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Mahri Rhivesa was the most comfortable she’d ever been in her life. In Ul’Dah, she was just a vagabond taking jobs. No specialized racism here, like the Shroud, because here in the wild rose of the desert, everyone got treated poorly. It was, strangely, refreshing. Later down the road, her future best friends would call that an “effect of years of being mistreated and abused,” but what did Sharlayan scholars know anyroad?
The culture of blanket cruelty did, however, highlight when someone was kind.
She handed in the pelts she’d been sent out to retrieve, doing her best to hide her exhaustion as she leaned against a column in the Quicksand. Her hood was up, and her ears swiveled slowly to keep track of things going on around her...but, she somehow missed the steps of a bard approaching her.
“Long day?” Thancred asked, holding out a glass to her.
She slowly looked at it, then took it. It looked like water, and she was relatively sure that the bard had no reason to slip her anything else. Mahri had been quite...forceful with the last man to offer her an alcoholic drink. She was so tired that she decided fuckit if this is alcohol, she’d take the whole bar down with her. She’d been underpaid for weeks since she got here. She gulped down the first chunk of liquid, quickly cooled by the ice she had formed in her palm.
“Work’s been bad,” she answered. “You’d think it wouldn’t be, with the Sultana as a reference on my resume, but...I’m guessing that got me blacklisted.”
“Not a lot in Ul’Dah willing to work with heroes,” Thancred replied.
Mahri snorted, downing the rest of the water in a couple of gulps. She looked at him, panting lightly with her fangs out. “I’m no fucking hero, Waters. Keep the songs for the birds that want them.”
“Oh, pish-posh, you’re an adventurer. Pretty sure that makes you somebody’s hero, somewhere.” Thancred leaned on the column near her. “Surely, you’ve a story like that.”
Mahri closed her eyes. “Ha...” Her eyes snapped open as a memory she’d buried came back, smacking her. Damn, this weird, new mutation. She muttered, “I...I guess I do.”
“Oh?” Thancred asked as if she hadn’t been spaced out for a hot minute. “This, I must hear.”
She offered the glass back to him. “Another water and a table.”
He took the water and, somehow managing the impossible, got them a private table. He sat down across from Mahri, looking the role of a mob boss hearing secret news even if he hadn’t changed from his black shirt and green pants. “Well?”
She picked up one of the five glasses of water he’d gotten her. She sipped before starting, “Da was a bandit leader, out in the Shroud. Nine times out of ten, he’d stick to the Shroud. But, for one moon when I was seven winters old, he came over to Limsa Lominsa.”
“Why?”
Mahri shrugged. “Think he was trying to find a new hidey-hole back in the Shroud and needed space to do it from if I’m ascribing him any intelligence today. We shared a shoddy apartment overlooking the water from the city docks. My favorite thing about that was that the windows were easy to unhinge and glided open as smooth as silk. Could sneak out every night we were there, and he never caught me once.”
“Ah, a heroine with darker skills,” Thancred replied. “A classic.” Mahri gave him a flat look. He put up his hands. “Apologies, but given your stubbornness, I feel the need to remind you of your classical heroic traits often.”
She rolled her eyes. “I snuck out. I met a boy-”
“Oh?”
“Shut up, I was seven, he was nine, nothing like that was happening,” Mahri answered. She huffed and ran a hand through her hair. “We didn’t trade names the way most folks do. Think we both recognized the same energy in each other and just...gave each other fake names. I introduced myself as Night, and he was Hawk.”
Mahri didn’t recognize the way Thancred sat up just a tiny bit straighter. Didn’t see his eyes gain a sharp focus to them, because that focus was carefully hidden behind his projected casual air. She was too busy being nostalgic for a past she thought gone.
“He found me perched on one of the lamps in Limsa,” she continued, “and practically bullied me to teach him how I got up there.”
“Did you?” Thancred asked, even though he had a strong theory as to what the answer would be.
Mahri snorted. “I did throughout three nights. Quick study. And then, just to squish his ego, I jumped from one to another and stuck my tongue out at him.” She chuckled. “Squawked at me to teach him that trick too.”
“So, he called you a hero for being a teacher?” he asked, needing the confirmation to clinch her identity in his mind.
Mahri shook her head. “No.” She sighed. “Kids are dumb. The two of us, the Nighthawk gang we’d call ourselves, we had habits built up from years of survival. Like pickpocketing.” She ran a hand through her hair again. “We picked a bad mark. He caught Hawk, had him by the neck. Everything that’d been taught to me said to leave him to die.”
“But you didn’t, did you?” Thancred asked softly.
“Nope,” Mahri answered, popping the p. “I launched myself at the guy, threw some salt I had in my pockets into his eyes, and then got Hawk, and we ran.”
Thancred asked a question that’d burnt out years ago but now rekindled in his mind. “Why in Hydaelyn’s name did you have salt in your pockets?”
“Any good sneak has tricks up their sleeve,” Mahri answered. “The best sneaks turn what’s available to them into tricks. Da brought home salt packets like they were fleas. Didn’t miss a couple.”
“Well, shite,” Thancred told himself. “That's a hell of a mystery that didn't even really need solving, but damn me if it didn't just get solved.”
“Anyroad, we ran,” Mahri continued, “and we found an alleyway to hide in, and he did the damnedest things.”
Thancred frowned. He didn’t remember doing anything that odd. “Oh?”
“Gave me the first hug I ever got,” Mahri answered. She continued as Thancred stared shocked at her, “It was warm, even if he was kinda dirty and smelled like fish glue. Kissed me on the forehead and called me a hero. You can imagine my reaction.”
“Blushing with bright silver eyes, shaking from adrenaline, and smiling a little?” Thancred paused and took a different tact before that left his mouth. “Oh, utter denial, surely.”
If he hadn’t been looking for it, he’d have missed the light blush. Mahri nodded, lying like a liar, “Yes. Because I’m not a hero.” She paused and took another sip of her water. “But...he said to me, almost at the end of the moon when I told him I had to leave...that I was the reason he was going to start believing in heroes.”
Thancred hid a smirk behind his own sip. He’d been a smooth-talker from the start, and it did wonderful things for his ego. “Well, this clinches it.”
Mahri blinked. “What?”
“I am going to introduce you to some friends of mine,” Thancred answered. “Before, I was just going to do it because I have a theory that you’ve got the Echo, which is a trait we like to help people figure out how to get used to. Now, I’m going to do it because you’d fit right in, Ms. Hero.”
“Wait, you know-”
“The spacing out, fainting spells: both are common symptoms of the Echo,” Thancred explained. “Most can pas it off as aether sickness, but-”
“-but I’m a mutated freak, and so that can’t be the case,” Mahri replied, hope leaking into her tone despite her rougher words. She stood, downing another glass of water as she did. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Thancred asked.
“I’ll go,” Mahri answered. “But not because I agree with you that I’m a hero. But because I need answers.”
“So do I, Night,” Thancred thought to himself, looking up at his grown-up childhood friend, “what in the seven hells happened to your eyes?” He stood up. “Well, I’ve played enough cards to know when to take any victory I can. Let us be off, Ms. Rhivesa.”