Dar
I've just had my brain messed with, so I'm half reeling in the writing department.
So here are a few interesting things I wrote up for a DnD campaign the resident DnD ubergeek has put together.
Meet Dar
----
Once I had a family. Now, humans say these things and they just kind of smile and nod, laugh about it, or maybe get all pity eyed and talk about lost mothers and fathers in fires. For Aventi that’s a whole range of things all at once. Family is everything. You are nothing without them. Law is everything. Codes and etiquette uphold our lives, strict rules, and Family in our tongue encompasses more then just blood. It is stability, a place, an order to things that are rituals in and of themselves.
So when, in my tongue, you say ‘Once I had a family’ you know what you really mean. Exile, Thrown out. That I did something so horrible that I’ll never drag my fingers through the grasses of the darkest sea, or tend to the sea gardens swaying with currents warm and cold. I left the patterns, the order, the law, and became something wild and chaotic that had to leave. Now I’m on the land, sand between my toes or, more often now, blood mixed with pus on the stones of the streets. Wounds split my skin and I deserve every last bit of it, every drop of pain that wrings out of my throat when I take in a broken leg. I’m a Healer now, a grunt, someone desperate pushing to make others survive because war seems to be loved by this tree walking races when the oceans could give them everything they could ever want. Ever need.
I care too much. I always cared too much, wrapped up in what people thought or felt or believed. I couldn’t just leave them there to die. I couldn’t. My blood salted the waters no more then theirs did. Called the sharks just as well. What was myself to them? Split skin, cracked bones, phelm filled lungs, and I couldn’t breathe and just floated for a while. I’ve heard they keep small fish, cheap little things, fake gold, and they float oddly on their backs when they die. I was cheap gold. I floated to the surface of the ocean and simply died for a while, and when I woke up again the blood was gone and there was screaming. No.
There was more blood, and I thrashed in webbed arms as cold fish eyes watched me gasp and gurgle through my lungs. My skin. My gills tucked quietly away, breathing, breathing, but they didn’t help me, just dragged me with nets and why was there nets and why
Thirteen. Three died right out form shock. Five from the blood in the water calling the predators of the sea. Three more because they drowned. Two from trying to fight off sharks.
I’d killed them.
“If you weren’t an idiot, then I wouldn’t have to set this,” he grumbled thickly through ill-used lungs, grunting with the effort to shift the bone back into place. Screaming pierced the air, but not the stone walls to the city, and that was all that mattered as the nice crunch of bone settling back into place rumbled more in his bones then in his ears. He knew. Just knew.
Knew that soft sigh of muscle that meant it was back into place.
“Oh, shut up,” he grumbled, smacking a limp hand away and silencing the string of obscenities with a turned back. It all retreated into the dim line of experience, a dirty edged sort of tunnel that just kept going and going on and on into the end of times. One nameless face after another, one stupid person after another, getting themselves hurt and injured and all sorts of stupid-
“Dar! ...Dar! Please, don’t bend the splints!” Small hands tugged at the back of his blood and worse stained tunic, and he quietly placed the long metal rods into her hands. Some faceless aid whom he brought up a smile for and a vague attempt at tucking blonde strands behind his ears.
“Finish up for me.” He shooed her off in the direction of the moaning patience. They need him sometimes for the ability to work things back into place, things no one else could quite handle. Rubbing at his palms, red from manhandling bone and flesh, he ducked through a fraying curtain that had once been white and shoved his hands into the cool splash of water.
They’d barely been able to get it. The military had been fast to reserve all the good water pumps for themselves, their barracks, or the new upper class stomping around in thickly heeled boots. Gave him headaches, all they did, constant pounding headaches that weren’t the echoes of waves against the shore.
Bodies moved too close together, and he straightened only long enough to curse at their disease brood. Small spaces and no air meant gangrene and plague could spread like wildfire, lit in an instant that burned out all the body, one system after another until you were dealing with just piles of corpses. Healers bumped shoulders with aides, reaching over each other just to get bandages from a communal pile.
Thud. Thud. Thud. His head snapped up, and hands paused the moment all their ears strained to the noise of those damned booted heels. “...Get back to work!” He shoved one thin face girl, no older then sixteen, at a man coughing up blood into the sheets and swept outside, flinging water everywhere from his dripping hands as yet another patrol stomped to a halt. In crude letters someone had written “Bone House” in Common on some ratty bed sheets strung up above their heads. After the fifth time, they’d kept it, and Dar almost smiled (grimly) when the recruit glanced up at the title, then at Dar’s blood spattered uniform, and nearly flinched.
“Where’s the lead Healer for this place? Only those blessed by the God-“
The man’s words were cut off by another long, wailing scream of a particular pitch that only finger bone settings took. At least one face paled. Dar bowed his head, carefully keeping his hands loosely closed. “Just inside, Master. Please just wait a moment.” The sweet, soft tongue of noble houses slid off his tongue.
He hated it.
He straightened up at a sharp nod, and then stopped short of ducking back inside at the snapped, “Why is he not here now? Quickly, we don’t have time for-“
Dar spun about, and gave them his most calm, serene smile. “My apologies. If you’d like to come inside-“
“....That’s fine.” Blue tinged throats, fingers shifting along weapons that gleamed with no blood on them, no rust stains from long rainy marches or gore caught deep in the tines of spears.
Dar ducked back inside before the urge became stronger to play with the officers, in their shiny new coats and their shiny new positions. Strong lads, most of them, most likely sons of Military underdogs who had proven they could beat a woman or lift an axe high enough to chop off a head. None of them had the stomach for bits of entrails making the floor treacherous, of the weaving it took over chopped off legs and moaning bodies to find the lead Healer in his sharp white tunic, gold emblazoned on the shoulder with military black edging.
Dar paused long enough to gather in the urge to growl, waiting a few breaths before sliding in between one debating Noviate and the next to quietly point to the door. “Master Healer, there are military ranks at the door-“ He pushed it out as fast as he could, coating it with instinctual politeness strained to a thin, cracking veneer.
Only the word Military could make the man move that fast, and Dar stayed where he was, watching the lead Healer dodge and shout orders over the low roar of cries of pain echoing off stone walls. Skill was in each movement, sharp dexterity that one needed to spin the weaving of the Gods, but only the hem of his shirt ever picked up the more ordinary grime of the floor.
Irrespectful. Irresponsible fo a superior to simply delegate with no sign of the work it took for his under workers to just set a single, simple, stupidity broken bone-
“Dar!” That young aide was back, what’s her name, Cel, tugging at his elbow and dragged him back behind a supply curtain. It took sharp footwork to avoid catching his feet on loops of white cloth. She wasn’t a bad kid, girl, just another piece of property now, but she’d been given to the Houses to work and she worked with a fierce, underlaying anger that suited her.
“-Cel, what is it that you-“
“We have to move him!” She shoved him through another cloth acting as a temporary, heavily stained wall into another section of the former grand hall of some merchant walled off using strips of cloth waving on strings of clothesline. Somehow quieter, but more eerie-patients, fully away and bright eyed, rolled restlessly on hard cots as the echoes of their worse off fellows slipped amongst the cracks into a background roar. Simple things, like cuts that had been infected, or may be check ups from old wounds, or-
Dar found himself thrown in front of a young man pushing himself up on one elbow to force them to meet eyes.
He’d never forget that first moment he met Jarle Quiece.
Black. Black eyes, rat eyes. No, that was just the intelligence, sharp as teeth against your ankle in the sewers and refusing to let go. Really they were wolf eyes, cool, distant, unimpressed with anything you had to offer. Narrow chin, sharp lines for fingers, quick turn of his lips. Handsome, roguish, all those kinds of words bards used to throw into their songs before the Uprising five years back.
Even then, Dar’s first thought had been ‘This is a dangerous man.’ Because he was the type people followed, even when they didn’t realize why.
“I cracked that leg into place.” He pointed at the man’s thigh bone, turning my eyes to Cel with the faintest edge of a worried frown between his brows. “He shouldn’t be moved anywhere until four days from now.”
Cel and the man he’d come to know as Jarle exchanged sharp glances. He’d been stupid not to notice that look in her before-that sharp flint that anger could turn determination. They echoed each other, blonde air and black ash, each on one side of a fire’s burning. “We got to. They’ll take him, otherwise.”
Dar’s eyebrow lifted, even as he knelt down and took up the man’s leg carefully between his palms. Not too high, or too far-Dar wasn’t that strong-but enough to study the set of the splints. Thick, heavy metal bars they’d had to dig deep for.
Cel turned desperate, grabbing at Dar’s sleeve. “They’ll take him and beat him worse, then he’ll be back again. That leg will never heal.”
His fingers stilled. The sharp eyed man hadn’t even said a word, but still smiled as if he’d won some weird check of Dar’s inner morals against his pure charm. He fingered the edge fo a bandage, dripping off the edge of the bed, idly working a fraying ling to keep it form degrading further.
“Worse. What is he?”
“Just someone who helps those who help him, friend.” Long, cold fingers rested along Dar’s upper arm, heavy ice through the fabric. Black eyes studied the lines of a quiet face. Too sharp, too knowing. “Eye for an eye. Hand for a hand.”
Cel might’ve held her breath. Dar didn’t. He didn’t need to, never had needed to, and he shoved himself to his feet after a moment with a curse he never voiced on his lips.
The sharp eyed man just watched, intent, leaning a bit as if watching some players tumbling on stage and about to act out the final drama. Or maybe the first.
“Get me a stretcher.”
----
So here are a few interesting things I wrote up for a DnD campaign the resident DnD ubergeek has put together.
Meet Dar
----
Once I had a family. Now, humans say these things and they just kind of smile and nod, laugh about it, or maybe get all pity eyed and talk about lost mothers and fathers in fires. For Aventi that’s a whole range of things all at once. Family is everything. You are nothing without them. Law is everything. Codes and etiquette uphold our lives, strict rules, and Family in our tongue encompasses more then just blood. It is stability, a place, an order to things that are rituals in and of themselves.
So when, in my tongue, you say ‘Once I had a family’ you know what you really mean. Exile, Thrown out. That I did something so horrible that I’ll never drag my fingers through the grasses of the darkest sea, or tend to the sea gardens swaying with currents warm and cold. I left the patterns, the order, the law, and became something wild and chaotic that had to leave. Now I’m on the land, sand between my toes or, more often now, blood mixed with pus on the stones of the streets. Wounds split my skin and I deserve every last bit of it, every drop of pain that wrings out of my throat when I take in a broken leg. I’m a Healer now, a grunt, someone desperate pushing to make others survive because war seems to be loved by this tree walking races when the oceans could give them everything they could ever want. Ever need.
I care too much. I always cared too much, wrapped up in what people thought or felt or believed. I couldn’t just leave them there to die. I couldn’t. My blood salted the waters no more then theirs did. Called the sharks just as well. What was myself to them? Split skin, cracked bones, phelm filled lungs, and I couldn’t breathe and just floated for a while. I’ve heard they keep small fish, cheap little things, fake gold, and they float oddly on their backs when they die. I was cheap gold. I floated to the surface of the ocean and simply died for a while, and when I woke up again the blood was gone and there was screaming. No.
There was more blood, and I thrashed in webbed arms as cold fish eyes watched me gasp and gurgle through my lungs. My skin. My gills tucked quietly away, breathing, breathing, but they didn’t help me, just dragged me with nets and why was there nets and why
Thirteen. Three died right out form shock. Five from the blood in the water calling the predators of the sea. Three more because they drowned. Two from trying to fight off sharks.
I’d killed them.
“If you weren’t an idiot, then I wouldn’t have to set this,” he grumbled thickly through ill-used lungs, grunting with the effort to shift the bone back into place. Screaming pierced the air, but not the stone walls to the city, and that was all that mattered as the nice crunch of bone settling back into place rumbled more in his bones then in his ears. He knew. Just knew.
Knew that soft sigh of muscle that meant it was back into place.
“Oh, shut up,” he grumbled, smacking a limp hand away and silencing the string of obscenities with a turned back. It all retreated into the dim line of experience, a dirty edged sort of tunnel that just kept going and going on and on into the end of times. One nameless face after another, one stupid person after another, getting themselves hurt and injured and all sorts of stupid-
“Dar! ...Dar! Please, don’t bend the splints!” Small hands tugged at the back of his blood and worse stained tunic, and he quietly placed the long metal rods into her hands. Some faceless aid whom he brought up a smile for and a vague attempt at tucking blonde strands behind his ears.
“Finish up for me.” He shooed her off in the direction of the moaning patience. They need him sometimes for the ability to work things back into place, things no one else could quite handle. Rubbing at his palms, red from manhandling bone and flesh, he ducked through a fraying curtain that had once been white and shoved his hands into the cool splash of water.
They’d barely been able to get it. The military had been fast to reserve all the good water pumps for themselves, their barracks, or the new upper class stomping around in thickly heeled boots. Gave him headaches, all they did, constant pounding headaches that weren’t the echoes of waves against the shore.
Bodies moved too close together, and he straightened only long enough to curse at their disease brood. Small spaces and no air meant gangrene and plague could spread like wildfire, lit in an instant that burned out all the body, one system after another until you were dealing with just piles of corpses. Healers bumped shoulders with aides, reaching over each other just to get bandages from a communal pile.
Thud. Thud. Thud. His head snapped up, and hands paused the moment all their ears strained to the noise of those damned booted heels. “...Get back to work!” He shoved one thin face girl, no older then sixteen, at a man coughing up blood into the sheets and swept outside, flinging water everywhere from his dripping hands as yet another patrol stomped to a halt. In crude letters someone had written “Bone House” in Common on some ratty bed sheets strung up above their heads. After the fifth time, they’d kept it, and Dar almost smiled (grimly) when the recruit glanced up at the title, then at Dar’s blood spattered uniform, and nearly flinched.
“Where’s the lead Healer for this place? Only those blessed by the God-“
The man’s words were cut off by another long, wailing scream of a particular pitch that only finger bone settings took. At least one face paled. Dar bowed his head, carefully keeping his hands loosely closed. “Just inside, Master. Please just wait a moment.” The sweet, soft tongue of noble houses slid off his tongue.
He hated it.
He straightened up at a sharp nod, and then stopped short of ducking back inside at the snapped, “Why is he not here now? Quickly, we don’t have time for-“
Dar spun about, and gave them his most calm, serene smile. “My apologies. If you’d like to come inside-“
“....That’s fine.” Blue tinged throats, fingers shifting along weapons that gleamed with no blood on them, no rust stains from long rainy marches or gore caught deep in the tines of spears.
Dar ducked back inside before the urge became stronger to play with the officers, in their shiny new coats and their shiny new positions. Strong lads, most of them, most likely sons of Military underdogs who had proven they could beat a woman or lift an axe high enough to chop off a head. None of them had the stomach for bits of entrails making the floor treacherous, of the weaving it took over chopped off legs and moaning bodies to find the lead Healer in his sharp white tunic, gold emblazoned on the shoulder with military black edging.
Dar paused long enough to gather in the urge to growl, waiting a few breaths before sliding in between one debating Noviate and the next to quietly point to the door. “Master Healer, there are military ranks at the door-“ He pushed it out as fast as he could, coating it with instinctual politeness strained to a thin, cracking veneer.
Only the word Military could make the man move that fast, and Dar stayed where he was, watching the lead Healer dodge and shout orders over the low roar of cries of pain echoing off stone walls. Skill was in each movement, sharp dexterity that one needed to spin the weaving of the Gods, but only the hem of his shirt ever picked up the more ordinary grime of the floor.
Irrespectful. Irresponsible fo a superior to simply delegate with no sign of the work it took for his under workers to just set a single, simple, stupidity broken bone-
“Dar!” That young aide was back, what’s her name, Cel, tugging at his elbow and dragged him back behind a supply curtain. It took sharp footwork to avoid catching his feet on loops of white cloth. She wasn’t a bad kid, girl, just another piece of property now, but she’d been given to the Houses to work and she worked with a fierce, underlaying anger that suited her.
“-Cel, what is it that you-“
“We have to move him!” She shoved him through another cloth acting as a temporary, heavily stained wall into another section of the former grand hall of some merchant walled off using strips of cloth waving on strings of clothesline. Somehow quieter, but more eerie-patients, fully away and bright eyed, rolled restlessly on hard cots as the echoes of their worse off fellows slipped amongst the cracks into a background roar. Simple things, like cuts that had been infected, or may be check ups from old wounds, or-
Dar found himself thrown in front of a young man pushing himself up on one elbow to force them to meet eyes.
He’d never forget that first moment he met Jarle Quiece.
Black. Black eyes, rat eyes. No, that was just the intelligence, sharp as teeth against your ankle in the sewers and refusing to let go. Really they were wolf eyes, cool, distant, unimpressed with anything you had to offer. Narrow chin, sharp lines for fingers, quick turn of his lips. Handsome, roguish, all those kinds of words bards used to throw into their songs before the Uprising five years back.
Even then, Dar’s first thought had been ‘This is a dangerous man.’ Because he was the type people followed, even when they didn’t realize why.
“I cracked that leg into place.” He pointed at the man’s thigh bone, turning my eyes to Cel with the faintest edge of a worried frown between his brows. “He shouldn’t be moved anywhere until four days from now.”
Cel and the man he’d come to know as Jarle exchanged sharp glances. He’d been stupid not to notice that look in her before-that sharp flint that anger could turn determination. They echoed each other, blonde air and black ash, each on one side of a fire’s burning. “We got to. They’ll take him, otherwise.”
Dar’s eyebrow lifted, even as he knelt down and took up the man’s leg carefully between his palms. Not too high, or too far-Dar wasn’t that strong-but enough to study the set of the splints. Thick, heavy metal bars they’d had to dig deep for.
Cel turned desperate, grabbing at Dar’s sleeve. “They’ll take him and beat him worse, then he’ll be back again. That leg will never heal.”
His fingers stilled. The sharp eyed man hadn’t even said a word, but still smiled as if he’d won some weird check of Dar’s inner morals against his pure charm. He fingered the edge fo a bandage, dripping off the edge of the bed, idly working a fraying ling to keep it form degrading further.
“Worse. What is he?”
“Just someone who helps those who help him, friend.” Long, cold fingers rested along Dar’s upper arm, heavy ice through the fabric. Black eyes studied the lines of a quiet face. Too sharp, too knowing. “Eye for an eye. Hand for a hand.”
Cel might’ve held her breath. Dar didn’t. He didn’t need to, never had needed to, and he shoved himself to his feet after a moment with a curse he never voiced on his lips.
The sharp eyed man just watched, intent, leaning a bit as if watching some players tumbling on stage and about to act out the final drama. Or maybe the first.
“Get me a stretcher.”
----