Chapter Text
It did not start the way most fateful encounters in the Lands Between seemed to, with violence and blood. This encounter began with a laugh. Dainty almost, he’d say. Not hearty and full, but something polite, perhaps even compulsive, self-conscious. Certainly alien in Gurranq’s halls regardless, but not malicious. Had he and his brother not shared a soul, one may then have turned to the other to exchange wondering glances at the sound. Instead, they both felt a stir of intrigue in each other. No words need pass between them for both to know they each would ask the same thing: Who is here, and why?
The laugh was followed by an unfamiliar voice, one which did not belong to any of the other hunters the twins occasionally crossed paths with here. The tone was mild, amicable, the speaker clearly of noble bearing or hoping to appear to be. The notion of some pampered aristocrat come to make demands of Gurranq set Darian on edge before they even entered the Sanctuary. Gurranq was a servant of the Golden Order, seeking to repair broken Death. A somber and holy obligation requiring strength others sometimes coveted. This merry little whoever wouldn't be the first to look for Gurranq’s aid in their greedy quest to find some slice of power and acclaim in these quailing lands, and he surely wouldn’t be the last.
Only, as they neared, and the words spoken by these voices-one familiar, one foreign-became clearer, there were no demands made, no threat of punishment over refusal. “...made into a spirit summons, then?” asked the voice. They caught sight of the speaker easily. His clothing should have been garish. Instead they seemed more to Darian in that moment a balm on eyes trained on the bleak, harsh wilds of rot-bitten Caelid. Not unlike the pale, violet flower the young man held in his hand for Gurranq’s inspection.
“The grave violet,” Gurranq rumbled, “it blooms from death, true death, and holds the hex of the ghostflame.”
The man nodded as he wrote something quickly, as if to keep pace with Gurranq’s words. Recording them, Darian realized. At about that time, their approach was noticed. Not by the young man, but by Gurranq, who surely smelled the foul stench of deathroot on them. The great beast’s head snapped up from the flower, which may have been cloying enough to conceal the scent of deathroot at first. But they were too near now for that to matter.
“You have one,” Gurranq said. The young man stood and watched them approach. His friendly expression did not waver as his eyes found them. But Darian couldn’t spare any attention for him while still holding the wicked root which Gurranq so craved. “Give it to me, boy,” came the demand as Gurranq started forward, claws outstretched.
Darian reached into his pack, looking for the burlap parcel that held the filthy thing. Scarcely had he withdrawn his hand from the bag had Gurranq swept in and snatched the thing away. Darian was relieved, at least, that Gurranq hadn’t lead with his teeth. His manner seemed to worsen when he caught the scent of the deathroot. The noise of it being eaten was nearly as vile as its very existence. Gurranq became as one frenzied, flashing yellowed fangs and the dribble of fetid saliva. It was a sight and sound both Darian and Devin were well accustomed to by now, though it never became exactly pleasant. He felt Devin’s attention flicker to the aristocrat, gauging his reaction, and so Darian looked too.
Instead of anything reasonable, like disgust, fear, or a tight and polite expression of revulsion, the man looked on with curiosity, and then even ventured to ask, “Might I ask, what is it that you’ve given him?” His eyes shifted from Gurranq to the pair of them.
“Deathroot,” Devin answered. “A blight on these lands, harvested from infected tombs and the blasphemous Mariners themselves."
Gurranq gave a great, shuddering sigh, and the man’s attention returned to the beast as he lumbered away to his altar. It went like this often. When the root was devoured, Gurranq seemed to forget them for a space of time.
“Forgive me,” the man said suddenly, as if just realizing something. “I’ve failed to introduce myself. My name is Rogier.”
“Devin,” came the response from beside him. “This is my brother, Darian.” A hand on his shoulder, the clank of metal against metal, silver against gold.
“Your armor is truly something. I’ve never seen anything like it. Is it an heirloom of your house?”
Darian felt himself tense at the assumption. An heirloom! What heirloom would orphaned sons of the Northern Wilds bear but dirt on the soles of their feet and dried blood beneath their fingernails? But how could a stranger know anything about that? He could not even see their faces to gauge where they were from. For all he knew, they were born in the Lands Between, Grace-given and blessed instead of Tarnished and accursed.
Devin didn’t make it that far in his thoughts, and Darian could feel an acidic distaste for Rogier building in him. “No,” Darian answered before Devin could begin spitting his venom. “We are of no great house. There are none in the Northern Wilds which we hail from. It is a gift, bestowed upon us by the Golden Order for our service to them.”
Rogier nodded, disarming smile undeterred by Darian’s admission of what could only be seen as something lowly and wretched to a noble. But this one was full of surprises, it seemed, for he did not politely recuse himself of their company the way many others did upon finding this out about them. He did not turn his nose up at their admission of carrying the blood of a people seen as scarcely civilized by foreigners like him. “Oh! That's an interesting place. I read that in the winter, the night lasts all day, and vice versa in the summer. I can’t imagine, endless night and day for the span of a season. Is it true?”
Devin’s anger quickly shifted to intrigue and maybe something like cautious hope. “You are Tarnished?” Devin asked. It was obvious enough. The man’s eyes held no gold of in-born Grace, same as their own. His were pale green instead, the way glass looked after it had been burnished by an ungentle sea.
“Yes, from Eochaid once upon a time, but that’s hardly of importance now,” Rogier said, almost dismissive of his homeland in a way that Darian found off-putting. Perhaps it was easier to do when one wasn’t required to be defensive of his people, which he supposed anyone from lands that bore nobility never had to do.
Devin seemed to hardly care. He was far more absorbed in the fact that someone was speaking to them without disgust lacing their voice. Darian couldn’t help wondering if that would hold true once Rogier discovered more about what they were. But Devin was already hooked on the possibility, however frail, that someone, anyone, might have a kind word to trade with them in spite of everything. “I would be more than willing to tell you all that you wish to know of our home,” Devin said eagerly. “It is not often that anyone takes an interest in it, after all. And even less often that a friendly face passes this way. Let us divest ourselves of the day’s travel, first.”
Rogier’s smile broadened. “Fantastic! I’ll await your return here, then?” He gestured with a hand to one of the pews facing the altar where Gurranq now lay in his quiet meditation. In his other hand was the book he’d been scribbling furiously in, and the Grave Violet.
“Yes. Half an hour or so, I should think,” Devin said. Darian left with him for the upper vaults of the Sanctuary. Often, they and other hunters took their rest here. It was a safe place, where one did not need to fear for a sudden attack, or prowling beasts. And a bed was always more preferable than the cold, hard earth. In the past few years, the Sanctuary had become like a second home to them, as their first would always be in the rolling, open hills and quiet forests of the Wilds.
“Why did you do that?” Darian asked aloud as they shed themselves carefully of their armor. Recently cleansed after their bout with the Mariner, it did indeed seem like some relic of a house greater than either of them could claim kinship to. Gold and silver gleamed even in the meager, scarlet light that spilled through their windows.
Devin shook out his hair, raking his fingers through it. “It is as I said. Have you met anyone other than fellow Northerners who looked on us with anything other than contempt?”
“You think he will not do so when he sees that we are Cloven?” Twice cursed, the pair of them, but it suited Darian well enough. He had his brother. That served him better than any random fool he might meet on these highways. He desired nothing else. But while they shared a soul, their hearts were their own, and Devin’s was far, far more fragile. It was more unusual to be accepted than rejected, and Darian had done much to harden himself against that. Maybe that made it harder for Devin to do the same, since Darian bore the brunt of the scorn for him, when he could.
Devin’s tone became soft and sad and Darian immediately regretted arguing at all as his brother said, “I’ve never met a foreigner who deigned to read anything of our homeland that wasn’t some vile mistruth borne of condescension. And I do miss it. To speak of it with one who has never seen it would be like seeing it anew myself.”
Darian could withhold nothing from Devin. In the grand and sometimes sordid list of desires a man could have, an evening of regaling a stranger with fond memories of your home was not so awful a thing.
They made themselves as presentable as they knew how. They did not wear the fine raiment of lords and nobles. But neither did they wallow in rotting rags the way some of the more fanatical devotees of the Order did. Half-nude, clothing soiled, as though sparing a moment for anything other than reverence was itself a sin. The armor, though, was becoming more and more like a second skin, and he did feel strangely light without it. As though he may float away, untethered to the earth without its comforting weight. He knew in these halls he had nothing to fear in the way of danger, but still the possibility of it was ever buried in his mind like a splinter.
Rogier waited for them without sign of impatience. He was reading over something. A different book than the first he’d been carrying, Darian realized. The first had been a beaten up journal bound in leather. This was something like he’d seen in the ruins of some villages, or in Hold upon Gideon's many shelves. It was slim, hardcovered, blue, its pages yellowed but unfrayed.
He looked up on their approach, and here came another moment of truth. He did seem to double-take as he took in their faces, their sameness. But like some creature ordained by a petulant god to be as contrary to Darian’s specific expectations as possible, a curious, almost eager expression blossomed on Rogier’s face. “You are -!” and here he said a word that neither of them understood. It was, he realized abruptly, a word in the High Tongue, maybe some academic term for a soul born across two bodies. “That is, forgive me, I know there’s another word for it...” he waved a white-gloved hand as if to conjure said word from the air.
“Cloven,” Devin supplied. It was one of the less-rude ways to put it.
“This is terribly exciting, apologies, I scarcely meet Northeners, never met Cloven, and now in one day I meet both,” Rogier said, and he appeared genuinely thrilled about all of this.
Darian had no experience with such a reaction, and lacked an immediate, instinctive response other than a profound confusion. Maybe that’s why he said, “You’re a lunatic.”
Devin looked at him sharply, his thoughts plain to his brother. He may as well have been shouting it in Darian’s face: ‘We find the one person in the world who isn’t spitting at us and you insult him first chance you get!’
Rogier seemed a hard man to deter, though, as his smile did not falter. “I’ve been called worse,” he said with cheer and a shrug.
“What my brother means,” Devin said forcefully at first, eyes hard on Darian, “is that we are unused to such a positive, inquisitive reaction.”
That brought a confused expression briefly, before Rogier nodded his understanding. “I see. Well, I don’t suppose the word of a stranger you’ve only just met will mean much to you, but it’s not something that concerns me overmuch. Except...”
There was always something. Always an exception, a but, an ‘I really should say...’, and it was always followed with a condemnation or rebuke or chastisement, as though Darian and Devin had chosen to be what they were out of spite. Darian braced himself, debating whether to defer politely to whatever the man was about to say or to bite back against it in their defense.
“Well, would it be terribly rude of me to ask – can you really speak to each other without words?”
The tension he held did not dissipate, but clung to his chest in a stubborn sort of confusion, leaving him unable to answer. Devin did so, plenty eager to have someone understand what it was like, to be an object of interest and fascination rather than scorn and disgust. “Not as such." He took a seat across the aisle from Rogier. “It’s more like...a knowing. The way you know your own thoughts, we can sort of know each other’s, sometimes.”
“Amazing,” Rogier whispered, glancing between them. “And does aught effect that? Say, if you were in a cave and you at the top of a mountain? Is the earth between you as a barrier? Or what if you were leagues and leagues from each other? If one is asleep and the other-”
“One at a time!” Devin laughed. The sound always warmed Darian’s heart. Whether it was simply Devin’s own amusement filling his chest or his own joy at seeing his brother happy, he didn’t know. And upon drawing that laugh forth, without pretensions or ulterior motives, with simply the sheer force of his own naked curiosity, Rogier had begun to endear himself to Darian, whether either realized it or not. It was not something that happened often.
Darian took a seat behind Devin, always placing himself between danger and his brother. It was instinctive. Unlikely any assailant may come through the doors of this Sanctuary, but still his mind sought to fill those risky spaces. He mostly listened while the others spoke. Rogier asked question after question. Each answer Devin-and occasionally, Darian-yielded seemed never to satiate Rogier’s need to know more. They spoke of their bond first, the trials faced, how it worked, how it didn’t work, how it affected their lives.
Then they turned to tales of the Northern Wilds, and Darian’s heart ached for home as Devin described it. “We have conifers, evergreen no matter the season, dense old forests. They look beautiful laden with fresh snow. Not much in the way of the grandeur of other lands, but there is a certain comfort in simplicity.” Darian could picture it all easily in his mind: the untrammeled forests west of their village. The wooden homes with the thatch roofs. Their bedroom window which looked out to the woods, where sometimes, animals peered out from the shadows of the trees. White foxes, reindeer, speckled hawks, and owls.
“And the night and day cycles truly are distorted there? Given you are so near to the ends of the earth?” Rogier asked. His head rested against his knuckles, elbow against the back of the pew, eyes clear and focused as Devin answered, his attention never wavering the way one might if they were simply entertaining the conversation for politeness’ sake.
“I don’t know the reason for it,” Devin said. “But yes, it is so. And some nights, there is green fire in the sky. The Wild Hunt, we call it.”
“The Wild Hunt?”
“Outer gods tearing through the heavens,” Devin continued. “It is said, that if one were to whistle to them, they would be swept away to another world. Isn’t that right, Darian?”
“Sounds like something one fool child would say to scare another into behaving,” Darian answered. Because indeed, that’s exactly what it had been. When their mother took ill, and Darian was at his wits’ end trying to care both for her and Devin, that was what he’d snap at Devin. I’ll whistle to the Wild Hunt and they will come and take you!
“Have you siblings? Or any family back home?” Devin asked suddenly. He’d realized then that in all this time they’d spoken, neither of them had asked Rogier about himself. Neither one was particularly good with the mechanics of conversation with strangers. It was not a common enough occurrence in their lives for any set of rules to be learned and reinforced.
Rogier’s smile did not falter. But there was a certain change to it. Something Darian could not place entirely, though he did not take it for anything malicious. Caution, maybe. Or perhaps the one-sided nature of the conversation had been that way by design. “A mother, her consort. Nothing terribly interesting. I know of your brother, but have you any other family?”
“Our father left when we were born. Neither of us remember him, but heard he died when we were still young,” Devin said. While their people weren't warriors by nature after having left the battlefields of the Badlands behind centuries ago, the role was thrust on them now and again as the vicious people of Kaiden swept down from the mountains now and again. He'd likely fallen to one of their blades. “We were privileged enough to keep our mother for eight years, before illness took her.”
“I’m terribly sorry. That is a hard thing to bear at so young an age,” Rogier said. Darian knew not whether his sympathies were genuine, or if it was well-bred manners. The son of a woman important enough to have a consort as a husband would always be trained to give the right responses, after all.
“You are of a noble house in Eochaid?” Darian asked then, perhaps abruptly so. Darian knew nothing about the country, couldn’t even point to it on a map. His concerns growing up hadn’t been letters and politics, but food on a sparse table, protection for a frightened brother, meeting the endless demands of a harsh and unforgiving land.
“Yes. But I am Tarnished first and foremost now, I suppose,” Rogier said with his ever-pleasant tone. Darian wondered what it would take to make the man flustered, agitated, enraged. It had only been a few hours, but Darian was hard-pressed to picture Rogier as anything other than agreeable and smiling.
“Now it is my turn for a question,” Devin said and Darian braced, begged, warned, in fact. Still, he went unlistened to, which was hardly new. “Do you remember how you died?” Tarnished, who were revived by Grace, were not the same as Those Who Live in Death. Rebirth was not undeath, after all, certainly not a rebirth ordained by Marika herself. But it was hardly a polite thing to ask someone how they died.
“A little, yes,” Rogier answered softly. His smile was not nervous, but it was plain this was no topic he was interested in exploring. And who would be? Darian could remember their own deaths in the way one remembers a nightmare. It had been a vivid and indelible image in his mind upon reawakening, the smell of burning flesh, the cacophony of war cries and metal against metal, the searing agony of the blade spearing into the delicate organs behind his sternum, Devin's blood warming his hands, and that dread, the all-consuming dread of impending death. But then they’d been reborn and their deaths were but terrible memories they could not hope to forget.
“Do you remember anything of what came after?” Devin asked.
“That is blasphemous to ask,” Darian warned, shocked that his brother would speak the question aloud.
“I only wondered. What it may be like there, held within the Erdtree. Is it truly as peaceful as they say? Even now?” It was longing, not doubt, that Devin felt as he wondered these things, and so Darian’s temper quelled some. A longing for peace and comfort was no surprise, given the turbulent nature of their lives. The endless violence and deep terrors, the uncertainty of the disordered world.
“I’m sorry,” Rogier said gently. “I don’t remember anything. It’s not a subject I tend to dwell on, after all.” He gave a laugh much like the one Darian had first heard of him as he climbed the steps to the Sanctuary doors. Like a compulsive habit borne of a need to soothe flared tempers or awkward situations. “Would you tell me of the animals of the Northern Wilds? There was a book I read once which said a type of deer was quite valued by your people?”
“The reindeer, yes,” Devin said fondly, rambling as long as Rogier would listen, which turned out to be an extensive amount of time. The minutes stretched to hours, and Darian mostly listened as the other two spoke. He withheld further questions of Rogier, now that it seemed plain the man had little interest in divulging much about himself. It was always a polite, vague response followed by a distraction. The careful but precise deflections drove Darian to the conclusion that the man had something to hide. A conclusion Devin would have berated him for, called him paranoid and ridiculous. As if to defy him, Devin said, “It’s nearly dark. It will be dangerous to traverse Caelid now. You ought to stay here for the night.”
“Devin,” Darian said in a voice he hoped sounded mild while inside he was regretting his brother’s carelessness. “Rogier may have somewhere else he needs to be.” He may also be a Tarnished hunter, or some other more mundane flavor of violent. He could kill them both in their sleep for the fun of it, or be a sellsword for any number of factions seeking to dismantle the remnants of the Golden Order.
“And I prefer to see he gets there alive,” Devin said. “There is room for you here. A bed, even. This place used to have a full clergy, you know. Before the Rot took it. So it is truly no trouble.”
Darian said nothing. Because Devin was right. Caelid was dangerous enough in the daylight when you could see what was stalking you. It’d be a death sentence in the dark. Maybe that’d been the man’s game all the time. To distract them with talk until night fell so he could steal a safe place to-
His anxious thoughts welled into Devin, and Devin’s agitation welled back. Steal a safe place! Was he so merciless? Sufficiently chastened, Darian said, “No trouble at all.” Rogier was one man, and they were two. Should he truly be a threat, they would end him, and be doing the world a favor. But should he be honest, and they turn him away out into the hostility of the Caelid night, it would be like putting the blade to an innocent throat with their own hands.
“Well, if that is the case, I won’t deny your hospitality.”
“Maybe in the morning, you can tell us of Eochaid,” Darian said, unable to dredge up any real enthusiasm in the wake of his internal struggle between a need to protect Devin and the desire to walk a gracious path. It was petulant, perhaps, to take it out on Rogier. But it was fair that they should be given some information about the stranger taking up space in their home.
“Of course,” Rogier answered. He gathered his pair of books and the pack at his feet. The sword belt he’d removed before even Darian and Devin had returned, likely to show Gurranq he meant no harm. And the hat which marked him a heretic in sorcerous practices, which gave Darian cause to wonder: what else may the man hold such dangerous views on?