Chapter Text
The sun is setting low over the horizon as Beauregard Lionett walks out of Isharnai’s hut, face and posture brittle, like she’s one word away from shattering. Her friends, her chosen family of misfits, mob her immediately.
“What'd you say, what'd you do? What happened?” Nott shrills, tugging on her sleeve.
Beau keeps walking. “Go talk to her.”
“Beau, what did you do?” Jester asks, eyes wide with concern. The others gather round, the air growing tense as it’s immediately clear that something is horribly, awfully wrong.
“Just go- just go fucking talk to her, alright?” Beau snaps, not looking at them. “I made- I made a trade. You have to make sure she follows fucking through on it, okay?”
“What trade? Beau, what the fuck is going on?” Fjord snaps.
“She’s going to let Nott have her body back. That’s what we came here to do, right?” Beau chokes out. She can’t look at them. Because if she does, all the effort she’s putting into keeping herself together will be pointless. She’ll fall apart.
She keeps walking. She tunes out the voices around her that are rising in fear, in horror, in grief as they begin to understand what she just did. And then they’re muffled, cut off, volume rising but like they’re yelling through a brick wall. They’ve stopped following her, too, as if tethered to the cabin by unseen strings.
Isharnai’s magic, making sure she follows the terms of their deal. After all, it wouldn’t be lonesome exile if her friends were allowed to go with her, now would it?
She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t say goodbye.
She will regret that for the rest of her life, short as it may be.
Beau walks. She walks down out of the mountains, back toward a semblance of civilization. She assumes the hag has done something, given her some layer of protection from the beasts and monsters that threatened before - after all, it’s not very long-lasting misery if Beau gets eaten three steps from her doorstep. For days Beau doesn’t think, doesn’t let herself feel. She just walks, with the barest of interactions to acquire food and sleeping outside rather than interacting with an inn. She doesn’t want strangers to see her like this.
She can’t go back to the Cobalt Soul. That was part of the deal, one of the foundations of happiness in her new life. She doesn’t send a message to Dairon. She doesn’t know how they’d react to this, to her throwing away her future for someone else. Honestly, she doesn’t want to know.
But it’s worth it. Nott has a husband, a child, people who need her. A family. And clearly, Beau doesn’t have the same. There’s so much less for her to lose. It’s a fair trade.
She doesn’t think of shopping excursions with Jester, or adventures at sea with Fjord, or late-night talks about morality with Caleb. That part of her life is over, now. She’s been alone before, and she can do it again.
She wanders vaguely eastward, no real goal in mind. Her only plan is avoidance of the places she’s been before - Felderwin, Zadash, the Menagerie Coast, anywhere that’s too intertwined with memories that hurt like a flurry of blows to the chest.
Turns out that’s most of the continent. The Mighty Nein got around.
She takes basic mercenary contracts, here and there. Nothing like she had before, of course, not the sort of tasks they could handle with seven fighters, half of them magic users. She only has herself and her fists. Which admittedly can go a long way - she slays beasts harassing small towns, steals a family’s riches back from a group of bandits, investigates the source of a haunting.
But as she does her best to bandage a brutal slash to her leg, after one fight where she forgot, just for a second, that no one has her back - it’s not just the wound that hurts.
She doesn’t talk much anymore. All her growth, all her work at reaching out, at being less of an asshole is rather pointless now. She handles her contracts brusquely and efficiently, she orders her drinks at the bar, and that’s it.
A few weeks pass like this. She hears the news that the war has ended in a hole in the wall tavern east of the Zemni Fields, where she’s already a bit too maudlin due to hearing too many painfully familiar accents. She drains her mug and tries not to cry in front of dozens of strangers, suppresses her urge to ask as many questions as she can. Why would any of them know, anyway? Outside of the negotiators, no one knew or even cared about the Mighty Nein’s involvement in the peace talks.
She still asks. She may not be an expositor any more, but questions are in her blood. She hears bits and pieces, what gossip has filtered its way along trade routes and through taverns.
None of the gossip mentions her friends, and she tries to not let that break her heart.
Beau travels on, days passing in a haze. She’s aimless in a way she hasn’t been in a long while, since she was dragged into the Cobalt Soul and the Mighty Nein. She does what good she can, caring more than she once did all those months ago, but she still feels set adrift on an unsettled and lonely sea.
It’s weeks later that it happens. Beau’s sleeping rough, camping in the woods en route between small, forgettable towns. As such, tonight she’s sprawled out under the night sky, watching the stars peek through the shifting canopy above. She’s drifting, just dozing off, and then there’s a wrenching feeling, like a god grabbed reality by the throat and pulled.
The sky, moments ago deep indigo-black, is now a vicious purple, splashed with colors almost beyond perception. Stars are now fireworks, supernovas, explosions of light and brilliance that are nearly blinding. Beauregard, now painfully awake, stumbles to her feet, fists raised to fight off - what, the sky?
As she watches, one by one, every star in the sky blinks out. And then one, two, dozens and hundreds and more every second wink back into existence until the sky seems lit aflame. But they’re no longer stars. They’re brilliant, blood-red eyes, blazing with the power of the holy, the profane. And they all turn, and they look directly at Beauregard Lionett, who stands bracing herself as if to punch the gods.
There’s another wrenching feeling, a ripping feeling, and then-
Nothing.
—
Far away, in an ancient city in the Astral Sea, her friends lay dashed on the ground, discarded like trash before a monstrosity, a godlike being wearing the skin of their friend. Weapons and holy items are scattered, shattered into useless pieces. The trail of carnage is marked with seven broken and bloodied bodies, some barely moving, some not at all. Above them, the Neo-Somnovem revels, resplendent in his full power and awful glory as he prepares to break the world asunder.
And as he bleeds out into the flesh of the corrupted city, Caduceus Clay makes one last prayer.
“Wildmother…” he breathes. “Bring her back.”
There’s a rushing wind, a scent of greenery, and he sighs out his final breath and knows no more.
—
“Who wishes to talk?”
Beauregard Lionett comes to her senses in the dingy, mountainous swamp in the Bromkiln Hills, mere feet away from the golden, beckoning door of Isharnai’s hut.