first walk middy

You wake up strewn across a soft, plush rug in a quiet place that smells like old books and magical residue. It’s still as dark as ever, but you’re used to that. You’re blind, after all, and the only sight that comes to you comes from what you can feel and hear. Right now, you hear silence, and the ticking of a clock somewhere in the background. No one is here right now. This rug feels royal blue and ornate. Hand-woven.

Your leg hurts, intensely, but somehow it also feels numb. Your muscles refuse to cooperate with you, and you’re left lying there, on the plush rug. Something hot, warm and wet is pooling underneath you. It feels red and sticky. It’s blood. Your blood.

Now, in the quiet, you remember where you were and what you were doing.

You had hit the big time when the queen of Kaldraixen fell for you even after you tried to rob her blind. She pitied you for your blindness and invited you into her home, and pity soon turned to affection. You heard it in her voice and felt it in her touch. You almost couldn’t tell her you already had a child, a little girl who now lived with her father on the border between the dangerous badlands of Xiyaotl and the lush jungles of Elpis. It was an ordeal, blind as you were, to even get to the lands where the Naga lived to see them, but you made the journey often despite your obligations to your thieves’ clan and your friends. And yourself.

When the queen started acting funny, you needed space. You felt the dampness of swamps and the darkness of black leylines starting to form in Kaldraixen. You didn’t know why it was happening, but you’d grown fond of this stupid bat and you didn’t like the road she was walking. And you wondered, if it was happening here, was it happening in other countries?

Your first instinct was to travel to that border. You needed to know your daughter was alright.

You snuck through riots in Invictus, feeling the eyes of angels on you and praying that you would be allowed to pass in silence. It worried you, because you knew the routines there were stringent and heirarchal. You smelled blood near the burrows of Glasbryn, and you grew even more worried. It was as if you could feel the ambition, the tension, the murders and the violence. The Loup were the same, wary of you and solitary. But they guided you through the woods as they always did.

There was a familiar feeling on the air as you approached the border to Elpis. It felt blue, like magic. The leader here was always wary of magic, you knew from the meetings you eavesdropped on. He was touched very little by it, didn’t know it, didn’t trust it. If he had been given time, maybe he could know that it isn’t always used for artifice and civilization. But to have it dropped on him suddenly, it could lead to a disaster until he adjusted.

You grew hasty and impatient. You stopped paying attention to what was around you, until the moment the ground trembled to your immediate left.

The hydra was on you just as soon as you felt it coming. Eight massive roars punctuated the feeling of a ninth head biting down on your weak leg. All you could do was try to cling to a tree nearby as it pulled back up. Most of you got away. Your leg didn’t. Now, you were left lying helpless, nothing but prey for a tremendous monstrosity.

It bit down again, and all you could think about was your daughter, her father. The queen and how you’d never know what was wrong with her. You’d never know what was wrong with the world itself. You were prey. That was how it would end.

In the heat of the moment, you felt the hydra’s jaws disappear from around you. You didn’t know where you were, but you latched on to the brightest beacon you could feel. It was a cool, soothing blue, and powerful. It felt like it reached into your mind directly and beckoned you toward it.

The next thing you knew, you were here, bleeding on someone’s floor.

It’s better than dying lost and alone in the jungles, you suppose. Bled out on someone’s carpet is way better than being lunch. You don’t know how you got here and you’re too tired to question it. Your only regret is that you’ll never see your child again, and she’ll never see you. The leylines will be a mystery that someone else will have to solve.

Your mind grows hazy, but you swear you feel that cool, soothing blue tear through the air in a whorl of magic. You feel someone in your mind.

You feel ocean air and sea salt. Freshly calloused hands and the beginnings of toned muscles. You feel a love of puzzles that begets dangerous instability of the eldritch kind. You feel the law of a land you’ve never been to made flesh on front of you, you feel the faint scars of torture long past, and you feel the regret and sadness and pain of a lost friend, or maybe lover.

You hear breathing.

Someone is here with you.

Someone is staring at you in stunned silence.

What will you do now?