#// i know this isn't elden ring but honestly he doesn't have anyone in the lands between that fit this prompt (yet!)

[necrophcge]

💔 BROKEN HEART — is there anyone in your life you wish you had a better relationship with? if so, how come? what makes this person important to you?

@izar-tarazed // plucking at their web of thoughts; pray you don't become the fly to their spider // not accepting.

For a time there is no response. Only the restless, endless heartbeat of the hive can be heard as the many drones fufill their roles. Foragers by the hundreds skittering across the vast walls as they extend the nearly endless tunnels and reinforce the already iron-strong walls of their nest, the wingbeats of necrodrone echoing their arrivals and departures in their constant surveillance of the lands surrounding the hive, battle born roused from their forced slumber to eviscerate any trespassers into their domain...

And amidst the shrieks and whirring stands a titan of mutated chitin, star-metal armaments and raw reanimated muscle. Upon four monstrous legs does the champion march about, and his powerful pincers easily tear free chunks of stone thrice his size as he bulldozes a path forward for the hive to expand. Crowned with horns the envy of any battering ram's head, the champion commands the teeming horde with the ease of a creature that knows its own incredible might.

He Who Meddles gestures to that champion of the Necrophage with a single hand... while two of the others wrap around his abdomen, and the last clenches tightly into a clawed fist before relaxing just as swiftly. "Rhiss al-Khali." There is almost something akin to reverence in that dual tone of his, tinged with something that sounds terribly like grief or regret. "An ardent mage once. Human, once. He came to us not as prey or foe but as a supplicant... to become one. To join us as kindred and to become an inheritor of our world, bonded with us in mind and flesh as Necrophage. Obsessed with mutation and adaptation, he looked upon us and saw perfection."

He hesitates, many-eyes fixed on his champion. "He survived where every other being before him had succumbed to the agony of having all that defined them rewritten on a genetic level, or been driven to utter madness by the weight of our shared consciousness. What had once been merely a man emerged from the growth vat as new creature; one with the power of our greatest warriors, yet still in possession of his unparalleled intellect. So it was then that he became not only my general and most loyal subject... but the only one to whom I kept counsel with and confided to. For none other among the Necrophage had the awareness that I possess save for Rhiss al-Khali, and we spoke long into many a night on our visions for the world and for the future we would secure together."

Something harsh, something awry and almost mournful seeps into the dual-tone of his voice. To the ears of a mere hindlegs, perhaps it would seem to be nothing more than mere noise. But to someone who could parse the subharmonics... it would be nothing but pure sorrow and grief, too potent to be merely spoken aloud in that cumbersome way that most "intelligent" creatures do. "Yet he succumbed, in the end. While the conversion of mere flesh and bone to chitin and invertebrate might may have been a swift and violent affair, the restructuring of the mind proved to be a far quieter and... crueler process. It was a slow fade that began with him losing time and recent memory, only to progress into fits of animalistic fury and violence as time wore on and his connection to our mind strengthened."

There are beads of greenish-yellow blood running down his sides from where his claws have bitten into his abdomen. He hardly seems to notice, many-eyes still fixated on Kha-Riss far below. "I would not speak of those last hours before his mind was utterly consumed, for the words and companionship we shared are ours alone... yet I will tell you that for all that there was fear for the end, there was no regret. Somehow, some way, he held no fear for... for becoming like..."

There would be silence, for how He Who Meddles trails off, were it not for the rising cry building deep within his abdomen. It erupts in not only a screech, a cry of pain so much more like that of a mere animal than any supposed sapient being, but with claws extended in a blow that nearly shatters the nearest hive wall. Dust shrouds them for a moment, then two, only to pass away and reveal He Who Meddles leaning heavily against the now crumbling wall. Head bowed, mandibles clenched so tightly against his maw they grind together almost painfully, the noise that slithers free from the confines of his too-small chest speaks only of pain.

"... what I would do to speak with him again. My kindred-who-chose, my dearest friend, to share words and thoughts once more for even an hour would be worth all of our world."