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a whole bunch of random stories about my D&D characters that absolutely nobody asked for

[seadeepywrites]

these four walls remain

Character: Leilatha "Lei" Dymerscis Words: 1143 tw: grief, betrayal, death

Somewhere, in another universe — some cold, clear place where the stars shone a little bit differently in the sky — maybe Lei was able to stay.

In one of those universes, Bless stared up at her from the ground and begged for her life. "Please," she'd said, "don't hurt me."

And in that world, maybe Lei's resolve had crumbled and she'd turned away. Maybe she'd fought with Uriel later that night, cut straight through all the festering anger and let it spill forth steaming into the open air. Maybe she'd even raised her voice to her angel, and turned away from them.

Maybe Bless had welcomed her back, or maybe they'd had to go their separate ways. Maybe Bless wouldn't look at her anymore, not after the betrayal, and Lei had wandered, cut adrift from both the things that mattered most to her. Struggling to figure out who she was after Uriel and the decade she'd spent in their service. Struggling to live a life that would lead her back to Bless, eventually, as someone whom a Watchers paladin would not have to kill on sight.

Lei can imagine that life so distinctly, but even that lonely, uncertain version of Leilatha is a fantasy. Just one more ludicrous story she tells herself, like the versions of the future she used to imagine on watch, late at night. She used to stare at Bless as she slept in that fitful, restless way of hers, and Lei had dared to imagine this might turn out any other way than the inevitable one.

The problem with Lei is that she can tell a thousand lies to a thousand people, but she knows herself better than that.

She hadn't shouted at Uriel at all that night. She'd only faced them with a face like ice and a heart like dark iron and said, "It's done. It's over."

Uriel had known what she'd meant, of course. They almost always did. They'd smiled at her — smiled at her — and opened their arms, offering a rare embrace. A mark of favor that Lei had literally traveled the world to earn, now bestowed at a time when it no longer meant anything to her.

"It's over," she'd said again, and only then did Uriel hear the second meaning below the first. She saw them rearrange their expression, trying for pity and understanding, but if they understood they would never have asked her to— she never would have had to—

"You and I both know what happens if I disobey a direct order," Lei said into the silence, very quietly. "We both have a lot to lose."

She'd dropped her gaze from Uriel's face, unable to meet those fiery eyes. She wasn't trying to hide anything, not anymore — there was no point — but asking this of them was still as painful as sawing off her own hand. Even though the pain was radiating from some chilly, distant place within her consciousness, far-removed from this place and this moment. Perhaps, she'd thought, it would hurt more later, after she'd processed some of the monumental grief that was currently burying her in night-black shadow.

"If you no longer want to be—" Uriel had started to say, and Lei had held up a hand, still staring fixedly at the ground.

"I do not want to discuss it," she'd said, and Uriel had fallen silent.

"What I want—" She'd swallowed hard then, and rephrased. "What I need right now is... time."

And Uriel had granted her that much, at least, without asking any further questions. So she still has her pact magic —  her silver flame that burns bright as anything but always remains slightly cool to the touch.

Bless' magic had always felt warm to Lei, but she'd feared the heat, wondering if some day she would feel it searing through her. That whip, ensnaring Lei as she tried to run. That sword, coming down like holy vengeance.

In the end, Lei had walked straight through Bless' scarlet-limned Shield of Faith with the same ease she'd found in tearing down the rest of Bless' walls. In the end, the most destructive thing hadn't been the magic either of them had cast.

It had been Bless' eyes, and the furious heartbreak roiling inside them as she tried to lift her mundane shield to parry, and failed.

In another universe, maybe Bless moved a little faster, turned that moment of total defeat into a counterattack. Maybe Lei had ended up on the ground instead, bleeding and broken. Lei would not have begged either, no more than Bless had, and then Bless would have taken up her sword again and—

Lei isn't sure, actually. Even after all those labyrinthine conversations, Lei found it hard to predict what Bless was going to do. Would she have spared Lei's life, even after all that? Would she have ever forgiven Lei for the truth about what she is?

It doesn't really matter. One way or another, in any world, Lei was going to have to choose between her angel and her paladin. And as much as she was fond of Bless— as much as she cared for her— as much as she—

Loved her. It seems futile to avoid the thought now, when Lei has already made her decision.

So maybe in those other worlds, Lei bargained for more time with Uriel, and it only hurt more when it came time to fulfill their directive. Maybe she broke her pact, at least temporarily, until she couldn't flee the dreamscape any longer and she and Uriel had that final reckoning they outlined in her contract together when she turned sixteen.

Maybe Lei was able to stay, but only ever as a fragment of herself, bereft of the radiance that has burned beneath her skin her entire life. It wouldn't really have been her, that Leilatha — the one with the courage to tear herself away from Uriel, and the fortitude to staunch the bleeding afterward.

Lei travels a lot, these days. Mostly alone, but sometimes in a party with other adventurers. Her nights are full of dark and dreamless sleep, but her divine connection remains intact. She knows because her pact magic is always there waiting for her, whether she intends to heal or harm with it. She takes odd jobs, helps people she doesn't care about in the slightest, and waits for Uriel's patience to run out.

It doesn't seem fair, that Lei has done the deed along with everything else Uriel has ever asked of her, and yet she still wakes up expecting Bless to be there beside her. It doesn't seem fair that she's the one who won, yet loss drags at her every footstep and gathers in her bones like molten metal.

Lei waits for it to stop hurting, but it hasn't yet, and she doesn't know if it ever will.

[oceangenasi]

2, 21, 28, 38 and 64 for basil and fathom!

2. before they met their party, what was their main goal?

Basil wanted to find a place where he was useful and valued and could punch people a whole lot. He was working for his cousin on the promise she gave him to erase his bastard heritage and make him a "full" member of the family. And he was ready to prove his loyalty and do whatever it took. He fully expected to work with the party only briefly before watching them get killed -- or killing them himself -- but was surprised to find how well they worked as a team.

Fathom's goal has been the same since he was about nine years old, and that's to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, unless Melora specifically asks him to do something else. Like save the world. He's pretty aimless and is just out to enjoy life to the fullest, trusting that he'll know a sign from Melora when he sees one.

21. do they follow their head, their heart, or their body?

Basil would believe he follows his body -- it's his greatest tool and best weapon, as a monk -- but he's way more caught up in his fucked-up headspace than he realizes. He has a lot of very rigid beliefs about power and control and order, and doesn't even realize they're assumptions. To him, that's simply the way the world works and is always disturbed and suspicious when anyone (read: Teamnesia) claims otherwise.

Fathom's heart and his body are kind of the same thing -- he wants to be free and have a good time, as described above, and that's kind of it. There's nothing and no one he cares about except Melora, and he believes she just wants him to have a good time too.

28. who would they kill? who would they kill for?

I mean, in Basil's case, literally anyone for any reason. He's just that passionate about physical violence. But to answer more seriously, he especially loves being a cog in the machine: being sent to hurt and threaten people on behalf of a greater force, especially an organization or person he respects. I built him to be a mafia enforcer at heart, and it shows! He enjoys the process of killing people, and finds that it solves most of his problems in life. He doubly enjoys it when it makes him employee of the month for his bosses.

Fathom doesn't have any deep respect for the sanctity of life, but he also doesn't go out of his way to kill or even to cause harm. He kills when directly threatened, or to accomplish an objective. But it would need to be an obvious, direct solution to the objective without any gigantic negative consequences. He's not bloodthirsty in the slightest, but he's competent enough at combat when required. I used to prep quite the mix of healing, damage and utility spells when I played him, because he's... flexible.

38. what do they smell like?

Basil smells like clean sweat, if he smells of anything at all. He has some sensory issues -- avoids strong flavors, doesn't like to be touched -- and I imagine that extends to perfume/scents as well. But he also is quite fastidious about cleaning himself off, despite his occasional dips into blood-soaked carnage. If he lived in the modern day, he'd use unscented soaps and detergents.

Fathom smells of the sea, even when he's on dry land. He's constantly emanating saltwater, meaning he's always a little bit damp, mostly because I find that concept very funny. He's had to invest in extremely waterproof eyeliner for this reason, and I guess that means any investigation into perfume or cologne would be doomed to failure. But if he could wear it, he wouldn't mind something with a strong/sharp scent. He likes to make a splash :)

64. do they value mercy or justice more?

Basil believes strongly in justice, but not for any moral reasons -- he only expects it as a punitive force, if he were ever held accountable for his actions. Like, say, if a party found out he and his cousin had been lying to them about their entire existences, and then that party threw him in jail. Basil simply assumed he'd get the death penalty, because that's what people with "principles" do when they catch people who have "murdered a whole bunch of people over the last century." Radical mercy as a concept may never make sense to him despite living through it. It's simply too strange and illogical for him to comprehend.

Fathom values justice in the sense of balance -- the ocean gives and the ocean takes. Sometimes he's the force balancing things out, and sometimes he gets fucked by the same force. It is what it is. But he's changeable enough to be swayed by the kind of people he travels with, and could be easily persuaded to show mercy or give up on a quest -- whether that was for vengeance, or someone's personal agenda, or some great wrong that needed to be righted. He will work Melora's will in whatever way he sees fit, and sometimes that means letting things take their "natural" course. Stepping away instead of stepping in. He's remarkably passive -- unless of course he doesn't want to be on that particular day.

[therpmemes]

                                    moodboard meme

send me one of the following symbols and i’ll make a moodboard for my character.

✿ for a general moodboard about my muse

💛 for a moodboard about our muses’ relationship

❤  for a moodboard about a romantic relationship of my muse 

💗 for a moodboard about another significant relationship in my muse’s life

💕  for a moodboard on my muse’s view on romantic and/or sexual relationships 

👗 for a moodboard about my muse’s fashion style

👶 for a moodboard about my muse’s childhood

🏠  for a moodboard about my muse’s home aesthetics

🍕 for a moodboard about my muse’s favorite foods

👮 for a moodboard about my muse’s occupation

[seadeepywrites]

Archive Fire

Characters: Rionniska "Rion" Ixenkornari & Basil Noctis Word Count: 2,623 tw: arson, violence, gore, death, loss of a family member/mentor figure, Basil's fucked-up headspace

BASIL

There are parts of Basil that have never felt alive until the inferno tonight. Chath's eyes are awash in orange flame, and her hands are wreathed in flickering fire up to her elbows. She shakes her ragged mane of dark hair, miraculously un-singed, and moves to the next house with a savage grin. Basil follows in her footsteps, experiencing a newfound joy that scorches him with its intensity.

A streak of molten gold from the doorway of the house they are approaching: a dragonborn, slender and stumbling, glasses reflecting the destruction around it. It evades Chath, who has her arms outstretched toward the building with a single-minded intensity. She is a holy woman, and her god is calling her. Basil feels no such connection. As the dragonborn tries to rush past him into the street, he snaps out a kick that catches it square in the hipbone. It's nearly two feet taller than him, and nobody never expects a slender high elf like him to land a blow with so much force. The dragonborn is knocked off balance, and Basil closes with his foe, fists tight and humming with ki. The poor bastard never stood a chance.

By the time Chath is finished, the archway in front of her is crumbling, eaten away by shimmering arcane fire. She turns back to him, mouthing his name, almost inaudible above the crackling blaze. Basil rises from kneeling on the body of the dragonborn and wipes the chunks of gore from his hands on his robes. Below him, half of the dragonborn's face is caved in, eye socket fractured and misshapen. The glasses lie next to its head, crushed. They have thick skulls, these creatures, but Basil has on his side all the anger he's been carrying since he first realized he did not belong in the monastery of Shar. He kept pummeling after it was dead: a waste of energy, really, but satisfying somehow. 

Chath gestures to the body as they pass, makes some comment in her wheezing voice. Basil can't hear it, but smiles back. She's a good friend. She gets him, in a way that a lot of people never have. As they continue to the next house, he takes a moment to appreciate how lucky he is to have her.

~

RIONNISKA

Deep in the dusty embrace of the Archives, Rion and her mentor don't hear the beginnings of their world crumbling around them. Sometime in her reshelving, Rion pauses. There is a kind of buzz at the outer limits of her hearing. Perhaps raised voices. It's not a festival night, but a few of the younger dragonborn in Frosthill are known to get rowdier with drinking. Sometimes Sethrekar is with them, and he stops by to shout into the dusty stacks for her. She declines, laughing, and later she and Thadalynn share a quiet drink and a well-worn discussion they already know by heart. Lynn's so close to finishing the first draft of her manuscript -- Rion can't waste time partying now. If Seth stops by, she'll refuse him.

She's carrying an armful of books back towards Lynn's desk in the center of the library when she hears the front door bang open. A swirl of dust tickles her nostrils, but she sniffs it away with the ease of long practice. She detours towards the entrance, already composing a polite no-thank-you message.  Maybe she can suggest apple-picking on the weekend to make up for it -- it'll do Seth and her both some good to get outside the University for a few hours.

Rion hears Lynn speaking, a few words with that soft reprimanding tone she knows so well -- before her voice changes, pitch rising sharply. Anger, or alarm. Rion picks up the pace, hoping Seth isn't too much the worse for drink. If he puts Lynn in a bad mood, she'll wallow in it for days.

"--away from the books! And don't-- oh, gods." Rion has never heard fear like that in her entire life. Lynn, soft and fervent, uttering a plea to deities she's spent decades researching. In years to come, Rion will remember those two words. The moment Lynn's academic pursuits became the realest thing in the world to her.

Rion rounds the corner with her books and stops in her tracks. Lynn has her arms outstretched, hands facing the two people who have invaded the sanctity of the Archives. There is both desperation and defiance in her stance, and her rose gold scales shimmer in the low light. Her assailants are not dragonborn -- that much is immediately obvious. One has dark purple skin and wild hair, pointed ears flattened back against her head and sharp teeth curving upwards from her brutish jaw. A dark elf, an orc, or some strange mix of the two, Rion cannot tell and can't spare the time to decide. Because there's fire licking up her shoulders, unnatural in hue and in the ghostly way it flickers without burning. The dark one mutters something in a guttural tongue, and with a snap, the flame coalesces in her hand. There, it burns with a familiar orange and a heat Rion can feel from fifteen feet away. It will devour the Archives in minutes.

"Don't run for help," the dark one's companion says suddenly. Rion's body floods with fear. Something raw and primal, as the pale one snaps his head around to look at her. His eyes glitter against paper-white skin, wisps of silvery blue hair escaping his tight braid. Where his companion is amorphous heat, he is all cold, sharp edges. He's narrow and compact, and the bandages wrapped around his hands and feet are stained with blood. Rion knows it is dragonborn blood.

The dark one cackles at the terror she can see bloom in Lynn and Rion's faces. The pale one just smiles. 

~

BASIL

He doesn't know much about dragonborn and has never cared enough to learn, but he thinks the one with the books is young. Not an adult yet, surely. He can see it in the purity of the emotion that flares in its wide violet eyes. He takes a moment to savor that expression and the thrill it gives him.

"So," Basil drawls, channeling the high-elf accent he grew up around, "if you behave, we might let one of you live. Any preferences?"

"Turn around and leave," says the pinkish one in front of them. "Right now." Its voice trembles, but its words are forceful. Basil can respect that.

Chath flicks her fingers, and a jet of flame whips out to the nearest bookshelf. The young one makes an inarticulate sound, shoving its armful of books onto a stretch of open shelf and bolting for the hotspot Chath has created. Basil moves smoothly to intercept, closing the distance between them with magically enhanced speed. He lands a flurry of blows on its silvery scales, incapacitating it with savage ease. It crumples, mewling in pain.

The pinkish one rushes to its side, and Basil leaves the two of them to comfort each other. He and Chath are here on a mission. Focused on their temporary pain, the two dragonborn are too distracted to really take in what Basil is here for: destruction. He doesn't wield the elements the way Chath does, but he can certainly help. As Chath sends fire splashing over the shelves, Basil pulls scrolls and books off to feed the blaze. Chath darts deeper into the stacks, to create more ignition points. Basil can hear her laughing as she goes.

The silver dragonborn is standing now, cradling a broken arm. Still hunched in pain, it takes in a deep lungful of the hazy air and faces the burning shelf. Baring its teeth, it breathes out in a great huff. Frost crystals spiral through the air, and a chill soaks Basil to his bones. It dampens the fire in front of them, to be sure, but cold is not water.

"It's hopeless," Basil says softly.

"Why?" says the pinkish one, voice hoarse. It isn't asking him to clarify. The word is not so much a question as a cry of despair.

"Hm." Basil fiddles with one of the wrappings on his hands. "Chath would say we're called by Shar."

The silver dragonborn stumbles to another shelf and tries to breathe cold again, but the puff of frost evaporates with a hiss, making no difference to the spreading fire. The ceilings are high, but smoke is gathering above them, dark and thick.

The pinkish dragonborn seems to be casting about for words. "This isn't the way to serve your goddess," it says.

Basil quirks an eyebrow. "Don't you think we'd know that better than you?" Not that he does, of course. But the group he's fallen in with certainly seems confident in what they're doing. He's just here for the fun.

The silver one stares at him, repulsed. But Basil's attention has settled on the pinkish one. He can see the desperation building inside it, lithe muscles tensing beneath its scaly hide. It will act soon, and then maybe there will be some beauty to what they're doing here.

Basil hates the ones that don't fight back.

~

RIONNISKA

Rion's eyes are streaming with tears, and she can't tell if it's from the hurt outside her or within her. The elf watching them is pale and small, but when he punched her the force traveled straight through her. Her arm bones grate against each other, pain suffusing her from her horns to her feet. 

Around her, the Archives burn. Rion's worked here for over a decade now, but she still remembers the first dressing-down she got from Lynn. It was over the little oil lamp she'd brought in, to help her as she ran from shelf to shelf fetching the books her mentor needed. Lynn's tail had lashed with agitation, and it was the closest Rion ever got to hearing her shout.

Now, the two of them kneel together on the floor and watch the destruction, helpless. Her throat is raw from struggling with her cold breath. Here in the foyer, she is finally able to process the sounds she heard from outside. Theirs are not the only cries of loss tonight. She senses if she runs for help, that none will come -- whoever these two strangers are, they brought an army of cultists with them. The sheer weight of loss crushes Rion from all sides. Her library, and further beyond her, her town. Her home. Everything burns.

She feels Thadalynn's weight shift next to her. Lifting her head in alarm, Rion only has time to process the expression on her mentor's face, equal parts sorrow and rage. She is used to seeing Lynn focused on a tricky reading, or serenely scribbling away at one of her many lengthy parchments of notes. Now her features are contorted nearly beyond recognition. The sight paralyzes Rion for the split second it takes for Lynn to twist out of their embrace and launch herself at the elf nearby.

Lynn is a foot and a half taller and twice as heavy as her opponent.   She does knock him back, and for a second Rion's heart lurches sideways with hope. And then the elf springs backward, twisting out of Lynn's grasp with uncanny flexibility. He whips straight into a high kick, and Rion could swear she sees a blue sheen left behind in the blur of his motion.

The fight, if it could be called that, is short and brutal. It ends with the elf reaching out and gripping a fistful of Lynn's shirt as she sags in front of him, bloody. His face has been composed and blank as he dismantled her. Now his bright eyes flare with a sudden, fierce joy. Lightning arcs from his hand, crackling around his fist. Lynn shudders, eyes rolling back in her head. Rion cries out.

Another moment that lives on in her nightmares: Rion, crumpled on the floor, watches. She doesn't fling herself towards the elf and fight for her friend and teacher's life. She doesn't breathe out a billowing cloud of ice, incapacitating the stony-eyed stranger that has broken both of them. She doesn't cry out, so that Lynn can look toward her and see the fear in her eyes and know, in her final moments, that Rion loves her.

The elf gently reaches beneath Lynn's jaw. He stands over her, silhouetted against the flames. Embraces her head almost tenderly, looking deep into her eyes. Lynn whimpers. The elf's gaze is steady. And without flinching, he moves his slender hands into two different directions. Jagged, but elegant. The snap of Lynn's neck is almost lost in the growing roar of the fire.

~

BASIL

In his one-hundred-and-fifty-odd years, Basil has found no greater aphrodisiac than the pleasure he gets from extinguishing a life with his bare hands. He had deliberated over whether to join this raid, unsure if rioting and mob destruction would help him overcome the melancholy that has settled on him these last few years in the monastery. He watched Chath and the others whip themselves into a frenzy, calling for violence against this dragonborn community. Basil is a high elf -- he is quite familiar with the superiority mindset that leads to racial violence. He appreciates the order inherent, but he doesn't take pride in it. 

But this. Everything tonight has led up to this. Basil has punched a lot of dragonborn tonight. Beaten some to a pulp -- even killed a few. But to feel this one's blood-slick scales against his fingertips, to cradle its vitality between his palms and experience that perfect connection between predator and prey: that is exquisite.

The younger dragonborn screams. A high keen, full of anguish. It startles Basil from his rapture, and he releases the dragonborn's body. It slumps to the floor. The cry breaks into a coughing fit, and Basil notes absently the air inside has grown thick and smoky. There is no sign of Chath, but he can feel the blistering heat of her revel beginning to encroach.

He walks over and kneels beside where the younger dragonborn sprawls, moaning. He tilts its chin up with one finger and looks into those intense violet eyes, glassy with shock and grief. And he tells a lie.

"This was for our Lady of Loss," he murmurs. "Praise be to Shar." The words come easy enough, because he has rehearsed them so many times in the last decade. Mouthed empty adulations to a greater power he barely believes in. No. If there is delight to be found on this grim earth, it is here and now in this tableau of suffering he and his companion have wrought. Basil does this for himself, not for any deity.

But this dragonborn never needs to know that. He leaves it lying there, alive, because he's already taken away everything that matters. He walks out of the Archives into the cool night air, watching the other cultists pillage and destroy. Chath joins him after a few minutes, singed and exhilarated. They walk side by side down the ruined main street of the University, idly debating their next target. They are content: Chath because she's accomplished the objective she was sent here for, fanatic as ever towards her goddess, and Basil for other reasons entirely.

Perhaps the silver dragonborn he leaves behind will die. Perhaps instead it will crawl out of the ashes of its past and emerge with a powerful thirst for vengeance, swearing its life to a path that will combat the forces of great evil that have descended on its hometown tonight. Basil doesn't really care. Either way, he is sure their paths will never cross again.

[seadeepywrites]

My D&D Characters Ranked By Evilness

This post has been sitting in my drafts for like a year now, because I love creating characters with moralities and motivations all over the spectrum of alignments. And if I had to directly compare how "good" some of them are, things get interesting real fast! Is a well-meaning paladin that fucks up a lot because of her anger issues a better or worse person than a nepo-baby sorcerer who manipulates people into situations that will make them happy?

So here are my D&D characters ranked from "most evil" to "most good," for no reason other than that I wanted to. Obviously some of this is subjective and based on my own opinions about morality but also, they're my PCs so I can do what I want.

(1.) Basil:

My only Evil-aligned PC, who goes at the top of the list not for his many decades of crime but for his defining trait of sadism. Not the sexy and consensual kind of sadism but the kind where he takes genuine pleasure in inflicting pain on people who cannot do anything to stop him. This was clearly a direct result of his childhood neglect and deep-seated control issues, but I have gone off before about backstory not excusing immorality and I will do it again at the drop of a hat! What makes him interesting is that his sociopathy and his sadistic tendencies don't inherently bar him from Neutrality — and in fact there are many universes where he could have lead a relatively harm-free life. But because of the universe and backstory he did exist in as a PC, he hurt and killed a lot of innocent people with no remorse, and kept going like that until he was forcibly stopped. Hence, he wins for "most evil" on this list.

(2.) Leilatha:

Although she's Neutral-aligned, she makes second on this list because her streak of cruelty easily leads her to committing acts best described as "a real dick move." She also has ambition! She craves power and control, and that means the potential to cause even more harm than Basil. Lei would rule the world if she could, which is a lot scarier than Basil's petty and mundane forms of evil. Her evil is less pathological in source than Basil's, and therefore perhaps less explicable — she'll simply prioritize herself and her patron above any other cause or person, every time. She'll burn down anything and anyone else in pursuit of her objectives. She also ranks high on the list because of the developing situation in her campaign where she was lying to the party's paladin about her religious affiliations — i.e. that she was a Celestial warlock sworn to an angel and not a cleric, while fully aware the paladin had taken the Oath of the Watchers and would be deeply mistrustful and hostile towards her, if made aware of that fact. Especially egregious because Lei and Bless were also careening towards a romantic relationship, and because Lei was subtly using her growing influence over Bless to nudge Bless' personal beliefs in a more useful direction. Bless trusts her, and Lei was abusing that trust. I would have liked to see how that situation developed, because there were possible outcomes where Lei learned how to love something other than herself, and changed the way she treats people. Unlike Basil, she does actually care, and that means there's hope for her. But her party is also less willing to drag her kicking and screaming into a redemption arc, which was an opportunity Basil encountered unexpectedly after 150 years of crime.

(3.) Nym:

He's less of a bitch than Lei, but he's still pretty high on this list. His character is defined by ruthlessness, which was common and necessary in the campaign setting he grew up in. But that's also not the world/setting he ended the campaign in, so he looks very different to people there! In short, he grew up in a post-apocalyptic desert setting where resources were incredibly scarce and sentimentality was a luxury his community could not afford. Half of his party was from a much more privileged part of the world and didn't understand him, and after some time travel shenanigans, we ended up in a more typical fantasy setting. So even what little context his party had for his values is now unknown to the general population. He doesn't possess the same levels of psychopathy that Basil does, but is certainly quite cold and aloof. It takes him a long time to develop positive feelings for anyone — there are maybe two people in the entire world he truly cares for. Most of the time, he operates under the rules of brutal practicality. He's also remarkably comfortable with death and gore, which certainly doesn't enamor him to strangers. Yet none of that is truly Evil. One defining moment from his campaign was when he didn't hesitate to shoot and kill a few innocent bystanders, in an attempt to foil an enemy NPC who was escaping through the crowd. He'd quickly done the math — the enemy NPC was responsible for many deaths and would cause more if he escaped, there were several priests nearby who knew Revivify and would be able to tend to dead civilians, and the party's best chance at stopping this NPC was slipping away from them. So he shot to kill, which horrified some of the Good-aligned party members.

Nym's quite willing to go through other people to get what he wants, especially if it's the simplest or quickest solution, which is one reason he's so high on the list. But he's ruled ultimately by practicality, and won't kill people if it doesn't make sense to do so. If it would cause more problems, it isn't worth it to him. And since he doesn't harbor as much ambition as Lei, that happens relatively frequently. Luckily for the rest of the party, he's always willing to consider other approaches. He just happens to be awesome at killing people with arrows and knives, so it's his go-to method if there's a dearth of ideas.

The irony with Nym was always that the party's enchantment wizard was a much more selfish and power-hungry person, but he also possessed a great deal more Charisma. The wizard didn't like to draw too much negative attention to himself, so his image was generally better, even to other party members. Meanwhile, Nym was really exactly what he appeared to be on the surface — cautious, calculating, and ultimately very Neutral.

(4.) Fathom:

Doesn't like hurting people needlessly, and doesn't have the levels of ambition and passion as the other characters on this list. The latter is both good and bad for him morality-wise. He won't hurt others in pursuit of his own goals like Lei or Nym, and he won't hurt people for fun like Basil. But he'll absolutely drift along with any group that interests him, agreeing to any plan they make and contributing where he can. He's therefore done some pretty evil shit in the past, which he easily excuses with the concept of balance. He and his goddess are both True Neutral, and that can mean doing evil as well as good. He does not have any moral framework beyond his faith in Melora, at all. All that said, in his actual campaign, he saved the world. Put simply, he fell in with some Good-aligned people that cared enough. And Melora herself was threatened by the world-ending plans of the BBEG, so he tried very hard to prevent them. Therefore while he has the potential to do evil in certain scenarios, one could argue from a utilitarian standpoint that he was, ultimately, a force for Good during his lifetime.

(5.) Oren:

Very much in the middle of the list for several reasons, one of which being that they died in a TPK before their campaign could get very far. The most Evil they ever committed was probably as a soldier, and their disinterest in challenging authority is their most questionable trait. Possibly belongs above Fathom on this list, but Fathom went further in either direction. I think Oren just kept their head down and lived their life, neither committing atrocities nor saving the world. And they died before they could find out what their life beyond the military would even look like.

(6.) Pterin:

Neutral-aligned in the sense that he doesn't care about larger causes beyond himself, but really contains very little malice. Hard to estimate because I didn't play him much, but he's compassionate enough that he'd be upset by small injustices and try to right them — something basic like seeing some bandits robbing a rando, or a crying child. But on a larger level, he's too erratic to dedicate himself to any one objective. To be entirely fair, he's only nineteen!

(7.) Rion:

Unquestionably well-intentioned, but, well... she's an Oath of Vengeance paladin, so inherently believes in punitive, retributive justice. She wins the dubious honor of being the Good-aligned character who slips closest to Neutral, mostly because of how easily she's ruled by powerful emotions. Her anger issues plague her every decision — she has done some terrible things in the heat of combat.

When I designed her character, I gave her a Lawful Good god who values mercy — already knowing she was much more Chaotic Good and driven by vengeance, both of which conflict directly with the ideals of her god. It was free character tension, and between that and her extremely Neutral-aligned slightly murder-hobo-y party, a great deal of her character arc was about learning to trust her own moral judgment because it was the best she had, despite her flaws. A real recipe for potential evil, since she ended up as judge, jury, and enthusiastic executioner. But she knew that, and at some point had to recognize that dwelling so intensely on her past mistakes wasn't fixing anything. So her mentality was that she was imperfect, but doing what she could. She was always trying to improve herself, and it took time for her to recognize that using her shame against herself punitively wasn't making her a better person — it was only making her miserable. (That last part may or may not be heavily inspired by my own issues... who's to say?)

In other words, Rion's a much harsher kind of Good than some of my less violent characters, but she is, if nothing else, highly effective. She's cleansed the world of a lot of evildoers, and the worst crime there is the possibility than some of them possibly didn't deserve death for their crimes. In a more civilized society with the resources to avoid the death penalty and rehabilitate criminals, it would be a lot easier to judge her for that, but she spent most of her campaign in a megadungeon with creatures attacking her left and right, so I find it hard to blame her for resolving those situations with the best tool available to her, i.e. her gigantic polearm and a shitload of radiant damage.

(8.) Rosie:

She's a complicated one. Rosie is a really, really false person whose entire personality is a facade she works hard to maintain, so people with good Insight get suspicious of her sweet, kind, cheerful barmaid persona when they realized how manufactured it is. They catch a glimpse beneath the facade, and assume that she's pretending to be that person for deeply sinister reasons.

And that is the worst part of her to be sure: the Rosie you first meet is very controlled and performative. She is a lot more flawed than she first appears, and every move she makes is calculated to make people like her, deepen her relationships with them and earn their trust. She is absolutely deceptive and manipulative, in the sense that she thinks about and pursues this agenda at every opportunity. She can even be ruthless when she needs to be, in the classic House Ghallanda way of a very well-connected person with a lot of information whom it would be a bad idea to cross.

However, I use that Dr Horrible joke a lot to describe her — sometimes, people are like pie, and the bottom layer is exactly the same as the top layer. Rosie's ultimate goal is to build a space that shelters and protects the community, with an emphasis on welcoming outcasts. To that extent, she is exactly what she first appears to be. It's only her self-esteem issues preventing her from being authentic — her insecurity and self-loathing surrounding her unpredictable sorcery. At its heart, her magic is a metaphor for an extremely unhealth self-sacrificing mentality where she tries to conceal and minimize her messy emotions and her negative impact on other people.

All of which is to say that Rosie can be a lot more ruthless and manipulative than she first appears, but her secret evil plan is to make everyone around her as happy as possible, so ultimately yeah, I'd categorize her overall as a good person.

(9.) Qree:

Honestly ranks so high only because he's baby, and hasn't been forced into the kind of hard choices that someone like Rion has. It would definitely have been interesting to put him under more pressure and see how his ideals evolved. He does have feelings, but isn't as ruled by them as, say, Haven and Rion are. 

Qree is a noble-minded person, in that they will generally sacrifice their own safety for that of others. They're a monk, so that often involves putting themself on the front line physically. Of course, they were also extremely fragile and spent most of their time unconscious, which might have developed into a full-blown depressive episode about their efficacy if I'd played as them more. Instead, their arc can be summarized as "they had a bad time on Savnaer and decided to go home," neatly removing them from the dangers and challenges they experienced on the continent. 

He would have been intriguing to more fully develop for sure, but Haven was always my higher priority and I don't regret focusing on her instead. 

(10.) Whist:

Technically a DMPC, but what the hell. Whist's character has always been defined by their loneliness — in their backstory as a PC, it drove them away from their hometown when their only real friendship crumbled in the face of capitalism. As a DMPC, they remained in their hometown but existed literally on the outskirts, until they left to travel with the party and address the larger threat to the region. 

I mention this because their fiercest desire, i.e. to protect the people of the valley from the Duskwood, is based more in principle than in specific attachments. There are people in Graycott who are kind to them, but they do their job because of their family's lineage as protectors and their belief in its value. They have a clear, grounded, unwavering sense of right and wrong, and they rarely lapse into the angst that plagues my more uncertain, inconstant PCs. They are simply too practical, and experience less intense emotionality. 

They are, however, willing to go to incredible lengths to save the people they care about, and due to trauma with their mom it's the only time they exhibit real irrationality. Luckily for them, this has rarely come into conflict with their morals, but that's a situation where I imagine their ironclad principles might falter. Since I'm the DM, though, I don't anticipate highlighting that struggle too thoroughly, at least not in this campaign. Unless I consider their current intent to sacrifice themself to close the planar rift, which the party has argued against but thoroughly failed to talk them out of yet...

Their other weakness, I'd say, is that they aren't assertive enough in interpersonal moral quandaries. They are blunt and straightforward and will face down monsters without a second thought, but when it comes to the questionable actions of other humanoids, they falter. Mostly that's their cripplingly low Cha of 6 (read: autism) contributing to uncertainty over how to express their doubts without jeopardizing their place in the party and when such doubts are appropriate to express at all. And this has hinted at some more interesting conflict, because their bright-line convictions were all well and good when they were spending most of their time alone, but how do they play out in a party where opinions differ on what the right thing to do might be?

It's not a conversation that's happened frequently in my game, but it's become a major conflict in Haven's campaign, so I might as well move on to the last PC on my list.  

(11.) Haven:

In a campaign which has consistently re-proven the thesis "All wizards are inherently evil," it's fucking hilarious that I've ranked Haven as my most Good-aligned PC. But she's so staunchly committed to helping people and saving the world that she has remained somewhat incorruptible.... unless? I'm in the process of writing a literal essay on her development as a character over the course of the campaign, and that has included some questionable decisions she's made under stress, but I stand by this ranking. 

Intention matters a lot to me, and that's why characters like Nym and Lei don't qualify as Neutral in my mind until they've crossed some invisible line of intentionality — they make decisions out of ruthlessness or practicality, where they've weighed their options and decided the cost was worth it. At some point that becomes Evil, when the magnitude of their goals vs the cost simply isn't justifiable. Basil, for example, will kill someone to accomplish the smallest objective, and hurts people for his own entertainment.

This is highly relevant to Haven because her intentions are, at their core, so very very good and pure. She chose Haven as her virtue name to express how much she wants to protect people and keep them safe! She is so deeply compassionate and so hopeful, truly willing to believe the best of people and continue hoping for their improvement. And she has the exact opposite of an ego — she's always willing to forgive other's mistakes and modify her own behavior as best as she can. She's not as practical as Whist or as angry as Rion or as manipulative as Rosie, which causes occasional problems because she won't harm people simply to stop them causing future problems. She believes too strongly in the possibility of redemption, or at least she did at the beginning of the campaign.

Like Rion, it's those rash decisions in the heat of the moment that cause the most trouble. She too takes her own failures hard and ruminates on what she could have done differently, but she's less likely than Rion to spiral into angst. She simply fucks up, again and again, and is continually trying to improve on her past mistakes. So when some of those fuck-ups are hurtful or morally questionable, she resolves to do better and moves forward. She has to, because with her kind of brain (unmedicated ADHD, poor impulse control, intense emotions) she's going to be making mistakes for the rest of her life. She carries around a lot of regret, but unlike Rion she hasn't let it push her into a solipsistic mentality of discarding the judgment of others.... yet. Perhaps only because she's had more support, and didn't experience the constant criticism and scrutiny and hostility that Rion did. 

The only stormclouds on the horizon are Haven's growing tendency to accumulate really significant amounts of power to herself and only herself: powerful magic items, captaincy of the party's magical pirate ship, an ungodly number of spells in her spellbook, etc. She decided those things were better off in her hands than the people she took them from or the people who would have them otherwise, and she's probably right — for now. But the more stress she's put under and the worse the choices that face her are, the higher the chance she'll do something really concerning with that power. There's been hints of that, but, well... I'll save that for my character essay.

[seadeepywrites]

Small Temptations

Character: Leilatha "Lei" Dymeriscis Words: 784 tw: lying, scheming & manipulation; alcohol

Lei stares into the depths of her drink, trying to remember why it was so important to her to order the cherry wine and not any of the drier flavors she usually prefers. The taste is sweet and sticky on her tongue, bursting bright when she licks her lips. Too intense, nearly overpowering.

“You don’t like it?”

That was why. Lei remembers now, as her head comes up — too fast, too eager. She tries to school her expression, to keep the cool composure that used to come easily to her. It’s harder to maintain it around her party these days. Well, harder to maintain around one party member in particular.

Bless has been drinking much faster than Lei, approaching even Istvaan in pace, and nobody can keep up with Istvaan. She doesn’t stagger as she moves toward the corner of the tavern where Lei is standing, but she is overly deliberate about where she is putting her feet, and her wide stance tells Lei she is struggling to keep her balance. The signs are obvious to anyone that knows her well, and Lei is beginning to count herself among that number.

“It’s very sweet,” Lei says diplomatically, allowing the corners of her mouth to tilt into a small smile. Affection, even fondness — she lets herself show those things, as consolation for the dozen other things crowding inside her chest these days and rattling her equilibrium.

Bless’ face twists in dismay, and though she’s exaggerating for effect, there is a glimmer of real uncertainty in her eyes. “You hate it. You hate the wine.”

Lei returns to examining her glass, unable to look Bless in the face when she gets like this. Tipsy Bless is just so vulnerable, so open. It only takes a few tankards of ale and her inhibitions simply evaporate. All her emotions play out in her expressions like a symphony, quick and exhilarating and very, very obvious.

And when Bless gets to the flirtatious part of the evening, when she leans in and makes her interest clear, Lei always finds herself wondering first if it would be a tactical advantage to say yes. Her second thought, then, is to gauge the probability of consequences — how likely a tryst would be to splinter the party, or the deepening trust that Lei has cultivated so carefully between the two of them. Her third thought, which burns beneath the others like still-smoldering embers, isn’t usually a thought at all.

It has only been Bless’ final burst of panic, predictable as sunrise, that has prevented things from going any further on nights like these.

“I don’t hate it,” Lei says, gently but firmly. She can dissipate this anxiety, at least. “It’s just not the kind of thing I usually drink.”

Bless’ eyes glitter. The lantern-light doesn’t do much to soften their pale, biting green, and her mouth flattens into an unhappy line. But out loud, she says, “Okay. All right.”

Lei takes another sip of her wine, drawing the mouthful slowly across her tongue. She tries to concentrate, to appreciate the subtleties of the flavor beyond the initial flood of saccharine. But Bless has gone still, watching Lei drink, and Lei is finding her scrutiny distracting.

“It’s a lot at first,” Lei admits. “But after a moment…” She runs the tip of her tongue along her upper lip, considering. “There’s more there, I think. It just takes getting used to.”

Near the floor, Bless’ tail twitches once.

Perhaps Lei has drunk too much after all — perhaps that is where the strangely liquid feeling in her bones is coming from, the loosening of her upright posture. She lists sideways a little and props one shoulder up against the wall. Bless takes half a step closer, still staring into her face.

“It’s hard to tell,” Bless says quietly, or what passes for quietly with someone that inebriated. “I don’t know if you… I just never know.”

Lei holds their shared fiction out in front of her, the illusion that this conversation is still about alcohol. She says, with casual diffidence, “Old habits die hard, I suppose. We could only drink wine at the abbey if it was properly watered down, and didn’t taste like anything someone could enjoy.”

“I get it,” Bless says almost instantly, then frowns. Regret gathers in the crease between her eyebrows, but she forges ahead. “Some of the Watchers are like that. We believe that small temptations can lead to larger ones, and some of us…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, letting the end of the thought trail away into silence. She doesn’t move towards Lei, but she also doesn’t turn away.

Lei harbors the same belief, incidentally, but with very different intentions.

[seadeepywrites]

for future's sake

Character: Haven Vasselon Words: 1219 tw: intense grief, depression

Haven yanks herself free of the puppet so violently she strains a muscle in her shoulder. She crumples, there inside the puppet glove, and she cries. She cries herself into headache territory and out the other side. She cries herself into hyperventilation, and then into dry heaving. By the time she can catch a full breath, her eyes itch and burn, and the taste of bile coats the back of her throat. 

She can't touch the memory of what has just happened, not voluntarily — every time she even approaches it, her whole body hurts, like the time she got chewed on by the hyenas, or the plesiosauri. Or even sharper than that, filling up the spaces inside her with an all-consuming, white-out kind of agony. Words echo around her, piercing through the thick fog of tears, until finally and blessedly, she's cried too hard to even make sense of the sounds anymore. Until she lies amid the mechanisms of the glove, curled up with her knees tucked tight to her chest, with only the pain she still carries in her body.

She slips in and out of a fitful sleep for a while. Alternating waves of anxiety and misery crash down on her, tugging her in and out of an exhausted haze. Half a dozen times she makes to stand up and plug herself back into the glove, and then she remembers the exact twist of Klaus’ mouth as he broke her heart, and she collapses back to the floor again. She's spent weeks throwing herself back into the puppet at all hours, driving herself past her breaking point, terrified her friends will get hurt in her absence, the way they did with the false hydra. But no matter how hard she tries now, she can't muster that urgency. Can't make her limbs obey her command to get up and keep going.

Besides, her friends fought three ships a few days ago without her and nobody got hurt. Maybe she isn’t as essential as she thinks she is. Maybe she never was.

Haven has no idea how much time has passed when she finally pulls herself to her feet. Her head pounds and her stomach muscles ache. She is tired, worn through with fatigue and frustration, and she is also tired of crying so goddamn much. She takes some wobbly breaths, and collects her things — her spellbook, a few sheets of notes. She leaves the room and the glove that squats inside of it, and she exits Rise by the back stairwell, to avoid any potential for conversation.

Her heart is heavy as a stone inside her as she walks back across the city, but she refuses the Serving who offers her a palanquin with a slow shake of her head. She walks, and her tears spill down her face sometimes, like a jostled cup overflowing.

The last time she cried this much over Klaus, she wrote him a letter. And when she came back from whatever plane she'd been banished to, the ship they'd all built together was in splinters at the bottom of the ocean.

Whisper isn't home when she lets herself into the house — which isn't surprising, since it's still midday here in Heline. Haven trudges to the room they share, and stacks her spellbook and notes next to the bed. She tugs the wand from her hair and places it on top of the precarious pile. She climbs into bed, and pulls all the blankets over her, all the way up past her antlers until she is breathing warm, moist air in a cavern of her own devising.

She stays like that for a long time. It's hard to call what she does thinking, exactly. She isn't spooling out a line of logic, hand over hand, to any clean-cut conclusion. She isn't composing a letter to anyone either, pen in hand, inking her thoughts onto the page to find out what they are and keep them there in clear, dark script. She's only drifting, lost somewhere below the surface of an increasingly familiar ocean, full of shadow-shrouded depths and strange currents she does not understand.

The truth comes into focus, slowly and yet all at once, in a way she's never experienced before. In the past, Haven has fought for every inch of understanding, talked herself and others to death as she tried to circumnavigate and circumscribe her relationships with other people. She's poured herself into pages and pages of words, both spoken and written, because that's how she makes sense of the spinning chaos around her. Tonight, the truth that unfolds inside her has the shape of an absence, and the weight of incipient grief.

She has loved Klaus Graves for years, and trusted him even when she shouldn't, but mostly when she should have. He came back when she needed him, countless times, and chose shore leave when she only wanted him around, as a friend. She's tried to talk to him in every language she knows and several she doesn't, hoping they could both reach out across that chasm that separates them, that fundamental disconnect between the ways the two of them are. Hoping they could touch, even briefly, and continue this strange and improbable friendship.

Klaus has never, not once, spoken to her the way he did today. The worst part is that Haven can't find it within herself to be surprised. She has never opened up that completely before, either, never made one final and faltering attempt to voice the agony she carries at the heart of her.

But she does know how mean Klaus can be when he's backed into a corner, and she knows how fantastic he is at sinking arrows deep into his enemy's weak points.

Haven stretches out of her fetal curl a little bit. She sticks her head out of the blankets, so that she's only covered up to her neck now, and takes in a few lungfuls of un-blanketed fresh air. It is over, she realizes, only it comes more as a feeling than a conscious thought. There is a nauseating, devastating finality that settles on her then, coming to rest in the branches of the doubts that took root in her all those months ago.

Haven has forgiven and been forgiven before, and she's fucked up who knows how many times, and she's tried her very best to be okay with it. She thinks maybe this time something has broken for good, and that's new to her — she's used to re-treading her past mistakes, to throwing herself at someone as many times as they'll take her back, to loving people until they decide they don't want her anymore.

It is a shivery, breathlessly bizarre idea to consider the possibility of being the one to walk away for once. It is exceedingly unusual to her, and it hurts like she's dying, but she's starting to wonder if the only thing more painful would be to bloody herself on Klaus' sharp edges over and over until there's nothing left of her.

Haven makes a decision, there in the solitude of her bedroom in Heline, hundreds of miles away from the sun-tanned elf with bone-white hair and acid-green eyes and a mouth full of shark teeth. And then she closes her eyes, and she falls asleep.

[seadeepywrites]

bleeding from the storm

Character: Haven Vasselon Words: 6139 tw: death, depression, fantasy violence

1. like an ambulance that's turning on the sirens

"I can fix this," Haven says. In panic, she says it a few more times. "I can fix this! I can fix this."

There's nobody to hear her babbling except the dead — the truly dead, like Siggi, who lies motionless on the bloodstained deck, and the undead, who crowd in around Haven and Siggi with gaunt, grasping hands. The possessed navy crewmates have a terrible slackness to their faces, eyes rolled so far back in their heads that only the whites are showing, but Haven's attention remains on the gatekeeper. It is something that should not exist, something Haven had not prepared for, and there is a very real possibility that she is about to die alongside Siggi.

The gatekeeper says nothing as the echoes of its Toll the Dead spell vibrate through the floorboards. It only stands before her implacably, its scythe glinting in the darkness and its withered face obscured under the deep cowl of its tattered cloak. 

Haven licks her lips, noticing absently how dry and cracked they are. She can taste blood beading up on them, then hardening almost immediately into a grainy crust. She feels cold, all the way to her core.

She has to leave. Now, while she still can.

"I can fix this," she says, more faintly this time.

She leans on her Staff of Power for support, bends down to touch Siggi, and tries not to lose her balance as her vision swims and tilts with the motion. Gripping Siggi's collar in her fist, she mumbles a few arcane words. She steps backwards, away from the gatekeeper, and through the gleaming golden outline of a door that has opened behind her.

She sags almost immediately upon emerging, sinking to the deck in exhaustion, but her Dimension Door sent them where she intended — strong hands support her as she falls. Haven knows those hands intimately, very literally. Even as she blinks to stay conscious, she gestures towards Siggi.

"I'm fine," she wheezes, which isn't actually true. "But Siggi, he's..."

Whisper eases Haven to the deck, sparing half a second to brush one hand against Haven's cheek, then nods and reaches for Siggi. She pulls a small pouch from her belt, empties it over his body. Diamond dust spills downward like a waterfall, glittering in the lanternlight.

Haven relaxes, closing her eyes. The Nightweaver still lurks, less than five hundred feet away — Haven can be sure of that distance, considering her Dimension Door — but she got them out.

Whisper can do the rest.

~

2. like a loser that's betting on his last dime

Haven's nerves haven't settled since the gatekeeper fight. Even after the Magic Missiles hissed outward from her Staff of Power and shattered the gatekeeper's final ward, and even after Jaeldirra, tears streaming down their face, summoned shadowy spider legs to cram Whisper's soul back into her body. Even after Haven held tight to Whisper, touching her face, her shoulders, her hands, over and over — reassured herself that Whisper was alive again, was still here.

Haven kneels on the deck of the Abyssal Gaze, hand in hand with Whisper, and wonders why she can't quite manage to catch her breath.

It takes her ten minutes to identify the anxiety that buzzes inside her like an unquiet hive of bees. The telepathic bond has faded, its hour elapsed, and one of the last messages exchanged through it was a hazy reassurance from Klaus that he was conscious and swimming to the Munafik with the Kraken. So Haven knows Klaus is still alive, but knowing that intellectually doesn't settle the discomfort, the occasional little sparks of adrenaline.

Haven, it would appear, cannot trust the fight is over until she sees Klaus with her own two eyes. His stealth and his alacrity and his caution mean that by the time she's realized there's a threat, he's already vanished, and the devastating barrage of his black-feathered arrows is sometimes her first clue there's anything wrong around her. Conversely, she relies far more on his ability to sense danger than her own, and she knows he never appears back on deck until he's confident that all the enemy combatants have been dealt with.

But here, in the exhaustion after a fight that claimed the life of two crewmates, Klaus is absent. He's on board another ship, tending the Kraken's wounds, which were moderately serious — as well as his own, which were significantly worse than anything he usually suffers. There's no particular reason Haven needs him here, no practical justification she can find to demand his presence. She just cannot relax, cannot make herself believe this horror-filled night is over yet.

As it turns out, she is entirely correct. Even Haven can recognize the percussive roar of cannon-fire when she hears it. There's an awful crunching, splintering noise. The entire ship lurches suddenly, and chips of wood begin to rain down from above as the canvas of the sails folds and crumples. A few seconds later, another impact, and the deck begins to list beneath her.

Haven jumps like a startled cat. Looks around wildly, struggles to her feet. Her heart is in her throat, but she still does not understand what's happening. She saw the conjured crew of the Abyssal Gaze using crane equipment to move the Nightweaver's cannons across to their ship, so where is this damage coming from?

"Under attack," Whisper signs. And when Haven stares at her uncomprehendingly, she just points — across the dark, storm-tossed waters, through the drifting snow.

Towards the Kraken's ship, where its sails paint a blood-red pattern against the night.

Haven understands then, as Siggi begins barking orders to the crew and Nitha yells something about the Haste spell and a bottle. But her heart trips and stutters, one question swelling up to eclipse the rest. The details of why the Kraken betrayed them, and why now — they aren't important.

What she needs to know, so desperately that it feels like the question is carving its way out of her chest, is whether Klaus knew about it.

~

3. like a junkie tying off for the last time

Haven has cried so much in the last twenty-four hours that her eyes are sticky, her throat is parched, and she cannot breathe through her nose. Every time she thinks there are no tears left inside her, she thinks of something new the shipwreck has cost them, and her eyes well up again.

But before breakfast, before the seafloor search for their various possessions, Haven attends to the most important item that's missing — the former captain of the Abyssal Gaze.

From the unfamiliar surroundings of a cabin on the Nightweaver, she casts Sending, picturing Slark in her mind. His mottled skin, his webbed fin-like ears. The glittering diamond scars surrounding where his eyes once were, and the starry black orbs that replaced them.

The relief Haven feels when the Sending connects is like a rope snapping, tension evaporating into mist. She mumbles the words aloud as she thinks them.

"Are you okay?" she asks. "It's Haven. We couldn't find you."

The surge of distress at the memory scrambles her concentration, and she finds herself repeating, "Are you okay?"

It's all she can think to ask. If Slark's in trouble, he can tell her where he is and they can come find him. They can save him. She waits for a few seconds, then finishes with, "Love, Haven."

At least with Sending, the response is almost immediate. Slark's voice, nasal and as rapid-fire as his pistols, rings out inside her head.

"I'm okay! It seemed like things are getting pretty dangerous with you guys, so I think I'm gonna leave. Good luck with everything."

And that's it. Haven blinks a few times, lips parted in shock. It shouldn't surprise her — the day she met Slark, he told her that he was in Savnaer because, faced with a difficult conversation, he'd simply leapt off a pier and started swimming. He's even more flighty than Klaus, frequently choosing to vanish into the walls of the ship when combat erupts rather than stay and lend his gunfire to the fight. The idea that the Abyssal Gaze sinking — and therefore severing Slark's bond to the Shiplactery for good in the process — would cause Slark to panic and leave them is, unfortunately, wholly in-character for him.

It hurts anyway. Haven has known Slark for over a year, and shared a room with him for half that time. He was her first friend on Savnaer. She saved him from aliens, then debated a gatekeeper to call his soul back from beyond the Shell. They've faced Trihorn Behemoths and hyenas and aliens together, and Haven thought—

Haven thought he might have said goodbye. To her, if to nobody else. She'd thought their friendship was worth enough to him for that, at least, but it turns out she was wrong.

She's crying again, stomach muscles shuddering and shoulders shaking, but there are barely any tears to accompany the sobs. She just has nothing left to give.

~

4. like a child looking off on the horizon

The Nightweaver flees the harbor at full speed, sails snapping in the wind. Behind them, only half-visible behind the dark silhouette of the peninsula, the Disciple burns.

Haven watches from the sterncastle of the Nightweaver, clutching her Staff of Power close, because it seems like the right thing to do. Nothing else about what they've done to Bless and her crewmates felt right, and this is the best she can offer. To witness the destruction, to acknowledge it.

Haven only manages this vigil for a few moments, however, because Siggi quickly calls her over to the sails. She remembers why they came back to Farwater in the first place — they don't even have enough crew for her to remain at the railing and protect them. Setting her staff aside and shaking out her fingers, she stretches sore muscles and trips over to take her place on deck with the other Corsairs. Her arms and back haven't stopped hurting in the week and a half since the conjured crew liquefied into seawater. Keeping the Nightweaver moving requires everyone to pitch in, even pink tieflings who can barely hold a line taut without trembling.

The work is physically demanding, but only in intervals. Haven has altogether too much time to huddle on deck and be buffeted by the wind and the wet, driving rain, which combine to leave her freezing cold and even more thoroughly miserable. She can't stop replaying it all in her mind: the blue and red lanterns signaling for the Nightweaver to slow, the flurry of action to hide the illegal goods, the hasty conversation to agree on a story to tell.

They all knew why the Peaceguard was waiting at the mouth of the harbor, after all. The crew of the Nightweaver were returning to Farwater to reap the rewards of a sin they'd already committed weeks ago. They just hadn't counted on Bless and the other residents of Farwater putting the pieces together so quickly.

Haven hopes she never has to experience that awful feeling again — standing in front of Bless, drenched in sweat, stomach twisting with fear and guilt. Fever-hot tides of nausea and vertigo, piling up on top of each other and then crashing like waves on the shore. An echo of the feeling passes through her even remembering the moment, aftershocks following an earthquake, and she clenches her teeth until her jaw protests.

She couldn't lie to Bless, when the time came. Bless looked at her with those luminous green eyes and just — asked.

Haven, do you know what happened to Bessie?

Yeah, Haven said, shutting her eyes tight. I do.

At the time, Haven was solely concerned with getting Bless off the deck of the Nightweaver. Haven pleaded with her to stop, to let them leave, to stay away so Haven wouldn't have to hurt her. Yet no matter how many times Haven shoved her back onto the Disciple with Bigby's Hand, Bless kept leaping the gap and re-entering the fray, bruised and bleeding and relentless.

Haven was wholly focused on the delicate maneuver of keeping Bless alive. It would have been far easier to blow them all to hell with her magic, but that's always been true, hasn't it? Haven's an abjuration specialist for a reason — she flatly refuses to enact the indiscriminate violence that comes so easily to most wizards. Not against sentient creatures, and certainly not against someone she considered a friend. Bless was trying to die for Farwater, and Haven was just as incapable of allowing that as the day that they met.

But in that single-minded state, Haven didn't notice Nitha stealing the diamonds — or didn't realize the consequences. Haven torched the sails of the Disciple to stop pursuit, but never thought what that might mean for a port town already missing their monstrous defender.

It's far from the first time that Haven's been sideswiped by the unforeseen impact of her actions, but rarely has the impact been so widespread or so universally harmful. And she has never, not once, heard the kind of hatred that burns like wildfire through the Greater Sending that she establishes with Bless on the evening following the confrontation.

It was a mistake to befriend you, Bless says through the Sending, and I don't trust your word, or your crew.

Haven can't find the words to refute her. She isn't even sure that Bless is wrong.

We've made the decision to abandon Farwater, Bless says.

There are a thousand excuses and apologies that seethe on Haven's tongue, but in the end she shares none of them. She has already witnessed the tempered-steel strength of Bless' convictions.

What has been broken is already damaged beyond repair.

~

5. like a son that was raised without a father

Haven's conversation with Bless hurts worse than the time Haven got chewed up by giant hyenas, but when it's over, she swallows the heartache and casts Greater Sending again. She reaches out one golden thread of magic, seeking the brightest soul she's ever encountered. She holds his image in her mind's eye — his poncho from Pentibor, the shaggy mop of his hair growing too long, and that faint blush that always seems to dust his cheekbones.

Haven is seeking answers — she can rationalize Slark's abrupt departure, as painful as it has been for her, but Zeremy? He started teaching her Celestial only a few days ago, and he wants to explore the world. The garbled explanation that Nitha gave the crew on his behalf just doesn't make sense. There must be something that Haven is missing.

This conversation lasts twice as long as the one with Bless did — Haven has to burn through the entire day's reserve of her high-level magic to keep fueling the spell that connects them. And Zeremy assures her that he doesn't hate her or the crew, which should comfort her, but it doesn't.

Zeremy, formerly the Zenith of Tillnette Isle, still beloved of Vrent, cares most of all about the truth. And he tells Haven in no uncertain terms that the truth and the Corsairs are incompatible.

I realized, he says, that I had to choose between my god and my friends.

Bless' hostility has scorched Haven, has left her raw and open and stinging with humiliation. Zeremy's disapproval passes through her flesh entirely, exposing the darkest parts of her to an unflinching, unforgiving radiance. And even as she burns, Haven finds herself sick with jealousy. She wishes she possessed even a shred of Zeremy's confidence, or at least his conviction in the path forward.

What does it mean if someone that holy can't stay with this ship, despite knowing their mission and how little time is left to accomplish it? Haven has convinced herself so many times that she needs these people with her to save the world — that despite their lies and thousand little cruelties, she is stronger when she is with them. She loves her friends, even knowing how much blood is on their hands. Even when traveling with them bloodies her hands too, more vivid and indelible with every day that passes.

In the last minute that the Greater Sending grants her, Haven whispers to Zeremy her hopes for his happiness. Doubt in her own decisions mantles darkly above her like dragon wings, like thunder. There is silence in the room after the Sending, and she stares unseeingly into the corners without any expectation that the shadows will yield the solace she seeks.

She knows what she could have done differently — has scrawled it in ink-splattered words across countless pages of her notebook as some form of self-punishment, as if repetition alone can atone for her mistakes. The past cannot be altered, but that doesn't blunt the sharp edge to her sorrow, or season the bitterness that fills her mouth like blood.

Later, on the map in the captain's quarters, Haven traces a line from Coalition Cove to Tillnette Isle, from Tillnette to Veville, and from Veville to Farwater. Her fingers are shaking, but the path of destruction is all too clear. When she closes her eyes, she can see the scenes overlapping on the canvas of her eyelids.

The fleet burning in Coalition Cove, masts and sails ablaze as Peaceguard and priests lie slaughtered on the shore nearby.

An airship and its crew consumed in an explosion of blue light, all because Haven agreed to lend her magic to someone she should have known better than to trust.

A child kidnapped from Tillnette Isle, an entire community left in darkness without its sun-blessed figurehead.

The rumors of a prison break in Veville, gang violence surging and civilians caught in the deadly crossfire.

Most recently, Farwater. Families scraping together their possessions and leaving behind what they cannot carry. Bless, teeth bared and shield gleaming, leading them into the wilds of Benatia.

There is good that Haven has done — she can even call to mind some of the details, like the defeat of Xatroch in the Shadowfell and the exorcism of her brother. But right now, the rest of it eats at her with serrated teeth, and Zeremy's departure is one more loss piling up. One more crack widening in Haven's fractured heart.

The Corsairs might have kidnapped Zeremy, but it also brought him the freedom he'd only dreamed of. They gave him a new name and brought him to new continents, but it seems that wasn't enough.

Haven isn't enough.

~

6. like a mother barely keeping it together

Magical Darkness boils up from beneath the deck, and from the shadow-smothered hatch in the floor emerges a midnight-blue tiefling. Haven's first instinct is relief, but her stomach plummets a second later as she remembers Whisper's warning. She curls her fingers tighter around her Staff of Power, breathing shallowly.

Haven wishes she could be unilaterally glad to see Siggi, because it's only Haven and Whisper on deck right now — Klaus is entirely absent, in a way that actually concerns her, and after a few minutes of muffled screaming from beneath the floorboards, it seems Nitha's voice has given out entirely. Jaeldirra is working against the crew, possessed by a rabid fervency that is not their own, and Haven and Whisper by themselves may not be enough. 

The howling void that parts the stars above the ship has broken the minds of the crew as easily as it broke the Shell itself. And Haven was slow to acknowledge the spreading fissures through her own her heart, her trust, her hope in the world. But she has learned her lesson by now. So she doesn't step towards Siggi, doesn't smile. Doesn't take her eyes off of him, even as Jaeldirra gurgles something incoherent from the ocean on the starboard side of the ship.

Siggi waves one hand in a lazy gesture, banishing the Darkness, and climbs out onto the deck. His ascent is hampered by the sword in his hand, which gleams like glass and measures easily six feet long.

The sight of it confirms all of Haven's worst suspicions. She asks anyway.

"Siggi, what did you do?"

Siggi smiles, looking down at the blade. Haven's not good at reading people, but something in Siggi's expression makes her skin crawl. It's not as obviously, abhorrently wrong as Jaeldirra's current insanity, but it's terrifying nevertheless.

"I have this now," Siggi says slowly. He looks at her, his gaze curiously vacant. His tone is all vague surprise on the surface, but there's an undercurrent of satisfaction running beneath it.

"Where's Lastiar?" Haven asks. She asks it slowly, nausea already roiling in her gut because she knows the answer to this question too.

"Downstairs," Siggi says.

His reply is smooth and instantaneous — simple enough when it reveals nothing important. The cuffs of his shirt are dyed crimson, but his gait is loose and even as he strolls across the deck towards Haven. He is casual, uninjured and intact. That's what fills in the remaining details for Haven — those stains on Siggi's shirt aren't his own blood.

Even as Haven processes this, Whisper has already taken a step, placing herself between Haven and Siggi as he approaches. Whatever Whisper has already seen belowdecks was enough for her to condemn Siggi, it would appear. Haven recognizes the iron hardness in Whisper's posture — instant and unyielding protective instinct. A choice to defend. It is the way Whisper faces her enemies.

Haven looks away. Moves to the railing again, even though each step feels like wading through mud. She is so tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally.

Jaeldirra is swimming back towards the Nightweaver, if it can be called swimming — an odd, disconnected movement that involves flickering closer by several feet at a time, disappearing between one clumsy stroke and the next.

Whisper's hand closes on Haven's elbow. A surge of warmth, of healing and strength. Something unspoken must pass between Whisper and Siggi behind Haven's back, because Siggi speaks again.

"I love Haven," Siggi says, higher-pitched. True surprise in his voice. "I would never hurt her."

Haven curls her hand into a fist, summoning Bigby's Hand to smack Jaeldirra, and wishes she could still believe him. He hasn't attacked her yet, though, so she says, "I can stop JD. I just need someone to hold them still."

"On it," Siggi says promptly. He takes a few quick steps to the railing and dives overboard in one graceful motion. He disappears into the dark waters with barely a ripple, resurfacing only to strike out towards Jaeldirra with Presvyre, and Haven has just enough time to think — wait, isn't Jaeldirra an elf? Won't Presvyre object?

A wave submerges both of them before Haven can judge the result. She blinks and squints against the salt-spray, lifting her hand in preparation for another push with Bigby's Hand. It is only Jaeldirra who comes back up, and it sends a shock of terror twisting through her throat, so she responds with a shock of her own — golden lightning crackling out from her staff, racing across the water towards them.

It's not the first time Haven's caught Siggi in one of her Lightning Bolts — it's not even the third or fourth time — but she worries anyway as the seconds pass and there's still no sign of Siggi. He has disappeared into the depths, and she and Whisper are alone again against Jaeldirra.

Except — there's someone else behind her on the deck, dripping seawater. Haven spins around, fearing another threat, and cannot quite bring herself to relax when she meets a familiar set of lime-green eyes.

"What now?" she asks, heavy with dread.

Klaus looks down, nocking an arrow to his bowstring with slow, methodical precision. "The sky," he says after a moment, "is really scary."

Well, Haven can't argue with that. Klaus does look afraid, wild-eyed with some emotion that seems different than his usual paranoia. It is less controlled, more unsettling — but it isn't that different. He is here with Haven. He vanished, but he came back, like he always does. Haven almost smiles.

But then Klaus stiffens, staring hard at the weather-scarred boards of the deck. "They're belowdecks," he says, low and urgent. "Heading for the stairs."

Haven calls her Hand to her side. It swivels to place itself in between her and the stairs, coloring her vision in a shimmering, translucent pink. When she looks up again, Klaus is gone, but that doesn't surprise her. Hopefully he is hiding away to help her, not merely to hide, but she'll find out soon enough.

It ends like this: 

Jaeldirra slithers up the stairs and pushes through Bigby's Hand, which shouldn't be possible. Then they phase partially into Haven, which really shouldn't be possible, and tangle their grasping fingers into her hair. They force her head back, even as she gasps and struggles, and the sight of the sky above drills into her. Encompasses her. Obliterates her entire being. 

Haven gapes as the stars dance above her. Only for a few seconds, before she wrenches herself back to reality, but it is enough. Jaeldirra passes a hand through her flesh again, and Haven's knees give out.

As she crumples, she summons her Hellish Rebuke — a last act of futile desperation, because her tiefling flames have never burned very bright, but it's all she can think of. The fire is only a few flickers of gold in the darkness. Not enough. 

Her staff clanks to the deck, rolling away as she loses control of her limbs.

The last thing Haven remembers is the hiss of an arrow above her head, passing directly between the prongs of her antlers. A masterful shot, but Haven would expect nothing less.

She sinks into unconsciousness hoping Klaus can finish what she could not. 

~

7. like a soldier coming home for the first time

Haven comes to in the medical bay of the Nightweaver, splayed out on one of the cots. She keeps her eyes closed for a few minutes after she wakes, in a meager attempt to ward off the headache that has her skull in a vice grip, but eventually she acknowledges the futility of the act. She rolls over, opens her eyes, faces the world.

The world turns out to be Whisper, Nitha and Klaus at the moment. Whisper is lying motionless on the cot next to Haven, and she waits for a few trembling seconds — but yes, Whisper is still breathing. Nitha huddles on a stool in the corner, resembling nothing so much as a ragged bundle of red and white feathers. Her good eye tracks Haven as Haven sits up, but when she cracks her jaw open, only a wheezing rasp comes out. 

It takes another few moments to find Klaus — even in this small, crowded room, Haven’s attention skips right over him at first. He is making no effort to hide, but he simply blends in with the teetering piles of supplies in his corner, possibly by pure instinct. He has something in his hands that he is fiddling with, fingers moving rapidly.

“How are you feeling?” Klaus asks without looking up.

Haven considers the question for longer than it truly merits. She presses the heels of her palms against her eyes, applying grinding pressure until her vision bursts with sparkling swirls of colored light.

"My head hurts," is all that she says out loud.

It is hardly the only part of her that is wounded. Whatever Jaeldirra did to her left deep bruises that throb with pain, and they are layered over several weeks' worth of other combat injuries. Her heart keeps its unsteady rhythm in her chest, but even that is conditional, held captive by the amulet around her neck. Any other words she might say have withered in her throat, stifled by her deepening misery.

Klaus doesn't reply, though, and Nitha still cannot speak, so they sit in silence for a minute or two — just the three of them and an unconscious Whisper. Haven dredges up a flickering wisp of curiosity, some fading echo of a sense of responsibility.

“How long have I been out?” she asks.

Klaus does meet her eyes now, gaze steady. “About an hour.”

Glancing at Whisper, Haven recovers a blurry memory of Jaeldirra attacking Whisper the same way they attacked Haven. Of Whisper hitting the deck shortly before Haven did. And if the ship’s only cleric is still unconscious, then that means…

Haven swallows, hard, and forces out the next question. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Jaeldirra left. Siggi hasn’t come back. Lastiar’s dead.”

Klaus sounds so calm about it, so matter-of-fact. Even about Jaeldirra, whom Haven thought he genuinely liked. Haven buries her face in her hands again. Quite independent of her intentions, her brain whirs into motion again, churning out her usual iterative lists of options: spells to cast that might help, clarifying questions to ask, people to check up on after the immediate crises are resolved one way or another.

She doesn’t reach for her notebook, though, or a scrap of parchment. She just lets the thoughts ricochet off the inside of her battered skull, splintering into pieces and disappearing again when she does not focus on them or transcribe them as is her usual habit. She’ll reach for them later, and probably only be able to come up with half the checklist, and hate herself a little for being unable to remember.

Instead, Haven thinks: there have always been words clouding the air between herself and Jaeldirra. It is rare that Haven finds herself so frustrated by language, because it’s usually one of her greatest tools. But the slippery consonants of Undercommon continue to elude her, and she never found a way in any language to reassure Jaeldirra, despite her repeated attempts.

When the Abyssal Gaze first sets sail from Veville, even Haven could see Jaeldirra's misery. And she wanted to help, of course, if she could. They were both children of Povrunei, though Haven was raised on the sunny surface and Jaeldirra in the unforgiving depths of the Underdark. So Haven shared some of the convoluted tangle of logic and emotions she has constructed through intense consideration over the past couple years. Magic and its morality are topics she ponders frequently — which is apparently unusual behavior for a wizard, but that's not the point. 

The point, which she tried somewhat incoherently to explain to Jaeldirra, is that power on its own isn't inherently evil. That using magic to save people isn't wrong just because other people have used that same magic to cause harm. Jaeldirra listened to her explanation, watching her in thoughtful silence, but Haven doesn't think she made them feel any better.

Later, she offered to teach Jaeldirra arcane magic, which they refused — of course they did. Haven only wanted to offer another option, one that didn't require worshipping a god of deception and pain, but it was probably tactless. Another clumsy reminder of Jaeldirra's rejection from the Unwoven.

Haven's request, then, to learn Undercommon from Jaeldirra, was made as politely and unobtrusively as she could manage. She tried her hardest to adhere to to Jaeldirra's rigid curriculum and strict lecturing style — Jaeldirra, normally level-headed and almost as quiet as Whisper, was brisk and unforgiving as a teacher, right up until Haven broke down crying during one of their lessons. After several earnest apologies on both sides, the two of them reached a workable compromise. Haven was making rapid progress, too, and estimated she'd only need a few more weeks to attain reasonable fluency. She planned to have another conversation with Jaeldirra about magic, maybe in Undercommon this time, when—

The sky split open.

Something monstrous took up residence in Jaeldirra's body.

The rest of the Corsairs also descended into various levels of insanity, and Haven was left standing alone on deck, trying to stop Jaeldirra's rampage without killing them.

Haven wishes now, here in the medbay, that she had been more ruthless. The crew could have brought Jaeldirra back from death, but cannot rescue them from the all-devouring obliteration that awaits them beyond the Shell. In trying to save Jaeldirra, she has damned them to a fate that is even worse.

Despite all that time Haven spent with Jaeldirra, she never really connected with them. It was only Klaus who seemed to see the world in a way they understood, who could speak to that restless uncertainty at the core of them.

Haven chooses her third question carefully. She’s watching Klaus’ expression, but she also knows he could easily hide his emotions from her even if he did feel something.

“What do you mean by ‘left,’ exactly?”

Klaus blinks. His voice is very level when he says, “They sort of… turned into spaghetti. And went up into the sky.”

“Oh,” Haven says. “Um.”

She thinks about that — what kind of spell it might have been, and how it correlates with the rest of the strange new abilities Jaeldirra developed in the short minutes before their ascension. It explains why Klaus couldn’t stop them, at least — he can obliterate any mage that sticks around long enough to fight him, but his arrows can’t counter teleportation spells. Only Haven or Siggi can do that, and they had both already been eliminated from the fight.

“They said something about Sty’ryk,” Klaus adds, helpfully. “That they were returning to it.”

Haven scours her memory. The word doesn’t spark any kind of recognition, but maybe there’s something in her notes. Then again, since it’s probably a place or entity beyond the Shell, her chances aren’t good.

From the hammock, Nitha makes a kind of creaking noise. Her eye is wide, but her voice is still too ruined to form words. Maybe she knows more than Haven does — it will have to wait until she’s recovered from the special brand of insanity the sky awarded her.

Haven makes ready to stand up, reaching out with one hand. She hesitates.

One last question, then — an important one. “Where’s my staff?”

The silence stretches a little too long before Klaus replies. Haven’s already sinking back to the cot, strength draining from her limbs, as Klaus says, “JD took it with them. As a gift.”

She doesn’t cry. She can feel her dismay in her chest and throat, thick as smoke and sharp as broken glass, but it only gathers there, dense and aching, without breaking open or spilling out.

“I can cast Gentle Repose on Lastiar’s body,” Haven says dully, falling back on those mental lists. “And, um, I’ll Send to Siggi, I guess. To see if he’s okay.” After a moment, she glances at Klaus, then Nitha. “Are you guys okay?”

Nitha can’t answer, and settles for an eloquent shrug. Klaus looks away. There is a strange sadness in his expression, a vulnerability that looks entirely unfamiliar on him.

“I want to go home,” he says softly, “but I don’t know where home is.”

Haven doesn’t know what to say to that — she can count the number of times on one hand that she's tried to offer advice to Klaus, rather than the other way around. It is a conversation that will have to wait for later.

Instead of speaking, she unwinds what's left of her bun, yanking her wand from the tangled mess. Her hair tumbles down around her and spills across her shoulders, down her back. She stares at the wand, readjusting to the feel of its wood in her hand, and bites her lip as she fights again against the burgeoning cascade of tears.

The Staff of Power was more than a lucky find — it was a trophy she and her friends had to defend over and over again, at the cost of two of their lives. Haven only took it originally because she wanted to keep it from Ally, but it has become her most powerful tool to keep them all safe. Not that Haven's done a very good job of that, recently. But now it is gone, along with Jaeldirra, to a place Haven could not follow even with twice the power she currently wields.

Haven tries to summon up optimism from a well that is rapidly running dry. There is no way to make this latest crisis more bearable, but the rest of it — she can still try. She has to, or risk losing her mind completely.

Half of her friends might have left her, but at least most of them are still on this plane of existence. And healthy and safe, as far as she knows. Klaus is still here with the Corsairs, and not with the Kraken, despite the memories that haunt him on the Nightweaver long after the more literal ghosts have been vanquished. And at least the Corsairs recovered most of their possessions from the wreck of the Abyssal Gaze, and were able to commandeer the Nightweaver.

At least they have a ship, and some of their crew.

But as Haven looks around this small, cluttered room, it all seems like slim comfort indeed.

[seadeepywrites]

stardust in the wind

Character: Reed Menetia (NPC) Words: 2415 tw: death, grief

After all these years, Reed recognizes her goddess’ influence in her dreams. When she opens her eyes to find herself standing in an endless field, twilight settling like indigo silk across a vast expanse of sky — she merely smiles. 

It is warm here, and the wind whispers across her skin with a familiar gentle touch. Reed tucks her hands inside the sleeves of her robe, noting with some amusement that it is the long green outfit she wears on ceremonial occasions. It is stitched along the hem with intricate golden embroidery, and it is one of her finest possessions. 

“This must be important,” she says to the sky, to the grass, to the breeze. “Last time I dreamt like this, you had me still in my sleep shirt.”

Melora doesn’t answer her directly, which isn’t terribly surprising. Reed can be patient. She closes her eyes, enjoying the balmy weather, and trusts in her goddess to make clear the reason for this vision eventually. 

In a minute, or an hour, or perhaps no time at all, Reed becomes aware that there is someone standing in front of her. It feels the same as entering a room with a sleeping patient, knowing their presence in the way it changes the silence, rather than hearing anything in particular. 

When she opens her eyes again, Reed is looking at the face of a friend. 

“Oh,” she says softly. Not because she isn’t glad to see them, but because she hasn’t the faintest idea what their presence in her dream might mean.

Whist smiles slightly, tilting their head in a quizzical gesture.

“It’s nice to see you,” Reed says, a bit hastily. “I just — didn’t expect you here.”

Whist might love the forest with the same ardor that Reed does — albeit in a more practical, less mystical way — but they have never seemed to Reed like a dedicated devotee of the divine. If they are here, it suggests a new and unexpected chapter in the story of Reed’s and Whist’s hometown. 

Whist looks around. “Uh,” they say. “Where is ‘here,’ exactly?”

Tipping her head back, Reed gazes at the sky. There is no sun, only wisps of clouds that streak pale over the purple expanse. 

“It’s a dream-place. We’re dreaming.”

"You might be dreaming," Whist says with a shrug. "I don't think that I am."

"And why is that?" Reed says, curious.

In the exact same casual tone, Whist says, "Because I'm dead."

Reed stares at them for a moment, dismay catching in her throat. "What?"

"I'm dead," Whist repeats without affect. "We went to find Darcy, but then the guy that probably kidnapped her showed up with a bunch of people, and they killed me." 

Reed wishes, for a few desperate seconds, that she weren't so sure of the truth of this vision. It would have been easier to believe this a nightmare, the inane imaginings of a sleeping mind.

"I think they got Gravel too," Whist adds as an afterthought. "Though I couldn't really see too well at that point."

"I'll..." Reed swallows hard. "I'll tell your father for you. Whist... I'm so sorry."

"I don't know why you're apologizing. You're not the one who killed me."

That brings a smile to Reed's face, even amid the devastation that drums its thunderous rhythm on her breastbone. It really is a very Whist-like thing to say.

"It just means I'm sad to hear that," Reed says. Tries to fill her voice to the brim with warmth, like offering a steaming mug of tea. "You're a friend of mine, and it hurts to think that I'll never see you again."

"Yeah. All right." Whist gnaws at their lip with their sharp little teeth. "I get that, I think." They pause. "I thought being dead meant going to the afterlife, or not being anywhere anymore, or something. So why am I here? In your dream?"

"Maybe Melora has a purpose for you still," Reed says, with a faint but non-negligible trace of hope. "Maybe it's not the end for you yet."

"Hmm." Whist does not sound convinced.

"May I give you a hug?"

"Uh, sure."

Reed steps forward, half-expecting Whist to pass like fog through her embrace. Whist does not accept hugs very often — a preference that stems from their general dislike of being touched — but it does happen occasionally, and in her dream, hugging Whist feels exactly the same as Reed remembers. Their leather armor creaks as she squeezes them, and the lithe lines of their body are solid and reassuring. They even hug back, a little stiffly.

When Reed withdraws, she uses the sleeve of her fancy robe to wipe away a few tears. Her throat aches with the dull agony of oncoming grief, and all her limbs are heavy as lead. She takes a few deep breaths, trying to savor the sweet summer scent that hangs in the air, hoping that she can inhale enough of it to erode the stone-heavy heart in her chest.

Is it Reed's imagination, or has the twilit sky darkened by a few shades? She had thought of it as a serene and dusky blue earlier, but now it more closely resembles the violet of a deep bruise. Almost the color of Whist's skin, actually. Reed stares upwards, wondering if night is approaching here the way it would in the waking world, even with no sun to slip below the horizon.

In the darkest part of the sky, a scatter of stars catches her eye. They twinkle like a handful of crushed diamonds, silvery and scintillating, or like tiny flecks of white paint on purple canvas.

Or, Reed realizes, like the opalescent freckles sprinkled across the bridge of Whist's nose and cheekbones. She looks sharply at Whist, the specter of suspicion starting to coalesce inside her.

"What?" Whist asks. "What is it?"

With no pupils or irises, Whist's pearl-white eyes resemble nothing so much as two fragments of the waxing moon — Reed has idly considered this thought many times over the years. Now she can only watch, half-hypnotized, as their sheen brightens into a steady glow. The light beaming from Whist's eyes is very much like moonlight, in the sense that it shines without illuminating. Gleams without blinding the viewer.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Reed doesn't know what to say. Under her care, Whist had regularly cast Cure Wounds on their broken leg, in an attempt to ease the pain and speed along the healing process. In other words, Reed knows what Whist's magic looks like — a purple shimmer that glints like sunlight on satin as it ripples down their arms and out through their hands.

Reed knows what Whist's magic looks like, and this isn't it.

She says, "Do you feel any different? Right now, at this exact moment?"

Whist blinks, the twin bits of moon winking out for a fraction of a second. "Uh, I'm dead. And hanging out in someone else's dream. I don't really know what that's supposed to feel like."

Reed steps towards them, intending to examine Whist's face more closely, but the vibration that thrums through her renders that inspection unnecessary. Entering into Whist's personal space is like a boulder crumbling to join a landslide — like Whist is one of those celestial bodies that Darcy's always talking about, and Reed has fallen into elliptical orbit around them. It's magic that moves the breath through Reed's lungs in this moment and pulls at her muscles, shaping her like clay. More importantly, the hand crafting it is one she recognizes.

Reed gasps as the sensation crests inside her, foaming like the long arch of an ocean wave. As it breaks, she stumbles, only distantly registering the strong hands that catch at her elbow and her shoulder to steady her.

"I get it," Reed says indistinctly. "Whist, I get it now."

"I think you should probably sit down." Whist's face swims into view in front of Reed, wavering through several feet of rippling water. "You're, uh, not making any sense."

"No, I'm..." Reed trails off, gripping Whist's forearm with all her strength. "She brought you here. She's... given..."

"Reed? Come on, get it together."

Whist gives Reed a little shake, which is surprisingly helpful in slowing the way this dream-world spins around her. Reed straightens up, standing on her own two feet, and Whist snaps back into focus. Their eyes and their freckles still glow as brightly as miniature comets, leaving white streaks across Reed's vision.

"That's better," Whist says. "I don't think you should die until I've had a chance to scout out the situation a little bit first. So you'll know what to expect."

Chuckling weakly, Reed folds her hands back into her robes and regains her previous composure. Whist floats nearby, much closer than convention dictates platonic friends should stand, but it's difficult to be too concerned about something like that, considering the circumstances.

"I appreciate it," Reed says. "That's very thoughtful of you."

Whist shrugs.

The air has cooled somewhat, and the buzzing of insects heralds oncoming evening. It is a peculiar sound — loud enough to be noticeable, but muted such that she cannot pick out any one chirp from the cacophony. More the idea of what insects should sound like than any particular bug's melody. The oddity of it tips the corner of Reed’s mouth up in a half-smile.

“I know why you’re here,” she tells Whist, then pauses. “But there’s no guarantee that either of us are going to remember this conversation. You know how dreams can come and go.”

“I can’t remember much of anything right now,” Whist says. “Because I’m—”

“I know.” Reed’s smile grows wider, warmer. “But I have a feeling that might not be true for much longer.”

Whist squints at her. "What do you mean?"

Reed takes a moment to answer them, considering her words carefully. "You know how you can feel a storm coming, sometimes? Everything goes still and the air gets all heavy?"

"Yes."

"It's like that. Something's coming, and the world around us is shifting."

"But is the something good or bad?" Whist asks with a frown.

"There are many things that are neither," Reed says. "I only know that for your piece in it... any chance you might have to walk this plane again... I hope you take it. Because I greatly prefer a world with you in it."

"Oh. Thank you."

Reed looks to the sky again, apprehensive about the dusk approaching even when she knows she shouldn't be. Night, after all, is only a different flavor of Melora's domain — all the crepuscular and nocturnal creatures that lurk under cover of darkness belong to her too, as do their various murky and mysterious affairs. Reed wonders if perhaps her anxiety is a side effect of living her life at the border of the Duskwood, where twilight signifies imminent danger, as well as fey mischief that can be malicious as often as it is harmless.

"It's okay," Whist says, touching Reed's elbow again. "If there's anything else here, I'll protect you."

Whist's other hand goes to their hip, where their quiver is normally strapped. Reed is absolutely certain that when Whist appeared here, they did so unarmed. Yet in this moment, Whist's fingers brush against a forest of feathered arrow-shafts. When they take their hand from Reed's elbow, they are holding the dark, smooth wood of an intricately carved longbow. It fits in their grip like a tree trunk wrapped in vines — symbiotic and perfectly, breathtakingly natural.

"I know you will," Reed says gently. She moves to stand just behind Whist's shoulder, so that their faces are both turned towards the shadows that stain the underbelly of the sky. 

"Is it weird," Whist asks, "that I died like my mom did, fighting things that came out of the Duskwood, but I'm not even a little afraid?"

"I don't think it's weird at all."

"Or maybe I am afraid, but..." Whist shrugs. "I'm going to do whatever I can. And either that will be good enough, or it won't be."

Reed would take Whist's hand, but they need it for their longbow — and they have never been as tactile as Reed is, and might dislike the gesture.

Instead, Reed draws in another lungful of imaginary air and murmurs, "May the gods bless you and your bravery, Whist Duskhunter. We need more people like you."

Whist doesn't smile, but they blink their pearly eyes at her in a manner reminiscent of a cat's sleepy affection, and Reed gets the idea.

The daylight is fleeing this dream-field now with exceptional speed, tugging the smothering blanket of twilight into the places it vacates. Whist is loose-limbed and alert, pivoting slowly as they search for the danger that chitters in the corners of awareness.

Perhaps Whist's confidence is contagious. All Reed can think, as darkness claims the two of them, is that she hopes she remembers what she's learned here: both the loss, and the hope that's tempered it.

***

Reed awakes wildly disoriented. The black-velvet night that swallowed down the last dregs of her dream was so vivid, yet it is pale dawn light that filters through her gauzy curtains and splashes specks of sunlight across the floorboards. She sits up in bed, the quilt tangled around her, and scrubs at her eyes until her vision scintillates in patterns of red and blue.

She remembers a field, and the presence of a friend. The rest is already fading, in the intangible way that dreams always do — but even as the details escape her grasp, Reed retains the impression that she has witnessed something important. She might not be able to explain the exact origin of the bruising sadness that pools in her abdomen, but she believes it nonetheless. She might not understand why the sight of her green robe hanging on its hook in the corner suddenly provokes in her the burgeoning weight of responsibility, but it does.

After all these years, Reed knows that her goddess will guide her in ineffable ways along mysterious paths, and all she has to do is relax and pay close attention. Reed will remember what she needs to remember when the time comes, and until then?

She sets her bare feet on the floor and she stands up. She washes, and dresses, and goes forth to serve the town of Graycott.

Her grief once had a name, and now it doesn't, but it will again. Reed can be patient.

[seadeepywrites]

Part Two

Character: Haven Vasselon Words: 1888 tw: blood, wound care

The cool glassy surface of a plane beyond the Shell stretches out in every direction to an indifferent horizon. Haven sits at the center of her Leomund's Tiny Hut and tries to stay positive.

One: She is alive, and she has stayed alive long enough to bring up the Hut around her — neither of those were a guarantee when she was wrenched unwillingly from the only reality she's ever known.

Two: The creature that appeared, bearing brilliant light beneath its feet, was simply a friendly gnome from Kyndra and not a monster intending her harm. Haven aches to follow him, and find out where he went after the color suffusing him faded away, but blood is still leaking in sticky, clotting patches through her clothing. His fate will remain a mystery — although Haven knows what it usually takes for mortal souls to pass beyond the Shell, and it doesn't bode well for his life back on Thiuhm.

Three: Haven has time now, sitting in this Hut, to bind her wounds and attune to the Amulet of the Planes. The Amulet is shining serendipity, a treasure looted from the caves below Veville that may now hold her only hope for returning to her party and her ship.

So even though the world around her is starting to tilt and spin — and Haven's pretty sure that's just blood loss, not some new quality of this plane — things could be a whole lot worse. Haven digs in her backpack and fishes out the amulet, which is wrapped carefully and buried below most of her other possessions as insurance against pickpocketing. She slips the chain over her head, struggling for a moment as it tangles with her antlers, and touches the strange, spiky metal of the amulet itself.

It is cold to the touch, which she expects. What she doesn't expect is the strange pulse of heat that suffuses it for a few seconds, bringing it from icy to warm against her skin. It cools again, then pulses hot again. Cold again, hot again. The rhythm is almost consistent, but not quite.

"Huh," Haven says out loud.

Bundling the Rod of Absorption away into her pack and removing the few medical supplies she has, Haven makes an effort to bandage and salve her various cuts and bruises. Her ministrations are clumsy at best and incompetent at worst — Whisper and Klaus are usually around, and both of them are better than she is at this, but she's not going to bleed out here. 

The thought of her loved ones reminds Haven, with a dull throb of misery that goes far deeper than any injury, of what she intends to do next.

Moving slowly and tenderly, Haven rummages for a sheet of parchment and a pen. She flexes the fingers of her writing hand a few times, though they are no more stiff than the rest of her. Absently, she notices she has begun to shiver, and raises the temperature of the interior of the Hut by a few degrees.

And then she places the gleaming tip of the pen to the parchment and tries to marshal her whirling thoughts into some sort of coherent language. She swallows, tears trembling on the end of her lashes, and she writes:

Klaus,

It's not that I wish you'd never met the Kraken. Obviously if you hadn't he probably would have just killed us all when we first met him, and also I wouldn't want to take away such an important person from your life. I remember we already talked about this a little, but I know that I'm very different than I would have been without meeting you all, and I wouldn't want to ever assume that I know what's healthy for you—

She crosses out the last part of the sentence, and tries again.

I wouldn't want to ever assume that I know everything about what people should do in their own lives. It's kind of the exact opposite, really. You're a lot smarter than I am when it comes to making good decisions, and staying alive, and I don't think that I thank you enough for it. We all know that we'd be dead a dozen times over if you weren't around, but me especially.

I've spent a lot of this letter so far writing about what I'm not saying, and maybe if I do that enough I'll be able to figure out what it is that I am trying to say. My point is that my personal feelings about the Kraken don't matter, but we do. Your crew matters.

Haven hesitates for a few long seconds, looking at the word "your." Eventually, she leaves it as she wrote it, but the tears begin to slip down her face without a sound, leaving dark spots on the parchment and blurring the ink.

I should have known back in Tillnete, she writes, then crosses it out furiously. The pen rips through the parchment, and she makes a small noise of frustration deep in her throat.

The Kraken is not a good person, but you know that already. That kind of thing is important to me, but like I said — that's not what matters here. The part I don't understand and maybe won't ever understand is that we also all know that you can't trust him.

Haven strikes out the entirety of that sentence. She replaces it with, What does matter is that he's proven twice now that he'll hurt us even when we try to play by his rules. Even when you try to talk him out of it — and I do believe that you tried.

Memory swirls up, and Haven's fingers twitch with the echoes of a thin gold ray of arcane power.

I know you'll be alive to read this when I get back, she writes. I can only hope the rest of the crew is as well.

The next part requires more thought. Haven touches her hand to her face as she deliberates, realizing only after she lowers the pen again that she's smeared black ink across her lower lip and the curve of her chin. She swallows hard when she touches pen to parchment, but she's stopped crying. Her hand is steady as she begins writing again, her handwriting clear and even.

It's my job to protect our crew. You keep us safe too in so many ways, with your caution and your arrows from nowhere, and as long as you're traveling with us I will try my hardest to make sure you're happy. You're my friend, Klaus Graves. I care about you so much I can't even write it all in words.

For the safety of our crew and our ship, we can't work with the Kraken anymore. It seems obvious when I put it like that, after what just happened, but when he broke his word in Tillnete Isle we let you talk us into meeting him again. And look where I ended up. Look what happened to Whisper.

Haven scribbles over that last part, because it's not entirely fair. Her sense of justice would have sent her chasing after the Nightweaver anyway, and the Munafik's cannons are the only reason the Nightweaver didn't disappear into the night as abruptly as it arrived. But Haven can feel her heart beating in her fingertips, because she's getting at a larger truth here, and it scares her senseless.

I won't make you pick between us, she writes, and doesn't add that it's because she suspects she knows the answer Klaus would give.

I won't give you any advice on your relationship with him. But I will say, in this letter, before you give me a hundred practical reasons why it just makes sense to forgive him, that you can't play both sides. Not even in the short term, before the world ends. You have some sort of decision to make, before someone you care about gets hurt in a way you can't save them from.

I've made my own decision about this, Haven writes, fingers pressed so hard against the pen that it leaves indents. Whisper says a lot that we can't change how other people act, only how we respond to them. So this is just my opinion I'm sharing with you, because you've helped me so much in the time I've known you. It seems so long to me and so brief to you, but I hope you'll at least take the time to consider what I've said. I'm pretty sure that even people with really long lifespans can still change things to make themselves happier. But I guess that part is up to you.

Love,

Haven

Signing the letter with a flourish, Haven caps the pen and sets it aside before blowing gently over the ink to dry it. In the soft golden light of the Hut, the letter looks as messy as she feels. There are dents and blots where she crossed out sentences, and her tears have diffused some of the words into indistinct, feathery patches. Haven considers copying the letter onto a cleaner sheet of parchment for a few moments, but eventually decides against it. She wants to be honest with Klaus, and this is as honest as she can get.

The Amulet of the Planes is still cycling between hot and cold, but Haven recognizes the rhythm now. It has slowed and aligned to match her pulse. Perfectly in sync, almost eerily so. She wraps her fingers around the amulet, holding it close like the lifeline that it is, and breathes deeply. Tilts her chin up. Some of the uncertainty that has churned inside her for months is settling, channeled through her pen and out into the world at large. The view is beautiful here on this unknown plane, and even the oddities she's encountered so far are beautifully unique and unexpected. She wishes she could explore further, but what matters right now is staying alive long enough to return to the Material Plane — to return home, whatever that might mean.

In the space her uncertainty leaves behind, a twisting vine of sorrow begins to put down roots. She can admit it now, in this silence: the Kraken's betrayal has chipped away at her faith. Not in the Kraken, whom she's never liked nor trusted, but in Klaus. It's a hairline fracture for now, one small imperfection in an otherwise unshakeable foundation, but it's tarnishing the edges of Haven's affection for him, and she hates it. If Klaus was so spectacularly wrong about how this would go — enough to be caught and caged, a feat Haven didn't think was possible — then what else might he be wrong about?

It's insidious, this doubt. It burrows its spidery filaments through all her worries and fears, and then deeper still, wending its way through her hopes. Her plans for the future. Her half-formed yearnings and her tendency toward blind devotion. Haven can feel the tides changing, slow but inexorable, beginning to wash away the sand beneath her.

Haven waits for the hour to pass, ready to cast Plane Shift as soon as she can. She isn't afraid to channel altogether unfamiliar arcane magic — that part is intriguing, even exciting.

What frightens her is that she's no longer as certain in the people to whom she'll return.

[seadeepywrites]

your only rivers run cold

Character: Nanael-Soren Wardfell (NPC) Words: 2026 tw: possession, mention of fantasy racism

It is just past dawn when the tiefling enters the taproom. This is good — although she was not outside to witness it, the pale sunlight that flooded over the horizon has given Nanael new strength. She has channeled that strength into exercising tighter control over Soren's body, stifling the echoes of his anger and distress beneath the overwhelm of her presence. Yesterday's incident cannot be allowed to recur, for any number of reasons.

Nanael does not blame the tiefling for the brief twitch of displeasure that crosses their face when they catch sight of Nanael, who sits upright and relaxed in one of the inn's carved wooden booths. The face that Nanael wears was there when the tiefling died the first time, and was probably sneering in triumph at their suffering, if Nanael knows Soren at all — which she does, every breath and bone of him.

"The others are still sleeping," Nanael says with Soren's voice, pitching it to carry without raising it to a shout.

The tiefling frowns and squints up at the ceiling, as if they can wake the other members of their party with only a thought. Nanael could, but that's not the point.

"I guess I should wait down here," the tiefling then says reluctantly. They eye another table, clearly considering sitting across the room from Nanael-Soren and settling into semi-hostile silence until somebody else shows up.

It won't do. Not if Nanael hopes to stay with this party for any length of time, which she does. She needs to stitch shut this tear before it can widen, not just for the party's sake but for her own. She had never heard the multiple beings inside Geordie's head speak in unison before yesterday, and it doesn't bode well for her if all three of them are willing to leap to the tiefling's defense so enthusiastically.

"Whist," she says, waving one pale hand.

Nanael speaks the name partly as a reminder to herself, to fix the tiefling more firmly in her mind as a person and not a wavering concept of liminality. She knows the party doesn't know much about what has happened to Whist as a result of their two deaths. She suspects Whist themself may not know too much about it either.

Whist grimaces, but does cross the taproom to slide onto the bench opposite her. They unshoulder their quiver as they do, propping it up against the table within easy reach. It's the new magical one that the party gifted them in Dawsbury — Nanael notes this, and smiles faintly.

"What do you want?" the tiefling asks. It's difficult to tell with no pupils, but Nanael thinks they are avoiding eye contact. More difficult still to say if this is a symptom of their general social ineptitude or an aversion to Nanael-Soren's face specifically.

"I don't want anything in particular," Nanael replies pleasantly. "I just thought we might have time to chat while the rest of the party continues their well-earned rest."

"I don't like chatting," says Whist. They glare at her. "And I don't like you either."

Nanael makes a small noise of amusement, unable to help herself. "Heavens, you are blunt, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Yet I'm sure it's occurred to you," Nanael says, still in that same mild tone, "that the party of adventurers you travel with has great need of my skills and abilities."

"I don't know about 'great' need."

"If it weren't for me," Nanael says, allowing her tone to sharpen ever so slightly, "all of them but the wizard would be dead in the wilderness surrounding Dawsbury. Yourself included."

She lets Whist chew on that for a few seconds. Whist's irritation is obvious, but eventually they nod.

"That's true," they admit, with more grace than Nanael really expected from them. "You've been very helpful to them. To us."

"It's what I'm here for."

"Yeah, that's what bothers me." Whist does look at Nanael now, and it removes any earlier doubt about eye contact — their gaze is a presence all in itself, like the faint sting of moonlight on her skin.

Nanael represses a shiver, knowing the tiefling would misinterpret it. What they are to each other is far more than merely another instance of the mundane racism that Whist has surely experienced in this backwards little town.

"Is it the fact that I must use Soren's body to do my work here on the Material Plane?" Nanael asks, leaning forward to quell the urge to lean away. "I can understand why you might be wary, after all the evil he's wrought."

"Honestly?" Whist says, as if they can ever be anything but. "That's not really it. I mean, it was a little freaky yesterday when you sort of blinked out for a second, but the party killed him once. They could do it again, if they needed to."

"So it's me that you have an issue with," Nanael says quietly, as if this is a revelation to her. As if she didn't predict this little dilemma days ago, before she'd even Raised the first of the party from the dead.

Whist takes a moment to think about their answer, which surprises Nanael a little.

"Yeah," they say. "I guess it is."

"That's unfortunate." Nanael purses her lips, reveling in how easy it is to puppet Soren's body into the appearance of disappointment. "I don't see any real reason for us to be at odds with each other. We both want many of the same things."

Whist tilts their head. "I don't think we do," they say slowly. "Or if we do, we want them in different ways."

"I'm not sure I understand," Nanael says, although she does.

"It's been really bothering me," Whist says, "that you brought back Geordie and Gunther and Glove and me from the dead for free. You didn't even use diamonds to do it."

Nanael gives a dismissive little shrug. "There's no cost to doing what comes naturally to a being such as myself."

"That's not true," Whist snaps, then hesitates. Their every emotion is so visible on their white-freckled face — sharp disagreement in the corners of their mouth, followed immediately by anxious uncertainty.

"I don't think that's true," they say, less confidently. "I don't know why. That's just... what it feels like."

Nanael could very easily explain the root of the philosophical quandary Whist is experiencing, but she sees no value in reinforcing a structure she eventually plans to tear down.

"I have been channeling these powers for far longer than you have, dreamwalker," she says gently. "Perhaps you should trust that I do, on some level, know what I'm doing."

Whist says, "What?"

Knowing perfectly well which part of that statement confused them, Nanael says nothing and lets Whist frown their way through a series of small revelations.

Whist lifts their own hands, staring at their palms with something akin to dismay. "But I can't do any of that stuff," they say. "I can't raise the dead or anything. I mean, I can heal, but that's... that's my ranger magic."

"The gift you are discovering in yourself is far from conventional," Nanael agrees. "I cannot predict how it will manifest, any more than I could have predicted how this cohabitation with my aasimar would play out."

"Cohabitation? Is that what you call it?"

For the first time in this conversation, Nanael's composure wavers. It's not because of Whist's question as much as the hatred that boils up inside her, sudden and violent and malevolent. The hatred isn't hers, of course, but it seethes inside her body like it is, clenching her muscles and choking off her next carefully crafted sentence.

And Whist sees Nanael falter — those pearlescent white eyes watch her, unblinking, as she clamps down on the remnants of Soren's free will even harder. Nanael's vision blurs briefly — a sure sign that Soren can see out of his own mismatched irises again, even if there's nothing he can do about what he perceives.

"I have done what I must," Nanael says, a bit hoarsely, as she regains control of herself again. "I will continue to do so, for as long as it takes."

"If he lets you," Whist says. For once, Nanael has no idea what they are thinking as they say it.

She shakes her head, banishing the possibility. "I am a force for good," she says, and means it. "I won't let the frailty of a single mortal being's intentions get in the way of my higher purpose."

"And what purpose is that?" Whist asks. "Because you haven't been giving Gunther or anyone an answer to that when they've asked you." They pause. "It's frustrating them, so I know it's not just me missing something."

Nanael takes her time to find the right words. She may not owe Whist an explanation for all the mysteries they are now part of, but she owes them this much.

"I serve the sun," she says, but continues past that declaration, knowing it won't be enough. "The force of life, of growth, of waking — whatever you want to call it."

Whist doesn't interrupt, so she keeps talking.

"That's what Soren was supposed to be, you know. Guided by a deva since birth, granted divine sorceries to serve us here on the Material Plane. He was supposed to make things better."

"He didn't want to do that," Whist says. An unnecessary addendum, since they are both well aware of the fact.

"He did not," Nanael confirms, and beneath the burden of her sorrow she can sense a flicker of Soren's anger. Defiant even beyond death, her little aasimar.

"The rift at the heart of the Duskwood is between the Mortal Plane and the Feywild, but it strengthens magic of many kinds by its very existence." Nanael raises her eyebrows. "The pair of dark elves we encountered in Dawsbury were hoping to capitalize on the power it generates, and they will hardly be the last to attempt such a thing."

Whist shudders. It could be from their memories of Dawsbury, or from dread of the rift, or from something else entirely.

Nanael ignores that, for now. "My connection to Soren allowed me to bring life back to his body — and to displace his consciousness, as you have already seen. It seemed like a pity, letting him lie there in that forest for eternity, when there was something I could do about it." Her voice, melodic and feminine, is becoming more forceful as she speaks, overpowering the natural sound of Soren's voice issuing from his actual vocal cords. "After all the damage Soren has done, it seems fitting, too, that he be forced to make amends for it all. Don't you agree?"

"I don't know," Whist says, as flatly as ever. "I'm not sure if it works that way. If it should work that way."

"Isn't that the balance you're looking for?" Nanael ventures, treading closer to the doctrine that Whist does not consciously understand but has referenced several times already in this conversation. "I'm here to help — especially for the people that Soren has harmed."

"I don't know," Whist repeats.

It seems like they might say something more, like Nanael's overwhelming assurance in her mission has finally swayed them, and Nanael waits eagerly to hear their rejoinder. It is so easy to find a foothold in someone as transparent as this tiefling, and to scatter the seeds of doubt across the fertile ground of their ignorance.

Nanael can sense that she is making headway — she spots the furrow between Whist’s eyebrows, the restless tapping of their fingers on the tabletop  — but any further progress will have to wait, because it is now that they both hear an ungainly tread on the stairs, and a slightly off-key voice humming a scrap of a folk song.

Whist brightens immediately. "That's Geordie," they say, apparently genuinely glad to see him despite his scary new eyes and longer-running issues with identity and insanity.

Nanael brings a smile to Soren's face as Geordie stumbles into view, and offers him a polite, "Good morning."

And it is, Nanael thinks. Or it will be. She is almost certain of it.

[seadeepywrites]

in the name of what you love

Character: Whisper (NPC) Words: 111 tw: slavery mention

These are a few things that Whisper already knew:

(1) When chains break, they sound like thunder — taut iron misery giving way to shatter and salvation.

(2) When lightning strikes, it hits faster than the eye can see — just the brightness, the instant of irrevocable change, and the lingering scent of ozone in the storm-rent air.

(3) When pottery cracks, some craftspeople choose to repair it with metallic lacquer — brushing gold dust along its jagged edges and leaving the history of its fracture visible. It is made whole again, but even more beautiful for having been broken.

This is the thing that Whisper learns:

Haven is thunder, and lightning, and gold.

[seadeepywrites]

shine a light into the wreckage

Character: Whist Duskhunter (NPC) Words: 3557 tw: a lot of spiders, fantasy violence, death

Whist is beginning to recognize what it feels like to wake up in somebody else's dream. If it can even be called waking up, really — it's just that moment after oblivion when their consciousness collects again and they are surprised to find themself aware of anything at all.

Twice now, death has come to claim them, and some other force has gotten there first.

The last dream was prettier, though, and Whist had been reassured to encounter Reed in that endless field of whispering grass. There is no breeze here, or sourceless sunlight. Only the slick stone walls of a cave, and the echo of water dripping somewhere, and approximately one thousand spiders.

"Ew," Whist says, looking around. They've seen a lot of gross stuff out in the Duskwood — dung heaps as tall as they are, decomposing corpses, horrific abominations of nature, things like that — but they are developing a particular distaste for spiders after their recent experiences in Dawsbury.

In fact, to their immediate dismay, they recognize the spiders as the same species that has infested the town. The spiders scuttle over the walls in shifting near-hypnotic patterns, glinting in plum purple and waving their thick, chitinous legs. They leave behind snatches of silvery webbing in the cracks on the walls, ephemeral and glistening.

Whist watches them for a moment or two, and wonders whose nightmare this is. Geordie doesn't dream, if they understand correctly, but everyone else has reason enough to fear these spiders by now.

A slender figure steps around the corner with eerie, lethal grace, and Whist has their question answered for them in the most unpleasant way possible.

"You!" they exclaim, reaching for their longbow, but it is not in its place at their shoulder.

Rhelata's eyes widen, their scarlet irises drained to ash-gray by the monochrome hue of Whist's low-light vision. She seems just as surprised as Whist to encounter someone, actually. One of her long-fingered hands comes up, curling into a spellcasting gesture, but she pauses with the words of the spell poised on her tongue.

"You are dead," Rhelata says, all derision and confidence. "I saw you with your lifeblood spilled out across the floorboards."

Whist's hand goes to their neck, remembering the tearing pain that had accompanied their final moments. They expect a wound, but their fingers find only unblemished skin and intact muscle.

"Maybe," they say, even though they're pretty sure Rhelata is right.

Rhelata cocks her head. The spiders covering the walls swirl clockwise in response. "And what power is it that has brought you here, then?"

"Uh," Whist says, "I dunno."

Smirking, Rhelata lowers her hand. Whist should probably be insulted by that, because it's clear she's decided Whist doesn't pose any threat to her.

"I am not accustomed to dreaming like this," Rhelata muses. She examines the walls, brushing a hand across them and coming away with a vambrace of spiders swarming up her forearm. "My trances tend to be considerably less... vivid."

Whist shrugs. "Yeah, but if I'm dead, then it's probably not my dream. Plus I don't spend a lot of time in caves."

"Mm." Rhelata folds her arms. The spiders climb to her shoulders and settle there like the folds of a cloak. "You are claiming that you did not create this location?"

"Not on purpose, that's for sure." Whist looks at her. "I didn't even want to talk to you when I was alive."

"Less interested than your friends are to invite me into your little save-the-world club?"

"I know evil when I see it," Whist says flatly. "And I know that what you did to that town was evil."

Rhelata flutters her fingers, dismissive. "My beloved and I are still discovering what is possible this close to the forest. The town is only the beginning."

"They'll stop you." Whist's eyes narrow and their tail lashes behind them. "My friends. They don't even need me to do it."

"That's fortunate," Rhelata says, amusement laced like venom through her voice, "since you are certainly not able to help them anymore. Neither is your wizard, for that matter."

Staring at Rhelata, Whist tenses with a pinch of panic. "But you didn't kill Gerald," they say, hoping it's true. "Because you want to use her as your servant or something."

"She's not dead yet," Rhelata agrees. "She's most useful that way, for now."

"I wish I was there to watch my friends kick your ass," Whist says with a huff.

Rhelata pauses, considering this. Her silver-white hair moves gently, as if stirred by wind, but the air here is absolutely still — stifling, even. Whist decides that maybe it's a warlock thing, to keep your hair perfect like that, since Gunther seems to possess the same skill. Harder to tell if Geordie's got it too, especially after he hacked off his braid at Gravel's funeral.

"What is the purpose, do you think, of the two of us meeting here?" Rhelata asks after a moment. She sounds genuinely curious. "You don't seem very interested in an intellectual conversation."

"I'm not," Whist says. "My job is protecting people from bad things, and you're one of those."

For the first time in this conversation, something cracks in Rhelata's perfect composure, though Whist could not begin to guess the reason.

"My beloved and I," Rhelata says slowly, "have come a long way and worked very hard for what we have. And you and your dreamwalking are hardly the worst we've faced."

Whist shrugs. "Okay."

Silence between them for a moment, as the spiders continue to skitter and web-weave across the uneven walls. Rhelata inspects her nails, which are painted some dark color, long and artfully shaped.

"This happened before," Whist says abruptly.

One pale eyebrow arches. "Oh?"

"The last time I died. But I was talking to someone I knew, and she said..." Whist hesitates, not sure why they're telling her this. "She said it was the work of her goddess."

Rhelata's eyes snap to Whist. This has apparently merited her attention. "Her goddess?"

"Melora," Whist says. "But you're not a priest. I'm pretty sure." They look at the spiders. "And Melora's the goddess of nature, but this doesn't really seem like her."

"No." Rhelata makes an elegant gesture, rotating her wrist, and in her upturned palm there materializes a single spider, much larger than all the others. It waves its forelegs at her, and the trace of a smile curls her painted lips.

"The gods abandoned the drow centuries ago," she says. "All but one."

"One god? Or one drow?"

Chin tilting up, Rhelata says, "One goddess," but she does not elaborate.

More silence.

"I don't know why I'm here," Whist says truthfully. "And I don't know why I was there last time."

"You don't seem to be very good at staying alive, do you?" Rhelata asks.

It might be a rhetorical question — a concept Whist often struggles to identify. Whist shakes their head anyway. "I guess not."

"I'm only sorry that Errol got to you before my beloved could. She could have given you so much more life after your death... a life lived for us."

"That doesn't sound like something I'd want."

Rhelata smirks. "Perhaps not. You wouldn't have had much say in the matter."

Whist reaches for their bow again, hoping it will materialize in their hand the way it did in Reed's dream. They focus all their will on it: the desire to hold a weapon, the desire to wipe the smug condescension off of Rhelata's perfectly symmetrical face. The sense of danger in this dream isn't an unknown force coalescing in the oncoming darkness — the darkness is already here, trembling like dew along the threads of spider-silk and writhing in the shifting shadows.

But instead of the smooth weight of their mother's longbow — or even the cruder bow they've been using as a replacement while they scheme to retrieve their weapon from Lanville's unscrupulous undertaker — the sensation that builds in the cradle of Whist's fingers is more energy than substance. White light flares up, bright enough to blind both Rhelata and Whist, and when it dwindles back to a soft glow its source is immediately apparent.

Whist lifts their hand, a parallel to Rhelata's earlier gesture that summoned the spider, and examines the tiny star that floats a few inches above their palm.

"Huh," they say softly. 

It's not their nature magic, with its purple-satin sheen and its primitive thrum through their bones. The star emits the remarkable new radiance that has blazed from them at unexpected moments since their resurrection a few days ago, the radiance that has repelled undead creatures and their jagged fangs even as it sank beneath Geordie's skin to protect him in mysterious ways.

"Either you have been lying to me," Rhelata says, matching Whist's low volume, "or you possess a power that you yourself do not fully understand."

"Definitely that second one," Whist says, and snaps their wrist out.

The star streaks towards Rhelata, scoring a dark line across Whist's vision with its afterimage, and explodes against Rhelata in silver-white light. She cries out and stumbles backward. When she straightens up again, there are shards of moonlight glittering in her clothes, pale and luminescent.

Rhelata doesn't hesitate. She snarls an arcane word and raises a gnarled black staff that Whist does not remember seeing before now — apparently Whist isn't the only one who can summon weapons into this dream. There is an unpleasant squelching sound, and sticky ropes of spider silk spring outward from the walls, criss-crossing around Whist. Whist drops to the ground on instinct, wriggling forward on their stomach, and leaps to their feet outside the thick web that is forming where they stood a few seconds ago. They claw at their leather armor, tearing the spiderwebs away in cloudy gray strips, and shake out their fingers with a few quick motions.

Rhelata huffs in frustration. "You're quick even in death, dreamwalker."

This time, Whist doesn't even think about it. Their right arm comes up, their left hand reaches for their hip quiver, and they don't realize what they're doing until there's an arrow nocked to their bowstring. They draw, exhale, release.

The moonlight guides their arrow as surely as their Hunter's Mark ever has. The arrowhead sinks deep into Rhelata's abdomen, piercing past her leather armor, and Whist gives a small nod of satisfaction. Another arrow joins the first a few seconds later.

Rhelata staggers. As she braces herself against the cave wall, the spiders swarm her, crawling across her body and mantling her shoulders in a thick layer of hairy legs and glossy eyes. Her eyes burn out from among them, irises as red and raw as flayed muscle. She flicks one gaunt hand, and hisses another arcane word.

Whist tries to dodge, but the three beams of crackling silver that shoot toward them arc unnaturally to find points of impact — ribs, shoulder, and the last one clipping their arm on its way by. The streaking magic carries a deep, bruising force, and Whist spares a second to wonder if Geordie's and Gunther's Eldritch Blasts hurt quite this much.

But now Whist has their mother's bow in their grip. It sings with familial, familiar magic, and the routine to adjust their stance, nock and fire is so well-practiced that Whist can forget all about the odd celestial power that stirred inside them earlier. All that matters is moving. Keeping Rhelata in sight.

The hiss of another arrow, and the scrape-clatter as it misses, hitting the cave wall.

Rhelata advances. The strange, scuttling sidestep of her gait is peculiar, but less awkward than Whist might expect. And it's threatening, too, though Whist doesn't quite know what Rhelata can do. They retreat at the same speed, only knowing enough to be wary, because Rhelata is most certainly a warlock. A dark elf, probably. A... spider enthusiast?

As Whist backs up, they collide with unyielding stone, and they recall their surroundings. Another thing they know for sure — this is Rhelata's dream, not theirs. Spiders drop onto them like the ponderous beginnings of a rainstorm, heavy and without rhythm. A few at first, and then more, faster and faster.

Whist grimaces. They take another shot at Rhelata, who is closing the distance fast. Their arrow tears a bloody gash along her forearm, but she doesn't even hesitate, spreading out her fingers in a many-pincered maw and reaching out for Whist's shoulder.

Pain. Intense and overwhelming. It is only after Whist has collapsed, struggling to draw air into lungs that stutter and spasm, that they can feel the poison sizzling outward from Rhelata's touch. They curl up and cough and cough and cough. Fumble for their bow and can't find it through vision that swims with reflexive tears.

"Pathetic," Rhelata sneers from somewhere above them.

Amid the churning darkness of Whist's desperation, a light gleams. It's somewhere inexpressible in the depths of their soul, dim and distant, and Whist channels energy into it without understanding what they are truly doing. They only know it is here with them in the ravenous nighttime, glowing brightly enough to light their way.

White light swells up again, chasing away Rhelata's menacing presence. She skitters backwards with a hiss, recoiling like the light burns her — but how could something so pale and soft-edged cause harm?

It resolves into sense for Whist as they gather their feet under them again. Moonlight is only a threat to creatures of shadow. The only ones who fear its illumination are the monsters that prefer to cloak their misdeeds in the black-velvet cloak of true darkness.

"Back," Whist says sharply, in the same tone they'd use on a wild animal. A warning, but more in the sound of it than the speech.

And Rhelata retreats before them, whatever that might mean.

Whist raises their bow and trades volleys with Rhelata. In the dream-world, the two of them seem evenly matched — for every dark smear of blood Rhelata leaves along the cave wall, Whist earns another bruise from the sucker-punch force of Rhelata's magic. Each clattering hail of arrows is answered by a barrage of fizzing silver energy.

The webs are a nuisance, congealing in sticky masses around Whist's boots, but Whist treats them like they would any other hazard of the forest floor — stepping carefully and quickly, trusting their balance — and the webs do not seem to have the effect that Rhelata intended. The spiders, too, are creepy-crawly menaces. They leave their sharp bite wounds across Whist's neck and face, the only exposed skin that Whist has, and attempt to burrow industriously into the joints of Whist's armor.

Yet Whist's aim is steady and true with their mother's bow in their hands. Every so often, the mysterious moonlit radiance bursts from them again and haloes Rhelata, and whenever it does, she seems even easier to target with the next arrow. Evenly matched they might be, and on Rhelata's home turf too, but Whist is winning this fight. Slowly, and gradually, in a war of attrition that is leaving both of them drained and depleted, but Whist is winning.

Rhelata pulls herself up to her full height, one spindly arm wrapped tight around her abdomen, where several of Whist's arrows have punched through her armor. Her scarlet eyes are fever-bright as she faces Whist, raising her staff. Whist braces themself, but instead of an attack, an ink-black cloud of magical Darkness billows out, quickly swallowing Rhelata inside its bulk.

Whist circles the Darkness, cautious, with an arrow nocked on their bow. They strain to hear a footstep inside the void, a muttered arcane word, any sign of what is to come. But the only sound that meets their ears is the hiss and skitter of spiders, faint enough to be nearly inaudible.

And then the Darkness disappears. It dwindles into nothing as fast as it arrived — and spreading outward from the point where Rhelata was standing, a low tide of spiders ripples along the cave floor. Dozens of them, crawling over and under each other, moving with alacrity and an eerie cohesion. Whist doesn't know which swarm to target, or if Rhelata is even among them. 

So instead, they stand perfectly motionless, as taught with tension as their bowstring, waiting for the next attack — but it never comes. The spiders retreat into corners and crevices and lurk there. Nearly invisible, a hairy leg or a multi-faceted eye peeking out occasionally from the shadows.

Frowning, Whist looks around again, like they'll see something different. If Rhelata has fled, will her dream release them now? Or are they trapped here, at the whim of whatever power sent them in the first place? The last dream they walked through in death was Reed's, and it was a conversation more than a battle. The dream had dissolved before the danger gathering at the edge of the twilight ever arrived.

Whist doesn't get it. They don't know why they're here, or how much of this they'll remember. They don't understand where the moonlight inside them is coming from, or how to control its wax and wane. That power could be immensely valuable to Whist and their friends, if only they could summon it more reliably.

And still Rhelata's dream continues without her presence. Time itself moves strangely — skipping here and stretching there — but Whist is frustrated, and weary of these mysteries.

"Let me go," they say out loud, voice quickly swallowed down into the silence of the cave.

The cave gives no reply.

Whist sighs. They pass among the spiders, stepping carefully, heading for the bend around which Rhelata first appeared. There is nothing but rock at their back, so they might as well see if that passage leads anywhere. Such logic might not truly apply in dreams, but it's all they have at the moment.

Turning the corner, Whist's boots scuff against the stone as they come to an abrupt halt. The walls here have changed from irregular rock formations to glittering crystal — dark geometric shapes that scintillate in a way that should be impossible in the low light. The overall effect is dizzying, and gives the illusion that the passageway shifts and breathes like a living thing.

Whist blinks several times, hard, against the sudden vertigo. But their disorientation only worsens as the crystals give off a pulse of sound, a low-pitched hum that reverberates in their bones and rattles their teeth in their skull. Whist staggers, or thinks they do. They walk forward, or try to. Intent and action are twin creatures, identical but separated by miles. Whist might be walking forward into the crystal-covered tunnel, or they might be lingering still at the mouth, staring down its jagged, toothy throat.

Either way, Whist reaches a warm red darkness that clings to them with fetid breath. Their footsteps sink into the floor, which is spongy as moss but wafts up a foul stench to clog their nostrils. They snort, shaking their head like a dog. They cannot clear the disgusting taste off of their tongue, and their darkvision has failed them. Forget three hundred feet — Whist cannot see their hand in front of their face.

"Ew," they say, but half-heartedly, because they know it won't make much difference.

The battle with Rhelata made some kind of physical sense, at least. The natural laws that Darcy has tried to explain to them before seemed to apply. Wherever Whist is now, they float free of gravity, and all their senses swirl together in one sticky whirlpool of sensation. They close their eyes — why not? — and try to focus, bringing their thoughts to coalesce in slow, meditative pulses. Whist puts themself back together, there in the darkness, and thinks about how much they really don't want to die this time around either. Not when there's so much left they could still do, so many people they still want to help.

Time is passing, though, and there's nothing Whist can do to prevent it. Outside the dream-world, on the Material Plane, life is continuing, and life is ending. One warlock dies, and then another. Whist can sense their deaths, like stars blinking out. Neither of them are the warlock whom Whist would have liked to put an arrow through, and neither of them deserved to die.

Time keeps passing, and Whist keeps waiting. Concentrating. Holding on. Breathing.

And then. Here, over the surface of the deep, there is light.

The light that pierces through into this place is not pure white and silver-sheened — it is not whatever power Whist was channeling against Rhelata. It is separate from Whist, ignited by somebody else, and it scintillates in exquisite silver and gold.

Whist frowns. There is something very familiar about that color, and not in a good way, but they cannot remember why they should not trust it. All they can muster is the world-weary, persistent will to live. All they can comprehend is that any light must be better than the ravenous, whispering dark.

Whist swims upwards towards consciousness, towards the silver-gold light. They kick furiously against the leaden drag of the current, which is not water as much as it is weariness, and is not weariness as much as the dearth of hope.

When Whist opens their eyes again on the Material Plane, they are looking upward into the face of an enemy.

[seadeepywrites]

give and take a little more

Character: Leilatha "Lei" Dymeriscis Words: 1546 tw: gaslighting and manipulation

The people who Leilatha has pretended to be, in reverse chronological order:

1. 

A young drow scholar, with bright eyes and a leather satchel that's stuffed with books. She leans on the edge of the counter in the student center and favors the barista with a soft but eager smile. She is careful not to indicate her interest in the headmistress too obviously — scatters her inquiries among idle comments and false hesitance about the student life, the rumors of crime in the city proper.

"It's the responsibility of wizards to advance society," she tells the bartender solemnly, while her own power burns ice-cold and unstudied inside her.

2. 

A traveler, whose journeying has left her with lithe muscles, silvered scars, and grim lines at the corners of her mouth. She is a drow, of course, because Lei has seen the sideways glances she and her companions earned in the streets of Kaermahfvyn and understands instantly that her pale skin will not be welcome in this tavern.

The rumors swirl around her like paint in a bowl of water, tendrils of cobalt-blue and midnight-black and blood-red. Lei is familiar with the color of lies, and she can reach through the ripples to this artwork's beating heart. She won't find the truth, exactly, but she can make out the shape of the reality that somebody else is attempting to speak into existence.

Lei sips her ale and adds her own falsehoods to the canvas.

3.

A concerned friend. Lei doesn't wear another face for this lie, at least not in skin tone and features. But her expression is anxious as she shields Klyxy's body from curious onlookers, and her hands are gentle on the kobold's scaly shoulders. 

"She has a medical condition," Lei announces to the small crowd, grip tightening. "A seizure disorder. She'll be all right."

Klyxy wipes blood from her eyes and beckons with one sharp claw. Lei inclines her head, every movement attentive and affectionate.

"I could take you in a fight," Klyxy hisses in Lei's ear.

Lei smiles, and her amusement is genuine. Too quietly for anyone else to hear, she says, "I'd like to see you try, you rat."

Klyxy makes a clicking noise that Lei recognizes as the reptilian equivalent of laughter.

4.

A companion of Tia'ana're from university, with half-remembered inside jokes and shared history. Most of the personas Lei invents are as new and fresh as blank parchment, unknown to everyone she meets. This time, it's like painting over another person's sketch — guessing at intentions, embellishing with light and shadow, illustrating new details. Lei names herself Elanaerin because those are the syllables Tia's uncertain mouth shapes, and she smiles in an encouraging fashion when Tia's face clears in supposed recognition.

By the end of the first evening, Lei has convinced Tia that they should rekindle a friendship that never happened. Lei gracefully accepts an invitation to meet Tia's other friends a few nights later, but almost fumbles her accent entirely as a bonnet-clad tiefling with dark hair enters the bar. Lei knew it was a possibility — it's another thing entirely to introduce herself all over again to Bless and watch Bless' green eyes sweep up and down the length of Lei's illusory body.

That evening, Lei must remind herself repeatedly to keep up appearances with Tia, when all she's thinking about are new angles of conversation she can use to approach Bless. Bless knows Lei as cold and aloof, so Ela is as warm and soft as sunshine instead, and flatters Bless outrageously. In less than an hour, Bless is tipsy and flushed pink.

It is only a game, only an opportunity to learn more about Bless. It cannot go any further, because Lei's illusion will fail if Bless touches her. It is unlikely to go any further, because Bless smiles and blushes but sits upright at the bar, righting herself whenever she begins to list sideways. She responds to Lei-slash-Ela's advances in a throaty murmur that makes Lei's stomach flip over, but she is unfailingly polite — some last half-inch of distance between them that Ela cannot seem to cross.

Lei can't quite decide if she wants Bless' eyes to linger, if she wants Bless to want this version of her. Would it feel like triumph, or betrayal?

5.

A human man, who gives his name as Carver when the librarian asks for it. Lei has been telling lies her entire life, but there is something thrilling about the total freedom of her new Disguise Self spell. She doesn't need a story to explain her missing pupils, or the faint luminescence of her skin —  she can be incredibly and uniformly average, the kind of person who only occupies someone's thoughts when he's standing in front of them.

Giddy within the freedom of her illusion, Leilatha cuts a page out of one of the library books and slips it beneath her jacket. She converses with Uriel, whose idea of a humanoid disguise still draws attention. Perhaps, she thinks, Uriel has not walked among mortals enough to chafe the way she does at her obviously plane-touched appearance. 

She would not presume to provide Uriel with constructive criticism, but it reassures her to know that if anyone notices her acting strangely inside the Blisterport library, the person they'll search for never existed in the first place.

6. 

A humble pilgrim, asking for a bargain price on rations to feed herself and the other indigents she's traveling with. Lei conjures this story without much forethought, and has no spells to cloak the quality of her clothes — a tight, crisp vest, a pure white linen shirt, and boots of fine, supple leather. The merchant raises an eyebrow and sticks to his prices with callous tenacity. Lei ends up paying the full cost for the rations, irritation prickling inside her chest.

The conclusion she draws is straightforward and obvious. She will need magic that can match her words, that can help her become whomever she needs to be. She sends this thought to Uriel as something less than a prayer and more than a wish — an intention, a request.

She is confident that Uriel will answer her. They always have.

7.

A devotee of Dialore’e, a priestess who carries compassion and kindness in her heart. It is the source from which all her other lies spring forth, like snowmelt flowing down out of the mountains. Lei allowed Istvaan, Bless and Gerold to glimpse the holy symbol she wears around her neck, and mentioned casually her upbringing in Aerlock Abbey, and did not correct the logical conclusion they arrived at. She lived inside this particular illusion for months before she ever learned Disguise Self as a spell. It is, after all, the most insidious kind of lie — the one that exists only a hairsbreadth from the truth.

Gerold and Istvaan suspect she hasn't told them everything, but she knows their accusations will take time to ripen. Gerold's specialty is arcana, and before he says anything, he'll want to fit the pieces together like a wooden puzzle — interlocking, seamless. Istvaan doesn't yet know what he knows, only letting the moments he's winnowed from her occasional errors smolder in the hearthfire of his awareness. Together, Istvaan and Gerold might have the whole picture, but as long as they keep to themselves, Lei isn't worried. 

And then there is Bless, who has sworn her life to eradicating creatures like Leilatha — and she suspects nothing. Lei nods her way through every stumbling conversation between them and pretends to give moral advice, but all the while she spins Bless deeper into a silvery web of uncertainty and immorality. She erodes Bless' foundations as inexorably as the sea against stone. She holds Bless' hand and brushes fingers up Bless' arm and thinks — Bless will cut her down when she finds out who Lei really is. This is lovely, but it cannot last. 

Later, the party will meet Klyxy, and Lei will recognize someone else who protects herself in the armor of assumptions. Lei will gauge the kobold's raw cunning, and witness her ruthless vengeance, and gather secrets to defend herself with if Klyxy should attempt exposure of Lei's deception. They have the measure of each other, and it is almost a relief to smile in Klyxy's general direction and know that Klyxy doesn't believe her for a second.

So Lei balances on a knife's edge, waiting for the blood and pain that will surely follow. She draws on the power that Uriel has granted her — she heals, and calls down radiant fire, and launches hissing blasts of arcane energy — and she pretends that it comes from belief in Dialore'e rather than faith in the only being who's stayed by her side her entire lifetime. Privately, she scorns the idea of worshipping some distant deity, and sneers at Bless' blind acceptance of Lei's flimsy falsehoods.

But to the many denizens of the world she lives in, Lei offers a pale smile and dignified composure. She watches people gape at her height, and her luminescent skin, and the curious lack of pupils in her silver-gray eyes. She never provides an explanation, protecting in her silences the only truth she's ever cared about.

Instead, she opens her mouth and she lies, and she lies, and she lies.

[seadeepywrites]

the star reversed

Character: Soren Wardfell (NPC) Words: 1734 tw: possession, claustrophobia, excessive use of em dashes

Soren wakes up. It is more than he had expected, in all honesty. As the last blood-colored beam of magic had slammed into him and he collapsed to the ground, Soren had felt some dark vortex pull him downward into oblivion. His consciousness had scattered into the void and the last thing Soren had known, bone-deep and stone-sure, was that there would be no return.

Except that there has been. Except that Soren opens his eyes, and does not find darkness.

The earthy smell of the Duskwood squirms into his nostrils, and he realizes that he is uncomfortable. There are twigs and leaves in his clothes and hair, scratching at his skin, and he is, inexplicably, swaddled tightly in some kind of cloth wrap. Squinting in the dappled light, Soren encounters the mottled bark of a rotten log two inches from his face. 

He wriggles, both to alleviate the itch of the foliage and to more clearly ascertain his situation. He discovers that he cannot free his arms — any attempt to move them merely results in wobbling, and he lacks the abdominal strength to roll over. It is cold inside the log, but not dangerously so, and Soren feels more physically whole than he might expect, considering recent events. The spongy wood of the log prevents from lifting his head to examine his surroundings, so for the time being, his appraisal is complete.

"Hmm," Soren says thoughtfully. His voice is a hoarse whisper, creaky from disuse. It brings up more questions. How long was he unconscious or worse? Who wrapped him in this cloth and shoved him inside a log, and why? And most importantly, is the wellspring of his magic intact?

He closes his eyes again, reaching cautiously for that silver-gold brilliance that shines inside him. His magic usually responds to his will in indistinct flickers, but the attempt yields unexpected results — he hardly has to think about his power before it floods him in a deluge of scintillating light. It overwhelms him, sending his mind spinning out past the edges of his body and further still, until he is only one mundane soul adrift on a sea of radiance.

Crammed inside the log, Soren gags and shudders. He'd only intended to channel his magic, but along with this inundation comes the presence — comes the knowledge, the pressure, the intimate awareness of her. It's worse than all the awkward discomfort of the forest's dirt and detritus. It's worse even than if he discovered worms writhing in his ears or maggots burrowing into his flesh. She is all around him, inside him, permeated through him like thick smoke on a muggy summer night.

Soren, she whispers with all the familiarity of a lover. She sounds — or perhaps feels — pleased to be with him again. Delighted, even. You are awake.

Soren grits his teeth and does not respond. He focuses his considerable willpower on keeping his psyche separate from hers — refusing to allow her the unfettered access into his mind and body that she craves. She reaches for it without asking permission, without a lick of consideration for his sanity. To her, it is simply a birthright — his or hers, it is hard to say. To her, there is no difference.

"Get out of my head," he snaps, and her presence retreats somewhat.

I can't, she says, unapologetic.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Soren... She passes over his whole body, healing his scrapes with a gentle, sunlit warmth, before returning to linger in the center of his chest. From there, twined around his lungs and heart, she says, You died, beloved. Back in that forest clearing, you died.

Considering this, Soren scowls. "And Nadir, she — what, buried me?"

Left you here, the presence agrees. She intends to return for your body, to bring it to Deephaven. She thought maybe the clerics there could bring you back.

"But I'm alive," Soren says flatly. "Already. Somehow."

I couldn't lose you, she says. I know how you feel about me, but gods help me, I couldn't lose you.

"Nanael." Her name is heavy in his mouth, and it tastes of ashes. He nearly chokes on his words. "What did you do to me?"

The celestial spirit within him flutters and flashes. The dimness of this small space where he lies mummified is illuminated momentarily, as silver-gold light glows from beneath his skin.

I am here, Nanael says, more a concept than a sentence. It carries the flavor of an offering, a blessing, a benediction — but it is a gift that Soren does not want.

"What did you do?" he spits. Suddenly claustrophobic, he writhes and thrashes, banging his head against the log and straining the muscles in his arms and legs. His breath comes choppy-short-panicked. He pants, ensnared and afraid.

And then the worst thing of all happens: he goes still. His body locks up, then relaxes, muscles going slack. It is entirely beyond his control, as if somebody else is shaping his mortal frame like so much clay.

I couldn't lose you, she says for the third time, and this time he understands.

What have you done? he would shriek, but his mouth will not obey him. And besides — he already knows the answer.

The part of Soren that's still him — the part he has fought all his life to preserve — seethes with rage and fear. He wants to scream, to beat his fists against the inside of the log until the wood breaks away and he can drag himself free, spilling outward into the implacable twilight of the Duskwood. He wants to claw at the flesh of his body, scraping and tearing until it comes away in pale ribbons and he is as raw and bloody as a newly skinned hare.

He cannot do any of this, because he no longer has any say over what he does with his limbs. Instead, her presence pulses through his body like a second heartbeat, cleansing and eradicating and consuming.

I love you, she tells him, and he would laugh in bitter distaste if he were able.

This isn't love, he thinks furiously back at her. This is possession.

You may call it what you will. She is imperturbable. Inevitable. I did what I had to, to save your life.

I don't want this! he howls. I don't want you!

He summons the last shreds of his will to speak within his own mind. With all the fervency of a sacred truth, he adds: I would rather have stayed dead.

There is still work for us to do on this plane, says Nanael. Your time here is not over yet.

He — she — they wiggle a hand, slipping far enough free of the wrappings to press three fingers into the bark of the log. There is a flash of light, and a wave of magic that surges outward from the core of them. The log simply crumbles away, breaking down into chunks of loam that cascade over Soren's body.

They work their way free of the wrappings — slowly, deliberately. Sitting up, they brush the bark off their shirt and inspect it. It is the same outfit they died in, the rich fabric torn in places and mottled by scorch marks and bloodstains. They touch their left wrist, confirming the near-invisible presence of the Glove of Disguise.

They look around, and tilt their head back to breathe in the fresh scent of moss and damp leaves. Above the canopy, the sun shines. It is day, but they cannot tell any more than that from the misty, crepuscular quality to the light, because the Duskwood always looks this way. It is cool, at any rate, and relatively quiet.

This is life, of a sort, but what kind? Soren-Nanael rises to their feet, stretching, and shakes circulation back into their cramped limbs. Hatred burns inside them like a beacon, but if hatred alone could cast out his deva, Soren would have been free of her a long time ago.

They search the area nearby. Soren cannot tell if this is his desire or hers, an idea that disturbs him so profoundly it threatens insanity if he contemplates it for too long. They can clearly see that there were others here at some point — a bootprint in the dirt, a patch of flattened ferns where a heavy object rested — but they lack the survival skills to discern how long ago, or how many people there were.

It takes some time for them to notice that their wings are visible, neatly folded at their shoulders. The wings possess the same incorporeal translucence as they always have, but Soren remembers the days before his death, when they were shredded to bone and a sickly dark aura haloed their edges whenever he summoned them. They are not like that like now — they are as densely feathered and pure white as they once were. There is a weight to them, too, a substance they did not previously possess. Soren suspects that if he — or she, or they — were to shake them out and take flight, they would bear him as the skeletal wings could not, if not even faster, even farther.

They consider. If they head east, they might encounter Deephaven — or at least some of its scouts. However, since they don't know where they're starting from, there is a strong possibility that they'll miss the area entirely and continue for miles into the forest's depths, which will most certainly kill them all over again.

West, then. They are guaranteed to reach the edge of the forest eventually, probably, and from there they can travel back to Lanville, or seek shelter in the nearest town. With the thought, they begin to move, staggering on stiff legs. The uneven ground is somehow, subtly more treacherous than usual — they trip several times, scraping the heels of their hands and ripping their already-ruined breeches. But they continue, lurching and weaving, towards the end of the Duskwood and the beginning of civilization.

Unable to speak and unwilling to address her again, Soren stays quiet. He cannot fathom out her larger purpose, but he feels her desires as his own. Her incendiary intent to re-enter the world and seek — what? Why is she here, and what did she bring him back for?

It is a grim comfort to Soren to realize that, if this untenable situation continues, he is soon to find out.

[seadeepywrites]

Not A Follower

Character: Haven Vasselon Words: 1990 tw: fantasy violence and a lotta bones

The sting of sea-spray on chapped lips, the ominous crimson light from the cat-eyed moon, the clattering of tiny fish skeletons against the outside of the Magic Circle — it all adds up to a thunderous assault on Haven's senses, a drumbeat of rising panic as the crew of the newly christened Stormborn lays its preparations for the monstrous undead shark approaching the ship.

Haven takes a deep, brine-soaked breath and holds it, with the same determination she uses to clutch her wand and spellbook close. She squeezes her eyes shut for just a few seconds, rehearsing the incantation in her head. She's cast exactly one other spell of this power before, and tonight's spell is entirely new to her — scribbled down from a stolen spellbook in the week before the Stormborn set sail, while the Everstorm lashed rainwater against her dormitory window.

But Haven needs to get this right, tonight, right now, because their lives and their brand-new ship depend on it. On her.

Haven shoves her hair back out of her face, twirls her wand, and speaks the words of the spell. Her magic rises up from within her, power roaring in her ears to the rhythm of her pulse. It dances out across the water, coating over the blood-dark waves with a shimmering golden sheen, and — there it is, an entire swath of the ocean at her command.

Haven flings her hands out and pushes — not necessary to the spell, but it helps her focus her will on the motion. And the water responds, a golden wave rolling up and away from the ship. Carrying the menacing dorsal fin of the undead shark away with it. Thirty feet, fifty, a hundred — in the red moonlight, her magic glistens like an enormous square of satin that has drifted down to settle on the ocean's surface.

"It's out of my range now," Klaus grumbles, but he quickly finds another target to interest him. He and Aeolyn insist there's a humanoid out there swimming towards the ship, whom Haven can't see and can't spare the attention to search for.

She lets the archers worry about the humanoid, and trusts in her wards to protect herself, and pours the entirety of herself into the Control Water spell. She is distantly aware of the toss and roll of the deck, and the relentless hail of the skeletal fish, but she plants her hooved feet on the deck right in front of the mast, at the center of the circle of runes she painted so carefully a few hours ago, and she concentrates.

Haven's spell, appropriately enough, ebbs and flows as the seconds pass. She falls into a pattern: waiting for her power to reach its peak, the point where the seawater is indistinguishable from the blood in her veins, and conjuring another wave into the area she controls, shoving the shark back again and again. Apparently oblivious to the unusual pattern in the currents, the shark continues its stubborn progress forward, swimming almost exactly as fast as she can summon the waves to counter it. 

"Haven!" Siggi calls, leaning into her field of vision. "Can you cast Fly on me? There's an undead triton trying to board the ship, and—"

Haven doesn't listen to the rest. She glares at him, her whole body vibrating with the effort of her spell. "I can only do so much at once!"

"Understood," Siggi says, cool as ever, waving a hand in acknowledgement. He grips his spear and steps out of her Magic Circle, already focusing on the next threat. The quippers flopping on the deck leap for him, but Haven has to rip her gaze away to push back the shark again and doesn't see if they hit. She figures Siggi's faced a lot worse, anyway, and died twice. These fish aren't going to be what takes him down.

Beneath the storm-surge of the Control Water spell, her abjuration magic whispers at the edges of her attention. Most of the crew huddles inside her Magic Circle, with the exception of the team working the ballista and the unlucky sailor whose turn it is to shovel the piles of murderous-but-pathetic fish off of the deck and back into the sea. If Haven were to approach the edge of the Circle, as she did when she first activated it, her Arcane Ward would flare up, bright and solid, shielding her from any danger. Her Mage Armor, plated invisibly across her body for the time being, seems practically redundant.

As this final battle of Vecnocht stretches on, Haven spares a small corner of her brain to think that maybe, just maybe, she'll make a halfway decent ship's mage.

And then the shark dives, disappearing into deeper waters and leaving the range of Haven's Control Water spell.

"Where did it go?" Haven asks of nobody in particular, desperation pitching her voice up half an octave. Practically everybody on this ship is more observant than she is, after all.

"It's coming towards the ship," Klaus says. He nocks an arrow to his longbow, tracking a shape beneath the surface that Haven can't see. "There."

Haven stares out helplessly over the waves. Her fingers twitch on the shaft of her wand as she mentally sifts through her arsenal of spells. She prepared for this night the best she could, with control and combat spells specifically aimed at the undead who have risen to do battle with the ship. But it's nearly dawn — most of her magic has been used up over the course of the night — and she can't think of a single thing to do against this shark anymore except blast it with as much firepower as possible and hope they can put it down before it chomps the boat in half.

Nitha scuttles over to the railing, producing a sack from gods-know-where, and begins to cram it full of a dizzying variety of bottles and jars. She seems intent on her mission, whatever it might be. Haven leaves her to it, skidding up beside Siggi and gesturing at the purple stone orbiting her head.

"I can cast Fly now," she says breathlessly. "Will it help?"

Siggi studies the choppy red waters with thoughtful turquoise eyes. "I think so," he says after a second.

"Good enough for me," Haven says, and pulls the spell out of the stone. She flings it over Siggi like a pail of water — a golden haze that condenses along his arms, drips down his sides and pools beneath his feet. From the haze, tiny wings sprout, glittering and fluttering at his wrists and ankles. It makes Haven smile.

Siggi lifts off the deck almost immediately, plunging into the water, and Haven loses sight of him. What she can see is the pale swirls of the quippers in the water that swarm towards him, hungry for a taste of flesh.

Maintaining her concentration on the Fly spell for Siggi isn't nearly as active a process as wielding Control Water was — she only has to hold the spell in her head, not manipulate the shape of it constantly. It gives her time to find her unsteady way across the deck to Nitha and stare downward, hoping — and at the same time, fearing — to catch sight of the shark approaching.

It's there. Even Haven can see it, rotting gray cartilage and gleaming white bone, undulating as it rises towards the surface. It's gathering speed to ram the ship, she thinks, and from the size alone she knows such an attack would be catastrophic.

Nitha waves a hand, something white clutched in her claws. There's a corresponding flicker in the depths below them, near Siggi's characteristic glimmer of indigo and gold.

"Take the bait," Nitha mutters. "Tasty tuna, come on..."

Haven has no clue what Nitha's talking about, but she knows one thing she can do to help. She braces herself against the railing, leaning out over the water. Aims her wand downward. Casts one of the best damage-dealing spells she knows.

Haven's Lightning Bolt spell snaps in the air, releasing a massive static discharge that lifts strands of her hair outward from her head. Initially a straight line as she'd intended, the electricity bursts outward as it hits the water and becomes more of a lightning... cone. It crackles and zig-zags in unexpected directions — Haven's jaw drops — and engulfs several swarms of quippers within its fast-expanding boundaries.

Unfortunately, it also engulfs Siggi. Oops. Haven squints, hoping that the swirling disturbance beneath the surface is him preparing for the shark's approach and not the quippers feasting on his lightning-roasted flesh. She really needs to get more careful with her area-of-effect spells.

"Wow," Nitha says.

Haven can't read the expression on her serpentine face, but from her tone of voice, maybe she's impressed? Nitha's not looking at Haven, though — her beady little eyes are still staring down into the churning waves, the feathers beneath her hat and along her forearms sticking up and her gangly limbs coiled tight with tension.

Haven racks her brain, concerned that another Lightning Bolt might fry Siggi completely — but a few Magic Missiles or a Toll the Dead cantrip aren't going to do much against a creature this size — and Klaus has told her in no uncertain terms not to Shatter anything that's even close to the hull of the ship. She can protect other people by flinging her Arcane Ward out over them, but that's not going to help when this shark munches a hole in the hull of the boat.

And then whatever the hell Nitha was up to explodes, violently. It's difficult to make out, but the percussive force of it rocks the deck beneath their feet, and the triumphant squawk that Nitha emits clearly identifies her as the mastermind. There's a brilliant green light from the general vicinity of the shark, but Haven doesn't think it's magic. Something more chemical, perhaps, that bubbles as it leaks out from the shark's shattered jaw.

"Did we do it?" Haven asks Nitha. "Is it dead? I mean, dead again?"

"Yes," Nitha hisses, triumphant. "We did it."

Klaus joins them at the railing, kicking aside a flip-flopping quipper as he does — and his presence, more than anything, reassures Haven. If she can see him out in the open, if he's not a blur of motion firing his longbow from the shadows, then the danger is past. He points upward, so Haven looks.

Throughout the night, a ragged gash of darkness has bisected the blood-red fullness of the moon, transforming it into an ominous evil eye glaring down at them. But now, as the crew of the Stormborn watches, the darkness shivers and recedes, curling in on itself. The skeletal fish on deck cease their spasmodic twitching and teeth-gnashing, returning to their true state as miserable little piles of spindly bones.

This is only Haven's twenty-first Vecnocht, but she knows what such things mean. She looks to the east, where the dull gray fringe of the Everstorm still blurs the horizon, and yes — there it is. Weak and watery, fighting to be seen through the rain and the fading crimson moonlight, the pale disk of the sun has just risen.

The sky lightens, dawn erasing most of the evidence of their terrible night. Vunrus and Mark are hard at work flipping quippers off the deck, but soon even those mementos will be gone. Haven scrubs at her face with both hands, exhausted, and nearly pokes her eye out with the wand she has forgotten she is holding. She scrapes her hair into a lumpy bun, too worn-out to care that it is listing significantly to the right on her head, and stuffs her wand into it without a shred of finesse.

The ship is intact. Her friends are safe. Despite it all, hope rises in Haven with the sunrise.

The Stormborn sails north and west, away from Savnaer, as the 1st of Cyrdut dawns cold and clear.

[seadeepywrites]

eg

Character: Leilatha "Lei" Dymeriscis Words: 1505 tw: mild fantasy racism

It takes Leilatha a few moments to process her first sight of the throne room. She'd sketched out an idea in her head from the descriptions the trembling kobolds had given, and now she mentally lays down brushstrokes of paint, colored in gray and black, over those charcoal lines.

Lei's eyes aren't as keen as Istvaan's, and she doesn't possess the battle-ready instincts that Bless does. Bless is already reaching for the sword sheathed at her hip, and Gerold makes some noise of dismay, while Leilatha is still counting kobolds. Kobolds with wings, kobolds with shields, kobolds with precarious lenses strapped to their heads that magnify their eyes three-fold larger. One kobold, draped in blue robes and a leather bandolier, stands against the far wall in front of an alcove. The sheer volume of kobolds is distressing, and the alcove is intriguing, but it's the archway near the alcove that draws Lei's attention, suddenly and surprisingly enough that she loses track of the kobolds she'd counted.

The archway is carved into the stone of this cave, its chiseled molding far more ancient and intricate than anything these kobolds could have produced. A shimmering curtain of light obscures what lies beyond the archway. It swirls in rainbow colors as it dances there, like lamp oil on the surface of a puddle. In front of the archway, completing the tableau, lies a dark and oblong shape that can only be the egg.

The robed kobold shouts and raises one clawed hand to point at Lei's party, and the other kobolds tumble forward in a messy landslide of blue-scaled limbs. Sharp teeth and sharper weapons glint in the low light. Lei has counted enough kobolds to know that if this comes to a fight, her party will be swiftly and messily eviscerated.

So — win the fight before it's even begun. Stop the kobolds in their tracks. And what would draw their attention all at once? What would terrify every single little scaly creature that's been scrabbling its life away in this depressing cave system?

Lei hefts her quarterstaff in one hand, casting Shillelagh through it. With the other hand, she grasps the corner of her cloak, flipping it to send its magic rippling through her, and vanishes from where she was standing. A split second of disorientation pummels her before she is looking back again at the cave — but this time from the exact opposite perspective. Her party members are a distant multicolored smudge huddling at the entrance — Istvaan in brown and green, Bless in red and silver, Gerold a flash of bright yellow as he cowers behind the rest of the group.

Without giving the kobolds time to turn on her, or for anybody else to realize what she intends, Lei raises her staff like an executioner's axe — both hands on it, gripping near the end. The Shillelagh cantrip has blessed it with a faint silver shimmer, nearly invisible, and Lei knows that if she swings it, her aim will be true.

"Nobody move," Lei commands, her voice ringing out through the cavern.

Every kobold in the room goes instantly and totally still. The dragon egg, which is about as long as Lei's forearm and covered in a fine layer of delicate midnight-blue scales, rests unsuspectingly at her feet. Pure and unmarred. Precious. 

"Please," hisses the robed kobold, who stands closest to her. "No, please, don't hurt the egg."

"Lay down your weapons." Lei doesn't even have to articulate the threat that might follow such an order — it is drawn in the taught lines of her body, in the menace of her stance.

For a single trembling second, the air in the cavern hums with tension. The sorcerer continues to babble and beg, approaching her with pleading claws outstretched — but then somewhere in its drivel are a few words of Draconic, directed towards the rest of the cavern. Most of the kobolds respond immediately to the command, throwing down their weapons as instructed. The winged kobolds land. The shield-bearing kobolds are hesitant, but they place their spears at their feet and lower their shields with slow caution.

Leilatha gestures for the robed kobold to hand over its bandolier of spell components, and directs the rest of the kobolds to gather against the wall to her left, away from their weapons. She doesn't change her stance for a minute or two, as the party makes its way across the cavern to her. There is a brief flurry of conversation, a discussion of strategy about the door and the egg and the future of both. Lei nods and stows her quarterstaff.

"Myrak," Lei says, picking up the egg in both hands. "You can translate into Draconic, right? Istvaan, you get the horn while Bless finds out what she can about the door. Gerold, see if there's anything valuable in the hoard."

It might sound like Lei giving orders, but truthfully the members of the party have all already split off in their respective directions, drawn to the locations that interest them the most. Bless' dark eyebrows are furrowed in a frown, and her focus on the door is as sharp as the blade she carries. Gerold scoops up handfuls of copper coins and lets them run through his fingers like sand, wearing an expression of vague disappointment. Istvaan is already lifting the horn from the alcove with ponderous reverence.

Lei strides across the cavern towards the mass of kobolds, Myrak easily keeping pace with her. The two kobolds — Lei can't be bothered to remember their names — who swore their loyalty to the party earlier trail behind Myrak, chittering to each other in Draconic.

"You've proven that you cannot keep the egg safe," Lei declares, addressing the kobolds en masse. She knows what tone to take, to secure the dominance over them the party has begun to assert. She doesn't even have to manufacture the derision in her tone, only the illusion that she cares about their most treasured possession. "We are taking it with us when we leave."

The kobolds erupt into cacophony when Myrak translates — some of them hiss, while others make short, sharp mewling sounds of distress. Lei ignores it all.

She says, "In return for our protection of the egg, you will keep watch over the door." There is no need to clarify which door she refers to — she can feel the hum of its presence from halfway across the cavern. "You will fight back any creatures that try to come through it and guard it until we return."

Glancing over her shoulder towards the archway and Bless, Lei notices one of Myrak's kobolds watching her closely. Its teeth are partly bared, halfway to a snarl, but it does not shriek objections like the others. It only stares at her, beady little eyes gleaming. She ignores it too.

"If you have done well, we will then give you back the egg," Leilatha tells the kobolds, with absolutely no intention of keeping her promise. She doesn't wait for a reply, only spins on her heel and rejoins the others.

Bless has to be coaxed away from the archway and the curtain of light. The whole way out of the cavern, she twitches with a feverish energy that Lei recognizes but cannot understand. Lei has lived in an abbey most of her life — she recognizes devotion. She has seen how obsessive one's dedication to an ideal can become, and the power it can grant as a result. But Lei has never felt the same fervor, and doubts she ever will. She finds it hard to believe she will ever care about something or someone that much — even Uriel.

"We are coming back here, right?" Bless asks Lei as the party emerges from the cave entrance, blinking in the afternoon sunshine. "You meant what you said to them?"

Lei shrugs. "More or less. The egg is valuable."

Bless looks at Lei with that open, guileless expression she wears sometimes. Her pupils have narrowed in the light, black upright lines bisecting her pale green eyes.

"I will come back," she says, voice firm. "I have to."

"I figured as much," Lei says with a sigh.

As they navigate through the scrubby mountain foliage back to the road — moving slowly, for Gerold's sake — Leilatha considers such a future. Bless' oath will bring her back here eventually, to be sure. As naively and inevitably as a moth to a flame. With everything that Lei knows about their mutual interests, it seems unlikely that the two of them will still be in the same adventuring party. If Bless lives to return, it's even possible she'll have killed Lei in some dramatic duel of honor.

So the chances that both of them will return here, together, are slim to none. Leilatha knows this, but imagines it anyway — just a quick series of thumbnail paintings in her head, daubs of color suggesting two figures. Red and silver, silver and white.

And of course, the blurry rainbow of the light in the archway, mysterious and tantalizing.