BLACKHEART OF SLAVER'S BAY

Bast ╳ Faceless Man THE BASTARD OF CASTLE BLACK "All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red."

[facelessbast]

       THE FLEET CAPTAIN’S LEGS BUCKLED beneath his dead weight, and his blood-slick form slipped from Bast’s strong hold. Bent knees met hollow deck with a final knock, and the rest of him followed — limbs unfolding, weight sinking to the lowest points in a symphony of thuds and creaks. Rills of angry red slithered away from his victim’s grinning throat, following the wood grain faithfully. The skin would discolor where the dead blood pooled leaving an unrecognizable mass of meat, pitted and sallow and stinking in the hazy glow of the sun.

Bast took the silver purse tied to his belt, his gleaming daggers and cured leather sheathes. He took the polished, wooden lockbox from his death-stiff fingers, and the gilded little key he’d sewn into the layers of his coat. Lastly, the Faceless Man gifted his target’s deathly visage to the god he served; it belonged to him anyway.

As he slipped to the docks from the shrouded deck of that lonesome ship, he heard the sound of a serving girl’s scream. The crowd rushed the groaning pier, parting around him like sheets of water around an unmoving stone. He watched them with little interest, having collected what he’d come for. Another contract completed, but the guild would send another to greet him by morning’s unfailing light. With discerning eyes, he surveyed the grim faces of Pyke, those who had gathered at the water’s edge, and wondered how he might feasibly pass a night in such a PLACE.

[facelessbast]

🙋 + blood

THE SCENT OF RUSTED IRON incites many things in Bast, but it is mostly a comfort. He chases the rush of adrenaline that can only come from killing, and it is in lethal patterns, and soulless anonymity that he has found purchase. While his views on slavery have been diverted (he may even carry a sense of remorse for his past actions), Bast lives in the moments he is able to flex the only skill he has ever known, and has been praised for — delivering indiscriminate death. Blood is sacred, blood runs for him like a familiar river. Blood is his true nature, the constant common denominator. It is the only thing he’s ever KNOWN.

[facelessbast]

🙋 + independence

THE FIRST TIME THAT BAST saw a glimpse of his freedom being torn away was during his stint at the Wall, among the conscripted brothers of the Night’s Watch. His move of self-sacrifice for the survival of the freefolk he called family had ended in their frozen, blue death, and he had allow a sense of loss to overshadow his own burning desire to survive, to live, to be free. After a year, he finally shed that black cloak and fled out from under a sense of obligation that had died with those wildlings in the brutal northern winter. 

Though he believed men deserved freedom, he found himself working as a smuggler of slaves — somehow able to justify his vocation with a survival of the fittest attitude. The poor lot that ended up in shackles, their skin shredded by whips, forced below decks of soaring wooden ships — they were an example of what his life could be if he allowed another man to get the better of him, if he allowed himself to stay at Castle Black. 

When his stint as a smuggler of human flesh ended in in his own enslavement, Bast saw endless punishment for his actions, and emerged from that narrow chapter of his life stripped of all sense of self and entitlement. As a Faceless Man, Bast knows his independence is a very complicated illusion. Though he can move freely throughout the world, his physicality and his soul belong to the Many-Faced God. He is a slave to Death, but to no earthly GOD.

[facelessbast]

"🙋" + cats

THE CAT ABOARD THE SHIP that circled from King’s Landing to Slaver’s Bay was named Bharoo, and her spine rose like the ridge of a great mountain when she walked. She made her home in the hull of the ship, and circled the Captain’s foot with a devilish gleam in her eye. Bast had suffered her infectious bite to the meat of his palm one evening when batting her away from his bowl of fish stew — a feud was thusly initiated. He would toss her scraps overboard, and douse her in saltwater when she laid in the sun. She would wait for him to round a corner in the cabins, and launch at him in a fit of claws and fangs. This went on for nearly six months as their fleet visited the great slave cities, importing unwilling slaves to their new masters. 

Their relationship changed when Bharoo was injured in the midsts of a scuffle over cargo. In an instant, her hide was torn away from her left hip in a sheet, and her eye socket was crushed to dust. Bast found her bleeding and helpless — a heap of matted fur — and took it upon himself to nurse the feline back to health. The bastard fed her from his bowl every night thereafter, and scratched her behind her bitten ears. He would never admit it, but he felt a pang of sadness when his tour was over, and he had to leave her BEHIND.

[facelessbast]

🙋 + Castle Black

FOR SO LONG, the Wall had been a beacon of hope for Bast, a portcullis leading to another world, and he’d loomed at the edge of the Haunted Forest in its shadow wondering what adventure and opportunity laid beyond. When he was sent forth to bargain with the Lord Commander for his people’s safety, he surrendered those dreams in exchange for a gray life of discipline and regiment, a life known to only those at Castle Black. He’d known he’d been born within those walls — the cold masonry his origin, the grim sound of singing steel his inception — but he did not belong.

They groomed him as a ranger, knowing that his life among the freefolk and beyond the great Wall would benefit their inexperienced conscripts, however, echoes of The Bastard of Castle Black followed him where he went. The brothers of the Night’s Watch punished him for his obvious skill — hounding his sleep, denying his meals, forcing him from the barracks, and attacking him in great legions when the Lord Commander had turned his back. He welcomed their brutality with a grin, and never once stopped rising to their challenges. After a year of sleeping in the barbican, pilfering meals from the kitchens, and swinging his fists with abandon in the direction of any opposition, he abandoned the Wall, its aath, and his so-called brothers for whatever laid south.

Bast never longs for Castle Black, and his mind avoids the gritty year he spent there. Escaping the weight of that black cloak remains his greatest ACHIEVEMENT. 

[randomroleplaymemes-blog]

Send "🙋" + any headcannons you want to know about my muse.

[facelessbast]

        THE FLEET CAPTAIN’S LEGS BUCKLED beneath his dead weight, and his blood-slick form slipped from Bast’s strong hold. Bent knees met hollow deck with a final knock, and the rest of him followed — limbs unfolding, weight sinking to the lowest points in a symphony of thuds and creaks. Rills of angry red slithered away from his victim’s grinning throat, following the wood grain faithfully. The skin would discolor where the dead blood pooled leaving an unrecognizable mass of meat, pitted and sallow and stinking in the hazy glow of the sun.

Bast took the silver purse tied to his belt, his gleaming daggers and cured leather sheathes. He took the polished, wooden lockbox from his death-stiff fingers, and the gilded little key he’d sewn into the layers of his coat. Lastly, the Faceless Man gifted his target’s deathly visage to the god he served; it belonged to him anyway.

As he slipped to the docks from the shrouded deck of that lonesome ship, he heard the sound of a serving girl’s scream. The crowd rushed the groaning pier, parting around him like sheets of water around an unmoving stone. He watched them with little interest, having collected what he'd come for. Another contract completed, but the guild would send another to greet him by morning’s unfailing light. With discerning eyes, he surveyed the grim faces of Pyke, those who had gathered at the water’s edge, and wondered how he might feasibly pass a night in such a PLACE.

[lemontartcreations]

[othercentury]