The #Broken_Dagger Forum

All good things begin and end with children.

They begin with innocence, as all good things should.

For that is an otherworldly and preternatural vitae. That is the prelude and overture, the first dramatic soliloquy. That is the meaning behind the ethereal doll-quality of youth, the blank, naïve slate of souls that lie like puppets on a most flamboyantly-colored stage. Purity: it is almost a living idea. And there is a sumptuous revelation in knowing this, this hypnotic, bountiful, witchwork of innocence; for this is often innately pliant and submissive to a greater good or evil; in wanting soft things, wanting benediction, wanting prostration at the feet of something loving. That is its nature. That is its purpose. That is how all good things should begin, with this stuff bled into children.

Although the elf was not so much a child, and not so much a woman. Nevertheless, it would begin with her.

The acknowledgement of her presence was often a diffident thing, and a rarity in and of itself. She blended into the very fabric of the realm, the fine and fair creature that she was; she was precisely ordinary in design, a doll all black-and-white like spots of punctuated ink over blissfully clean parchment. Her autobiography would read of a purpose stitched and threaded to the fate of others; and the perpetual, alluring, inescapable nature of her slavery, there was always that. That was the way of it. And the town swallowed her as towns often will, eager for the ripe, unflawed flesh, drinking like wine the dramatic precipice of an exotic and yet fragile nature. It would devour her quietly, as it had devoured men, women, and children before her, and that would be the unmarked end; the town was the attentive shepherd to the flock and the pool, and she was the glamour of yet another... sheep.

Make her an addition to the fold, then, to the masses that consumed the weak like wolves at a bit of pristine prey; she was the dependent clause of their sentence, and she was best left unspoken.

"Songbird," Audmathus called her, and his mistress thought her sweet; or at least that was the story they wove against her fae-tapered ear, so that to differ from their horde of other victims and endless, endless prey, Reverie was immaculately darling. When there was ridicule of the fairy porcelain-quality of her skin, which was enough of her bane; when there were instances of pain brought like tempests over her body; she regarded them with the polite, wide-eyed acceptance which lay in such contrast to fury, to misery, to indignation, to resignation. They were blackened where she was light, the sharp antithesis to her entire existence; they added the color of sepia tones to her psyche, for things were so often bloody and bleeding; they were dark elves swooping like ravens to feast on the flesh of the elfin carrion.

And perhaps it was the pliant nature of her will that was endearing and overall the most important reason; it was true, too, that she had slain easily enough, that while it was not yet stitched into the softness of her being, she was nevertheless capable of destruction. And love; she knew that with the freshness of a child; protection, loyalty, a steadfast devotion. They wrote her story with the elegance of arrogance; Audmathus scrawled his will like a gothic god bringing commandments down over her, for it was that dramatic, it was that sudden and pronounced, that immaculately conceived. It was done; as she sat with small china-made feet swinging from the edge of her chair, it was concocted and hatched, in an upstairs room made for sun, and light, and childish pleasures; she had not been afraid, as she was never afraid. She had not known.

And the work of words is as important as anything else. For therein lay the hypnosis.



All good things begin and end with children; they begin with innocence, with whitewashed virtue. And this must be a good thing, for we do not dare fathom its negative. We cannot really think what it might be, if not precious and true. If she was the beginning of this, then the child that swelled in the secret confines of her virgin-womb... that was to be the end. And the madness? The seed was already planted, its destiny taking root; already was there the triumphant breeding swell of her young abdomen as if in heavenly annunciation of a most evil burden. A body infested with a drow child. Already the stitches of blood and time, and demons and drow, of men and mortals and gods, had been threaded, woven, unwoven, reformed.

She was maiden still, wide-eyed in wonder, bearing the child of the black-skinned royalty. And Reverie; Reverie, in innocence...

...she did not know.

Spit in the eye of the surface world itself. An insult bred of the blood of wretched, sobbing captives. A way that he, as a self-proclaimed god, as a deity who believed himself far too great for the bracers of a throne on the Pantheon, could exercise his insubordinate power.

The black prince knew all too well that his mistress -- his recreator and compatriot in blood-shed, his lover amid silken sheets and hater in blades -- would soon demand that he help her conceive a child, for was this not the way of a budding Matron, to solidify her power by bringing forth into the world a progeny of feminine perfection or male submission? For as much as Faeryl's seductive wiles often called to him, beckoned him, he would do no such thing.

Could he? Would this body -- brought back to him through ritual, infused with the parts of a slaughtered loyal -- even have the ability to assist in procreation?

And this was why he came to his songbird, to this broken little elf he had taught to murder, for a final visit. Faeryl would not know. This was his gift to his mistress, meant to foster in the belly of a useless creature like a plague. He had brought with him the vials of this dark task, one filled with a mixture of the blood of D'ran and Cinjin, and one with the oily gore of an imprisoned planes-demon, a tanar'ri, a creature that thrived off of hate, destruction, and desolation.

"...And it is here, that a goddess must realize... that her most loyal venerate is herself, and that when two gods do battle, there is no need to truly harm a loyal... when one of power can merely crush the very heart of the problem."

His words, spoken while the air of the small room still echoed with the snap of her defensive bowstring, with the floor about them littered in shattered glass, and Shadowdancer -- beloved, precious Shadowdancer -- finding its fateful home buried deep within the confines of the elfling's gut.

"Look down, songbird," he had told her, grinding the obsidian weapon within her stomach. "Look down upon ... perfection."

Altias Bromn had been an imperfect candidate in the past. It mattered not what kind of body Avel attempted to inhabit, but instead how well it could fortify itself against the unholy presence of an unnatural, abysmal, invasive presence such as this. This was the most immaculate of conception, to be driven upon blade-point through an unsuspecting belly, for the ritual to be sanctified by the blood of the suffering.

Avel, the whole time, had protested. Audmathus had not listened. Let half of her presence linger with that of a hungry tanar'ri within the stomach of this white-skinned creature. Let this Reverie bear the gift that he, in return to his mistress, would give to her.

Let D'ran and Cinjin sleep in the secrecy that their blood had been such an important aspect of the ritual.

Let Avel, as she had once before, be birthed again, but perfect.

He had vanished not long after. Reverie showed no wound, showed no pain, no torment ... save, perhaps, the uncanny thing festering within her womb. And why a creature of the surface? Why this imperfect, white-skinned, vulnerable elf-being? Because of his hatred; because he and his mistress were the most dangerous creatures to walk the breadth of surface-grasses, and there would be little threat to the sanctity of his gift. In due time, Faeryl would have a child for which she did not ask.

Long before then, there was tea to be had, and Myrken Wood to take for their very own.