See the sweet Mousie care for her babes,
Sometimes with much love and sometimes with much pain.
The weak and the scared she holds safe and warm,
The loud and the careless she sternly warns.
The meek and the timid grow strong under her hands,
But a sharp nip puts to rest all rebellious demands.
-From Mutt’s writings.
I’m not much in Radasanth these days. I’m Unfounded’s swiftest messenger, and as we rebuild from the war, our communications across Corone are vital. Most days I wake up in one town and am in another town by dusk. It’s a little lonely, but the times I get to spend with everyone from all over the organization make it worthwhile.
Radasanth will always be home; I’ve put too much into it and it’s put too much into me. If I’m within a hundred miles of the city and nothing is urgently keeping me away, I come back, walk its streets, blend with its people. I go to the tiny little apartment that has been mine for the past forty years and I seek out my favorite taverns to remind myself why they do or do not deserve my patronage.
I want to be buried here, in the quiet little corner of heaven’s hell that has become the final place for so many of the people I have ever cared about. The life I live is far from safe; that day may come sooner than later. I won’t complain when it happens, but I’m not ready for it yet, for so many reasons.
One of those reasons is a girl I know only as Monsoon. She’s new to Unfounded, recruited by Diamond Knave only about two years ago. It’s hard to tell a human’s age; they’re here and gone so quickly that there’s no keeping track of them. They just go from birth to childhood to youth to adulthood to old age to their grave in the span of a few breaths, leaving a gaping, silent hole in their wake.
I think Monsoon is eighteen or nineteen. When I first met her, she was a scrawny sub-adult with a chip on her shoulder. These days she’s a strong young adult with an even bigger chip on her shoulder. Knave tends to foster those, and has since his father’s death a few years ago. She’s a very strong fighter, out of control to the point that she broke Silver’s ankle in a spar since the last time I was here.
Splinter, Unfounded’s leader, won’t stand for the lack of discipline. There have been calls from among the higher leadership to cut her loose, take the safety net of the organization away from her. Kicking an Unfoundling back out to the curb is not an action we take lightly; how do you disown your children?
As one of two founding members of the organization, I’d been summoned back for the discussion, and was one of the more fervent advocates to rehabilitate her. We’ve only kicked two members out in the last half century, one for treachery and one for killing another Unfoundling. While Monsoon’s violations could get that serious, I think she’s currently just a kid seeing how far the limitations go. Stars know I did some stupid shit when I was young. Stars know Knave did, and Splinter, and Rainbow, and every kid I’ve known who managed to make it to adulthood.
So here I am on this drizzly night, walking up the stairs to the Citadel.
“I thought we did all our sparring in the old warehouse?” Tanned hands wove a lazy braid into dark brown hair. Eyes gray as molten mythril probed my face. It was a valid question, really. We don’t usually put ourselves out in the open streets like this; as the city’s dirt, we belong under rugs and out of sight. But not tonight.
“We aren’t sparring, Monsoon. I’m taking you on to train as a courier. Sometimes while running, you’ll get waylaid, and you need to learn that the things you learn in a spar don’t mean shit when you’re ambushed.”
A blase scoff. “You’re going to ambush me? You? No offense, Mongrel, but you’re a twiggy little elf. There’s no way you’ll last through one hit of my chains. And really, I’m a brawler. I wanna go mess up some faces. Maybe find them Scara Scourges who’ve been poking into our streets and teach ‘em not to mess with Unfounded! I don’t want to go traipsing through the woods like some...some merry elf. No offense.”
I try to suppress my smirk, only with partial success. “Sometimes the quiet brings wisdom. You’ve been severely lacking in that, Monsoon. You don’t really have a choice, here. We discussed your situation among the entirety of our leadership, and your fate is decided, at least for the next few years. Splinter, Knave, Rainbow and I all agreed that for your own good, you’re leaving Knave’s locals and becoming one of my runners. If you don’t like that enough to leave, you are more than welcome to. But there would be consequences to walking away in a fit of attitude.”
The young woman scowled, shrugging her shoulders and rattling the chains she carried over her black tunic. Unfoundlings are chosen carefully, so only a handful have ever left the group. One left because he had an opportunity he could no more pass up than a caged bird could resist the open sky. Another left because she wanted different for her children than a life of crime. A few others had left in fits of pique, and they were no longer welcome at our safe houses or our card tables. Unfounded becomes much of our world when we join, our family, our friends, our home. Could a girl so young throw that away simply because she wasn’t getting what she wanted?
“It’s not like I meant to break her leg,” she grumbled. “Why should I be punished?”
“Because you did mean to break her leg, and refused to get her help before the others found her. What you did was callous and cruel, and this punishment is mild compared to what you deserve. You will take it or you will face worse consequences. Am I utter clear?”
She grumbled at me, but kept stomping up the ziggurat’s steps.
An Ai’Brone monk greeted us when we entered the Citadel, and when I requested a room, he led us to one. It expanded into endless whiteness, and Monsoon started unwrapping the chains around her slender body as soon as the door closed. “Are you seriously gonna ambush me in this? ‘Cuz, you know, you kinda stick out.”
The room rippled and I stepped back, pulling my daggers. The first thing to change was the room’s smell. It went from dead and sterile to the must of bloodoaks and the bite of scrawny pines. The light dimmed, old trees and new saplings faded in. The unassuming white underfoot became dirt and loam, fallen leaves and beetle husks. The light that came from all corners became dappled murk.
“...oh shit.”
My steps away took me behind a tree, out of her sight. Monsoon was a city girl through and through; the woods she didn’t know would devour her on their own if I let them. That would be a later lesson. This lesson was about pain.
Chains sailed through the air on the other side of the tree, singing their song of brutality. Faster and faster they went, harder and harder. Anything caught in her whorl of violence would be relentlessly pummelled; it was from her fighting style she was given her name.
But she had yet to use it practically.
Hardly reaching out to steady myself with my hands, I ran up the gnarled vermillion trunk until I reached a branch. She was striking blindly, expending energy she only thought she had in abundance. I knew that fear, the fear of the monsters that might pop up out of the darkness. The fear that if she didn’t prove herself, she’d be condemned to the darkness forever. I couldn’t nurture that fear.
I watched the rhythm of her swings, and when I saw my opening, I dropped. An iron link caught my shoulder on the way down, sending me a little off course, but I landed within the safe zone, where she couldn’t strike as hard or effectively.
She was also right in my kill zone.
Iron sharp as razors flashed and flew, opening up sheer fabric and soft flesh. Leaves and sticks crunched and cracked beneath our feet as she stumbled and ran backward to avoid me. She was neither quick nor deft enough to get out of my effective range and put me into hers. Sure, her chains bounced from my body, bruising down to bone, but they couldn’t get enough momentum to shred skin and maul muscle. Meanwhile, her blood cascaded from her arms, her sides, her legs, her flanks. If she left an opening, I punished it. The crisp woodland air breathed metallic in our wake, in her agony.
Screams of rage and pain, furious and desperate blows slowed to sobs of terror and weak flicks as the life drained out of her. The fight lasted less than a minute before she collapsed, curled up as tight as she could.
“NO! Stop, please! Stop! Mommy! MOMMY!”
While that would never save her in a real fight, I stopped. She’d had enough. We could work more later; she had learned she wasn’t as invincible as she’d thought.
I knelt beside her, she flinched when I stroked her hair. “You have a lot to learn about a lot of things. And I will teach you. For now, the exit’s about thirty feet that way. The monks will clean you up.”
She sobbed into a pile of leaves, broken. “I can’t, I can’t…”
“There may come a day when you either will push yourself harder and farther than this or you will die. Silver had to crawl for help while injured, now it’s your turn. I will guide you if you need it, but I will not carry you. Get up, Monsoon.” She struggled, but pushed halfway to her feet and started stumbling in the direction of the exit.
I sighed, standing up and checking for any particularly bad injuries. Nothing that wouldn’t heal on its own. I started my own journey for the door, my own journey for the next two or three years that would see Monsoon grow or wither under my tutelage. Would her foibles be something she could grow beyond? Would mine not stop her from reaching her full potential? The journey would not be easy for either of us, that I knew.
On my way out, I tripped over a root and kicked something free. Kneeling, I picked it up and held it up to the dim light that filtered through the slowly-fading woods.
“What?”
Originally Posted by OOC
Akiv has left an item in the Citadel. Who knows where it might show up? Post the story of your character finding it, and I'll choose one person to receive it and let you know what it isFor the sake of moving this along. This contest will last only 24 hours! Have fun!
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