Speak No Evil

24 comics.
by on July 17, 2019 at 12:00 am
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Birth of The Mute

Warning: Contains talk of physical abuse

“Shit, they really got most of it, eh?”

Blueten sat, quivering, on a rickety stool in what appeared to be a small washroom made of rotted wood. The voice had come from a short stocky sylvari looming above her, roughly clawing her mouth open and moving her jaw side to side for a better look. There was a taller more gangly looking one just beside them, peering cautiously down at her. She squirmed and tightened her grip on the stool’s edges as the sylvari continued to pry.

“Ain’t much of a tongue at all. S’plains why she ain’t talkin’. Think it’ll grow back?” The stockier one continued in a sort’ve bemused grumble.

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by on July 17, 2019 at 12:05 am
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Birth of The Mute

Warning: Contains talk of physical abuse

“Don’t be so damn rough with her, Zed.” A small slender sylvari spoke cooly from over by the sink. Her voice was casual, but carried a note of authority that made the stockier plant move their hands back in a heartbeat. Blueten let go of the stool to caress her stinging jaw. It wasn’t the worst she’d been through, but hurt was hurt.

The slender sylvari leaned back on the sink, playing idly with a petal from her hair – a bed of roses. “Meritt? How’s it lookin’?”

“I, uh, n-not good.” The tall gangly one. “I don’t think that’ll grow. Poison, I think.”

“Thought as much. Damned Nightmare weeds.” The rose sylvari sighed. “ Aight, give her a good cleanin’, patch her up, and give her back her mask.”

The two sylvari standing above her moved back then, and Blueten felt a hand on her shoulder as the rose sylvari came into view. She could smell the thick sweet scent of roses, saw the easygoing smile on the sylvari’s face. They were missing an eye, its empty socket hidden behind a black patch of fabric.

“Aight, sweetheart, yer safe now. Dont’chu worry ‘bout nothin’. Welcome to the Wychmire Daggers. You can call me Baya.”

That was the day Blueten joined the guild.

It wasn’t long after they started calling her “The Mute.” She didn’t bother telling them her name, though she could have. She didn’t bother telling them much of anything at all.

No, Blueten had already learned the hard way what that led to. She seemed to have something of a knack for just… knowing things she perhaps shouldn’t, and being perhaps too honest about it. It was something she’d always struggled with, her uncanny ability to read people. At first, as a young sapling, she thought it was just her race’s natural empathy she was experiencing, but it proved more than that. She would look at someone, the way they walked, talked, held themselves around others, and she could just see things about them. They were fairly obvious to her, but to her surprise, not so to anyone else. Even more to her surprise, other sylvari didn’t always want to know what she saw.

It was with this sort of constant social blunder that she found herself in trouble with the Nightmare Court. Though perhaps it was more accurate to say the trouble started when they found her walking alone at night, stole her off the road and stuffed her in a cage of vines and thorns. Regardless, her unwelcome stay with them might’ve gone smoother had she kept her mouth shut.

“You always turn aggressive when your size is mentioned. Do you not like your size?” She told one particularly small captor.

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by on July 17, 2019 at 12:10 am
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Birth of The Mute

Warning: Contains talk of physical abuse

“Your friends only tell you you’re beautiful because you scare them. One of them even grabs for her sword every time you talk to her.” She told another.

“Oh, how interesting. You joined the Court because you have a fear of intimacy? I suppose this is the place for shallow relationships.”

“That one won’t turn, you know. Nothing you’ve done is getting to him, and I can tell you know this. Were you lovers once? That must really bother you.”

And of course, her last truly spoken words.

“Does everyone here have Mother issues?”

She’d been getting on their nerves from the day they imprisoned her, but those were the words that crossed the line and found her where she was now: battered, overtly-cautious …and missing most of her tongue.

It took two cuts, one to open up her left cheek, and the other to get most of her tongue. The cuts had been surprisingly clean, though her face swelled for days after. The Court feigned disgust at the sight of her, though both she and they knew they’d seen far worse. A rather vocally “disgusted” courtier tossed her a plank of wood to cover up with.

“No one wants to see your gross face.”

It’s what she wore now: a barrier between the world and she, carved into a misshapen mask from jagged bones she’d found in her cell. The mask was her sole comfort at times, an unfortunate coping mechanism she’d come to rely on. When she wore it, the world couldn’t see her anymore, couldn’t hurt her anymore. That was enough.

She still saw too much though, this part did not change, and when the Daggers swept through the camp, stealing her with them into the night… it was only a matter of time before she started seeing too much in them too.

And she did.

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by on July 20, 2019 at 12:00 am
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Blueberries

Warning: Contains talk of abuse

Someone kept leaving a bowl of blueberries outside Blueten’s door. She didn’t notice until her second week with the Daggers though. The first week was more a blur, clouded by the residual feelings of fear she had from being with the Court. She hid in a room in Baya’s home just under the stairs, refusing to come out. If the blueberries started then, she hadn’t seen it or didn’t remember it at least. She didn’t even remember the other rescues that the guild brought along with her. By the time she felt comfortable enough to leave her room, they’d all left to their original homes. She was the only one left. That’s when she noticed the blueberries.

Usually left in a bowl, but sometimes a small sack, she kept finding them just outside her door in the early hours of the morning. She never saw who put them there, nor heard them do it. One time Meritt, a tall gangly plant with a mushroom top, caught her picking a bowl of them off the floor and he laughed.

“So you get them too?” He showed her his own bowl, shaking a little like he always did. “It’s usually blueberries, but sometimes I get glasses of melon juice or like, c-crab legs? I used to think it was Baya who um, left em here, but she said she didn’t… i-it’s definitely someone in the guild but I’ve never seen em. D-Darach, maybe?”

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by on July 20, 2019 at 12:05 am
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Blueberries

Warning: Contains talk of abuse

Blueten slowly shook her head at that. Darach was Baya’s husband, and a hefty tower of a plant. She remembered enough of him during her first week to know you always heard him walk – he stomped. They’d have heard him.

“N-No?” Meritt chuckled. “Well whoever they are, I think they also keep the storage box filled s-so that’s nice. Don’t tell anyone but um, Baya gets kinda cranky if it’s empty. It is her house I guess…”

It was her house, and Blueten and Meritt were permanent guests in it. The home had several empty rooms available for any member to stay in if they felt they had nowhere to go. Blueten didn’t, not the way she was now. Meritt was likely the same. She figured he was a Nightmare Court rescue too, judging by how he moved: always shaking, flinching at small sounds, and giving cautious glances like he was anticipating an attack. Meritt jittered with an anxious energy -it was a look she was familiar with. She imagined she looked the same when her mask was off. Meritt would know, he was one of the only few who’d seen it.

Blueten looked at Meritt’s quivering bowl of blueberries, then her own, and carefully placed one into her mouth.

She tried not to worry about them after that, and spent the rest of her second week exploring the house. Meritt often accompanied her, a faithful shadow that hadn’t really left her side since she first arrived. He was her personal guide and medic of a sort. It was Meritt who regularly cleaned her wounds, made sure she ate… She didn’t mind, if anything she’d gotten too used to him, barely noticing his presence as she traversed Baya’s peculiar home.

And it very much was a peculiar home –  a three floored wooden construct rotting apart out in the middle of the Wychmire Swamp. It was an odd residence for a sylvari, and signs pointed to it belonging to someone else long before – a human perhaps. It begged for exploration, but…

“Oh! Oh no! D-Don’t climb that!” Meritt cried after her when she attempted to climb the rickety staircase to the upper floor. “Baya and Darach sleep up there! You’re not allowed up there – no one but Baya and Darach are!”

“Oh no, p-please don’t touch that!” Meritt cried again when Blueten attempted to pry open a latch leading to the basement. She couldn’t open it anyway. It was locked. “You can’t go down there! N-No one goes down there.”

Apparently it was also Meritt’s job to make sure she didn’t go anywhere she wasn’t supposed to. She’d have resented him for it if he wasn’t so friendly.

“You really should just stick to the main floor.”

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by on July 20, 2019 at 12:10 am
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Blueberries

Warning: Contains talk of abuse

So she did, though she never felt she got a good justification for why the upstairs and basement were off limits. The basement especially, with its strange latch entrance almost hidden behind the main floor’s dining table. What was it hiding? She never did like questions without proper answers. Mysteries were things that begged to be solved. She wanted to know what was upstairs and what was in the basement.

She wanted to know who kept leaving her blueberries.

If the house’s mysteries were out, she could at least solve that.

So by the third week Blueten moved on from exploring the house, and proceeded to observe the guild mates who passed in and out of it. Not including herself, there were 17 members total, all Soundless (she supposed it made the thieving easier). They came and went through the house like passing tides. There could be as few as three members in the house at any time to a full house. Sometimes members slept over, came in at odd hours, or just passed through. Baya’s house, it seemed, acted as their headquarters of sorts, and the only times they really were all there were for planning raids or coming back from them to split their spoils.

Whoever was leaving the blueberries would have to be someone among them who regularly passed through the house in the early morning. The top suspects were the ones who actually lived there but… Aside from her and Meritt, there was only Baya and her husband. Darach was too loud not to be caught, and Meritt was just as bad. Besides, he seemed too honest to lie about it. Was it Baya after all? She said it wasn’t. Did she lie?

Blueten tried to catch whoever it was in the act a couple times, but the best she caught was a glimpse of someone’s coat as they left the house. They were gone by the time she got outside. She was disappointed, but it did give her a solid hint: it wasn’t someone who lived in the house.

That left quite a lot of members, and she quickly discovered that they were all rescues of a kind. They’d either lost something: homes, families, jobs, or had otherwise been hurt. She saw it in the way some shrunk, tried to be invisible, and others grew larger, lashing out at others as if to make up for some insecurity or another. Meritt was always eager to tell her what he knew of each member, but she often knew before he told her or saw more than he did.

Claws had a mechanical arm he frequently tinkered with to replace his lost one, he must’ve been an engineer before; Onora was powerful but super defensive, showing signs of coming from a broken home; Needles had a gambling addiction, she talked like she was stuck in debt; Bogs was abandoned, frequently panicked at not being included; And Sheridan…

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by on July 20, 2019 at 12:20 am
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Blueberries

Warning: Contains talk of abuse

“They’re a Nightmare Court rescue, like us.”

They’d rescued them too late. The gaunt plant was unnaturally still and wide-eyed – one push away from turning to Nightmare, she knew the look. She wondered if anyone noticed. Did Meritt notice? Judging by the worried looks he cast at Sheridan, she gathered he did.

Definitely not the one leaving blueberries.

In fact, it didn’t take long for her to feel quite comfortable in cutting out many of the members as potential blueberry-leaving candidates. By her fourth week there, she realized there was a hierarchy among them, with the louder or more powerful members lording over those who were deemed weaker. They’d bully them, harass them, or make them do grunt work like cleaning their tools or clothes. The louder ones simply didn’t seem the type, and the quieter ones…

The most notable one was Pepper, a young sylvari whose right-side of his face looked utterly mangled with one eye completely missing. He was for the most part easy to read: another case of a broken home, likely neglected and made to feel small. The scar on his face though, the damage looked like the result of daggers and poison -the kind of poison the Court used on her… She pointed him out to Meritt once, then pointed to her right eye as a question. He caught on.

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by on July 20, 2019 at 12:25 am
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Blueberries

Warning: Contains talk of abuse

“We uh, don’t know what happened to him actually. He was gone a bit, then he came back like that. Baya said he took on a camp by himself. I’m guessing it was his rite of passage? I kinda thought he did that already though. He’s been here longer than me.”

Blueten waited for him to explain.

“Everyone has to go through a rite of passage to be here” Meritt informed her. “You have to prove you’re tough enough to handle being a Dagger. When I joined, Birr once um… he uh, stole my clothes and tied it up in a tree south of here. I had to uh, w-wade through the swamp full of wild skelk naked to get em back…”

Blueten only stared at him, horrified when he told her.

“H-Hey, it’s better than Nightmare Court though, right?”

She wasn’t so sure.

And this was something that started to bother her. More than the upstairs and basement being off limits, more than her silly search for someone leaving bowls of blueberries… This guild had a lot of abuse in it. A mess of hurt sylvari taking out that hurt on others until they too started hurting people. A never ending cycle of abuse. She’d seen it before, from behind bars of thorny vines.

The guild members were all quick to try and sell her on their guild mission though. For whatever it was worth, they really did think they were doing good for the sylvari race. They were adamant about stealing only from Nightmare Court and… foreigners, especially asura. The former made sense to her but the latter?

“Baya likes to mention their wrongs toward sylvari a lot. I don’t know.” Meritt told her when she gave him a concerned look over it. “I think she um, you know when the asura kidnapped a bunch of us? No one knows for sure, but we think Baya may be second generation…so…”

That explained some things, but not all. Baya definitely seemed older, but was otherwise unreadable. She wore a casual grin that revealed nothing, rarely said anything that’d betray something too personal, and moved in a way that seemed lax but was clearly practiced. Baya gave nothing away about herself, and Meritt had little to offer on where she came from or who she was beyond meagre rumours.

She was intriguing, commanding a presence whenever she entered the room. More than their leader, she was the guild star, a powerful force of wit that charmed every member. Baya always appeared calm, and ready to give a quick joke or to entertain with her latest stories. Yet there was something off about her, false in a way. Her behaviour was too precise, too practiced… every word she gave felt empty. No one seemed to notice.

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by on July 20, 2019 at 12:30 am
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Blueberries

Warning: Contains talk of abuse

Baya was suspicious. Her whole guild was suspicious, but by the fifth week, Blueten didn’t have time to dwell on it. It seemed her own “rite of passage” had finally come, in the form of Birr, a rather portly and greasy sylvari with a bulbous nose and a constant smirk. Her initial profile of him was a plant with a major insecurity about his looks that resulted in a preoccupation with everyone else’s. He was quick to shout unwanted appraisals on appearances, make lewd inappropriate comments, or otherwise be rude. The only person he seemed to be truly kind to was Baya, whom he praised for her beauty.

It was perhaps no surprise then that he eventually targeted Blueten for hiding her looks behind a mask. He was relentless about seeing her without it, harassing her whenever he saw her -nagging, pleading, and even raging to see her without her wooden barrier. Eventually, to the cheers of others, he tried to remove it by force.

She left him dangling from the ceiling, with a small flock of minions she’d summoned tying his clothes around the rafters. That’s when they found out she was a necromancer. It was also when they discovered she could talk, using her minions to speak for her.

“Do not touch me.”

She found a jar of nectar by her door the next day.

It didn’t seem to matter who left it anymore. She was so tired.

Whoever left it must’ve been impressed, and they weren’t the only one. Meritt gave her looks of awe and was eager to have full conversations now that he knew she could talk. Most members gave her a lot of space, giving her uneasy looks as she passed them. And then there was Baya…

“You’ve a talent that’s wastin’, eh? Why aint’cha raidin’ with us?”

So she did, though in truth she wasn’t sure about it. Part of her wanted to give the guild a chance though, despite all their flaws. Maybe this was it. Maybe she just needed to really see them at work.

Her first raid was against a small camp of Nightmare Court, but she made a point to only observe. She didn’t steal a single thing, only acting to fight if they alerted a guard or a Nightmare hound. It wasn’t particularly difficult. It was even relieving in a way, and she secretly wished the guild did more than steal. How stress relieving it would be to wipe out every Courtier onsite.

Then they returned to headquarters, and gathered in the main room around the one dining table. Blueten found herself huddled among the weaker members who all looked very nervous. This was her first time taking part, but she’d seen this ritual before. Each member would go up to the table and drop what they stole on it.

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by on July 20, 2019 at 12:35 am
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Blueberries

Warning: Contains talk of abuse

It was a moment of judgement, to see who’d stolen the most. She was hardly concerned, she already knew she stole nothing, but the members beside her looked ashamed. Even Meritt, who stood beside her, looked worried.

Just before they could start the ritual in earnest though, Blueten felt herself get shoved aside as a short plant, roughly the same height as her, tumbled his way through the gathering of weaker members. He tripped and fell to the ground, dropping a small bag. The louder members laughed and sneered as he hastily grabbed the bag and picked himself off the floor. She stared, wide-eyed. Who was this?

“Real smooth, Tora!”

“He does this every fuckin’ time…”

“D’ya even look where ya goin’?!”

Face flushed and head bowed, Tora silently made his way to Baya’s side. Blueten watched him  as Baya started the ritual. She couldn’t recall him at all, yet it felt like she must have seen him at least once but… there were 17 members, she’d counted. She looked around again, counted them off by name: Claws, Onora, Birr, Ebril, Meritt, Shade… 18. There were 18 members.

Her pockets felt heavier.

As member after member poured their spoils onto the table, she cautiously searched her pockets. Six gold. She hadn’t stolen six gold. She looked up as the members around her started taking their turns. Each one came back from the table looking relieved, including Meritt. He came up to Blueten, placed a hand on her shoulder, and laughed.

“I always think I’ve stolen less than I have. It’s your turn, Mute!”

Confused, she walked up to the table and slowly dropped the six gold coins onto its rough surface. Six coins she shouldn’t have had. Her mind was racing. The guild cheered, but she barely registered it.

“Pretty good fer a first go!”

“Six gold? Not bad at all!”

She walked back to Meritt’s side, mind spinning faster and faster. Why did she have six gold? She hadn’t stolen six gold! Where did the six gold come from?! A loud yell snapped her out of it.

“YOU DIDN’T STEAL ANYTHING?! AGAIN?!”

Blueten spun around to see Claws snarling at Tora. He’d shrunken behind Baya, but was smiling. It was a copy of Baya’s smile, she realized, except far weaker -it didn’t hide his feelings at all. He was panicking. Did anyone notice?

“Yer so fuckin’ useless! What kinda thief are ya?” Spat another.

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