last thing i remember, i was running for the door
in the master's chambers, they gathered for the feast
they stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast
Somewhere in between the towers and the observatory, he forgets. He always forgets. The chain, the link, is tugged out.
Unthinkable as it is, he forgets her anguish, her disgust, the sheer discomfort she feels as she is forced to maintain her cursed form.
Elena remembers. Elena always remembers. She stands and watches you leave for the Scar every day she can, because on some days she's just too weak, and yet you forget, Aeron. How can you do this?
Actually, though, it's not so bad, really. Just makes him a little bit slower winding his way out, because he forgets why he's even in there, and he's not so frantic to leave as just vaguely creeped out by the place. As a soldier, he is conditioned to dispatch with monsters. He does want to see the place a little spiffier, like the holy sanctum it used to be. Anybody would.
Or, well. That's fine for the Treetop Tower, anyway. Elena's not so fully consumed in proportion to the amount of time it takes him to beat the Master there. All of the servant beast flesh, he discards. At least, at the very least, he doesn't think it appropriate to dispose of the Master's innards so blithely.
Mavda will know what it means, he thinks. Mavda brought us to live here for a reason, after all. And why was that...?
Oh. Oh, dear Aios. Yes, that is why.
Aeron feeds Elena the Master Flesh without a word, shrinking under Mavda's husband's unexpectedly withering gaze. The old crone herself doesn't seem to mind, much. Maybe she knows what's going on, and maybe that's why. She studies him, grimly, as he lays a bruised Dawn Chorus at Elena's dozing side.
When it comes time to leave for the Sheerdrop Spire, Elena is almost feverish with worry.
"Promise me, Aeron, you won't forget? Mavda told me...she told me how guilty you looked."
Of course. Of course it's about him, and not Elena herself, who was in all that pain. While she'd slept, and the Vestra couple chittered in the closet, he'd held his head in his hands and tried to drill in the instructions. Into the Tower, get the lay of it, back to the Observatory with enough flesh to tide. In once more (and it'd be twice or thrice, later), then back out with the Master Flesh.
You cannot forget. You cannot forget.
But as the wolves threaten to maul him in the mines, Aeron doesn't know what should stop him from letting them take him completely, so Elena just won't have to worry anymore. He only retreats because he is out of medicine. With nothing to give Elena, he ducks in for revenge on the silver beasts and quickly back out again. Somehow, miraculously, she survives.
Again, in Wellspring Steeple, conditions are brutal. The beasts lurking in the murky waters are not so much vicious as viciously efficient, and try as he might Aeron cannot train his reflexes to keep up. He palms furiously at a pocket on his vest and comes up with a nigh-depleted bottle of panacea; the hastily scribbled note dictating the essence of his quest falls into a nearby pool and soon dissolves.
There's no time to rest and figure it out. The Aeron in the Observatory knows he has to keep going; the Aeron in the Towers doesn't know why. He surges on, through crimson and ironclad and arcadian variants of keep and turret and tower. He develops the instinct, muscle memory of time on a clock passing from midday to midnight, that draws him back in to home base, and to Elena. But it isn't enough.
She offers, nearly begs at points, for him to do the Vow of Aios with her. He refuses, almost always, in much of the same way as he recoils from her unnatural addiction to the flesh.
He writes in his journal, gives himself reminders etched and wrapped about the handles of his weapons, takes cakes and salves and talismans and ambrosia, and partakes of them with no guilt, hardly even any anger, on his face while he is buried deep in the unholy sanctums.
Not so bad, he tells himself, late at night when even Mavda's husband has stopped clacking his jaws. Half done, and I'm getting faster. My technique is improving, I'm getting even stronger even faster than the monsters are. I solve the labyrinths more quickly every time.
I can make it. It doesn't matter if I remember. All of this will soon be a distant memory to the both of us - all four, really - soon enough.
Soon enough.
But after the sinister goddess of the wooden tower fails to see Aeron through the final Master battle in enough time to return to anything other, more cogent, than Elena's prone figure lain vomiting in a pool of milky blood on the floor, fleshy tendrils thrashing from her shoulder and dress fully torn (Mavda had thrown a towel over top, apparently), it is her trembling index finger he reaches for first.
"Elena! Elena, don't let this be how I remember you. Let me...no, let us..."
Memory. Hope.
Back he goes into the other half. This time, he remembers. This time, he sees. This time, he is doing it all, every last second, for Elena.
(The Eagles, Hotel California)