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hauntedjpegcollection · 7 months

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speak with dead

wc: 2391 au: bg3 au ch: xavier, lark

They find the paladin amongst fallen rubble and foliage.

It would be a beautiful resting place, if the battle field were not twenty paces away reeking of offal and death. Yet the sunlight cuts through the overhang of trees and paints the red haired man in little dapples of yellow. The shrine he and many of the others had been working to protect stands mostly surviving, but the stone around him is bright white and lively. His eyes are open, staring upward, green as pond water.

Avery thinks hes beautiful, imagines him alive briefly. Stunningly tall, a sword as long as he is. Gallant and knightly. An extended gauntleted hand that would help her onto a horse—a brown mare and the paladin would hold her knee briefly through her skirts and smile at her.

His breast plate is cracked open however, his blood a dark red color soaking into the dirt underneath him.

“Use the amulet,” Torvald hisses. He throws anxious glances around his shoulders, as if the dead will rise and attack them for their thievery. The air is stagnant and thick with blood and misery. There is hardly any sound in the forest. Even birds have silenced themselves in the wake of the small battle. The dead will rise, Avery thinks; at least enough to ask them questions.

He is the fourth they’ve harassed from a peaceful death, her brother convinced that one of them will have the key to the shrines lockboxes. Or will know how to solve some secret puzzle that will send stones sliding to uncover a hidden indent in a wall—an amulet more useful than speaking with the dead. Something that will sell for lots of gold, enough that Torvald’s debt might stop haunting him.

“Avery,” he snaps in a thin voice and she flinches.

There is a scar across the paladin’s face. Something thin and almost delicate—a slice over his chin and nose. He has a very dignified nose, she thinks, staring down at him. A long, handsome thing. Regal, really. Avery imagines him related to nobility. She imagines that he was the son of a well off family that cried when their brave, oldest son went to take an oath. She imagines the ancient oath, something honorable. He is exceptionally pale. Maybe from all the blood loss.

And he has so many freckles.

She breathes in slowly and finds that odd place inside her that a connection to magic resides. She could be a sorceress maybe. She could train as a wizard. She could sell her soul to be a warlock. Avery lifts a hand, grasping at what remnants of the paladin’s soul are still there inside his body. He’s fresh enough to talk to—a part of her knows that means he’s also fresh enough to be revived. If only she had a scroll, if only she were a cleric. Maybe. A cleric would be nice too…

As the paladin rises from the ground, limbs rag doll and limp, she notices just how large he is. Massive really. Taller than Torvald by two heads at least. She has to reimagine her daydream then. He’d be able to hold her by the waist to help her onto the horse. She could lean down for a kiss. His green eyes become nothing but a glowing sickly light, mouth slack in waiting for a question.

“Who are you?” Avery asks. Torvald crowds behind her shoulder. She can feel his breath on the nape of her neck. But since she is the one with the amulet, he has to let her have this one question. No matter what corpse she speaks to, Avery always gets the first question, and that first question is always—

“Xavier….Wolffe….”

“Ask him—”

“I know,” Avery clips out. Her tenuous connection to magic wavers a bit, strumming power along her outstretched hand. Xavier…What a handsome name. “What are you here for?” She swears for a moment, outside the ringing of necromancy in her ears, that she hears something in the woods. A rustling. Something approaching, but—

“Benji…”

The name shocks her. It’s not what they’re looking for—Torvald wants to know which of these dead are here because of the shrine and which just got caught up in the skirmish. Paladin’s are noble. They’ll fight for whatever is right. At least, that’s what Avery knows of paladins, anyway. She touches her lips with her other hand, thinking of the name. Benji. Who?

“Don’t ask,” Torvald snarls, stepping around her shoulder and glaring into her eyes. A thick, mottled bruise covers one half of his face. It’s a cruel reminder of how badly they need coin. Avery wishes they could use it to catch a cart and leave, to find some remote village where she could maybe become a medium and Torvald could go back to masonry and they could have a normal life. Not something scrounged for on battlefields, picking between corpses for gems and coppers.

“I want to know,” Avery snaps. Xavier…She feels strongly about her paladin now.

“Who cares?”

“I….care….”

Both of them recoil and stare at the floating corpse. It doesn’t move. It hangs in the balance of life and death, just enough soul to bid them answers to a necromancer call. But no corpse had ever answered her brother, even when he’d used the amulet once before. She feels dread in her stomach. If Torvald could use it, he might not need her. What then? Where would she go if she wasn’t following him?

“Only two left,” Torvald says. His hands tremble at his sides; scared that the dead paladin had answered him instead. Good. Maybe if he was too afraid of the power, it could still be hers. Avery stepped closer. She could smell the tang of blood, iron and salt. Her hand reached out further. She wanted to touch him, to keep a part of him for herself. His head hung loose, glowing eyes on nothing.

“Is there treasure here?” Avery whispers, finally asking the real question Torvald had wanted this whole time.

“Treasure….” The paladin doesn’t move, but she feels something. Through the link from her to the amulet to him. There is a broiling beneath the power. Something unknown and strong; it’s her turn to be afraid. Xavier scares her now. Whatever he is thinking, it is such a connection that his soul rallies at the thought of it. What treasure?

“In…bag….treasure…”

“Yes! Bloody fuckin’ right there’s treasure!” Torvald darts around the paladin, scouring the grass for the paladin’s pack. He must have been crawling for it, as he was dying, to have gone so far from where the battle had started. Avery watches her brother rip into a leather satchel, and her eyes fall once more to the paladin. The air hums with the electricity of the final question. Her brother might want another, might want to know about the shrine, or the temple that’s further into the forest. But instead she comes closer. Her hand tentatively touches the paladin’s shoulder.

“Do you have family?”

“Avery, come off it,” Torvald growls, emptying the pack into the bloodied grass with a frantic need. But she doesn’t care.

“Someone should at least know—”

“Lark….” The dead paladin breathes out in a soft, gentle whisper.

And then the connection severs, and his body floats back to the ground with a heavy thud.

Avery feels empty as she stares at the dead man. At the promise of his entire life, snuffed out because people had come to—what? Steal, pillage, murder just for fun? And he’d stepped between it all. Who was Lark? A brother maybe. An uncle perhaps. She’d never know. Avery never knew anything but the five questions. She leaves the paladin by his rubble and stands beside her brother instead.

Torvald howls in frustration and fury, tearing through the pack. She watches a tiny wooden ship clatter onto some of the pristine, white rubble. There’s a bottle of ale that nearly smashes. She saves it with the tip of her boot, thinking she’ll drink the rest of it tonight when they inevitably stop at a stable and sleep amongst the hay. Torvald shakes the pack and more items tumble free, but none of it…nothing looks valuable.

A dagger that is handsomely made, but perhaps no better than Torvald’s own swordbreaker. A book that she crouches to look at. The cover is worn, the title nearly rubbed clean. PALADIN’S AND THEIR OATH’S. She runs her fingers over the cloth cover. Torvald begins to cry, big frustrated sobs as he slaps a bundle of parchment to the ground. He punches the soil next, childish and furious. Avery ignores him to gently take the stack.

They are held together by a strand of green yarn.

A cawing makes her flinch, stumbling from her couch with the parchment in her hand. A raven—the biggest she’s ever seen—sits on Xavier Wolffe’s chest. It’s curious head cocks to the side, beady eye on her.

“He said there was fuckin’ treasure,” Torvald continues, taking the wooden ship in hands. He attempts to crack it over his knee in blind rage, but he’s either not strong enough or it’s not just simple wood. And when that doesn’t work, he throws it at the bird. The raven hops into the air and when it’s wings spread as if to take off, a man appears instead.

“Those are my brothers,” the drow says, with a lifted finger to the papers in Avery’s hand.

Torvald screams, the sound high pitched and wet and the sound of branches breaking behind her lets Avery know he’s run. She can’t take her eyes off the drow; his dark grey skin, the luminosity of his pale yellow eyes, the inky tattoos on his face in the shape of…something sinister. She can barely see, because her eyes have welled with tears.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” she begs. Her brothers screams fade. He’s far from her now.

“Give me them.”

Avery throws the bundle of parchment to the ground. When she turns, the leather cord around her throat snags and she chokes. The amulet slaps across her collarbone and her hands claw at it, the tears siding down her cheeks and making fat droplets onto her miserable grey dress. Oh please, no, please help, she thinks uselessly and imagines the paladin once more.

Then the cord is cut and Avery runs for her life.

—

Xavier picks up the wooden homage of Alandei and sits on the stone steps leading to the dais he’d crawled toward during those last, dark moments. He pushes out the memory, the way his vision had tunneled, how he’d known that he had nothing left to give and still had to get this far. A sending stone, for him to touch and let Lark—who had waited in the woods for some sort of signal—know that things had gone very fucking wrong.

He sighs and fixes the mast, which had bent only slightly under the thief’s abuse.

“Can’t believe you still have that,” Lark says, standing in front of him with arms crossed over his chest.

“No love for our home village?” Xavier asks with a sheepish smile.

“I don’t come from Alandei,” Lark replies, with his own sly grin.

“No, just wash up on it’s shore. I’d say you’re more born of it then me, since the sea spit you onto the beach.”

Lark waves a bored hand. Xavier gently tucks the wooden toy into his bag. The strap had been torn, the contents still mostly scattered. A gathering of clerics still hum, a short distance away where most of the carnage had been. Xavier can feel the thickness of their divine power, the tang of their holy magic on his tongue. But he’d not been revived by a cleric.

“Do I owe you?” Xavier asks, grinning at his brother, and his reviver.

Lark slowly holds out the bundle of letters. His heart wrenches at the sight, his hands greedy enough to shake as he takes them. Xavier inspects, as if he’ll find dirt of blood from the nasty thieves, but they’re in tact and whole. Unmarred. He looks from under his eyelashes to the druid standing in front of him.

“So I do owe you,” he wagers, gently tucking the letters into his ravaged pack. One of them, the top letter, is actually penned by him. Meant to be dropped off at the next town he’s in, so Benji can get it at the next town he’d sworn to be in.

“I won’t tell Benji you died if you help me find Matilda.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” Xavier reasons as he slowly stands.

“Yes, she does,” Lark sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “She just wants to make it difficult for me, because she loves to see me struggle.” They share a laugh; Lark’s quiet and reserved and Xavier’s much louder. He can see clerics in the field over looking at him over their shoulders. He raises a hand slightly, trying to appear friendly, despite the bloody hole in his armor.

“Did you see anything?” his brother asks quietly, coming to stand beside them. More men rise on the battle field. Not everyone could be saved. Such is the way of the world. Luck plays a part in it, Xavier knows that. His hand unconsciously dips into his pack, fingers touching sheaths of parchment. “When you were—well. Did you see—maybe you saw mother—your mother.”

“Ours,” Xavier corrects, with a soft smile. Then he’s quiet for a long moment.

He had seen something. But it’s already slipping, because he’s no longer dead. Xavier only remembers the warmth, really. Like being in water, head tilted back for the sun to heat the skin of his cheeks, his shoulders, his chest. He remembers the smell of salt and the kiss of the sea. And he remembers—

“I don’t remember,” Xavier finally answers, clapping a guantleted hand on Lark’s shoulder. “Matilda went East.”

“She told me South,” Lark hisses between sharp, white teeth. His yellow eyes turn slitted and feral like an animal and Xavier’s laugh gets loud enough to scare the birds that had returned. Up into the air, the flock casts shadows of V’s across them all.

#writing #xw #lt #bg3 au #:)))

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