Larkcall Lowlands it was hard to know who was more crazy: me, or everyone else

Rue's mouth fell open as he brusquely interrupted her again, forcing her to put aside her current notes and reach for yet more.

"Roosemooth. He called himself Roosemooth."

The world collapsed.

He staggered backwards as though physically struck. Everything he had known, all the rage and grief and guilt and regret, was all turned into dust. The very pillars of his being were shaken. He was unable to simultaneously accept what she was saying as truth and doubt the words of the man who he would have walked into flame for. There was the tiniest possibility that she was yet mistaken, that it had been an impostor, but it was quickly overpowered by the rising hope that she was entirely right.

That somewhere out there, his daughter yet lived, and it had not all been in vain.

It was increasingly difficult to understand and predict his reactions, and yet again he proved it. Suddenly, Rue found herself free of obstruction, the wolf no longer imposing his bulk on her, no longer pressing down on her lungs, and she took a hungry breath of fresh air to soothe her aching chest. Slowly, she rolled onto her front, eyes never leaving his face even though it was clear he was a hundred miles away.

Man, this day had gotten weird super fast.

Though tempted to flee while he was distracted, Rue hesitated. There was so much more to say, so many more things she knew, but could she risk him regaining his senses - or, more rightly, his anger? She didn't want to be the unwilling target for any of his old ires, no matter what they were. It was nothing to do with her, she was just the storykeeper who happened to have a story which meant something to him.

Licking her lips, she tensed, ready to spring away if necessary, but charity won out. If he was Craw... and by now, there could be no doubt... then she remembered feeling sad when hearing about his story. She tried to remember that. "She gave herself a new name," she whispered, voice building in confidence as she saw the way he looked at her, as though through a dense fog. "Rejected Kh- her grandfather's name, just like you. Calls herself Odysseia Immorta now. After... after your son, and after you. She doesn't think you're dead. She still thinks you're coming back."

Mortus' face swam up in his memory, a little pale slip of a boy with just a hint of black around his eyes. The memory of him playing with his smaller half-sister, playing rough, biting too hard. Odysseia had wailed, just long enough to distract him - and then she'd clamped her tiny needle teeth into her sibling's unsuspecting nose, entirely deliberate in her revenge.

Craw had watched proudly. He had never loved anything more.

Immorta. "Immorta." He liked the way it sounded, how it felt on his tongue. He liked how it made his heart hurt with the reminder of Mortus, of the fact that his surviving daughter thought that he could not be so easily killed. That they might not think he had forgotten them - but was just waiting for the right moment.

His mind went to @Wraith, and he wished he had learned this sooner, before his Second had gone to chase information which had walked into him right here, and the burning need for his friend to return grew intolerable. Suddenly, everything was not so out of reach - not just the hint of a bitter taste on his tongue, the tease of metallic tang, but tangible.

Slowly, slowly, his world started to rebuild itself.

There was so, so much more, so many pages of detailed information that she had barely touched, but watching him process this smallest of datums, Rue decided that he couldn't handle it. More rightly, she couldn't handle the possibility of saying something which he didn't seem to like - hearing that one's daughter was alive and well and giving herself a pretentious name must've been a good thing, this was a good reaction, right? If, instead, she had mentioned what Breaker had done, given everything else she understood about the father-son dynamic... well, Rue probably would have felt those teeth, she was sure.

Taking a careful step back, testing his awareness, Rue squinted slightly at him, running through her notes to see if there was anything else worth mentioning which might keep in this stupor. Nothing quite seemed to compare to this, so she chose to take her chances.

"Yeah, well, I - glad I could be of help. You... you have a nice life, now."

She wasn't even sure he was listening. With a half-hearted bow, heart still pounding madly in her chest, Rue turned and scampered away, unscathed.