Faeril paused and turned slightly to study the mercenary, her lips a thin line.
”Not trustworthy? And do you think I-” The Black Widow paused and turned fully then to face Dareen, her head cocking to one side in thought. A frow creasing the brow as she spoke softly.
”I never did look into your mind, did I? I never did check.” Faeril winced internally at that thought, how could she have been such a fool as to not check?! Well, there was the given answer. She had been exactly that. A fool who had overreached with her power. Taken too much at once and let something- someone- slip through the cracks.
”Yet you remained. You never tried to slip away, and even now you claim you are untrustworthy to my face rather than attempting to do as I have said and sell us out for a rich reward to a corrupted queen.”Still, Faeril was careful to pull her gloves off with dainty fingers. Readying her snake-tooth subtly as she fiddled with the gloves. Careful was one thing, and the Black Widow wouldn’t deny being a bit paranoid after being driven from her home.
”Now why would you admit that? There is a Warlord Prince who is my kin downstairs and would tear you apart if you harmed me- let alone his Queen.” Arching a brow, she commented in a dry tone.
”But allow me to point out once more that people who are dishonest, generally don’t just declare their dishonesty.” Dareen wasn’t going to let herself off the hook that easily. She looked away and covered her mouth with her hand before slapping it against her thigh.
"Okay, so, maybe I’m not dishonest, but that doesn’t mean I’m trustworthy. What if...what if, I’m just kind of trailing along looking for opportunity, and then as soon as things get tough and flee and sell you all out. You don’t know! You don’t know anything about me, and yet, your protective Warlord Prince has left you alone with me and you didn’t even consider me a threat until I brought it up." Dareen rambled, not even realising she had clocked and then pointed out Faeril’s slightly defensive posture and preparation of poison.
She leaned back into the wall, letting her boots drag along the ground a little bit.
” Would you rather I did force myself into your mind?” Faeril stated softly, but there was iron there.
” Tear into your secrets and leave it all bare? I don’t like doing that. I don’t like to invade people’s inner thoughts, Dareen.” The Black Widow’s lip curled.
”It is… unclean.”Dareen shook her head, looking conflicted.
”I mean...no." She stood up straight against the wall.
"But maybe I deserve it. I thought it would happen, but it didn’t. I thought...maybe it was fate. That I should meet you." She trailed off. Her heart was racing and she wasn’t exactly sure what to say, or what she was even trying to say.
"You could at least ask me some questions. You don’t even know why I’m here, what my intentions are. I don’t even think you know my last name- I don’t-" She swore a single syllable curse in Pruulish.
"I don’t even know why I’m here, really." ”We never had the time.” Logic, cool and collected, was Faeril’s greatest weapon. The dispassion she displayed to most people. The aloofness born of being far too close. Faeril studied the Pruulish witch and gave a small nod of agreement. Of apology.
”Fate is never a simple thing. You came here because you were at the right place at the right time- or the other way around. But, you are not wrong. So, Dareen ‘Whose-last-name-eludes-me’. What is your name? And why did you come to my village?” Well, at least she was going to be tearing through the woman’s mind. Faeril always hated that. She could do it, and would, but she was a Healer. Not merely a Black Widow.
Dareen exhaled, smirking a little bit. It faded quickly.
"My name is Dareen Kahina. And...it’s not that I came to Aren as much as I stumbled across it. I was merely travelling north, away from my homeland of Pruul, when Xandar ‘found’ me, and apparently decided that I would be of interest to you." She explained, with a bemused shrug. Recounting the incredibly simple sounding event that led to her being dragged into all of this. Nothing more than a chance meeting. She left it there, leaving crucial words unsaid, such as why she was leaving her homeland.
Faeril shifted uncomfortably reminded of their missing member.
”So simple, yet not.” Sitting back on one of the trunks, she let her skirts drape across the wood as she arranged them carefully.
”But if you are not to be trusted, your words and not my own, then why were you heading North away from Pruul? Away from family and friends, comfort, I would presume.”Dareen bit her lower lip and moved her jaw to the side. Time to just come out with it, she supposed internally. She couldn’t move on without the truth being out in the open. Didn’t make it any easier, any less shameful.
"Something like that..." She trailed off briefly.
"I was...running. Running away. From where I was, from what...from what I was doing." She tried to put it into words.
"I used to run with...with a mercenary company. Closest thing I ever had to a family, really. We were the only kind allowed to exist. The kind that traded blood for coin, the kind that had the approval of the Queen." She said, her voice going low, her eyes on the wooden floor. She kept going, though, not wanting to leave anything implied.
"The kind that hunted the enemies of the Queen." She crossed her arms and dug her fingers into the cloth.
The Black Widow winced slightly at the meaning behind those words. The hunting and killing of Black Widows and anyone the Queen could poise to being a threat or a bandit was something that happened. All underhanded, but it happened. Faeril was a few centuries old, young for one of the long-lived races though she rarely admitted to that fact. The appearance of age gave her a boost as a no-nonsense Healer.
”And you enjoyed it?” There was that dispassionate voice as she considered the woman across from her.
Dareen briefly looked up at Faeril and considered her briefly.
"In the same way that anyone enjoys the work they are good at. Finding Black Widows became a regular occurance as the Queen trusted us more. The tracking, the hunting, the fight. It was challenging work, and paid well." Her voice was grimmer in tone as she committed to this confession. Now she offered no excuses and just let it sit there, not attempting to defend herself or sugarcoat the truth.
Faeril forced herself to remember that Dareen was from a short-lived race. That she had no hand in the whispers and framings that force Black Widows to bow to the Queens or die.
”Regular… And what is regular?” She hoped it was maybe a handful a year. Young Black Widows born of recent years and not the elder witches that held the knowledge. Those ancient crones had gone to ground.If only her aunt had been so wise, Faeril thought wearily.
Dareen shrugged passively.
"Don’t know. Two or three a year towards the end. Mixed it with the other...targets. We also ran protection and all that. If a despot wanted someone to get their hands dirty, we could be there." Dareen looked away from Faeril.
"Most around my age. A few old ones. Some younger." She furrowed her eyebrows and stared not at the wooden floor, but past it.
"The last one...I couldn’t tell how old she was for sure. But she looked and sounded younger than me. We had to burn her out, then we cut her down. It..." She closed her eyes for a short moment.
"Made me consider. For the first time that..." She seemed to come back into reality and stared at Faeril, her dark eyes two muddy pools of sand, blood, and regret.
"Faeril...I am a bad person." She concluded succinctly.
Faeril closed her eyes, unable to hide the pain and anger that the thought of her sisters in the Hourglass being burned out of their homes and cut down caused her.
”Why.” It was a demand and there was raw pain in the Black Widow’s voice as she asked it.
”Why did you choose to hunt down my sisters when there were other options.”Dareen was silent for a moment as she saw the hurt she caused Faeril. Really the first time she had ever seen her actions hurt someone she knew directly. Faeril was a healer. A good person who fixed, who didn’t destroy. She asked a very hard question.
"Because...because the lives of those I didn’t know didn’t matter. Mortal lives have no inherent value outside of that is perceived by the individual. I didn’t know your sisters. They didn’t matter to me. No one except my brothers in arms did. I lived by the sword, so I would die by the sword. It was honest." Dareen’s words slowly stopped becoming her own as she echoed the man who has had the most influence over her short life.
"Honest work. Kill, or be killed. Everything else, the society and rules we have constructed and choose to live in, are just extensions of that single, simple concept." She explained passively. It wasn’t a particular hatred of the Black Widows. In her life, it was a total disregard for all life. It could have been anyone on the other side of her blade. Dareen sat neutrally, trying not to defend herself. To offer excuses. She wanted Faeril to be the judge, jury, and executioner on the truth. What could she say, really, to defend herself? That she had changed? That wasn’t true.
"Honest," She added bitterly, with a hollow smirk.
"Like you said. I’m not dishonest. I’m trustworthy and reliable in what I do." Dareen concluded. Hopefully, she thought, that was a good enough answer for a question as hard to answer as to why people choose to kill. It’s easy to kill when no life, not even one’s own, has value.
Faeril’s mouth was a thin line as she studied Dareen. She did not like what she had heard, but there was truth in those words. Minutes ticked past before Faeril spoke again, searching for the words she needed. For once, her skills as a witch failed her.
”And now? Would you slaughter an old woman for her caste or a babe for who their mother was?”Dareen shook her head quite quickly.
"No. I wouldn’t. It was never about the people I killed. It didn’t matter who they were or where they had come from. It was about the money, and my brothers, and the sword.” She paused, furrowing her brow. Then she raised an index finger and pointed it at the invisible truth in the middle of the room.
But...the people with the gold were all the same, and the people they wanted dead were very often all the same. So I often slaughtered old women for her caste, and babes for who their mother was, even if I claimed that it didn’t matter. Right? That’s the rub. I didn’t care, but the people paying me certainly did. Oops." She shrugged with faux-flippancy, mocking herself. She had never personally killed a baby before, but some of the people she killed had to have had children somewhere, so she didn’t bring that up as a defence.
Faeril closed her eyes and let out a shaky breath. Then she opened the blue icy gaze again.
”So you would betray us for coin?” The voice shook slightly as the Black Widow spoke and her eyes were dangerously flinty.
”All for the sake of coin that people have hunted and killed my sisters of the Hourglass. Claiming them to be unnatural women to the point I must work the magic of that craft in the deepest part of my Eyrie without the sun or sky in sight. That I must harvest the herbs and plants I would need in the darkest of nights in the wild? Growing it and to be proven to grow it would mean a death sentence.” Faeril took a shaky breath and a question came.
”Do you know what witchblood is? It’s a red flower, common in Terreille.” She gave a brief description of the beautiful bloom.
Dareen kept quiet as Faeril asked her questions. In confessing, she couldn’t help but recede into an unusually unemotional state. She nodded slightly as she asked her final question, the one she wanted an answer, too. The mercenary felt like she knew where Faeril was going, but she answered anyway.
"Yeah," she answered quietly,
"A little.""Only when we hung around the area long enough," She added, remembering several hard to forget images of red flowers and violence.
"There is a story that those flowers whisper the name of who was killed. How many will whisper of witches you killed?" Faeril asked harshly. She looked away harshly as she took a shake breathe. Darren was nothing more than a murderer in some sense. A horris thought, but none the less true she had killed for marks, the Blood's money.
"I will leave Fatima to pass judgment. I cannot. You murdered people and got paid for it. All because-" The Black Widow turned her head away. Torn between wanting to like the woman and disgust for the murders Dareen had committed.
"What? Did you hope I would absolve you of the guilt? You chose to pick u p the blade and murder innocents- not all of them, but there were innocents in there, were they not?"Dareen shook her head.
"Probably," She said simply.
"Faeril, I...I’m not looking for absolution. Or...forgiveness. But I wanna do the right thing. So I couldn’t keep this a secret. Especially since...well, I thought you already knew." She chuckled lightly, awkwardly, floundering slightly at the gravity of the situation.
"I don’t want to betray you. I won’t. I-” She hesitated, frustrated. She didn’t want to guilt trip Faeril into going easy on her. As far as Dareen was concerned, she deserved whatever harsh judgement was coming her way. She had accepted that when they first met.
”I’m looking for closure. Whatever form that takes. Be it helping you all do what needs to be done, or finally watering some witchblood of my own. Or both. I thought I would tell you, first, since, well..." Dareen trailed off. Since you’re a Black Widow,
Faeril ran a hand over her face, torn between her emotions. The killing of Black Widows stung, and it had been one thing to be a mercenary… But to be a hunter of innocents? Oh, she knew not all Black Widows were innocent, especially now. Yet, it stung. It made her want to water the ground with Dareen’s blood. But the Pruulish witch was little more than a child in the sense of the corruption that had plagued the realm. She could hardly be blamed for what was today’s society.
It didn’t make Faeril feel any better.
”I must think on this… But Fatima will have the final say.” Yes, let it be the Queen’s problem. Because this judgement was too much, too messy for the Black Widow’s hands.
”Stay or go play dice with Denvar. I have business to attend to.”Dareen finally looked up at Faeril solemnly.
"All right. I know it doesn’t really mean anything but...I’m sorry," She muttered quietly, taking her leave of the room.
Member
op2024
stone
NoriWasHere
DisturbedSpec
Sylvan
Aku the Samurai
Damycles
Hitman
Majoraa
