He didn't know what he was even trying to do.
There was no way he would be able to impress her, and he wasn't certain he even knew what was going on, or why he picked up the formless, colourless earring at all, elegant and in his vision seeming like what would soon be an original ring simply put around the ear, but he had done it.
Why did he see what it would look like?
He didn't know, and if he was entirely honest, right now, he didn't really care either, he simply wanted to proceed, furthering himself once more, progressing once more and taking another step towards his unnamed goal, right now being the goal of escaping and surviving his encounter with Coures, as she had called herself.
His hand slowly took the material, reaching onto it and covering it with his closed fist.
He held it downwards, his eyes closed, his breath slightly burning, his soul moving, his mind filled with glee shining from Cades, his self unknowing of what they were doing, it was quite weird after all.
Though he didn't know why he was doing it, he was thinking about his whole life, everything that he had done, he remembered how he picked up his sister, how he held her and turned around himself in a game, throwing her into the water int he end, how he once threw her into that very same water as they were playing in the sea and she rested on a bench, something she hadn't liked, how he had talked with his parents about history, his father always having been a bit of a nerd when it came to that, though only very specific parts of it, his mother having been informed, always having been a teacher for cosmetical magic and aesthetical changes in another magical academy.
Then he remembered himself, he remembered how he had been planning to be an artificer, how he had lost that plan, how he had rediscovered it, how he had struggled with finding out what he wanted to be, how he had thought he would always remain alone and a failure, how he had become someone they had been proud about, how he had become Cades before ehetria fell.
After that he lived through the fall of ehetria, he saw that pain, he saw the suffering all over again, he felt the heat from the flames as he once again felt dried tears upon his cheeks as he thought of the corpses of his parents, now unrecognizable in his memories, so much so he wasn't even entirely sure which his father and which his mother's was, then he felt the screams his sister must've been screaming, he felt the anger he had wielded onto Manug, he felt everything and so much more.
He felt the anxiety, that horrible boiling emptiness inside of the warp train, a unfitting name as he now realized, but still, he felt that emptiness as he once more saw the soldier who had most likely run from his duties, as he felt the cries of the little child that had been killed, ripped apart by that monster as he now began to remember, probably lost amidst the endless nothing he had been dragged through before.
Now he was alone, and still, he continued experiencing the maelstrom of feelings, sensations, and he felt the experiences that had both weighed him down and driven him, he felt hate for enemies he had never met, he felt hated for Cades who had once killed Manug's friends, and he hated himself, until it continued even further, into that loneliness, into those forests he had crossed, into those mountains he had flown above.
He felt his fear as he faced his first thomiside, he felt the elatedness as he made his first artifacts from the creature's corpse, he felt it again when he killed the eximimus and when he made tools from it, then again with the queen, feeling even more elated as he became one of the apex-rank, then again as he killed the demons, regretting his killing of the people in that castle, regretting what he had said back then, though he still didn't know why he had said something so dry and without purpose, something akin to a speech, something they had surely never even heard.
Then he fell into the nothingness of the forsaken realm, a name that had now begun to really stuck to him inside of his head, and he felt the pain as his shoes were ripped apart, he felt the intense loneliness as he wandered above the endless sea of light once more, atop the shaking chain that seemed to shake not even when something happened, but only when he thought it would shake, with light somehow still not coming from beneath but also from atop where there was simply a never-ending darkness, with chaos greater than anything else and yet a calmness one could not imitate no matter what they ever tried.
He felt happy and also angry as he met Manug, his friend as he had called him after the wooden world, though he wasn't there yet, no, he was still feeling the slight elation as he talked with Manug all the time, learning, understanding, feeling slightly understood as they wandered across the endless nothing once more, now at least with someone, something, besides him.
He felt ashamed as he once more remembered that he would soon be inside Manug's body, but still, the storm wouldn't halt for empathy of that nature, or anything else, he felt how he lost on the wooden world, he felt the helplessness, and he felt himself fracture, and he felt everything being lost, eternally so.
Finally, though this was not the end of the true journey, he felt himself being born, and Cades true existence seized at that moment, at the moment he had fought against that overwhelming enemy, already having begun to crumble as he had killed that only friend he had, the only being that was even remotely like that for him.
Now he stood here, having already known everything inside this place, and he was making something to face her judgement, the judgement of motion, of progress, itself, herself, himself, whatever it might be.