Yorak isn't the sort that spends a lot of time with others. At all. He does visit that baker occasionally, but it's not as if he can stick around for long when he does— the villagers would punish Takashi if they saw Yorak in his place of business. So he has never kept the company of a mortal long enough to hear about his family and his daily life. Lance McClain is a strange disruption to his routine and has completely defied each of his expectations of a human farm boy.
...It's also made him recognize his own loneliness for what it is. That is his motivation as he frantically searches through a velvet bag of what would appear, to the unenlightened, to be a bunch of shiny rocks. They're much more than that. Memory stones, his mother called them. She spent many long nights making them for him not long before she left him here all alone.
There are many ways to use a memory stone, but Yorak has his preferred methods. He picks the memories he wishes to see and he dons his special fitted glove with a groove in the back of it in which he can insert the right stone. He then stands above his cauldron and casts the memory like a vision across the glass-like surface of the water. He is proficient enough at magick that he can see the visions clear as day.
Yorak usually picks the same stone. Tonight is not different in that respect. It is the first one in his collection, chronologically speaking. Or, at least, he has always assumed as much— some sort of nameless fear has thus far kept him from inspecting each memory. He ignores that fear as he watches the familiar pictures dance across the water. Krolia holds her newborn son in her arms and rocks him gently back and forth, singing him a chant in a language he knows only bits and pieces of even now. She tells him what his name means, why she chose it for him. He is dressed in handmade robes that look strange on an infant and are too big for him. She tells him that he is quite small for a warlock, hence the errors in his wardrobe, but that she loves him anyway because he is her son, and she knows that his heart is big. She will see to it that he grows bigger and stronger and she will never, ever leave him.
But that memory, as it always does, fades, and then Krolia is gone. She has been for quite some time now and no amount of remembering will bring her back. Even magick can't do that. Yorak stares at the water in what is now a pitch-black room, and for the first time in a long while he finds himself thinking about his father. He hardly knew the man, after all. Even his face is a blurry picture in Yorak's head.
He takes a deep breath. He lights a lamp before he searches through the stones, the surfaces of them cold against his skin. He feels the energy that pulses from them and searches for his father. He finds one that bears the man's energy, and for many long moments he does nothing but cup it in his palm, uncertain of what to do with it. Now is as good a time as any, he decides, and so he casts the memory.
Yorak's father was a mortal man. Yorak is stiff as he squints at his features, searching for something familiar there, and he finds it. He sees his own self in him. His coloring, and the texture of his hair. His smile. Yorak doesn't have his mother's smile, and he always thought that he did, and he doesn't know how to feel about that revelation.
How much more is hidden in these unassuming stones? Yorak can approximate a vague idea of their contents and their emotions, but he isn't certain. Once more, he argues with himself as a vision ends. This is always where he stops himself. But Krolia gave these to him for good reason, didn't she? He has been terribly selfish thus far. Selfish and cowardly.
Yorak has, without thinking, ignored his mother's repeated warnings. She once made him promise that he would never, ever cast a spell while he was angry— when he didn't truly mean it. And yet he's done just what he promised he wouldn't in cursing the village chieftain. Why didn't he listen? He of all people should know what can happen when spells are cast under emotional duress. When magick is used like a reflex. Krolia learned that lesson the hard way, and even now, his memory is a senseless swamp of sensations because of it.
He knows she didn't mean it. He knows that. She wept as she insisted as much, over and over again. But no amount of her apologies ever undid the damage. ...She shattered his memory. She broke it. With a single touch of her hand, she split his fragile young mind into thousands of fragments, and all because she made a subconscious wish that he would not remember his pain. These stones, now, are all that he has to glue his memories back together. She wanted to make up for her mistakes somehow. What right does he have to defy her final wish?
Yorak takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and chooses the stone that calls to him. He has never watched three visions in one night before, but there's a first time for everything. Colors swim into focus on the surface of the liquid. Right away, he knows this memory is... different. And he knows, then, why he has been so afraid to view it. His blood runs cold at the eerily familiar scenario that plays out.
The witch Krolia of the Clan Marmora prowls through the Feldakor woods in total silence. Her form is that of a black deer, sleek and elegant, antlers like the branches of a birch tree spindling away from her head in impossible spirals and with eyes like violet flames and with legs so long and slender that the hooves in which they end are like merciless daggers. Subtlety, it seems, is not her strong suit. This is clearly not an average deer.
Without warning, and despite the odds, she is confronted by a puny mortal man. A dark-haired hunter with his bow and arrow drawn and ready. Her fur bristles. A black miasma spills from her in glowing particles. A warning to anyone with common sense. But the man is not scared away, perhaps because he lacks it. Intrigued, he grins.
"It's you," he declares. "The witch from the hilltop."
"And what do you know of witches?" Krolia answers in several booming voices, only one of them her own. Her form lurches, and it looks like her spine breaks. The shape of the deer twists and lengthens until Krolia stands there as herself. Taller than any human woman, with alien but regal features and adorned in gold and jewels and billowing robes, ears a fine tapered point, hair like silk, eyes like death and teeth sharp enough to inflict it. Beauty and terror all at once— something Yorak can only aspire to as he is now.
All the while the hunter watches. He is mesmerized, and apparently he is happy with what he sees when her transformation is through. The grotesque nature of the change doesn't seem to register with him.
"So it's true," he breathes. "You can shape-shift."
"What do you want with me? If you intend only to waste my time, or are truly so arrogant as to believe that you could harm me, I will be on my way."
"I intended not to distract you, your witchiness. Not at all! I only wanted to see what everyone else was so afraid of. And now that I have... I hardly see anything to fear."
Krolia contemplates this. She does not appear to move, but she is inches away from the hunter's face in the blink of an eye, her searching expression unchanged.
"Is that so?"
The hunter shivers slightly, but he does not retreat.
"Yeah," he affirms, grin widening.
Krolia, unimpressed, takes her leave. She knows without having to look that the mortal follows, as he makes no effort to conceal his footfalls. She tells him that if he is going to stalk behind her, he may as well make himself useful to her. So she has him assist her in gathering animal bones— if he is a truly a hunter he should know where to procure them. He offers to get her fresh ones and she scoffs, asserting that she has no need for such cruelty. Is it not enough that she must grind their bones for her potions? She has no desire for the deaths of the innocent.
The man is obedient enough, it seems. Krolia makes a bitter remark about how men are as easy to discipline as dogs. She also scolds him about the fact that he insists on staring at her face, though. He asks what he is expected to do in the presence of such beauty and she scoffs. He never once complains as he does the witch's bidding, and so when they part, she begrudgingly gives him a token of her appreciation. A charged crystal, she calls it. An amethyst that should bring him clarity of mind.
"I've never believed in all of that mumbo-jumbo about vibrations," he says as he inspects the present. Krolia doesn't hide her amusement.
"You ought to in this case. I've blessed it with my magick." As if to prove the truth of her words, the gemstone glows. The man puts the cord around his neck to confirm that it fits him, and it does as if it was custom-cut for his neck.
"In that case, I will cherish it. Always."
Krolia raises her head proudly.
"A wise decision," she assures him. "A mere mortal needs all the help he can get."
The mortal in question does not buy into her routine— a wall carefully crafted to shield her— and smiles at her as if she was any one of his neighbors.
"Will I see you again?" The inquiry is casual, but there is hope in his voice.
"...We shall see."
The memory ends as the witch and the mortal part ways, and Yorak withdraws fearfully from the cauldron to fall against the far wall. His chest rises and falls too quickly and his breath is hoarse as he tries to refill his lungs with much-needed air, but he has been so transfixed on the vision that he does not know when he forgot to breathe.
He cannot help but look to his cupboards, where he can see a large glass bottle full of fresh essence of moonlight. He cannot help but recall how he acquired it. Is he doomed to repeat his mother's mistakes, or...? Were they mistakes at all? He wouldn't be here at all if not for that folly. But Krolia would also be alive if not for that mortal. Yorak suspects as much, anyway. Had she not wasted so much of her magick trying in vain to extend his mortal lifespan, she would have had to strength to fight off some silly illness.
Yorak wipes the sweat from his clammy brow and then shakes his head. He is overthinking things, he's sure. He decides that he is only allowing himself to do so because he has not slept in some time.
He clings to that belief as he turns in and he blatantly refuses to dream, as though a lack of his own meaningless nocturnal visions will erase the ones he knows all too well are real.