There’s a crystal hanging from a pendant around his neck.
Like so many other things — the focus engraved with a name he can’t read, the hat patched with a square of denim, the pen with engravings carved in a language he doesn’t understand — he doesn’t remember where he got it. His mind’s always been a bit addled. Part of being an idiot wizard, he supposes.
The pendant is roughly the size of his fingernail, and dormant most of the time. But sometimes, when he’s sleeping or when he’s gearing up to defend himself it wisps a faint red, heated against his skin. Most of the time, he doesn’t notice. Sometimes he does.
Unlike the other useless trinkets he had, Taako doesn’t pawn this one off for gold. Whenever he tries there’s a deep sense of wrongness, of unease, like he needs to keep it, though he can’t remember why.
So he keeps the pendant with him, tucked beneath his shirts, and on the cool winter nights before Sizzle it Up, it keeps him warm.
Then: Sizzle it Up, and Glamour Springs. Taako finds himself alone, again. He’s fleeing through the woods, utterly alone, outcast from a town that was once happy to see him, running from the law and Sazed and his own condemnation. If he can just run fast enough, he won’t have to reflect, won’t have to look back and wonder what he did wrong, where his magic failed him —
Steady, warrior, a voice whispers.
“I’m not a fucking fighter,” Taako snaps, breathless and panting, eyes stinging. He pretends that’s due to the cold. “I’m a wizard.”
A fighter’s name springs to his lips, one he doesn’t know the shape of. Taako’s long since learned against trying to speak these names that come to him, unbidden. So he shakes it away angrily, still running, still fleeing, the trees towering dark and spearlike over his head, jabbing toward the gray winter sky.
That night, alone again and huddled beneath a blanket beside a smokeless fire, the pendant keeps him warm.
When Hurley throws herself into Sloane’s arms for the last time, when Sloane closes her eyes and kisses her forehead and makes them promise through reddened eyes that this will never happen again, when the Sash immortalizes their love in the center of Goldcliff, proud and beaming and beautiful, a sorrow that isn’t his own lodges in his chest.
He doesn’t notice the feeling until much later, when his own grief subsides. But left behind is a steady ache of remorse and sympathy, an empathy that Taako himself could never conjure. “What the hell,” he mutters. He tugs off the pendant and stares at it, and as always it looks back, its surface a smooth and marbled red stone. The oddly-arranged grain tells Taako that this rock was the product of transmutation, but whoever created it was a master of their art.
He wonders vaguely who he’s met, a master that skilled, and then forgotten.
Taako tucks the stone back beneath his shirt, resting by his Stone of Farspeech, and tries for sleep. He doesn’t expect to find it; not with the memory of Hurley’s fond smile as she sacrificed herself, Sloane’s unwavering demands, the joy on their faces as they died. But something curls up that doubt and regret and soothes it, smooths it.
And when he falls asleep, he does not dream.
In Refuge, as Taako watches his empire fall by another’s hand, the pendant against his chest beats like a heart as his stops in his throat. Steady, it murmurs, comforting, ceaseless. Steady, warrior. There is much that is not this to regret.
When he rejects the Chalice’s offer — when they all do — Taako feels a wash of pride that is not his own.
Then, Wonderland. For much of it the pendant is silent. When his spine is rent by a piece of foul luck, it’s silent. When he chooses Forsake, it’s silent.
Taako watches Magnus approach the wheel and hisses, “Fucked off, then? You finally decided it’s time to leave, too?”
For a long while — long enough to forget a lifetime, long enough to forget a self — there is no reply. Then, before Taako can give up, the voice comes; weak, as though far away, but there.
Steady, warrior, it says. Draw your staff and wait for sunrise.
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