![[Verified by Antipodes]](./images/checkmark.png "[Verified by Antipodes]")
Kurin Fell
Appearance
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Age: 22 Years old
Birthday: 5th of Spring, 496 AV
Birthplace: Zeltiva
Appearance: Harmless is the word that often first comes to mind when people look at Kurin. Standing at just over 5'7", his short fluffy hair and soft, smiling eyes make him resemble nothing so much as an old dog, despite his youth; quiet, patient, warm and gentle.
Old scars and burns, all around the same age, litter his body, speaking to some traumatic event in his past; faint, faded cuts over his cheeks, whip marks across his back and shoulders, the healed over ghost of a noose around his neck, a burn along his left forearm that fades away just below the palm, the first joint missing from his right pinky.
Character Concept
Kurin is the bloody, razor sharp edge of a knife, painted in light pastels and decorated with ribbons. Whether he's out making friends at a pub or elbow deep in a screaming man's guts, Kurin is practically never without a joke or a smile.
His cheerful face is both real, yet not. Kurin is a man often disconnected from himself, going through the motions of the kind, happy boy he'd once been. Joy and fear, pain and love, all of it comes muted to him, most days. Those around him feel as real as they are unreal to him, as is Kurin himself.
He is not delusional, however. He has no illusions that other people are truly fake, nor that he is genuinely emotionless himself. But knowing something and feeling it are very different things, and Kurin only occasionally feels anything at all.
Medicine and torture may seem like opposite skills to some, but to Kurin, they are very nearly one and the same. Stitch a wound shut, and it heals; break a man's arm, and he screams. There is logic and consistency to the way flesh and bone cleave apart, the way they knit back together again...
The way a mind might do the same.
Character History
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Age: 22 Years old
Birthday: 5th of Spring, 496 AV
Birthplace: Zeltiva
Appearance: Harmless is the word that often first comes to mind when people look at Kurin. Standing at just over 5'7", his short fluffy hair and soft, smiling eyes make him resemble nothing so much as an old dog, despite his youth; quiet, patient, warm and gentle.
Old scars and burns, all around the same age, litter his body, speaking to some traumatic event in his past; faint, faded cuts over his cheeks, whip marks across his back and shoulders, the healed over ghost of a noose around his neck, a burn along his left forearm that fades away just below the palm, the first joint missing from his right pinky.
Character Concept
Kurin is the bloody, razor sharp edge of a knife, painted in light pastels and decorated with ribbons. Whether he's out making friends at a pub or elbow deep in a screaming man's guts, Kurin is practically never without a joke or a smile.
His cheerful face is both real, yet not. Kurin is a man often disconnected from himself, going through the motions of the kind, happy boy he'd once been. Joy and fear, pain and love, all of it comes muted to him, most days. Those around him feel as real as they are unreal to him, as is Kurin himself.
He is not delusional, however. He has no illusions that other people are truly fake, nor that he is genuinely emotionless himself. But knowing something and feeling it are very different things, and Kurin only occasionally feels anything at all.
Medicine and torture may seem like opposite skills to some, but to Kurin, they are very nearly one and the same. Stitch a wound shut, and it heals; break a man's arm, and he screams. There is logic and consistency to the way flesh and bone cleave apart, the way they knit back together again...
The way a mind might do the same.
Character History
Pre-Creation :
There’s a saying, in some circles, that bad men come from bad homes. If that were true, though, they’d need a new name for whatever Kurin is.
Kurin’s early life was filled with love and joy, with smiles and laughter; little wonder he has such a warm disposition, with such a childhood behind him. His mother, Lienne Fell, was a learned and kind woman, a healer by trade, who'd spent some time in the Opal Temple, though she never joined the order herself. His father, Kurin had never known, but his mother frequently called him a kindred spirit to her. Kurin's conception had been ironic, in a way. The get of two brilliant doctors, neither of whom had realized Lienne was pregnant until they had parted ways.
With parents like those, it came as no surprise to anyone that Kurin was a healer and nurturer almost from birth. His mother liked to tell anyone who would listen that his first word had come when she'd cut herself cooking; he'd looked up from his playing, crawled over to her, and asked "Ouchie?" in the most anxious voice she'd ever heard from a toddler.
Even as a child, Kurin displayed an obvious fascination with his mother's work, frequently sitting by her side as she worked and asking question after question. As time went on, it became clear that he had a particular interest in blood and bone and organs, no matter how gory. Perhaps this was the result of early exposure: as a single mother of a fairly quiet baby, and with patients coming in at all bells of the day, Kurin had spent quite some time in infancy swaddled at his mother's side as she worked. Or perhaps it was something simpler: blood always tells.
There were those that frowned on this development in Kurin's personality, of course. Friends and patients would sometimes express concern over such a young child being interested in something so distasteful, that it would warp a young mind to see something so adult. Lienne would hear none of it. Her son had an interest in medicine, a love of anatomy, and all the resources he would need to learn; in her mind, his future was clear. Kurin would be a doctor as well, a surgeon, maybe one who would surpass her or even his father, wherever he was. And with that decided, she began to teach him everything he would need to know.
She taught him the parts of the body, from corpses when she could manage them and drawings when she couldn't. She showed him how to clean a wound, how to stitch it together, how to soothe a burn and splint a break, and much more. When she judged him ready, she taught him Auristics to see beneath the skin with djed, to spot fractures, internal damage and contusions, and then, dreaming of her son being one of the few men to ever join the Opal Order, she taught him the few scraps of Kontinese she'd picked up in her time with them.
And after the first time he cried after watching her lose a patient, she taught him to be cold. They both had warmth and empathy aplenty, and it frequently helped with calming patients down, but Lienne had been a healer too long to think that was all that was needed. The world was a dangerous place, and not all wounds could be fixed. A good doctor needed to be able to shut themselves off from death and suffering, lest the work they do break them down. Moreover, a doctor needed to have the coldness to let one patient die to take the time to save another. It hurt Lienne to teach her gentle, compassionate boy to turn his back on suffering, but it would hurt more to see him crumble under it. A doctor should be kind, but with his head, not his heart.
Still despite the occasional dark spot in his education, Kurin took to it like a Svefra to water. At seven, Lienne would quiz him as she worked; at ten, he was helping her clean instruments and bandage cuts. By the time he was fourteen, he could provide basic aid without her supervision, and help her diagnose patients. They made a good team. Lienne had wisdom and experience, and Kurin had passion and talent. It was a good life, a simple life, and Kurin knew and wanted nothing else until he was sixteen.
In the winter of Kurin's sixteenth year, a man stumbled into the clinic, bleeding profusely. It took only a glance for Kurin to tell that the wound was almost certainly fatal. A clean slash through the stomach had nicked open the man's intestines, and with Lienne elsewhere, fixing a man's innards was beyond Kurin's capabilities. Still, he did his best, providing the man with herbs to numb the pain, and tried to stem the bleeding, to no avail. The stranger's final words were in a language Kurin did not speak, to a person who was not there, and after burying the man, Kurin gave it no more thought, closing his heart to the sorrow as he'd been trained.
Four weeks later, he made a house call at East Street, and found a knife at his throat.
------
Where is the bastard's treasure?
That was what the men who hauled him down to the basement of their safehouse wanted to know.
Where is it?
I don’t know what you're talking about, Kurin told them, to no avail. Desperate men do not often think rationally, and these men were desperate indeed; the man Kurin had tried to save had been a member of their band of thieves and bandits, until he took all their gold and ran. The wound Kurin hadn't been able to fix had been a gift from them, but their wayward member had hidden the loot already. And Kurin had been the only person he’d spoken to before he died.
Kurin had to know the location of the treasure, went the reasoning. Else it was lost forever, and that was a thought too unbearable to entertain. And if the young healer would not talk, then they would make him.
There was no drawing lot to determine who would do the dirty deed, no argument about who would stain their hands like this; there was already one among them perfect for the job. A man only called Splinter, who made even his compatriots uncomfortable in his sadism.
Where is the treasure?
Kurin cried out as he was struck. Cheekbone bruised, maybe fractured. Ice wrapped in a towel would help with the swelling, but aside from that it would heal on its own.
Where is the treasure!?
Bruised stomach, no organ damage as far as he could tell. Some burning of the throat from throwing up, nothing that wouldn’t heal.
WHERE IS IT?
Pinky finger dislocated. Popped back into place quickly enough to avoid serious damage, but the muscle remains strained and sprained.
There was no answer Kurin could give that would satisfy them; they refused to believe he didn’t know, and he couldn’t name a place that the treasure could plausibly be.
As the days went by, Kurin’s torment grew and grew as Splinter grew angry and frustrated. To escape, Kurin retreated into his own mind, cataloguing each injury as it happened, treating each in his own imagination.
Reassuring himself that each injury could be far worse.
A knife dragged over his cheeks, opening shallow wounds to the air; needed to be cleaned out and bandaged. At least it wasn’t along the palms or fingers, which would be far more painful.
Boots kicking and stomping as he curled up on the ground, bruising ribs and cracking something in his forearm; a splint to set the break, herbs to dull the pain. His arm hurt, but was still useable. A proper break would be far, far worse.
Lashes along his shoulders, disinfected with salt water; stitches and a poultice would let those heal cleanly. Lashes across the back of his thighs and knees would be near unbearable, with the added benefit of hindering any escape attempt.
Of its own will, his mind began to detach itself, not only from grief and sadness, but from his very sense of self, leaving him feeling like a limp souls floating in the fog of a ruined body. Every pain and pang, every emotion seemed muted, like a heartbeat thudding behind bone, except for one: fury.
Starvation, eight days. A human could survive longer than that without food. A man of Splinters size could life for fifteen, maybe twenty.
Left arm, up to the heel of his hand, forced into the hearth. Painful — agonizing, actually — but that was good. The worst burns were the ones that didn’t hurt at all. Splinter had callouses along his palms, which might dull the pain, but the underarms and the back of his thighs were still soft and sensitive. Or perhaps the callouses could be cut off first.
Right pinky tip, cut off with a hatchet. Needed to be treated before he went into shock, before it got infected, before he lost too much blood. It hurt badly, but the shock and horror numbed it. He could do it slowly. Flay skin from flesh, carve flesh from bone, pop bone from its joint. Splinter was missing a few bits, but that still left twenty one finger bones to work on. He didn't have a scalpel, but a boning knife should work just as well.
Kurin had no sense of time passing, each agonizing day blurring into the next. But he woke one night to realize that he was alone with his tormentor, for the first time since he'd been taken; the bandits had caught word of a caravan and left to ambush it, leaving Splinter in charge of the safehouse.
They were alone.
Like a man possessed, Kurin seized his own thumb. Without a second of thought, he wrenched it from its socket, the give afforded by the dislocated digit allowing him to pull his hand through the manacles that held him captive. The hatchet that had separated his fingertip from him was within arms reach, and he took it up without hesitation. With his back turned, and never a thought that his prisoner could fight back, Splinter never stood a chance. A blow to the knee had the man crumpling to the ground, and within moments, Kurin was on him. He hadn't the equipment he would need to enact every thought he'd had of torturing Splinter, but Kurin was a creative man. He made do.
When Splinter finally expired, too soon, after too little punishment, Kurin ran. He didn't have a plan or a destination, he only knew he had to go. He stumbled up the stairs, and ran, and ran, and ran until he was out of East Street, and then collapsed, his bruised and battered body unable to go on a moment longer.
------
He woke in his own bed, heavily bandaged, with his arm in a splint and his mother waiting by his bedside. Quite a few people had seen his frantic flight; one had recognized him as the son of a healer who had saved her eye.
He was safe now, she whispered to him through her tears. He would heal, she vowed to him, his torturers would be brought to justice, and everything would be as it was.
She was half right.
Kurin's body healed. His mind did not. Even as his strength returned, Kurin found the fog in his mind remained, holding him apart from all that he'd felt so strongly before. Even anger held no satisfaction for him; with the target of his hatred dead, even that most visceral of emotions slipped away from him like mist between his fingers. He could recall vividly every moment of his torture, and feel nothing at all. Were it not for his scars, he might have wondered if it had happened to him at all. The people around him felt distant, unreal, as did he. The man who stared back at him in the mirror wore a familiar face and an easy smile, but he couldn't bring himself to think of it as him; he may as well have been looking at a long lost twin.
Worse still was the fact that he could feel his old self still, lurking in a body he did not fully control. He would think of acting, and his body would perform it, but was it truly him moving his body? He wasn't so sure. In time, he came to think of himself as a being of two parts: one, the old Kurin who lived in his body, a man who still smiled and sang and made people laugh, and another, this floating mind, peering down on his own body. It wasn't true, he knew it wasn't. His body did nothing he didn't want it to; he had control. Even if it didn't feel like it.
Lienne knew none of this. The Kurin of his body went through all his usual motions, and the Kurin of his mind tried his best to hide it from her, passing off any oddity on his part off as lingering memories or trauma. Even if he could no longer feel the love or worry for her he knew hid somewhere in his heart, she had taught him to think kindly, even when he could not afford to feel empathy. He did not want her to worry, especially about something she could not fix. (And there was a part of him that feared she would think him mad, cast him out.) So he did what he could to let her believe that everything was alright. Life moved on.
The woman who had recognized him, a half Svefra mercenary named Zei, became a frequent visitor at their home, friendship, and something more blooming between her and Lienne. She taught Kurin to use her two weapons of choice, a rope dart and poison, though he took to one far more than the other. She moved in before long, and Kurin was glad; having a new lover gave Lienne much less time to watch and worry about him.
In an attempt to stave off the circling worry of his own mind, Kurin kept himself as busy as possible, healing when he could and practicing his new weapon when he couldn't. Both helped, in their own way. His fascination with the mortal body had never abated, and those fleeting moments of interest and awe as he studied a wound were the closest he ever got to feeling real again, while the rope dart required such concentration and physicality that he had no time to think on how he had changed.
They helped. For a time. But he could not distract himself from his mind every waking moment. Worry began to consume him, that he was mad, that he was a dream, that he was a ghost only possessing the real Kurin. He needed something to ground him, something to occupy his mind and force him to feel that he was here, in his body, in this world. But there had only ever been one thing in his life that could inhabit his mind so fully, and that...
For seasons, he shied away from the thought, well aware that it went beyond morbid into disturbing. He tried to content himself with memories of surgeries past, even poured over the memories of his own torture. But his memories remained dull in his mind, crystal clear with no shine to them.
One night, he stopped on his way home to pet a stray cat he'd been feeding for years, and found himself seized with a desperation to feel again. It was cruel, it was awful, it went against everything he was and believed. This was a creature, a living creature who knew and trusted him, and yet...
His hand slid down to its neck, still scratching, and slowly closed around its neck.
He couldn't. He shouldn't.
He did.
Later that night, he lay in bed, eyes shut as he ran through the memory again and again. The feel of fur under his fingers, the wet of blood over his palms, the parting of flesh under his experienced fingers. He'd never dissected a cat before, and even now, bells later, he could feel the thrumming of excitement in his chest. For the first time since he returned, he went to sleep contented.
When he woke, it was gone. There was something when he grasped at the memory again, but it was faint and faded, nothing like the visceral excitement of the night before.
He couldn't live like this. This couldn't happen again. He needed more. He was a monster. He was surviving. A cacophony of conflicting thoughts flooded his mind, and his heart ached, already longing for that peaceful oneness he felt with a body under his fingers.
He couldn't kill again. He already knew he would.
------
Years passed, and Kurin lived his double life, body facing out to the world, still cheery and laughing, while his mind retreated into itself, reliving scenes of blood and gore. He took to taking trophies, tufts of fur or whiskers to remind himself, help the memories linger for longer, discarding them when the memory faded. He learned too, to make these little sessions last longer, draw out the blood and agony over longer before the creatures inevitably expired, giving him more mental material to work with. With time and practice, he could make the feeling linger for weeks, and last almost a season before the unbearable hollowness in him had him going out again, catching rats and cats when he could, buying them when he couldn't.
The fog ebbed and flowed, receding and returning seemingly at random. Some weeks, he was almost fully alive; others, he was nothing but mist in the mind, the mere impression of a man. In recent seasons, though, it had begun to fade, allowing him to truly feel more and more frequently. It should have made him more like himself, less willing to hurt and kill. Instead, he found himself addicted; the heightened excitement, fascination and even guilt a shocking relief after the numbness of these past years.
He found himself itching to do more, to move on from the animals he had been contenting himself with up til then. What would a dog be like, inside, in the throes of agony? What would a human be like, if he were not trying to save their lives? He knew he would never find out, not while he still worked with his mother. Could he be alright with that?
The answer, as it turned out, was no.
As with everything he did, Kurin was careful and methodical about his mother's murder. He had some money squirreled away, and he knew where Lienne and Zei kept theirs. His things were neat and orderly, and he knew it would take only a few chimes to pack everything he needed.
In the last days of Fall, 518 AV, he went to a Svefra ship to barter for passage. It would cost much of what he had, plus his services aboard the ship over the course of their journey, but they would take him to Sunberth at dawn.
With the last of his preparations complete, Kurin went home to wait. He would need to time this perfectly; a bell too early, and he risked discovery, capture, and probably execution.
When it was done, he took a lock of Lienne and Zei's hair, tying them together in a moment of what would have been sentimentality in a normal man. As he strode out of the building, he turned, and pressed his hand to the door. He had grown up in this house and clinic, had every happy memory and loving moment here. This had been his home all his life, the one place a man should feel truly comfortable. Leaving it should have been a bittersweet moment, filled with tearful laughs and loving hugs and entreaties to write home frequently. Instead, he felt nothing.
Nothing but the singing joy of having held his mothers heart in his hands as she died.
Kurin’s early life was filled with love and joy, with smiles and laughter; little wonder he has such a warm disposition, with such a childhood behind him. His mother, Lienne Fell, was a learned and kind woman, a healer by trade, who'd spent some time in the Opal Temple, though she never joined the order herself. His father, Kurin had never known, but his mother frequently called him a kindred spirit to her. Kurin's conception had been ironic, in a way. The get of two brilliant doctors, neither of whom had realized Lienne was pregnant until they had parted ways.
With parents like those, it came as no surprise to anyone that Kurin was a healer and nurturer almost from birth. His mother liked to tell anyone who would listen that his first word had come when she'd cut herself cooking; he'd looked up from his playing, crawled over to her, and asked "Ouchie?" in the most anxious voice she'd ever heard from a toddler.
Even as a child, Kurin displayed an obvious fascination with his mother's work, frequently sitting by her side as she worked and asking question after question. As time went on, it became clear that he had a particular interest in blood and bone and organs, no matter how gory. Perhaps this was the result of early exposure: as a single mother of a fairly quiet baby, and with patients coming in at all bells of the day, Kurin had spent quite some time in infancy swaddled at his mother's side as she worked. Or perhaps it was something simpler: blood always tells.
There were those that frowned on this development in Kurin's personality, of course. Friends and patients would sometimes express concern over such a young child being interested in something so distasteful, that it would warp a young mind to see something so adult. Lienne would hear none of it. Her son had an interest in medicine, a love of anatomy, and all the resources he would need to learn; in her mind, his future was clear. Kurin would be a doctor as well, a surgeon, maybe one who would surpass her or even his father, wherever he was. And with that decided, she began to teach him everything he would need to know.
She taught him the parts of the body, from corpses when she could manage them and drawings when she couldn't. She showed him how to clean a wound, how to stitch it together, how to soothe a burn and splint a break, and much more. When she judged him ready, she taught him Auristics to see beneath the skin with djed, to spot fractures, internal damage and contusions, and then, dreaming of her son being one of the few men to ever join the Opal Order, she taught him the few scraps of Kontinese she'd picked up in her time with them.
And after the first time he cried after watching her lose a patient, she taught him to be cold. They both had warmth and empathy aplenty, and it frequently helped with calming patients down, but Lienne had been a healer too long to think that was all that was needed. The world was a dangerous place, and not all wounds could be fixed. A good doctor needed to be able to shut themselves off from death and suffering, lest the work they do break them down. Moreover, a doctor needed to have the coldness to let one patient die to take the time to save another. It hurt Lienne to teach her gentle, compassionate boy to turn his back on suffering, but it would hurt more to see him crumble under it. A doctor should be kind, but with his head, not his heart.
Still despite the occasional dark spot in his education, Kurin took to it like a Svefra to water. At seven, Lienne would quiz him as she worked; at ten, he was helping her clean instruments and bandage cuts. By the time he was fourteen, he could provide basic aid without her supervision, and help her diagnose patients. They made a good team. Lienne had wisdom and experience, and Kurin had passion and talent. It was a good life, a simple life, and Kurin knew and wanted nothing else until he was sixteen.
In the winter of Kurin's sixteenth year, a man stumbled into the clinic, bleeding profusely. It took only a glance for Kurin to tell that the wound was almost certainly fatal. A clean slash through the stomach had nicked open the man's intestines, and with Lienne elsewhere, fixing a man's innards was beyond Kurin's capabilities. Still, he did his best, providing the man with herbs to numb the pain, and tried to stem the bleeding, to no avail. The stranger's final words were in a language Kurin did not speak, to a person who was not there, and after burying the man, Kurin gave it no more thought, closing his heart to the sorrow as he'd been trained.
Four weeks later, he made a house call at East Street, and found a knife at his throat.
------
Where is the bastard's treasure?
That was what the men who hauled him down to the basement of their safehouse wanted to know.
Where is it?
I don’t know what you're talking about, Kurin told them, to no avail. Desperate men do not often think rationally, and these men were desperate indeed; the man Kurin had tried to save had been a member of their band of thieves and bandits, until he took all their gold and ran. The wound Kurin hadn't been able to fix had been a gift from them, but their wayward member had hidden the loot already. And Kurin had been the only person he’d spoken to before he died.
Kurin had to know the location of the treasure, went the reasoning. Else it was lost forever, and that was a thought too unbearable to entertain. And if the young healer would not talk, then they would make him.
There was no drawing lot to determine who would do the dirty deed, no argument about who would stain their hands like this; there was already one among them perfect for the job. A man only called Splinter, who made even his compatriots uncomfortable in his sadism.
Where is the treasure?
Kurin cried out as he was struck. Cheekbone bruised, maybe fractured. Ice wrapped in a towel would help with the swelling, but aside from that it would heal on its own.
Where is the treasure!?
Bruised stomach, no organ damage as far as he could tell. Some burning of the throat from throwing up, nothing that wouldn’t heal.
WHERE IS IT?
Pinky finger dislocated. Popped back into place quickly enough to avoid serious damage, but the muscle remains strained and sprained.
There was no answer Kurin could give that would satisfy them; they refused to believe he didn’t know, and he couldn’t name a place that the treasure could plausibly be.
As the days went by, Kurin’s torment grew and grew as Splinter grew angry and frustrated. To escape, Kurin retreated into his own mind, cataloguing each injury as it happened, treating each in his own imagination.
Reassuring himself that each injury could be far worse.
A knife dragged over his cheeks, opening shallow wounds to the air; needed to be cleaned out and bandaged. At least it wasn’t along the palms or fingers, which would be far more painful.
Boots kicking and stomping as he curled up on the ground, bruising ribs and cracking something in his forearm; a splint to set the break, herbs to dull the pain. His arm hurt, but was still useable. A proper break would be far, far worse.
Lashes along his shoulders, disinfected with salt water; stitches and a poultice would let those heal cleanly. Lashes across the back of his thighs and knees would be near unbearable, with the added benefit of hindering any escape attempt.
Of its own will, his mind began to detach itself, not only from grief and sadness, but from his very sense of self, leaving him feeling like a limp souls floating in the fog of a ruined body. Every pain and pang, every emotion seemed muted, like a heartbeat thudding behind bone, except for one: fury.
Starvation, eight days. A human could survive longer than that without food. A man of Splinters size could life for fifteen, maybe twenty.
Left arm, up to the heel of his hand, forced into the hearth. Painful — agonizing, actually — but that was good. The worst burns were the ones that didn’t hurt at all. Splinter had callouses along his palms, which might dull the pain, but the underarms and the back of his thighs were still soft and sensitive. Or perhaps the callouses could be cut off first.
Right pinky tip, cut off with a hatchet. Needed to be treated before he went into shock, before it got infected, before he lost too much blood. It hurt badly, but the shock and horror numbed it. He could do it slowly. Flay skin from flesh, carve flesh from bone, pop bone from its joint. Splinter was missing a few bits, but that still left twenty one finger bones to work on. He didn't have a scalpel, but a boning knife should work just as well.
Kurin had no sense of time passing, each agonizing day blurring into the next. But he woke one night to realize that he was alone with his tormentor, for the first time since he'd been taken; the bandits had caught word of a caravan and left to ambush it, leaving Splinter in charge of the safehouse.
They were alone.
Like a man possessed, Kurin seized his own thumb. Without a second of thought, he wrenched it from its socket, the give afforded by the dislocated digit allowing him to pull his hand through the manacles that held him captive. The hatchet that had separated his fingertip from him was within arms reach, and he took it up without hesitation. With his back turned, and never a thought that his prisoner could fight back, Splinter never stood a chance. A blow to the knee had the man crumpling to the ground, and within moments, Kurin was on him. He hadn't the equipment he would need to enact every thought he'd had of torturing Splinter, but Kurin was a creative man. He made do.
When Splinter finally expired, too soon, after too little punishment, Kurin ran. He didn't have a plan or a destination, he only knew he had to go. He stumbled up the stairs, and ran, and ran, and ran until he was out of East Street, and then collapsed, his bruised and battered body unable to go on a moment longer.
------
He woke in his own bed, heavily bandaged, with his arm in a splint and his mother waiting by his bedside. Quite a few people had seen his frantic flight; one had recognized him as the son of a healer who had saved her eye.
He was safe now, she whispered to him through her tears. He would heal, she vowed to him, his torturers would be brought to justice, and everything would be as it was.
She was half right.
Kurin's body healed. His mind did not. Even as his strength returned, Kurin found the fog in his mind remained, holding him apart from all that he'd felt so strongly before. Even anger held no satisfaction for him; with the target of his hatred dead, even that most visceral of emotions slipped away from him like mist between his fingers. He could recall vividly every moment of his torture, and feel nothing at all. Were it not for his scars, he might have wondered if it had happened to him at all. The people around him felt distant, unreal, as did he. The man who stared back at him in the mirror wore a familiar face and an easy smile, but he couldn't bring himself to think of it as him; he may as well have been looking at a long lost twin.
Worse still was the fact that he could feel his old self still, lurking in a body he did not fully control. He would think of acting, and his body would perform it, but was it truly him moving his body? He wasn't so sure. In time, he came to think of himself as a being of two parts: one, the old Kurin who lived in his body, a man who still smiled and sang and made people laugh, and another, this floating mind, peering down on his own body. It wasn't true, he knew it wasn't. His body did nothing he didn't want it to; he had control. Even if it didn't feel like it.
Lienne knew none of this. The Kurin of his body went through all his usual motions, and the Kurin of his mind tried his best to hide it from her, passing off any oddity on his part off as lingering memories or trauma. Even if he could no longer feel the love or worry for her he knew hid somewhere in his heart, she had taught him to think kindly, even when he could not afford to feel empathy. He did not want her to worry, especially about something she could not fix. (And there was a part of him that feared she would think him mad, cast him out.) So he did what he could to let her believe that everything was alright. Life moved on.
The woman who had recognized him, a half Svefra mercenary named Zei, became a frequent visitor at their home, friendship, and something more blooming between her and Lienne. She taught Kurin to use her two weapons of choice, a rope dart and poison, though he took to one far more than the other. She moved in before long, and Kurin was glad; having a new lover gave Lienne much less time to watch and worry about him.
In an attempt to stave off the circling worry of his own mind, Kurin kept himself as busy as possible, healing when he could and practicing his new weapon when he couldn't. Both helped, in their own way. His fascination with the mortal body had never abated, and those fleeting moments of interest and awe as he studied a wound were the closest he ever got to feeling real again, while the rope dart required such concentration and physicality that he had no time to think on how he had changed.
They helped. For a time. But he could not distract himself from his mind every waking moment. Worry began to consume him, that he was mad, that he was a dream, that he was a ghost only possessing the real Kurin. He needed something to ground him, something to occupy his mind and force him to feel that he was here, in his body, in this world. But there had only ever been one thing in his life that could inhabit his mind so fully, and that...
For seasons, he shied away from the thought, well aware that it went beyond morbid into disturbing. He tried to content himself with memories of surgeries past, even poured over the memories of his own torture. But his memories remained dull in his mind, crystal clear with no shine to them.
One night, he stopped on his way home to pet a stray cat he'd been feeding for years, and found himself seized with a desperation to feel again. It was cruel, it was awful, it went against everything he was and believed. This was a creature, a living creature who knew and trusted him, and yet...
His hand slid down to its neck, still scratching, and slowly closed around its neck.
He couldn't. He shouldn't.
He did.
Later that night, he lay in bed, eyes shut as he ran through the memory again and again. The feel of fur under his fingers, the wet of blood over his palms, the parting of flesh under his experienced fingers. He'd never dissected a cat before, and even now, bells later, he could feel the thrumming of excitement in his chest. For the first time since he returned, he went to sleep contented.
When he woke, it was gone. There was something when he grasped at the memory again, but it was faint and faded, nothing like the visceral excitement of the night before.
He couldn't live like this. This couldn't happen again. He needed more. He was a monster. He was surviving. A cacophony of conflicting thoughts flooded his mind, and his heart ached, already longing for that peaceful oneness he felt with a body under his fingers.
He couldn't kill again. He already knew he would.
------
Years passed, and Kurin lived his double life, body facing out to the world, still cheery and laughing, while his mind retreated into itself, reliving scenes of blood and gore. He took to taking trophies, tufts of fur or whiskers to remind himself, help the memories linger for longer, discarding them when the memory faded. He learned too, to make these little sessions last longer, draw out the blood and agony over longer before the creatures inevitably expired, giving him more mental material to work with. With time and practice, he could make the feeling linger for weeks, and last almost a season before the unbearable hollowness in him had him going out again, catching rats and cats when he could, buying them when he couldn't.
The fog ebbed and flowed, receding and returning seemingly at random. Some weeks, he was almost fully alive; others, he was nothing but mist in the mind, the mere impression of a man. In recent seasons, though, it had begun to fade, allowing him to truly feel more and more frequently. It should have made him more like himself, less willing to hurt and kill. Instead, he found himself addicted; the heightened excitement, fascination and even guilt a shocking relief after the numbness of these past years.
He found himself itching to do more, to move on from the animals he had been contenting himself with up til then. What would a dog be like, inside, in the throes of agony? What would a human be like, if he were not trying to save their lives? He knew he would never find out, not while he still worked with his mother. Could he be alright with that?
The answer, as it turned out, was no.
As with everything he did, Kurin was careful and methodical about his mother's murder. He had some money squirreled away, and he knew where Lienne and Zei kept theirs. His things were neat and orderly, and he knew it would take only a few chimes to pack everything he needed.
In the last days of Fall, 518 AV, he went to a Svefra ship to barter for passage. It would cost much of what he had, plus his services aboard the ship over the course of their journey, but they would take him to Sunberth at dawn.
With the last of his preparations complete, Kurin went home to wait. He would need to time this perfectly; a bell too early, and he risked discovery, capture, and probably execution.
When it was done, he took a lock of Lienne and Zei's hair, tying them together in a moment of what would have been sentimentality in a normal man. As he strode out of the building, he turned, and pressed his hand to the door. He had grown up in this house and clinic, had every happy memory and loving moment here. This had been his home all his life, the one place a man should feel truly comfortable. Leaving it should have been a bittersweet moment, filled with tearful laughs and loving hugs and entreaties to write home frequently. Instead, he felt nothing.
Nothing but the singing joy of having held his mothers heart in his hands as she died.
Post-Creation :
