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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