Rising in the East

You sleep poorly, and the next day, overcast and gloomy, does not start off auspiciously.

"Hold still," Parting Sigh tells you. "I know what I'm doing."

"I'd be more comfortable with this if you weren't using that," you tell her, glancing sidelong at the razor-sharp throwing knife she's using to sheer away your hair. This is only partially true, of course — the sight of your bright green hair piling up on the floor gives you a far-from-comfortable pang. Not to mention, things with the assassin still feel very strange, for all that she's at least seemingly decided you're not going to murder her unexpectedly.

"Oh, stop complaining," Sigh says. She's standing over you while you sit in a rickety, uncomfortable chair. It's about the only position the two of you could be in where she has easy access to the top of your head. "I'm doing you a favour, remember."

"Right," you mutter, "thanks. You're sure this will even work?"

Sigh exhales sharply. "Was I Chosen by the Dragons to have my skills questioned by a battering ram who walks like a woman?" she demands. "Was I trained by the world's most deadly assassins for eight years to be second-guessed by some common soldier who stole a little sunlight?"

"Sorry," you say, sheepish more than defensive.

"You can criticise my disguises once you're not the least subtle Anathema alive, not before!"

"Well, I've never lounged on a throne made out of bones, at least," you say.

"What, did that Ogre of yours do that?" Sigh guesses. She finished up her final touches, taking a step back from you. When you raise a hand to check her handiwork, it's been cropped shorter than you can ever remember it being, not even coming down lower than your ears.

"Yes," you say. "Right before she grew spider legs. And called up a thousand spiders."

"Well, can't fault the choice in aesthetic," says the Grass Spider. She moves over to a mortar and pestle resting on a little table nearby. She picks up the mortar and examines its contents critically, making sure that the disgusting mixture she made earlier hasn't separated or otherwise gone off already. "This is about ready — here."

Sigh approaches you, mortar in one hand, what looks like a paintbrush in the other. You look at her dubiously enough that she actually laughs. "Oh, relax. If I wanted to try and kill you, I've been working on at least five better ways to go about it than trying to poison you through hair dye. Everyone knows that common poisons only slow Anathema down."

"Do you usually put this much thought into how to kill people you're working with?" you ask, somehow not reassured.

"Of course not," she says, as she begins applying the cold, murky concoction to your hair. "Hardly anyone needs this much thought. Try to take it as a compliment."

"Well, thanks?" you say, with less enthusiasm than might have been hoped.

Sigh spends a good while working the dye into your roots, clearly aiming to be thorough, rather than gentle. At the end of it all, you're left looking at yourself in the safehouse's single, cracked mirror. Your hair is as coal-black as Sigh's own, to say nothing about the length. It really does do a lot to change your look, especially with you not wearing your uniform.

"Hm," Sigh says, looking at you critically. She goes up on tip-toes, taking your chin in a businesslike grip to tilt it this way and that, scrutinising your features as much as her own handiwork. "Can't you at least try to be a little shorter?" she asks.

You give her a strange look. "Of course not. I'm the height I am."

Sigh brushes this off irritably. "I know Dragon-Blooded who can disguise themselves so perfectly their own mother wouldn't know them. To say nothing about some of the wild stories you hear about your kind. So don't give me that." She takes you by the shoulders, pushing down on them until you're standing at more of a slouch.

"Yeah, well, I can't really do anything like that," you say. "I can balance real well, and my senses are real sharp now, but mostly I'm just good at hitting people. And farming, but I don't have any Anathema magic for that that I know about."

"A farm girl," Sigh says. "Yes, that explains a lot. Come here." You approach her, and immediately regret it. She starts apply grime to your face, further obfuscating your looks.

You wince, both at her continued efforts, and at her choice of words, even though it's a silly thing to worry over. "Please don't call me that," you say, voice quiet.

"Call you what? 'Farm girl'?"

"It's what Jewel calls— called me," you admit, looking away.

You catch sight of Sigh's grimace in the mirror. "Right. Okay. Let's avoid that one, then," she agrees, looking suddenly as awkward as you feel.

Things go quiet between you two after that as you wait for the dye to dry completely. Sigh's the one to break the silence, rising with a stretch from her cot where she'd been brooding. "I've got some work to do. Information gathering. Hopefully that'll give you something to do when I get back. Shouldn't take long, really."

You glance around at the largely-empty room. "Um, okay," you say, watching her snatch up her things. Then she's gone.

The problem isn't quite boredom. Mind you, you are bored enough, as you lounge on your uncomfortable cot alone, staring up at the ceiling overhead. The man from last night had appeared with breakfast, then retreated again. There's been no sign of him since, so there's not even the off chance of a conversation to cut through the tedium. Much worse, though, is that same fire in your belly, that feeling that first drove you to go out and join the Tributary Guard instead of keeping your head down and minding the farm. You don't like not doing anything for too long.

You give up on lounging, and go through some training exercises, using a broom in place of a proper staff. Verdance is frankly too long for the confined spaces you're currently in, even if the weight is off and has to be accounted for. The training can only go on for so long, though. In the end, you're left sitting on the creaking chair, looking out the tiny window and down at the river-front street below. Through the mist of the Falls, people go about their day. Workers swarm around the docks that downriver, while peddlers and food-sellers hawk their wares. A pack of children in ragged clothes run through the crowd, laughing as they chase one another.

There's a tension in the air, though. People can see the soldiers on the street as easily as you can — not Tributary Guard, but Cynis troops from the Imperial Garrison, their suspicious, contemptuous gazes making people hurry about their business. There's a great deal of hushed, nervous whispering going on. You can imagine that rumours are starting to propagate through the townspeople. There's only so long the satrap can keep news of four Anathema in the area quiet, after all.

Your eyes fall on a group of three soldiers idling around a stall selling steamed clams, eating and talking and generally scaring off far more business than they're providing. One man sets down a pastry he must have grabbed from another vendor, briefly looking up to scan the mist-obscured figures around them for signs of danger. He misses the young girl — maybe eleven or twelve, at a guess — who walks up and, bold as brass, snatches the partially eaten food, happily munching on it as she continues on her way. You watch this, half-impressed, half-appalled, not sure whether you want the soldiers to notice. The girl looks very pale and sickly, and could probably use a decent meal.

Whatever your ambivalence, the soldiers do notice her. The man reaches down for his pastry, hand coming up with nothing. His eyes go wide, and he whirls around on the spot, trying to see where the thief might have gone. The girl's dark head of hair stands out through the mist, and she doesn't even try to hide the pastry she holds in both hands.

While his companions grin, the soldier rushes after the girl, shoving aside the crowd and catching up in several long strides. He reaches out a hand to seize her by the shoulders... and misses. The girl side-steps just in time, as if knowing his approach by a sixth sense, then bends out of the way of his next grab even as she takes an insolent bite out of the soldier's food, right in front of him. Roaring with anger, he lunges for her. She ducks, rams her small shoulder into his midsection at just the right angle to send him spilling over her shoulder. He hits the street hard on his back, the air driven out of him. Grinning, the girl takes another bite of the pastry, and kicks him hard in the face.

She's already up and running when he surges to his feet, broken nose bleeding freely. He wheezes a bellow and staggers after the girl, murder in every pained line of his body. His two companions don't look much less furious as they race to catch up. It had been funny to them, until the little thief had actually dared to fight back.

This isn't your business. It's not your job to save thieves — in fact, it was rather recently your job to catch them. But however slippery and mean in a pinch, that's a little girl they're trying to run down, not a hardened street tough. If you had it in you to look the other way and put your own well-being ahead of others' when they're right in front of you, well... you wouldn't be in this situation, would you?

You're out of the room, out the door, and down the stairs to the street in short order, before you have time to really consider what you're doing. As your feet hit the paving-stones, you try to follow Sigh's advice, slouching as much as looks remotely natural, doing what you can to alter your natural gait. You head in the direction the girl and the soldiers left in. You think you know where she's going to try and lose them, which would be your only hope of catching up if it weren't for the trail of disgruntled cityfolk shoved out of the way in the soldiers' wake.

Your guess turns out to be right, regardless — you just barely catch sight of one of the soldiers ducking under a little-used pier, where the riverbank becomes suddenly inconveniently steep. The bright colours of his uniform vanish into the mist and the gloom. A moment later, you follow, the diffuse spray of the Falls thicker this close to the water. It makes your clothes hang heavily against your body, and the chill feels strange on your suddenly much shorter head of hair.

"Alright, come here, you little shit!" you hear. Sound down here is strange, echoing around the underside of the pier and resounding off the surface of the river as much as it's also swallowed up by the mist. You see them, the three soldiers having cornered the girl right at the water's edge.

"Aren't you all supposed to be looking out for Anathema?" you say, announcing your presence as you come up behind the other two. They turn to look at you, glaring.

"Girl, I don't know who told you that, but this has nothing to do with you," one of them says, giving you a warning look. "Turn around and walk away."

The street urchin glances away from the man screaming at her to regard you curiously, saying something small and questioning in Forest-Tongue. Then she pointedly shoves the rest of the pastry entirely into her mouth, barely chewing before she swallows. "Oh, that's it!" the soldier with the broken nose cries, pulling his sword clear of its sheath as he lunges for the girl. You're fairly certain, by his opening motion, that he intends to club the child over her head with the pommel, rather than actually running her through. You're also sure that he's angry enough not to stop there.

Either way, you're already trying to push your way past his two companions. One of them pulls his own shield from his back, shoving you away hard. "Last warning, local girl," he says. "Believe me, I'm not picky about how much uppity Threshold trash we have to teach a lesson to." While he and his companion block your line of sight to the action, you don't see what causes the first soldier's strangled scream. Understanding that things have become violent, you don't waste anymore time, though. You don't even think.

When the two barring your way turn their heads to see what's going on behind them, you reach your hand out for your weapon... and it's just there, called back from wherever it had been waiting for you. With one move, you lever Verdance up over the top of the sloppily-held shield in front of you, wrenching it straight out of its owner's hands, and automatically putting it into a spin, bringing its length down onto the shoulder of his swordarm. You internally wince — his armour does little to blunt the impact that six feet of masterwork jadesteel makes as it crashes down. You hear his collarbone snap, and a ragged gasp as he drops, sliding halfway into the river.

You barely have time to register that, beyond him, the first soldier is on his back, blood pooling beneath him. Most of your attention remains on the last soldier standing, who is already on you, stabbing at you with her sword. Once again, instinct takes over as much as training. She blunts her sword's edge against Verdance with a horrible, metal-on-metal screech. Your counterblow strikes her square in the head, ringing against her helmet almost loudly enough to drown out the snapping sound her neck makes. She goes down bonelessly and does not get up. You've killed her.

A group of bandits while half out of your mind was one thing — they had categorically deserved it, and your memories of that fight are hazy at best. Besides, you'd been a little distracted by the spiritually-shattering realisation of what you'd become. These three had been planning to hurt a child quite severely, if not outright kill her, fuelled by the disdain that most of the Blessed Isle-born troops often have for the local population. They were still soldiers of the Realm, though, and you'd killed one of them, maybe crippled the other. It had been disconcerting, just how easy it had been. How fragile mortals are compared to you now.

You look around, checking for the urchin girl. It takes you a moment to spot her, and when you do, you can only stare, frozen. She's on top of the man whose collarbone you'd broken, and she's biting his throat. Biting into it with razor-sharp fangs, drinking the blood that gushes out. As she straightens, you see that on her forehead, she bears a mark like someone has carved your own Caste Mark into her pallid skin with a sharp knife, blood trailing down from each of the sun's eight rays.

"Well, that wasn't too boring," the Anathema child says. She begins shamelessly rifling through the pockets of her victim. Her second victim, you realise — a glance over in the direction of her original attacker reveals that a knife taken from his own belt has been left in his throat. "Who are you, anyway?"

Your attention is jerked back to the girl at the sound of her voice. "I, uh..." She's speaking Forest-Tongue, in some kind of Northern dialect you are just barely managing to follow. The old Nuri language is a Forest-Tongue dialect as well, but it's taken on a great many loan words from Riverspeak and even Realm, and your family doesn't usually speak it at home anyway. You fumble past your shock, trying to think of the correct way to answer her question. "I am called Aster."

She doesn't seem offended by your pause, or your stilted answer. "I saw some gold when you called up that beat-stick," she says. "You the Solar that grumpy Linowan lady's supposed to be all mad over?"

Linowan lady? "You mean... Winter Jasmine?" you ask, a fresh chill going down your spine.

"Oh, yeah, I remember you both had stupid flower names like that," the girl says. "Must be you, then! I've never met an actual Solar before." She's incredibly calm for someone who has, in effect, just murdered two people over a pastry.

"What are you?" you demand.

"I'm the Shoat," she says, as if this explains everything. She's already rifling through the pockets on the second body. "Lucky break no one heard that fight, huh? I dunno if I could've kept it as quiet if you hadn't shown up."

She's the... Shoat? Maybe you hadn't translated that well enough. You watch as the Shoat finishes turning over the soldiers, depositing their possessions in a little pile. Then she starts picking stones up from the riverbank, and stuffing them into the corpses' clothing.

"What are you doing?" you hiss. "You... them... you just killed them!"

"Well, two of em," the Shoat says. "Or, one and a half, maybe. They would've done the same thing to us, though."

"No, that's— we're Anathema!" You'd feel this distinction is patently obvious.

She shrugs, and blithely rolls the first body into the river, displaying an uncanny strength beyond what her small frame should be able to conceal. You let out a gasp at this rough treatment of the dead. "Who are you? Where did you come from?"

She rolls her horrible red eyes at you, but at the very least, she doesn't pretend to misunderstand. She sits down on a larger rock, one incongruous well-made boot planted against the second corpse. "The Shoat of the Mire, deathknight blah blah, in service to the Dowager of the Irreverent Vulgate in Unrent Veils, Deathlord and blah blah, you get the idea."

You certainly know one of those words. Rumours of the particularly horrible Anathema that had overrun the coastal satrapy of Thorns at the head of an army of ghosts and monsters had swept the Scavenger Lands from end-to-end. You raise your weapon, ready to ward her off. You can't quite bring yourself to attack a pre-teen child, though, no matter what she's claiming to be.

The Shoat continues. "Yeah, so, Mother sent me here to give a message to your girl— Jasmine, I guess — and then I was supposed to come straight back, but... it gets real, real boring around the Mound of Forsaken Seeds. Like, so boring. And it'll be ages until she misses me. She's there most of the time, but she's not there most of the time. Anyway! Stop looking so worried, we killed people together, right? That makes us friends." Then she kicks the second body into the river.

"You cannot just do that!" you protest. "They... the bodies must be burned." Apart from common decency, without at least a small amount of ceremony, their lower souls will grow restless and vex the living, more likely than not.

The Shoat looks up at you like you're being stupid. "So, what, you want to start a fire instead?"

You falter. "... No," you admit. It's impractical where you are, and you can't exactly drag them out of here through the streets.

"This way, it'll be a good while before anyone finds 'em," the Shoat continues. She gets up, moving over to the last body, the filthy hem of her shift just barely clearing a puddle of blood. "And the bodies won't lead anyone right to whoever's hiding you this way, yeah?"

Your stomach twists uncomfortably at that thought. That would be a fine way to repay Wandering Heart and Parting Sigh, wouldn't it? Ugh. You hate it when things get all grey and muddled like this. All you want from life is a way to defend something worthwhile, and maybe a nice girl. Not all these murderers and Anathema.

Setting your teeth grimly, you kneel down in the mud beside the last fallen soldier, the one you killed directly. You think about saying sorry, but... they had certainly not known that they were cornering a dangerous Anathema, rather than an unusually brazen street urchin. Instead, you just mutter "Thank you for your service. May you do better in your next life. Please don't come back." And you roll the woman's weighted body into the river, where it promptly vanishes beneath the dark water. You have no idea how you're going to explain this to anyone.

You straighten again to glare down at the Shoat. "You made this happen on purpose!" It's frustrating how stilted your words are in this language.

The Shoat blinks up at you. "What, kill them? Sure, I did that on purpose, but at first I just wanted that bun. And it was so good!"

You keep frowning at her. "Are you going to kill anyone else in this city?"

She shrugs. "Dunno. If they deserve it. Say, you know where I can get more?"

"... More?"

The Shoat nods. "Yeah! More sweets. Back home, I mostly have to find stuff for myself. Nothing that good, ever."

"Why would I help you?" you demand.

She sighs. "'Cause we're friends? We kinda are, anyway. Also, I won't kill no one in this valley unless they—" she stops, winces, looking annoyed. "Oh, just shut up for a bit," she mutters, seemingly at thin air. Then she continues as if nothing had interrupted her. "I won't kill no one unless they attack me first. Plus, I'll give you something good on your girlfriend, since you two are fighting so bad."

You jerk back, appalled. "Winter Jasmine is not my girlfriend!"

"Whatever," the Shoat says, waving a tiny, bloodied hand carelessly. She's average height for a girl her age, by Eastern standards, meaning her head comes just barely past your shoulder. "I've got some good stuff, you know, and I don't like her that much. Gotta have something to offer your bosses when this is all over, right?"

This whole situation is deeply surreal, and your mind races to try and find a way to get rid of her aside from the one she's presenting. You draw an immediate blank, other than starting a fight that will definitely draw the wrong kind of attention down on you both. And it will feel good to actually salvage something useful out of this mess.

Reluctantly, you play along. ""Alright, but only if you promise."

"Already did!" grins the Shoat. "Go on, ask me, then."

Article:

What do you ask the Shoat about Jasmine's plans?

[ ] Where Jasmine is hiding
[ ] What Jasmine is looking for
[ ] Who Jasmine has helping her

You'll just barely arrive back at the safehouse before you're confronted by:

[ ] Parting Sigh
[ ] Silent Pause
[ ] Both Sigh and Pause arriving at once