apricoctopus - Tumblr blog

apricoctopus · 1 month ago

Text

An answer for an answer

I felt like writing again. This fic will probably suffer the same fate as its predecessors but let it be there for now.

Baldur's Gate 3, Act 1, my Tav's messed up childhood, Raphael is there too of course

2328 words. Probably should warn about fantasy child abuse

Summary: Raphael comes up with a little game to get to know his favorite future client better.

This far to the north, the weather was harsh all year round. Winters were long and dark, and short summers were mercilessly hot. Under bleak, cloudless skies, the earth heated up so much that you could see the air shimmering and melting in the distance. But there was beauty in it — in vast grasslands blooming with small, bright flowers, and thousands of creeks running from the mountains to the sea.

But this summer was different. It brought unnatural heat that first killed the crops when the creeks dried out and the soil turned to dust. Then it took its toll among animals and humans.

People prayed to the gods for mercy and rain, and hid from the sun in their houses. The only one unbothered by the disaster was the youngest daughter of Reinekens, owners of the only inn in their small town.

When she was born nine years ago, their neighbors tried to act sympathetic. It was a terrible tragedy, after all — a child born with a pinkish rat's tail, yellow eyes, and ugly nubs on her forehead that grew with time into even uglier horns. The same neighbors, after offering their condolences, gossiped that it was a punishment for the Reinekens. Perhaps they weren't such honest and gods-fearing people as they seemed? Or their wealth was ill-gotten? Or someone among their ancestors struck a deal with a creature no good person should deal with, and it was finally time to pay?

No one would have blamed the Reinekens if they had left the little fiend in the forest in winter so its soul — if it had any — would get a chance to be reborn into a better body. And no one was happy when they chose to carry this burden for as long as the gods deemed necessary.

Most of the townspeople didn't think the girl was directly responsible for the drought, but almost all of them agreed that her appearance was an offense to everything holy and divine — the wriggling tail, the thin yellow horns, the glowing eyes, and those ungodly pale markings covering her disgusting, bumpy pink skin from head to toe. How could they expect mercy from the powers above, when this creature walked among them, so shameless about its abhorrent, fiendish nature?

Agartha knew of these talks — there were always people who made sure of it — and she was terribly sorry that she had no control over the weather. If she had, she would make the sun glow even hotter until those people (well, not all of them — some were alright) turned into embers. But she couldn't do it, and so she preferred to spend her days in her reading nook in the dusty attic of the now-empty inn for her own safety. She had already learned that whispers and curses behind her back weren't the only bad things people could do.

"Agartha? Are you there?"

She warily looked out from her nook behind an old, moth-eaten chair in the corner. Her father was climbing up the ladder, his face already red and sweaty. The attic was hot like an oven, and that was why Agartha loved to read there during summer months — no one else could bear the heat.

"Agartha!"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm here, I'm coming." She crawled out of her corner, dusting her pants off. She didn't need her father lurking there. The sooner he was gone, the better.

"What are you doing here?"

"Reading."

She showed him her book. Father leaned in, trying to make out the name on the cover in the dim light. But she could tell he didn't care about it — he seemed nervous and deep in thought at the same time.

"Reading about your demons again?"

"Devils. They are not the same."

"Right, of course."

He looked at her with a strange, miserable expression. She threw a quick glance at the trapdoor behind him. Father was a kind man and he was kind to her, but he never spent more time with her than absolutely, inevitably necessary. And he never came here. Something was wrong.

"You are… a smart girl, not like Ygrid or Logran." He chuckled after mentioning her siblings' names and "smart" in the same sentence. "You read a lot. Not always good books, but yeah… still. You take it from your mum."

Agartha grasped the book so hard, her fingers ached. She braced herself to throw it at him and run. He tried to say something else, stuttered, and then nodded — as if agreeing with a thought he didn't say aloud. Agartha noticed he awkwardly kept one hand behind his back.

"Yeah, real smart. You'll understand."

With unexpected speed, he grabbed her by one of her horns. She shrieked and threw her book at him, making him grunt, but he still held firmly. She thrashed and scratched his hand with her claws, lashed at him with her tail, trying to throw him off balance so he would fall down the trapdoor. He dropped to his knees instead, slamming her face against the wooden boards in the process and making her cry out in pain.

"No, no! Let me go! I didn't do anything! LET ME GO!"

He pressed her head to the floor and tried to say something about her own good, but she couldn't hear his words with blood rushing in her ears. She managed to turn her face up and finally saw what her father had been hiding all this time.

Panic clasped Agartha's throat and sucked the air out of her lungs. She wanted to beg, but only whimpered.

A handsaw.

"I'll just take those horns off. They always get in the way, right? It's for the best. You won't tear all your pillows anymore..."

Agartha didn't realize she had started crying until her father awkwardly wiped her tears with the heel of his palm, still holding the saw. It was so close she heard a low magical hum.

"P-please…"

"It's alright, sweetheart. It'll be quick," he said gently as he started sawing one of her horns off.

The sound of the saw's edge cutting through bone was terrible, but it had a strange, hypnotizing rhythm to it.

A melody.

And this melody resonated with Agartha — her shaky breathing and frantic heartbeat, the boards creaking, a dog barking outside, and the magical hum of the blade. It was all too much, it was overwhelming, and she only wanted it to—

"STOP!"

Father froze mid-movement, uttering a shocked gasp.

Agartha crawled away from him and gingerly touched the damaged horn: it had a notch, but it wasn't too deep. Then she looked at her hands — the markings on her skin, an intricate pattern of thin lines, were glowing with a soft golden light. They had glowed before sometimes, but never this brightly.

Agartha felt strange with this new power swelling in her, wanting to burst out, like when you take a very deep breath and you can't hold it for long.

She also felt anger.

No, not anger. Fury.

The saw hummed erratically — it was so loud, how could she have missed it earlier? — as her father's hand twitched, trying to break the spell. His muscles tensed, and large drops of sweat rolled down his face, twisted by fear and magical paralysis, but he couldn't move. Agartha saw her book on the floor behind him — a story of a cunning devil sowing discord among people, making them fight each other with his poisonous words. Of course, a noble knight with a pure heart would defeat the fiend in the end, but right now there were no noble knights.

Maybe everybody was right.

Maybe there was evil in her all along.

"Cut your hand off."

Father looked at her in terror. His hand shook as he tried to resist her command.

"Cut. Your. Hand. OFF!"

These words broke through his defenses. He couldn't speak, and he choked a terrible, pathetic sobbing sound as the enchanted blade cut through his skin. The smell of blood and the sight of red, contracting muscles were nauseating, making Agartha retch and lose concentration. The glow faded, and the power faded with it.

Father dropped the saw immediately and took a long, deep breath, regaining control of his body. Agartha darted past him to the trapdoor, fell down the ladder, and ran. She didn't know where she would go, and she had no time to think — she just needed to run as far away as possible.

"And then what?"

"It's a different story." Agartha smiled triumphantly as she saw the look on Raphael’s face.

"What do you mean, a different story? Tell me now!"

She shrugged and leaned back against a giant mushroom under which they were sitting. She enjoyed both the view of the Sussur tree glow reflected in the black glass of the Underdark lake, and the sound of Raphael's indignant sniffing and puffing.

"Nope. You asked how I got this," she tapped her horn, "and I told you. What happens next is a different story. A different question."

"Preposterous." Raphael also leaned back against the mushroom, arms crossed, nose scrunched.

It was all his idea, actually.

Agartha had always been intrigued with anything infernal, and finally she got herself a real, flesh-and-blood devil firmly determined to get on her good side. She couldn't miss the opportunity to learn more about his kind, the Hells, and the intricacies of diabolic contracts. Raphael didn't mind her questions — partially, as Agartha suspected, because there were few things he enjoyed more than listening to his own voice.

Yet eventually he claimed that the situation was utterly unfair: Agartha got all the answers she wanted without offering anything in return. So he proposed a deal… no, a game: for each question she asked, he would also get to ask her something about herself, and vice versa. Each of them could refuse to answer — "Of course, you don't have to say anything if you don't want to, Little Mouse, it's a game, we are doing it for fun!" — but if they agreed, they had to be completely honest.

It seemed redundant to Agartha — Raphael could simply ask her anything just like she asked him — but it cost her nothing to humor him. She quickly learned that even rules as simple as these he could twist in his own favor by being ridiculously strict about what counted as a single question and what could be considered a proper answer. It was completely unnecessary, sometimes annoying, but surprisingly entertaining.

And each time she got a chance to give him a taste of his own medicine, he would act scandalized, but not for long.

"While your behavior is completely unacceptable, I have to admit I'm impressed. You put your father under some sort of mind-controlling spell and commanded him to cut off his own hand at nine? I didn't think you had it in you!"

"Well… he didn't cut it off completely, but… yeah…" Agartha didn't share Raphael's enthusiasm about this particular part of her story.

"Although you shamelessly abused the rules of our little game, you did answer my question. It's my turn, isn't it? If I remember correctly, you wanted to ask something about Dis?"

"I did, but I have a new question."

"Ask away, then."

Something moved in the lake, sending ripples across its surface. It was quiet, and Agartha could hear the voices of her companions arguing in the distance. Apparently, the Lady of Sorrows still wouldn't grant Shadowheart her dark blessing to heal Lae'Zel's burns from the magic missiles of those damn turrets.

"That saw was special. And I know where dad got it — he borrowed it from his friend Devemar, a dwarven carpenter. He had a set of enchanted tools. Like this saw — it could cut through any piece of wood like butter. Very, very expensive stuff. No idea where he got it."

Agartha turned to Raphael. He nodded, urging her to continue.

"I recognized it because I saw it. He even let me use it a couple of times. I'd come to his shop and he would let me do some tasks, like I was his apprentice or something. I was terrible, but he wasn’t too bothered about it. He wasn't… he wasn’t like the others there. He said he had known other tieflings and they were alright. And he always said this wasn't my fault," Agartha tapped her horn again.

"This is not your fault because there is nothing wrong with being a tiefling, Little Mouse. It can't be anyone's fault by definition."

Raphael could feign friendliness well enough, when he wanted. And Agartha couldn't deny that he was often helpful — this time he had initially dropped by to tell her that there was another entry to the tower, in the garden down below. With some luck, and the potion of flight he by mere coincidence had on his person, she could get there pretty easily.

But Raphael was still a devil, with his own, still undisclosed agenda. And he wasn't even subtle about his intentions toward her — he wanted to gain her trust so he could use her later in way he hadn't yet explained. Agartha hoped that being so open about his plans was his way of showing somewhat genuine affection — a sign that she deserved some degree of sincerity.

Opening up to him was stupid — he would just use it to manipulate her in some way, and this was the sole purpose of his stupid game.

"So? What was your question? Do you want me to fix this notch? I could do it, for a price."

"This carpenter. Do you think he knew why dad borrowed the saw?"

Raphael sighed theatrically.

"Little Mouse, why would you ask this? What good…"

"You owe me an answer, Raphael. And I simply want to know your opinion. Do you think he knew?"

"Yes. I think he did."

#baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #raphael bg3 #tiefling tav #raphael the cambion #bg3 fic

4 notes · View notes