#Cupcake Coterie Prequels

[thesswrites]

The First Aurilmas

More Cupcake Coterie prequel for a Christmas present for @true0neutral, and this one is seasonally apropos - Hazel’s first Ellon Christmas-analog with the Hearthhearts.

Three months after Hazel became a Hearthheart, she was finally getting used to the idea of talking to people. Such things hadn’t been encouraged when she was growing up in her mother’s residence - if you could call being left in a room and ignored all the time ‘growing up’ - but now, finally, she felt confident enough to start really talking to people. Admittedly, the issue now was trying to get her to stop talking, but there was time enough for that. The little five-year-old half-elf was so full of questions and observations about all the new things she was seeing and doing for the first time that no one, not even impatient teenage foster siblings, had the heart to shut her down.

The first indication that something big was afoot at Hearthhome was the morning when Willem (a half-orc approaching his majority, and thus Hazel’s biggest new brother in all senses of the word) stamped out into the snow with eight-year-old Condred at his heels. Willem carried an axe when he went, and Hazel wondered about that. And, since she wondered, there was nothing for it but to ask.

So she went to find Momma, who knew everything, and who was currently trimming the wicks on tiny candles for no apparent reason. Hazel knew that tiny candles came for birthdays - Andromeda, another half-elf and the closest foster sibling to Hazel in age, had had her eighth birthday just two weeks ago, and her cake had been decorated with the candles and it had been so pretty! - but there wasn’t a birthday that Hazel knew about...

It still took a moment to get started, but when she did, Hazel didn’t quite stop. “Momma, why is Willem with the axe? And why are you with the candles? Is there a birthday? We all got Andri presents for birthday so should I find presents for birthday? And--” Hazel took a sniff of the air, her attention caught by a molasses-cranberry-brown sugar smell of baking. “--ooh that smells nice Mom’s baking niceys so that means there’s a birthday, right? Who’s got a birthday?”

Miranda - ‘Momma’ to the children in residence, to differentiate from ‘Mom’ Twilly - chuckled a little and put her candles down before nudging Hazel over to one of the dining room chairs and sitting her down. “It’s not really a birthday,” she explained to her new daughter, “but it sort of is.” When Hazel frowned in perplexity, Miranda explained. “There’s a festival, that we have on the shortest day of the year. We call it Aurilmas.”

“...Auril’s the Lady of Snows, right?” Hazel was starting to learn the pantheon, and was very proud of that. She liked Pelor best, but Auril was good too. Snow was pretty.

Miranda nodded. “And Auril’s at the height of her rule on the shortest day of the year. So we do her honour. Chauntea and Beory get all the accolades, you see, because they’re set over the growing things and we do them honour for our crops. But people forget what Auril gives to the land.”

Hazel, who had listened to Willem and Sylvie and Bess worry about frost damage to the pumpkins when she first got to Hearthhome, frowned again. “Snow gives things? They said it kills plants!”

“Some plants.” Miranda ruffled Hazel’s bow a little, more to straighten it than set it askew. “Mostly, though...” After a moment’s thought for how best to put it, Miranda said, “You know when you’ve had a long day and been running around with chores and playing and you’re all tired out, and Mom and I come to tuck you in?” When Hazel nodded, Miranda shrugged. “Well, the earth needs rest too. Being farmed and growing plants and feeding animals is awfully hard work, you know. So every year, Auril comes and tucks the land into a blanket of snow for the winter, so it can rest up and be ready for another year of growing things.”

After a moment’s pause, Hazel beamed at the mental image that put into her head. Then she frowned again, more thoughtful than confused. “So we celebrate Auril putting the world to bed with ... tiny candles and axes?”

Miranda couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Not axes, darling; trees. Well, a tree. Willem’s going to find a little pine tree, and he’s going to cut it down but not take the branches off it yet. And it will sit in the house for a few days, decorated with little candles and ornaments. It’s a way of celebrating how Auril leaves us life and colour even in the darkest times of year.”

Hazel frowned again. “Orn’ments?”

Twilly came into the room at that point, biting her lips against a chuckle. Miranda looked up at her and shook her head. “You made me do the Aurilmas story this year, my love?”

“It was just so entertaining!” Twilly’s giggles started escaping at that point. “Sensible people should be made to tell stories more often! But anyway, I did come in to rescue you, didn’t I?” Then she turned to Hazel. “Your momma is in charge of all the ornaments for the tree, and each of our children has one. She made this for you.” With that, she reached into an apron pocket and held up a carved-wood hazel tree with a huge gold-trimmed green bow wrapped around its trunk, with the name ‘HAZEL’ embossed on it in gold to match the bow’s trim. A small wire hook was threaded into a tiny hole in the top.

Hazel just stared at the ornament, tears coming to her eyes. She didn’t want to cry, because crying was for sad but she wasn’t sad; she was really happy. Some day, someone would explain to her that crying didn’t only come when you were sad, but that day hadn’t quite yet arrived. So for now, all Hazel could do was blink really hard to try to keep the tears from coming out and hug her mothers. “‘nkyou...”

Twilly and Miranda hugged the little half-elf back, Twilly putting a kiss on the top of her head. Miranda, always the more sensible of the two, smoothed down Hazel’s hair and said, “You’re very welcome. In all senses of the word. This is your home now, and you’re as much part of the family as every other name on that tree. But to answer your question about gifts ... you could, if you wanted. We’re going shopping in a few days, and you can see what you can pick up ... or you can make something; some of our little ones do.”

“And speaking of making things,” Twilly said, putting another kiss on the top of Hazel’s head before disengaging, “my cranberry cakes will burn if I don’t take them out now. And the maple sugar cookies need to go in. ‘Scuse me!”

Hazel worked for days on presents, and everyone loved them, no matter how lopsided and awkward they were. The dinner was the best Hazel had ever had, and the tree and other household decorations were prettier than even the shiniest things at her birth mother’s house. Pelor would always be Hazel’s favourite god, and she honoured His festival days with reverence and pride ... but after that first Aurilmas, Auril of the Snows would always have a special place in Hazel’s heart.

[thesswrites]

Leading the Blind

Carrying on from the first part of my gift to @true0neutral, another story of the Hearthhearts of Goldendale, with a difference. We meet Lira Sweetwater, halfling cleric of Pelor, at the start of her own journey into the mercenary life.

A battlefield outside Pallav; Temeni (the Southern Lands)

Alone behind enemy lines, Lira reflected, was a bad place to be. Particularly with her target yelling at her through the communication earring Jennandrel had made for them. “Lira what by Tritherion’s bleeding piles are you doing? I thought I told you people to leave me!”

Lira rolled her eyes, slipping between bits of ruined building and trusting her substandard halfling height to make up for the target beacon that was her bright red hair. “We don’t do that, Goban. And you know it.”

Grumbled swearing in dwarven was the only reply. It was part of the motto of the Quickflight Diminutives, Twylla Quickflight’s mercenary band. ‘In fast, out faster, leave no man behind’. It worked well, and given the makeup of the company, it was the only way it could. They were the Diminituves because that was what they were - diminutive. Four halflings, a dozen or so dwarves, six gnomes, and a surprisingly useful fairy dragon that Lira had liberated from a local noble’s household and now followed her around like a faithful hound, they were the smallest mercenary band in Belarys ... but they were one of the best for insertions like this.

Goban was their demolitionist, one of the few dwarves in their group who wasn’t a straight-up fighter. He’d snuck into the cultist camp on the outskirts of Pallav with a few of his more localised bits of boom, intending to cause enough chaos to flush the cultists out of their tight battle formation and allow the skirmishers of the Diminutives to pick them off. This was a job for more than twenty-odd tiny people, but Lira didn’t consider the odds, any more than she considered the odds of surviving a solo extraction when one of her friends got trapped behind enemy lines.

These cultists called themselves the Eaters of Suns. Lira’s god was a god of the sun. While she herself was a pacifist by inclination, she would do whatever was necessary to stop these cultists in their tracks.

When she finally reached Goban, she reached for the symbol of Pelor around her neck with one hand and for the fallen dwarf with the broken leg with the other; she had a hand on his shoulder and had started to heal him before her knees had touched the ground beside him. Goban shook his head. “You’re a brave girl, Little Lira. Damn fool, mind, but a brave girl.”

Lira looked at him, eyes narrowing in mock offense. “Damn fool, hmm? How is saving our only demolitionist a foolish thing to do?”

Goban glared at her, meeting her eyes with some desperation. “I’m their only demolitionist, but since Ellain left, you’re our only healer, girl. Do you not smell trap on this? Agh,” he grumbled, shaking his head. “Of course you don’t and I shouldn’t expect it. You’re a fledgling to the ways of war, and--”

Fledgling she might be, but at the word ‘trap’, she touched her amulet again, this time seeking out evil. The force of it almost knocked her over, and without a moment’s hesitation, she took his flints from him and slapped the small coin Twylla had given her into Goban’s hand. Speaking the activation word, she opened a Dimension Door to get him out of harm’s way, cutting off his cheated curse mid-epithet. She hadn’t finished healing him yet, and she had no idea how well he’d be able to walk. She, on the other hand, could still run. So thinking, she found the fuse that Goban had spent many patient hours explaining and lit it with a hasty flick of tinder on slate, waiting for a spear to find her back with every second she wasted. Then, still miraculously unstabbed, she stood to face the oncoming enemy.

All that evil coming from a single man was disconcerting, to say the least. Although ‘man’ might have been stretching the point. The cultists they had been fighting had looked somehow wrong - the term Lira used was ‘soul-sick’. This one, however, looked soul-dead, and she pitied him even as she grabbed her dropped quarterstaff and drove him back, as much to get herself under cover before Goban’s black powder exploded as to keep him from finding and snuffing the fuse.

She was only barely in time; shards of broken rock skated harmlessly across her displacer cloak as she pinned the soul-dead cultist to a sandstone wall, somehow praying she could reach him. Pelor, let me help just one of them, she thought, pressing him into the wall with her quarterstaff mashing his elbows into the crumbling wall she’d found to back him against. She felt Pelor’s regretful smile even as she tried: “...Do you still have a name?”

The cultist responded by opening his mouth and spitting a mouthful of something green and foul-smelling directly into her eyes. She had a merciful moment of thinking that he had just vomited in her face (she was a healer, she worked with mercenaries, she’d had worse with every session of drinking, never mind war) ... and then the stinging in her eyes became a nearly insupportable burn and her eyelids refused to work ... possibly because they no longer existed.

While it was far too little and far too late, Lira turned her face away from the acid-spitting abomination that had once been a human man ... but she still refused to let him away from the wall. She had little enough strength left, more of it being sapped away all the time by the acid eating into her face, but there was one chance. She knew Twylla Quickflight, her immediate superior. While the plan to send Lira behind enemy lines to save Goban had originated with their commander, Lira knew that Twylla Quickflight left nothing to chance ... if only because her lover believed in preparedness to the point of triple-redundancy. Which was why, instead of an incoherent scream, Lira centred herself enough to put her cry of agony into a single word: “Rand!”

Lira’s ears were very good. She heard the quick flight of two arrows fly above her head, and the sound of impact indicated that Rand Hearthheart had chosen the path of poetic justice by putting out the eyes of the creature that had taken Lira’s.

It was about all that Lira could process before the pain overwhelmed her and she lost consciousness.

Only half-conscious, some unknown time later, Lira caught a few words from her commander. Not many, but enough to terrify her. Those words were “...back to the temple”.

Lira didn’t want to go back. She couldn’t. This cult was trying to kill suns, and one of those suns was her god. More, her time so far behind enemy lines had shown her what became of those who followed this sun-eating horror. No one deserved to have their soul destroyed that way, to walk on with darkness corroding their soul the way the acid had corroded--

Oh.

It was dark, and she was conscious, and while she could feel bandages over her eyes, she’d had cloth over her eyes before and still had some sense that she could see. Now she didn’t even have the sense of that. The pain had faded, but there was a sunken feeling where her eyes should be. Where her eyes no longer were.

The price of overconfidence.

All Lira could do was pray. Pelor, she thought, and would have closed her eyes if she could have. Pelor, if that is to be the last thing I ever see, please let me continue to help fight it. I ... I don’t ask for my eyes back. That is the mark of a lesson well-learned. Just ... please. I want to help. I want to stop them. I want my people to be spared the fate of the man who took my eyes. Let me heal them. Let me protect them. Let me help them. Let me do Your work in Your name, and keep them well.

She heard a chuckle - something huge and powerful and kind, indulgent as a beloved uncle - and felt the benevolence of a sun-god’s smile, and warm but otherworldly lips upon her forehead. Then, there was a word, and the presence of Pelor receded. Never gone - Pelor was never far from His chosen - but back in His proper place in the material.

Gods seldom intervened, by rules set down long ago - rules that Pelor and Nerull and Tritherion had all agreed upon to allow mortals to be free. But those who dedicated their lives to their gods could ask. There were dispensations, if a mortal like that asked. Knowing that Pelor had found her request worthy of granting, Lira sat up, murmuring the word she’d heard in her delirium. “...Truesight?”

“You need to be lying down,” said Rand Hearthheart. Lira had known for a long time that Twylla’s lover ‘Rand’ was actually a woman named Miranda, having healed her of enough wounds to see her without that much in the way of clothing. But now, to Lira’s lack of eyes, it was all the more obvious. The illusion spell that had at one point kept Lira’s notice away from certain anatomical features didn’t function as it should, because Lira didn’t see it at all; she sensed Miranda Hearthheart as sort of a polished stiletto blade of a woman, polished and versatile and hidden until needed.

Then a quicksilver presence that Lira identified as Twylla pushed forward. “Well, she can do that in a moment, but first I want to know what you mean by ‘Truesight’. Because I heard you say ‘Truesight’, Lira my girl, and honestly, that’s not the sort of thing I expect to hear from someone who had acid spit eat their eyes.”

Lira shook her head. “I ... asked Pelor ... to let me still help you. I ... said I didn’t want or need my eyes back. That the lesson learned was too important to lose, but ... you were talking about sending me back--”

Rand huffed out a little chuckle. “That was Goban,” ‘he’ said with a grin. “The guilt’s eating. He doesn’t really understand the whole thing where clerics put their trust in the gods. He’s less ‘praise the lords’ and more ‘pass the ammunition’.”

All Twylla could do at that point was shake her head. “Well, I’ll tell you this much, Lira-lass; you’re not going anywhere just now. And I don’t just mean because you’re injured, because whatever Pelor did to you, it at least healed the acid burns to scars, which will have to do, I suppose. Listen,” she went on, and Lira could feel the commander grinning, “even if you hadn’t had a bit of divine intervention, we’d have just kept you in the medical tent. We don’t have enough healing to spare. But a healer with Truesight? We’re not passing that up. We’ll train you up in blind-fighting and get you back in the field.”

After a silent moment in which Lira would have cried had her tear ducts not been obliterated, she simply said, “Thank you”. Everyone in the room knew that she wasn’t talking to them.

[thesswrites]

Meeting in the Middle

I have chosen to newly christen this page with a Christmas gift for @true0neutral, the little brother I should have had and the one primarily responsible for my current Skype-and-Roll20 D&D group. His character’s parents, two halfling ladies by the name of Twilly and Miranda Hearthheart, were adventurers in their own right once, and had an interesting life prior to the start of the player characters’ story. Here are a few samples from that interesting life.

The Salted Pike, a pub in The Hearth, Star Coast, Baronsvere

Miranda Hearthheart did her chores the way any young woman of The Hearth did. It didn’t matter that she was one of the mayor’s children; at The Hearth, you worked. Apparently that sort of thing prepared you for whatever was to come.

She preferred the other things, though. A lot of her training went to hunting in the woods bordering The Hearth, leading up to Cedargrove and the Elvenwild. She was trained for stealth, and hunting, and combat in a variety of ways. She wasn’t sure why. The Hearth was such a peaceful place. As evidenced by her current job - waiting tables at the Salted Pike.

It wasn’t a bad pub. It was just ... ordinary. Miranda had made a few runs to the city of Star Coast with her younger sister Melinda, who was setting up an apothecary shop in town. One day, it was expected that she would move in with her sister and ... well, Miranda didn’t know. All she would truly be able to do in that circumstance was help in the store, maybe keep her sister safe from unsavoury elements. Why she would have to do that, Miranda had no idea. Little Lin had arcane gifts. People with arcane gifts didn’t need a sister good with knives to keep her safe, right?

Still, at least it was somewhere other than the Hearth. She would meet new people and at least hear of interesting places. If she couldn’t go and visit them herself - and she couldn’t; her mother was very clear on that point - hearing about them was the next best thing. Maybe she could get a job in a tavern there. She’d heard good things about one not far from the shop that would soon be her sister’s; the Piecemeal. It catered to sailors and tradesmen, and was full of stories and--

The door to the Salted Pike opened with a bang, and Miranda looked up to see the first stranger she’d ever seen come to town. And what a stranger it was. A halfling like Miranda, and unlike Miranda didn’t have to have ‘tall for a halfling woman’ pinned to her description. She was blonde, dressed in a finely embroidered shirt and trousers - trousers, yet; Miranda’s mother would have a fit if any of her daughters ever wore trousers in mixed company - and finely made boots. Miranda suddenly felt a bit clunky in her sturdy workboots and her plain linen dress.

The stranger wore a wand at her belt. An actual wand. Miranda looked up at the woman’s face ... and the woman was smiling at her. Miranda hadn’t seen a woman smile at her that way since most of the other girls of The Hearth outgrew their ‘curious about what it’s like to kiss a girl’ phase. She cursed herself for blushing as the strange halfling woman bellied up to the bar like she’d been coming to the Salted Pike all her life.

“Don’t worry,” was the blonde’s first comment, eyes twinkling with merriment and appreciation, cheeks flushed in that round little face. “I don’t make a habit of seducing the innkeeper’s daughter.”

Encouraged by the twinkling eyes, the blush, the novelty of the whole affair, Miranda asked, only half-joking, “Not even if they ask very nicely indeed?”

The wizard raised an eyebrow, but her appreciative-of-the-flirtation smirk became a giggle in too short order for her to be some ... whatever the female equivalent of a rake was. “Well, in a case like that, I might make an exception,” she said. “I suppose it would depend on the innkeeper’s daughter.”

“Well, this innkeeper’s daughter would like to start by offering you a pint and asking your name as part of the payment,” Miranda told her with a smile. “We would have to see how it went after that.”

The wizard pulled a coin pouch off her belt - it jingled in a most satisfying way as she opened it to fish out the coin she needed - and then slapped two silvers on the bar. “So long as the pint comes with your own name. ...Twylla,” she finally said, taking her hand away from the coins. “Twylla Quickflight.”

As Miranda slid a full pint of the Salted Pike’s finest across the bar towards her pretty and flirtatious customer, she said, “Miranda Hearthheart. My family sort of runs the place.”

Twylla chuckled. “So you really are the innkeeper’s daughter.”

“Oh, not the tavern - or, not just the tavern. The town.” The admission came with a sheepish blush. “I just ... thought I’d tell you now. In case it came up later and ... well ... mattered, somehow.”

After a moment of consideration, Twylla nodded. Still, she asked, “Are you this forthright with everyone who comes in the door?”

“I don’t have to be,” Miranda told her. “You’re the first stranger to come into this tavern in at least ten years. Not counting some of the through traders from Star Coast. And we don’t because it’s always the same ones.” A thought occurred at that point, and her watchfulness of Twylla became less appreciative glances and more an in-depth study. “The last thing we’d expect is to have a high-ranked mercenary from Belarys come through the door.”

Twylla blinked at Miranda. “That’s ... quite the leap.”

Miranda shrugged. “Well, you might be from Egref, at least originally,” she said, walking through her reasoning. “Kobrea-Val halflings are generally red-haired or blonde, after all. But you’re more than obviously a wizard, and doing very well for yourself, which means the University in Belarys, not Egref’s Academy. I thought for a moment that the University sent you at the request of some high-ranking Star Coast baron, but then I noticed some of the embroidery on your coin pouch. That, if I remember right, is the gubernatorial seal of Hial Fortinbras, worked into the leather, and the way the dragon’s facing indicates ... something other than direct fealty. Thus, mercenary. And you’d have to be high-ranking given the clothes and the coin you have to throw around.”

Silence drew out between them. Twylla just looked at Miranda for what felt like half an hour, face now unreadable and devoid of any of that mischievous twinkle. Miranda bit her lower lip and stood under it, knowing that she’d gone too far. It had been a lovely flirtation, and more would have been lovely, but maybe it was just as well. Nothing could come of it anyway--

Then Twylla laughed, and Miranda only noticed that she’d stopped breathing because she started again at the impressed pleasure in that sound. “You have a very sharp eye, Miranda Hearthheart! I am impressed! Yes, I run a mercenary company. The smaller races get such a bad name in fighter circles - as if you have to stand over five foot tall to do any real damage! My crew always says that if your head is level with their waist, then your teeth are level with their--”

“Did the nice mercenary want to order some food and maybe a room?” A younger brown-haired halfling poked her head out of the kitchen doorway, and Miranda leveled a glare at her, clearly wishing that it was permissable to smack her little sister in front of visitors. It only got worse when the younger Hearthheart added, “Because she can’t share yours; I already do and some educations I don’t need.”

“Melinda...” Miranda, beet-red in the face, closed her eyes and clearly wished she could sink through the floor and just die.

Twylla chuckled and shook her head. “I’ll have a room and a plate of whatever’s going ... and some company while I eat, if you wouldn’t mind a bribe for the trouble of having to tend bar on your own.”

“I’ll take the bribe,” Melinda said, “but I just want to see my sister finally tell someone who’d care that she can put an arrow through the eye of a duck on the wing at over a hundred feet.” Grinning at the now nearly apoplectic Miranda, Melinda curtsied and dashed off to the kitchen to put together a plate of dinner.

Still blushing, Miranda turned to Twylla. “...Little sisters,” she said, her shrug a sheepish and nearly cringing thing. “Can’t live with them; can’t eat them.”

Twylla didn’t respond at first. She was too busy looking appreciatively at Miranda. “Over a hundred feet, hmm?”

The blush somehow managed to deepen. Miranda wasn’t entirely sure how. “By our best estimates, yes.”

“Any good with short blades?”

Miranda’s blush finally faded as she frowned, a bit confused. “I’m told I’m alright. I haven’t exactly had an outside opinion.”

“Well. Maybe you should get one sometime.” With that, she picked her mug of ale off the bar and tipped it Miranda’s way in a silent salute before she swigged. Then she gave Miranda that carelessly delighted grin of hers and said, “But that’s for later. For now, show me the finest table in the house and let’s share some stories. I’m on a long bit of leave from a fairly unpleasant campaign and I wanted a break with something ... warm and homey.”

Miranda led Twylla to one of the better tables with a wistful smile. “Well, I suppose it is that, here. But at least you have adventures to share. I just have ... normal.”

Twylla put a hand on Miranda’s as they both sat down. “You provide the normal. I’ll provide the frenetic, and we’ll meet in the middle. How does that sound?”

Forty years later, and a barony away, it still sounded as good as ever it had.