass. Closer now, Flins could observe scuttling beneath the bindings— a would-be limb, slicked grotesque with Celestia knows what— and his stomach rolls in nauseating curiosity.
"Do they know of me?" Whisper curls around the wintry air. Taunting. Reminiscent of ghostly fingers tapping on hefty locked doors. Let us in.
Flins raises his lantern. The light catches on the towering flesh vessel before him, painting Rerir in a peculiar sight of illuminated ichor and rot. A haunting chiaroscuro: ghastly, yet powerful.
It takes Flins longer than he would like to respond.
"They fear you." His tongue feels clumsy against the syllables. "They fear those who let themselves be consumed by their misdeeds."
Rerir simply laughs.
The space between them grows small enough now that Flins can feel the feverish burn of Rerir's rank, godless visage. The smell was nauseating, all copper and brine, a vessel in denial of its false flesh.
A hand raises, and a glove brushes gentle against soaked bandage. It sags under the Lightkeeper's ghosting touch, seepage clinging to unsteady fingers. He trembled not from fear of his impulsivity, but the terrible intimacy it presented— how eerie it was to a caress, how far from affectionate it would remain.
Blotched skin hued maroon and black presents itself with the tilt of Rerir's head. Corruption throbs and weeps, a reminder that the sinner was still alive, if it could even be seen as living.
"You could let me in." Just like his lighthouse, Flins was covered in cracks. Rerir had seen through them for a while now. "You could drown in my darkness. Is that not what you Lightkeepers desire, deep down? To go under, to snuff your own light?"
His words cut deeper than anything offered by the Wild Hunt, but Flins had hoped they'd wound him deeper still. He wanted to hear this monster seduce him like this again, just so he could see his own reflection in that accursed eye. To see the wound fester beyond repair.
And for a moment— one single, knife-twist moment— he almost surrenders. Almost extinguishes his Aarnivalkea light to step into the ruination that Rerir would always be for him.
Almost.