#damned straight my pc is still carrying aarin's necklace around through Hordes though

[araneaes-order]

Replaying Neverwinter Nights (Part 1) and rediscovering Hordes of the Underdark...

...fanfic

A disillusioned hero departs from a city determined to repeat its mistakes and parts with a love she’d thought she’d found a home with. (Yeah, this is very much leading to hooking up with Valen, but dammit, I really liked Aarin too, gotta at least acknowledge him! I bet he would have been fun to actually take on adventures...)

Rough, didn’t fact check, unbetaed, I shouldn’t be writing it, I should be focused on camp nano and my original fic but... Valen! And Aarin!

Heh...and dardrea was a name I used in games before it was my screen name anywhere so when I got NWN again the first name that I thought to use was... ah *embarrassed but can’t be bothered to change the PC’s name* She was a level 10 shifter/7 druid at this point in the campaigns. ;) 

Dar ran her hands through her hair. “I can’t believe he’s doing this. How can he do this?”

Aarin knew better than to encroach when she was pacing, and stood with his arms crossed, safe in the doorway of their chamber.

If she’d thought him more of a coward she might have suspected he was poised to flee, but even as angry as she was she knew that was unkind. He was just giving her space.

She needed space. Gods, she needed so much more space than any street or alley of this city could offer her. Nyatar and his tree, hemmed all around with quarried stone and concrete, were a poor excuse for a grove, Chauntea bless them both for trying.

The city was a graveyard. The dead had been cleared from the streets, mostly, but they were still finding bodies, all ages, all stages of decay, fallen in the first flush of the plague and in the last days of the siege, crawled off to die, or to hide, and found their safety become a tomb.

She could have put up with that. She was a druid, death was what it was, and sometimes it was a cruel, cleansing fire that prepared the land for new growth. Neverwinter would live again. Or some other city would rise from its foundations, nature abhorred waste and this land was too well situated to be abandoned, no matter the horrors that had recently faced it.

But this?

She whirled on Aarin, his expression was mild but his eyes were sympathetic, and maybe even reflected some pain of his own, but she was too shaken by his stoicism to give any sympathy in return.

“I am sorry, my love,” he said and she knew he meant it.

But she also knew it didn’t matter.

“What about his regrets? What about when he stood beside me wondering if he hadn’t called all this down on his city himself when he let this happen to Fenthick? He told me he hoped he would act differently if he had another chance. He told me he wished he had another chance!”

She paced back to him, flailing her arms in her agitation but with his impeccable sense of timing he reached out for her then, pulling her gently to his chest, and her arms circled him as they often had in the recent months.

She clung without shame. He smelled of the docks—in a good way. Of the salty sea and damp sand and waxed wood. She wasn’t called to the waters the way she was called to the forests but she could still recognize another of her goddess’ faces. There was more to the wild, natural ways than trees.

She hid her face against the open vee of his shirt, as though the salt of her tears were drawn by the salt of his skin and his scent, like to like.

“For what it’s worth, I think he still wishes that,” he murmured into her hair, pressing a kiss to her temple when she shuddered.

“He had his chance. Aribeth stood before him, repentant, defeated, but delivered of her own accord and he—damn it, Aarin, how could he?”

“The people need—”

She shoved away from him, glaring now, but not hiding her tears though it made the large shadow of him waver in front of her eyes. “To forgive. The people need to learn to forgive or death and destruction will always be their lot here. Vengeance piled on vengeance, death on death, graveyard atop graveyard until the dirt beneath their feet is nothing but the bone dust of their bloody history. Better I had let Morag and her people rise.”

She could hear the frown in his voice. “You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I?” She backed away, crossing her arms in a poor mimic of his usual stance, but it didn’t mean the same thing. So what if he was right, if only about that. “Where do you stand? She was your friend too, wasn’t she? You said you sympathized with her reasons, if not what she did. Just because you wouldn’t make that choice doesn’t mean you can’t understand it. Will you just let this happen?”

“What else can I do? I serve Neverwinter, just as Nasher does.”

She scoffed. “Then serve Neverwinter. Do what’s right for the soul of the city, not the petty, fleeting wants of a petty people.” She couldn’t look at him as she said it, because she already knew what his answer would be. She’d fallen in love with him because of his sense of duty. Because she’d seen him as a man who could walk the shadows in service of the light, and who wouldn’t be tempted by either from what he knew in his heart to be just.

To him, what was just was what his people and his lord needed, but she couldn’t agree in this.

For a moment neither spoke. She’d never cared for anyone the way she cared for him. She hadn’t known she could feel this way until she’d met him.

He’d loved before. And killed his love, because she’d sought to undermine Lord Nasher and the law of Neverwinter, and refused to give up her plans, even for him, even for pardon, even for escape.

A man who wouldn’t be tempted.

She knew what his answer would be, but she had to say the words and hear him say them back. “Come with me.”

“My love—”

Damn pride anyway. She reached for him, catching one of his hands and pressing it to her lips. “Come with me. This city is poisoned by its own misdeeds, doomed to repeat its own mistakes. Don’t stay and be the next sacrifice. Come with me.”

“Where would we go?” He’d stepped towards her, his words soft. She knew he was only humoring her, maybe even humoring himself, but she couldn’t stop.

“Anywhere! People like us? There’s nowhere we couldn’t go. No wild place, no city, what door would be barred against us?”

He pulled his hand, and hers with it, and pressed a kiss to her knuckle in return. “I can’t, my love. Neverwinter needs me. It needs us.”

“Not me. It doesn’t need me. There’s nothing I can do or say that can heal what’s still broken here.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’ll have my proof of it at dawn.”

He flinched. “Stay,” he whispered, as pointless as her plea for him to come.

“I can’t,” she said.

The air was crisp. The sky slowly brightening as the first light crept higher and darkness fled. It was what had drawn her to the service of nature, this permanence in an impermanent world. That promise of another day dawning, even if there was no one and nothing left to sit and enjoy it.

This was not an enjoyable dawn.

She suspected the time had been set in a small nod to mercy. Nasher couldn’t let Aribeth die with the dignity of true privacy, the people needed to see it done, or there was no point, after all, but at dawn there was perhaps less chance of too much of a crowd.

He’d underestimated his people’s blood lust if that had been his thinking though. And Dar couldn’t deny they had a reason to be angry. But to be so blind to their own mistakes that they couldn’t see their own hands in driving the paladin’s fall and betrayal—she sighed. It was part of the anger too, though, she was almost sure. Aribeth was a reminder of their faults, more even since she’d turned herself over to them, facing her misdeeds as they couldn’t. She had to die; she’d shamed them twice over.

Dar wasn’t surprised when Aarin sat beside her, though she hadn’t chosen an easy seat, atop the roof of the Red Mage’s tower, overlooking the makeshift gallows and the restive crowd that had gathered around it.

He touched her back lightly, as though afraid she’d pull away—and potentially tumble herself right off in a cloud of shingles—but she turned to him instantly, letting him hold her, and his breath was almost a sigh of relief.

But then the guards arrived, and Aribeth. Paladin and blackgaurd, champion and betrayer. Chosen of the god of justice, she’d worked to save this city and then she’d helped to bring it to its knees. Anyone who’d survived the siege had only done so because of luck, not because Tyr’s champion hadn’t done all she could to crush them completely.

She’d been stripped of her holy armor, wearing little more than linen rags, not suitable for a shroud in her former life. Anger still mixed with shame on her face, Dar could see it from the top of the tower, or imagined she could. The half-elf kept her head high, even when they looped the noose over it.

Nasher was there, still at this age a monolith, the pillar of his people’s strength, the bearer of their weaknesses.

He gave the nod, as he had when it had been Fenthick, Aribeth’s beloved, who’d worn the noose and carried this city’s sins into the next world.

Dar held her breath, staring unblinking until she was sure it was over. Part of it was perhaps to see the moment that would have to come if human justice was true, when Tyr, the maimed god, Aribeth’s god, the god of justice, would appear to save his chosen from this ignoble death. What was justice if it couldn’t be tempered with mercy? Better to live as a beast with no concept of it, just living until your days were spent.

She wiped her wrist across her eyes and said a prayer. Chauntea didn’t care for human justice. Her children were innocent and innocent they would all return to her in time; Dar could only pray Aribeth’s troubled soul would found her way to a kinder god than her own had been.

For herself, there would be no more dawns in Neverwinter.

She let Aarin hold her as the sun climbed higher and the crowd below dispersed, their blood lust satisfied for the moment, if their guilty souls couldn’t possibly be.

When she finally looked at him she could see that he’d been crying too, and she was glad they’d shared this moment, as terrible as it had been.

Her fingers trembled when she unfastened his necklace from around her neck and tried to hand it to him.

He frowned at it, his eyes already clearing. “What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving,” she said, only slightly confused. She’d thought it had been clear the night before.

“I know that, what are you doing with the necklace?”

She huffed in annoyance. “I’m giving it back. It’s yours. You should keep it for the woman who—the one who stays with you.” She had to look away but she gripped the pendant and chain in her hand and clutched it in her lap.

“When I gave it to you I meant for you to keep it. It didn’t come with strings.”

“I know that. I didn’t think it did, but it’s your mother’s necklace—”

“No, it’s yours. Unless you value it so little.”

How could he sound hurt at this? She was trying to do the right thing by him. “You’re a good man, Aarin. You’ll find a woman who fits into your life better than I do. You should take it back, for her.”

He touched her hand but she still wouldn’t look at him. She didn’t offer the necklace again though. “Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way, you’re the one I gave it to. Keep it. Let it remind you of me. Let it remind you that, I hope, everything that happened here wasn’t as bad as…this.”

She didn’t have to look to know he was gesturing towards the gallows, not the way his voice had thickened.

He turned her hand over and her breath caught for a moment when he took the necklace, but he fastened it around her neck, the way he had when he’d first given it to her, at Beorunna’s Well, while they’d been fighting to save his beloved city.

He gently turned her to face him, and he looked so sad she wished she could tell him she’d stay with him in Neverwinter. There were so many more things she wanted to say, promises she wouldn’t be able to keep, the words of love that none of this had changed, but he kissed her, softly, and she knew their goodbye had been said.

She stood up, because she couldn’t stay, weaving for one moment in the wind, a deadly distance from the ground below. She could fall, but he wouldn’t have let her and she didn’t.

Vanity wouldn’t see her leave him with the parting image of a harpy or a gargoyle. She shifted into a blue wyrmling instead, its little wings would serve as well. There was a grace in dragons that appealed to her, now, on this graceless day.

Then she threw herself from the tower, and let the wind carry her tears.

Yeah and literally the next part is Valen, Shadows of Undrentide happened but I skip all that in narrative. Also the next part will probably never see daylight because I wouldn’t want to post until I finished the whole bit (as in the whole recap of Hordes of the Underdark, at least the parts I think are pertinent to the romance between Valen and the PC) and I should 100% not be working on fanfic right now anyway, so...there you go. 

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