a hypothetical d&d party
The bard is mute.
It’s not the first thing people notice about her, usually. The first thing is generally that she’s young, and female, and lovely–the first thing people notice about their entire party is that they’re all young, and female, and lovely, and that’s gotten more than one would-be thief or mugger in far over their head when they haven’t noticed the the paladin’s hammer or the ranger’s axe. It comes up rather quickly though, often enough. Whoever heard of a bard who can’t sing?
She plays a lute, mostly, or a lap-harp made of shell and sinew, string instruments she can pluck while she smiles in secret and watches everyone around her. She dances quick, except when she’s tired, when she’s scared, when she forgets to remember the feet at the ends of her legs.
She doesn’t tell her story to strangers, but enough of the other girls have learned to sign by now, and it’s easy enough to sketch out the outlines of the old bargain: the voice, the prince, the witch, the thousand shards of glass she walked upon on her way up the beach, the look in her sea-green eyes when they travel too near water. The thousand shards of glass she walked upon when she left the palace, and turned back towards the sea to throw herself upon the rocks, and then made her way up the road inland, and kept walking.
.
The warlock is beautiful and mild and self-effacing and shy, is tidy and generous and charming. She’s small with herself in exactly the right way to shout abuse to the half of her party who knows how to recognize that same look in the mirror in the morning. The bird on her shoulder is too small, too bright, too sweet for a real warlock’s familiar. The knife at her belt is sharp enough for anything that needs doing, though, cooking or otherwise.
Her fae patron visits sometimes, in the quiet hours between dusk and midnight, a sweetly old godmother made of moonlight and shadow. She’s kind to the whole lot of them in her own chaotic way, free-handed with transmutations and illusions that break halfway through the evening, for better or worse. She once spent three hours around their campfire drinking brandy and gossipping outrageously about the Feywild and teasing the wizard into fits of laughter.
She’s never told the story of how she met the warlock’s mother, or what debt was owed there, and the warlock doesn’t know herself. It was never meant to be a debt paid in power and violence and the deft will-sapping enchantments the warlock weaves now, but, well. The prince wasn’t meant to be cruel, the warlock says. The palace was meant to be warmer than the fireplace cinders in her stepmother’s house. The faerie was meant to be saving her from her lot, not throwing her into something worse. The power’s an apology of sorts.
.
The wizard is awkward and joyful and nervous. She has no fear of heights or small places, which just stands to be expected, she says, after all those years in that little tower, and she’s got no skill at lying or even edging around the truth at all, which is why she isn’t in the tower any more in the first place. She says too much or too little or the wrong thing entirely, always, but the most well-socialized member of the whole party is the ranger who walks around with a dire wolf at her hip, or maybe their mute bard, so who are any of them to judge.
There was nothing to do in that tower but read, and brush her hair, and sort through the witch’s endless stockpile of dried herbs and potions ingredients, and watch out the window as woodcutters and hunters and princes rode by, and dream. The reading was more interesting than the dreaming, most of the time, and the witch didn’t mind it as much when she talked about it. She never bothered to actually use any of the magic in the witch’s books until the thing with the prince and the haircut and the desert, which she’s told them all about in all the detail they could ever ask for, but most of the girls get uncomfortable when she starts talking about princes. It’s a little easier if she just starts rambling about conjuration and abjuration and illusion theory, about the 400-year-old history of a city that doesn’t exist any more, about the proper grammatical structure of Celestial, until maybe one of the quiet ones finally answers back.
Her hair is too short. She keeps an illusion up over it whenever she can, while it grows back slowly, tickling the side of her face and the back of her neck and leaving her head too light and unbalanced.
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The ranger doesn’t care about princes, which makes one of them at least. Then again, the ranger doesn’t trust anyone, really, prince or no, not wolves or monsters or the men who kill them. She more or less trusts the rest of them by now, mostly, when the wind blows in the right direction.
She wears bright red in the middle of the woods and it shouldn’t help her slip into the shadows half as easily as it does, but most beasts can’t see color and red’s just another shade of gray if the light’s low enough. She never uses her axe against trees. She doesn’t need to. She can find a path through any brush without it. She picks flowers when she finds them, and tucks them into the other girls’ hair.
Her wolf’s mother killed the man who taught her to use the axe, and the man who taught her to use the axe killed that wolf’s mate before that, and the mate had an old woman’s blood on his teeth when it happened. The ranger’s blade found the wolf’s mother’s throat. The ranger’s mother sent her out into the woods in the first place. It’s not as though anywhere is really safe, cottage or forest, axe or teeth. One of these days maybe her wolf will turn and go for her in return, and maybe one of these days her axe will be faster and maybe it won’t. In the mean time, there’s flowers and berries and pastries and enough game to keep everyone sated, for a little while.
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The paladin’s hair is raven black and her skin is chalky as a corpse. She’s not undead, mostly. The undead are her job. She knows that much.
She was sweet, once (they were all sweet, once) but apples are bitter now and so is she, and there’s judgment to lay out in the world. Her grip on her warhammer’s all wrong–she holds it like a mining hammer, but it hits as hard as it needs to. Her armor’s all dwarven make, and her shield’s black and red and white like snow.
She was sweet once, and frightened, and when she says it quietly around the campfire in the night when none of them can quite make out the glimmer of understanding on each others’ faces, everyone still nods. She took a bite of poison and somebody left her a full year in a glass coffin of Gentle Repose, dangling on the edge of the Raven Queen’s domain while all the other newly-arrived dead passed by and faded away. She woke up to somebody’s lips and hands and skin on her lips and her hands and her skin. She doesn’t like princes. She doesn’t like necromancers.
She likes sunlight, and summer, and colors that aren’t black and white and red. She likes the way the bard grins when she whirls into a dance, and the look in the warlock’s eye when she sets her feet to say no, and the wizard’s laughter on high with a Fly spell, and the ranger’s gentle fingers braiding flowers into everything she can touch.
They didn’t like him, and he though that rather odd, because on balance people didn’t give a damn about princes one way or another.
A crown prince was another matter, but those were scarce - one per kingdom, to be precise - and royal mortality being what it was, princes were certainly not. In a world of scheming courtiers, evil wizards and marauding dragons, a large family was the best insurance policy. Second-best was boarding schools in distant allied nations, which mitigated against scheming young princes. For rich kingdoms, at least - the smaller and poorer (i.e. most of them) had enough problems at home to occupy their surplus royalty. No poorly-paid Sergeant-At-Arms can compete with one’s own sons or brothers for loyalty, especially viewed from a plain throne in a crumbling castle, and oft enough in such places few aside the princes owned a suit of armor, shining or otherwise. Duties flowed accordingly.
Thus he found it odd to draw more than a second look, and from foreign visitors to his little kingdom, doubly so. Princes were common and commonly seen, chasing these bandits or that troll-band; alone, with their brothers or a small band of men-at-arms, and in greatest exigency, hired adventurers - like now. It was what young princes did, an occupation one was born into. Not for nothing did “prince” elbow against “woodcutter” and “hunter” for room in the famous annals the bards endlessly embellished; they also bore bright steel into the dark woods regularly, and people who do that just to feed their families aren’t the type to falter in the crucial moment. The princes in bard’s tales were generic and nameless because nobody gave a damn about a prince’s name, any more than they cared to name the town guardsmen that always arrived just after the climatic battle was over.
There was nothing special about someone simply doing their job.
Perhaps that was the problem, he reasoned; the job. Woodcutters and hunters choose their job, and the timid and weak choose to be weavers or tanners or basket-weavers. Princes are born to it, and neither kingdom nor kinsman cares if they were also born timid and shy and gentle-hearted - into the dark woods they go, because too many lives are forfeit if they don’t. Someone must be obliged to slay monsters, because hunters and woodcutters aren’t, and a trail of destruction and horror tends to discourage volunteers. Some princes rise to the occasion, most simply survive, and a few simply break - and the fighting band there to witness it are often adventurers.
Perhaps this band had seen it one too many times, and that’s why he felt the distance between them growing as they trekked into the shadow of the forest’s edge. And he could scarce blame them, because adventurers were everything princes were not; varied and wild and strange and free.
In a word - special.
Princes were nothing special, and they all knew it.
They could handle it alone, he knew, and again he wondered why he was here. Here, creeping into the shadows with a leather-wrapped hilt abrading his sweaty palm. He, the youngest son, gentle and quiet and quick with his studies.
Again, with a retinue that offered little comfort; but whence his father’s grim-faced retainers had simply been cold and professional, these adventurers were mysterious and intimidating and they did not like him one damn bit. He wanted more than anything to leave them to it and get the hell out of here; away from the cold eyes and the dark woods and the whole damn everything, but nobody gave a damn what he wanted; not the peasants and certainly not the nobles.
The path ahead was dark and winding and root-twisted, but since there was no other, he lit his torch and led on.
