Uhhhh I Got Rambly But - Tumblr Posts
“Untwist yer knickers, Shady One,” Anne replies almost immediately. Gods above—is this what dealing with her is like? Unpleasant and mean without a real reason? …what a stupid fucking question. Of course this what dealing with her is like, right down to the dismissive assumptions. Anne isn’t used to dealing with someone like herself; James and Jack were loud, brash arseholes, and Read was a serious, quiet shadow at her shoulder. She doesn’t miss James, or Jack, or any other shit-dick excuse for a sailor on the Ranger save Read. They were always a good sort. “Didn’t say I would stop ye. Hells, didn’t say I wouldn’t help ye!” She also didn’t say she would, but that’s another matter. “Just lookin t’understand. Ain’t met something I’d risk my everything for like that.”
She thought she had, twice.
Both times she’d been sorely mistaken.
Anne rolls her eyes when she’s accused of jabbering. Leaves crunch underfoot and a breeze stirs the trees, but without the sound of canvas snapping against it, it just doesn’t seem like real wind. These others, except the elf, they all seem so…unbothered by it all. Like they’ve spent their whole lives traversing woods and caves and what all else, likes midges and flies and mosquitoes and goblins are just run of the mill nuisances one must suffer to continue living. She’d known the sea was a world apart from any other, but the unexpected loneliness of that truth keeps driving Anne to do stupid shite she wouldn’t normally.
Like all the talking. She usually enjoys being reticent, closed off, let alone—but maybe Read’s broken something in her, because now being totally alone feels…lonely. She has to choose between horrible hyper-awareness of the leech in her skull, being alone with her thoughts and unoccupied hands, or making an arse of herself to distract from it all. It’s an easy choice to make, despite looking so out of character for her in the face of it.
Besides, she isn’t jabbering. The Blade fella jabbers. A never-ending source of sound, that one! Always on about his exploits or trying to woo one of the women in the party. He reminds her of Jack in that way, and she can’t trust herself to go ply him for talk. Might end up with her blade in his belly out of reflex.
Anne scoffs at the idea of rotting her gut the moment they make port. “Is that yer best? ‘Sailors are drunkards, har-har’? Pull yer head outta yer arse.”
Truthfully, Baldur’s Gate is only her destination because that’s the heading her companions have taken. Anne isn’t from these parts, wasn’t even before she turned pirate; she’d been born and partly raised in a different country of Toril altogether, and hadn’t spent more than a few years in Faerûn before marrying James and running off. She has no home here, no home anywhere as of ten minutes prior to ending up kidnapped by the squids. The question of her fate is an uneasy one. The uncertainty and the terror of it threaten to choke her: frankly, if it weren’t for the whole becoming one after part, letting the little bugger in her brain finish its bidding might just be a mercy for her. No more living in lesser men’s shadows.
“I done more drinking at camp with you lot than I done in all my life, gods’ honest truth.” There was always something to be done on the ship, after all; knots to check, tighten, tie, supplies to be accounted for, training to be had, navigation, mending, polishing, cleaning, and in the few stolen moments she’d allow for it, Anne would bury herself in more shameful pursuits. Read aside, the things she misses most about the Ranger already are the books she’d so unexpectedly left behind. Jack would toss them overboard if he found them, and only him and Read actually know that Anne can read at all. To be a woman at sea is already to be considered cursed, and each thing Anne is after that is another curse compounded upon her: not just a woman, but a learned woman. Not just a learned woman, but in fact the captain’s whore wife. And more! The result of an illicit inter-class affair, red-haired and left-handed, a murderer, a law clerk—all of it too much! All of it that could be hidden away kept just so. She forced herself to use her right hand until that became an easy, unconscious ruse. She’s disguised herself as a boy and, when that was discovered, quit her place as a law clerk. She left her father’s name so it would never be tied to her and feigned ignorance in the face of arithmetic and literature. The first murder was swept under the rug, the rest justified as battle.
And now she’s hiding one more thing. In a world where it isn’t as bad to be a woman, or even a learned woman, it’s considerably worse to be a pirate.
Anne stretches her arms over her head and tries to relieve the pain in her back. These fucking packs are awful. (That’s another thing; no need to carry all of your effects with you at sea.) In all the ways that Shadowheart can sense the sea on Anne, Anne is all but insensible to the Sharran influences on Shadowheart. Like her father before her, she isn’t sure if she does or even can worship a god, though also like him and her mother she knows them all to be real. Her mother instilled a fear of the gods into Anne before her passing that her father only plastered over with his indifference to them. Though unaccustomed to the company of other women, Anne is confident that the things she does sense in Shadowheart are more telling, anyway. Aside from being a fellow utter twat, Shadowheart’s hiding a hurt in plain sight. The strange black mark on her hand she sometimes rubs as if it pains her when she thinks no one is watching. Anne doesn’t need to know its story to recognize that it’s nothing, in the same sense that the scar on Anne’s own back is nothing. She knows better than to pry uninvited into nothing.
“S’pose I’ll figure out my fate when it arrives.” Anything’s better than what she’d had, and even has now. She pretends she doesn’t feel the tadpole shift, but her small flinch at the sensation says otherwise. It’s less subtle than the waver in Shadowheart’s voice, making it harder to ignore. “’Less it gets figured out for me before then.”
@neverhangd sent: “So…let me get this straight. Ye’ve got a magical doohickey in yer possession of foreign origin and unknown purpose, and it just so happens t’be keeping the tentacles at bay…and ye still plan t’hand it o’er when we get t’the fucking Gate? Does that apply even if the wriggler’s still present for ye?” She isn’t judgmental of the religious aspects of the cleric’s plans—that’d make her one hell of a hypocrite, her own sordid past considered—family’s family, whether that family’s a torture cult or a band of thieves—but the lack of self-preservation continues to astonish her. Especially seeing as Shadowheart’s yet to present such an astonishing lack of care for the self, both in battle and in camp.
The plan was intended to be simple. Horrendously dangerous and almost certainly liable to result in her own death, but simple.
Steal Retrieve the prism, keep it safe and out of unsafe hands, and deliver it personally to the control of her sacred enclave. This changed the moment she discovered its true capabilities. The moment she learned it was all that stood between them and their agonizing mutation. Not just a permanent end, but a resurrection into something monstrous and unfathomable. A mindflayer.
She still intends to carry out her mission in its entirety. Failure is not an option she is willing to consider, but she's not immune to doubt. To the grim reality of what obedience means for both her and her fellow companions. To choose between thoroughbred faith, and the atrocious violation of body and mind to live onward as illithid, well, such a decision is beyond what she's prepared to handle.
Still, if there's anything Shadowheart can rely on, it's faking it. And she will fake it until she makes it, or, until it breaks her.
"There is no outcome that ends in me forfeiting my duties. I will deliver the artifact, with or without help, and will face whatever consequences as they come." It's nearly imperceptible, almost invisible, but her voice wavers. She is scared. "… if you intend to stop me, I won't show mercy. Anyone who stands against me will be brought to their knees, through force, if necessary." A well-placed, violent threat might add a bit of credence, and she was eager to prove herself worthy of the responsibility placed upon her shoulders. Not that she needed to prove anything to anyone, of course.
The group treks onward, carving a route through a mountainous forest. Sun speckled polka dots filter through the canopy, still hours away from dusk. The day had been long, and it only promised more to come. Their journey's been anything but peaceful, and more than anything, Shadowheart just wanted to go home.
"We're a long way from the Gate, though. Might want to conserve your strength and focus on the more pressing matters at hand. There's a decent chance we won't even make it that far, especially with you jabbering my ear off." A rather abrupt plea to end the conversation. Shadowheart isn't chatty even in her sunniest of dispositions, and much less so when she feels cornered and probed.
"... and what of your fate? I can only imagine you'll find the nearest leaking tap and drown your gullet in pints of ale." Or rum. Or mead. Or whatever it is that seafarers seek to fill their barrels. That's what Anne is, no? Either a caster of nets, or an explorer of tides, or a castaway sailor seeking glory. Her story is sealed away, hidden behind chapters unopened, perhaps permanently. Shadowheart has pieced together a small bit of Anne's heritage, based on the odd off-hand comment or educated observation of the redhead's wardrobe. She smelled of the sea, as well. Whiffs of salt breezed water and a sun-kissed complexion. All the trademarks of a seasoned mariner.
Baldur's Gate is a port teeming with much of the same breed, and the Sharran would recognize their stench a mile away.