In hindsight, Scar will admit: he’s made a few mistakes, and this was one of them.
To be fair, he hadn’t thought Grian would be capable of following through on “if you know my name and a lot of illager magic you can technically summon me, yes, especially since I severed any tie I would have had with any other mage”. He hadn’t thought it was possible! He’d told that to Grian in the middle of the night because he didn’t think Grian could learn evoker magic! It’s not like it’s common, or a thing illagers write down, or a thing they’re willing to teach players! He’d thought he was safe!
So, Scar may have made a mistake. He makes a lot of them! He didn’t think this one would catch up with him.
He didn’t think, until the swirling magic in the back of his head cools off, and there’s blood on a sword Scar didn’t remember getting as he pulls his arm from where it had phased through the last of the enemies around them, and he blinks several times to try to figure out how he’d gotten here and what time he’d been missing, and—
“Scar?” says a shaky voice. “Scar, they’re gone now, I’m sorry, I panicked, it was a joke.” Oh. His new summoner. A thing purrs in Scar’s chest, the thing that Scar hasn’t had to deal with since he and Cub had shattered it together. Satisfaction. A lack of decision. He’s missing time. There are dead mobs and, he thinks, maybe dead players here too, but mostly mobs, and isn’t that strange? Normally his evoker would have…
“Scar. Scar, you’re scaring me.”
Scar turns to the summoner and tries to figure out how to—
Grian stares back, wide-eyed and terrified.
“Grian?” Scar says, and his voice echoes.
“I—hahaha, it was a joke, Scar,” Grian says, shaking. “I’m fine. See? You can—I did something, didn’t I? I…”
“…yeah Grian, I’d say you did something,” says Scar, thinking of back then, on burning yellow sand, handing a man Scar shouldn’t trust his Name, because he didn’t trust Grian at all but trusted Grian with his soul utterly, and—it’s too late to take that sort of thing back, Scar thinks.
Far too late.
“You’re all blue,” Grian says, reaching for Scar, who is beginning to empathize with how panicked Grian looks. “And glowing. I couldn’t touch you.”
“That’s how vexes tend to work, Grian,” Scar says, much calmer than he should probably feel. The thing in his heart continues to purr. “Where did you even learn enough illager to manage this?” he asks.
“You don’t even sound mad,” Grian says.
“I don’t think I can be? Not yet, anyway. Not this early.” He shrugs. He should probably be mad about that too, but the yell in his head of summoner, summoner is overriding it entirely. He hasn’t had an evoker since—well, and now it’s Grian, someone Scar had handed over his soul to willingly. It’s hard to fight the instinct to start smiling again, so he doesn’t, and he grins, and he knows it’s some crooked fey thing, and probably making Grian more concerned, but he doesn’t care.
“What did I do,” Grian says, and Scar wants to laugh at him, or maybe at himself, but instead he says—
“I think you’re going to need to learn a lot more illager.”
“Oh right, to reverse it. Of course. I didn’t… I thought you’d just teleport here and we’d both… hold on.”
Scar watches him, and decides that letting Grian think he’d said that so it could be reversed was what he’d meant for the time being. Eventually, Grian would learn there was only one way to do that, and if it had been anyone else, maybe, but…
Scar thinks about mistakes, and mistaken trust, and the genuine fear for his sake in Grian’s face, and thinks: at least it’s not that bad.
Or maybe that’s the magic talking.
Grian mumbles to himself about lessons while Scar follows him, idly wondering how badly Cub’s going to kill them both when he finds out. He supposes he’ll see.
