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spellsparkler · 4 months ago

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“ – that isn’t covered in blood and fluids? We can’t leave her in that –”

“– didn’t exactly have time to pack a bag –”

She is sitting on the ground, cross-legged; her head hurts; she was looking for something, but she can’t remember what. Something like grass tickles her knees, but when she looks down she can’t find it – just a flat, speckled plane of green, like an ugly carpet. There is a wide expanse of brown. She deduces it’s her lap; there’s something in her lap. She can’t feel it. Everything she reaches for slithers away. There’s a distant cacophony in her ears but when she tries to catch it – spread its iridescent wings and pin it down – it fades into nothing, like so much smoke between her fingers, like a candleflame that burns and burns and never stays. Her head hurts. There’s so many heads. She wants to let them roll just to get a little peace.

“– underneath, I can do without it, I’m sure! Though it might not be as comfortable without an underlayer –”

“– Oh, do. Let her puke on the wizard’s clothes, that would be hilarious –”

She opens her mouth, and several seconds later, some echo of the words she’s thinking peel out. “What’s happening?” she asks; there are people here, with their gaggling voices and their screaming heads, and she thinks she knows them. She’s not hiding. She’s not alone. She can’t remember who they are but she knows she’s not alone. Something high-pitched happens and her headache twists in a way that momentarily punches all understanding from her body; when she comes back to it she’s standing over the hideous green carpet. Something fraying and irritable wisps over her skin. There’s so many colours and so much clutter and none of it quite makes sense. What were they doing, again? She was looking for something. She’s still looking.

“I’m Shadowheart,” says a voice, ever so calmly, and something bright and shiny jostles through her field of view, aching bright. “We nearly died, but we escaped together.”

“We haven’t,” says another garbled voice, and then there is something that is lost to the noise, and then, “introduced! But unfortunately you’ve misplaced your name – unless –”

“Collar,” she replies. It trips out of her mouth without her quite thinking about it. When she looks down, she sees heaps of trailing fabric, a mess of dreary colour; her dress must be torn to shreds, she realises. She can feel scraps hanging down, brushing her skin. Coming apart at the edges. Thread unwinds and unwinds and unwinds, until the bobbin rattles empty, until the puckered silk screams for a steadying stitch; this isn’t even silk. She says, “Who are you?”

There is a blur of sound. She can’t hold any of the threads. Everything unspools.

There’s a lot of green around her, the weft of the canvas that pins her in its centre. It’s so bright. Shadow dapples everything like an old friend; things keep moving but she can’t quite ascertain where. She can’t remember where her hands are. Her head is too high. Her hands feel wet and gritty and cloth whispers over her arms.

“– in combat.” Those words peel themselves clear from the miasma with steely precision.

“ – haven’t had cause to witness that performance yet, but it sounds like remarkable resilience –”

“Not remarkable,” says the voice threaded through with the sharp things and the soft things hiding like meat inside them, “impossible. That level of awareness doesn’t fit with her disorientation, and yet she didn’t so much as stumble –”

She was looking for something. There’s something she needs to do. Her distant, lopsided hands are holding something; she looks down at it, uncomprehending, to see something flat and grey. There is a dark stone set into a little peal of filigree. She lets her hands do as they will with it; the weight in them evens her out. What was she looking for? Why can’t she find it? She can’t find it. She can’t find anything.

“– Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” she says. “Who are you?”

“I’m Shadowheart.”

She squints, toying with the thing as it warms in her hands, and says, “You said I had a brain injury.”

The voice that is Shadowheart says, “I did, yes.”

“It’s a waste of breath to state the obvious,” she says. The thing in her hand is a knife. She sets her fingers over its ornate hilt longways and particular, like it’s a scalpel, and she feels a little better. Her head still hurts quite badly, like some burning thing has lodged itself there, swollen, and is gnawing at her ganglia. She flicks her wrist, delicate as anything, and imagines cutting it all open. She could fix it that way – open up the coronal suture, the sagittal suture that carves its way along the place where the hemispheres diverge, the delicate shield of the pterion. She says, “Where did we escape from?”

Again, a disparate noise, fizzling into nonsense. She says, “I can’t hear you.” She says, “I can’t see you.”

Everything is moving too much and she can’t find the right parts; it’s all a mess, smears of colour and hard-lined shapes, light and shade and twisted edges. “I can’t see you,” she says. The knife is warm as blood in her hand. Her hands hurt. Her head hurts. “Where are you?”

She can’t remember how many there are; she can’t remember their names. She can’t remember if she’s supposed to listen to them or not. She can’t remember how they got here. She finds skin, blood-warm under her bare hand, and presses her fingers to it hard, arm outstretched, elbow clicked into place. “You’re pinching my nose,” says the owner of the voice. Her fingers drive against the joining of nasal bone and cartilage.

“You had green eyes,” she says.

The voice says, “Yes.”

That remembering is enough of a relief that she drops her hand. There are other voices, but they are quiet. The steady voice is still talking to her. “– a river,” it says, words slipping, sometimes. “You’re covered in blood. – stopped here – thanks, Gale – wash?”

She asks, “What’s happening?”

She wants to lie down, but she can’t do that in front of the people. How many people are there? How did she meet them?

What is she missing? What is her name?

“We’re going to clean you up,” says the voice, with tired patience. “Put the knife away, please.”

“All right,” she says, ever affable, and, “no, thank you.”

The gaggle of noises rises and tumbles; the sky is piercing blue; there are trees around her, she deduces after a time spent staring at them. It’s very hard to make the shapes around her resolve into anything recognisable, which is concerning. She has obviously had a head injury; her senses aren’t connecting as they are supposed to, and she keeps finding her mouth open with forgotten words dying on her tongue, and her head hurts. It wriggles. Her body moves like something unrelated to her, perambulating her around like a passenger in a carriage. Her fingers are wrapped around a hilt. It’s warm to the touch.

There are trees around her. She is outside; if her head tips back her eyes are directed up and she can see the sky, and the pain that lances through her right temple at its light is truly impressive, and even when she puts her head down light dances all through her vision. She looks very hard and she sees a rock, but she can’t tell if it’s close enough to sit down on. Her hand twists, the knife she holds flicked deftly over her fingers and safely gripped again. Her head hurts. She can’t really feel anything else. There’s a soft, curving pattern to the rock’s grain. The world behind it is flat and lurid, as if it was coloured in with pastels blown over with water, something that sticks and runs. Sound fizzles in her ears. Something, somewhere, is dreadfully cold.

“– think your dress can be salvaged,” says the voice of the woman with the green eyes and the soft things and the sharp things; “A shame. It looks like it was quite pretty, once.”

Thank you, she says, or maybe thinks; it’s all so loud. The sun is in her eyes again. No matter where she looks it gets there. She says, “I’m quite certain I’ve had a head injury.”

“We’ve established that,” says the woman. “The river is just in front of you, now. Do you think you can manage taking a bath?”

She asks, “When did we get to the river?”

If she focuses, pain slinking shyly between the lobes and hemispheres of her brain, she can see the person she’s talking to; smudges of pink and black and silver. The ringed shine of chainmail. The black is helpfully distinguishing. Everything is silver, but the trees are rarely black.

“Just now,” says the voice. She thinks she’s doing a remarkable job of keeping track of this conversation. “We walked.”

She doesn’t remember moving, but seeing as she remembers literally nothing else either, it hardly signifies. She looks to the muddled plane in front of her – the light reflecting off the river! the grey sludge the colour of water! If she were not definitely unequivocally suffering from a recent brain injury she would not be so pleased at recognising these things. If her body wasn’t holding fort so well she would need to lie down. But it stands – a bulwark – a tower – a blade blunted into the ground – and she stands with it.

“ – help taking your clothes off?” a voice asks, primly inexpressive.

“My clothes off,” she says, which is not what she means to say. It doesn’t come out right. She lets her hands rise to the back of her neck; the knife – she’s holding a knife – whispers through her hair. She can feel it in her scalp. The buttons come neatly, easily loose, even as the fabric around them is pulling flimsily apart. Two of them are missing. When they’re all undone, the dress slides off her like a leech falling fatly away from a meal. There are more clothes underneath. This stumps her, briefly, but her hands get rid of them too; they fold both, though the fabric that was once a dress is sticky and delicate and probably impossible to put on again, and put them down on the rock. Her hands know how close and how far the rock is, which is convenient, as she does not.

There is mail lying in a clothes shape on the rock. She looks long enough to determine it is a shirt. Shadowheart says, “The knife will get rusty if you take it in to bathe,” and she remembers Shadowheart; and she sees the objective reasoning of this statement, so she puts the knife down. Her fingers mourn its absence, but she is not, in this, a servant to her fingers. It isn’t as if she might lose it – they will remember where it is, even as she forgets, which she will, because she has sustained a head injury.

The water is cold and bright, pressing in on the pimpled rind of her skin. All the little vessels of it constrict with the shock; her heart tumbles steadily on. An ache rises in her ankles, in concert with the ache in her head. The water is beautifully bright. She discovers that she likes cold water. This is lucky, because she is covered in filth – blood and bile and sweat and dirt, speckled over the undulating grey-pink of her, streaked through the long, unavoidable daylily yellow that she assumes is her hair.

“– little further,” says the owner of the hand on her elbow. “Good.” And they sit down together, in the water; she looks until she makes out a dark block of what must be hair, and the black seems familiar. She makes out the pale smudge of the face, though its details elude her. She focuses on one of the eyes. It’s green.

“Good,” says the woman, again. The name eludes her, at the moment. The hand is on her arm. The water laps at her chest. “– me? The Lady guide me – we’re days from a horrible death and I’m helping a stranger bathe.” She can see her hair floating like so many of those little flower petals in the water. The name escapes her. This bothers her tremendously. The woman says lightly, “If I didn’t owe you a life debt I’d be tempted to leave you to the illithids.”

“Your bedside manner is terrible,” she replies, and tips her head back until it meets the water, until the cold shocks the place at her skull where all the agony lives and time skips through her fingers like badly gathered ribbon.

She might scream; it doesn’t really matter. It barely signifies. The water is cold around her, heavy, and with her ears under the noise is all diluted down to a wet, swirling gasp. It’s like before, wandering the cold, soft floors, thumbs knuckle-deep in tissue, all the walls breathing and flexing, all taut ligaments and raw, unfinished flesh; she couldn’t make it out but she knew it was unfamiliar and strange and interesting, though it hurt too much for anything to be interesting. Her body had moved neatly through, hands trailing over the meat of the walls. There had been so much noise, horrible screaming, that it had dampened itself behind the pulp, gone past what she could hear, taken her to a place of merciful silence. It would have been more merciful if her head didn’t ache with such terrible pressure that she could have cracked it open at the pterion just to aspirate the excess. She’d found a scalpel. She can’t remember what she did with it. She can’t remember where the meat place went.

Right now she’s underwater, eyes open to a shining-pale sky, limbs drifting; her hair is writhing like snakes, tugging gently for attention, twisting itself into plaits. Something moves at the top end of her vision. She doesn’t think it’s part of the sky, but it’s hard to be sure. Her head hurts. She doesn’t remember how long it’s been hurting for but she’s beginning to get sick of thinking about it.

She leans against the thing that is behind her, and it presses solid against her back, taps like rattling fingerbones at her scalp. Her eyes hurt in the light. It pushes her head up; water drips out of her ears, down her neck, hooking its way under her jaw like pearls. Her shoulders are gently nudged upright, too.

It’s a person who is touching her, she realises, and for some reason this strikes her as astounding. She wonders why; people touch each other all the time. She thinks. But she is an amnesiac who didn’t realise there was a person there until just now, so she probably shouldn’t take her own word on anything.

“– easier with soap,” says the person who is touching her. They slip around in front of her, so that they are a black and purple and pale silhouette. She can feel the shape of their limbs in the water; black hair drips down onto the surface like a rope. They say, “Oh,” and they say, “Are you listening?”

“Yes,” she says.

They press deft fingers bare to the tough, livid skin stretched over her sternum, and they ask, “What is this?”

She drops her head so she can see the hand. It doesn’t make much difference. Part of their arm is purple; she assumes that’s their sleeve. She can’t see exactly what she’s referring to, but she feels it under the pressure of touch; she knows each jigsaw-cut piece of the body by name. (Where did she learn that? She must have learned somewhere.) Her fingers pinch, as if grasping a scalpel, or a knife; she says, “The juncture of body and manubrium. Second rib.”

Above those bones is the beginning of the clavicle, half the framework that the shoulders rest on; skin draped over osseous scaffolding, hinged at the joints. The body is a careful machine. There is a spanner in her works. Her headache keeps moving, as if it can’t just get comfortable and let her get used to it – the cold is seeping up her spine – hair is plastered wetly to the back of her neck. The sky in front of her is pale as the fragile shell of an egg, and just as prone to breaking. Why does she know the things she knows? Costal notches, serratus anterior, linea alba. The positioning of the heart and the map of its arteries, the threaded tangle of nerves, ligaments that stretch from bone to bone. The empty cavities where organs nestle. There is an answer, and it belongs to the hollow place, but whatever was there has gone missing and she can’t find it again. It was important. It might have been the most important. There might have been nothing else in the world that mattered. But she is still here, and it is still gone, and excepting false muscle memory, grand gestures that do nothing, hits that should land glancing away, a half-centimetre off – excepted, she is bearing its loss well. Whatever it is.

She’s looking for it, but she doesn’t know what she’s looking for, and that makes the whole thing rather unachievable.

Her arms float limply in the water. Her fingers curl around the hilt of her knife, but it isn’t within reach. Where did it go? She knows she had it. She knows. There is a clever-knuckled hand rubbing at her shoulder. She is bare; the hand is bare. She reaches for her knife. It isn’t there.

“You put your skin on my skin,” says her mouth. It’s so very cold. Her head feels pained and slow. “I would honour your gall.” Her fingers curl around the knife that isn’t there. Her legs, criss-crossed in this shallow ocean, are still. The stranger speaks, but the words are unfamiliar.

It’s cold in the water. She reaches for her knife. It isn’t there. The stranger speaks. “I don’t understand,” she says, but her mouth doesn’t open. All the attention of her skin is turning inwards.

It’s cold in the water. She reaches for her knife. It isn’t there. The stranger says the same sounds again and again, like the same moment in time is twisting itself into knots, spiralling back around until there is no past and no future and not very much in the present, either. Her mind is quiet. There is water around her. It’s cold.

She holds the hilt of a knife that isn’t there. The headache squirms until it settles. She closes her fingers around the hilt of a knife. Light shifts in front of her eyes. Sounds swelter without meaning. Her fingers wrap around the hilt of a knife. Her hands are empty. Her ever-aware body isn’t looking; and she is unmoving; and she is alone.

She grasps a knife that isn’t there.

She lets go of it, eventually. It’s a sharp, juddering thing, like the cut of a line; pain spears through her temples like it’s caught her skull on a spit, and she cries out.

And Shadowheart says, “Eli?”

She is sitting down. Her hair is damp, hanging neatly down her back in a thick braid. She is dressed in something heavy and purple. The material is good. There’s something small and a little heavy in her lap. Upon close inspection she finds it is an apple. She knows what an apple is. That’s good news.

Her hair is wet. Water drips into the warm weight of her collar. She must have been in the water at some point.

She asks, “What’s Eli?”

Shadowheart looks orange; the light shifts over her, giving her too many shapes to track. The sky has gone away. She says, “I found it stitched into the collar of your dress.”

The light shifts. Her hands are empty. She closes them – opens them.

Shadowheart says, “The rest of the embroidery was too damaged to make out.”

Her body curls around her, steady, warm. She says, “I want to go to sleep.”

“All right,” says Shadowheart. In the orange light, her eyes are as slick and formless as oil-pools. It takes several lipid-slow seconds to pin them down. “I’ll keep watch.”

#today i offer you. a couple thousand words of terrible disorientation #tomorrow... who knows...#this is set the day the nautiloid crashed. the next day they would find the grove and meet wyll + lae'zel #and then elias wakes up on the third or fourth day with all her most blatant symptoms gone. to everyone's bafflement #everyone pour one out for shadowheart. she feels herself obliged to try to care for someone with the most inexplicable brain injury ever #looking at everything elias does going What the fuck. what the fuckk #my writing #elias tag #dark urge #bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #microfic

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