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There’s mud between his teeth. Georg sure as hell never mentioned this unfortunate side effect of adventuring when he was spinning tales back in West Harbour. Rhys tongues despondently at the gritty mess coating his molars and chokes back the urge to spit.
Better not, not in front of this crew anyway. He should try and present at least the illusion of calm competence. It was an uphill battle as it was: he’d already thrown up on himself today after all.
Behind him, Casavir is waxing rhapsodical about honour to the angry farm girl - name, name, what was it? Shandra. Neeshka chimes in periodically in her high - shrill, corrects the rat bastard that lives behind his smile - voice. Neither of them is doing his raging headache any favours.
Ahead, the ranger’s leather clad back is disappearing into the undergrowth. Rhys forces his aching legs to step a little faster. Each footfall drives another sharp splinter of pain through his chest. No, not a splinter - a Shard.
There is, Rhys thinks, somewhat hysterically, a chunk of interdimensional silver sword stuck in my fucking chest. Right next to my heart.
He thinks it’ll start getting better as they trek closer to Neverwinter. It does not. Every breath is prickling agony, every step a knife, a splinter, a fucking Shard. He keeps his face still as his thoughts tangle and twist and shatter into sharp edged pieces. Bishop doesn’t even need to kick him awake for his watch. He’s been staring blankly into the dark for hours as his scar throbs out of time with his heartbeat. There is a flicker of movement to his left and he catches the incoming boot in the palm of his hand. For a second, their eyes meet in the dull glow of the banked campfire. And then Bishop pulls free and turns away.
Near the edge of the forest, they’re ambushed. Well, Rhys is ambushed. The others likely heard the pitchy chatter of the goblins and low harsh growling of their bugbear commander well before the raiding party spilled out onto the path. Rhys is preoccupied listening to the discordant beat in his chest.
He fumbles the cantrip - just a simple whistle spell he’s been singing for most of a decade. But the beat is all wrong; how in the hells is he supposed to make music like this? Fuck it. He ducks under the bugbear’s wild swing, and draws the notched hatchet from his belt. Somewhere else, Shandra is babbling, a note of panic in her voice. It goes away. Everything outside of that horrible jarring beat goes away.
There’s something different between his teeth now. It tastes of copper and Shandra's backing away, Neeshka’s hands are folded over her mouth, eyes wide. Casavir stares off into the trees, tendons standing out in thick lines as he clenches that oh-so-heroic jaw. There is a soft clink behind him and Rhys turns.
Bishop straightens up from a mess of meat in patchy rabbit skins, a dull gleam of copper in his closing fist. He meets Rhys’ eyes square-on, wolf gold and steady.
“How much further?” That can’t be his voice. Rhys has never sounded like that in his life, raspy raw, rabid.
“‘Nother hour or so to the high road.” The ranger smirks, eyes flicking down and unhurriedly back up again. “We’ll have to tip you in a creek along the way.”
“Alright,” Rhys says and follows Bishop into the trees.
They find a stream and the water turns red when Bishop, true to his word, shoves him into it.
Casavir tries to pull him aside when they get back to the Flagon, but all Rhys can hear is the beat. He shrugs off the hand on his shoulder, dumps his pack in the barren room Duncan offered him and walks back into the street without uttering a word. His voice is still wrong, anyway.
The first healer he finds asks a great many questions. What happened here, son? Grenade? The scar’s well enough, did you already get a cleric to have a looksie?
“Can you get it out?” is the only reply he can find in the spinning, shattering cacophony of his thoughts.
The answer is a meandering road to no. “The edge is right in there next to your heart, lad. I can patch up the damage that’s been done, but if I try to move it at all, it’s going to slice straight in. Maybe…” He trails off, frowning, and shakes his head.
Rhys pays him in silver scavenged from Zeeaire’s corpse and walks out.
Two more healers, each with variations of the same questions and Rhys doesn’t say, “She picked me up by it. She lifted me into the air and I puked thin bile all down my jerkin. Shandra was screaming and Casavir was invoking something or other and I’ve never heard Neeshka growl like that before. And it twisted, all that sound. Tore to shreds, tore me to shreds, sank deep and settled and it’s wrong now. It’s all wrong.”
He stops at the edge of the docks, stares out across the dark water. Picks carefully at the horrible throbbing knot in his chest until he can tease out the barest threads of that horrible interwoven melody. Pain and fear and misery all tangled together… Even touching it hurts. He sways, nearly falls, lets the song go as he goes to his knees on the glass smooth boards of the dock. By the barest margin he manages to forestall the indignity of throwing up on himself twice in a week.
It’s all wrong. The ground is moving under him and he can’t keep his balance, not without an anchor. How can he possibly hold back the madness now?
“Bishop did not make a sound.”
The words arrive in his head without fanfare, as he sits and shakes and despairs. Bishop. When Zeeaire’s torture broke him, broke the music, broke every tether he’d painstakingly built to hold himself back from the madness - the whole world was screaming. Every song he’d held in that moment warped, distorted sickeningly.
But - Bishop was silent. No words, no battlecries or screams of shocked denial to twist and contort into something alien. He hadn’t even begun to grasp the first note of Bishop’s melody. But he hears it now in the whistling echo of a single arrow slicing through the air to shatter against Zeeaire’s barrier.
A single note, rising, clean and sharp against the cacophony in his head, in his heart, in his bones. It might yet be enough.
The sun is rising as he walks steadily along rubbish strewn lanes, down along the docks, towards the Flagon. Duncan has a fine explanation for the Shard in his chest, a perfect series of justifications for Daeghun’s reticence. It doesn’t matter. He lets all the right words trip smoothly from his tongue, his tone reassuring, his manner warm. It’s okay, Duncan, he says. I understand that this was hard for you both. It’s going to be fine.
And it is. It is. The song in his bones is unfamiliar and jagged but he can learn a new tune. He turns away from his so well-meaning uncle and -
Bishop is lounging in a chair by the hearth, the top two clasps of his tunic undone, scruff darkening into beard along his jaw. The logs have crumbled into coals, casting a dim reddish glow across his face. Wolf eyes, Rhys thinks, meeting them. And silence. For now at least. In time, I’ll hear his song and it’ll be something new again.
He stands, boots silent on the uneven floorboards, steps forward and offers Rhys the remains of his beer. It’s bitter going down. Rhys looks at his hand on the chipped clay mug, sees the blood caked thickly beneath his nails and smiles.
Time for a new kind of music.