(The Mute is Legion’s character Blueten. I asked him ages ago if I could use her for the role and after explaining, he responded by putting a wooden mask on her. I took that to mean “Yes.”)
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on March 16, 2019
at 12:00 am
on March 23, 2019
at 12:00 am
Today’s page was colored by @syankora who’ll be helping me color pages from now on! Thanks Syan! You did a fantastic job!!
on May 4, 2019
at 12:00 am
It’s fine.
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.
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.
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.
