Post by Jaezred Vandree on Jun 6, 2024 14:55:37 GMT
(Continuing from All Good Things…)
Just as he predicted, Jaezred finds Keros in the Fort Ettin training yard, a hulking figure with a dark cloud looming over his horned head. He has bags under his eyes and the straw dummy he has been practising against looks like it’s had some very rough treatment.
As Keros slams the dummy off its stake, sending it flying across the yard and causing some adventurers to leap out of the way, he finally notices Jaezred in the corner of his eye, leaning forward against the wooden fence that encloses the training area. The drow’s crimson gaze is fixed squarely on him.
Keros sighs deeply and walks over to the well-stocked box with the replacement dummies sitting a few feet from Jaezred. He doesn’t make eye contact as he opens the lid. “Bad news travels fast.”
“Especially so when the object of the news happened in a very public place. What happened, Keros?”
He rummages through the dummies. They’re all the same. He just doesn’t want to look at Jaezred. “What is there to say? You know what happened.”
“No, I do not. I’m sure you felt you had to do it for the sake of your personal well-being, and I will not dispute that — your feelings are your own. But what I fail to understand is why you chose to do it now. You know that Rae is in a very precarious position. Severe emotional turbulence could very well make the hunger worse, push them closer into becoming an avatar. So I’m asking you, Keros, why?”
Keros slams down the lid on the box and turns suddenly toward Jaezred, the smoke and brimstone and shadowy apparitions that accompany him losing his temper coming into play. “You think I did this for me? For my well-being?”
“Then what did you do it for? Because it’s certainly not helping Rae.”
He instantly simmers down, the fire in his eyes extinguishing in a heartbeat. His voice is pleading. “Have you seen them? Are they okay?”
Jaezred doesn’t reply immediately. He straightens up as he continues to stare at Keros. Behind his eyes, there is a swift calculation, weighing whether or not he should divulge what he’d heard from Jenna: a sighting of Rae within the halls of Fort Ettin, laughing whilst tears stream down their cheeks.
Keros’s tone shifts to concern as he clocks the apprehension. “Jaezred, what are you not telling me?”
Jaezred lets out a small sigh. “I do not think they’re alright. From what I’ve heard, I think they might be…delirious, or something like that. But calm down, it’s best you don’t make things worse by going to them now. Just talk to me, Keros. What made you break it off?”
Keros walks over to the fence and leans on it heavily, hunching over and resting on his forearms, looking out over the fields. “I did not mean to. I did not want to. I just thought that after everything we have been through together and everything we have said to one another… I asked them to choose between me and the book.”
He clasps his head in his hands. “I really thought they would pick me.”
“The book? You mean Kyra Stuurm’s diary? What about it?”
There is a long gap before Keros can compose himself enough to reply. “Jaezred, you knew exactly which book I meant and you want me to believe…” He trails off, shaking his head. “The hunger thing I could deal with; Hells, I have to eat a lot too. That book… It has been…” He struggles to find the words. “Slow. Subtle. It has changed them, and you do not see them every day, but I do… I did.”
“Changed them?” Jaezred’s brow furrows deeply. “Look, I know they’ve been looking into this book for a way to help you. But now you say they chose the book over you. Tell me, how has it changed them?”
“It is like they think it holds the solution to every problem. Their research on it took up our whole room at the Hung Rabbit until I had to move out to make space for it. They would stay up late into the night working on it, and when they ran out of ink, they would cut their hand and write on the walls in blood, Jaezred.”
Jaezred is silent again. He searches Keros’s eyes, processing and reprocessing the younger man’s words as a dreadful realisation creeps into his mind.
“Give me a few days,” he says briskly. “I’ll see if I can sort this out.”
Keros turns and looks at him. “If they are doing this to save me, then we both know how this gets ‘sorted out’, Jaezred.”
“No, you don’t understand. I have a suspicion about what this is, but I have to find out more.”
“Do you have any idea how many times I have heard those words these past few months?”
Jaezred glares at him, clearly annoyed. “Will you trust me, Keros?”
They stare at each other for a long while before Keros sighs. “Fine. But when you are done having me continue to sit on my hands while you try and do something smart to fix this, let me know so I can do something right to fix this.”
The corner of Jaezred’s lips quirks up into a small smile. “If you insist.”
Several days later.
The cartography room is one of the more impressive-looking ones at Daring Academy — a gleaming orrery in the centre, surrounded by rows of criss-cross shelves and long, wide drawers filled with vellum scrolls, and in between them banks of tilted desks and display cases. Today, the room appears dark and empty but for a single scholar. She is sitting at one of the desks, legs dangling, working under the ambient glow of her assortment of magic items.
A fist raps gently against a nearby shelf. The arcane glow from the desk barely catches the tall figure standing on the edge of the light.
“Miss Calla Prim, I presume? You work in a rather unusual environment.”
A diminutive but not especially finely built elf turns to look at the interloper: huge, owlish eyes, black enough to drown in. As she fumbles for her glasses a glamour reasserts itself, but in that frantic second a splash of dried blood all but covers one side of her sharp features and fringe. A jagged crown protrudes from her ashen, tangled hair. For a moment she looks…awful. And then fine. Bookish. A curious purple glint to her eyes, a strong set to her jaw, but a junior wizard like any other. She blinks hard, tilts her head, owlish again.
“Lord Vandree?” She closes the tome in front of her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Jaezred steps into the light and pulls up a chair to sit in front of Calla. “I suspected you have heard of me before…” He pauses as he looks at her. Through her. “Had a rough night?”
Calla chuckles, answering both questions in one. “Of course, who hasn’t?”
Under Jaezred’s gaze, the glamour starts to crumble. Thorny crags return from within her hairline, her keen cheekbones pocked with subsurface gravel. Her ears lengthen and twitch behind her, eyes deepen to wells, lips all but disappear. Her deft fingers are stained ochre at the tips with ink and dirt. And that bloodstain blooms steadily across her face.
Entirely unaware, she smiles, and past the oversized spectacles Jaezred sees both. The nebbish academic, and the creature sunk deep in a maze of her own making.
He returns her smile with one of his own, easygoing but reserved. The drow man before her seems at home in the darkness, sitting comfortably as if the gloom is a tailor-made fit on his body like the clothes he wears. He crosses one leg over the other and laces his fingers together — an image of confidence, and yet there is still a millisecond of hesitancy before he speaks again.
“I came here to talk about Rae. They’re in a bad way and they don’t even know it,” he says in a low tone. “I understand that the two of you have a sort of wizardly bond, and so I thought you might be the person in the best position to help them.”
“Again?” Even without distinct pupils, Jaezred can infer Calla’s despairing eyeroll. “I swear to all that’s holy, if it’s another curse, after all I’ve…”
She puts fingertips to the bridge of her nose, takes a deep breath, and settles herself. “What I mean to say is, what seems to be the problem?”
Jaezred suppresses an amused grin. “Yes. Again, I'm afraid, and much worse this time. What I need you to understand, Miss Prim, is that Rae is doubly cursed. One of these curses cannot be cured by a simple casting of remove curse — it’s a long story — but the other one, I believe, can be, because it comes from a spellbook they’ve been using.”
“I really should have charged them more,” Calla mutters to herself. “What kind of spellbook?”
“It belonged to a dead wizard and it contains much writing about a certain theory regarding the Weave — I’ll spare you the details, I don’t wish to tempt another person into its web. Rae has been researching very, very deeply into this theory, and it’s made them… Well, I’ll just show you what I’ve written here.”
Jaezred pulls out a thin scroll of parchment, bound with a purple ribbon, and offers it to Calla. It is taken in remarkably quickly.
“Mmm. I have to say, Lord Vandree, that these symptoms largely describe, well…academics. Maybe excluding the first…” Calla considers her own words briefly. “Maybe. I’m all too ready to believe that Rae has fallen foul of something unpleasant, and there’s no harm in my intercession either way, but…is there more than this?”
Jaezred sighs and leans in closer. “Not that I came here to gossip,” he says, suddenly switching to Drowic Elvish, “but to be completely honest, I didn’t think much of their attachment to this book until they and Keros broke up. Messily. In public. It seems Keros put forth an ultimatum — him or the book — and Rae refused to let go of the book.”
“THEY DID WHAT.”
“Yeah.”
Calla’s jaw tightens, her mouth becoming a clenched line. Although Jaezred has never observed her in a fight, he imagines that it might be the last thing several people have ever seen.
“I’ll get right on it.”
“Well, I appreciate your eagerness. Rae will be coming here to the Academy in a couple of days, to further their research. I think you’ll find them in the sections for the Weave and enchantment magic, or somewhere more secluded. And I don’t need to tell you, given the nature of this curse, that resistance is to be expected?”
“I believe the Dawnlands expression, albeit rather distasteful to some of my colleagues, is that there’s ‘more than one way to skin a cat’. I can promise no lasting harm to Rae in the dissolution of this particular curse, and privacy around both this discussion and their…ongoing arcane woes.” An eyebrow is steadily arched. “I make no such promises about what I’ll do to them vis-a-vis their romantic turmoil.”
Jaezred chuckles. “I accept your terms. Oh, and I ought to remind you, they are currently plagued with another curse that we can’t do anything about at the moment — a hunger curse that’s understandably making them even grumpier. Again, long story. Don’t mind it too much.”
He rises from his seat, looks at Calla again, and bites back a comment about skincare routines that are suitable for drow skin. “I shall bring Keros round here once it’s done so the two of them can talk it out. Thank you, Miss Calla.” He extends a hand out to her.
Calla dismounts from her perch, notably shorter than Jaezred. Instead of immediately reaching for his hand, she slips off her glasses to polish them.
“Terms?”
She lets the word hang in the air between them.
“Then you understand, of course, that there’s one last matter to discuss. Favourably, of course, given the subject under discussion. Not that I’ll leave it unattended, but…your choice of words must be closed out before thanks can be accepted. You understand, of course. Better for a nominal bargain than one left…vague.”
Jaezred retracts his hand. He arches a brow, the smile evaporating from his face. He knows well the ways of the fair folk, but he has an image to maintain and an allegiance to conceal. “I think you misunderstand, Miss Prim. I am asking you to help a mutual friend, not for a bargain.”
Calla removes a single copper piece from a pocket, puts it on the nearest desk, and gestures for it to be met.
She watches as Jaezred’s gaze flits between her and the coin, and she notices for the first time how intensely his red eyes stare, almost glowing in the darkness and boring a hole into everything they lay upon. He takes a deep breath through his nostrils, before he digs around in his coat pockets and finds a coin of his own.
He lays his copper piece next to Calla’s, and waits.
Her expression is stony, right up until she takes the coin, when she visibly relaxes. “I’ll keep this safe for you. I may not be a diviner but I’m certain there will be a time, hopefully not too soon, when I come to you with news about our mutual friend.”
Calla replaces the glasses on her face, on both of them, and extends a hand. “Sincerely, thank you.”
The hand is taken and shaken firmly. “No, thank you,” Jaezred says, smiling again.
He takes the coin left on the desk, flicks it up into the air with a loud ping, and it vanishes in the curl of his fingers as soon as it lands.
Several more days later.
Calla Prim is dead.
Jaezred massages his temples with his fingers as he stares down at the oracle bones lying on his desk, reading their positions again and again. He can almost feel an aneurysm coming.
Days have passed with no word from Calla, and her colleagues at the Academy have not seen nor heard from her either. So he casted commune and asked the obvious question — thrice, querying the spirits in three different ways. The bones gave the same answer each time.
“Well, of course the person most capable of helping you drops dead right after she agrees to help you,” he mutters to himself. “I’m starting to think you’re cursed in every sense of the word, Rae.”
He carefully sweeps the bones into a black leather pouch, dropping Calla’s copper coin on top of the pile before pulling the drawstrings shut. Plan A has officially gone out the window.
Perhaps now he ought to fulfil Keros’s wish and give him something useful to do, and enact Plan B.
Co-written with Tom M and dee
Just as he predicted, Jaezred finds Keros in the Fort Ettin training yard, a hulking figure with a dark cloud looming over his horned head. He has bags under his eyes and the straw dummy he has been practising against looks like it’s had some very rough treatment.
As Keros slams the dummy off its stake, sending it flying across the yard and causing some adventurers to leap out of the way, he finally notices Jaezred in the corner of his eye, leaning forward against the wooden fence that encloses the training area. The drow’s crimson gaze is fixed squarely on him.
Keros sighs deeply and walks over to the well-stocked box with the replacement dummies sitting a few feet from Jaezred. He doesn’t make eye contact as he opens the lid. “Bad news travels fast.”
“Especially so when the object of the news happened in a very public place. What happened, Keros?”
He rummages through the dummies. They’re all the same. He just doesn’t want to look at Jaezred. “What is there to say? You know what happened.”
“No, I do not. I’m sure you felt you had to do it for the sake of your personal well-being, and I will not dispute that — your feelings are your own. But what I fail to understand is why you chose to do it now. You know that Rae is in a very precarious position. Severe emotional turbulence could very well make the hunger worse, push them closer into becoming an avatar. So I’m asking you, Keros, why?”
Keros slams down the lid on the box and turns suddenly toward Jaezred, the smoke and brimstone and shadowy apparitions that accompany him losing his temper coming into play. “You think I did this for me? For my well-being?”
“Then what did you do it for? Because it’s certainly not helping Rae.”
He instantly simmers down, the fire in his eyes extinguishing in a heartbeat. His voice is pleading. “Have you seen them? Are they okay?”
Jaezred doesn’t reply immediately. He straightens up as he continues to stare at Keros. Behind his eyes, there is a swift calculation, weighing whether or not he should divulge what he’d heard from Jenna: a sighting of Rae within the halls of Fort Ettin, laughing whilst tears stream down their cheeks.
Keros’s tone shifts to concern as he clocks the apprehension. “Jaezred, what are you not telling me?”
Jaezred lets out a small sigh. “I do not think they’re alright. From what I’ve heard, I think they might be…delirious, or something like that. But calm down, it’s best you don’t make things worse by going to them now. Just talk to me, Keros. What made you break it off?”
Keros walks over to the fence and leans on it heavily, hunching over and resting on his forearms, looking out over the fields. “I did not mean to. I did not want to. I just thought that after everything we have been through together and everything we have said to one another… I asked them to choose between me and the book.”
He clasps his head in his hands. “I really thought they would pick me.”
“The book? You mean Kyra Stuurm’s diary? What about it?”
There is a long gap before Keros can compose himself enough to reply. “Jaezred, you knew exactly which book I meant and you want me to believe…” He trails off, shaking his head. “The hunger thing I could deal with; Hells, I have to eat a lot too. That book… It has been…” He struggles to find the words. “Slow. Subtle. It has changed them, and you do not see them every day, but I do… I did.”
“Changed them?” Jaezred’s brow furrows deeply. “Look, I know they’ve been looking into this book for a way to help you. But now you say they chose the book over you. Tell me, how has it changed them?”
“It is like they think it holds the solution to every problem. Their research on it took up our whole room at the Hung Rabbit until I had to move out to make space for it. They would stay up late into the night working on it, and when they ran out of ink, they would cut their hand and write on the walls in blood, Jaezred.”
Jaezred is silent again. He searches Keros’s eyes, processing and reprocessing the younger man’s words as a dreadful realisation creeps into his mind.
“Give me a few days,” he says briskly. “I’ll see if I can sort this out.”
Keros turns and looks at him. “If they are doing this to save me, then we both know how this gets ‘sorted out’, Jaezred.”
“No, you don’t understand. I have a suspicion about what this is, but I have to find out more.”
“Do you have any idea how many times I have heard those words these past few months?”
Jaezred glares at him, clearly annoyed. “Will you trust me, Keros?”
They stare at each other for a long while before Keros sighs. “Fine. But when you are done having me continue to sit on my hands while you try and do something smart to fix this, let me know so I can do something right to fix this.”
The corner of Jaezred’s lips quirks up into a small smile. “If you insist.”
Several days later.
The cartography room is one of the more impressive-looking ones at Daring Academy — a gleaming orrery in the centre, surrounded by rows of criss-cross shelves and long, wide drawers filled with vellum scrolls, and in between them banks of tilted desks and display cases. Today, the room appears dark and empty but for a single scholar. She is sitting at one of the desks, legs dangling, working under the ambient glow of her assortment of magic items.
A fist raps gently against a nearby shelf. The arcane glow from the desk barely catches the tall figure standing on the edge of the light.
“Miss Calla Prim, I presume? You work in a rather unusual environment.”
A diminutive but not especially finely built elf turns to look at the interloper: huge, owlish eyes, black enough to drown in. As she fumbles for her glasses a glamour reasserts itself, but in that frantic second a splash of dried blood all but covers one side of her sharp features and fringe. A jagged crown protrudes from her ashen, tangled hair. For a moment she looks…awful. And then fine. Bookish. A curious purple glint to her eyes, a strong set to her jaw, but a junior wizard like any other. She blinks hard, tilts her head, owlish again.
“Lord Vandree?” She closes the tome in front of her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Jaezred steps into the light and pulls up a chair to sit in front of Calla. “I suspected you have heard of me before…” He pauses as he looks at her. Through her. “Had a rough night?”
Calla chuckles, answering both questions in one. “Of course, who hasn’t?”
Under Jaezred’s gaze, the glamour starts to crumble. Thorny crags return from within her hairline, her keen cheekbones pocked with subsurface gravel. Her ears lengthen and twitch behind her, eyes deepen to wells, lips all but disappear. Her deft fingers are stained ochre at the tips with ink and dirt. And that bloodstain blooms steadily across her face.
Entirely unaware, she smiles, and past the oversized spectacles Jaezred sees both. The nebbish academic, and the creature sunk deep in a maze of her own making.
He returns her smile with one of his own, easygoing but reserved. The drow man before her seems at home in the darkness, sitting comfortably as if the gloom is a tailor-made fit on his body like the clothes he wears. He crosses one leg over the other and laces his fingers together — an image of confidence, and yet there is still a millisecond of hesitancy before he speaks again.
“I came here to talk about Rae. They’re in a bad way and they don’t even know it,” he says in a low tone. “I understand that the two of you have a sort of wizardly bond, and so I thought you might be the person in the best position to help them.”
“Again?” Even without distinct pupils, Jaezred can infer Calla’s despairing eyeroll. “I swear to all that’s holy, if it’s another curse, after all I’ve…”
She puts fingertips to the bridge of her nose, takes a deep breath, and settles herself. “What I mean to say is, what seems to be the problem?”
Jaezred suppresses an amused grin. “Yes. Again, I'm afraid, and much worse this time. What I need you to understand, Miss Prim, is that Rae is doubly cursed. One of these curses cannot be cured by a simple casting of remove curse — it’s a long story — but the other one, I believe, can be, because it comes from a spellbook they’ve been using.”
“I really should have charged them more,” Calla mutters to herself. “What kind of spellbook?”
“It belonged to a dead wizard and it contains much writing about a certain theory regarding the Weave — I’ll spare you the details, I don’t wish to tempt another person into its web. Rae has been researching very, very deeply into this theory, and it’s made them… Well, I’ll just show you what I’ve written here.”
Jaezred pulls out a thin scroll of parchment, bound with a purple ribbon, and offers it to Calla. It is taken in remarkably quickly.
• Extreme obsession with researching book; would write using their own blood if out of ink
• Displays uncharacteristic hostility when asked about research
• Extreme reclusiveness
• Heavily impaired situational awareness
• Shortened attention span with regards to anything other than research
• Impulsive behaviour (moreso than usual!)
• Displays uncharacteristic hostility when asked about research
• Extreme reclusiveness
• Heavily impaired situational awareness
• Shortened attention span with regards to anything other than research
• Impulsive behaviour (moreso than usual!)
“Mmm. I have to say, Lord Vandree, that these symptoms largely describe, well…academics. Maybe excluding the first…” Calla considers her own words briefly. “Maybe. I’m all too ready to believe that Rae has fallen foul of something unpleasant, and there’s no harm in my intercession either way, but…is there more than this?”
Jaezred sighs and leans in closer. “Not that I came here to gossip,” he says, suddenly switching to Drowic Elvish, “but to be completely honest, I didn’t think much of their attachment to this book until they and Keros broke up. Messily. In public. It seems Keros put forth an ultimatum — him or the book — and Rae refused to let go of the book.”
“THEY DID WHAT.”
“Yeah.”
Calla’s jaw tightens, her mouth becoming a clenched line. Although Jaezred has never observed her in a fight, he imagines that it might be the last thing several people have ever seen.
“I’ll get right on it.”
“Well, I appreciate your eagerness. Rae will be coming here to the Academy in a couple of days, to further their research. I think you’ll find them in the sections for the Weave and enchantment magic, or somewhere more secluded. And I don’t need to tell you, given the nature of this curse, that resistance is to be expected?”
“I believe the Dawnlands expression, albeit rather distasteful to some of my colleagues, is that there’s ‘more than one way to skin a cat’. I can promise no lasting harm to Rae in the dissolution of this particular curse, and privacy around both this discussion and their…ongoing arcane woes.” An eyebrow is steadily arched. “I make no such promises about what I’ll do to them vis-a-vis their romantic turmoil.”
Jaezred chuckles. “I accept your terms. Oh, and I ought to remind you, they are currently plagued with another curse that we can’t do anything about at the moment — a hunger curse that’s understandably making them even grumpier. Again, long story. Don’t mind it too much.”
He rises from his seat, looks at Calla again, and bites back a comment about skincare routines that are suitable for drow skin. “I shall bring Keros round here once it’s done so the two of them can talk it out. Thank you, Miss Calla.” He extends a hand out to her.
Calla dismounts from her perch, notably shorter than Jaezred. Instead of immediately reaching for his hand, she slips off her glasses to polish them.
“Terms?”
She lets the word hang in the air between them.
“Then you understand, of course, that there’s one last matter to discuss. Favourably, of course, given the subject under discussion. Not that I’ll leave it unattended, but…your choice of words must be closed out before thanks can be accepted. You understand, of course. Better for a nominal bargain than one left…vague.”
Jaezred retracts his hand. He arches a brow, the smile evaporating from his face. He knows well the ways of the fair folk, but he has an image to maintain and an allegiance to conceal. “I think you misunderstand, Miss Prim. I am asking you to help a mutual friend, not for a bargain.”
Calla removes a single copper piece from a pocket, puts it on the nearest desk, and gestures for it to be met.
She watches as Jaezred’s gaze flits between her and the coin, and she notices for the first time how intensely his red eyes stare, almost glowing in the darkness and boring a hole into everything they lay upon. He takes a deep breath through his nostrils, before he digs around in his coat pockets and finds a coin of his own.
He lays his copper piece next to Calla’s, and waits.
Her expression is stony, right up until she takes the coin, when she visibly relaxes. “I’ll keep this safe for you. I may not be a diviner but I’m certain there will be a time, hopefully not too soon, when I come to you with news about our mutual friend.”
Calla replaces the glasses on her face, on both of them, and extends a hand. “Sincerely, thank you.”
The hand is taken and shaken firmly. “No, thank you,” Jaezred says, smiling again.
He takes the coin left on the desk, flicks it up into the air with a loud ping, and it vanishes in the curl of his fingers as soon as it lands.
Several more days later.
Calla Prim is dead.
Jaezred massages his temples with his fingers as he stares down at the oracle bones lying on his desk, reading their positions again and again. He can almost feel an aneurysm coming.
Days have passed with no word from Calla, and her colleagues at the Academy have not seen nor heard from her either. So he casted commune and asked the obvious question — thrice, querying the spirits in three different ways. The bones gave the same answer each time.
“Well, of course the person most capable of helping you drops dead right after she agrees to help you,” he mutters to himself. “I’m starting to think you’re cursed in every sense of the word, Rae.”
He carefully sweeps the bones into a black leather pouch, dropping Calla’s copper coin on top of the pile before pulling the drawstrings shut. Plan A has officially gone out the window.
Perhaps now he ought to fulfil Keros’s wish and give him something useful to do, and enact Plan B.
Co-written with Tom M and dee