Page 125 of Whisper of Nightmares

This is Otho’s deathbed.

Sitting on the bed, Kelda’s head is bowed, her forehead pressed against the back of her husband’s hand. Another version of Dagfinn stands beside her, this one seeming far younger, even though Euphemia knows this was only a year ago.

Her Dagfinn stands frozen in the room, watching what she suspects is his worst memory unfold before him.

Four words escape his father’s cracked lips. “Take care…of her.”

And then the man’s head slumps.

A father gone.

A husband unmade.

A region without their lord.

Euphemia’s vision swirls as the room becomes a kaleidoscope of warm browns and muted greys.

Days blur by. The old Dagfinn hunches over wine and vials of strange, bubbling liquids. Stacks of parchment litter his desk, illuminated by flickering candles. Euphemia can see the man Kelda told her about, the one obsessed with his studies, losing sleep over his each experiment, chasing solutions to problems no one else could understand.

The old Dagfinn slams his fists on the desk, knocking everything to the ground in a shattering of glass and smoking liquid.

Another swirl of color.

Another room.

Euphemia sees Kelda begging the old Dagfinn to sit with her—in the great hall, in the sitting room, on a horse while they go for a ride. All of her pleas are met with silence and a cold shoulder. Until eventually, Kelda gives up. She stops asking.

More days pass and the old Dagfinn spirals deeper.

His cheeks become gaunt. His eyes hazy with delirium.

Euphemia knows this madness.

The magnitude of the grief it takes to consume a person.

But it’s more than that. She sees herself in the way this man loses himself in his work the same way she can with her brews. He spends hours every day examining every mixture, every formula, every failed attempt, tinkering and trying again until he gets it right.

But perfect for what? She cannot yet understand what it is he’s so focused on.

Perhaps this was simply the way he knew to survive, throwing himself into his work the same way she threw herself into serving her family and filling the void her father left behind.

She never realized how tragic it was before now.

The room shifts around them one final time, bringing them to the last day in old Dagfinn’s life.

The day the curse took him.

Only, it is not a curse. Not in the way Kelda believes.

It is Dagfinn’s own creation.

A brew that hits him harder than all the wine and mead she’s witnessed him drink until this point.

The old Dagfinn staggers out of his study—but even in this state, he has the forethought to lock the chamber behind him. Out of habit? Out of fear that someone else might stumble upon it?

He barely makes it another three steps before the concoction seizes him and the old Dagfinn falls like a tree.

Then the memory fades.