rúni vintergaard | watcher of caed nua | glamfellen | the white that wends | aristocrat | aggressive, cruel, passionate, diplomatic, clever, rational | sides with crucible knights / helps build forge knights | sides with royal deadfire company / convinces eothas to empower berath | aides raedric and deposes of kolsc | binds maerwald to caed nua | reforges abydon | returns souls to the wheel | banishes thaos's soul to breith eaman | cipher (soul blade) / paladin (bleak walker) / priest of berath | 'the black hand of berath', 'the herald of berath', 'the tyrant of berath' | aloth romance
So, continuing the adventures of an intrepid Dracozzi Paladini.
Hello there Sagani! You seem nice enough, though maybe a bit too much like a mom friend for Othello to feel completely comfortable around you. You sound like his mom. He keeps expecting her to tell him to go to bed early and wash behind his ears.
Caed Nua is now properly in Othello’s possession. The Stewart is nice, though she’s also A Mom.
The whole thing Maerwald was rather unnerving. Is this what happens to all Watchers? Or just ones who’ve Awakened with a mind-whammy that big? Othello thinks his Awakened memories can’t be that bad. Or screwed up. He was the guy who... and the kid... and yikes.
Next stop was Raedric. Othello doesn’t think much of Readric. So Kolsc didn’t mention he’s Raedric’s cousin? He’s not killing his own wife, is he? And his people.
prompt "🎄 there ain’t language for the things i feel" for anyone!
Thanks for the prompt!! feeling normal about this one!! as you can probably tell by the word count!!
Lord Huron lyric prompts
content warnings: Devil-typical stuff (murder, references to past abuse, robot body dysphoria)
spoiler warnings: spoilers for Devil's entire storyline and for the end of The White March Part 2
it's also on AO3 because I've put way too much work into this
there ain’t language for the things I feel (Devil of Caroc x The Watcher, 2964 words)
The Devil of Caroc feels nothing.
Not the floor under her feet. Not the cold mountain air. Not the grip of a knife in her fingers.
She's had to relearn how to move, how to do everything that requires you to know where your body is. It was kinda funny, the look on Galvino's face when his precious "creation" couldn't take a single step forward.
Those first days, part of her wondered if she should just stay that way, a useless heap of metal on the floor that won't move no matter how much you kick or curse at it; maybe then the old madman would deem his experiment a failure and let her rest.
But Galvino didn't take her apart, and, after a few days of sullen motionless defiance, Devil got bored.
The learning was slow, but she had nothing else to occupy herself with, and by the end of the week she was walking. Things would still slip out of her hands when she tried to pick them up, but eventually she had that figured out too.
But while she got the ability to move back — got good at it, even; learned how to be quick and quiet with the mess of metal that her new body was — everything else was gone.
She took to fiddling with her hands just to see them move, tapping her fingers against her own armored plates just to remind herself there's something there at all; carving shit into Galvino's walls and the occasional tree just to see she'd left a mark there, some kind of proof she still exists in the world.
It didn't help much.
Years later, in her dreams she's still folk, and can feel and smell and hurt, and oftentimes the things she dreams feel realer than anything that happens in her waking hours.
She dreams about her home sometimes: about soft rabbit-pelt blankets and the smell of food cooking over a fire, the voices of her folks and her brothers and sister coming from the other room.
More often than that, she dreams about killing.
Sometimes it's the killing she's already done; sometimes it's the killing she still needs to do.
She dreams about Harmke a lot. When she kills him in her dreams, he screams and writhes and gurgles as his flesh splits open under her blade, and she feels his warm blood on her hands.
It doesn't play out like that, when it really happens.
Oh, he screams alright; he makes all the same noises everyone else does, and he bleeds, and he rasps out a last breath, and then he goes still.
And Devil feels nothing.
Nothing.
Not even a tiny bit of what she's felt in her dreams.
And really, she should've known, there's nothing different between that death and all the others she's caused since she woke up inside of this metal thing, but it's —
It's —
It's been the one thing that kept her going, and now it's gone.
And she got nothing from it.
*
The Watcher's got eyes like golden coins, a tongue sharper than her teeth and a real knack for striking fear into folks two, three, four times her size.
Devil likes her.
She's liked her from the moment she punched Galvino in the stomach and skewered his neck on her blade as he doubled over.
It was clean, fast, precise. Like clockwork. Like a trap closing.
And then she told Devil she did it to read his soul as he died; to get the answers he wouldn't give her when he was still living. To learn how to keep Devil from rusting.
It takes her some time to figure out why the Watcher cares so much.
(Mae, just call me Mae, she says and rolls her eyes like she’s had to repeat that more times than she cares to remember)
Eventually Devil pieces together that Mae’s family's had a history with slavery, and Galvino's bold-faced attempt to sell Devil to her rubbed her wrong enough to kill him for it, and try to see his wrongs made right.
Funny thing is, Mae doesn’t care about the murders much. Seems her family doesn’t have a history with that.
She doesn’t hesitate a second before agreeing to help her track down Harmke.
“It’s only fair,” she says.
Things being fair is important to her. It’s the Goldpact Knight way, never leaving a debt unsettled.
So Mae helps Devil do her killing, and in return, Devil promises to help with hers.
It’s only fair.
Besides, she doesn’t mind Mae half as much as the rest of them, and she’s the only one who can do Devil’s repairs now.
“That’s temporary,” Mae tells her. “You’ll learn to do it yourself, and then you won’t depend on me or anyone else.”
She says it with the same zeal that Pallegina, the feathered girl, has when she talks about her Republics. Devil reckons that might be the way all paladins talk.
By then, it’s after Harmke, after the Battery, and she’s resigned herself to the fact that it’s just going to be like this, forever.
But when Mae looks straight at her with those gold-coin eyes — and she’s got this way of looking that makes Devil feel like she’s really looking at her, seeing something past Galvino’s work that even Devil herself can’t find — and says you won’t depend on anyone else, it almost feels like an oath; a promise that there’s something waiting for her still.
*
There’s a new dream comes to take the place of the one where she kills Harmke.
In this one, Mae runs a hand through her hair, and then Devil pulls her closer and kisses her. Mae’s warm in her arms, her hand rough with a swordswoman’s calluses against her cheek, and Devil cuts her tongue on one of her fangs and tastes blood.
It feels just as real as the other dreams.
And then she wakes up, a bronze corpse with a mask for a face, and she feels nothing, nothing, nothing.
She should’ve seen this coming. They’ve been trading looks and words for a while now; hard to remember who started it, or when it turned from just figuring each other out to something different.
Mae makes her laugh. She’s got this hardass conviction that lets her stare down a club-swinging ogre and say let’s talk, a worse obsession with words and numbers than Galvino had, and a real short fuse for people wasting her time.
She’s clever, she’s got a way with words, and she’s a beauty to watch in a fight.
Devil would say that’s just how she likes ‘em, but truth is, it’s been so long since she’s liked anyone that she doesn’t really remember.
She just knows she likes Mae. And sometimes, Mae looks at her like she knows, like she thinks about it too.
They’ll never have what Devil's dreams are showing her, though.
Sometimes that gnaws at her so badly that she needs to find something or someone to break, just to get it to stop.
Other times, she’s glad for it.
Part of her was worried she’d grow aimless after Harmke’s death didn’t bring anything she’d hoped for. She couldn’t for the life of her guess that she could still want things other than killing; that she could dream about something that hasn’t got anything to do with Cold Morn.
It’s a part of her that could’ve died in the fires or in Galvino’s cursed machine, and now she knows that it didn’t. That, on its own, is probably worth something.
That, and the way Mae smiles at her sometimes.
*
Mae frowns, tracing the dent in her chest plate with gloved fingers.
Devil doesn't feel it, of course.
"Try to lift your arm?"
Devil does as asked, lifting her right arm until it gets stuck halfway and doesn't go any further.
"...Alright, put it back down."
She does.
"I think we'd have to open you up and look," Mae says. "And I don't want to do it out here in the snow."
She glances over her shoulder, at the rest of their party taking a second to recover while they try to figure out Devil's situation. Turns out, taking a maegfolc's club straight to the chest is a bad idea even if you're made of bronze; go figure.
The rest of them are doing alright, already patched up by Hiravias' and Mae's joined efforts; Mae herself still has blood in her hair from a cut that just closed up.
Funny thing about flesh: easier to hurt, but sometimes easier to fix, too.
Mae looks back at Devil, and says:
"I think you should fall back. The Eyeless will be going after our reinforcements; you should have a clean shot through."
She's right about that. Even with some of her gears stuck or whatever the Hel happened in there, getting back to the edge of the crater won't be a problem if Devil goes alone.
Except, Mae's hand shakes a little as it withdraws from her chest, and there are dark circles under her eyes, her right eye bloodshot.
She's keeping it together, but she's not well. These god-visions have been pushing her to the limit.
"Sure you won't need me in there?" Devil asks. "Could be trapped. Who'll be disarming that, Kana?"
Mae shakes her head:
"We'll manage."
That's that, then. She won't budge.
Devil shrugs; something screeches and grinds inside of her as she does.
"Fine," she says. "It's your funeral."
"Fine by me as long as it's not yours," Mae parries.
Devil rolls her eyes.
Goddamn paladins.
“Don’t go dying in there,” she tells her.
Mae just grins, all stripes and golden eyes and sharp teeth, and offers her a hand up.
Then, the rest of them go down into the cave, and Devil goes in the opposite direction.
She weaves her way between ogres and Eyeless and Bleak Walkers beating the shit out of each other, unnoticed; they’re all so caught up in the skirmish that she barely needs to hide.
She finds a safe-looking nook near the edge of the crater with a good view of the battlefield, climbs in, and waits.
*
She must have dozed off at some point, because the rumbling startles her awake.
It's in the ground and in the rocks around her, and her first instinct is to get the Hel out of her hiding spot before she gets crushed. Once she does, she gets a better idea of what's happening: the tremors aren't happening near her, they're coming from the lake.
When she sees the ice begin to crack, she knows something's happening down there, where the rest of them are.
Where Mae is.
Devil takes off running.
*
She makes it to the water just in time to see them pour out of the cave mouth. Something in her body is making a clicking noise that wasn't happening before, and it's getting on her nerves.
As they scramble across the ice, she moves along the edge of the water to meet them on solid ground. She's got a bad feeling all of a sudden, she doesn't know why, and it's the kind she hasn't had in over a decade.
They get closer.
Sagani and Itumaak make the leap to safety like it's nothing. Kana nearly loses his balance; Devil catches him with her good arm, then Sagani joins in, and they pull until he tumbles forward. Zahua leaps over with Hiravias under his arm, and then it's —
Edér. It's Edér.
And he always goes last, to make sure everyone else makes it through.
Soon as he regains his balance, Devil steps up to him and grabs him by the collar of his armor.
"Where's Mae?" she asks.
She doesn't like the look Edér gives her.
"I'm sorry," he says.
She tightens her grip, metal grinding against metal.
"You tell me what happened or I get it out of you."
He doesn't flinch, just stares back at her with his mouth set and a weird shine to his eyes.
"She stayed back," he says. "One of us had to. She made us draw lots, and... she pulled the short one."
Then he swallows, takes a deep breath, and repeats:
"I'm sorry."
That's when she realizes he's on the verge of tears.
Devil flinches, releases his collar like she's grabbed something hot or sharp, and turns away, which just forces her to face the rest of them.
Sagani's sitting on the ground, her face buried in Itumaak's fur as she holds him close; Hiravias is dusting himself off, turned away so that none of them can see his good eye; Kana's weeping openly, strangely quiet for a guy his size; and Zahua's just staring out at the cracked ice with a look of wonder, or maybe jealousy.
Their grieving faces close in on her like a torch-bearing mob; wherever she turns, there's one of them, driving her back into the fire.
She feels a scream starting somewhere in the back of her mind — no words, just violence with nowhere to put it.
And then, she's cold.
She's cold, and the ground is hard under her feet, and the wind blowing from the crater whistles through the seams of her body, chilling her core, tugging at the tightly wound wires in her faulty right arm, and her chest aches where she'd taken the blow.
The air smells like pitch and smoke and salt.
Her knees buckle and she collapses, the fight knocked out of her at once; there's nothing she can do but stare at her own twitching hands, still bronze, still wrong, and feel.
For a brief, horrible moment she understands everything Zahua had ever said about pain being beautiful.
Then, something clicks and catches inside of her, and the world goes dark.
*
Devil dreams about home again.
Her face is buried in a rabbit-fur blanket, and she can hear — and smell — a crackling fire nearby.
It's warm.
There's someone sitting on the bed next to her. She pushes the blanket off, sits up to see who it is.
Mae startles, ears flicking up, but quickly relaxes again and smiles at her.
"You woke up," she says. "Thank the gods. I was just about to start worrying I'd messed something up."
Devil doesn't even question it; she doesn't want to.
She reaches for her —
And freezes.
Her arm is bronze, engraved with vine patterns and arcane nonsense, reflecting the light of a fire somewhere to her left.
But she still feels the soft fur and the bedding, and the air smells like wet clothes and healing potions and smoked fish.
Mae takes her outstretched hand in hers, and her hands are warm and rough, just like Devil always dreams them. And, now that Mae's fully turned towards her, she can see the large bruise over almost the entire right side of her face.
Too many things are wrong. Her hands. The smell. Mae's face. Devil's starting to think that —
"How are you feeling?" Mae asks.
— that she's not dreaming this.
"Ain't you dead?" she creaks out.
Mae laughs; there's a tense edge to it.
"I thought I was," she says, and then repeats, her smile fading, "I really thought I was."
Mae looks down — she's still holding her hand — and runs a thumb over the side of Devil's palm.
A shiver goes down her spine.
Mae looks back up, and asks:
"Can you feel this?"
There isn't a single thing Devil can bring herself to say, so she just nods.
Mae exhales and squeezes her hand, bowing her head over it, almost as if in prayer.
"It worked," she whispers.
Devil finally manages to scrape some words together.
She says:
"You did this to me."
Mae shakes her head, looks back up at her.
"Not me," she says. "Abydon. I just asked. It's... a long story, but the gist of it is that I did him a favor, and he said I could ask for one in return. I asked for this."
She lightens her grip on Devil's hand just a little, but she doesn't let go.
Devil stares at her, and tries to understand.
"You... asked for me to feel again?"
Mae shrugs, and gives her a shaky kind of smile Devil hasn't ever seen on her before.
"Well, he said he couldn't make you folk again, and that was his next best offer."
Something strange happens to her.
Her body gets warmer, a strange heat coming from the core in her chest. Things click and turn, and when she tries to speak, just a weird creaking noise comes out.
Devil knows she can't cry, but it feels like she's about to.
She stares down at their hands intertwined on the rabbit fur for a long moment; her ornate bronze, and Mae's small hands that are warm and alive, with faded scars and little tufts of fur on her knuckles.
"Don't know what I done to deserve someone who'd get a wish from a god and waste it on me," she says finally.
Mae squeezes her hand again.
"I just wanted to give you something," she says, her voice shaking as much as her hands are. "I thought I was dying, and I — I didn't want to leave you like that. I wanted my love to be good for something."
"Effigy's eyes, Mae," Devil says. "Come here."
She pulls her into her lap, meeting no resistance, and hugs her.
Mae's warm in her arms, her breathing and heartbeat a long-forgotten rhythm against Devil's chest. She hugs her back, squeezing tightly, and Devil feels it. She feels it.
Devil buries her face in Mae's hair — it's thick and wavy, and warm like the rest of her — and cries without crying.
