Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Day 2: Your character meeting your (personal) favourite party member for the first time.

1 - Sunken Flagon, After the canon scene, Duncan is very happy indeed to meet his new nephew. Rhys would like this to be over now. Bishop is a dick.

He does not expect Daeghun’s brother to hug him. And to be perfectly honest, he could have gone on quite well without ever, ever experiencing that. He would have been fine without having this moment in his life. Truly. It would have been better, even. So much better…

When is Duncan going to let go?

Is he ever going to let go?

Is this Rhys’ life now? Things were already pretty strange before he was getting endlessly embraced by long lost relatives. Maybe this is what he deserves. Maybe he deserves to stand here and endure this. Possibly forever.

Duncan makes a weird noise into his hair, like he’s about to start crying or something, and Rhys breaks. 

“Yup, yeah, that’s – It’s good to meet you too, Duncan, so good, but I think maybe – Maybe it’s time to let go?” He starts patting frantically at Duncan’s shoulder with the hand that isn’t pinned between their bodies. Duncan is surprisingly strong for a tavern keeper. Also hot. Like, swelteringly hot. And sweaty? He smells like beer and old sweat and if he doesn’t let go right fucking now Rhys is going to have to bite him. Retta Starling would not approve.

Behind Duncan, there is a man leaning up against the wall by the hearth, watching them. He looks like he’s fighting back laughter. 

Rhys glares at him, skin crawling, his whole being suffused with revolted desperation. Help me, he mouths.

The bastard grins at him and raises his tankard in a mocking toast. Congratulations! he mouths back. 

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2 - Post Shandra-theft. Rhys is moderately feral but holding it together (?). Elanee is creepy. Bishop is a dick.

Blood is soaking into the taproom floorboards. Rhys clutches his hatchet in numb fingers, eyes casting about the room. There’s no movement, besides that of his companions – and Duncan wringing his hands over by the bar. No one left to fight – to hurt, to kill – no one left but off-limits prey, his people, the ones he brought here and the ones he found. He’s not supposed to hurt them.

Shandra’s gone – thought I saved her, but that’s never how it works is it? Brought her here – safe, right? – and then the ozone-smelling fuckers turn up to take – take her like Amie, dead and cold on the green and Bevil’s wailing and the blood on my lips then tasted like it does now – bitter and sweet in turns and I want –

I want. No. I don’t. Not really.

I don’t want to stop.

There are people here, still walking around the taproom, making noises with their mouths, smelling of blood and anger and fear.

Off-limits.

Not-prey.

Well, who said so?

Something touches him, a hand on his arm, narrow brown fingers and a soft voice in his ear – “Do not worry, Rhys. I’m sure –” Big brown eyes blinking up at him and it’d be easy, so fucking easy. Just reach up and dig your claws in. She won’t be looking at you, and looking at you, and looking at you then, will she?

A prickling shudder is travelling its way up his arm. He can feel it moving from under her light touch, worming its way up and up. What will he do when it reaches the parts of him that aren’t numb and cold? What will happen then?

“This one’s got a sprig of Duskwood trapped in his boot.” 

Rhys’ head snaps round, eyes snagging on an unfamiliar man crouched beside one of the gith corpses. He moves towards him, arm sliding out from underneath Elanee’s hand. He doesn’t catch the reproachful stare she aims at his back, all his attention focussed on the twig the other man is holding.

“The Duskwood is to the North, right?” he hears himself say and oh gods, his voice is all manner of wrong. He swallows and adjusts his tone to something a little less ragged. “I don’t know that ground.”
The man looks up at him and why, why doesn’t his stare prickle like Elanee’s does? It’s enough of an oddity to stop Rhys in his tracks, staring blankly down at the other man as he sways. The man’s lip curls, part sneer, part snarl, part smile. “Well, why would you, Harbourman?” he says, and Rhys can’t tell if his tone is meant to be cutting or mocking or what. He offers Rhys the bit of wood he’d pulled from the gith’s boot.

There’s something wrong with my head, Rhys thinks. Or there’s something wrong with his eyes. His hand is already moving to take the sprig from the other man’s fingers. He watches himself fumble a little, taking it, and the heat from the other man’s hand brushing against his is – startling. It radiates up from his fingertips, cutting through the numbing chill that had settled into his bones.

“That’s Luskan territory!” Rhys’s uncle brays over his shoulder and the man’s face changes completely as he pushes to his feet. It’s like a door shut somewhere behind his eyes. He’s standing too close, shoulders Rhys roughly to one side as he advances on the tavern-keeper. He’s not particularly gentle about it.

Rhys rocks back on his feet, turning the spring over in his fingers as heat spreads out from the point of impact. 

Behind him, the man is snarling. It sounds like all the rage in his head given voice.

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3 - Rhys and Bishop meet in the Mere as children. Neither of them remember this later. Bishop is (kind of) a dick.

It’s around the fifth day in the Mere that Rhys is finally forced to face facts. He’s lost. He’s really, incredibly lost.

He sits down in the reeds to consider this, digging out his slim packet of provisions. He’s got enough food left for two days. Maybe. He can probably stretch that to four or five if he starts rationing it. But rationing has its own danger - the Mere is not terribly forgiving to those distracted or weakened by hunger. He’s found the bones of unfortunate travellers half buried in the mud more than once. He has no particular desire to join them.

If he could just figure out where he strayed from the known paths, he could maybe figure out where he is. But that’s nigh impossible – paths and waterways in the Mere change regularly. A heavy rain can render all maps entirely worthless.

So at this point all he can really do is pick a direction and hope for the best. He’d started out heading roughly north-west from West Harbour, but who knows when he got turned around. Probably easiest to start heading due west for as long as he can, and hope the borders of the Mere aren’t too far off. 

While he’s hoping, he puts in a request for the least amount of slipmud, lizardfolk and undead on his path as can possibly be managed. Pretty please.

Rhys gusts a soft sigh and repacks his satchel, climbing to his feet. At least he brought the bow Daeghun had recently given him. Maybe he’ll get lucky and cross paths with a deer on his way. 

He does not get that lucky. That’s not to say that there isn’t a certain amount of luck in evidence over the next couple of days: Rhys does not meet with a messy death courtesy of zombies or lizardmen, nor does he find himself waist deep in sucking mud and thereafter eaten alive by bloodbloaters. 

These are all good things. Rhys is appropriately grateful for them.

The less good things are thus: he has not yet stumbled across anything remotely resembling a path, or familiar terrain – or any of the freshwater springs that bubble up at random in the mostly saltwater marsh. And his waterskin is running low. He’s been rationing it, but that can only go so far…

He has been a bit luckier in regards to food – the rushes grow thick in this part of the Mere and he’s been uncovering swamphen nests like nobody’s business.

Alas, a full belly really isn’t going to be much use when he starts hallucinating from drinking brackwater.

A lowering ceiling of thick grey cloud taunts him from above. Rhys has lived in the Mere his whole life and he is painfully familiar with this kind of cloud: it likes to sit up there, hiding the sun and otherwise refusing to do anything. It’s the kind of cloud that drives the farmers in West Harbour to literal drink.

He kind of wants to yell at it, though that may be the dehydration talking.

He’s also pretty sure he’s been going in circles. He hasn’t yet stumbled across one of his own camps, but out here in the reeds he could miss them by a matter of inches and never know it. He should have reached the High Road by now, if he was travelling in anything even approaching a straight line…

For the first time in that hellish tenday, Rhys is forced to admit to himself that he might actually die out here, wandering aimlessly around the reeds. It’s not a pleasant thought.

He curls up in his reed nest and tries not to cry about it. He’s thirteen, for fuck’s sake. Far too old to go around sobbing like a baby over his likely imminent demise.

The next day, he runs into the boy.

Literally runs into, as it happens: he’s grimly staggering along the edges of a waterway with a decent amount of movement – probably his best bet for finding the elusive edge of the Mere – when there’s a sudden rustle in the reeds to his left. And a mud smeared kid erupts from the wall of greenery, slamming into him and sending them both tumbling into the water.

It’s rather a shock, going from grim resignation of his slow death to sudden assault – and Rhys reacts accordingly. When they hit the water, he wriggles out of the other boy’s grip and sets to doing his level best to drown him.

It seems like the appropriate response to his sudden dunking – though Rhys will be the first to admit that he’s not thinking particularly clearly at this stage. 

He manages to inhale a fair bit of brackwater in the process, however, and is too busy coughing to really put much effort into his murder attempt. The other kid fetches him a solid blow upside the head that sets his ears ringing and Rhys wrenches away with a hissing growl. That fucking hurt.

“Knock it off,” the other boy snarls. “Listen.”

Rhys doesn’t want to listen. He wants to hit this kid until the panic and frustration of the last few days fades out a bit. It’d probably be at least a little more satisfying than screaming at the clouds…

But despite his intense irritation with this entire situation, he does listen. A few seconds later, his eyes widen and he joins the other boy in a frantic, silent swim to the other side of the waterway. They scramble up the bank and burrow into the reeds. Pressed tightly against his side, Rhys can feel the other boy’s heart thumping wildly in harmony with his own.

Across the water, a hand parts the reeds. Strips of withered skin hang off the fingerbones like tattered ribbons, though the claws seem to still be in good order…

The wind changes, wafting the grave-reek across to them. Rhys swallows convulsively, and wriggles a little lower into the mud. The other boy hunches down beside him. Together, they wait for the low moans to turn to snarls. They’re not well hidden here, in the reeds – surely the zombie will find them…

But it seems that all the luck that had deserted Rhys for the last tenday has decided to make its reappearance: the hand withdraws and the groaning gradually recedes. Rhys holds himself tense for a long moment, straining his ears for the slightest sound. Nothing.

The relief feels like some vast hand pressing him down into the mud. Rhys wants to lie there for the next year or so – or at least until his heart stops trying to crawl out of his throat, whichever comes first – but the other boy is already moving, sliding back through the reeds. In lieu of any better options, Rhys follows him.

They travel together for nearly another tenday before they find the High Road again. The other boy – Rhys never thinks to ask for his name – is short-tempered at best, outright vicious at worst. They fight more often than not, with words and fists both. Once – and only once – the other boy slashes at him with the battered skinning knife he wears at his hip. Rhys manages to knock out two of his teeth in answer. Later, the boy helps him bind the shallow slice in his arm with strips torn from an undertunic. Blood still dribbles intermittently over his lower lip. Later still, they sleep back to back in a hollow beneath a gnarled tree.

The other boy had a full waterskin, thank the gods. They bring down swamphens with thrown rocks and snatch fish from the stream as they go. Rhys' bowstring was well soaked in their initial swim, unfortunately, but there’s enough small game to sustain them without it.

Eyeing the protruding ribs through the holes in the other’s threadbare tunic, Rhys slips into the habit of declaring himself full early into each meal. He might be a frustrating shithead, this kid – but it twists something in Rhys’ gut to see anyone that skinny.

The morning after they find the High Road, Rhys wakes up cold to find the other boy long gone. Also missing is Rhys’ bow – and most of their food.

Such a shithead.

Chapter Text

Shandra comes around the side of the house, hog bucket in hand and stops dead. There are… people. In her farmyard. Probably the strangest collection of people she’s ever come across, really.

It’s like a bad joke, she thinks. An elf, a dwarf, and a tiefling walk into a farmyard… Oh, and a… what the hell is that?

At first she can’t tell what’s wrong with the lanky man in the battered leathers – just that something is profoundly, fundamentally wrong. Maybe it’s the way he stands there, so terribly still, his head cocked to one side as though listening intently? She can see him breathing, even at a bit of a distance, because that is all he is doing. 

But no, as he catches sight of her in turn and shifts fully to face her, the strangeness still lingers. If anything, it intensifies. The simple action of his head turning, the half step he takes to face her… Each part of the process is distinct from the next, strung together in a fluid chain but still somehow disjointed. It raises the hairs on the back of her neck.

He meets her eyes and smiles, tentatively. And oh gods, that’s worse. That is so much worse. 

What in the hells is wrong with his eyes. Nothing should have eyes like that. Certainly not in her farmyard. Not in her simple orderly farmyard, where things behave themselves and make sense. 

Even as she’s thinking it, she can’t quite pin down the source of the wrongness. It’s getting annoying. 

They eat the light, says a soft voice in the back of her head but that. That’s ridiculous. 

Shandra takes a deep breath and sternly orders herself to get a grip, damn it. They’re just eyes , really dark eyes, fine. But that’s not that weird. Gods.

And yeah, his face is… pointy. Weird bone structure. But it’s just a face.

Ugh. Enough, already. She hasn’t got time for this nonsense. 

Shandra sets down the bucket.

“Who are you? Did Mayne send you?”

As the stranger starts to answer her, his voice a soft drawl, she stubbornly refuses to notice how his shadow seems to pool just a little bit darker at his feet.