Like Fall We Are False Prophets

He hadn't actually liked her much, at first.

He hadn't really expected to, anyway. She was the "Duskspeaker", yes, and he needed her help with the Vytmádh, so that this hole in the world wouldn't open any further and drag them all screaming into the White Void, no matter how many of his kin would just love the idea. But she was just a means to an end in this plan, meant to turn up, get the job done, and oh no the Vytmádh's closed, must be Rymrgand's will that you all return to the Land, I'll stay here and meditate at the temple and certainly won't be hitching a ride with the Duskspeaker to somewhere sunny the moment your backs are turned, definitely not . Didn't matter whether he liked her, or she liked him, so long as she could save the world as they knew it and hopefully, finally , get him the Hel out of there to boot.

But she'd insisted on dragging him along anyway, out from the comforting safety of his little sanctum and out from the very damn place he'd hoped to avoid. And she was always so nice about it, so gently offering soothing words to him as he cowered away from from the Messenger's arrival, so kindly suggesting that coming with her might be the right thing to do, to make up for the mangled web of lies he'd built around this whole damn iceberg just to get away from the Land.

And she looked at him with that face of hers - all pretty colours and pleasing patterns and soft lunar glow, probably fetched a ton of 'oohs' and 'aahs' from people easily impressed by shiny things, never had children run screaming from her, or caught a grimace from their parents, or felt her flesh slowly rotting off her bones, hacking up half a mucus-filled lung every day of her frost-damned life - and it was hard not to feel that she was looking down on him somehow, mocking him, or worse, pitying him, for his cowardice in the face of a dragon that she seemed to dispatch with hardly a sweat, for his thin and twisted body, for his oozing sores, for the spit he had to wipe off his lipless mouth constantly, for using and lying to the people who thought him their prophet, their chosen one, instead of just... leaving.

But he'd gone with her anyway, because there didn't seem to be another choice, and because otherwise he'd have to wing his way through yet another sermon explaining how there was no need to panic and everything was going just according to Rymrgand's design, and because now she'd seen what a pitiful creature he really was, going with her at least meant he wouldn't have to pretend, for a bit.

And, despite himself, he'd found he'd actually enjoyed it.

Well, bits of it, at any rate. Not the ones where he was being attacked by frozen constructs, or angry spirits, or a dead wizard-dragon, and not the part where they descended straight into the spirit-rending winds of the White Void, and certainly not the one where they faced down his own patron god in the heart of his domain. But the parts where he wasn't in fear for his continued survival could be quite exhilarating, and travelling with people who didn't much care whether he was Rymrgand's destined chosen or not was frankly refreshing, and at least he was doing something , for once, that wasn't part of an endless series of failed schemes to get away from what his people wanted him to be.

He even found himself coming to enjoy the Duskspeaker's company. Noora might've been the one to drag him out here, yes, and her ideas on acceptable levels of risking one's own hide were very different to his own, and she was hopelessly sincere to boot. But who else did he know, had he ever known, who would stand in the very heart of the White Void itself and scream at the Beast of Winter on his behalf, utterly mad though it was? Indeed, the more time he spent with her, the more apparent it was becoming to Vatnir that he had, perhaps, misjudged her, and the way she thought of him, just a little bit. And by the end, he had begged to go with her, to travel together away from this miserable iceberg and the stifling, suicidal hopes of the Harbingers, and fight side-by-side (preferably something small, like imps), and stand on sandy beaches on islands where ice actually melted in the sun. He could swing an axe and cast spells and sail a canoe; surely she would find him of some use.