#also bronze disease can't forget the bronze disease | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

stylishanachronism · 4 years ago

Note

Could I request either dialogue prompt 3 or 11 for whichever characters you feel like make them work?

lmao like a month later, here you go babe, thank you so much for the prompt. 3 was “I can’t see anything.” “Hold on I’ll set something on fire.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Hold on, I’ll set something on fire.”

Alys sighs at him, but doesn’t protest, hiking Vela higher on her hip. She, he squints, just puts her thumb in her mouth, her other arm tight around Alys’ neck, wide-eyed and clingy to the point her mother can’t put her down, though she’s not looking so steady herself.

From the half sunk rowboat moored at the end of the rotting dock, this place hasn’t been occupied in years, but a little groping at a likely shadow gets him a crude torch, a replacement for the one mounted at the wall that never got used, better than the broken crate he was expecting.

“It seems awfully empty. Do you think he even came this way?”

“Nowhere else for him to go.” He clicks his sparker together, lucky that was still in his pocket, cursing under his breath as the damp rag won’t catch. She frowns, but not at his language; she’s squinting out into the dark herself, turning so Vela’s away from the stream, closer to the cave mouth.

“See something?”

“Mm. It might be nothing, but- Beodul?” She calls, to no response.

“Maybe it’s the locals.”

“I’m fairly certain the pirates left, dear.”

He clicks his sparker again, pressing it up against the resin this time, and the resulting bloom of light catches on steel, a skeleton wobbling towards them, still dressed in rags and rust.

“Looks like at least one of them didn’t.”

It’s a nasty little surprise, Alys accepting the torch as she backs away, but it comes apart at the barest swing of his sword, which is somewhat alarming, but better it be extra fragile than the other way around. Alys frowns at it, eyes going hazy in a way he doesn’t like for a moment, and then she’s ignoring it again, lifting the torch higher and peering down the passageway.

The sand’s too mussed to give any hint of which way Beodul went; there’s at least two more bodies, so to speak, in here, from the tracks on the floor, though if he had to put money on it the right fork looks like it’s seen more movement recently.

“Which way, do you think?”

He takes the torch back from her, not the smartest idea, given he’s the one with the sword, but he’s also taller, and it’s awful dark in here, and the extra reach shows what might very well be a boot print in the spill of sand ahead of them.

“Right.”

She lets him take the lead, murmuring to Vela in low tones, trying to coax her sweet again, at a guess, she’d never much liked the dark before all this shit happened, but she screamed when they tried to leave her behind, and Alys is just as clingy, considering, so it wasn’t like she resisted too hard, and he follows the bootprints as best he can, pausing at another fork. This place must be a misery when the tide comes in, given the rotting bridges everywhere, light from some distant crack in the roof enough for him to know they aren’t setting foot that way, that particular bridge well out, but there’s a passage ahead, and another squeezed between that one and the water, and nothing in the sand to say which one’s a better bet.

“Beodul?” Alys calls again, coming up to his elbow, free hand cupped around her mouth, and it’s hard to tell, what with the echoes, but he thinks the answering cry comes from ahead of them. It sounds pained, or at the least terrified, so with a quick glance at Alys, whose mouth has set in a grim line, clearly they’re thinking the same thing, he presses forwards, passing the torch back to her as he goes.

The skeleton that comes careening out of the dark is not Beodul, but it is wearing boots. A boot. Its friend has the other, its breastplate buckled in in a way that makes a frankly horrible noise every time it moves, the same noise that brought them this direction, he realizes, so at least if Beodul isn’t dead, he wasn’t screaming either.

It’s a trickier fight than the last, there’s two of them this time, and he can’t back up, or see much of anything, so it’s luck more than anything else that lets him shoulder one of them into the wall hard enough it crumbles before it can get past him. He catches a glimpse of Alys stomping its skull in from the corner of his eye, something about the way she moves unsettling and strange, but he doesn’t get a good look, and can’t spare the attention anyway, as the one in the breastplate, the one still standing, claws at his face. At least it doesn’t have a sword, like the other one did.

One of them is a simpler proposition, even though he still can’t see shit; he feints for its knees and then smashes its skull askew, ducks as it doesn’t give up and grabs at him again, and settles for doing some grabbing himself, hooking his fingers under its jawbone and yanking until it comes to pieces. Alys stumbles in his peripheral, Vela sliding off her hip with a wail, but they’ve both got their feet under them by the time the skeleton collapses into itself and he’s able to turn around.

Alys is chalky, what little color she’d regained well gone, the graze on her temple dark and sticky again, and she’s ice cold when he catches her chin to get a better look, but the torch is still steady in her hand, and it looks like she just moved too fast or something, since the graze is already clotting up again, so that’s something, at least.

“You’re alright?”

“Should be asking you that, Nineteen.”

Her smile’s more like a grimace, but it counts.

“I’m fine.”

She pulls away then, ducking to check on Vela, whose eyes are wet and whose lip is wobbling, but otherwise looks unharmed.

“Sweetheart?”

Vela bursts into tears, flinging her arms around her mother’s shoulders again and smearing her snotty face into her neck, Alys rocking back on her heels to catch her.

“Oh, my heart.”

He takes the torch back so she can gather the girl close, stroking her hair and murmuring to her as she cries, keeping watch.

“Do you want to go back to the beach? We have to stay and find Master Beodul, but I’d feel much better if you were safe outside.” She asks, cupping her cheek as her sniffles peter out. Safe… isn’t the word he’d use, between the wildlife and the fact she’d probably be the healthiest person at their little camp, for all she’s six years old, but it’s a tossup, considering what they’ve found in here so far.

“No!” She shakes her head vehemently, braids flying, and Alys gives him a helpless look.

“Vela—“

“No!!!”

She’s back near tears again, probably also on the verge of screaming her head off again, which is really the last thing they need, and Alys pulls her back against her shoulder, listening intently as her daughter sobs her way through her fears. He can’t actually understand what she’s saying, for the most part, though Alys is looking distinctly alarmed as it goes on, but he’s had the ‘what if Mama doesn’t wake up?’ discussion with her enough times over the last month he can guess the gist of it.

“Oh, Vela.” She sighs, when she starts crying too hard to speak. “Oh, my girl.” She cradles her head, stroking her thumb along the line of her skull. “Not even the gods know what might happen tomorrow, but I promise I will always do my best to come home to you.”

She gives him another look, cutting her eyes away behind him as she lifts her again, and yeah, if they have to settle Vela he doesn’t really like this spot to do it.

The skeletons came out of a sharp turn in the wall, opening into a small chamber, the main passage veering away to join the other one, he thinks, lining up the space in his head. If they died here, the evidence is long gone; from the waterline on the posts holding up the platform that covers most of the room, this place floods most every day, at least. It’s rotting like everything else in here, but it holds his weight when he tries it, and he’s half again as heavy as Alys and Vela together so that should be fine. This was where the previous occupants slept, if he had to make a guess, or maybe where whoever was in charge did their work, since there’s a table, mildewed papers strewn across it, and a rickety chair that amazingly doesn’t look like it’ll collapse into dust if he drops them in it, though he leans on it himself just to be sure, but it might have been something else, given the piles, probably once neatly organized, around the edges of the thing.

Vela has progressed into hiccuping by the time Alys sits down, looking highly dubious about the state of the platform and everything on it, settling Vela into her lap and holding her close as she starts to hum, and he leaves her to it, kicking through the mouldering treasures stacked along the wall of the platform instead. Most of it’s beyond salvaging; blackened paintings that tear at a breath, bolts of fine fabrics rotted into a single mass, sacks of what was probably grain gone to dirt, but there’s a little coin, a handful of jewelry, some deeply tarnished silver candlesticks, and the candles themselves are fine, poured beeswax tapers that were probably tied neatly into bundles at some point, but no longer, and at the back, half buried under the rest of it, a pile of something wrapped in sturdy oilcloth, miraculously preserved against the elements.

“Something interesting?” Alys comes to lean on him, Vela clearly feeling better, looking over his shoulder as he drags it out, and then her fingers tighten into his shirt as she gets a good look at it.

“You know what it is?”

She leans further forward, Vela, quiet again, squeezing between them to cling to his shirt too, and he can hear the smile in her voice as she starts listing it off.

“Three, no, four bolts of dyed wyrwool broadcloth from the Pearl Coast, out of a lot of two hundred, two bolts of violet from the Pales, out of a lot of ten, a special order for…. someone from the Republics, I don’t recognize the name, and a bolt each of samite and cloth-of-silver, from a Master Caligari’s workshop in Old Valia, from the same order.”

“How do you figure that?” She’s a Watcher, sure, but no mind hunter, and this is a bit of a stretch.

“Aelere’s always been thorough. And you ought to recognize Aloth’s spellwork, honestly.”

He leans forward, careful, and yeah, now that he’s looking it’s familiar, not that he could have placed it, but she seems certain, except-

“Aelere?”

“My cousin. I’ve not gone mad, stop fretting.” She stands up again, tugging Vela away so he can get to his feet as well.

“How’d Aloth get involved, then?”

“He had a very expensive education, and he’s good at this sort of thing; she probably bullied him into it on one of his visits.”

“Like you bullied him about the rations?”

“That was just common sense. He needed to eat too, so he might as well have gone to the effort.”

The second he’s standing, Vela’s back to clinging, one hand fisted in his shirt, the other tight in her mother’s skirts, like the minute she couldn’t see him’s convinced her he’ll up and vanish on her, which is not going to be doable once they’re out of this nook. Which. On the off hand, he’d really like to find Beodul and get the Hel out of here before anything else happens, but Alys sitting down for a longer spell is probably a better idea, she’s still an icon of Berath, but breathing, and they really ought to see if there’s anything left in those papers, maybe get an idea of what the Hel even happened in here before they run headlong into it. Given her luck he wouldn’t even be surprised by a dragon somewhere in this mess.

“I don’t think a dragon could get in here, Edér.” She sighs, letting him shuffle them back to the table, clearly having read the look on his face. Vela’s brows draw together, but her eyes aren’t wet, good, so she’s probably thinking about her little friends, who won’t be too big to fit anywhere until the rest of them were all long dead and gone.

“Not the kittens, my heart.” Alys agrees, dropping back into the chair and peeling open the logbook set pride of place in front of her, wafting a dirty, vegetablely scent that makes Vela scrunch her nose and press closer to him. He snags a scrap of parchment for himself, pinned to the desk with a pitted, rusty eating knife; wasteful, that, the point would’ve never been the same even before whatever the Hel went down happened. The handwriting’s atrocious, even without the bleed, and the mildew’s not helping any neither, but the gist of it seems to be somebody was pissed and proper worried about something the headman, whatever they called him, had bought as added security, plus the fact that they apparently don’t have an Aloth to hand to keep the tides from wrecking everything.

“Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Well, if we’re lucky, the construct our friend from the storm picked up somewhere will have rusted to pieces.”

So this was that asshole’s stomping grounds. Whatever guilt he might have felt over making off with what wasn’t already destroyed dissolves instantly.

“I don’t know why he picked it up, he was already behind on his taxes and those aren’t cheap to maintain, or easy to control, for that matter.” She wrinkles her nose, probably thinking about the little animat they’d picked up all those years ago, probably still kicking under the rubble of the house. That thing was tough as nails, but clearly this is a different beast.

“Pirates don’t pay taxes.” At least, he’s pretty sure they don’t pay taxes, given the whole ‘outside of the law’ bit.

“Tithes to the Principi council, who mostly use it to maintain their little fort as I understand it. Same thing really. In any case he was well behind on them.” She frowns at his accounting, the wet really hasn’t improved the state of that asshole’s books, then closes it again and pushes it away.

It might just be the torchlight, but it looks like she’s got a little color back when she glances up at him, eyes flickering between the parchment in his hand and his face, and he drops it back on the table.

“Construct probably killed everyone in here, somebody was complaining about it ‘giving them the eye’, best as I can guess. If we see crystals, keep an eye out, apparently it liked them.”

“Adra, not crystals, if I had to guess. I’m no animancer, but I’ve never encountered a construct with a particularly stable or well anchored soul.“

She accepts his hand back up, leaning into his shoulder when she sways on her feet, and honestly he doesn’t know how she’s still standing. She was asleep for a long time, and then the fight, and then the storm, and then they all escaped drowning by the skin of their teeth, and now this shit. She gives him a dry look as she steps away, mouth twisting, but doesn’t say anything, taking the torch back again and tugging Vela to follow, though she scowls and doesn’t let go of his shirt.

“I’m fine, Edér.” She says eventually, leading them back into the tunnel.

“You aren’t, but nothing we can do about that now.”

They make a funny little parade, Alys leading though she ought to be behind him, Vela clutching at them both with a grim determination that would be cute in any other circumstance, and he never liked any of this to begin with but he likes it less now. Hopefully they’ll find Beodul and get the Hel out of here before anything else happens, they’ve got to be running out of cavern if the map he’s put together in his head’s any good.

It’s a little drier, as they get further in, the tunnel sloping up just enough to let things dry out a smidge, which only serves to make the sand slippery, exactly what they needed right now.

The gleam of adra gets him by surprise, knocking him out of his grumbly thoughts as they come around another corner, this time into a proper cavern, and this must be where those assholes lived, not the little one, he can see the remains of a couple of hammocks tangled up with a pile of bones that’s not trying to kill them, heaped up near the dull, dead stone. It’s somehow creepier than the live stuff, sort of empty and shadowed, and really, he hasn’t liked any of this, but this is the last straw. A quick glance says Beodul’s not in here either, and even if there might be information they can come back for it, it’s not like it can end up in worse condition, so he chivvies them towards the tunnel leading out again; it should loop around to meet up with that broken bridge they saw earlier, which now that he thinks about it seems like it might have been Beodul’s doing, so if he’s anywhere, he’ll be there.

They almost make it out. They’re steps from the exit when Alys slips, windmilling back as her legs go out from under her, and what he’d taken for a particularly salty pile of rocks scrapes itself to its feet, lumbering at them faster than they can get past it.

Alys scrambles backwards, the torch flying out of her hand as she grabs Vela and drags her away, and its all he can do not to trip over her himself, doing an awkward little hop that just means when the thing swings at him it’s all he can do to duck, a broken edge on its arm drawing a line of fire across his shoulder, but his shirt doesn’t tear so it can’t be that bad, and he spares a thought for that old door, probably still leaning up against the wall in his cottage, where it does them all a fuck lot of good, as he dodges away from the girls, trying to keep its attention.

It’s limping, for lack of a better word, something wrecked in one of its legs, what he’d taken for salt more like mold, great holes eaten away in its shell, and despite that it’s still faster than he’d like, with more reach, and a sword is not the thing to be fighting it with, but it’s all he’s got so it’ll have to suffice.

The first swing just clatters off it, getting its attention well enough but not actually doing anything, and he has to dodge again as it swings its other arm at him, but the second catches one of those moldy patches and punches straight through, overbalancing him, and it, fortunately, though it nearly takes the sword right out of his hand, and then Alys is singing, whipping the memory of this place into something tangible, and the bones huddled near the adra pull themselves into the semblance of whoever they were before they died.

They, whoever they were, had a gun in life, which is also less than ideal, but it lets him swing around behind the thing and kick another of the moldy patches in, the machinery inside grinding out little sparks where bits of it have rusted nearly together, and the delicate little lattice of adra and copper looks important, so he swings at that, misses, has to back away as it decides he’s a better target than the person it already killed, and Alys makes a horrible, breathless noise and the lattice explodes in a flash of light that leaves purple-green-gold spots in his vision.

There’s a finality to the way the thing crashes back to the floor, solidified when it doesn’t try to get up again, but he doesn’t have time to do more than kick it’s innards away, because Vela is screaming, for real this time. Alys is crumpled on the ground, and for a long, heart-stopping second he thinks this is it, whatever it was she did finally killed her, gods, why did they even come in here, and then she’s scrabbling at the floor, trying to heave herself back up as Vela shrieks in denial, patting at her shoulder as the closest thing to hand.

He has no memory of crossing the cavern back to them, it happens so fast, going to his knees and hauling her to hers, Vela darting under her mother’s arm as soon as she properly reaches for her. She’s lost all color, for true this time, the blood in the whites of her eyes not helping that impression any, staring out into the dark in a way that’d make all his hair stand on end if it wasn’t doing that already. The soft, greenish glow of the adra isn’t helping any, painting everything in sickly shades of grey with the help of the still guttering torch, the blood in her eyes and on her face, nose and temple and her lip is split, to boot, black in the dimness, pupils blown to pits, and she’s breathing like she can’t get any air in her lungs.

“Alys? Alys?”

“Mama!!”

Alys chokes, gasping, and then gives up on talking and flings her arm around his shoulders, fisting her hand in his shirt with an unpleasant squish, dragging Vela to her breast, and starts to cry.

#thank you for meming me!!!#pillars of eternity #risualto #my fic #I got stuck on literally one transition sentence whoops #and then my brain tried to kill me #but on the bright side I got rid of most of the extraneous touching if not the emotional whiplash #look I write precisely two things and neither of them well #and those two things are academic papers and romance novels #touching is a really great shorthand to build chemistry of any sort so I tend to put a lot of it in without realizing #if you hadn't noticed I have extremely detailed headcanons about some really wild shit here you go #this touches on tax law practical wizadry international commerce education and medical care among other things #also bronze disease can't forget the bronze disease #this was supposed to be ~5 lines of a joke about skeletons and now look where we are #related since I know this wasn't clear: both Alys and Vela are reading Eder's mind #but not a one of them realizes it because Alys wasn't given to ciphering before and Vela is a baby #and Eder is canonically Not Great about keeping his thoughts in his own head #look I've got an extensive vaugely scientific thing re: how much soul fits eothas' uh filter #which is a whole thing I won't get into right now #and also if you don't think the image of infant Vela plus the wurmlings curled up in a basket together is the cutest thing...#wurms are baby dragons; wurms form little flocks to keep each other alive when they're small; Vela was also a baby;wurms aren't very smart #therefore yes as far as the wurmlings are concerned Vela is also a wurmling #also yes this just sort of ends I had a real ending but yeah that transition sentence bit me and I was tired of the whole mess #if I ever like edit this properly I'll append it

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