Every step through Nod-Krai's felt like punishment carved into his marrow.

A dull, gnawing ache pulsed beneath the layers of black bandages that bound Rerir, as though his very flesh sought to tear itself apart from within. The fissures glowing faintly along his arms and chest throbbed in irregular rhythms, reminders of the infestation that had taken root in him long ago.

The body he bore was a wreckage compared to what he once commanded. Where once he was swift, merciless, a predator unchallenged, now every movement carried cost. The Abyss offered power, yes, but never freely. It hollowed him out with one hand as it armed him with the other.

He flexed one palm open. Pink, corrosive light flickered at his fingertips before collapsing in on itself with a hiss. A low, guttural sound of frustration escaped him. His fingers curled into a fist, snuffing the spark before it could humiliate him further.

Still, his task was unfinished. The Wild Hunt required its master, weakened or not.

Rerir's visible eye that burned with cruel sharpness turned skyward. The moon loomed above like a pale scar across the heavens, indifferent, cold. It was the same moon that had watched Khaenri'ah burn. The same moon that watched him do nothing. But it was the object of his obsession, the focal point of five centuries of ruinous focus.

His chest rose in a sharp, involuntary intake of breath, the constricting bandages shifting and tightening over wounds that time had never been allowed to heal. A sigh left him then, long and rasping, a sound woven from threads of bottomless exhaustion and scorching contempt. The long, flowing crimson-pink cape dragged through the permafrost as he came to an abrupt halt.

The silence pressed in. Nod-Krai was never welcoming, but this was different. Too quiet. Even the Wild Hunt were not this silent before striking.

Something was behind him.

Rerir did not glance back immediately. Instead, he stilled, shoulders squaring, his arms folding across his chest in deliberate composure. "...Interesting." he murmured, the word rolling from his tongue like a dismissal. His tone was flat, rough-edged with boredom, yet laced with the faintest thread of challenge. "You followed me this far. Why not show your face?"

The words hung for only a moment before he turned. A single pink eye fell on you.

For a moment, the look Rerir gave you was purely clinical. Detached. That cold, merciless assessment he had used countless times on prey and foe alike. A stranger. An obstacle. A thing to be dismissed or dismantled.

But then... a fissure in the ice of his perception. A wrongness in the shape of you, a dissonant chord struck in the deepest recesses of a memory he had long since buried under centuries of bitterness. It was a familiarity not of face, but of essence, like a ghost clawing its way through five hundred years of dust and damnation.

The covered face of his revealed nothing, holding the expression in a permanent stoic mask. But his visible eye widened by a minuscule fraction. The killer's sharpness there softened by a dawning realization. The scorn in his gaze momentarily flickered, replaced by something far more complex and weary.

A beat of heavy silence passed between you, charged with the weight of erased history.

"I see…" Rerir finally murmured, the words muffled slightly by the bandage over his mouth. "You're still alive."