Work Text:
[Make an investigation check]
[14]
Barely visible amidst the crowded room, packed with the resplendent furniture, dust-covered, and trunks, well-traveled, and goods that had been worth salvage, is the corner of a canvas. Your eye mistakes it for velvet. It could be velvet, the corner-square painted in such detail that your fingers expect to feel soft fabric when you reach out to touch. Having climbed through the debris, the piled chairs, the cases come with the Briarwoods out of Wildemount and moved into their new home, you separate it from the bookshelf it had been tucked behind. You wonder if Cassandra has stashed it there. You wonder if the Briarwoods had, so that they might force Cass to remember what they took from her.
Your thumb touches the edge, smearing dust, thick as paste. Your fingers dig into the back of the wood, where the canvas has been stretched and nailed, a memory on the rack; you slide the portrait out from where it has been saved by having been forgotten.
It is the last and only portrait of your family as they were, complete.
You are caught off guard; you stand quite still. You have made for yourself a nest amongst the memories of de Rolo decoration and the Briarwoods’ belongings, as if both are of equal value and worthiness in this house. As you kneel, on the toes of your muddy boots, your back balances against the oak frame of a grand bed. It had been Julius’s bed. You recognize it by the scratch-marks on the left-hand front, where Whitney and Ludwig had carved their initials into a post because you had taught them that people do that sort of thing to trees. You do not mean to sit, for you are still not certain the castle has welcomed you back. So you are balanced, on your toes, if there is a need to spring upright and fight. For now, you balance, and you have time to look onto the canvas, stripped out of its austere frame that once it ought to have been hung in. The frame, regardless of if it had been whitestone or gold or simply gilded tin, had value to bandits that the painting did not. You hold carefully around the edges so that your fingers do not stain the canvas.
[Make a history check, with advantage]
[5]
You can no longer remember when and why this painting had been made.
Only by looking at the faces - the small bundle, wrapped in white lace and a matching bow, held inside your mother’s embrace - can you assume the year it had been done. It had been for Cassandra’s birth, within the same calendar, most likely. Your mother has the glow to her cheeks that superstition says is Pelor’s blessing to new mothers. It had been paid for as a gift to the family now that they were complete. At the back, before the painted velvet curtains in their rich sanguine red, is your father, when his hair was still mostly chestnut-brown and present. When you think of him you believe that you remember him with white hair, or gray, more precisely. Thinner at the crown. He holds his wife’s one shoulder formally in the oils and the pigments. He wears a long dark robe with an indistinct gold pin on his left breast, and though you remember coveting it as a child, convinced it was a locket or held a secret in its insides, you cannot remember what it was meant to represent. Perhaps Pelor. Perhaps the city of Whitestone itself. But the portraiture has chosen to render it in a shape of golden swirls, a few little brushstrokes.
In the painting your father is not smiling. You think that this is true of him, that he, like you, had not been a warm and sentimental man. You do hesitate to say so for certain.
You search your father’s face for resemblances to yourself. Though you do not spend a great deal of time before a mirror - no more than is necessary to see that you have washed the soot off of your face, that there is not food stuck in your teeth - you have, in your conviction, a firm picture of yourself in your mind. And yet it surprises you to see that your father is given your same nose, and that the same pale blue has been used to render both his eyes beneath their dark-brown brows and your own, the child, shoved into the foreground. When you close your own, you remember your father having dark-brown eyes too, nearly black. You remember them in shadow, impossible to see but for the whites of them, how wide they had been opened.
It does not take you very long to do the mathematics in your head. You count backwards: Cassandra is the key.
All six children had been painted. Perhaps it had been you, or perhaps it had been Ludwig, whining about how many more of these were coming when Cassandra cried in her crib. Your mother had been firm - this is the last - and yet, when you try to think how she had sounded then, you are guessing. Had she laughed? Had it been a little joke, from beneath the smoothed linens of her bed, her face still gray and blotchy red from the delivery? Or had it been firm? A joke that was not a joke? An announcement, loud enough that your father heard from the next room? Regardless, you count six faces in the portrait. Your family had become complete. This was worth commemorating.
If Cassandra is an infant, then, here, you are six years old.
It is quite easy to tell who you are. There is father, standing at the back, and beside him is Julius, immortalized how he would despise it as a thin, weedy teenager play-pretending in a regal coat. The artist had been grateful in not rendering your brother’s thin attempts at a mustache. Vesper is seated beside your mother, and she has pink painted to her cheeks, red upon her lips and dark, thick lashes, which you do not remember ever seeing her wear. She had a vanity in her bedchambers with fine powders and rouges that you never saw her sit at. You found the remnants of that table in the bedroom Anna Ripley used while she took residence in your family’s home; she had converted it to a station for her tools, and the rosewood finish was blistered with burns. Then there are the twins - one another, hand in hand, and you, behind them, with a hand on each of their shoulders. Then there is you.
[Give me a perception check]
[7]
It should be impossible that you and that child are the same person. In fact, you do not believe it.
Even though you do not miscount and have a very good head for numbers, you count the figures once more. You list their names off one-by-one, looking directly into their dots of paint for eyes. There is the infant Cassandra. There is Julius, always an adult in your imagination of him, always tall and at the ready, despite how the portrait-painter rendered him as a nervous child. There is Whitney, and she is holding hands with Ludwig, and both are wearing matching pinafores with pins of whitestone on the opposing side. Therefore it could be no other but you - dark-haired, already bespectacled, cherub-cheeked and smiling. You do not believe it not because you are smiling, which is certainly the joke that you imagine one of your dear friends saying to liven up the air, but because there is no resemblance to what you see in the mirrors.
Of course there ought not be. You are more than thrice the age of that brunet child. No child ever truly resembles the adult they grow up into.
It is impossible, because in your memory you knew that you were making promises to protect Whitney and Ludwig and little Cassandra, be she in a bassinet or in the cream-colored dresses mother placed her in. You remember telling them that because Julius would be tasked with protecting the city, and Vesper was in charge of protecting their people, then it fell to you, the third-born child, to look after the little ones. You did not get a special task; you got the rest. The boring work. The books and the building and the babysitting. But you are not sure, and you lie to yourself, if you told them this, or if you meant to tell them, one day. To use it against them when they called you bossy and boring, sticking their tongues out at you - never fair, for the twins were two against your one - you meant to tell them there were reasons why you always wanted to know where they were hiding. There was a reason you had put your hands upon their shoulders and kept them there, tight as fists, standing on your tip-toes the whole time the portrait-painter had been at work. You wanted to see what they were doing and planning. You wanted to know they were doing what they were supposed to do.
You remember being very concerned with right and wrong when you were a child.
You remember this, and you wonder what business this little child, not even as tall as his father's knee, had, making such promises. This was a child who fell when he ran too quickly. This was a boy who needed thick spectacles because he had already strained his eyes from reading by candlelight. This was a child hungry, desperate, for attention and praise and acknowledgment. You remember, as a warm bit of sun caught in the afternoons, when Vesper said you did good. You came to show her first, even before mother, who was always busy with the courtly ladies, to tell her of the high marks your tutors gave you, of the little fussy bits of metal you had stuck together to make a toy of clockwork. You know that she laughed and said to set a good example for the twins and the baby, so you did. You would spend some days following them around and insisting you were there to make sure they did not do any bad, or else you would tell Vesper, and she would tell mother, and all of them would be very cross with you. Yet you look, and the little boy that you once were is blankly, dumbly smiling back at you. He thinks he is very smart because his tutors told him that he is and his eldest sister did agree.
It has only been five years, and you can no longer remember what Vesper’s voice was like.
You use your fingers wrapped around the edges of the canvas, nails resting upon the wooden frame behind it, and your thumbs touching the bare white part of the canvas which demarcated blankness from your family’s presence. You do not want to touch the portrait, knowing that fingers have oils on them that can damage paint. But you think of that only after you think of what is clogged beneath your nails, and that is the dirt of the soil underneath the dead Sun Tree, the discharge of your weapons, Anders’ and Kerrion’s blood, and not the Briarwoods’.
[Wisdom saving throw]
[Natural 1]
Nothing happens when you swallow. The shape caught in your throat is too large, too strong, for you to muster breath down passed it. You do not know how long it has been since you blinked, or since you took a breath. Kneeling down, your boots with the black mud upon the heels, and the trousers still with ancient dust and stains of smoke, you do not feel your body any longer. It is not numb. It simply has ceased to be.
You had been so very certain for so very long of what it was that you must do.
Within your hands, that have begun to shake, you hold perhaps the last and only remnant of your family’s faces that you will ever have, and you know that they would not be proud of you.
You wonder if Vesper would have done the same before you as she did before Sylas Briarwood. You wonder if, if she had seen the way you looked when you did, with blood spread across your knees and chest and face and fingers quick when putting more rounds into the pepperbox, she would have grabbed for Whitney’s hand. If she would have screamed Run, run, get out – and thrown herself between you, and your younger sibling, so the blow would strike her first. You do not need to wonder what she looked of when she died. You do not need to wonder, and so the scene is painted with vividity. You can only substitute the knife-wound for a bullet-hole, and she would bleed out on the floor the very same.
Because you are very good with dates and numbers and you endeavor to do so, for all your company is bad with them, save for their treasurer, Vex’ahlia, you are aware that you are now older than Vesper will have ever been. You are nearly as old as Julius was when he too was killed, thrown off the battlements screaming - as you listened and did not hear the smack of his corpse on the ground - and he, to you, had always been so impossibly old and tall and full of knowledge, even if he could not beat you at reciting number tables fastest.
You have yet to ask Cassandra where they are all buried. You have been a coward about it. But you ache to know, you need to know, what had been done with all their bodies. Had they gone to rest? All while he worked, and built, and killed and cut his way across this continent, have they been entombed with the rest of their illustrious, noble family that collapsed its legacy in a solitary night??
And if they had not been, you are too aware that your hands will shake and your teeth will grit and it will be at her fault, your youngest sister, who had been a small little baby tucked in the crook of your mother’s arm, who was so spoiled, who was so loved the whole family sat for hours and hours, days on days, to be painted in her honor, for not seeing them to a proper rest while she was here in Whitestone these five long, miserable years doing nothing to help – !!
[Let’s reroll that]
[15]
Nothing happens when you swallow. You suspect that there may be tears in your eyes. Just as equally, it could be from strain. You do not remember how long that you had slept the night before, or how many hours the night before last. You are tired. You have been tired for a long time now.
You are convinced that if you brought this painting out you would hear no end of it from Grog and Vax’ildan, who would be delighted to know that you, once, had been a fussy little nobleboy in white stockings and a lacy collar. They might tell you how it is the same, except your hair is different now, and you look older than your father. You are grayer, and more tired, than the late Lord of the city. You have so very much to do.
You can’t be spending time, borrowed against the future, still, spent looking at the past. That is what you are told, at least. You have heard so many variations on that trite and condescending sentiment since you have returned to your family’s undead city.
When you slide the portrait back, behind the bookcase, behind the arrangement of old dining chairs, you use the marks of dust upon the floor as a guide. It finds its place, back in the corner, and the figures on the canvas return to smiling faintly at the nothingness of the past. You find nothing else that is in this room that would give evidence to what the Briarwoods had planned, for what the great tragedy of the de Rolo family had been orchestrated for.
Therefore, when you reconvene with your companions, you comment bitterly that there is nothing here.