Archive of Our Own ^beta

Her story starts with a favour owed. Not to anyone, as best she knows, more of a cosmic debt that demands no repayment that she does not ask of herself.

It starts with a coffin designed to take her body and leave her. And it starts with pleading, with pounding on the glass, with begging the universe for anyone, just let her out please she will do anything just let her out!

There is another story before that. It is not one that she knows, not beyond the guesses she can make as to its outline.

Firstly, and most importantly, there is Shar. Her dark lady, her guiding shadow, her rock and her anchor. Before she is anything else, she is Shar’s. Everything flows from that: there is an artefact, which she took in Shar’s name, and which she must return to Shar’s worshippers. There were others with her, who she did not know, and so does not grieve and that is Shar’s kindness. And there is what she is called: Shadowheart.

Is it her name?

No.

It is what she is called.

Anything else has been given to Shar.

Here’s the catch, the trap, the locked latch. Generally worshipping the goddess of loss does not leave much room for helpful divine interventions. She is too much Shar’s creature to start pleading with other gods, she is too much Shar’s creature to really, truly pray to her in this situation.

And so she trusts herself to the generic, to calling out for mortal hands and heroes.

How lucky, then, that the universe listens.

“Can anyone hear me? Help!” She pounds and pounds, fists drumming against glass, as the strange flesh-vessel lurches and shakes through whatever is happening to it. Something is going terribly wrong, has been since that sudden moment when the mind flayer who put that – that thing in her eye ran and left her here trapped. All she’s seen since are the brains with legs scuttling about and the unconscious figures on the slabs who won’t wake up, no matter how much she screams at them. The whole place stinks, reeks of whatever strange purple-red membranes the ship is built out of. Like meat, like walking by a butchers and smelling the clean iron of the rows of hanging shanks and chops. And the underlying decay of the discard heap – the gristle and bone left out in the sun for the dogs to steal.

Like the wolf and the carcass and half-seen memories that she tears her mind away from before she can fall into them.

And then a man runs in. He’s dark skinned, though she can’t make out much more between the darkness and the distance, and dressed in armour that’s clearly been through its fair share of fights. Most likely, he’s one of them and he’s here to finish whatever the mind flayer started, but if she stays in this pod she will die and she can’t – she’s the only one left. She has to finish the mission.

“Help!” she calls, and he startles, locks onto her pod, and runs over.

“Get me out of here, please,” she says.

“Don’t worry. Stay calm, I’ll find a way to open this thing.”

Up close, his face is scarred and one of his eyes is stone, most likely destroyed by whatever sliced its way through his skin. He’s young under it. Not a child, but for a human, he can’t be out of his early twenties.

Then there’s more footsteps, and a gith runs in. “I destroyed the… netting. Nothing will follow us.”

The man, who’s poking around her pod, straightens up. “There’s no latch on this thing, I can’t see how it works. Damn it all to the hells. Lae’zel, tell me you know how to open these things?”

She storms over. Shadowheart’s hand flies behind her to the artefact. Her companions – friends, once, maybe? – torn apart by this creature’s people. The blood is caught under her fingernails, in the back of her throat, in the eyes of the gith.

“You are wasting time,” says the gith, not even bothering to look at Shadowheart. “Leave her. We must get to the bridge if we are to have any chance of survival.”

“We’re not leaving her,” says the human.

She has to get out, even if it’s a gith who saves her. “The console by my pod,” she says. “They did something to it, when they sealed me in here.”

The man runs over to it, poking it, before letting out a frustrated groan. He kicks it, and nothing happens. “It’s missing a piece,” he says. “Just stay put, I’ll look around.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” says Shadowheart, panic making her voice almost a cry.

The gith stands by the pod, arms crossed, glaring at the man, as he pokes around the room. He goes to the other glowing console, the one by the entrance, and presses a button. The two unconscious bodies slump, all tension gone from their bodies.

“Dead,” says the gith. “You are wasting our time.”

The man swears, running his free hand through his hair.

Her breath is rough in her throat, stinging in her lungs. She cannot die here. “There’s another room,” she calls. “There might be something through there.”

“We’ll try,” he says, and runs through. The gith follows.

She can’t make out their voices, not clearly, but they’re shouting about something. She stares at the dead bodies on their slabs. It’s just about possible to make out the eyes of the one on the right, where its head has lolled at the right angle. Slack-jawed and empty and hollowed out, because the man pressed the wrong button.

And then he returns, running over to the console. He shoves something into it, and her pod starts humming, like it’s suddenly powered up.

He looks over to her, shakes his head. “I can’t promise you this will work. But I’m afraid we’re out of other options. Do you want me to do this?”

“Just do it!”

His hand lowers to the console, and he frowns like he’s focusing extremely hard on some abstract problem. The gith, Lae’zel, watches from the doorway with her arms crossed, like she’s ready to move in at a moment’s notice.

And the pod swings open, just as his expression relaxes, and Shadowheart stumbles out into the fetid air of the ship. She breathes it in, coughing and desperate.

“There we go,” says the man. He walks over to her, offers her a hand which she takes. Skin meets skin, eyes meet eye, and something – something new, something alien, something that needs to get out of her head! – something connects to something else.

And then, like she’s falling again, she is flung through scene after scene. She fights, she helps a man with a bloodied arm to his feet, she flings energy at a devil charging towards her and it falls, and she fights on and on, alone, because no one else will and someone has to. She runs through Avernus, and a horned figure flees but oath and – and pact? drive her forwards. A mindflayer forces a tadpole into her eye and she cannot throw herself out the way, but then it falls, and dies and the pod breaks and she is free. And she stands facing the hells, and a gith woman looks at her and says, “Together, we might survive this day.”

She sees herself. Pale and shaken and wary, and in need of help.

It ends, and she sees the man, clutching at his head.

“Thank you.” She doesn’t know what else to say.

“The Blade of Frontiers, at your service,” he says, like she’s supposed to know what that means. Well, she supposes she does now. Sort of. “Wyll, to my friends.”

“I suppose this does make us friends, of a sort. Shadowheart.” Her pocket feels light. “One moment.”

She turns, making sure to block the gith’s view with her body, and fishes the artefact out from the pod, tucks it away safely. Wyll watches but does not comment.

“We’re making our way to the helm. Lae’zel – my companion –“ he gestures towards the gith who stalks her way towards them –“thinks we can take control of the ship.”

“We do have a better chance of getting out of this if we work together. Even if that means teaming up with a gith.” They both actually look like they’ve been fighting – her plate has scorch marks on it, and he’s got blood drying on the sword on his belt. That could prove dangerous, if they’re established allies. If the gith is here to retake the artefact. The others were clearly willing to die to defend it. But no – none of them survived to tell what she looked like. They won’t even know that it was Sharrans who took it. This has to be a coincidence – gith and mindflayers are famously enemies afterall.

“What do you even have against gith?” asks Wyll, sounding somewhere between amused and exasperated.

“Nothing,” she says, and smiles. “Only that you keep dangerous company.”

“Well –“ he gestures around to the alien room they find themselves in. The explanation is clear: the membranes that string down from the roof, the way the ground is nauseatingly squishy underfoot – the dead bodies on the slabs, murdered by the press of the wrong button.

Something occurs to her. “They put that – that worm in your eye too, right? I saw it during whatever that was. Do you know what they do?”

He huffs a laugh. Not in a way that sounds particularly amused. “I’m afraid there’s no easy way to say this. According to Lae’zel, they’ll turn us into mindflayers ourselves.”

“There has to be a way to stop that, right?” Wonderful. Her heart is racing again, and she swears the thing is squirming around in her brain. Changing her.

The gith steps forward. “Not if we do not stop wasting time. We must escape this ship, and find my kin. We understand the ghaik better than your kind can ever hope to.”

“Another reason to work with a gith, I suppose,” says Wyll. “Let’s go!”

He makes his way to the other door, the one the mindflayer ran through. The gith falls in beside her. “If you fall behind, I will leave you.”

“I can handle myself,” says Shadowheart. “Of course, it would be a shame if we had to abandon you.”

“You speak more boldly than the other one.” The gith gives her a sideways glance. “I had begun to think all your kind soft in words and deeds. But we will see if your abilities live up to it.”

Shadowheart sneers at her. “Just try me, once we get out of here.” She knows her face is doing something cruel, something that betrays the upset she is trying to bite back. This isn’t the time for it. But still, the anger is there. This gith will stab them both in the back, if it suits her. Probably will, once she no longer has any need of them. That’s just what gith do.

Lae’zel scoffs. She can’t make out her face, but while she neither falls behind Shadowheart (not that she’d allow it) nor walks in front of her (probably wise, her back would make a very tempting target), she drifts as far as the corridor will allow her. The conversation, if it could be called that, is clearly over.

Good.

She is free from the pod, and she doesn’t plan to forget who tried to get her out. Or who was happy to leave her. Wyll, who, from the look she had into his mind, is the sort of man who’ll run into a burning building or jump off a cliff if someone looks pathetic enough. It’s not the way that she knows how to be. That she must have been taught to be, if she could only remember. But she can't push it; those memories were taken for a reason, she has to hold on to that. If Shar wills it, she will return them, and if she doesn't then they will be another sacrifice to the goddess she will give every part of herself to. That's not a waste, nor a cause for regret. But she still wishes she could understand why Wyll’s willingness to risk his chance to escape for a stranger sits so strangely at the bottom of her sternum. And the gith. Lae’zel. Her, Shadowheart does understand. She’s looking out for herself – clinging to allies for as long as they’re useful to her, and she’ll throw them both away once they’re not needed anymore. If she can get Wyll onside, they’ll be able to take her: he's carved his name up and down the coast, by the stories his memories told. And he must be sharper than he acts, to have survived. To be here, to be able to save her. Her breath whistles over her lips as she whispers out her thanks to Lady Shar. But was it Shar? There is a debt owed here, for whatever force sent a self-identified hero her way, even one allied with a gith. She wishes she could believe that it was her goddess.

But she doesn’t.