His lips pulled into a tight, thin line as Tio positively lavished in the revelation. Though he never once looked away from the scene, he could hear it in his voice - hell, he could practically feel it just from standing close to him. "You know, it's truly amazing how much you can make me resent you in about three sentences." Well, to be honest he'd regretted the words the moment they'd left his mouth, so perhaps he was resenting himself more than him, but the point still stood. In fact, the scene before him just cemented it even further. For one tiny, tiny moment he'd actually believed that Tio might not be such a terrible, selfish person after all. For one moment he'd actually wondered if he'd misjudged him. Then he'd dove face-first back into his nefarious ways without a backward glance.
But it was a lesson to learn. Just never assume he was anything better. Perhaps that was where he'd gone wrong, in fact where they all had - they'd given him the benefit of the doubt, thinking he surely couldn't be that bad, that nobody would do that. But he did. Of course he did!
From the beginning he'd always been a self-centered cheat. Why think he'd really change now?
But if that was the case, wasn't it a horrible, terrible mistake to ever allow him to reach the Great Beyond? To even give him a chance of reaching it, in case he did something awful at the pinnacle moment?
It all came crashing down, the vision and the reality. The trust they had built evaporating as quickly as it had appeared, and then some - and took pieces of the pillar with it, as if huge hands were scraping over its surface and dragging chunks with it, until it snapped off a portion of its face and crushed it to dust in its palm. What remained looked like despair, and he swore the foreign emotions running through his head were so pure it was making tears prickle in the corners of his eyes. "If this pillar goes, I don't know if we can find another entry point in time." Already another thread was beginning to spool from his mind, drawing out a long memory... a long, painful one, much more so than the last. "Shiiiiit..." It almost felt familiar, actually. "Wait." Like he'd felt it a hundred times before. "Shit, no no! NO!"
There was something different about the way it manifested. In one second, they stood before the pillar in a swirling mass of chaos, and in the next, they weren't. The picture was crystal-clear. He remembered every detail, right down to the patterns of the cobwebs hanging from the top corners of the cramped little room. Nir'wei lay in the bed that dominated the middle of the room, cabinets and cupboards surrounding it, some open showing bottles and stoppers of all shapes and sizes - some with glass windows that showed complicated medical apparatus. The distant sounds of groaning and coughing, shuffling footsteps of busybodies and the frantic whispers of men and women clustered just outside the open door dominated everything as Nir'wei sat up in his bed and strained to hear what they were saying.
When they stopped and scattered, it was Faith that stood in the door, pure grief in her eyes and a coloured cloak that marked her status in the Order of the Adunih. "This was the day," he said quietly as Faith knelt next to his bed and took his hand in both of hers. She opened her mouth once, twice, three times but couldn't get the words out. "The first day she cried in front of me."
"How long do I have left?" the dream-Nir'wei asked with a surprisingly calm voice. "Two arcs, maybe three," she replied.
Reliving his death sentence felt worse knowing now that all the hard work that had gone into keeping him alive had ultimately been fruitless, seeing as he was just going to end up throwing it away down the line and committing himself to an eventual death on the front lines of battle. The scene froze with Nir'wei and Faith hunched over one-another, hands gripped tight and sobbing in the wake of his diagnosis. For this, he had no hope that Tio could give the right answer, but at the very least he tried to keep his face from crumpling as he relived one of the worst moments of his brief life once again.
