mazihhn is faced with parts of herself she's trying to forget.
set during hot. mind some mild body horror.
1k words. teen.
my part of the art trade with @pyroengi! ty for letting me borrow mazzi <3
Mazihhn has many memories.
She remembers the clash of claws, teeth. She remembers the taste of blood on her tongue, and she remembers the cage, the net, and the endless days that transferred between two kinds of violence. There was one Svanir in particular - a nasty man, a brutal man, with a half-frozen beard and without a few of his fingers that appear to have been lost to frostbite - whose throat she wanted to tear the most. He spoke in a low voice, icy cool against her own rage, and that made her want to slaughter him more.
She remembers he was her handler. She remembers how hard he pulled the chains of her collar, how he ordered her to fight in a way that betrayed how certain he was of the fact she’d listen to him. Others deferred to him. Mazihhn swore she’d not do the same, that she was better than a Svanir, even if she was half-animal. Worse yet, she did obey him, she tore and clawed and killed at his command, and she imagined it was him all the while.
Mazihhn remembers, and to this day, she shivers at the memory. Part of her, she thinks, died that day. She doesn’t talk about it.
There are places that memory doesn’t reach, however. There are places where personhood stops and the body transforms into a vessel for an emotion, capable of seeing but not analysing, carnal in a way few things ever are. Mazihhn doesn’t know what she did during that hole in her life. All she knows is that she was angry and that she killed.
Then came the bodies. Not the bodies of people and things she’d killed, no. The bodies of her friends - the body of her kodan sister, too - littered the grass, mingled with the bodies of Svanir. Death covered the land like an uncaring mother; maybe Mazihhn was an uncaring sister, leaving her heart amongst the dead as she watched them rot. Maybe she should’ve been more aware, more free, less of a beast and more of a person.
Mazihhn does remember solitude and she remembers wanting to die. But she didn’t. For better or for worse, she didn’t. She carries the guilt of leaving her kodan friends behind, but she did not join them in death. Memories here are blurry, more moments than a cohesive story a skaald might tell. No skaald would tell her story though. Norn speak of heroes and greatness, not scraggly survivors.
For a while, she thought she was safe from it. If she doesn’t mention it, if it stays in the ground with her fallen family, if nobody else hears a word about it, she is safe. And then Mordremoth came. Mazihhn didn’t have to speak, nor did anyone ask, but that same grass that had once gathered the blood and the grief and the bodies now came unearthed as a big jungle dragon, ready to spit in the face of her oblivion.
She is not always on the field, not in the same way the other Pact agents and soldiers are. She does go, occasionally; her spirit form isn’t the only way she can fight and do harm, and the dragon is the enemy. She recalls someone saying that the prey had never been greater, and that if this works out, the next one will be Jormag.
Mazihhn would love to take Jormag down. But the way Pact is currently existing - panicked, raw, trapped like an animal in a cage - isn’t inspiring hope. It grinds her gears and makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand in anger and something she doesn’t know how to name. She just knows it hurts, and that she wants it out, and that at night she sees the bodies of her kodan sister and her kodan kin.
She does not speak of that either. No soul knows the depths of Mazihhn’s pain. Her job is to make weapons and sometimes kill, not to tell tales. She isn’t a skaald.
But one time she’s on the field, she actually sees a sylvari die. Not the ally sylvari; those she regards with honor. The turned sylvari, the potential all of them have to become mindless slaves of the dragon, that’s what she sees. And it is difficult to not see a sylvari. She could’ve been fooled, had she not been who she is. Their eyes are wide in madness and pain, and they’re trashing and attacking until Mazihhn cuts them down and they drop to the ground beneath her feet.
The thud is maddening. It reminds her of a patter of paws and the bodies she killed for the Svanir. Her breath is rugged, her hands sticky with sap, and her heart beats like she’s been running away from something. Her chest compresses in on itself for one long moment and she sees, with horror, that the sylvari is growing claws, and that their bark is rotting and revealing parts of their upper jaw.
“Mazihhn?” One of the party members. A fellow smith. An ally. A non-sylvari. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” she replies. “I am fine. I am simply winded from battle.”
Caring eyes meet hers. The smith does not ask any more questions. Mazihhn looks at the half-turned sylvari again. They should be burned, she thinks, to avoid any unwanted consequences. Should she, in case she had died fighting for the Svanir on demands from her handler, also have been additionally put down as a liability?
And why the fuck is she viewing herself as this monster again?
Her hands are shaking. She stares at the body below her and sees herself, mad in a cage, and the screams of her spirit form and of the sylvari before they’d died merge in her head. It echoes in the jungle, this neverending cry for help, and at one point, Mazihhn feels a tear slide down her cheek.
The sylvari is also growing fangs.
Mazihhn closes her eyes. Leaves shush around her ominously and she almost feels the grass beneath her boots. She is not that beast that Svanir had kept in a cage. She is not. The sylvari would’ve been like her, a survivor, but they’d never gotten a chance to do so. Maybe, unlike norn, sylvari tell tales of survivors, not just heroes. They certainly will after this campaign. It matters little now, though. When she opens her eyes, she sees their bulging, dead gaze staring up at her in what seems to be one last return to themself before dying.
Mazihhn kneels before them and closes their eyes. Leaves still sing their mourning song.
She is not a monster. The thought calms her some and she looks at them one last time before she rejoins her party. She is not a monster, after all.
You say too late to start, got your heart in a headlock
I don't believe any of it
You say too late to start, with your heart in a headlock
You know you're better than this
Voice Claims! [order: maz, feannag, teek, & flux]
Only did my main four sillies but the others will b added in eventually..
I personally cant imagine a character's voice without a specific source; so i love VCs!
link to magistersieran's blog
