Private A Bitter Pill

25th Dviti, 350 EoD: Sanctum of Dawn, Captain's Office

---

Helena paced about the room, reading over the latest reports, to the steady tone of shroud lamps buzzing. Refugees moving across the Vayden, displaced by Lord's and Baron's conflicts so near to them, and further yet, those displace by the Empire and all its warring machinations. Knights sent abroad to aid in efforts to see them to safer holds. Routes to smuggle supplies in and out of those conflict lands needing be established. And yet again, in their own woods, Blight beasts afield, wargheists sighted. More and more, the world seemed to want to strangle the Chrysanthemum's roots.

A deep breath. She sat to her desk.

Orders scribed. Signed. Placed in proper file to be given to what Knight was dutied with the running orders this day. Pen moved quick.

Knocks came heavy at the door.

Bob and twift of quill pen go on. "Come in," she sounded.

In stepped Syr Atolia of Dawn, Scribe and Communicae within the Sanctum of Operations. "Captain," a snap of salute.

Helena let out her breath, slow and measured. Bowed her head. "Syr Atolia, what requires my attention?" she goes on scrawling the lines of a mission's objectives.

Syr Atolia, with their bald head, and their big brown eyes, braces a moment. Clears their throat and gives the slightest nod. "It is about the young Mistress Thiel,"

Helena's brow quirks. Pen still moving. "Oh?" she dashes the last line, and moves to the next. "Have we found her a suitable mentor yet?"

"N-no Syr, it's, well, she's been reported by a squire,"

The pen stills. Helena raises her eyes to meet Atolia. "Reported by a squire?"

---

Atop her courser, Rocinante, Helena sees that shock of red hair there, stark as a bloody stain against the greyed world about her. So drained of its magicks. Shroud waned. The Captain hops out her saddle, and hurries to the woman ignoring the protest of her suboridnates. Stops from bracing her when she sees the look in her eye. The hollowness of it all. Like one who had seen far too much of the world's secrets, and all its greater truths. Helena stiffens her resolve. Knight that she is, she hurries again to the woman and braces her all the more. Careful.

"Venla," she gasps out her breath. Steels through the twists of guilt in her gut. "You are alright, we will not harm you," she soothes, though it feels like she speaks to a woman made of stone. Helena rips her cloak from her shoulders, and drapes them about Venla's. Ushers her, careful, back toward the horses and the other Knights. All the while she can still smell the horror lurking just beyond. As she is sure they all can. Feels the bending and changing of the air about her nose with every breath. "Pursuant Valtais! Sworn Knight Mardon!" the pair of knights rode forth.

"Captain!" Valtais saluted.

"You will stay and investigate the anomoly ahead, be weary!" she cuts.

"Understood, Captain!" They both reply. Steeling themselves as they dismount.

---

In the stockade, whence they rode back to the monastery, the old oaken door, iron barred and riveted opens toward the cell halls. Ancient architecture made of stones far older, and every bit that cold. Those kept here are done for any number or reasons. Stealing supplies. The endangering of others. Magical malpractice.

Venla is held in a solitary wing. Bricks and bars laced with runes and seals strung together to mute the twist and pull one can muster from the shroud. A nullifying cell. Each cell is apointed with a cot, a latrine, and a wash basin and even the null cell has narrow window through which one can peer out unto the sky, and feilds far below.

Helena steps toward Venla's cell. Expression weighed down by it all. Tense. Her bootfalls stop there before the bars. She fills her lungs with a dust laden breath. "Venla," she starts. "I can't help but feel as if this is my own doing," she holds her gaze on the woman. About the same age as she, if the records serve. "I, I should have made sure we were able to begin your practice with the shroud as soon as you arrived," she shakes her head. "Even so," grips her hands into fists. "We must know what happened there in that glade,"

She heard Helena's boots before she heard her voice.

Her eyes came up slowly. The hollowness in them that the Captain had noted earlier had not filled in the interim. The runes along the bars and brickwork pressed against her in a way that the body could not name. Only the constant awareness of an absence where something ought to be. Like trying to breathe through cloth.

Her name in Helena's mouth landed differently than she expected. Not hard. Not accusatory. She had been bracing for accusation. "my own doing."

Venla's jaw tightened. She looked away from the Captain, toward the middle distance of the opposite wall, and the muscles in her throat worked once before she had herself back under any semblance of management. She registered the guilt in Helena's voice. Meant to address it. But something the Captain had said had snagged on something and her mind had pulled the thread before she could stop it. "As soon as you arrived."

She had arrived with Willard. She thought about the morning, three days after arrival, when she had stood with him in the garden, with a very clear head and a very simple plan. She even had the words already arranged in the right order. She had known, with the particular clarity that comes after a long and honest night, that what she felt for him was not sufficient. Had perhaps never been sufficient. "Give us a chance. Give me a second chance."

And she had thought, since arriving to the monastery, about Whiteport. The colleges in the south. Real instruction. Real structure. People who knew what she was and could teach her to manage it properly instead of this slow anxious white-knuckling order of knights. But she had stayed. Not for love, she could admit that now, here, in a cell. With blood on her that had turned a dark rust. She had stayed because his wanting her to stay had felt, in the moment, like a reason. Because she had not wanted to be the one who left.

If she had left then.... If she had gone south. If she had taken the road to Whiteport...

A deer would still be a deer.

She pressed the thought down. None of it was Willard's or Captain Helena's fault. She was clear on that. The choosing had been hers and she was not the kind of person who handed her choices to other people.

"It wasn't." Her voice came out harsher than she expected. Disused. She had not spoken since lifting Mina up on the horse and hurrying them to ride. She had pressed her lips together when the Knights had arrived and kept them pressed. "Don't... don't carry that."

But by the moons, she wished she had left.

Venla had washed her hands. Tried to, anyway. The water in the basin had turned pink almost immediately. Then red. Then murky with dirt and dried blood. There was still plenty left on her. In her hair. Under her nails. Stiff across her clothing. Some of it was hers... but most of it wasn't.

The bites along her forearm had swollen ugly and dark. Scratches crossed her neck and hands. She shifted, and the movement pulled at something in her thigh where one of the bites had gone deep, and she went still again. The wounds seeped. She could feel it, the slow dark wrongness of it that was different from ordinary bleeding, colder somehow.

"I went out alone." Her voice was even. She was holding it even deliberately. "Far enough that I was certain there was no one. I walked for ... a long time. I checked." Her eyes shifted down to her hands. "I thought I checked. I didn't know Mina had followed me." Something moved in her face. Brief. Painful.

"I wasn't trying to do anything large. That's what I need you to understand. I just wanted to... I needed to know what I would do if I tried."

Helena measured Venla. A picture starting to form now.

How much had she actually missed with this woman? How much had been invited in. What risks were left there hidden in that web of untapped power she seemed to have no hint of understanding. Until the glade. Before that, the totems. The only hook there to hang the hope of all this being true? Her word.

"If you tried," The Captain echoed. No question. No doubt. An echo. Round without an edge. So she could feel it on her own tongue.

Is that what Venla called whatever had been left out in the balewood? Trying.

Helena had not laid eyes on it, but she could feel it in the ground. Smelled it in the air. Tasted it on her tongue. Saw it painted across the sky there above the treeline she knew so well.

Red. Black. Grey. Where the shroud bent in on itself in ways no scholar of Khurun could put beyond poetic labels, or the strung together fragments of dead languages. Where so oft the stark cleansing silver of winter's haze did buoy ice and dew. Where greens and blues mixed across pine needle. An aberration. An anomaly, as known to the world of weavers, as the blight itself. Claim they otherwise. Their libraries were as old as the Orders.

Helena needn't see a report, for she had learned what those things were years prior. Faced them afield not long there after. Put them to word, so others could learn, and know, and would do so again, and again whenever the needs must. However the need came presented. She had been trained and raised up to do so. No matter her humble beginnings. And everything she knew, even that miner's daughter of old, screamed out there on that field. It was wrong.

It was her trainings, what the Masters of the Order, and the Captains before her had taught her, that had stayed her blade. It was that which Venla had been deprived of. For whatever number of reasons the Masters, Pursuants, and numbered Sworn whose duty it was to impart their learnings unto others, had failed to reach her. For whatever reason Helena had failed to reach her. For whatever reason Venla had not reached out.

Still. She seemed a raw and uprooted thing. A nerve, flared with pain for simple want to do. Bloodied. Bitten. By what?

The unsaid what of it all. There in lied the horrors. What did this nerve do. What was it trying to do.

Helena let her eyes take in all the ways the woman's body moved with hurts. Saw the evidence of her own incompetence, and that of her Sworn, dripping and bleeding out of wounds inflicted upon the very lands they swore oaths to defend. Filled with a blighted curse they had lost many a number to, year after year. And she had failed to even tend to that much.

She took the keyring from her belt, and worked the proper tool into the lock. Opened the door. Stepped to the wash basin. Hefted it up with two hands and but a breath. Carried it out the cell. Let it thunk and clatter against the stone. Water and blood sloshed and spilled there outside the gate. Locked the gate once more.

"You will receive treatment for your wounds before we continue," she stated plainly. "I will be your medicant, and I will have an assistant," she looked her over once more. Settled her gaze like dark and fertile earth unto the blood rusted weaver of shroud. Raw and darkened red as she was. "I do not fault you for wanting to try, Venla," shook her head. "But your actions have consequences, far beyond our Order. And I will take account for how my actions play a part in that ripple. That is what I hope you understand." she watched a moment. "I will return promptly," nod. Hefted up the bloodred basin, and turned away. Bootfalls knocking against the stone.

The puddle of red pooled there before the nullcell. Flicker of a nearby oillamp upon the wall, dancing light against that strange colored darkness.

"Your actions have consequences far beyond our Order."

Yes.

She knew that.

"I understand" she said.

And she did. That was the uncomplicated part.
She had known it before Helena said it and she would know it long after and the knowing of it was not the hard part.

Consequences was like ripples on water. You cast the stone. A single choice. A single moment. But the water keeps moving long after the hand has fallen still. And she had thrown a very large stone. Somewhere beyond the first ripples, beyond the fear and blood and broken trees, people would have to reckon with what she had done. So would she.

That was the easy truth. The oath-sworn duty of an order that had existed long before her and would exist long after. She understood all of that cleanly and without resistance.

She straightened her back against the wall. The rope webbing beneath the thin mattress shifted and creaked under her weight. Venla watched the Captain go. Watched the lamplight catch the water spreading across the stone. The red water, finding the cracks, going where gravity told it to.

What she did not understand, had never understood, had been sitting with the not-understanding of it since the first time something came out of her hands that should not have come out of anyone's hands, was the why of the shape of it. Some people could heal. That was their gift, or curse, or whatever the right word it. Some put their hands on broken things and the breaking reversed itself. There was an old man in Arrowdale, who could find water underground... just find it, so simple and useful in the way that a good tool is useful.

Why can't it be something small and warm and useful? Why can't it light hearths and find water and close wounds?

Venla pressed her palms flat against her thighs.

Instead it was... whatever it was. Large and indiscriminate and hungry in ways she could not predict or properly name.
Instead it turned a deer into something that tried to kill Mina. Instead it tore a hole in the fabric of a place and left something twisted. Instead it was the kind of thing that made Helena look at her with that expression that was guilt and assessment in equal measure.

She had not come to Astenvale because she wanted this. Any of this. The cell was perhaps the most honest version of a conversation she had been having with herself for a long time, but she had not wanted the cell either...

She pressed the back of her head against the cold stone wall and closed her eyes and for a long moment she just sat with the absolute absurdity. The absurdity of being a woman who had pulled pints all her life and learned which regulars wanted their cups refilled, sitting was in a cell in the Knight's monastery and blood drying on her hands.

Why did it have to be so terrifying?

Red, grey, and black wash spilled out into a larger holding tank. Knights attending took sample into the beaker. Helena watched. How the ichor diffused. Spread. Plumed and swirled there in the anymphaeus solution. Grit her teeth to keep from screaming. Clasped the side of the tank as all her limbs twitched and seized with a tremble.

"Captain," a gentle probe of voice.

A dark curled strand fell from Helena's crown. Down into the effervescent nectar that congealed into the spreading cloud of cosmic red. As if it forced it all to hold its breath. Slow to stutter and crawl, instead of the wash and expansion it seemed so hungry for. The hair. The Captain's own. Sat atop the surface of that viscous shimmer of bubbling drink. The color of dreams. Cool blues that shimmered to jade and teal as turquoise.

A lone curl of that mess touched Helenas hair. And the hair bloomed. Cracked open and almost seemed to breath there in the Captain's eye. And she but watched it. Wide eyed and horror stricken. As the rumble of storm clouds born from moon sent winds roared in whispers and secrets. The lone curl of ebon hair went on splintering and breaking. Opening. Like the splintering cone of a conifer. It went on opening.

Pulsing and beating.

Sprouting. Until it was a person whole. Three eyed and terrible.

"Captain." Another probe.

Helena opened her eyes. And the swirling dark of Venla's blood still gathered there in the anymphaeus drink. Helena's hair still sat there. Stuck to the surface of the fizzing pool that was the blood's prison. Helena reached down and plucked it.

"Helena," Syr Cresen said once more. Hand upon the Captain's shoulder.


Two pairs of footfalls came then. A larger water basin there between them. A tray of healer's supplies there atop it. Fresh clothes too, folded and tucked about braced arms. They set the waterbasin down before the gate.

"Venla, this is Syr Arietta. She will be my second in getting you cleaned, and seeing to your wounds,"

"Lady Venla, I am at your service," the young noble bowed at the hip.

"We will now be entering," Helena said clearly. Unlocked the gate. Carried the wash basin in as Arrietta handled the door behind her. The gate locked once they were in. Both women knights were in plain clothes. Simple linen tunics and chausses guarded by wool aprons. Down went the washbasin. Easy.

First she would need be cleaned. Locally, where the wounds seemed deeper, and more threatened by infection, worse yet, blight. The tears wold be stitched up. Flesh that was too ragged, cut away, and made a cleaner wound before the suture work began.

"You are very strong, surviving as you did, Venla," Helena would say gently as she worked the needle through. Pulled the hook through to have Arietta cut the spare chord. "Not every weaver is so fortunate, when their power comes calling like a storm,"


"It must have been frightening," Arietta mused. "Alone against the blight, shroud untamed,"

The scrape of iron. The rattle of keys. Venla saw them enter without rising from the cot. For a moment her eyes lingered on the basin. The clean cloth. The healer's tools. Such ordinary things. A few hours ago she had stood in the center of a maelstrom while the world came apart around her.

It felt strange that the world still contained ordinary things. Venla watched the two women enter through half-lidded eyes. Then looked toward the folded clothes.

"Those are for me?"

She pushed herself slowly to her feet. Slowly she reached for the bloodstiff laces. Fabric had dried hard in places. Blood had glued sections of it to her skin. Peeling it away, a moth opening its cocoon. No embarrassment. No modesty. Just practicality. Blood had dried across her arms and neck in dark scales.

And there, immediately visible beneath the skin, was the blight. A net of dark veins. Black as spilled ink. Threading outward from the worst wounds. Branching and twisting like roots. Black corruption still leaking from the wounds, something inside her body seemed to reject it violently. One of the dark tendrils beneath her skin pulled backward several inches. A small bead of oily black fluid welled from the center of a rat bite on her forearm. It rolled down her wrist. Dropped into the floor. Another followed. Then another. Venla watched it happen with a strange detachment. As if it were happening to somebody else.

As Helena began her work, the needle biting through torn flesh, Venla's jaw tightened but little else. Her gaze drifted toward the narrow window. Toward the distant sky. To the cloth passed gently across scratches and punctures. Venla kept still through most of it. Only occasionally flinching when a deeper wound was disturbed.

It must have been frightening.

"It was" Venla admitted quietly as she stared down at one of the wounds while Helena worked. Black fluid welled briefly from beneath the skin before something deeper pushed it outward. "It was the most frightened I've ever been." Then something changed in her expression. It was the look of someone still trying to understand what she'd done.

"There were creatures everywhere by the end." A pause. "I remember thinking I was going to die. There were so many of them." Helena spoke of strength and survival, Venla's eyes remained fixed on the wall ahead. The stone blocks blurred slightly in her vision. “And then I remember wondering why I thought that.”

"It wasn't difficult." Venla continued staring at the wall. "The fear was difficult, yes."

A slow breath.

"But the creatures were not."

It had felt a bit like watching rain threaten a mountain. Destroying them had felt easy.

“I don't think the blighted creatures understood what was happening either,” she said quietly. “One moment they were hunting after Mina on the horse and hurting me.” Her fingers curled slightly. “The next…” She stopped her words ...it stopped being a fight.

The last of the black blight oozed out in thick, dying strands as the healing work forced it into retreat. Where it left her flesh behind, it was no longer something other than blood. Only injury. Only damage. Human, again.

“They came at me anyway,” she said. Like they didn’t understand the rules had changed. “I don’t think I was ever in danger.” And Venla was still learning how little effort it took.

Venla watched the black corruption on the floor. Watched it bubble. Change. Become something else. Something almost harmless. The sight unsettled her more than she expected. The thing had been inside her moments ago. In her blood. Truth be told, she was too tired to care much more. It was out of her. That was enough. And now it sat on the floor like a strange little mushroom trembling in the light. Green eyes lingered on it. Then slowly lifted toward Arietta as the woman harvested it with such care. The blight had turned dull and harmless under Arietta’s careful hands.

Helena’s words drifted over her like incense in a chapel, all color and spectrum and world-made-right, but Venla only felt tired and stared at the Captain for a moment. What in the abyss was she talking about? It felt like every person she had met since arriving at the monastery had spent half their life practicing how to say simple things in the most complicated way possible.

Maybe it was something in the water?

Or maybe everybody who spent enough time near magic eventually forgot how normal people talked? Her gaze drifted toward the narrow window. Toward the patch of morning sky visible beyond the bars. Tired and very, very done with this room. The healers had finished their work. Fresh bandages wrapped her arms, legs and ribs. The worst of the blood had been washed from her skin.

The world's spectrum must remain in harmonious balance lest the colors lose their meaning.

That sounded like the sort of thing a wizard said right before accidentally summoning a demon. Venla rubbed her forehead.
Just once, she wanted somebody to tell her plainly. You did this. This is why it happened. This is what comes next.

"I know I made a mess of things. What becomes of me now?” she asked. She needed to know whether she was leaving this place in chains, in shame, or at all...

You clean up your damn mess.

Fair enough.

She pushed herself up from the cot. Every muscle protested. The stitched wounds pulled, burned along her arms. Her body felt like something that had been dropped down a mountainside. Venla reached for the folded clothes and pulled the clean linen shirt over her head.

“I understand what that means.”

The fabric felt strange against freshly cleaned skin. Strange after all blood, dirt and fear. For a moment she simply focused on the mundane act of dressing. One arm. Then the other. Tying the cords. Pulling laces with sore fingers.

"I will answer for what happened in that glade," Venla said. "I'll clean up whatever mess can still be cleaned."

She exhaled slowly through her nose and looked down at the linen she had just tied properly around herself. Proper training as a condition for her freedom. The offer was not a gift but a condition. Measured. Tested. Interpreted. Kept until she could be understood well enough to be managed. The way her future was being spoken about as something The Captain of Dawn would approve before Venla was allowed to have it.

"I am grateful for what The Order has done." The words were sincere. "You are treating me far more kindly than I deserve after tonight." Her eyes met Helena's before her eyes flicked briefly to the barred window, the runes etched into stone. Then back to Helena.

“If you don’t yet understand what I am or what I can do…” She adjusted the sleeve of her linen shirt. “…how exactly are you planning to train me?” Venla would not be agreeing to be shaped by people who are still trying to understand whether she was a person or a problem. “I don’t mean that as an insult. But it is a practical concern.” Her fingers flexed once at her side, still remembering the sensation of the threads, the way reality had responded.

Her eyes didn't move from Helena's. No heat in them. Just a kind of tired recognition. Venla had men and woman explain the world to her that way her whole life. Small words, small pictures, because surely the girl pouring the ale can't hold anything bigger than that. "A drunk who wants his drink..." she said.

Names Venla hadn't thought of in months, surfaced now, uninvited, the way they did. She let them, didn't push them back down.

She thought of Hemma, who used to cry into her cup over a wife three years dead and never once raised her voice doing it. Thought of the miners who came down off the ridge smelling of rock-dust, men who got quieter the more they drank, until they were just shapes hunched over the bar. None of them had wanted more. Not really. They were wanting less. Less of whatever they'd carried in with them. The drink was just the only thing that ever made that quiet for a while...

Venla knew the difference. She'd poured for it long enough. But she didn't say any of that. What was the use?
A small, tired sigh slipped out of her.

Drunk with power.

Blood Magick.

Outlawed.

Venla was quiet for a while. Long enough that it stopped being a pause and became its own kind of answer.

She turned that over slowly. Not the strangeness of it, but the shape of it. What it meant, practically. Kingdoms didn't waste laws on things that didn't frighten them. Kingdoms didn't bother outlawing something unless it had already cost them something they couldn't get back.

Venla thought of the blood on her own hands that wasn't hers. She thought of Mina. "Mina," she said. "Is she alright?"

The ginger had spent her adult life reading rooms for a living. Knowing which men were two drinks from trouble and which were already past it. Knowing when to smile and pour slow, and when to get the broom. She read this room now. And what she read was: careful. She understood that whatever happened in the next few minutes, in this cell, with this woman, it mattered. More than it had a moment ago. The wrong word here wasn't just rudeness. It was evidence for the Captain.

“You have made yourself clear,” Venla said, voice controlled to the point of brittleness. "I'll train. However you want it done."

Recovering well.
Something in Venla's chest unknotted. She cleared her throat once, looked at the floor, looked back up. "That's good. Thank you." She held that. It was the only thing said in this room tonight that had mattered.

When the bravery was mentioned she said nothing. Looked at a point somewhere past Helena's shoulder. Bravery. As though she'd had a choice in it. As though there'd been a version of that night where she'd weighed the options and selected the noble one from the pile.

Come the dawn, Mistress Thiel.
"Captain"

She held Helena's gaze for a moment. Then Venla stepped back. Away from the gate. Giving ground that hadn't been asked for, and knowing she was giving it, and doing it anyway because she understood what position she was in. She watched them take everything with them when they left. They had cleaned the cell and left her standing in the middle of the result. Four walls and a lamp she didn't control. She didn't reach for anything.

Near door.
Far door.

She counted the steps without deciding to. Venla looked at the gate. Just looked at it for a while. The bars of it. The lock. The cell was six paces one way. She walked them. Five the other. She walked those too, the way an animal learns a new enclosure. The floor was stone and the walls were stone and the cold came up through the soles of her bare feet.

When the sound of boots had gone far enough she finally let herself put her back to the wall and slide down it to the floor. Venla looked at the ceiling. Stone. Old. Cracks running through it in long, settled lines that had been there longer than she'd been alive. A spider had started something ambitious in the far corner. At some point her back started to ache from the wall and her legs were cold. She looked at the cot against the far wall, then she moved toward it.

She lay down on it, stared up at the ceiling from this new angle... the same ceiling, then she put one arm across her eyes.

Breathed in.
Breathed out.

Her body was so heavy. Her mind kept moving anyway, small, anxious circles, the same thoughts covered again and again, wearing a groove in it. She exhaled slowly.

The cot was cold. The cell was cold. The thing inside her was almost nothing in here, just the faintest ember at the center of her, barely there, the nullcell pressing it down to almost silence. She listened to the old stone settling and the distant muffled theory of a world that was still out there, still moving, wholly unconcerned with what was happening to her in here.

Her eyes burned. Venla did not sleep for a long time. When she did, finally, it was more the absence of being awake. Her body taking what it needed.