chapter twenty.
bad seed

Fallon's hands enclosed around the pliant, rough spun ball of yarn, and though she couldn't see nor discern from light, tone or sound the nature of her surroundings, she knew in that instant that she must pull.

She stepped into her home; the little hunt not far from the sea. The fire crackled and the bed was empty, though the sheets were tousled, as if she had caught them moments after her mother's departure. She touched a hand to the mattress; still warm. Daylight breached the window.

The yarn in her hands was violet. Her trail cut across the floorboards, twisting around the harp and its wooden stool, past the herb drying rack to the closet in the corner. The closet yawned open to a dark beyond. Hesitating, she thought to look over her shoulder, but something forbade her, like the yarn itself were anchoring her forward.

Who are you?

She stepped into a mass of bodies. The air was electric with the moment before a storm. This was familiar. Her string weaved between feet, ran through the rivulets between cobblestone. Winding, winding. The crowd moved instinctively from her path. Ahead of her, she saw a hint of dark hair, a child darting out of sight, ten paces before her, five. Fallon's stomach panged. When was the last time she had eaten? How long had she been there, amongst the crowd, searching for the small tawny hare that scurried through the foliage, alight with the hunt?

Where am I? What all does this mean?

Bent at the neck, surprise took her as a figure stepped in her path and she collided headlong against the fold of their coat. Fallon seemed to step through him.

And into a corridor. It was dark and narrow. The smell of hay and must. Lamplight hopped across the sconces; the stone oily with incandescence. She slowed her pace, cautious. Footsteps routine, as though she had walked this path for hours upon hours. She was coming to the beginning of a cell. Whispers. Children's whispers. The yarn she coiled in her hands was dark with damp. Fallon turned to look. Her stomach began to sink. Yet her feet trudged on, past the youth huddled inside, marching on like the hours before dawn.

Am I all alone?

Fallon turned a corner, and into the night.

She caught sight of herself. Small and wretched. Crouched by the window, jimmying a lock. Her movements rubbed bone against skin. Fallon's pace slowed, in fact she froze, stuck staring at the frightful reflection. Her hand touched the skin of her brow, where the silvery scar had aged. On the girl, it was yet to appear.

It had taken her a while to learn the locks. She remembered that. She'd been caught and beaten many times over before she finally mastered the tumblers. But she'd still struggled. As she was now.

The house was one on the edge of the Upper City, where it began to slope. Though its facade was tall and well adorned, the paint peeled, and weeds flourished in the dirt where the wooden boxes were piled.

With slick palms, Fallon rolled the yarn like a fisherman ushering in the catch. Click! The girl nudged the window up, gently, until she could squeeze inside and leap down with catlike precision to the interior of the pantry.

She could hear voices. One simpering, the other coarse and unfamiliar. Her stomach stabbed dull, her hand skimming the produce atop the wooden shelving, but the hunger focused her too, honed her senses, ears pricking. 

The pantry was open, and led to a dining room, lit by a single candle atop a wooden table. She peeked around the corner, keeping her body flush to the lip. Her uncle's back faced her, leaned forward, he wrung his hands against the table, shadow puppets darting across the walls. A man stood opposite him, in profile. Dark hair and an eye patch. A pair of large, black dogs curled at his feet.

In his hand, he sifted through a collection of sketches. He paused on one, mumbling gruff beneath his breath, shaking his head.

"The one under it. He's the one you seek."

The man pulled up the next sketch, hesitating only a second before tossing them to the table.

"No. This is the wrong one. They're all the wrong one."

The dome of her uncle's head shone with sweat. His outline shuddered. She shrunk into the shadows as the stranger took a menacing step toward the table.

"Wait! There's another, one more. B-but I promise, it couldn't be her. The mother is dying, has been since the day—"

The girl's eyes widened. Fallon watched as she took a step backwards, her arm knocking a basket of apples in her haste. The dogs rose; and she was scrambling, racing away, their howls nipping at her feet, rushing through Fallon as though she were little more than dust.

In a blink, Fallon was home. She felt her veins chill to ice. The inside of the house had been ransacked. Door blown open, furniture ransacked. A cauldron of watery soup flooded the thread. Her mother was still nowhere to be seen. Water dripped through a crack in the roof. She took a step backwards.

And emerged beyond the crowd. Beneath the curvature of the tunnel, hale echoed, few risking to break the mass to risk its pelt. They were body to body, side to side. But the scrawny child, flea bitten, earned a wide berth. Propped against the wall of the tunnel, so dirt covered to obscure the gold of her hair, she seemed to be resisting the nod of exhaustion.

Nothing, however, obscured the gold coin that had fallen from a generous hand to the potato sack at her feet.

A crack of lightening flashed through the sky; everything bright, everything dark.

This time she passed the cell close enough to see herself, in the furthermost corner, whispering something to a young Orikas. She reached into her hair, flashed him the pin. One of the other bastards raised their head in faint recognition. She passed it to Orikas.

Winding, winding; thump, thump, thump.

Her feet thudded the deserted streets. Her father's manor appeared on the horizon, cupped in an ethereal glow. The girl jiggled a tooth in the fence and shimmied the gap. Virric's garden was lush. Grape vines twisted an arched trellis, verdant ground bounced back underfoot. A stone fountain spat clean water from the mouth of a maiden; she paused to catch her breath, gulp a fistful.

She knocked on the backdoor; the house remained still. She used the trellis to peek into the window. A young blonde girl sat on the chaise longue of a sitting room, a book flipped open against her lap. She dragged her index finger against letters that twisted, even at a distance, to Fallon's unsure gaze. 

Fallon slapped her hand against the glass, jerking the girl's attention, and losing her balance.

She landed in a high backed chair, stiff against velvet. Her body drooped against its wooden arms; barely able to raise her head. For a long time, she stared without seeing. In the blur of her vision, she saw the figure, the bare torso curdled with dark. She willed herself to move. Why hadn't she moved? Why had she done nothing at all?

But Fallon knew why — mold never dies, and neither does the rot.

Across the room, the door slammed open.

"What is so important that you broke the rule?" Virric hissed. He had Fallon by the scruff, hauling her away from the open door and towards the fence. His daughter stood in the doorway.

"They're gonna tell everyone!" 

He stopped in his tracks, letting her fall to the grass. She scrambled to her feet, taking a step back from him, eyeing her escape.

Virric spoke after a beat: "Well? Out with it."

Fallon looked past him, to the girl. She had the book, dangling splayed open, the warm gentle blaze of the fireplace gilding her outline. Had she ever been tossed to the ground? Did she know desperation? Was she hollow? Bad?

"H-he had pictures. And he was looking for us. Everyone's gonna know." And in silence; that I'm your daughter too.

A look of finality flashed in Virric's eyes.

"So be it." He said. "But what a waste."

Fallon's hands burned. The string in her hand had begun to unravel at lightening speed, like it had finally caught on something; and that something had begun to run away from her. Virric blurred away as the past began to whip and whir around her.

She saw it all.

Orikas unlocking the door. The others surged forward. The guard's shadow approaching on the wall. Fallon shoving them back. She slammed the grate with teeth shuddering force.

Rushing past, dipping her hand as though into a stream, the gold in her hand. But the girl hadn't been asleep like she thought. It was bone and bone, sinew and hair. Blood in her mouth, across her face. Wresting the coin. The glint of victory.

The chair. The chair. The chair.

Every draw pilfered, line pushed, fight won, stone cold revenge. Each flash of tender skin, heated shame, a list of bad deeds she had promised did not, could not bother her. The thread burned in her hand.

This is who you are. These are the lies you tell.

Fallon jerked awake. Above her, the ceiling of the shack had been plucked away. Shadow coveted the sky. Breathing hard, she sat up. The moisture disappeared from her mouth.

A figure sat at the harp. Her mother? She could not see the face, only the dark curtain of hair. 

Chill gathered through her body as she approached. She reached out a shivering hand. All around them, rippling up from the floorboards, a fire blazed.

Suddenly the figure unfolded, doubling in height, and turned. The man who faced her was unknown, yet familiar. A pale visage against an ebony mane, tamed with a helm of ram's horns. Broad shouldered, and square jawed. Eyes, yellow as a cat's. She realised, with all the breath in her lungs, that she had dreamed of this man before. That his name was carved against the inside of her skull. Rivalen. 

She opened her mouth, but he waved his hand, and smiled, low with cunning.

"But you already know, don't you?"

Fallon nodded, but before she could attempt to speak once more, he had fast down a finger, and in one fell swoop, Fallon folded. Her muscles ached and she cried out. But try as she might to buck against the unseen force, she could not move.

"Finally, we have arrived at the order of things. I admit, to see folly through your eyes was, for a time, amusing. But my dormancy is over. Now my will shall overtake."

Two fingers, held flush, glided through the air. From them, Fallon could feel the overwhelming emanation of great power. She squeezed her eyes shut.

A rumble sounded. A crack split the darkened sky. Through it, a single beam of refracted starlight pierced the heavens, and in that moment, wiped clean Fallon's mind.

✼ ҉ ✼ ҉ ✼

It was a somber boat ride from Moonrise, no one dared speak, as though the truth of the matter would be a death in itself, and all silently agreed that it was better to pantomime a heartbeat than to snuff it.

An eternity passed on the unreflective surface. Last Light Inn emerged like the moon behind a cloudbank, the boats moored beside its dock, and they were met with the battle hardened figure of Jaheira. She looked upon them, unsurprised, and gestured to a troupe that leg them to a burial site, not far from the reaches of the inn.

Graves were unmarked, the soil fresh and stirred, separated by the thick coil of tree roots, risen tracts that stretched from the base of fruitless hosts. Their guard absorbed into that of the undertaker, working by the low light of a single moon lantern, a miserly figure who did not flinch at their approach.

She was lain in a shallow grave, between a juncture of root. Death had her pale as a vision, but her lips, were not bloodless and they beat with that which had been snatched and unspoken. At once at peace and restless, one could stand in anticipation of her for long enough for the seasons to change, the sun to set, for the dawn beyond the dense twilight, in a place like that.

Astarion retreated. He pulled up a seat alongside the adventurers he had met in the dungeon. To them, his lack of speech was to be expected, and he allowed false assumption its place at the table. But the peace did not last; Dalaia soon occupied the seat down the very end. He watched her from the corner of his eye as she built a fortress of thick handled glass, her red skin deepening, she conspired against the lingering damp of her cheeks. Marth briefly appeared to console her, but he was grey with grief, and his efforts afforded him a rebuff with the round of her shoulders.

She smoldered like sparkless smokepowder, long enough for Astarion to lose himself in dregs of wine, tasting of barrel, but after ducking outside for relief, she was waiting in the shadows; he was impressed by her cat's grace, but the arm to the windpipe silenced any comment. For a fleeting second, he saw the animus warp her vision: the were the only ones in a sightless, soundless room. But she dropped him, sobbing, pressing her damp, puffy face into the crook of her arm, stumbling out of sight to collapse in the corner with the firewood.

He came to the conclusion then that he would leave. He'd done enough. With her gone, there was no hope of the book, of translating the infernal pattern on his back. There was nothing left to do but return to Baldur's Gate and plot an end on his own terms.

And so he did just that, with one exception.

The journal was waterlogged, pages of stiff peaks and valleys, and the ink ran incomprehensible. Its cover, already hung by a thread, had ripped clean, and the binding on its way, unraveling in his hands as he lowered it to the soil, kneeling, and still, hearing nothing of the undertaker's footsteps or the gentle swish of his armored guard.

Astarion could feel nothing, think nothing, his insides were dull like a tongueless bell. It did, however, bother him, that he couldn't muster pity. Was that not what death stirred? It was what he had felt for himself for so much of his tenure below the floorboards. He could see her as he'd lain her, framed in dirt, and the image had not struck him as pitiable. Quite the opposite. Death had become her.

He felt the air stir with motion, something brush his cheek. It was velvety, yet hard, looking down he saw it was a bud. The tree above him had suddenly sprouted many of the same. They were violet in colour and threaded with yellow, like an iris, and growing before his eyes, from every branch, tens, hundreds, so on. They began to unfurl, rippling the night with sound, scent, and vision.

Now it was not only he who stopped but the others. The undertaker stabbed the head of his shovel into the ground and raised his head in wonder. He removed the cap he wore and pressed it to his chest, as the Harpers of his guard slowed in equal time. One barked in shock. On the hill above the burial, streaming down from the dark, marched a procession of shadows. Steel met the air but the undertaker, who had snuffed the lantern with his cap, halted their fire. The Harpers retreated in horror but nothing moved the old man. He had learned long before those cursed lands what folly befalls mortals in the face of miracle.

Astarion did not register the commotion behind. Above it all, high on the highest branch, floating on a cloud of thick petal, an apple glistened in impossibility. As the shadows fell to the earth, sinking to the dirt as though it were a hot spring, it severed from stalk. It fell. 

For a moment, it was he, the apple, and the cushioned dirt. The apple writhed. Astarion blinked. The dirt was moving. It hit him; the apple rolled to his knee. He began to dig, slow, then feverish, until her hand found his. He cleared her chest, her neck, the earth erupting with her, couching, trembling, but alive. 

He brushed her mouth, her nose, whispered the curve of his hand to what remained, and looked into the edged, dark glass of her eyes.