Yes, I’m alive. In Elona, helping out in refugee camps -- it’s a decent penance, if not the one I expected.
Found this and thought of you. I hope your life’s taken a good turn. I’m sorry I didn’t remake the Falcons with you. I’m sorry I’m not coming to deliver this in person. Sorries get empty after a while, don’t they? Puffs of words and wind.
Either way, you own a little bit of my cold stone of a heart, and I wish you everything good.
Cat
(( Included is a large animal horn of some exotic sort, an ungulate’s horn, proud and curving and with its cut edges and tip covered with a silver band. Characters mark it along one side. Jovan will make phallic jokes about it. ))
(( @alissabryliss-fairfax - I’m finally starting the thing! ))
(( LS4 spoilers within, up to the beginning of “Long Live the Lich.” ))
Doctor Ngembo shook her awake in the darkness. Before she could speak, he clapped a hand over her mouth and snapped, “Listen. No questions.” Daylight already streamed in through the seams of the canvas tent; outside it, she heard footsteps and panicked babble. She shook off her dream -- Orr, lightning, death -- and focused her gaze on the older man.
His hand dropped as soon as her gaze met his. “A trade delegation arrived from your land bearing the plague you study. It is contained, for now. The bodies are burned, the dock quarantined.”
Light flooded the tent with the sudden drawing back of the entrance flap. Seleme stormed in, only to stop short at the sight of Ngembo kneeling by Cat’s cot. Ngembo ignored the former priestess as he kept speaking. “You can stay and attempt to help the asura who study it without contamination, or you can do something truly useful and help me bring the refugees--”
“Gods, of course the refugees,” Cat said. “Move.” And when Ngembo eased back onto his haunches, she flipped her thin bedsheet back and rose to dress. Seleme smirked as the doctor averted his gaze.
As Cat buckled into her armor, she said to Seleme, “Get Nora out of the city. Back to the Reach, if they’re even allowing people out of Elona.”
“She might protest,” said Seleme, leaning against Cat’s small folding desk. “That cavalier of hers--”
“I don’t care if you carry her out bound and gagged,” said Cat. “Get her out of Amnoon. She can worry about him later.”
Seleme’s wry smile never faded as she said, “Done.” And as the former priestess slipped from the tent, Cat turned to face Ngembo.
“Where are we going?” Cat asked.
The Elonian doctor pointed north. “The temple of Kormir. No walls, but elevation. And far from the water. If that’s where the plague will come from, at least these weakened people will not be so close to it.”
She nodded. “I’m no sodding researcher. It was -- “ She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. This matters. Let’s get going.”
When did she get so bloody tall? When I was away, I suppose. All those years away. And when did she get so godsdamn brave? I remember her coltish and childish and without a speck of guile, heedless, but not -- gods, not ready to throw herself in an airship and get herself to Amnoon. What was I fucking thinking?
And now I stroke her hair back from her pretty, sleeping face. Little Nora, more than a head taller than me. Nineteen, now? She always did look up to me. She always wanted to be where I was. No wonder, when Ellen and Malcolm raised her to be the exact opposite of me.
Poor little thing. When I was her age I was in my second mercenary company. I was already a drunk, I was already enjoying men too much. I always like men too much. Nora probably doesn’t even realize that the cavalier who brought her in has more to do than sit at her bedside and frown at her like she’s a puzzle he doesn’t understand.
They like puzzles, I should tell her. Men. They like it when they think they put something together.
All so she could bring me some gear from home. Vanguard shit, from when we were studying poisons and I had to get Bryland to requisition me those pigs. Falcon shit, from when Jovan pissed off a Southsun pirate warlord and half of us drank that poisoned wine. Odds and ends. Helpful things.
And my sword. My Vanguard sword. A deserter’s sword. Ah well.
Her face isn’t much like mine. It’s softer, sweeter. They raised her to be that. Soft, sweet, incapable. She’s been going on and on about some new friend who helped her survive Lion’s Arch, gods help us. But Nora got here in the end, didn’t she? She followed through. She fell from the sky and here she is.
“Doctor Duvall, there is a cavalier here to see you.” Dr. Adebayo sure didn’t sound pleased to be my social secretary, and I couldn’t blame him. I gave him an apologetic look and words to match before standing and stretching.
Seleme yawned from her nearby cot. “Who is--” she started to ask the doctor, only to cut her words short when the man left the room mid-sentence. “Rude,” she said.
“The last thing he wants here is us.” She rolled her eyes at my words, extravagantly, so I’d see it. The process of researching a plague was proving dull for the former priestess of war. I’d told her it would be.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll go see. The cavaliers...” She waggled her eyebrows, said a coquettish, “Ahai!” and headed out of the room.
I splashed water on my face. Tiny script, heavy books -- gods, how the Falcons would laugh at me in my spectacles, with my hair in a bun, looking like some Priory librarian. I was smirking at the thought when Seleme burst back into the room with a handsome young armsman in tow.
“What --”
“That daft cousin of yours went down in an airship crash. Raid. Pirate raid. This one found her. She’s asking for you.” Seleme pushed the surprised cavalier forward.
“Ahai,” he said. “Yes. Nora. She is -- I am not a doctor, outlander. But she is in pain, if not in grave danger. She asks for you and for another outlander here on a ...vacation.” His voice dripped disapproval; I didn’t give a damn. He could disapprove of us later.
“Take me there,” I said. At least the cavalier knew how to act without all sorts of fool words being tossed around. He turned on his heels and left, and Seleme and I followed at a jog.
No more letters to dead men, Cat. Especially since you know he’d call this whole expedition a damn fool idea.
Seleme and I arrived by airship into a sizzling frying pan. It’s still odd to see her without the symbols of her god. Former god. She won’t talk about it, and I care about her too much to try and make her. Repressed silence is everyone’s right.
We wait here for Nora and my old life, and then we set south to try and find out more about the old plague that devastated Elona centuries ago. It’s a stupid idea. Like I told Seleme, Elona has its own brilliant people -- the libraries, the scholars! -- and I’m a doctor but not some researcher. I know how to conduct a basic experiment, but so does a child climbing for a cookie jar on a high shelf. Try, fail, try again. Try, succeed, eat.
I know what this is. What this really is. It’s ‘let’s keep Cat alive through medical busywork,’ which would be a damn fine plan if there weren’t fine doctors here, and fine magical healers, and all the rest. Yes, I can help with refugees from the Joko-ruled lands. Yes, I’m already trying to do that. But gods, if she calls me a plague researcher, I’m going to sink straight through the floor. I suppose her god never had a problem lying.
It’s beautiful here -- bright and dun at once, hot and fierce, not so different from Ossan, but more completely itself. It’s only been fifty years since the way was at least a little bit open -- did I think it’d be so strange? Gods. I sound like a Krytan.
Doctor Adebayo at the refugee camps knows a few new tricks about boils. Good stuff. He said I knew far too much about venereal diseases, but that’s soldiers for you.
The dreams are bad, but they always are. I miss you, but I always do. I’m alive for now. Suppose we’ll see where this goes.
Letters are sent without any return address, though the chain of stamps and approvals on the envelopes show that they were sent from Caer Shadowfain in the area of Orr known as the Cursed Shore.
Captain Harlow,
I owe you some stockade time, I figure. I won’t bother with excuses, since I know you wouldn’t accept them. I wouldn’t either. I’m doing something that can’t wait, but when I’m done, I’ll go back to Ebonhawke and turn myself in.
C. Duvall
Nora,
You always said you wanted to help. There’s a kit in your aunt’s house - look behind the third panel to the left of the big bookcase in your uncle’s old treatment room. Get it, buy round-trip passage on an airship to Amnoon, and meet me there in a week’s time. I’ll find you.
Round-trip, Nora.
Cat
Giles, Hubert,
I’m sorry. That’s all. Don’t show him -- he’s got to be wed by now, and I hope he’s happy. I won’t come anywhere near. But I’m sorry. That’s all. And I know it isn’t enough.
Cat
( mentions: @scoundrelcaptain, @raine-ooc, and my own about-to-be-very-excited @nora-duvall. )
It took four fucking months to find Catriona Duvall in Orr, not that Seleme had anything better to do. With Balthazar’s death, the priestess was out of a job, out of a faith, out of the raging gift that had seen her through twenty-seven years of brutish, bloody life. Looking for a doctor who’d rather be dead, that hardly seemed like work at all.
Seleme found Cat sitting in a corner of Caer Shadowfain, her back propped against a charr-made iron wall. The gun emplacement ten feet above her head kept up a constant barrage against a glut of Risen wandering slowly, brokenly up from the river-bank.
Cat spoke first. “The shit thing about Risen is, unless they’re dead-dead, triple-dead, it doesn’t matter how much shot you riddle them with. They just keep forgetting they’re supposed to stay down.” She pointed backwards with her thumb. “That bunch, they think they’re sailors. One used to have a little hat on his head. Looked ridiculous.”
“So what’d you do?” Seleme asked.
“Shot it off with an arrow.” Cat shrugged. “Why are you here?”
I beg, but what enters is grief,
tall as a shadow. I use it like I use your name, the myth of you—
like a line or a mule, like the raft I’ve made
from this lover’s back, to cross over. We are citizens
of the countries we imagine. We make our homes in the dark.
(( Cat’s no longer an active character; in fact, I’ll probably be renaming/changing her toon in the next week or so. That said, she’s one of the most meaningful characters I’ve ever made, and I keep thinking about what would have made her leave a role she respected and a man she was really beginning to care about (besides me having to take a long OOC break from the game). So here we are. ))
People talk about finding happiness like it’s a place you can go. You get there, you put down roots and foundations, and there you live, happy. Done.
They’re lying.
He’s a good man. Better than I deserved. Giles has the world at his feet and nobles who’ll want to wed him and Hubert to take care of him. Gods, he’ll get over me fast, though maybe now and again he’ll think about that scrawny doctor who got drunk and cried and swam with him and made him work too hard to get into her pants. I liked him. I really liked him.
Tristan was a soap-bubble dream. I see it. He’d never have divorced her, he’d never have backed out on his vows. And I’d never have gone after a married man -- Gods, at least I can claim that. Cat Duvall, often drunk, often a randy slut, but never one to break up a marriage! Raise a toast to her.
I suppose I never got over breaking my back in Maguuma. It healed, of course it healed. Hubert sent me soup and Giles sent me pretty robes and Tristan sent me books. And in the meantime Liselle sent note after note through my lawyer telling me how much she despised me, though I didn’t break up her father’s marriage either. I don’t do that. I said that already.
I’ve never wanted to die. I wanted to be with Fletcher, forever, always, but I never wanted to die. I wanted him back, that’s all. And without that, I wasn’t much of a person, just a shell that went through motions. I gave Liselle all my money - that, she accepted. I wrote some of the old Falcons because they’d understand. I left Captain Harlow a note and a uniform. I gave Tristan nothing, and Giles less than that -- just me gone. Clean breaks are the easiest ones to set. No jagged places that need careful fitting.
I wrote my mother. I sent my cousin Katie my clothes, I sent my littlest cousin Jonah my medical books for when he’s grown enough to read them. I sent my cousin Nora my Falcons sword, since the Vanguard one wouldn't mean a thing in her Krytan-raised eyes. I shed skin after skin until that’s all I had. Old Falcons armor, my Vanguard greatsword -- and forgive me, Captain, for taking it with me, but it meant something and it fit well in my hands.
You can still get to Orr, even though what’s left of the Pact has moved on. It’s not hard. Traders go that way, and mercenaries still getting paid for clearing out the last pockets of the dead. Treasure-hunters go to pick at tombs, Priory people to make their maps and write their books. And me, to where Fletcher died, because unlike happiness, grief is a place you can go. And set down roots. And stay.
It's awful here, like every other place where men and women wait, bored as shit, until they can try to kill something. We've lost five good Vanguard to trolls we can't find and can't track and who can climb walls like spiders. We're not doing the good work of finding Pact soldiers or going after Mordremoth's minions because we're stuck in these fucking canyons, and we're good soldiers who sit in the fucking canyons if that's what we're told to do.
How was your fancy party? Full of pretty people talking about things completely unrelated to the dragon and the Pact dead, I figure. Though I'm not trying to guilt you, you try, you donate, you do good things even though you --
I miss you, this is stupid, I hate letters.
Dear Giles,
I hope you're well, and Hubert, and Jillian. I hope all is well, well well well. I hope Divinity's Reach is well in its little bubble, and I hope you've gone to say hello to my mother and completely ignored how she looks at you like a son she wishes she could have. So pretty, so noble, so rich. Gods, you'd make them all so happy.
Dear Giles,
If I die in the jungles, all my things go to the daughter of my old lover. She hated him, but he made me promise before I had to kill him in Orr. Well, the promise wasn't on the same day as the killing, but still he made me promise. It is what it is.
Dear Giles,
Just don't bed half the damn city. I don't want to lose a friend over --
I just don't have many friends. My bed's the simplest thing in the world to fill. But friends --
Shit shit shit.
Dear Giles...
((the letter trails off here, and is crumpled and tossed into a canyon to flutter to the water far below.))
Cat wasn’t the Captain, and as always, she was glad of it. Captains wrote the truly shitty letters, the ones that began with, “I regret to inform you...” and went downhill from there. Cat got to write the other kind, the kind that sped directly from a medic through the Captain to points higher than him:
It is my recommendation that Private Monroe be offered an honorable discharge from the Ebon Vanguard due to severe injury. Private Monroe is no longer capable of performing her field duties as required, nor will her wounds allow her to fulfill alternate duties suitable for a Vanguard.
Private Monroe’s injuries were sustained in the line of duty, and she is due all the rights and honors of any Vanguard so incapacitated.
Respectfully,
Sergeant Catriona Duvall
Chief Medic, First Regiment
She rubbed her forehead. Two more of these to go, and then she’d head back out into the ruins with her little statue of Dwayna and her prayers. A cursed tower, a troll made mindless by Mordremoth and invisible noises...Gods, if the canyons didn’t frighten people before, they surely would now. Dwayna be with us, Cat said to herself as she set the finished letter aside.
