I have a pretty laid back relationship with my DM. We chat about backstory stuff, he’ll sometimes tell me things because I’m pretty good at not metagaming with it.
Some shit has been going on lately with my character, Corrine, and things she’s learned about the man she thought was her father. She’s understandably upset, but has been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, that maybe there was a really good reason he did the things he did. This evening I get a message from my DM, @halethewanderer.
“I say the following as your friend and not as your DM. Be prepared to hate him with every inch of your heart. I-the-DM am maintaining my position as ‘you have no reason to suspect that he’s been this way all along because there are about a dozen things that I came up with which could have made him a sympathetic villain’. I-the-human-being am telling you that Kylar is not a sympathetic villain. He is vile and evil.”
A little while ago, I had posted a character design for a multiclassed bard/blood hunter. I am super thrilled that now I have the opportunity to take her for a spin in an actual game! She seems to have eaten my brain a bit, though, because I’ve just written 4199 words of origin story for her. Oops?
[Author’s note: This takes place in the Eberron setting. Corrine was a native of Cyre, and is now (post-Mourning) a refugee in Thrane, a neighboring nation. I’ve also added links to the songs I’m referencing, so watch for links in the text!]
Before
Corrine is in Eastford, only two stops in on her performance tour, barely a week away from home, when she meets Calinou.
She’s finished her set for the evening, including two encores, and it was good. She’s very pleased with her performance; there are some nights she’s just on, and tonight was one of those nights. She’d even played the collection of smaller fiddle pieces she’s had in her head, continuity of performance be-damned. The audience had eaten it up, dead silent for the first time all night- the whole tavern even, not just the seated audience- until she’d played the last note and the whole place had erupted in applause. She’d done a few more songs after, but there was very little in the world like that feeling, the feeling of doing a thing you loved, and knowing you were good at it, and knowing others knew that as well and appreciated it.
She’s sipping a drink, a local cider, and chatting with the bartender when there’s the soft sound of someone clearing their throat behind her, and when she turns to look she comes face-to-bellybutton with what has to be one of the tallest men she’s ever seen in her life. She has to look up- and up, and up, and up- before she finds his face. He’s a Goliath, and he towers over her, broad enough she can’t see around him.
“Hello.”
His voice isn’t as gravelly as she’s been expecting; it’s deep, for sure, but it’s smooth, like a double bass decided to get up and start talking. She’s pretty good at reading body language, and his is soft, relaxed, body open and shoulders down, no signs of aggression like she sometimes sees in the men who approach her after a show. That of course doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be wary. She grins brightly up at him.
“Well hi there, big guy. What can I do for you?”
He smiles back, more subdued than she is, but warm. “I was wondering if I could buy you a drink?”
Her smile softens and she nods, patting a barstool next to her. “If you’d like, I won’t say no to a handsome gentleman buying me something sweet and fizzy.” He eyes the seat, then scoots it to the side, replacing it with a much sturdier looking stool instead. Once he's sitting, the height difference isn't as noticeable.
Over the next half hour or so they chat about a number of things, each nursing a drink- him telling her about Eastford and his blacksmithing business, her talking about the tour, what she’s seen before and where she’s going next.
She stifles a yawn, and looks at him apologetically. “I should probably be turning in for the night. Early morning of travel and another performance waiting for me in the evening, I’m afraid. It was lovely to meet you, though, Calinou. Perhaps I’ll see you again some day.” She sticks her hand out to him, and when he takes it, his hand envelopes hers, but his grip is exceedingly gentle, mindful in the way the strong learn to be.
“Perhaps.” he says, with a considering look on his face.
The next day she rises early and sets out. Her next performance is two towns over, and she should get there with enough time to settle in, freshen up and take a short nap before she has to get up and ready herself to perform.
The day’s ride is pleasant, the heat of summer just starting to transition to the cooler days of early autumn, and the sun is shining through the trees as she makes her way to Amber Run. It’s not difficult to find the evening’s venue- The Silver Swan; all she has to do is look for the biggest tavern in town. It’s a bit pretentious for her tastes, but it’s not so bad as all that. She checks in, looks over the performance space just to make sure there’s no issues that would need to be addressed immediately, then heads up to her room to rest. She’ll wash around before she heads down for the pre-performance warm up, but in the meantime a quick application of pres removes all the road dust she’d acquired over the day’s travel. The bed is comfortable, and when she wakes from her nap, she can tell from the change of light that it’s early evening. The sun is only just starting to set, and she still has an hour and a half or so before she needs to be on-stage. Her performance outfit is fairly simple- a dark green linen shirt over brown leather leggings, though it’s embellished with a few strategically-placed faceted glass beads for a touch of dramatic sparkle. She grabs her fiddle and banjo and heads down. She spends time in the space warming up, tuning both instruments, getting her bow strung and rosined, and by the time the sun is fully set, she’s ready to go.
It’s another good show, solid as the one the day before, and this time she plays a different fiddle piece towards the end. It’s a variation on part of the piece she played the day before, a bit slower, a bit more haunting. It garners the same sort of applause as she received the day before, even if the tone is different. She’s most of the way through her encore when she spots a familiar head towards the back of the crowd. She’s an experienced enough performer to not let her surprise show, to not let it affect her music, but she’d be lying if she said the last song in the encore didn’t have a little more flash and energy than she’d originally been planning to put into it.
After the show she accepts the handshakes and slaps on the back, the congratulations she’s come to expect after a show, smiling all the while. By the time she escapes to the bar to have a seat she’s pleasantly exhausted and glad she has an extra buffer day between the next bit of travel and her next performance; two shows plus travel in as many days is rough. The bartender has just delivered the mug of chamomile tea she’d ordered when there’s a voice from off to the side.
“Hi again.”
She opens her eyes from where she’d been leaning over the top of her mug, inhaling the steam, and when she looks over- and up, and up, and up- there he is again. She quirks a brow at him and waits a beat before asking, “A bit far from home, aren’t you?”
She hadn’t thought a goliath could look sheepish, but Calinou manages it. It’s a cute look on him.
“I wanted to ask you something yesterday, but I realized it wasn’t the right moment, and I wanted you to take the question seriously. I figured this was a good way to show intent, rather than it being just a spur of the moment thing.”
Huh. Interesting.
Corrine waves a hand, encouraging him with a smile to continue. Just because she wants to know what he’s going to ask doesn’t mean she’s going to make it easy for him.
“Your music-” he pauses, thinking his words through, taking his time, and she waits patiently for him to go on. “I know I may not look it, but I appreciate the arts quite a bit. I have no talent for the more ephemeral stuff myself, I do better with things I can touch- shaping metal, making it beautiful. But your music made me feel the same way I do when I’m making something in the forge. So I wanted to talk to you. And when I did, I found that not only are you an incredible performer, but you seem to be an incredible person as well, and I’d like to get to know you better, if you’re amenable.”
Corrine’s eyebrows have been rising the whole time he’s been talking, and when he glances up at her face, he smiles and shrugs. “Also you’re pretty cute.”
At that she bursts out laughing, delighted. She thinks about her interactions with him so far, his face as he’d watched her perform, how pleasant and natural their conversation had been the night before, and she pats the seat next to her, her smile intensifying.
“You know what? I think I’d like that very much.”
During
Corrine desperately wants to believe this isn’t happening, but she knows it is.
There are sounds of screams from so many places she can’t differentiate them anymore, just a constant undulating wail that seems to come from everywhere at once in hundreds of voices. She thinks one of the voices is hers, or was, anyway, but she doesn’t think there’s any sound coming from her throat anymore. There’s a small panicked part of her that’s worried about that, but there isn’t space for it in her mind right now, far too many other competing thoughts are vying for attention. At the moment, she’s hiding again; all her magic is gone, used up, and with her voice gone her cantrips are useless. She’d done her best to inspire those who she could at the start, and the last of her healing magic had gone to a little boy of maybe six or seven. He’d disappeared into the woods with his mother and gods above, Corrine hopes they’re ok. If she finds their bodies later she doesn’t know what she’ll do. To be fair, she doesn’t know what she’s doing now, either. Things seem to be winding down, but she still isn’t convinced she’s going to survive this, whatever it is.
The creatures had come flooding into town out of seemingly nowhere, and her father had shoved her behind himself and her mother. Once it became clear exactly how many of the creatures there were, they’d told her to run, to hide, while they stayed to fight. She hadn’t known what else to do, and so had done as asked. She hadn’t stayed in one place, couldn’t stay in one place, running from one spot to another trying to stay ahead of the oncoming horde, telling as many people to run as she could.
Now- now it’s quiet. There’s still the quiet crackle of fires going nearby, but the sound of screaming has stopped. When she carefully pokes her head out of her hiding spot to take a quick look, all the creatures are gone. She takes a cautious step out onto the street and looks around, wanting to be horrified, but so numb it’s not processing right. She’s vaguely aware that she’s in shock, but that’s not enough to help her do anything about it.
She wanders back to the center of town in a daze, starting to realize that in the whole town, she appears to be the only living thing. All around her, wherever she looks, are the dead- people and animals alike- slaughtered where they stood, as they tried to run, as they tried to fight. The stink of blood and sulphur is near overwhelming, countered only by the pall of ash that hangs in the air as the town burns.
She’s near what was once the general store when she finds them. Her parents are on the ground, her father’s arm flung over her mother as if in a last-ditch effort to protect her, and she has the distant thought that at least they were near each other when they died. She stumbles over, dropping to her knees next to them, and for short time loses herself. She's been numb, but as the shock starts to break, she can feel something else welling in her, building in her chest. It’s too big to be described by any words as simple as rage or grief. It’s near overwhelming, and she feels she’ll explode if she can’t release it somehow, that it will consume her as surely as the fire is consuming what’s left of her town. She opens her mouth to scream, the only way she can think of to let it out, but can’t give voice to it; that doesn’t stop her from trying. She curls over her parents, hands clenched in their clothes, and screams silently, tears making tracks through the ash and dust coating her face, screams until she feels something in her throat tear. Then she’s coughing, her throat burning, and she can see the splashes of red; she wants to be bothered by that, but just doesn’t have it in her anymore to be so. She coughs again, and spits some of the blood in her mouth to the side. When it hits the edge of her mother’s sword, Corrine feels something happen as the blade flashes blue and starts to spark. She spends a moment staring at it before tentatively reaching out to grasp at the hilt with a shaking hand, half expecting it to shock her on contact. When she touches it, the whole blade lights up in a bright electric blue, the sparks intensifying.
After everything else that’s happened, this is the thing that’s too much. She breaks down sobbing, still silent. Where was this when she needed it? Would it have helped change anything? Would it even have been possible before? She has no idea, and the uncertainty, the unbearable unfairness of it all has her hand clenching around the grip of the sword, knuckles gone bone-white.
She’s never been an especially violent person, but the desire for retribution, for revenge, flares up within her. Only barely louder than that in her mind is a need to keep this from happening to anyone else. She hadn’t seen where the devils- somehow she’s sure now that’s what they were, despite having never seen one before- had disappeared to, but she intends to find them and deal with them in a very permanent way. She stands, sword and sheath in hand, and makes her way home. Her parents’ house is on the outskirts of Oak Hill, not in the town proper, and it’s entirely untouched by the day’s violence. She walks in the front door and for the briefest second, she can believe none of it was real, that everything is okay. The smell of breakfast still lingers lightly in the air, a few pieces of parchment lie next to a quill and inkpot on the table where her father had been scribbling notes on a story that morning before leaving the house. Before she can get too lost in thought she goes to her room. She disrobes entirely, scrubbing herself down with water from her nightstand basin until she’s no longer covered in ash, until her parents’ blood is no longer staining her skin. Her throat still burns, and she can smell smoke in her hair, but there’s not much to be done about that. Before she dresses again she goes to her parents’ room. She has to fight down another wave of emotion, but pushes through it to make her way to a wooden chest in the corner. She opens it and inside is her mother’s armor. Corrine is- was- of a size to her mother, so it should fit. She pulls the pieces out and carries them back with her to her room. She gets dressed, her own clothes underneath and her mother’s worn leather armor on top. She goes back to the chest in the other room and rummages around, pulling out her father’s travel pack.
Over the course of the next hour she packs the bag- clothes, travel necessities, all the gold she can locate, along with some provisions. She sets the pack by the door and goes back to her parents’ room, not knowing if or when she’ll be back. Opening her mother’s jewelry box, she finds what she’s looking for- a small silver locket with tiny painted portraits in the panels. On one side is her mother, on the other is her father. They both look younger than she’s known them, a gift her father had given her mother in their adventuring days. She slips the chain over her head and tucks the locket under her shirt and armor. Going back to the door she buckles the sword onto her hip, hefts the travel pack on, and takes a last glance around the home she grew up in. It’s quiet in a way it’s never been before, even when her parents were away. It’s likely a trick of her mind, in that she knows they’ll never be back, and she’s projecting, but she can’t help but feel, if only a little, that somehow the house knows.
She steps out the door and starts walking, aiming for Eastford. She needs to find Calinou, tell him what happened. She doesn’t know if he can help, but if nothing else she knows she can’t do this alone, and she’ll feel better- for a certain value of ‘better’- if she has him.
Two days later, still a full day’s travel from Eastford, the Mourning happens, and everything goes to shit.
After
For the first time in a little over a week, Corrine has absolutely nothing to do.
It’s an uncomfortable sensation, one she’s unaccustomed to after the chaos of the last few days. She’s double-checked with Galen, checked in at all the main stations in camp, and to a one they’ve all told her things are handled, that she should go relax, that she’s earned it.
So she sits in her and Galen’s tent, at a complete and utter loss. She’s been in near constant motion since the Mourning, corralling people, getting them out of Cyre (she doesn’t actually remember that part, though that could easily be chalked up to extreme exhaustion and trauma), keeping them safe, helping to negotiate space in the fields outside of Flamekeep for her people, making sure the camp is as safe and supplied as she can. Now that they’re telling her to take a break, she honestly has no idea what that means.
She knows if Galen or anyone else wanders in they’ll be worried if they find her sitting and staring into space, so she has to find something to occupy herself with. She also knows that if she tries to go back out into camp to help with anything, she’s going to get a stern talking to from any number of people. She sighs, running her hands through her hair, and thinks. After a pause, she gets up and rummages around through the items on the table she’d been provided. There seems to be the pervasive idea in camp that she’s somehow in charge, which is utterly ridiculous. However, while being ridiculous, it also means that she has supplies that come with the implied position. She finds some parchment and a pencil, and sits down with a lapdesk on her cot. She taps the pencil against her lips as she thinks, unsure of what she’s going to write. She hasn’t composed anything since Oak Hill fell, since the Mourning, and doesn’t know how she feels about the potential for doing it again. She hasn’t felt much like singing lately, and even if she did, she hardly has the voice for it anymore (she’s been very pointedly not thinking about that fact too hard). Her instruments were left behind the day she left Oak Hill, unnecessary burdens when her goal had been to move quickly and as unencumbered as possible.
The tent is relatively quiet, but from outside she can hear the low susurrus of sound that never seems to end in the camp. People from all walks of life, all backgrounds, pulled together by a common sense of unimaginable tragedy and loss.
And yet.
She’s amazed, every single day, at how everyone’s come together, though whether it’s in spite of their differences or because of them she doesn’t know. They all fit together, like a giant puzzle, against incredible odds. Her pencil is moving before she realizes it, and when she surfaces for air a few hours later she finds she’s composed a piece of music. She looks it over, and can hear in her head what it should sound like. She wants it out in the world, but doesn’t know how. The thought that she can still create something when there’s so much that’s desperately wrong…
She knows it’s more than a bit fucked up that she feels this way. If it were someone else, anyone else, she’d tell them how great it is that they can find something inspiring in such awful circumstances. She holds the parchment in her hands and is half tempted to rip it up. Instead, she leaves the piece unsigned, and sneaks out of the tent.
It’s gotten late while she’s been in her own head, and it isn’t difficult to move unseen along the outer edges of the camp. They’d gained another group of people- other Cyran refugees- just that morning, and the extra bustle of people is nice in a way, even if the circumstances that led them here are definitely not. She finds one of the guard stations along part of the perimeter furthest from her tent, and leaves the finished song there to be found. She doesn’t know who she expects to find it, and she realizes she doesn’t especially care.
A few days later, she’s walking through camp on an errand and hears a group of voices suddenly rise from nearby. They start as individual voices, trying to find pitches, but then quickly come together. It’s incredible- a wall of voices, of music, strong and undaunted, and she realizes that’s her song, the one she’d written and left in the guard station. She has to quickly duck behind a tent to collect herself; she doesn’t want to have to explain why a bunch of people singing has reduced her to tears.
Later that evening she sits again, parchment and pencil in hand, and writes.
It’s a duet, this time. She’s glad Galen is occupied elsewhere, because she doesn’t realize she’s crying until she’s finished writing it. She wipes her face, blows her nose, and sneaks off to leave the music somewhere to be found.
It becomes a pattern for her. If she’s shuffled off to relax, or needs to fill time, the music comes. It may not come from her mouth anymore, or from her instruments, but she likes to think in some way it’s still her, just indirectly.
She never signs any of the music. Fireside, and now Flamekeep proper, are convinced they have a phantom bard roaming the area. In a way, she supposes they’re right. She feels like a shade of herself sometimes, not entirely solid, but those moments are fleeting.
One night, she dreams of Calinou.
She forgets, however briefly; for the tiniest sliver of a moment between sleep and waking she thinks he’ll be there, just to her side, ready to pull her close and kiss the top of her head. Then full awareness hits, and it strikes like a fist to her gut. She’s up and dressed in a blink, grabbing a handful of parchment, a pencil, and her cloak, stumbling out of the tent and into the nearby treeline. She goes farther than she really should, but she wants to be sure- needs to be sure- that nobody will bother her.
She drops down next to a tree, leaning back against it and taking a moment to breathe. The dream had felt so real, as if he were really there, and it’s like losing him all over again. Her chest aches with it, and she doesn’t even try to stop herself from crying as she starts to write.
By the time the first rays of sun are starting to show through the branches above her, the piece is done. She thinks this one is different than the others. She knows it will be beautiful, if melancholy, as is most of the music she’s created since leaving Cyre. She also knows she can’t let herself listen to the song. That would be too much. That would break her.
Time marches on, as it does, and she settles further into her place in the camp.Fireside grows up and out around her, expanding and pulling in more and more refugees. She’s given up on being surprised at the number of survivors, and decided to go with being grateful instead. Grateful that her whole nation wasn’t destroyed in one fell swoop. Grateful that somehow, insanely, life has managed to prevail, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. Her people (and when did they become her people?) need her. She has a family again, even if it’s not the one she was born with and lost. She has a whole host of mothers now, fussing at her over missed meals. A slew of fathers, keeping an eye on her. An army of brothers and a battalion of sisters ready to hold her up when she needs it.
They aren’t the Goliath she so desperately wants, but they’re the family she desperately needs, and she’s grateful for them all.
In my game session last night, my character, Corrine, attempted to destroy the sword she’s been using because she’s concerned (not without good reason) that it may be tied to a person who tried to kill her/sacrifice her. In the process of trying to destroy the sword at the closest forge that would let her try, the course of events were as follows:
She tried throwing the sword into a stoked forge, and failed a resulting will save, causing her to reach in and grab the sword to pull it back out, burning herself badly in the process and leaving a mark burned into her hand (which I’m sure will be a Thing later since the handle she grabbed didn’t have matching marks on it). The sword remained undamaged.
Had her friend the paladin try breaking it with a hammer. The paladin took lightning damage from the sword. The sword remained undamaged.
Corrine then tried flinging a Chaos Bolt at it. The resulting acid slagged the anvil the sword was sitting on. The sword remained undamaged.
Kind of peeved at this point, Corrine unleashed an Eldritch Blast at the sword, which she critted on, doing 36 points of damage. The blast bounced off the sword and took out a supporting wall of the forge, causing the walls of the forge (and also the three stories of apartments above it) to collapse, destroying the building. The sword remained undamaged.
Realizing it was perhaps time to leave (they were in a nice part of Sharn, and Corrine in no way has the money to pay for destroying a building), Corrine decided to run, but didn’t want to leave the sword behind. She discovered the fucking thing had reappeared back in her scabbard. Fucking teleporting swords, man.
Corrine then rolled a nat20 on a stealth check to flee the scene, walking right by the owner of the forge and the first guards on the scene, unnoticed, accidentally leaving her friend the paladin behind, to whom it hadn’t occurred to run.
...and this is where the session left off, with Corrine having evaded capture/questioning, same with the NPC party warlock, and our paladin being converged on by guards telling her to drop her weapon (which she’s generally disinclined to do).
I think my biggest concern at the moment (other than for our paladin Basha), is that Corrine now has a cloak and a sword who both refuse to leave her.
I’ve created a work on AO3 to be a collection of a bunch of the writing I’ve done for my D&D character. I don’t know that anyone will have much of an interest, but in case you do, feel free to take a look at the Shadow of the Mourning Ficlet Repository.
Corrine is mine, but everyone else mentioned is an NPC created by the brilliant @halethewanderer
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I’m a bit nervous posting this on AO3, since it’s the first original work I’ve really done. I’ll be editing and uploading the writing for my D&D character Corrine there, because I think it would be nice to have it all in one place, but also because I think it’s important for me to realize how much writing I’m actually producing (I had no idea this first piece was so long, omg). So, if you take a look, I hope you like it, and if not, that’s ok. I get it if you’re mostly here for the fannish stuff :)
