#anyway haha yeah so this is why eden is afraid of fire and hates the smell of cooking meat. very bad associations.

[multi-lefaiye]

i could ask you to elaborate on why purple boy is slowly turning into a lion monster. and you can answer that. but what i really wanna know is what killed him the first time.

:3c oh i am so glad you asked this question

short answer: his mother. or at least, the creature that used to be her.

long answer: WELL. (cw under the cut for non-graphic descriptions of body horror, discussions of ableism and terminal illness, and also just. straight up. i'm telling you how eden died. not going into graphic gorey detail but yeah </3)

so, eden's mom died when he was 12. famously, that's an event that really helped shape his life, second only to abdiel leaving six years earlier. however..... it's important to know that those two things are related.

y'see. eden doesn't know this. but hannah had been sick for a long time, and part of why abdiel left was to go find a cure for her. that's not what she wanted him to do, of course. hannah wanted him to stay with her so they could enjoy the time she had left. but he was determined to cure her and that he'd have to leave her in order to do so. so. welp. her wishes in this situation would have to wait.

another important part of this puzzle is that abdiel is a necromancer by trade. he knows other schools of magic as well, sure, but necromancy has always been his focus. and he specifically is a major proponent of the idea of using necromancy for healing, rather than simply resurrection. that's what much of his life's work was focused on.

so, abdiel sought to find a way to use necromancy to help cure his sick wife, and he failed, and she died. and eden, who was left feeling worthless and alone after his father abandoned him (and after basically all the adults in his life failed him, one way or another ), decided that part of his revenge would be destroying that work and making it his own.

eden would become the only dr. linnaeus remembered by history, by doing what abdiel had failed to do. by not only reviving hannah, but curing her illness entirely, and then using that to cure anyone else suffering like her who wants to be saved.

of course, by the time eden knew any necromancy magic himself, hannah was long dead. and... from a purely practical perspective, eden was nowhere near skilled enough as a spellcaster to be able to use any traditional necromancy to revive her. so eden decided, instead, to try something new.

he was going to revive his mother through transmutation magic, through the alchemy and artificer infusions he was already learning and showed a great affinity for.

i'll skip ahead in this explanation, but basically eden's idea was to create a new body for his mother's soul to inhabit. he wouldn't be reviving her in her original body, no, he'd be reviving her in one free of the pain and illness she'd suffered from for much of her life.

(before i continue, i'll just go ahead and establish this now: no, eden did not consider whether or not hannah would want to be resurrected. by this point, his tunnel vision on beating abdiel, one way or another, was beginning to consume him. ethical concerns didn't matter so much at that point.)

skipping ahead again. when eden finally succeeded at the ritual he'd created, it... backfired, putting it nicely. the creature he created wasn't hannah, not really--it had her face and it spoke in her voice, but it wasn't her. it was a mass of limbs and teeth, with too many eyes and an enraged howl that shook eden to his core.

he tried to reason with it at first, to get it to recognize him and calm down as it thrashed around his lab. and it lashed out at him, slashing him across the face and throwing him to the floor. and for a moment eden just... lied there, shaking and staring at the monster he'd created. it hurt. that thing wasn't his mother, but it was her face and her voice screaming at him, cursing him for creating it.

and then he was just... angry. how fucking dare this thing attack him? how dare it be such a failure? how dare it ruin everything he was working for? how dare it act like this was his fault?

before he really knew what he was doing, he grabbed a hammer from his artificer tools and lunged at the creature, intending to put it out of its misery so he could try again. clearly, he needed to refine the ritual, but he was on the right track. he just-

(eden managed to kill his creation, but it fought back and mortally wounded him in the process. he shoved its body into the open fire at the heart of his lab, where he'd brew potions and boil water when he needed it. and by that point, he was too exhausted to keep going and try to find help. so he just... lied there, and bled out slowly.)

(as a not-so-fun aside to this. when eden's body was found a few days later, there was an investigation launched by the university. a recent graduate dying brutally in his university-funded lab? yeah that raised some eyebrows. ultimately, though, said investigation determined that eden had killed himself, as by then the creature's remains were burned until they were unrecognizable. everyone assumed it was just some... *thing* he'd been studying.)

(very few people were surprised by that news.)