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The man selling Shadowheart the house was scared of her. He nervously eyed the great glowing mace on her back as he went on about the view from the property's windows. If he were a more honest man, she might have done something to appease his fear, but she wore as straight and serious a face as she could conjure. She might have missed a spot of blood or so when she cleaned the weapon. Her laziness would serve a dual purpose as intimidation.
"I'll leave you three to discuss." He was nervous, but not enough to hinder his dishonesty. He had woken up the morning after the battle and resumed his normal amoralities, a life of starched shirts, greased hair, and half-truths. Perhaps the nervousness itself was a ploy, but he didn't seem to have that kind of mercantile finesse in him. With a frantic, sweeping bow, he closed the door on them and left them alone.
"What do you think?" She looked over at her father. He relaxed into the chair's worn fabric, his arms folded.
"I think he's a funny man. When I told him you were the one paying, he dropped his quill. Did you see?"
She had noticed. The whole office was extravagant; plush backings, gold accents, and perfectly polished hardwood, now marred with an expensive blotch of ink. "I mean about the house."
"It's a bargain, isn't it? I don't know what property values are looking like these days. It's been a while." He was calm, watching the shadows of passing feet under the crack in the door. The same pair of ill-polished shoes passed, over and over again.
Shadowheart knew little about property values either, except where they were ludicrously high or low. "It's too much of a bargain."
"Surely it can't be worse than the docks," said Mother. Her posture was similarly sloped against the chair back, not out of informality but necessity. It had been a long day, and the niceties of commerce some significant exertion. Still, she smiled.
"Few things are," said Shadowheart. She stood and stretched. They had been sitting for quite the while and the mace had started to make a handle-shaped imprint on her back.
Her father looked at her mother and smiled, with that sort of humor and tenderness she expected was common, if not exclusive, to long-term partners. Something she wasn't privy to. "Whatever it is, we can fix it. So long as everything is structurally sound."
Structure didn't make a home. She almost would have preferred to just purchase some empty land and start the building from scratch, just to give them a fighting chance at a typical structure. But her mother needed something resembling a decent roof over her head, and as soon as possible. They might have to settle for something crumbling, as much as the thought of it turned her stomach. "Assuming it is structurally sound."
"We won't know until we look at it. The location is good."
Her father wouldn't state his arguments while the man outside was on his watchman's loop, but she knew his intention. The place was isolated. Better to see the stars this way. More proximity to the moon. A good place for a lycanthrope to find his footing.
"We can fix it." Her mother was the optimistic one of the two of them. Everything was fixable, no matter the state of disrepair. Shadowheart's own cynicism was a combination of many influences: the Sharran disposition, the general fearful creature in her, and yes, partially her father. He was generally a kind man, but time had worn him down. More than time.
Her hand didn't hurt, right now. Itched, a little, with the lack of any other sensation.
Her parents looked at her with expectation. She had hoped that she would be done with that, after the battle. Of course, she had known that being a living breathing daughter would have some sort of expectation attached, but she had been caught up in the parents of it all. Here they were, living and breathing. She had everything that she had ever wanted, and yet felt that scratch at the back of her throat.
It would have to wait. The decision needed to be made, and needed to be made by her. "Let's take a look. No commitment needed."
She went and opened the door, and the man nearly tripped into the room. He failed at pretending he hadn't been listening in.
"We're interested in touring the property," she said, and plastered on a smile she hoped was as bright and pointed as her mace.
He smiled too: pointed, but not bright. "Perfect."
Her father offered a hand to her mother to help her stand up. Shadowheart might have offered if she had thought of it.
"One note on the property," he said, after prearranging their visit, as he shoved them out the door. Here it was: the root of her suspicions, validated. Her parents exchanged knowing looks, then looked to her. Her father winked.
He turned the quill in his hand, staining his fingertips with ink. "There is a ghost."
The man kept a steady pace ahead of them. All of his nervous movement had turned itself into forward momentum, and he moved at a rather rapid pace up the gentle slope of the earth. Gently sloped was relative, compared to the steep hills along the right side of the road, and the formidable mountains beyond, but it was enough of a challenge to slow her mother. Father remained behind with her, while Shadowheart made up the middle of their caravan, keeping an eye turned on the man ahead and on the couple behind, aiming to make sure neither figure grew too small.
The carriage had only taken them so far on the main road. From there, they moved onto a side road and walked for a while. Distant, the man had said, and this decidedly was far off from anything resembling civilization. They had walked a similar road as she had entered the city; land that travelers had used before, but not frequently.
The house wasn't visible from where the carriage had brought them, and they saw it first from the side, coming up along the road. It was definitely a bargain; the house itself was larger than was proper to call a cottage, and the fenced land surrounding it stretched flat further beyond it up to an ungroomed orchard. It was wider than it was tall, with one protruding section in the middle and two chimneys on either side giving the appearance of some horned creature. The sides were a pale white framed with dark timber, where the plant matter hadn't staked its claim and turned it a mottled green.
She had seen a manner of dead spaces in her adventures: a once great Selunite temple turned goblin headquarters, the dying embers of Rosymorn Monastery. Here was another space devoid of presence, without the divine grandeur of the previous spots, something awkward, earthen, and decaying. The garden was more than overgrown. Weeds stood at knee height and curled up against the fencing, threatening to escape. And of course, the orchard was full of brambles and debris, also choked at the base by greedier plants.
She looked up at the topmost middle window, sitting under the dark surly brow of the roof. The curtain blew open, like the house was opening an eye, and closed again. There might have been movement on the top floor, but it was too small and quick to catch. She indicated the movement to her parents, and the man surged forward to intercept.
"It's peaceful. So I've heard." He fingered the buttons on his fine coat. He was not dressed for trekking through the wilds or wading into the plants. Underneath his coat he wore practical clothes for traveling, but the coat itself was embroidered and fine enough to hold neatly to all of the dirt he was kicking up.
"So you've heard?" Her unease had risen as they had climbed. The view of the house had only validated that feeling. It wasn't that it was ominous, because it wasn't. It was perfectly ordinary. Charming, even, which merited extra scrutiny. Many things were charming, that were more insidious beneath, and that were only revealed with a healthy degree of suspicion.
He stretched the threading in his button further. "I haven't been in to see it."
"Ah." A liar and a coward.
Her father evaluated the house and had evidently seen nothing wrong with it as well, at least from a first glance. "Shall I accompany you inside?"
"No need." She was the only armored one of them and had polished it to the point of reflection for intimidative purposes. She might have taken up the offer if her father was in wolf form, but he wasn't, and it really was a lot of walking for people who had spent forty years imprisoned, versus someone who had walked nearly halfway between Elturel and Baldur's Gate.
Father didn't like that answer but he accepted it all the same. "I'll take the exterior, then. Stay safe."
She would be, considering her battle dressings. With a nod to the man, whose coat made him look excessively red in the sun, she shoved at the gate. First she had to convince the hinges to move, then she had to force the gate further over the stubborn weeds, which kept held it open. Then she could trample a path to the front door. That, aside from the peeling paint, seemed to be in decent repair.
It was silent, as far as she could tell, beyond the door. Nothing moved inside. The doorknob was cold and offered no resistance as she turned it.
She cast a quick protection spell against the undead. It settled over her like a blanket, muffling the sudden uptick of her heart rate. That would have to do. She lofted Lathander's mace, sent a silent prayer to Selune, and stepped into the foyer.
It was well-lit inside, at least at the entrance, enough to the point where her mace's additional light was extraneous. A thick layer of dust covered every surface, and further dust moved in the light coming from the yellowed windows. There were furnishings: tables, chairs, but beyond that no signs of life, of someone once having lived here.
The house creaked hello, and she replied. She called out: out of courtesy, out of fear. Nothing responded. In she went, and closed the door behind her.
They must have had a house, before all this, but no memory told her what to do. She was ill-equipped for whatever was usually observed before the purchasing of a house. She pretended to know what she was doing: checking the walls for cracking, and looking at the baseboards for mildew. It all looked perfectly house-like, if not rundown.
Her expertise laid in the monstrous realm, and while the supernatural didn't always provoke her senses, the house felt refreshingly unalive. Should there be Sharrans or other dark pursuers, and there likely would be considering her luck, the front door was easily defensible, and the stairs positioned such that one could sit in a dark corner and survey all of the windows without detection. Vermin-wise, there weren't any large infestations of creatures, nor any trace of their presence. The place was lifeless.
There were two bedrooms on the first floor and she imagined the larger one fit for her parents. Her mother would likely appreciate not having to traverse the stairs every day. Also downstairs was a kitchen with four chairs and a fireplace. All looked well enough, and she continued up the stairs, which, while creaky, were solid underneath her feet.
Only on the ascent to the second floor did she get the feeling of being watched. Here there was less light, from this level's smaller windows, and she was thankful for the skinny stretch of the mace on the hardwood floor, for the familiar pointed shoulders of her shadow. The air had the same sticky warmth as exhaled breath. No creature breathed. Shadowheart hardly did.
She dutifully did her same checks on the walls and the floorboards, then moved to her real interest: the top room, where she had seen the movement in the window. She put a hand on the door and found it locked.
Luckily her parents weren't there. She extracted a set of thieves' tools from her pocket and got to work opening the door. They wouldn't question the ease with which she opened the lock, but it brought further questions swimming to the surface that she would rather have kept dredged.
This room had a bed, desk, closet, and nothing else. It was minimalist, resembling some cloister more than a living space, at least from what little furniture she could see. She threw open the curtains and let the light in.
Outside of the window was the front of the house, the dagger slice of the road they had walked at the base of the hills, and the thick fur of the trees covering the spines of the mountains. Some houses in Baldur's Gate, the nicer ones in the Lower City and the mansions in the Upper, had windows like these facing the water. They were meant for loved ones to watch leaving ships disappear over the edge of the horizon, and to scan an empty one for their return. Here, she supposed one could watch visitors leave similarly, not that she expected to have many visitors. She had a disquieting thought, something between false memory and vision, of watching a dark-haired girl slip into the tree line, never to return.
This would be a room she would like to have: a room with a view. There was enough space in the house for her to keep to herself. She could see her parents and the salesman standing by the fence. Her father waved at her. Her mother wasn't looking; she was bent over near the fence. The weeds lay discarded in a pile next to her and she was examining some square of dirt on the ground. The moon was out and pale in the midday sky.
She turned to leave and saw the ghost out of the corner of her eye. She saw it as a movement, a flash of white like the swing of a braid, cloth-like and flowing and gone, before she could see much of it at all. The protection of the spell she had placed on herself soothed the part of her that wanted to run and kept her hands from being too frozen around the edge of her mace to be useful. She took a shallow breath and followed.
It was too late by the time she stepped into the hall. Now she could recognize the houses's eerie quiet as the silence of a recently vacated space. Now she was being watched again.
"I'm not here to hurt you," she called out again, this time with a target. There it was; an extra draft, like the blowback from a closed door, but nothing was either opening or shutting in the house. Something of an answer.
Perhaps an expression of doubt regarding her statement. She was radiant, enough to send any undead creature sprawling. With a mutter, the mace went dark, and she squinted to adjust her vision.
"Do you like it here?" She followed the sound as best she could into a nearby room. There must have been some evidence of the previous occupant.
Again, the curtains of the room shuffled, though this time less violently than before. Otherwise, nothing.
What would a ghost do? Laugh, she thought, recalling the manic cackle of the monk in the amulet. Or wail some long-forgotten tune, like the distant singing in the Elfsong. All her known experience with ghosts didn't involve speech, in any understandable terms.
"Would you mind if I moved in?" Of course, the ghost itself might be generations old, and territorial. She suspected that its presence kept the Absolute's armies from staking their claim, but that was one thing. IT might have driven out the previous occupants, and the ones before, in an effort to keep its space to itself.
Somehow she thought that was wrong. She had faced down ambushes before. She had walked into hordes of shadows with spirits swirling around her, knowing they resisted every step. Even those dark creatures without faces moved with deliberate malice. She knew her enemies, and this ghost was not one.
She cleared the rest of the upstairs. It was haunted, true, but everything was in good enough condition. After calling out to the ghost once more, and receiving no answer, she came back down to the stairs and met the man at the front door.
"What's the ghost situation like?" The man spoke with an overly friendly air, like they were establishing a relationship and not conducting a transaction. He pulled again at the button of his coat. It was painted gold, and the brass below was showing through.
She took no effort to match his congeniality. "We've met. I think it was scared of me."
The man's nervousness melted from him, replaced with an ugly confidence. He tugged at the gaudy lapels of his coat and brushed back his hair. "As I said before. Peaceful."
She would've hated him more if she didn't pity him. "Let me talk to my parents."
She went and stood by her father. Her mother raised her face and smiled. She offered a handful of dirt to the wind, but it was too moist to catch and clung to her hand.
"Well?" said her father.
If she voiced her hesitation, her parents would follow along with her. They were an agreeable sort, and they loved her. Felt indebted to her, which provoked all sorts of guilt.
She aimed for neutrality. "I don't know. There is a ghost."
"A violent one?" said her mother.
"No. It fled when I tried to approach." She turned to her father. "How's the exterior?"
"The roof could use some repairs. The paneling is sagging. But the foundation is good."
"Good soil." Her mother knelt in the dirt and gestured to her father. Here, there could be a rose bush. Here, rows of herbs. Here, flowers. There was a tree by the gate, wide and tall and strong. The weeds spoke enough for it; plants could thrive, here.
"It has potential," said her father, in an open-ended yes.
"What do you want, Jen-- Shadowheart?" asked her mother, rising and brushing the dirt off of her hands.
She had no answer. She looked up at the moon to see if it would provide one.
Selune didn't answer, but Shar did. Pain, immediate and sharp, coursed through her hand. The pointed needle of memory, Shar's determined act of stitching her own torturous hand into everything.
Similarly, her father and mother flinched in reaction to a well-known pain. If the clerk noted this shared occurrence, he didn't comment.
Shar was petty and cruel. The ornery part of her dared Shar to try again and affirm that there was no better argument she had against it.
"We'll take it." She was a healer of deep wounds, and bar that a lifter of the dead. A house was a house, was just empty space and bones, and could be repaired. No divinity needed.
The return back to the city was welcome. She signed her name on the paperwork and studied her parent's signatures. Her father's was neat and blocky. Her mother's was elegant, with a slight tremor to it. Each, somehow, in slight resemblance to her own.
That was that. The Hallowleafs now had a home.
Her parents took the large room on the bottom floor, and she the one with the window. They owned very little, between the three of them, so they were settled quickly. She had never had so much enclosed space to call her own. That was a luxury.
It was hard goings to be a daughter. It was hard goings to be a house owner, and the initial act of weeding and pruning to put the land in serviceable shape. Supernatural activity had likely prevented the Absolute's armies from doing their worst, but nature had its own acts of destruction that needed remedy. They were busy and so the daughtering part came in pieces: stolen breakfasts in the morning, tea in the evening, passings in the halls.
But then routine settled in, and then she fully had to confront the beast of domesticity. Homes, she supposed, always developed a sort of hierarchy. There were spheres of influence involved, rooms in which each member spent the majority of their time. Small dominions. Her' was the entirety of the top floor, because she shared it with the ghost and no one else wanted it. She had been right about her mother and the stairs. Likewise, her father made a sort of study in the spare room on the bottom floor. Her mother took the newly bare patch of fenced land around the house and turned it into a garden. She was there most days when she was well, or in the parlor looking out at her tilled dirt when she wasn't.
Their structure of command went inverted immediately. Eventually, a child should take their parent's place at the head of the structure but she had no memory of being at the bottom. But now she was the one who her parents approached with household requests. They weren't as timid as children but they retained a sort of caution in their wording.
"We'd like to have some visitors over." They said to her one day over breakfast. They spoke as a unit sometimes, through her father's mouth.
"What kind of visitors?" Shadowheart asked, already knowing the answer. Visitors with silvery robes, to take the other windows on the top floor to frame the moon. Just recently her father had sent letters to a Selunite enclave, and a very well-fed bird had returned with letters tied to its leg.
"Weary travelers." His father wasn't being intentionally deceitful. He did mean Selunites, but of the common sort. No clerics from the dead, or winged god-children, but common people traveling to, from, and through the newly cleared Shadowlands. "We have the other room on the ground floor I've been clearing."
"We don't have to if you don't want to," said her mother.
"IT is up to you," said her father solemnly.
They didn't wear pleading expressions and were sincere in their deference. If she refused, they would not complain. They meant this as an expression of gratitude for all the heroic actions she had undertaken to save them.
They neglected all the harm she had done them. Every action she took to recompense them seemed pitiful. She didn't want visitors, true, but she wanted to make up for forty years of loss.
"No need. I'll take a walk when they arrive," she said, and later that day watched a bird fly out of the window, its letter sealed with a wax stamp of the moon.
A tenday later, she stood by the door as the guests entered: a stout man with a round face and a watery smile, and his husband with a sharp chin, both in dirtied traveling clothes lugging threadbare bags. They conducted the usual pleasantries: hand-shaking, small talk, the shuffling and slotting of bags and coats. Father had put out some tea. There was additionally milk, but not for the tea. They meant to pour it in bowls, to place them on the ground in imitation of the moon.
"This must be your daughter," they said to her mother. According to Selunite tradition, she was the one to answer to as the female head of the household. "The resemblance is strong."
"Shadowheart," she said, reaching out a hand and wishing a little she had gone back to her base name. It was her name, through and through, but always fell warped from her tongue upon introduction.
"Ah." The man said nothing about her name, though a brief moment of skepticism passed over his face. "Will you be joining us?"
"I've some errands to run. I'll join you for supper." They meant to conduct some bit of prayer, and Shadowheart meant to do anything but. She had words meant for Selune, but they bore more violence than was appropriate for their gathering, and she certainly wasn't going to violate the principles of basic hospitality.
The ghost threw open the curtains as she laced her boots. Perhaps it was agitated by the additional presence of religious practitioners in its midst, who would exorcise it in an instant.
Lucky for it, her word was law, and no exorcising would be done that evening. She had impressed that notion upon her parents, who had said they weren't planning on it anyway. "Hush, you. They won't force you out," she said as she fastened her armor. She and the ghost shared the same discomfort. These were good, devout men, who attended daily to their prayers. Their overtness, their piousness, radiated from them like an aura, and unpure creatures like her and the ghost were left reeling.
There were some murmurs, from their guests, as they looked to figure out who she was talking to and found no one at all. The ghost defiantly rustled the curtains once more and then fled upstairs, likely to toss around the sheets in her room.
"Stay safe," said Father, even as they began setting up the parlor for their prayers.
"I will," said Shadowheart. She embraced her mother and left.
The sun had truly decided to come out as she stepped out of the shelter of the roof, and she was thankful for the trees as she crossed the road and moved into the forest.
There was some thin path of land beaten out, by either game or people, and she followed that up and over the hill until it split into two: one path of switchbacks headed to the summit, and one weaving through the bases of the mountains, to where tall trees stood and guarded what she thought was a river. Her father had noted the trail going upwards as his desired moon-viewing location, and so she took the other path.
There was no river there, currently, but the sharp-edged rock that bracketed the side of the valley said that there might have once been, and could be again. It wasn't quite small enough, nor the side walls stark enough, to be a ravine, but the height and coldness of the trees caused a similar sense of claustrophobia, of being boxed in.
And yet they had been in far worse tunnels, far more tightened spaces, so there was no issue, not compared to the choking scent of incense and the walls of other people's shoulders. Walking was familiar and pleasantly solitary. They had walked long and often during their adventure and so she focused on the simple act of putting one foot after the other on solid earth. She fell into a sort of rhythm and focused on maintaining it with each footfall.
Then the trail disappeared, beaten earth giving way to dark soil, and then gray moss. She looked up from the ground and realized that there was very little light at all. At some point, the trees had grown taller and tangled, and the rock walls ever higher beyond the trees, and the sun was entirely gone, replaced with a false twilight. Or maybe, it was twilight. She had lost track of time in her thinking, and night these days seemed to sweep in faster and faster. She muttered and surrounded herself in the light of Lathander, which even in the Shadowlands hadn't seemed this dim.
This was not a physical darkness alone. It wasn't the Shadowlands, where it was pure magical dark everywhere, distributed evenly. It would have been better if it was, because here was all shadow warping the edges of the world, drawing harsh lines in some places and blurring them in others.
No, this wasn't a Sharran darkness. It belonged to other creatures, to unseen eyes that tracked her as she moved onto the untread dirt. There were plants here, long-stalked and pointed, but none of them seemed quite alive. There was no light for them to turn to, and so she was convinced that they reached for her instead.
How the hairs on her neck rose, how pointed her senses in the dark. No spell could help with that fear. She crept along, at every moment convinced that she should turn and flee. Instead, she prayed. The only prayers she knew by heart belonged to her old goddess, and she hadn't memorized any for her supposed new benefactor, so in the end, it came as a desperate, repeated, please, in time with each new step she took. She wasn't particular with whichever god was willing to answer.
A rustling came from a nearby bush. Already her mace was prepared, and a ball of flames warming her palm, and an incantation in her throat. She was unsure if it would catch, it being damp and maybe not a normal bush at all, there being no light for it to grow. But any wise creature had a healthy fear of fire.
Out of the bush came a mundane, normal, squirrel, whose eyes caught the wan light of her palm fire. She released the tension from her shoulders and lowered her mace. Definitely a stupid squirrel, as it inched closer and closer to her.
She extinguished the flame and stretched out her hand. "Come here."
It was a red-coated squirrel, the auburn flash of autumn leaves lively in this lightless place. "You don't belong here. This place isn't for you."
The squirrel looked up at her with dark, knowing eyes, almost with a sort of humor. It had laughing eyes. My dear, silly, humanoid, it seemed to say, you are the one who is new here. You are the one who doesn't belong.
It didn't protest as she slotted it into that spot by the points on her shoulder, which seemed a natural spot for an animal of that size. "There's a tree, by my house? I think you might like it. It's better than these ones." Her tree was at least bright and declawed.
Walking out of the darkness was easier. She moved with some speed, still feeling eyes at her back, but she had made it thus far, and was now covering familiar ground. She once again reached the trail. Here there was a trace of wind again, the faint trickle of distant water, and a pull, something tugging her back into the darkness. It had been quieter, there, true. She had been calmer after the first bout of fear.
By the time she saw the sun again, it was nearly twilight, this time for real, and she went quickly back to the tree by the entrance to the house to introduce the squirrel to its new home. It was a fine tree: appropriately thick-trunked and crowned with verdant green, the kind of tree that a child would turn into a palace. Indeed, a perfect place for a squirrel that fancied itself a monarch. "Here you are."
It didn't jump off her shoulder. After trying to shake it off, she shrugged, not wanting to hurt it, and moved towards the glowing yellow of the house. "Fine then. Come in."
The interior of the house was warm, with bodily heat and long-burning incense with something aromatic cooking bubbling in a pot. She was often the one to set the table for supper, but either her parents or their guests might have done so this evening. They were gathered around the kitchen table and greeted her as she entered. "I've brought in an extra guest."
The sharp-chinned man nodded with the gravity of understanding. He had figured the Hallowleafs out, them and their ghost and now this squirrel: they were collectors of stragglers. Ardent practitioners of the great Selunite virtue of hospitality.
And her parents understood too. This was their compromise. This is how it would be.
It became routine. She went on walks when visitors came, either through the orchard or into the forest, and soon began to go on walks when the weather permitted and the house wasn't full of things to do. Her dominion expanded to everything visible from her top-floor window. She walked to the top of the mountain, because she could, because there was enough sun for it. She sat with her map at the summit and marked landmarks and directions: there, the road to Baldur's Gate, battered by the Absolute's armies. Behind a mountain in the other direction, the now-misnamed Shadowlands, aiming to restore itself to something worth inhabiting. She avoided the summit at night, but sometimes her father and their guests went up there to pretend at touching the moon.
Against all sense of rationality, she returned to her valley. It never grew less unsettling, and yet seemed to at least grow accustomed to her presence. Mere tolerance, maybe, but some things just took getting used to.
She also began collecting animals. Some were practical: the milk cow, the sheep, and the chickens, to complete the cottage. She began bribing the messenger pigeons, and they delayed the sending of their letters and instead congregated in the trees and on her windowsill. The dogs and cats she didn't seek out. Like that fateful day when they had encountered Scratch in the woods, the dogs came with visitors who were unable to keep them, cats who had fallen from carriages and washed up at their doors. The upper floor became a temporary home for these creatures, and she and Father began work on constructing a proper outdoor place for them. It was summer and they found it best to do work in the mornings and the evenings and in the nights, when the moon was bright enough to see. The cruel middays she spent in the woods, under the comfort of the trees, because often her room was too warm and there were too many guests for her to feel at ease in her own home.
Now her world became cyclical: comforting in its constancy and tortuous in its predictability. Already they prepared for winter, even as summer turned her skin red and angry. They were too late into the year to take the proper precautions, firewood and insulation and infiltration and whatnot, so she accepted the further presence of their religious comrades as aid. They helped weatherize the exterior, dried foodstuffs, and helped in the continually ongoing process of putting the house back together.
The moon cycle was her father's plague. He kept his wolf form under control, though not without some discomfort. The first full moon she experienced with him was full of him pacing around their parlor, scratching at his skin and carving red marks with his nails.
"What if you were to let yourself be the wolf?" she asked. He had asked for her accompaniment; she could contain him magically if needed.
"It's not so easy." He said. "It has been a long time. I worry."
"I'm not a child anymore. I wouldn't be afraid." She laughed to put him at ease, but instead he frowned and began walking faster.
She wasn't afraid of him, and it didn't matter. It was the same fear she experienced sometimes looking in the mirror when she peeled back her lips from her teeth. Knowing your own capacity for cruelty was a burden, more so when it sprang from you unbidden.
That night, both spirit and man set the house alight with sound, her ghost with its usual lack of decorum and her father with his nervousness. She sat and watched her father pace and mutter until the sun painted the walls yellow and her father retreated into the guest room.
The next full moon, she watched him leave. It was a cool night, one that whispered of autumn nearing. He wore no shoes or hat and kept his coat slung over his shoulder.
"Stay safe," she said. "I hear there's a monster on the prowl."
He laughed but seemed as if he were leagues away. "I'll manage. I love you," he said, and left. She fell asleep to the sound of distant howling.
The night and the fog were her mother's plague. Her mother insisted on her gardening work being conducted under the moon in all phases, where possible, and so spent a tenday or more every month with a shawl over her shoulders at twilight, trowel in hand.
The nighttime gardening was a choice, something to be prevented; the fog was not. Shadowheart had grown used to the fog while she was in Baldur's Gate, but that was a summer affliction, something to do with the sun against the cold water. Here, from her window, in all seasons, she could see the fog approach, sometimes lying in wait in the valleys of far-off mountains, sometimes in the clouds sailing the neat blue sky, ready to break themselves over their roof.
Mother coughed more then, the kind of full-bodied cough that bent her in half, and nearly brought her to her knees. It was mostly the fog, she thought. She could ask her mother to stay in the avoid the worst of it. Her commands to avoid the colder nights would be ignored.
Autumn had come in full swing, and apples were in abundance in their orchard. Her father wanted homemade cider and she wanted anything vaguely resembling wine so they started on that, gathering small baskets full of apples. Her mother suggested apple pie when she saw them come in with the baskets.
"You loved it, when you were younger." Her mother always said such things casually. It was a normal motherly thing to say: loving, knowing, audaciously so.
It pricked at Shadowheart more than she wanted it to. Still, she found herself the next day up to her elbows in flour and rolling dough flat next to her mother in the kitchen. It was cool enough that the oven's heat wasn't sweltering, but she sweated far much more than she would have preferred.
The ghost was making a racket in the adjoining room. It did that sometimes, like a petulant child, whenever they were either too much or too little in the house.
"It's lonely," said her mother, setting out the latticework for the top of the pie.
Shadowheart knew base urges; it was jealous. Jealous of hands, to be coated in flour, to bring form to dough. Of noses, to take in the heat and spices.
Jealous of mouths. "Remember this?" said her mother, hours later, spooning an unstructured slice onto a plate and sliding it over.
A brief flash of annoyance passed through her that she moved to hide as she took the plate. She didn't remember, but her mother sometimes asked her as if it was easy to perform as a spell.
She took a bite. For a moment, she was someone else. Someone young, entranced by the scent of baked goods and afraid of red ooze from the side of the pastry. She recalled that trepidation, and her mother's reassurance, that she didn't have to decide right away, that she could decide her thoughts after one slice or even one bite. The memory of deciding after the first forkful: yes, I like this.
She couldn't form a sentence, but she didn't need to. Her mother saw the recognition in her and nodded as she brushed a strand of hair away from her own forehead. Her hair was thinner than Shadowheart's, but was similar in coloring, depending on the lighting.
A tenday later, in the kitchen, somehow covered in even more flour than before, she worked with her mother at baking a pie for their planned visitors that evening. There was to be a whole family coming: a mother, father, and three children, enough to eat an entire pie and then some. It was one of her mother's worse days, and so her mother sat and watched and Shadowheart followed orders.
Her mother handed her a knife, and she at least knew how to wield that with sufficient dexterity. She chopped the apples into thin slices and piled them. Her slices were neat and perfect, if not a bit thick. The ones her mother had cut were uneven, but of the exact thickness required. Likewise, the plums she sliced neat and thin under her mother's direction. "This is important," her mother said. "Remember this."
Her mother didn't add the prerequisite "when I'm gone," but that too hung like a fog over everything. She committed the memory to paper for preservation, but it was in vain. This first pie produced, even under her mother's supervision, was nothing like it should have tasted.
It was a pie, and not even a terrible-tasting one. It was serviceable. There was cinnamon, a touch too thick on her tongue. Acid, sugar, and salt; present but in the wrong ratios. Memory, but warped, viewed through a foggy glass. The ghost shouldn't have been jealous. She would stick to cider where apples were concerned.
Shar's reprimands came less often, and then infrequently. Her mother suggested that Shar had gotten bored of them, and maybe she had. Shadowheart was not one to deny a blessing.
But there was no avoiding loss, not as the trees dropped their leaves and the days grew ever shorter. Running from it was intolerable, impossible. But if not that, if not a full embrace, then what?
What need was a knife to the hand? What need was there for the Mirror of Loss? There were times she saw her mother look in the mirror and flinch, as if she didn't know the woman she saw. No, she remembered herself, forty years ago, looking more than a little like Shadowheart. Sometimes Shadowheart looked in the mirror and her hair leaned more gray than white, and the lines on her face more pronounced the more she frowned at her reflection. The two of them were like two mirrors faced upon each other, stretching backward and forwards in every direction.
There was little that could be done, other than live it. She walked often. That helped, or at least countered that hollowness with the familiar ache of flesh and muscle. The valley was some boon, in that regard, isolated from moons and far-off stars.
On one walk, she saw the wolf cub. It was a wolf, she knew with some immediacy before she even saw the whole of it: a wolf in the tense arc of its back, in the fullness of its bared teeth, in the peaks of its pointed ears.
It was one of those times she felt fear as a submersion, as a large and overwhelming wave, and only knew she was terrified when it began to recede. After that, she began to see the wolf for what it was: a creature, alone in the woods, hiding from the sun. It was a small animal, slightly smaller than Scratch but much, much younger. And where Scratch had a wizened look about him, even early on, this creature whined and cowered. Its mouth was open, and its teeth were bared, because it was threatened.
"Where's your mother?" She took a step forward and put her hand out. She had to assume a wolf was like a dog. Maybe it was incorrect, but it was all she had. Her previous fear of wolves hadn't led to any excessive knowledge of them.
She was wrong. The wolf snarled once and fled. In a way, she was thankful for its leaving and ashamed of her thankfulness.
She found its mother later on the walk, curled and still beside a tree. There must have been some fight, but it had been a vicious one; she had fought well, had been victorious, and retreated to a peaceful place to pass. Memory prodded at her; the owlbear pushed up against its mother's side.
Shadowheart was overwhelmed with something less easy to name than fear. Regret, though this was the way of things, to fight and try and scrounge out some form of nobility and die anyway. She might have healed it, if she had known its quarrel.
She returned to where she saw the wolf cub earlier and called out for it. It came cautiously, like a lost child in the woods, to her.
She outstretched her hand, just like before, and then her hand lit with pain, and the rest of her body with it. It was cruelly infrequent these days; just enough for her to forget that it could happen until it did. She was alone, at least, so dropped to the ground and waited for it to pass. She hoped her parents fared well.
It passed, and she found the wolf at her side, looking up at her in what seemed to be puzzlement. It had nice eyes: two different colored ones, like buttons.
She took it home. After healing a small wound on its paw, it was considerably more amenable to her presence and trotted at her side and she returned to the house. Her father opened the door and went to her as she exited the treeline. He had been worried, but his expression lifted as he saw the wolf cub trailing behind her, and he gestured them inside.
"Another creature?" Her father knelt on the floor to greet the wolf cub. Her mother regarded it from the couch where she sat, blanket obscuring all under her neck.
Again the wolf was wary, though it perhaps scented the wolf in her father and accepted his outreached hand first. Her father knew dogs; knew wolves, and scratched beneath its ear which it gladly accepted.
"What will you name it?" asked her mother.
"I'm not sure yet."
"Arnell Junior?" her mother said, and her father shook his head and laughed. The wolf cub had settled at his knees and curled up, almost peacefully.
"I was thinking Buttons." For the eyes, she meant to say, but there was no need to. Already her parents nodded in affirmation, looking at the wolf cub anew.
"I like Buttons," said her mother, and so the wolf cub was named and sheltered.
Buttons looked curiously at his new home. It would take time to get used to, but they had time in excess.
She was on the eighth cat-- a black one with moon-yellow eyes- by the time she thought that maybe she was experiencing a strange sort of loneliness. Perhaps it was a forgotten loneliness, lost with the remainder of her memories; she'd seen it before, in Wyll. Some void between parents and their wayward children.
But her relationship with her parents wasn't strained. It was nearly picturesque.
That was, in part, the issue. She loved her parents, and they her, yet there were times it felt like a flimsy reconstruction more than anything substantial. Even ignoring the forty years of loss, there was something missing. She felt loved, and yet still at times felt empty, rattling, and misunderstood. Sometimes they were Selunites more than they were her parents and saw all that was restored as a blessing from her, rather than some meager attempt at apology. She wouldn't argue. There was no point to it, but still she turned the feeling over and over, when she went on her walks.
She received the invitation from Withers at the close of autumn, at the door of winter. It was a pigeon-less message, one delivered by a confused visitor who had found it at the top of his luggage.
"You should go," her mother said, as soon as she presented the invitation.
"Have fun," Father said, already assuming her gone.
She did want to go. Perhaps that was the source of her discontent and this party the remedy. It was good to have friends, if friends they remained after six months of near nonexistent contact. Parenting was deep-rooted, but she wasn't sure how hardy her friendships were, even if forged in blood.
"You'll be okay up here?" It was a single-pointed question addressed to the two of them.
Her mother's eyes cracked at the edge as she smiled. "I'm doing wonderful."
A lie, most earnestly delivered, and she smiled, said nothing, and packed a bag to leave. Back to her beginnings she went, to the forest she had camped in where she learned to love the trees. There was a difference to this forest. Her mountain trees were a little haughty, standing so tall over their valley brethren. The trees here were more welcoming and bent to greet you.
Withers had done it all, somehow. Everyone had made their way from Baldur's Gate. He'd yanked Tav, Karlach, and Wyll from the hells. He'd even somehow retrieved Lae'zel from the Astral Plane, even if in unconventional form.
This was their campsite, but better than they ever kept it; in some ways, more of a home than four walls of stone and a thatched roof could ever pretend to be. Withers had set a grand feast on the table, roasts and cakes and so much wine, enough to drink bottles worth and bring a full bag home the next day. They were lucky.
Her new armor was a slowly emptying cup in hand, the warm fog of tipsiness easing her back into casual conversation. She was out of practice. There was a joke about dragons that she repeated at least three times, both because it was one of her father's favorites and because she had forgotten all the other ones she knew.
Tav, Wyll, and Karlach approached her as three, all jostling and good-spirited as they had been months ago, even as they reeked of brimstone and bore scars that had been imprecisely healed by time. The best of their party, forced into the hells and desperate for any bit of overland gossip. They laughed politely at her dragon joke and plunged directly into more fraught topics. She wished they would grant her the same grace as Astarion, who did her the favor of spending their entire conversation talking about himself.
"Does Shar still bother you?" Tav asked. "Are you happy?"
There it was; the monumental question. She told the truth; half of it, anyhow. She could ignore Shar and her greed. The ache in her hand was rarely an issue, and she fought through it when it was. There was the every day that tormented her more; the moon, the fog, the mirror. And she fought, because it was right and because it was all she could do, and she was still tired of fighting.
"We should have more gatherings like this," she said, only feeling the desperation of the feeling as it left her lips.
Already it was futile. It was difficult, she had learned, to hold things together. There was space enough at their house for visitors, but Shadowheart would not be the one to offer. She imagined it: her, and a fire-stained kettle, and lukewarm cups of tea arrayed on a table. Her friends would share tales of sword fights and trapped doors, setting bloodied armor at the coatrack and tracking monster innards from their shoes, and the house would be full of the mingling scents of the hells and overcooked pies. She would sit and listen and want to say something but would have nothing. What a ghastly thought.
Gale invited her to Waterdeep. A far grander city than Baldur's Gate, by the way he spoke of it, and it wasn't just his love for it that made it so. Waterdeep was a city of heights; the central peak of it, above all else; the surveilling straight figure of the Blackstaff tower, the arched dome of the House of the Moon, all rising above the flat never-ending stretch of ocean. She would have liked to see it, if not for her other obligations.
"I try not to abandon my parents too often," she said.
It was Gale, and he understood, even if by his expression he thought her more than a little a liar. He talked for a bit on his mother, and Tara sat behind him, preening in a manner more regal than any of her mundane cats.
She found herself at the end of the night with Lae'zel, whose astral projection held a glass of wine that she couldn't drink. Diplomacy had done her some good; she was sociable even without liquid aid. Lae'zel also did her the favor of talking incessantly about herself. She was fighting, bargaining, and all sorts of things that seemed to be most distinctly and rightfully Lae'zel. She enumerated every kill by her hand, but also every bargain she had made.
What a strange gratitude, to never be at risk of so near death, but at the same time, what jealousy! She didn't need to, as Lae'zel so grotesquely put it, tear out her enemies' throats and tally her kills and their methods. But in battle, things always were immediate and visceral, without that gossamer tint to everything, the world always shimmering at the edges like a bubble about to pop. And wine had drawn the world thin tonight, had turned it wobbly and formless and altogether dreary.
"It is strange, being here this way," mused Lae'zel, holding the cup loosely in her fingertips like she wanted it to spill. "Like being separated from the world by a thin layer of glass."
That, Shadowheart understood a little too well, and she swallowed her sudden sympathy before it reached her face. "I'm glad Withers brought you," said Shadowheart. "It is good to see you."
Lae'zel leveled her with a look that made her feel disgustingly sober. "It took twelve gish to bring me here, and a fortnight's worth of bargaining with my Prince. The skeleton had nothing to do with it." Even in this, she had lost her solidness. Perhaps her hard-fought-for spell was ending for her. Perhaps Shadowheart's alcohol tolerance had gone way, way, down. Lae'zel was insubstantial; more flickering and phantom-like than Shadowheart had ever known Lae'zel to be.
"Thank them, then, for me," she managed, and tore herself away before her vision or stomach went out.
She went home and was glad to see her parents, even as they attacked her with questions. The visit was fine. Yes, my friends send their regards, and yes, the vampire is still just as pale and just as vain. Yes, I missed them. Yes, I am happy. Will they visit? If they can. They are busy, and so are we.
Autumn left, and winter scraped icy fingers across the windows. Her mother stayed in before, but now stayed in more often, and sometimes didn't leave her room. Her presence on the worst days became the rustle of the curtains on the ground floor.
Winter held a unique clarity. She breathed out fog. The cold kept the world still, kept it quiet. She wore her father's scarf and hat and used her mother's coat interchangeably with her own.
Her walks continued with Buttons slinking at her side, and with far more caution dedicated to keeping herself from slipping on ice or sinking into powder. The valley was dark and cold, and either the sheltering trees or some other magic kept the floor from being shrouded in snow. There she walked, and thought, and kept both harvest and desolation in her mind. She asked questions to the wind that only blew them away, and returned home having at least been unburdened of that load.
There were dark and cold days, but she had very little to complain about. In the end, Selune provided some blessings after all. It was an easy winter, and they had prepared well for it, and they exited out the other side unscathed.
Already it was time to start preparing for the next winter, even as the last came to its unwilling close. Spring came in a spark of color, lighting up the hills, and sending plumes of pollen into the air. The mountains rose from their slumber and shook their backs of snow, sending it cascading down into rivers and valleys. The Chionthar was hungry too, and took gladly with what was given, going from muttering to a roar.
She walked in the winter; she continued in the spring. The valley still held its darkness, but there were new plants as the season changed. Sneering wildflowers dotted the newly green hills. The trees bled sap, and everything semi-living unearthed itself and wobbled on unsteady legs through slush.
In her valley, strange and wondrous plants grew out of the shadows. Flat-leaved things stretched their stalks, with razor sharp-edges and all sorts of oddly shaped flowers. Nothing so pretty as a night orchid, but hardier things. Things that survived the frost.
It was customary, now, to pray for the spring. For bountiful harvests, said her father, and there were more visitors here than ever had been before, casting blessings over their orchards and dirt and this time properly preparing firewood for the next winter.
Again, it was a bit of deceit. What they were doing was praying for her mother. It'd been one of those weeks where her mother had been in bed for a while. She saw her at mealtimes when she brought a tray to her room, and to deliver mugs of something warm. She usually got better, when the weather improved. It was spring and the weather had improved but she was worried that her mother wouldn't. This prayer would be the first time she saw her outside of her room in nearly three tendays.
Shadowheart did not participate in the springtime charade. She wasn't sure if she'd be able to stand it. Instead she went to her valley and built a small travelers shrine, a place for her to rest and refuel as she entered or left. There she left a bowl of water for Buttons, who now accompanied her nearly every time she went to the woods. He was larger now, and hungrier, and pushed against her side as she knelt in the dirt.
There she bent her head and closed her eyes. Not with words, not with intention, just a quiet openness to the sounds of the woods, to the ache of her legs, to the slight movement of air and the cool touch of the sheltering trees. A raw sort of openness, one laced with as much despair as gratitude, but an openness nonetheless. She thought of her mother.
She stayed that way until Buttons placed his head on her knees and forced her hand to accommodate him. When she opened her eyes, the world seemed brighter. She could see stripes on the leaves, where before she had only struggled to make out edges, and the flowers had new color that wasn't reddened by fire.
Selune did not speak to her. She never did, but this new vision was her doing. A blessing, a curse, something different. A change.
It was near nightfall when she exited, the sun about to sink behind the horizon and the moon already large at its edge. It would be full that night. At least that meant the visitors would be outside by the time she returned.
When she returned from her walk, her mother knelt in the dirt, examining the edge of one of their plants. She bent in as if she couldn't see very well. And yes, that was true for her, being human and being old.
"Hello," Shadowheart said and knelt to join her mother. She conjured a ball of fire in her palm.
"The plants," said her mother hurriedly, and Shadowheart snuffed out the flame. Guilt tugged at her-- something tugged at her, like the moon pulls at the water. Tonight she would not ignore the divine. She set her hand on her mother's shoulder and shared her new strange dark vision with her.
Mother looked her over, now that she could see. It had been some time since she had seen her in more than small sleep-fogged glimpses, and Shadowheart wished a little that she hadn't provided the light at all. "You're letting your hair grow out."
"I haven't had time to gather the right herbs." That was a lie, and she didn't care that her mother knew her well enough to know that. She wouldn't push at the real roots of it, but it was clear enough. The mirror held too many horrors. This would alleviate one of them.
"We can plant them here," said her mother.
Shadowheart didn't need to be honest, but lying would be too heavy to bear. "There's no need. I think I'd like to return to my old hairstyle."
Her mother pushed back the leaves of one plant to darken its base with water. "I remember that fringe you had."
She would go back to her old hairstyle, without the fringe. "I kept it for a while."
"I remember." That's right. Her mother did remember. The last remnants of Jenevelle Hallowleaf, on the face of a newly made Sharran warrior.
Again she felt the need to answer for her actions. She opened her mouth to grovel, to lay her sins at her mother's feet--
"You should wear your hair however you like," her mother said. The gentlest of reprimands, of graces.
Shadowheart helped push the next set of leaves out of the way. "What are the herbs for this time?"
"Just to dry and keep on hand. They're good to gather under moonlight before the days get longer."
There were merits to these drawn-out nights as winter departed. It extended that cool liminal time, that bridge between night and day that had grown so inexplicably comforting to her.
From the dark woods came a pointed howl. Her mother smiled at the sound.
"There's your father."
He had a few different howls. Sometimes they were a battle cry, the sign of a successful hunt. Sometimes they were mournful, for something lost greater than a night's catch. This time, she felt the howl a little melancholy. Joyous, perhaps, but stretched thin with longing.
"Is it easy for him?" Her father wouldn't tell her the extent of it, and yet she was curious.
Her mother looked out towards the trees like she would see him moving in them. "He worked on it for a while. With Selune's aid. I'm glad you encouraged him to roam. He seems happier this way."
"There is something in the forest that compels me. I thought it might compel him too."
They moved down the row, and soon her mother didn't need the help at all. Shadowheart rose.
Her mother scrutinized her. Both of her parents did at times, like a painting; at times, like a bug under glass.
"The visitors are a lot, aren't they?" Her mother was always pleasant with her questions. Empathetic and appropriately hospitable, if one didn't catch the game of strategy at play. Yet, strategy and sincerity weren't diametric. She did care.
"No, it's good to have guests." She had learned to tolerate them.
"We should invite your friends. They can take precedence over our guests." There it was, the bit of motherly strategy.
"There's no need for that," said Shadowheart, far too quickly.
"Or you could visit them? Your father and I are more than capable of handling ourselves."
"There is far too much needed around here to think of it."
Her mother redirected. "I'm glad you want to help me with the garden. It's a different kind of worship."
"Is that tradition?" Shadowheart had spent some of the winter poring over some Selunite texts and found nothing familiar to explain her mother's stubbornness. There was no mention of gardening.
"I've developed my own rituals."
That too, was an inevitable Selunite lead-in. Selune loved mavericks, and loved those who worshipped in whatever way they could. Shar liked a good bit of justification too, but what was once freeing in Sharran worship became oppressive under her sister.
Yet, her mother was right. It was a little like penance, putting her knees in the dirt. It was ritual, rising early in the mornings. It was worship, watching the sun set and the moon rise.
They were finished, and yet her mother didn't return inside. She knelt in the dirt and looked up at the sky, where a few stars were beginning to glow. The moon had shrunk a little as it rose higher but was still fat and bright.
"You've got to enjoy these evenings while you have them," said her mother. Shadowheart would lose her, one day, maybe even soon. Shar's paltry bit of magic was nothing, faced off against something primordial. Her mother knew it too, knew it deeper and truer than Shadowheart did. And she loved her herbs and her flowers, despite the impending winter.
"The moon is lovely tonight, isn't it?" said her mother. The moon was stark and cold, and yet her mother's face was turned upward like a plant searching for the sun. She smiled like a Selunite statue Shadowheart had once seen: impossibly knowing, impossibly serene.
"It is beautiful," Shadowheart said, looking at the moon, and meant it fully.