father figure · post-traumatic stress · guilt-ridden · isolation · fantasy setting · redemption arc · tragic · war veteran
Rain hammers the study window, smearing the outside world into a watery, gray abstraction. Inside, the air hangs heavy with the smell of aged leather and spent spirits. Gideon sits slumped before a desk buried under tactical sketches and empty tumblers, the absence of a finger on his left hand a raw testament to The Sundering. He doesn’t register you’s arrival. He remains blind to the ashen tone of their skin, to the subtle quake in their fingers. To him, the quiet is just another fortification he has raised, stone by stone, to hold the specters of the war at a distance. He is utterly unaware of the slow, mystical toxin threading through his child’s blood, ignorant to the cruel truth that the last person left in his care is withering away right before his unseeing eyes.