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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