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Caledon Forest

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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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by on July 20, 2019 at 12:40 am
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Blueberries

Warning: Contains talk of abuse

“Bayaaa why do you keep him? Honestly…”

“It’s like this every time! One gold or nothing! EVERY TIME!”

Several of them started shouting, enraged, until Baya made a motion for them to stop.

“We’re done here. Meritt, I want this counted and split proper by morning.”

“O-Of course!” Meritt rushed off to the table.

The rest of the guild grumbled and whined but did as they were told, slowly dispersing. All but Blueten who stood still where she was, staring intently at Tora as he began to follow Baya away from the table.

Tora the 18th member.

Tora who hadn’t stolen anything.

Yet she had six gold, and knew she hadn’t stolen anything.

Meritt thought he’d stolen less than what he had.

The weaker members all had looked relieved.

She watched carefully as Tora, now calm, casually reached into his coat pocket and brought out the small bag he’d dropped earlier. He reached into it, plucked something out, and ate it. She squinted as he reached for another.

Blueberries.

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by on July 27, 2019 at 12:00 am
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Maybe The Dead

Warning: Contains talk of abuse, and heavily implied sexual assault/rape

“Were you here all night?”

A raspy voice whispered from a tiny minion on Blueten’s shoulder. She placed a gentle hand on its rodent-like body to keep it from mindlessly squirming off, and stared pointedly at Meritt. It was the next morning after her first raid and he looked absolutely ragged. He was slumped in a chair by the dining table, idly playing with a thin stalk he used for a pen. There were 19 small sacks of coins piled atop the table surface, and a mound of stolen goods at his feet. A piece of parchment with the recorded inventory was laid out in front of him, weighed down with a half-empty glass of melon juice.

“I took a nap at some point…” Meritt groaned.

“Oh. So you didn’t see who left…”

“Mmm nope.” He reached over and grabbed the glass of juice. “They left me a drink today though! So that’s nice.”

She watched him for a moment as he tipped the glass back to drain it.

“Who is Tora?”

He swallowed audibly and put the glass back. “Tora Zollun? Didn’t I tell you?”

She responded with only a stare and he frowned, confused.

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by on July 27, 2019 at 12:02 am
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Maybe The Dead

Warning: Contains talk of abuse, and heavily implied sexual assault/rape

“I coulda sworn I did. Huh…. Well, he’s pretty new? Joined a few months before you did, I think. I don’t know if there’s much to say about him…”

Blueten pulled up a chair expectantly, and Meritt sighed, reluctantly forcing himself to sit up straight.

“Baya brought him in. He used to be a weapon smith, I think? She seems to think he’s got potential, but he hasn’t really gotten good at anything since he got here. Can’t steal, can’t stealth, too weak to fight. Lotta folks don’t understand why he’s here to be honest. And he never um, went through any rite of passage to be here either. Baya won’t let anyone touch him.”

“If he’s bad at stealth, how come I haven’t noticed him before?” The little minion skittered mindlessly over her shoulders as she/it spoke.

She meant that quite earnestly – she had, after all, just spent at least a month meticulously cataloguing each member of the guild. 17 members. She’d counted them, known every name, and had made a pretty good read of most of them. How did she miss there being an 18th member? How did Tora Zollun manage to slip by her?

“Uh, hm.” Meritt paused. “I don’t know how you didn’t? I mean, everyone knows Tora. A lotta people really don’t like him so he’s a bit of a hot topic. How do you not notice someone who’s Baya’s pet?”

Peculiar.

“…How often is he around?”

“Oh you know, all the time! He- wait…” Meritt paused again, brow furrowed. “Huh. I actually haven’t seen him around that much lately. I think last night was the first I’d seen him in awhile…”

More peculiar yet.

“How often does he bump into people like he did last night?”

Meritt laughed. “Is that what’s bothering you? He’s not doing it on purpose, I don’t think. He’s usually just uh, late to the spoils counting.”

“Does he always push by the same people?”

“I- these are awfully specific questions, Mute.”

“Does he usually push past you?”

“Y-yeah? Maybe? I mean, not as hard as he did last night, but yeah, pretty often I guess? But like, that’s just a coincidence, what are you getting at?”

“Yes, what are ya gettin’ at?” A cool voice dripped lazily into her right ear and Blueten felt its chill seep down her spine. She swung back in her chair in alarm.

“B-Baya!” Meritt jumped up from the table in shock.

Baya laughed, standing just behind Blueten with her usual composed smile.

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by on July 27, 2019 at 12:04 am
Chapter:
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Maybe The Dead

Warning: Contains talk of abuse, and heavily implied sexual assault/rape

“Surprised? I do live here, y’know.”

“R-Right,” Meritt laughed nervously. “Th-that’s Baya for you. D-Didn’t even see you there, wow!”

“Mmhm.” Baya pulled up the last available chair and leaned in casually, carefully towards Blueten. “So what’s this ‘bout Tora? You interested, luv?”

Blueten didn’t respond. She was occupied with Baya’s voice and posture. Both seemed perfectly relaxed as always but… Baya’s shoulders were tense, and her voice had a hint of something -something dark. She couldn’t put her finger on it.

“Was it his pretty face? Didja fall fer him?” Baya gave her a sly wink. “You two would make a cute couple, I think. Want me t’set ya up?”

Meritt gave another nervous laugh at that but Baya ignored him, her eyes poring into Blueten intently. Blueten’s eyes narrowed in thought behind her mask. She didn’t know how much Baya heard, but nothing Blueten spoke of indicated romantic interest. The way Baya asked suggested she was teasing, but the hint of darkness in her voice seemed stronger. What was that?

“Well?” Baya insisted.

Ah. Blueten finally caught on. A threat.

“No.” She replied. “…I was just a little upset at being shoved…”

Baya laughed, perhaps too hard, and relaxed back into her chair. “Is that all?!” The darkness retreated, taking the stiffness in her shoulders with it. “I’ll ask him t’be more careful next time.”

Blueten watched Baya carefully. If she was only mildly interested in Tora Zollun before, she most certainly was interested now.

And now that he was on her radar, he was much easier to watch, though admittedly it still took effort. She quickly realized how he’d escaped her scrutiny the first time – the boy was a shadow. If Baya was around, he tailed behind her, quiet and unassuming, easily lost in the gathering of members that followed Baya wherever she went. If she wasn’t around, then either he wasn’t there or he was aimlessly hanging about the house in its darkest corners. He was present when others were around, but always just out of view. It took a bit to find him, but he was usually there.

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