Chapter Text
She returns home in the evening, her body aching, her hands numb. It is two weeks off from Harvest’s Close, and outside her window she can see people milling about in the streets of Rexxentrum, already preparing for the festivities. She has no new jobs, no new missions, and so she sits at her desk, the writing quill awkward in her hand as she looks at the blank paper that will become her report.
Only a day ago, she had dragged herself and Eodwulf through the teleportation circle, his body limp, his eyes empty. She had walked him home and touched his face, drawn his gaze to hers. She had told Eodwulf not to worry. Told him she would take care of it. Told him not to think about it anymore—but as she details their encounter on the page, her knuckles are white, her veins visible from tension.
It takes her an hour to finish. To write one short, measly paragraph. The words curt, unfeeling, clipped. The ink dark against the crisp yellowed parchment. She sits in a high-backed, fancy chair, and looks at the report with unseeing eyes. Her neat handwriting and sharp signature, cold description of her encounter with the Mighty Nein.
She spins the quill through her fingers, over and over. So many words, so much , and yet—she does not know how to write it. How to say it. There is a group called the Mighty Nein, and they need to die, but Astrid and Eodwulf could not kill them, because—because—
Her fingers close. The quill snaps.
Astrid sits at her desk for a long time. Then she stands, and pulls on her cloak. The broken quill she tosses into a rubbish bin; the paper she folds, contemplative, between her fingers. She stands tall in the center of her cushy capital home, in her dirty boots and smoke-stinking cloak, and breathes. Just breathes.
After a long moment, she looks back down at the unfinished report in her hands. Her eyes draw to the last line she wrote, the ink still wet and blotchy on the thin paper.
I found Bren.
When she leaves, she closes the door secure behind her, with barely a sound. Barely a breeze. The papers on her desk rustle. The light from the fireplace wavers.
And deep in the firepit, out of sight from behind her locked door, the report smolders, blackens, and finally burns to ash.
.
She gets her new uniform the day after her graduation. It is beautiful—a deep red, made of rich and strong fabric worth more than her childhood home, with gleaming brass buttons and new boots so shiny she can see her reflection in them. She puts it on slowly, carefully, piece by piece. The pants, the tight boots, the fitted jacket and soft cotton blouse. When she looks in the mirror, she is stunned by what she finds.
Astrid smoothes her hands down by her sides, and thinks: she looks powerful. She looks strong. Brave, and competent, and unwavering. The woman she sees in the mirror is all she’s ever wanted to be—and now. Now she is.
It is the day after her graduation. The day after the fire, after the poison, after doing what needed to be done. Above her head, in a room spelled silent, Bren is still screaming. He will be screaming for years to come.
Astrid smiles.
.
The logic is simple: there is something she is missing. Something that she’s been missing for over sixteen years. A disconnect, a blindness. It has been nearly two decades since the fire, since Master Ikithon left Bren in the care of the asylum, since Astrid looked away and moved on. Nearly twenty years, and she has grown up. She has grown into herself.
It has been sixteen years for Bren, too. Sixteen long years, she thinks, and she considers the weight of that as she walks. Her boots sink in loose soil, her clothes caught and tugged by stray branches. This is not a path well-traveled by, not a path known but for a few. It has been a long time since she came down this backwards forest road, but her feet still remember the way.
Sixteen years. She was young, when she saw him last; he was only seventeen, still weedy, and in times of stress his voice would crack. He hated it, she remembers that. But he is not that seventeen-year-old anymore—he is old, now, thirty at least, and now when his voice cracks it does so not in youth but in rage.
Sixteen years, she thinks. So much time to change. So much time for things to go wrong.
Her eyes narrow at the thought. Her fists tighten. Know thy enemy , Master Ikithon used to say, and she knew Bren, once—but that was long ago. This new Bren, older and worn and stuttering… she doesn’t know him. She doesn’t know .
The logic is simple, her choice calculated. There is something she’s missing, and it’s far past time for Astrid to figure it out. Until she knows—until she understands—until then…
Her report can wait. Just for a little bit. Just for a while. Just until Astrid knows what to do, and what to think about it.
So she pulled on her cloak and packed her spellbooks. Tugged on her boots and pushed sweat-soaked hair from her face. Started on the trailing beaten path, and has been walking ever since. The midnight air cold and crisp, the breeze rustling through the leaves.
It has not been long since the battle. She still smells like smoke, like ash, like burning. Her skin is still dry and bloody from the backlash of heat from Bren’s fire spells. But Astrid ignores it and continues on anyway, despite the lingering ache of her half-healed concussion, despite the pain in her wrists from the iron cuffs. She slips silently through the night with barely a backward glance. Walking swift, and quick, and determined. It’s been a long time, but she still knows the route by heart.
By the time dawn crests over the distant hills, Astrid is already at the asylum gates.
.
Time passes. Years upon years, all building up. She kills the right people and tortures a few more, runs errands for Master Ikithon and keeps an ear out for the changing tide. Life goes on. She grabs drinks with Eodwulf and casts a ritual spell on a stupid cultist tiefling under Ikithon’s orders, burns down a few villages and stands tall and imposing at the necessary galas, letting her eyes track the guests. She eats fine food and buys herself a cushy capital house, talks to the right people and smiles cold and sharp. She holds wine glasses in gloved hands like a proper lady and unlike the country girl she was raised, and if she doesn’t drink from the cups, well, no-one really needs to know.
Her missions are varied, and all end in success. Eodwulf beams when he hears of it. Her superiors are pleased. Trent Ikithon rests a hand on her shoulder, the way he used to do only for Bren, and graces her with a tight smile.
“Well done,” he says. “Astrid.”
It is a small thing. So small. She goes home glowing, and smiles bright as she washes the bloodstains from her blouse.
.
She has not been here in years and she can feel the weight of each one. The pressure is like a knife to her back. Sharp, pointed, accusing. When she pushes open the door, her skin still crawls.
They don’t recognize her, but they go still when she says Bren’s name. Disgust and rage and fear beneath it all. The story comes from the healers in fits and bursts. Six years ago, there was an incident, a mistake—a guard killed, a fire started. A patient missing.
Six years, Astrid thinks, her mouth dry. Six years. He has been free for six years, and not once—
She learns something else, too. That night, when Bren snapped and escaped—he was alone. But for two months before that…
There is a mystery here, a disconnect. But there is a story, too. Bren, silent and unassuming and lying quiet for year after year after year. Eleven full years of compliance, to the point where Master Ikithon relaxed the restrictions around him. One guard, instead of two. A roommate allowed, to save for space.
“A madwoman,” the healers tell her, and their faces scrunch in remembered contempt. “Addled in the head. Crazy as they come, and stupid besides. Lady Astrid, I must insist, she’ll be no help to you, are you sure—?”
“Bring me to her,” Astrid says coldly, and the healers fall over themselves to obey.
.
It is not that Astrid can’t drink wine. She can. She can hold her breath and choke it down, or sip it fine and dainty like she’s supposed to. She can let it linger on her tongue, and pour it with a steady hand. She can do these things. It is just—
Bren’s voice in her ears; the taste of poison on her tongue, never mind that she never drank it; the way her parents fell forward, glassy-eyed and cold; the echo of screaming and the way the drink shines red in the light. A question she cannot forget. Why didn’t you break?
(Why didn’t she?)
—it is just better, she thinks, to avoid the mess entirely.
.
The woman is sitting up when Astrid enters the room. Hands folded in her lap and her expression dreamy. Her hair is dark and coiled tight by her head; her empty eyes are black as night. Age lines set deep in her face, premature gray streaking through her hair. She doesn’t look up when Astrid enters, and when the healers shout for her attention, the madwoman doesn’t even blink.
“Leave me,” Astrid snaps to the healers, unamused by their bootlicking, and slams the door shut behind them. She turns back to the woman with narrowed eyes and straight back. She strides to the bedside with cold purpose, and scowls down at the woman’s unseeing gaze.
The woman has soft leather straps around her wrists and is dressed in a childish white smock. The bed is too big for her—starched sheets almost swallowing her whole. Her empty eyes are turned to the window, her distant expression unfaltering.
The dismissal is likely unintentional, but in this place, after all that has happened—it makes her gut twist. “Look at me,” Astrid snaps, and the woman blinks slow at the window and doesn’t even twitch.
Well, then. Astrid grits her teeth. “I have some questions for you,” she says, cold. “About someone you used to know, from here. He would be—this would be six years ago. A roommate. Bren Aldric Ermendrud. Do you know who I’m talking about?”
The woman stares at the window. Astrid bites back a snarl.
“Answer me,” she snaps. “He— he was here, and you were his roommate, and three weeks after you had an apparent breakdown he killed a man and started a fire, and—you must know! Tell me!”
Nothing. Astrid shakes. “He has red hair,” she forces out. It is useless. Useless. She is back again in this awful place, speaking to someone who cannot hear. She hates it. But she still tries. “Blue eyes, white skin, freckles… He wouldn’t have spoken. He stared a lot. Even before, he—” She isn’t talking to the woman anymore. “He used to set leaves on fire when we were kids like an idiot and laugh about it, because fire was always his to control, and he would ask questions about the strangest things, and hunt down books like they were treasure, and he—he—”
“He screamed every night,” says the madwoman, soft, and Astrid’s mouth snaps shut.
She stares. The woman still isn’t looking at her—but her gaze has drifted away from the window, down to the bed, her skinny fingers plucking at a loose thread.
“W-what?”
The woman doesn’t answer right away. She just hums, a tuneless sound, something thoughtful. “Every night,” she murmurs. “Over and over and over… never sleeping. Never asleep. Would that he could have slept.”
Astrid hesitates. The shock of receiving an answer dulls the rage that had built since coming here, and she slowly sinks beside the woman on the bed. She waits. A smile twitches at the corner of the woman’s mouth.
“They think I am stupid,” she confesses to Astrid, in a sly whisper. “Think that because I am mad I cannot hear them. Hah! I know more than they ever will. No one watches their tongue around the insane. Not them. Not you, either.” A wry twist to her lips. Her fingers coil and tug around a loose cotton thread. “All those voices in my head, and you think I can’t hear you too?”
Astrid says nothing. She feels—it is bizarre, almost, because it feels like a slap to the wrist. She feels shamed. She feels like a child, and when the woman meets her eyes, blank and black and knowing, something in Astrid’s gut drops.
“They thought him too mad to know,” she says, distant. “And I too mad to listen. But he knew. Poor boy. He knew too much. It killed him in the day and ate him every night.” She twists the thread and it snaps. “And I, and I, I heard and heard and heard…”
Astrid stays quiet. Her mind is whirling. The bare bits of information the healers had let loose, the things that lurk between the lines. The messy print on this woman’s meager file. She had been a healer, once. Great renown, great power, great worth. But she was too weak, too kind. She turned over every body she found, and healed the dead until it broke her.
The realization is like ash in her mouth. “You—”
“I heard and I heard,” the woman murmurs, and her eyes snap to Astrid. “Hear enough, and then you start to think.” Her hands flex on the sheets and she smiles. “Not stupid,” she says, and her eyes are bright, bright, bright. “Not empty, either. Magic doesn’t wither. Magic never withers.”
“You healed him,” Astrid whispers, and the final piece clicks into place.
“Helped,” the woman corrects, and her eyes crinkle from the warmth of her smile. Her hand reaches out, and rests gently on Astrid’s cheek before she can even think to pull away. “Dear stranger. I can see so many shadows in your eyes. Would you like me to help you too?”
Astrid rips herself away, breathing tight. “ No,” she snaps. Her blood is pounding. There is an echo in her ears. She flies to her feet, steps back out of reach. “No. I am not broken. I am not like you. I don’t need—I don’t—”
The woman is still smiling, and her hands fall open and loose in her lap. “If you’re sure,” she says. Her voice is kind, strong where Astrid stutters. “The offer will be open to you always, dear stranger. A gift, for what you have done for me this day.” She sighs, sounding satisfied. “What a wonderful day. Such good news you have brought me.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Astrid snaps, and turns on her heel, striding to the door. “And I don’t care.” She throws open the door and stands in the doorway, breathing heavy—then freezes, realization striking through her. She is—is she—is she running away?
At her back, the woman speaks. Her voice, warm and sly. “If you are here… he got out, yes? He got free?” She can hear the smile in the woman’s voice. “How is he? How is my friend?”
Astrid doesn’t move. The woman hums.
“I’m so glad,” she says, “to hear he’s doing well.”
It is too much for her. Astrid slams the door shut. And behind the wood, through the layers and layers of stone in this disguised prison, she can hear the mad healer start to laugh.
.
Astrid is brilliant, is bright, is the best of all of them. She kills and she tortures and she stands strong. She is powerful. She is enough. Her hands no longer shake, and most days, nothing hurts at all. She looks traitors in the eyes as she breaks them and looks down with those same eyes at Master Ikithon’s new students, looks Eodwulf in the eye and lies to save his soul. She smiles, and smiles, and smiles, and the expression sits cold and hard on her face.
She thinks, bizarrely, that it used to come easier.
.
That night, she digs through a chest of rare materials and finds a silver mirror worth enough gold to make her late parents shake. She sits before the fire, the mirror in her lap, concentrating hard. For ten minutes she retains it, narrowing down her focus, forcing the spell through despite her lack of physical object to connect her to the target. It is not her forté, this spell, but she can still cast it.
She wants to look for Bren. But she knows him. She knows him, and so she doesn’t look for him, though she wishes she could. Instead—she takes her spell, and Scrys for the monk.
She knows she’s done right when the Scry goes blurry, indistinct—fuzzed by whatever Bren has to ward off any eyes. She can’t see them, and she can’t tell where they are—but the monk is less protected than he, and Astrid closes her eyes and listens.
She cannot see him, but she can see other things. The monk, smiling broadly at a joke. Sitting against a cart and speaking in a halted tone, apologies and promises and gentle rebukes. Sees the firbolg cooking a warm meal and watches the tiefling dart around the group and fret. The goblin, fuzzy and unfocused, pressed against the side of one who cannot be Seen.
She cannot see him, but she can see them responding to him. Laughing. Smiling. Speaking kindly. Saying his name— a name, one she doesn’t know but suspects is his. Caleb! the half-orc calls. Come over here, sit by us.
She cannot see him, but she can hear, briefly—the sound of him laughing too.
She closes the spell, shuts her eyes to the projected scenes. Presses her hands against her face, and wonders at how strange it feels—to smile, to be happy for him, even as some part of her despairs. Jealousy is a burn in her throat. Bitter certainty like a drag at her heart. He is happy there. He is happy.
He is a traitor.
Astrid pulls her hands away, and is startled to find the tears.
.
She goes home. She goes home. She goes home. Success after success, mission after mission. The imprint of Master Ikithon’s cold hand on her shoulder, burning like a brand. The whisper of Eodwulf’s bladed smile, sharper each day. The blood that stains her blouse.
She goes home. She hangs up her coat and slips off her boots, sits in a plush red chair by a big fireplace in an expensive house. Looks out the window, and watches the people milling below. Are you happy? Are you sad? They are so distant, so far away. She is so far above them, and the lingering touch of grass fields and childhood homes has gone dim in her memory.
There is a bottle of wine on her desk. A card signed by the looping hand of her teacher. She takes a cup and pours a glass, and chokes down every swallow.
.
She is calm, when she goes to him. Settled, and sure, and secure. She stands straight and tall, and she looks him in the eye. There is no give to her. There is no regret.
“Master Ikithon,” she says, and doesn’t waver, not once. “I have something to report.”
She tells him of the Mighty Nein. She tells him what—and who—she found there. She details faces and names and character traits, every slip of information they gave her. Their loose Common tongues, and all the secrets they spilled when they thought she could not hear them.
(She thinks, briefly, of the mad healer. Her smile. Her wry tone, her knowing eyes. An offer to help, and worst of all—the kindness in her voice, so genuine it felt like a foreign tongue.)
Astrid’s voice is not kind, and neither does it shake. Her hands are steady. But each word rests heavy on her tongue, and all she can feel is cold. Cold like the snow of her hometown, like the asylum rooms, like the look in Bren’s pale eyes when he chose to kill her.
She tells Trent Ikithon of a man named Caleb Widogast, and in the back of her mind, a ghost lingers still. Bren as she once knew him. Smiling, laughing, screaming, and his ruined voice echoes in her ear: Why? Why didn’t you break?
She doesn’t know. She will never know. And as she completes her report and waits for the verdict, the taste of wine heavy on her tongue, she watches Master Ikithon smile, and wonders if things would’ve been better, if kindness would come easier, had she broken that day too.
.
.
.
She is seven years old and lonely, when Bren Aldric Ermendrud first comes up and asks her to play. Seven years old and too lost in her own head to make friends. A little girl sitting propped up against a tree, throwing stones and watching them vanish into the waving grasses.
He is her first friend, even if she is not his. The first to ask and the first to listen. The first to offer his hand, and say, “Can I try, too?”
They play the rest of the day, and talk throughout it all. Where they live, what they like, who they will become. At sundown Bren’s parents call him home, and he leaves her behind with a wave and a quickfire smile. His eyes are bright against the glowing dusk; his laughter lingers long after he’s left.
She runs home with stumbling steps and practically falls into her mother’s open arms. “I made a friend!” she cries, and her parents brighten, their smiles wide. Her mother presses her for the story. Her father laughs at the antics. They set the table together, weak meat and dark bread and a thin ale, and her father sits her on his knees and wishes for wine.
Astrid wraps her arms around his neck and thinks about Bren, about games under the sunshine and promises to be better, to be more, to be something great. She’s sure Bren will be amazing, someday. And she thinks—maybe she can be amazing, too.
“One day,” Astrid tells them then, “Mom, Dad, I’ll get you all the wine in the world!”
Her father kisses her forehead. Her mother smiles, soft and fond. Their eyes are worn and their embrace is warm. She nestles into her father’s side, and drifts away under the candlelight glow, thinking of magic and greatness and the wine she will buy them, the things she will give to them, one day far off into the future. A promise to herself, a wish, tucked deep in the corners of her heart.
And she has never been happier.