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spellsparkler · 1 month ago

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N for Elias!!

N: The colour green.

Eli finds Shadowheart tucked away in the shade beneath those squat, crumbling rock faces, bushes crawling from cracks in the cliffs, shielded by the shrubbery from the campsite proper. Here, the talking in the clearing blends into an indiscernible slurry of sound, easy enough to pack away; Shadowheart is silent, on her knees with her feet tucked under her skirt, hands clasped into a palmless amalgamation of pale knuckles. (She has always had interesting hands; narrow-fingered, with careful-placed calluses, and a ragged little sore like a needle-nick or a cigar burn dug out of the place where the basilic vein splits into branches. They’re not like Eli’s hands, long and double-jointed and satin-soft. Eli likes them.) Her fringe is a sharp black line against her forehead. Her head is bowed. What little sun creeps over the steep rock slope catches on the delicate chains woven around her hair, and they shine so starkly it stings Eli’s eyes.

Eli sets herself down in the grass, cross-legged and dew-brushed, and, picking at the tough fabric of her trousers, she settles in to wait.

She doesn’t mind waiting; it’s easy. It’s nice to stay still, and it’s nice to stay quiet, and it’s nice to have time to press her snarling headache back into the recesses of her skull, with mixed success. She watches Shadowheart, her shaded face, the motion of it. Her lips are moving but she’s not speaking. Her eyes are closed. Her lashes, sooty dark, fan over her cheeks; there are purple-blue veins visible in her eyelids. Eli tucks her own heels under her weight, and she clasps her own hands so that she won’t keep pinching at the pants – the stretch of dark green ribbon wending itself between her fingers trails off into the air, its fraying end brushing her wrist. Her wrist which is bared, the too-short sleeves of her shirt peeling away from it every time she shifts her shoulders.

It’s new, the shirt, the trousers, the belt, the shoes. It’s almost a shame, because she liked the robe; its head-achingly vivid colour, like the fragile skin of a ripe plum; that inexplicable stretch of leather at the collar, red as the tender flesh you’d find biting in. She liked the weight of it, the protective padding about the torso, the hardy texture of the worsted purple weave. The stitches, neat and small and strong. The pointed metallic clasps, which she could press the pads of her fingers to and watch the indents they make in her skin even out. But the robe isn’t hers; it belongs to the wizard with purple fingers and purple-bruised eyes, and he seemed so dreadfully unready without it. His shirtsleeves are thin and stained, and she thinks he missed the robe’s wide hidden pockets.

She had to return it. But there was nothing else to wear – they showed her the clothes they found her in, the pale dress, stained brown with old blood and yellow with old bile, fabric hanging off in great ragged ribbons. Pale like peach flesh. Pale like murky water. It smelled sad and sick and one sleeve was missing altogether; all torn into some new, unwearable shape. The ribbon laced up the remaining sleeve was salvageable, the rest too ruined even for scrap. She pulled that ribbon carefully free, and now wraps it tautly around her index finger, as many times as it will fit.

There was the dress and the robe and she couldn’t wear either, so this morning – the dawn of her second day of coherence, surprising all of them a little that yesterday wasn’t a lovely and improbable fluke – Wyll with his red leathers and the silver woman and the paper-pale elf had gone back to the place that she still doesn’t quite remember, the one with other people and creaking floors and – a wolf, she thinks, or something with teeth – to barter for something more practical. Eli didn’t go with them. Astarion says that last time she was there she threatened someone with a poisonous stick, and he thinks this is dreadfully funny but there is some doubt anyone else will agree. (She’s never yet been able to conjure up the memory of the stick thing; she tries, but it’s all mixed up, overlaid by the echo of blood in the dirt and blood in her hair and her knee pressing down on someone’s stomach, someone taking her knife away.)

They got her clothes. They would have got her armour, only they all have maybe ten gold if they pool it together and no-one sells plate that cheap. So: shirt, trousers, belt, shoes. The shoes are inoffensive. She does like the belt – plain leather, but with loops for scabbards and frogs, straps enough to manage without either. She’s tucked both blades into them, the rough-edged scimitar and the straight silvered knife, and their weight at her hips evens her gate and steadies her hands. She doesn’t have to put them down every time she wants to do something, now; they get to stay always in reach.

The trousers are dark and durable and a little scratchy; rough against the soft skin on the backs of her knees, unevenly hemmed, ill-fitting at the waist. When she bends her legs the cloth creases unbearably. She likes the fabric of the shirt better. The drape is uninspiring. Both could do with some decorative detailing, a less economical cut, a long soak in a fresh dye pot. At the very least, some darts put in, some of the seams split and resewn – the stitching is too wide, some places, and it might not hold without reinforcement.

She is not ungrateful. But the wreckage of her dress looks like it might, once, have been pretty. She thinks she would like to wear pretty things again.

She pulls the ribbon tight around her finger until it begins to redden and ache; then she unwinds it, lets the satin drape over her knuckles, whispering smooth and snakelike. It’s green, like the leaves of choking vines, like she imagines the ocean might be; she likes it. So many colours are drab, and most of the rest seems so gaudy it hurts to look at. Most things hurt to look at. The headache squirms, unasked, against the right side of her skull; she can feel it like the scrape of fingernail. Scratching away at her from the inside out.

The clothes are easier to move in than the robe was, at least; so sweating heavy, so plush, with the unhelpful wide gap in the skirt. When they came back from the little not-town the white one with thin, pallid veins said Sorry they’re so drab, Elias, I was advocating for something that showed a bit more leg and Gale said Don’t make fun of her, Astarion, it was a dearth of options, not a stylistic choice, and Elias said serenely, I do have good legs. In the robe every step flashed a great length of bloodless thigh. She didn’t mind. She couldn’t afford to mind it even if she’d wanted to – there’s the lost-in-the-forest issue, and there’s the slugs-in-their-brains issue, and there’s the catastrophic-brain-damage issue, and it’s all rather too much to bother being prim.

Astarion said See and yelled over his shoulder I told you, and Wyll had stopped and said Oh, you look lovely, Elias, I’m glad they fit.

She curls the ribbon around her wrist and tucks the fraying end in neatly. They keep calling her that, the last in a long meandering trail of name guesses, a game they’ve kept going since before she woke up yesterday and things started to make sense; Elinor, Eliezer, Delilah, Angeline. They said Elias, and she liked it – the long smooth vowels, the sibilants, the taste of it in the mouth, like a cold smooth pebble held under the tongue – and she said so, and they haven’t stopped since. (It doesn’t feel like her name – not more than Eli did, not more than any other name or word they dragged up – Cymbeline, Dandelion, Elixir – but she doesn’t mind; they can call her what they like.)

(She learned, sometime in yesterday’s dusk, that the man in red leathers is called The Blade, and she’d wanted a name like that, and Shadowheart said no. Astarion said, mm, I imagine that’s a bit out there for Shadowheart’s tastes, and though Eli couldn’t see her face she knew that Shadowheart was looking at him like she wanted to hit him and wouldn’t, and then time skipped and spasmed quite terribly and she’d gone to lie down.)

But Shadowheart isn't angry now, and Elias' headache isn't tugging like a dog struggling against its lead, like it's grasping around for a loose thread to pull until the wet, uneven web of her brain unravels entirely. They're both just sitting, Shadowheart’s quiet murmuring lost to the blur of background noise, the river and the birds and the rustling leaves all melding into something unfamiliar and impenetrable; Eli toys with the length of ribbon, wary of the fraying at its sheared-off edge, and she carefully doesn't pluck at her cuffs or her trousers, and she enjoys the simple pleasure of watching. It still feels like something of a novelty, to look and to know so immediately what she's looking at; to see not just light and shadow, a splotch of grey and grey and grey in marbled grain, but to know it as a rock of discernable height and dimension. It still feels like a novelty, and yet she cannot fathom having ever lived without it. What inconstant memories she can reach from those early few days seem chimeric, and very, very far away.

(There must have been something before that – before the blood and the bile, before the strange, singular journey through that meat-made-ship – but if there was, she can't find it. Everything begins at the same point, headache and confusion, feet on glass, hands gloved with gore, and there is no echo of anything beyond it.)

She winds the ribbon around the base of her thumb, as stark as the flurry of veins that slip through her wrist, and she lets it go again. Her hair is in her face, daffodil-bright streaks in her eyes. The sun is high enough over the rocky outcropping that the reflection of it on the satin leaves white-hot smudges on her retinas.

The ribbon unwinds. Shadowheart raises her head. The sharp crescent-points of her circlet press grooves into her fringe. She looks pink, pale, calm; Eli watches her stretch out her arms, the hinges of her elbows, the careful roll of her shoulders, until eventually she glances over, a shallow divot tucked between her brows.

“Hm,” she says. “It’s better than the robe.”

“I liked the robe.” Eli’s hands press flat onto her knees, ribbon trailing off into the grass, darkening where it drags against the remains of the dew. “What were you doing?”

Shadowheart bends her fingers back until they click. “Praying.”

“Why?”

A pause; the forest-noise is very loud, for a moment, but she can’t pick out what made the change. It quiets itself again. Shadowheart flexes the fingers on her other hand. That little dip between her brows is still there, just above the seam where the frontal bone would meet the nasal. The bone there is thick and tough. Pressing through is inordinately difficult. “I pray twice a day, as a rule,” Shadowheart says; her face smooths out, then, the divot disappearing. “And,” she adds lightly, “if ever there was a time to ask for my god’s aid, don’t you think it would be now?”

Twice a day; the quiet of it, the stillness. A peaceful moment to talk to god. “And they listen?” Elias asks, with interest. Her hands tighten at her knees, pulling the cloth clumsily into fists.

Shadowheart rolls one shoulder and says, “Sometimes.”

Eli tips her head, the ache shifting with it like water. Pain settles somewhere not far from her ear, reaches, sprawling, towards her eyes, the hard plane of her forehead. Her hair, the yellow of gilt or of dandelions, shivers over her face. “Why?” she asks; Shadowheart looks clear-cut and smooth against the stone, all stark lines and patient mouth, and she is trying to envision what her god would look like – something smooth and cool, like a pebble in water, something serene – but it makes her feel like setting her teeth against the twitching muscle of her tongue and biting down. Blood in the mouth, pooling, iron-rich, spat against white porcelain, into the dirt, so she won’t choke on it. She asks, “What proof is there in prattle?”

“Don’t rip those,” Shadowheart tells her, eyes flicking down. “They’re new.”

“They’re hideous,” her mouth complains. She looks down at her lap, at her hands, pallid and angular, twisting the stretched cloth of the trousers into knots. She flattens them, sets them back on her rumpled knees, ribbon shining where it’s tucked between her fingers.

“I’ve seen worse,” Shadowheart says. “Did you want something?”

For a moment, the words slip; Eli has to stretch to reach them, and she feels spread-out, wound tight enough to snap, all her soft red innards a single synapse set alight. “My hair,” she says, after a moment of fumbling, and the feeling goes away. “Would you plait it for me? My hands don’t know how, and you do yours so prettily.”

She puts it up every morning and takes it down every night; Eli watched, yesterday, in the strange early fascination of being able to watch anything at all; watched the flat shining curtain of her hair gleam under the comb, the motion of her hands as she pulled it up high and twisted it into a rope, fine little chains woven through the partitions as if for grip or for strength. The way she tucked the ends back up into the braid. She’d followed the movements closely, but she cannot replicate them.

She tried; she tried until the ineptitude of the hands tangled in her hair began to make her cross, and Elias is not one for getting cross. She can’t see with hair in her eyes, dusting the world with gold leaf; it is hard enough, at times, to see without it. She must know how to get it away from her face, because she would have needed to know at some point in the missing time; it’s long enough, would have taken such a time to grow out, that she must have. But whenever she tried she got confused; couldn’t distinguish between the strands, or recall what needed to be done next, until it was all so tightly knotted around her fingers that her head screamed when she pulled them free. If she could see, she thinks, it would have been easier. It was the angle that made it difficult. But slicing the soft tissue from the skull – the red-grey peel of skin and muscle – so that she can move her scalp with hair attached in front of her seems more trouble than it’s worth.

Shadowheart’s gaze flickers over her hair, the ends resting in her lap, the pieces falling in her face again. “All right,” she says, and moves to kneel behind her.

It’s a funny feeling, Eli decides; hands in her hair, a comb slipping through it, while she just sits there, lamblike. It’s like carding fleece. It pulls a little on her scalp, sometimes, and her headache prickles at it, slinks sullenly behind her eyes and collects like tar behind the bridge of her nose. She winds the ribbon around and around and around her fingers, one by one, until they begin to blanche and sting, and still it is not enough; she wants to reach out and find something to properly hold onto, but there’s only Shadowheart, and she’s tucked away behind her with her arms all in motion. There’s hair fanned out over her eyes, thin and uneven and yellow-bright, tinting the blue of the sky. The shadow of the rock looms. Eli looks at them, and their shapes, and revels in knowing them as best she can. She ties the ribbon in a sequence of tight, evenly-spaced knots, and then she picks them loose. Something darts through the air above her, lightning-quick. She assumes it’s a bird, but it passed so quickly she can’t feel quite sure.

“Tilt your head back,” Shadowheart says, quietly enough it’s a little hard to make out through the forest noise, “I need to get your hair out of your face,” and Eli does as she’s told; lets the weight of her skull fall backwards until the length of skin that joins her throat to her mandible strains with it, the neat tower of her vertebrae folding to accommodate it. Her neck is made a long, pale line. Shadowheart blinks, once, shifting back; her mouth quirks. From this angle Eli can see the soft jut of her cheekbones and a good bit into her nose.

“It does get in my eyes,” she says.

Shadowheart smiles, a little. “That’s why I’ve got the fringe,” she says, which seems to Elias eminently sensible. There is a freckle just under her lip, pinpoint-small. It’s more visible when her smile drops. She leans in a little closer, and she asks, “How is your vision?”

It’s a non-sequitur if ever there’s been one. (Seeing was never an issue; Shadowheart knows that. The problem isn’t registering shape and colour and sound and gesture, it’s squeezing meaning from them. Like bleeding a stone.) Eli blinks, slowly, against the blue of the sky and the pink of the skin. She can see the blurred edge of her own lashes, if she pays attention. She asks, “Why?”

“I should have asked you yesterday,” Shadowheart says, which isn’t an answer. Eli can feel her breath where it rolls across her forehead. It’s warm.

Eli repeats, “Why?”

Shadowheart says, “Would you mind if I looked at your eyes for a moment?” which isn’t an answer.

Eli considers this. “Only if I can look at yours,” she replies. Shadowheart’s eyes are pale and limned with red, bracketed by the neat curves of the socket. Soft and trembling and the right size and shape to hold in the mouth. Eli’s eyes –

She doesn’t know, actually. No-one’s yet managed to find her a mirror. They feel soft, though, and damp; if she presses against the sides too hard they hurt. They’re all hemmed in by bone – nasal, lacrimal, zygomatic – and backed by the nerves her headache so dearly likes to pluck at like an amateur lutenist. She doesn’t think she has any issues seeing; she registers a vague, distant sense of offense at the idea that any part of her body would have any issues at all. Given the headache, the amnesia, and continuing episodes of disorientation, this seems rather unreasonable.

Her head is tilted as far back as she can comfortably reach; her neck, fully extended, is bared. Pale. Lamblike. Her hands are on the pommels of her blades. She’s not sure when she put them there. There are hands on her forehead; coming in across the crown of her head, so there is no wrist reaching past her chin, so there is nothing to bite. Someone is looking at her. She doesn’t mind; what is she sitting here so calmly for but to be looked at?

Shadowheart flicks a finger and the neat crescent of nail peeking over it is set aglow. She puts it to the very edge of Eli’s eye socket, and Eli blinks, and she watches the blistering afterimages appear where the light has traced in her peripheral. She says, “You’re checking my pupillary response?”

“Mm,” Shadowheart says, which still isn’t an answer, and the light burns merrily away at the edge of her vision. Shadowheart’s plait is falling down over her shoulder; the scalpel-sharp shine of her cantrip gleams on the weave of its chains. She shifts, holds up a hand against the sky above Eli’s face, three fingers curled down and middle and index pressed neatly together. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two.” Eli catches her hand before she can put it down again, wraps fingers loosely around the wrist until it all droops like an old bouquet. She says, “My vision is fine.”

Shadowheart looks down at her, pale-eyed, skin dimpling where it’s folded under her chin, plait tucked over her shoulder. Her brows are furrowed, neat and black and peeved. “What’s my name?” she asks. It is the second time she has asked it this morning, and the tenth Eli can remember in total.

“Shadowheart,” she says patiently.

Shadowheart neatly extracts her hand from Eli’s grip and asks, “What’s yours?”

That one has been asked a lot also, but it’s always harder; she stretches her spine, bends a little further back, the crown of her head meeting the cold metal of Shadowheart’s breastplate. “You call me Eli.” A pause, scrounging for the other names. “Wyll calls me Elias. The… Astarion calls me a lot of things.” All drawn from three letters stitched into the torn back of the dress they found her in; she looked at the collar, she found the embroidery, but she could barely make sense of the lettering, much less trace what else might have been sewn around it. She doesn’t mind. Three letters seem like name enough.

The little dip has dug itself quite firmly into place between Shadowheart’s brows. Eli blinks against the light. Patiently, she says, “We met a few days ago, on the meat-ship. We’re camping in a forest off the Chionthar. There are parasitic larva nested in our brains. We are trying to get them out. I’m perfectly lucid, Shadowheart.”

“Hm,” Shadowheart says. She does so like her evasive little nothing-responses.

Eli cranes her head back a little further and repeats, “Shadowheart.”

“Your neck is very hypermobile,” Shadowheart observes. There is a slight, dubious sort of edge to the set of her mouth. She is unconvinced; she has remained unconvinced for all the time that Eli remembers knowing her, of her illness and her wellness both. Eli understands. Her injury presents deeply atypically; her recovery pattern is unheard of. They all have maggots in their heads, though, and she can hold the thread of time so that it feels like night follows afternoon follows morning instead of everything surprising her all at once. Eli has retained a handful of idioms and one of them relates to horses and mouths.

She asks lightly, “Is there something wrong with my eyes?” and Shadowheart’s lit-up finger swipes across her cheekbone.

“Nothing new, no,” she says. “Sit up, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

There are several things wrong with Shadowheart’s eyes.

Eli holds her wrist still so she doesn’t dismiss her little light; she can’t go behind her, because Shadowheart can’t look as far back as she can, so she turns around where she is with her rumpled trouser-knees in the dirt and tilts her head back with careful hands. Shadowheart’s plait drapes over her shoulder, the black of it very stark against her bare neck. Her skin is so pale that the shadows are easy to make out – where the tissue stretches over cartilage and the straight line of ligaments, the bruise-blue locations of the veins. She is a little resistant when Eli moves her head back. Good.

Her eyes are light, watchful. Her sclera is rimmed a sleepless red. The left eye is faintly bruised, the skin around it swollen soft; when Eli presses the pad of a finger against it she hisses.

“Your eye is contused,” Eli says. The ribbon tucked between her fingers is trailing over Shadowheart’s face; she peels her hand back so she can wind it around her wrist, out of the way.

Shadowheart’s eyes follow the motion of her hands. “Almost everyone had that,” she replies. “Swelling, discolouration. We think it’s a reaction to the parasite.” A shudder, ever-so-slight.

Eli presses her finger back to the squishy, malleable tissue over the bone of the socket. “Ocular insertion?”

“Yes.”

It’s a shame that she doesn’t remember it. “My eyes aren’t swollen,” Eli says.

Shadowheart says, “No, they aren’t.”

Eli takes her hand again; presses the glowing tip of her finger to the outer edge of the inflamed eye, wraps her other hand around the smooth black plait to hold them both still. Shadowheart’s hair is neat and lank. The little chains spiralling around it make it much easier to grip. She blinks against the glare, so that Eli can see all the purple veins in her eylids; when she holds her eye open, the light is bright enough that Eli can almost see through, make out the whole perfect shape of it; the iris, the contracting pupil, pinhead-small, and past it the back of the eye, the gentle curve of the globe, seen through chambers of vitreous humour, and past that –

Eli looks closer, careful, at the shape of the eye set sweet and precious as ruby within the red-marrowed skull, and at the shadow behind it. The head is still; the chains of the plait biting into her palm. If she pulled the head back, held it, kept the throat exposed, like this, it would be so very easy to carve through it. Cut around the mess of the cartilage-wrapped windpipe. Shadowheart should wear a gorget; Eli’s told her so.

“I can see it,” Eli’s mouth says, eager. “I can see it. The maggot. The worm.”

Shadowheart says, “You’re pulling my hair.”

The chains, cold and hard against her hand, aid her grip. The plait is so very pretty. If Eli pulled it and kept pulling it, and kept pulling it, and kept pulling it, she wonders what would happen first – the tearing of the hair from the scalp, the slow snapping of the cervical vertebrae. Shadowheart can’t fold her neck back as far as Eli can. Shadowheart can’t do anything at all.

“I can see it,” she repeats. The braid is twining itself around her fingers. “Could you see mine?”

Shadowheart says, steely, “Let go.”

Her chin tips a little further up. “Could you?” the mouth demands, bright and bitten and cold in the sun, and Shadowheart pulls at the hand still pressed to her own cheek.

“Oh, hell,” says Shadowheart, and then, “Eli. Are you listening to me?” and then, “I said let go, Elias.”

A blink.

One by one, Elias peels her fingers back. The braid slithers out of her hand. Shadowheart pulls it back over her shoulder, so that it’s hanging straight down her back.

Elias asks, “Could you?”

Shadowheart looks at her. Her eyes are creased now at the edges; her brows are furrowed flat. “No,” she says. “I didn’t see anything like that.”

The ribbon is unwinding from around Elias’ wrist.

“Hm,” she says. “Shame. Your eyes are green.”

“They are,” says Shadowheart.

Elias asks, “What are mine?”

A bird sings somewhere, loud enough to cut over the rest of the noise; she’s very pleased at herself for recognising it. Hair is all in her face again, tinting everything buttercup gold, like strange cheap sunlight.

“They’re green as well,” Shadowheart says. She’s quite gentle about it. “They’re darker. A little like that ribbon.”

Elias considers this – weighs it in hand – does not find it very meaningful. It is hard, right now, to even believe that she has a face. She thinks it will take finding a mirror to really understand it.

“Thank you,” she says anyway, all politeness, and she drapes the ribbon over Shadowheart’s knee, sits again in the dew-damp grass, waiting.

#evening rb

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