In every whisper of the forest, in every flicker of flame, I find pieces of the puzzle that is my destiny. It is not just to change the world, but to understand why it asks me to.
Carefully, she places her hand on his back and rubs it gently, trying to help him through his cough. Vaguely, Araceli recalls enough to know keeping people on their side it’s helpful for drowning prevention, she thinks. So she keeps an eye on the man, just in case she needs to do something else.
“There was another woman with me, when we fell into the water,” she explains, eyes flicking back to the direction she walked from. In the distance she can vaguely see her shape, still lying at the beach. “But I haven’t found anyone else yet.”
“Thanks,” he muttered as he forced himself upright, wincing slightly as his legs adjusted beneath him. His fingers ghosted over a bruise on his ribs, then the line of an old burn across his shoulder. He rotated his arm slowly before letting it fall back to his side.
His eyes swept across the horizon, taking in pale sand, jagged rocks, unfamiliar cliffs in the distance. None of it stirred recognition. That wasn’t comforting.
“You wouldn’t happen to know where we washed up, would you?” he asked, voice still raw. His gaze lingered warily toward the treeline. “Because if this is Itzcoatal… we might not be out of danger yet.”
Her head canted to the side when Froy spoke of a hat, not understanding at first. And then, as he spoke more, the realization hit her. She had not known Prospero well, but as notable as Yhane had been as a figment of terror for his veil, Prospero could be known for his signature hat. Her heart sank a little as Froy numbly spoke of his memories of Prospero. Freydis had not known him much more deeply than his association with Alessia, but her heart bled when she thought about his fate nonetheless. “No, he didn’t,” she agreed ruefully, gently rubbing Froy’s shoulder for a moment.
“Not by much, but yes,” she responded, her eyes carefully tracking any tics or shifts in Froy’s body language or expression. The situation they were in was bad enough as it was, but the shock of the events of the last year compounded on what they had just endured could be crushing if not handled with care. A moment later, Freydis gingerly pried the cup from Froy’s hand and set it aside. “Yes, the Kossith took us, but we’ve been freed. Any of those fiends brave enough to attempt to face us has been cut down, and I suspect if any survive they are in too small a number to hope to contain us again.”
Freydis’ heart constricted in her chest as she realized how compressed and overlapping Froy’s memories were, tangled to the point that there were glaring holes. It hurt her to feel the responsibility to fill those gaps, but she felt it might be worse not to. “What you remember from Iskaldrik happened. Your parents were lost in the attack,” Freydis explained mournfully. “But it has been a year or so since that happened. You survive the invasion, one of Darkspawn and Aetherians, not Kossith. There have been battles across all of Taravell to extinguish the Dark One’s bid for power again. Many of which you’ve fought in.” She paused to momentarily place her hand on the back of his. “Some we fought together. And several months ago, we were taken from a the fallen fortress of Aventia by the Kossith.” She paused for a moment, her brows upturned as she she gauged how Froy was managing all of the information.
Froy stayed quiet for a long moment, her words familiar in rhythm, but strange in detail. Some of it slotted into place like stones in a wall. Other parts didn’t quite fit, jagged and askew.
“A year…” he murmured, gaze distant. “That feels… right. About them.” He blinked slowly, the ache of loss buried deep in his chest like a scar that had already begun to fade. The sharp pain of grief had dulled, replaced with something quieter. Hollow.
The mention of battles stirred flashes in his mind. Hordes of zombies, a kraken made of fire, a forest that shimmered like glass. Freydis beside him, shield in hand, determination in her eyes. But then the memory warped, twisted, and everything was in flames and all he could hear was screams.
“Gods,” he muttered, voice roughened by frustration. “It’s like trying to hold water in my hands. I get pieces and then they slip. Those collars caused this?"
He drank, and Freydis was relieved for a moment. She would see to it that he emptied the cup before she let him go far. She would have to try and find something for him to eat, too, hopeful that something in his stomach would help ground him again. As careful as she had been with her words, she was more attentive still to watching how it all landed on him. Most of what she said seemed to help, but the look behind his eyes would venture elsewhere from time to time. Toward memories, and from what she could intuit, unpleasant ones.
“Luna is fine,” she assured him, her tone leaving little room for doubt. She was easily marked amongst the names of survivors, though they were not out of the woods just yet. “The only two who aren’t, to my knowledge, are the Vuldak and the Darkfriend.” Freydis had not yet learned of their miraculous survival, and she did not know if Froy knew them personally. That wasn’t at the front of her mind, though. Her brow furrowed as she looked at Froy, her head canting to the side with obvious concern. “Froy–do you know where and when we are? Luna is older than both of us,” she reminded him.
“Hat. He had a ridiculous hat.” His brows knitted faintly, expression foggy but soft with the memory. “Took one of my cabbages like it offended him just to accept it.” His voice went quiet again. “He didn't deserve what they did to him.”
Freydis’s next words struck like a jolt of cold water. Froy blinked hard, brows drawing together. “What?” His eyes found hers again, searching for something solid. “Luna’s older than us?”
The idea clearly unsettled him. The Luna in his mind had wild braids, scraped knees, and a laugh like birdsong. He couldn’t picture her grown. Couldn’t see her face past the forests.
His hand gripped the now-empty cup a little tighter, and he turned his eyes out toward the wreckage-strewn sea. “We’re on a Kossith ship,” he said finally, more certainty there than anything else he’d said so far. He squinted slightly, brows still drawn. “They took us from Iskaldrik. I think… I think my parents were killed when they attacked.” A pause, his voice thinner now. “I think that’s how they got me.”
who? @froyofthe-ironwood
where? A small islet near Aurelia Isle
when? After the ship went kaboom
After dragging herself and the blonde woman out of the water and into the small islet, Araceli throws herself to the ground with a grunt. She lays there for a moment, not caring about the sand sticking to her wet clothes. She lays there for a long moment, taking a jagged breath after the other, but she doesn’t allow herself to rest. That last half an hour had not been divine provenance, something had pushed them towards the islet. Someone, even, and she needed to figure out if they were alive, and whether they were an enemy or not. Grunting again, she stood up and waved for the blonde to stay as she began traveling the edge of the beach, eyes scanning the horizon until she saw a form collapsed in the sand a few hundred meters away. Her slow walk turned into a jog, which turned into an outright run when she was close enough to vaguely recognize the person lying in the ground.
She had met him at the ship, right? He had been another one of the captured.
“Hey! Are you alright?” She calls out, falling to her knees next to him, hands hovering over his form as she wondered what to do.
He tried to speak but coughed instead, rolling weakly onto his side. Flashes of memory came in broken pieces: the roar of flames, the ship splitting apart, a surge of water carrying him and others to safety.
His voice was hoarse when it finally came out. “I—I’m fine,” he rasped, though the words barely convinced himself. His gaze flicked around the unfamiliar shore, the distant sound of waves crashing dull in his ears. “Anyone else make it?”
If she had noticed him on the ship sooner, she might have approached him. Not because she had anything noteworthy to say or ask of him, but because Froy looked so different from his usual self. Freydis struggled to meet his eye as he drew closer, so she busied herself trying to pull together something to offer him to cover this up. There was little more than a few sips of purified water left from the cup Sakkara had offered her and several bites of rations to her name, but she was prepared to offer these up to Froy, was about to until he spoke.
“Of the Midlands,” she reminded him softly, her eyes settling just below meeting his own. It was difficult to face him, or anyone else, at all, but she could see how fragile he was in the moment. She placed one hand on the back of his hand and lifted it to press the half-empty cup into it. “Drink. It’s just water,” she urged him gently.
It pained her that he seemed to remember half-facts, not because she felt her status was important to remember, but because she knew the terror it incited in him to lose his memories. She knew it intimately, as she had played this terror out before him nightly until the Kossith were sufficiently pleased with how his greatest fear had impacted his psyche. Freydis wept special tears for Froy in particular when they shoved her back into her cell; she had wanted to matter, yearned for it, and so much of mattering was memory. She understood the depths of what she had been forced to inflict upon Froy. “And you are Froy Instad, Jarl inherit of Skohfjell, the Highlands, home of the Ironwood forests. Luna is here…” She did not know whether or not he remembered each of these things, but her purpose wasn’t to inform. It was to help ground him.
Froy took the cup with fingers that still trembled faintly. When the water touched his lips, he flinched and his grip tightened. They had used water, made it turn on him. Drowned him in it again and again, until the instinct to breathe felt like betrayal. But this wasn’t saltwater. It wasn’t pulling at his lungs. It was clean. Cold. He drank.
The names she spoke—his name, his title, his home—each one landed like a drop in a shallow pool, disturbing some half-buried memory. Skohfjell. The Ironwood forests. They flickered behind his eyes in fragments: roads heavy with snow, elk running through the trees… then flames. Screams.
In one memory, invaders were the ones burning it down. In another, it was him.
"Luna," his voice drifted, fogged with confusion and the image of a little girl running along with the elk filled his head. He looked back to Freydis, uncertain. “She’s ok? I couldn't imagine going through all of this at such a young age.”
A weary smile flickers on her lips, there one moment and gone the next. It’s the flicker of understanding, of kinship amidst all the horrors. A second of comfort and humanity to stand against a dozen moments of terror and fear. It’s a kindness, Araceli knows, for many would not be as understanding. There is a double edge that comes with holding a power such as hers on her grasp. The potential is imaginable, the ability to gain leverage over others in her grasp, but it all hangs on the balance of her morality, of her choice.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In a way, she can gain absolute power over another with her blessing. That is why she had set limitations on herself, to stop herself from overreaching, of becoming too greedy. Valkeesh had seen this, and had decided to erode those limitations. Grain by grain, brick by brick, she was losing the grip on the control she had so tightly grasped the entirety of her life.
It scared her more than she had been scared to lose her life in Aventia.
“Still, it is all I can do right now, so I want to apologize.” Open disobedience was impossible, with the collar around their necks, but this? The small acts of rebellion? Acknowledging each other as people despite their captors insistence that they were not? This she could do.
Her tongue slips out to moisten dry lips and she nods slowly at his description of her abilities.
“I call it Mind Suggestion,” she comments slowly. “It’s a subtle nudge, a suggestion. When I do it right, people don't even realize I did it. It’s a boon when you want to be subtle. Here? Not so much.”
She doesn’t know how far the sul’dam will push her ability, and frankly she doesn’t know if she wants to find out.
Froy let out a slow breath through his nose, gaze fixed on some distant point down the corridor as she spoke. "Mind Suggestion," he repeats. That was one way to put it. Clean. Clinical. He wondered if it ever used to feel like a gift to her—before this place turned everything good into a weapon.
“They’re going to make me a frontliner,” he said, voice quiet but steady. “My sul’dam… she wants me to lead the charge whenever they run into rebel holdouts. Burn them out. Boil rivers. Flatten forests if I have to.” He paused, fingers curling into the fabric at his sides. “Says the sight of it will break the others faster.”
His mouth twisted, not quite a sneer. Not quite a wince. “I like to think I wouldn’t let them use me like that. That I’d fight it, even if it hurt.”
His eyes shifted toward her, softening, heavy with something more vulnerable.
“But if they told you to help them make me obey?” A beat. “I don’t know if I could stop it.”
Eivor tilted his head, looking at Froy now. Something told him that his secret wouldn't last; sooner or later Eivor would be forced out of hiding, into his draconic form that would level anything that stood before the Kossith. At this point, he was expecting it – no matter how hard he fought. The pain he could understand.
Freydis said he couldn't eat this little druid, and to be fair, the limp wrist told him all he needed to know. Eivor grinned, but it wasn't a nice one, "They have many of my friends. And I'll tear them apart at the end of all this. Just stay alive long enough to watch."
Froy found him near the wrecked helm, where the wind screamed through shattered beams and the sea boiled below. They’d torn the collars off, spilled Kossith blood across every deck, but they hadn’t escaped. Not really.
The ship was set to destroy itself. And they were still trapped inside it.
Froy’s steps slowed when he spotted him—Eivor. He didn’t fully remember him, not yet. His name surfaced slowly, like driftwood from a storm. A face. A voice. A warning, maybe.
“You said you’d tear them apart,” Froy said, stopping a few feet away. His voice was low, strained from days of torture he endured. “How many were you responsible for?”
notes: unknowingly telling his torturer he's terrified of them cuz he cant recognize her without her horns and stuff
Froy gripped the railing with trembling fingers, watching as others made useless attempts to get off the ship. Magic fizzled out the moment it was cast. Portals wouldn’t open. Even flying had failed. It was the Kossith’s final cruelty: freedom dangled just out of reach.
And now the ship was set to destroy itself.
He spotted her, knowing he knew her but his memories were still slowly coming back.He remembered whispers of her in the longhall, his father once calling her "the youngest Jarl in three generations."
He approached her slowly, bare feet shuffling against the broken deck. His steps were heavy, uneven, still stiff from burns that hadn’t fully healed. His gaze stayed on her, wary—not because he feared her, but because something in him was tangled up when he looked at her. Something he didn’t understand yet.
“I remember your name,” he said quietly, voice hoarse. “Freydis. Jarl of…”
“We truly are the lucky ones, aren’t we?” Freydis asked sardonically, her face becoming darker and angrier all at once. There were no shortage of instances where Freydis had been forced to survive, but most of those had been instances where she and her companions put her name down for the sake of her duty. This was different. She felt she could take it, or perhaps as some sort of cosmic joke she deserved it for her lack of initiative as a jarl when it came to the mines of Iskaldrik. But everyone else? She was determined to endure for their sake, to be of use to them, and to help set the scales right again.
Freydis stared back at Froy as he described what he had witnessed in Hestia’s Cove. Her expression was a mix of horror and deep consideration. It sounded like their approach at the Cove had not been dissimilar to that in Aventia. The Kossith moved quickly, those impacted only realizing the true gravity of the situation later. “Did they take anyone other than the Verdiian heir?” Freydis asked. She suspected there was value in knowing if that was a targeted abduction, or merely the first stop on the Kossith’s fucked up recruitment practices. “If you see him here, it might be worth pointing him out. That also suggests some have been picked up from places other than Aventia, and earlier than us. It would be worth paying attention to them if we can identify them, so we might know what’s coming–so we don’t become whatever they have or falter as easily to whatever has been done to them.”
“They tried to take Vecna too,” he said quietly. "He resisted. I think the collar wouldn’t take. Or couldn’t. Either way, they couldn’t bind him." He paused. “Lady Veridian held them off before they could try to grab anyone else. Her magic hit harder than I’d ever seen it. Forced them to retreat. Which means they’re not invincible.”
He nodded faintly at her last remark, the tension in his shoulders easing just a touch. "My mother used to tell me stories of her adventures sailing with pirates, back when I was little. Said the Kossith didn’t just steal people. Said they unmade them. Made them forget who they were, until they’d answer to a new name unlike their own.”
He looked over at Freydis then, something steely behind his eyes.
It took a beat to recognize the young druid, half-trained and twice as ineffectual - there was no question as to how the other - whose name was presently escaping him - had come to end up under the Kossith's control. An inevitable edge formed as he came to recall the other’s presence when both his and Eivor’s demons were left plain for everyone to see.
"Right. Cabbages." Though Wisdom the daemon had once been, not all information was worth committing to memory. He shifted his position slightly, eyeing the druid with greater consideration than he’d afforded him previously. There was little malice in the spirit toward the elvhen descendants, more indifference than anything else. “I was an obvious target.” A brow raised, “I’m surprised to see you here. How did they capture you?”
Froy rolled his eyes, letting his head thud back against the wall behind him. “Yeah, cabbages,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone else. “I wish I had one right now." Could throw it at your fat head.
When Nikandros claimed he was an obvious target, Froy snorted faintly. “Right. So they can leverage you against Eivor?” He asked innocently.
He let the silence stretch a beat, then added without looking over, “They got me in Aventia. I was helping with supplies—food, medicine, blankets. Should’ve known they were only helping Aventia for their own selfish reasons.”
He turned his head slightly then, just enough to glance Nikandros’s way with a raised brow of his own. “I'm guessing they had to put in work to capture Eivor?” His tone stayed light, but the implication was clear: you, not so much.
His eyes were closed, the thrumming of the metal collar around his throat doing everything to hold back the magic within the dragon. Eivor was a ticking time bomb, always had been, and this was no different. He couldn't let them sour his mind, sour his will once more. Already he'd wished for death before being captured again, he'd wanted it more than anything – but his task was incomplete. He was the monster that would always return, teeth bared – they would know no peace while he still breathed.
Froy was a familiar face, one he hadn't seen for months at this point. Since he'd tried to eat him. Good times. "I shouldn't be here." He said that like it was obvious, but still, he tilted his head, eyes glittering with anger. Though it wasn't at Froy, just their situation, "I am an Elvhen." That was all he said, the polymorph would have to keep him safe. Until they pressed harder, at least.
He glanced down the corridor, then stepped a little closer. “They want us to think these collars are absolute,” Froy said quietly. “But they’re not.” He glanced over at Eivor. “Back in Hestia’s Cove, they tried to collar a liche called Vecna. Didn’t work. Slipped right out of their grasp.” His jaw tightened. “So there are limits. Weaknesses. We just have to find them before it’s too late.”
“I understand now why you resist. You aren’t strong… I don’t even think you’re all that stubborn. You’re lost, confused. You resist because of the lie you were raised on - this illusion that you’re still clinging to. You spent your whole life believing you are a person, when really, you are a mistake of flesh made animate. You are a rahaat. A tool to be used, nothing more. Do you know what rahaat means in High Kossathi? It does not mean servant. We do not bind our servants, we give them roles, names, honors. You are beneath that - so do not think we punish you for your resistance, we only work to correct your confusion and when you stop believing you are a person, you will stop suffering. You will know peace as only rah’tashan can.”
Rahaat
noun | High Kossathi
An instrument or tool - a person reduced to the status of a mere object, stripped of autonomy and identity, existing solely to serve the will of another.
A captive - a being whose thoughts and actions are no longer their own, forced into servitude through magical means, particularly the a’dam collar.
Usage: “You are no longer a person, you are a rahaat, a tool for our use.”
Rah’tashan
noun | High Kossathi
A perfected instrument - a rahaat who has been fully subdued and transformed, their will completely erased, existing only to obey without question.
A reprogrammed tool - a captured being who has been conditioned to embrace their loss of identity and autonomy, functioning as an ideal vessel of another’s power.
Usage: “She is no longer merely a rahaat; she is a rah’tashan, free from resistance, free from self.”
Shan'tar
noun | High Kossathi
A collective, a bonded unit formed of three or more rahaat, each bound by the a’dam under a sul'dam’s control, united in servitude. Loosely this translates to “Heart” though it is not used to describe the organ.
Usage: “You are not individuals, you are a shan'tar, nothing more than tools of the Kossathi.”
Prompts should be posted by Thursday May 1st, no IC response is required but is encouraged, the aim of these prompts is to help fuel IC interactions on the dreadnought. Anyone who has posted dreadnought content should receive a prompt, please discuss/plot/coordinate with your fellow captives on how your prompt might influence others.
PROMPT
They make you a storm, a punishment, and a spectacle. Each night they break your body anew - earth to crush your bones, water to drown your lungs, air to choke your breath, fire to blister your skin. You are the balance of all things, a druid once in harmony with the land, but the a’dam shatters that harmony with every command. Your sul’dam speaks a single word and you split the sky with lightning, grind bone to dust with tremors, flood the decks with crashing waves. The wind whips through you like a scream. You tear down those who beg for freedom. You kill without lifting a hand - only because you are told to. You used to feel the elements, used to listen to them. Now you are deafened by their screams, your magic a cage turned inside out. You will be made to suffocate rebels in mud, to drown lovers in brine, and incinerate hope in heat.
Vhaezan, the Kossith have renamed you. Bound Tempest.
They’ve assigned you to the Heart of Flame, run by the sul’dam Jharro. A Heart forged for destruction, pain, and power. Jharro delights in burning out resistance and reshaping his rahaat, when he speaks, he tends to do so in pose - adding a bit of poetry to your suffering. Quite the charmer.
The collar hums before he hears the command. This time it’s water—again. Froy doesn’t get to brace for it. His lungs seize as sea brine rushes down his throat and slams into his ribs like anchors. He gasps. He chokes. He claws at his own throat like that’ll fix what’s inside.
“Please,” he wheezes, salt and blood clinging to his lips. “Please, stop—please, you don’t have to do this.”
Jharro remains quiet, snapping his fingers like a conductor calling on his favorite instrument. The a’dam responds. So does Froy.
He watches the rebel ship crack and shatter under his tidal wave. So many of them scream, but grow silent when he sends a bolt of lightning from his fingertips.
After, they throw him back in his cell. They call him Vhaezan now.
“Vhaezan,” he said once. Just to see what it felt like in his mouth.
The guards shoved Froy into the cell hard enough that his shoulder clipped the metal frame. He straightened, brushing blood off his lip, only to freeze when he saw who else was already inside.
Nikandros.
For a moment, he just stared, taking in the familiar scowl, having not seen him since the Feywilds. It was clear then how little he cared for Froy and the others. He never needed to say it out loud— it clung to every word, every glance. Everything about him implied he was keeping score, waiting for the moment they became more burden than ally.
Yet here he was, in chains. Again.
“Even you, huh,” Froy muttered as he crossed to the far side of the cell, dropping into a crouch. “That's too bad.”
notes: dragon but eivor probs does do that tongue thing
The ship groaned with each wave, metal grinding like it hated being afloat. Froy moved quietly through the dim corridors, barefoot, collar humming faintly at his throat.
He spotted him leaning near the grated wall—Eivor. The dragon in disguise. Last time they’d met, it was in the Feywilds. Tense, strange, but nothing like this.
Froy approached, stopping a few paces away. “Didn’t think I’d see you here,” he said, voice low. "Do they know what you are?"
He moved with the others, eyes low, counting the seconds between commands. There was no point in fighting right now. All he could do was keep walking and try not to look too closely at the hollow stares around him.
Then he looked up.
His breath caught. The world sharpened around a single figure across the corridor. Froy blinked hard, as if expecting the image to vanish, but Adrian was still there.
He stepped forward slowly, almost dazed. “I—gods. It’s only been a couple months, hasn’t it?” His voice cracked as he laughed, short and bitter. "The next time we saw each other wasn't supposed to be like this."
