The Seven Stages of Sociopathy (VII)

Age 5 (and a half, and best you not be forgetting it!)

But months after, just when Father seemed on the verge of joining his son in being bleak/dark/nothing, hope returned.

It dropped into their lives from the back of a cart.

It barrelled into the quiet of the fortress library like an iridescent rainbow comet coloured the sound of merry laughter, a hurricane of light and chaos that didn't seek anyone out but swept all along its trail regardless. It made him watch and wait and watch some more as it jumped from Winthrop's supply wagon and barrelled onto and across the grounds, through monks and healers and guards and tutors. Hope was pink and silver sunlight that dodged guards wound up by sticky fingers. It was green-backlit wrinkled noses at Winthrop's long-suffering cajoling to 'sit still and learn your letters, young lady!' Hope ran, hid, jumped and ran some more each time the innkeeper tried to reel it in with chores after helping itself to things not of itself 'so it's time for some time out, ya little devil you!' Hope snuck from nook to nook through light and dark alike, it peered around corners whether or not it bothered to hide. It popped out from the most unlikely places, a shout in its throat and a grin on its lips even though it never managed to startle him or in any way sneak up on him even once.

Hope was bright and immaculate no matter that it came from squalor. It was vibrant and colourful despite not having mother or father. Hope talked and asked incessant questions all the time. It whirled and glimmered and hopped and dashed, never stopping and never tiring. And whether or not it achieved anything it set out to do, if it even bothered to try for anything at all, each following day the bright star rose and ran, laughed, peered, jumped and swept across the grounds all over again.

As he watched hope drift towards him from the bar across the main inn hall, Gorion's Ward felt that he could finally claim to know what his mother and father had hoped for him when they gave him the name they did.

Cyrus Anwar.

Far-Sighted Mind Most Luminous.

He was nothing of that, save perhaps the blind ashes of a sight never clear.

Hope was everything else.

"You stare." Hope was blunt, but her light reached him then and bathed him all throughout, and for the first time in his life he felt like he could understand and feel irony.

"Do I?" He shouldn't have cared one way or the other, but the bleak/dark/nothing was a different kind of nothing when there was so much light to fill and blot it out.

"Of course what you're doing's called staring!" Hope gasped in disbelief. "You live with your nose in books and you don't even know that?" The star she was inside didn't change in hue or texture at all when she spoke. It never did, whether or not she lied at all. "Well don't you be worrying none!" Hope proclaimed with a hand on her hip and a high-pointed finger, eyes seeing the sky despite the wood and second floor above. "This rudeness won't be lasting long, mark my words! For I've your measure now and I'm-"

"Magnificent."

Hope gaped and stared like he'd grown quite used to stare at her, but he was only speaking the truth as his father always expected him to do, whether or not he was there to see and gaze in bemused wonder like he was doing now from across the table.

But Hope was still there, speechlessly open-mouthed, so maybe he should be more clear. "You are magnificent."

The rainbow-like iridescence fluttered comically behind her silence, and Cyrus almost started at the notion of actually feeling something, let alone actual cheer.

Something besides morbid curiosity as to what the next step should be in the ever-evolving plan to bring an end to everything.

"Goodness!" Hope gasped dramatically, shifting to put her other hand on her hip and point with the other one. At him this time. "So you've heard of me after all!" She crowed triumphantly, heedless of the turned heads and looks of all sorts that her commotion was drawing from everywhere. "Yes, you've heard well! That's me alright! Imoen the Magnificent, and don't you forget it!"

Hope was life speckled with sameness and memories of little bodies of flesh and same-as-him-but-not-really-as-much-overall. But where his sameness was bleak/dark/nothing, hers may as well not have been there at all.

For all that they churned and rushed around and around the brilliant star she was inside, the specks and smokemist did nothing and were nothing because there was no room for shadow in her spirit.

Cyrus watched and knew the meaning and feel of fascination.