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Across the vast shadowed expanse of Cloakwood, along the thread-thin shoreline of the Trackless Sea, and over the ancient walls of Baldur’s Gate comes their first spring together.
Soft sticky leaves erupt from trees and bushes. The air smells like honey and wet earth. Jaheira’s gruff mask slips a little, and every now and then, Sfir catches her muttering something tenderly under her breath while coaxing chubby young shoots of bitterroot from the ground.
“Shouldn’t you let them fend for themselves?” Sfir asks. Despite herself, she can feel one half of her mouth curl up in a smile. “Survival of the strongest and all?”
“They’ll have plenty of time to die later,” Jaheira retorts. “And even the strongest need a little help sometimes.”
It is an unexpectedly sentimental thing to say. If Sfir thinks that the youngest bitterroot makes the best tea, well, she doesn’t say that out loud.
Khalid, though less interested in the tiny plants fighting for their place in the sun, is clearly enamoured of Jaheira’s rare show of gentleness. The more she fusses over the bitterroot, the more he stares at her, looking as besotted as any bridegroom. At one point, Sfir looks over at him only to find him obliviously polishing his armour - which he’s neurotic about at the best of times - with a generous hunk of fried cheese.
“Khalid,” she says, softly, and stares pointedly.
“Ah?” It takes him a few moments of flustered looking around. Then his gaze lands on the cheese in his hand, and he grows a brilliant red. “S-sorry. I must’ve- I’ll buy more next time we’re in the city.”
Sfir laughs and pats his shoulder. “Forget it. I’m sure it’s still edible if we cut off the crust.”
For all his subsequent efforts to clean the armour, Khalid’s breastplate looks distinctly greasy over the next few days - at least, until they find themselves knee deep in Fire Giant guts during the next skirmish. A splatter of boiling hot black viscera burns off any remaining cheddar residue.
Springtime makes their life on the road feel fairly idyllic, if only for a while. The whole world around them is shaded a lovely golden-green.
But where Jaheira and Khalid see love, hope, and new beginnings, her cursed eyes see something else entirely.
The green world burns.
The meadows around them smoulder blue with cornflowers. Apple blossoms engulf young trees like so many white-hot flames. When they die, shedding ashen petals to the ground, they are replaced with blazing red and ember-yellow. Nothing is safe. Everywhere she looks, new life eats through the old only to then be consumed in turn.
In that endless destruction, Sfir sees herself. She sleeps poorly.
In retrospect, her life with Gorion seems breathtakingly uncomplicated. Safe. She lies next to the remnants of their fire and half-remembers, half-dreams of things long past.
In her memories, Gorion is younger. His face is already creased with laugh lines, but he’s not yet wholly grey.
She is angry. She doesn’t remember why. Back then, she was angry a lot, prone to inconsolable temper tantrums. Was that a natural consequence of her difficult childhood, she wonders, or an early manifestation of the corruption in her blood?..
Gorion holds her in outstretched arms, a little ball of impotent fury. His large hands smell of tobacco and lightning. He does not look upset at her outburst; his eyes, brown like decaying autumn leaves, are mellow with kindness.
Paradoxically, it is that kindness that torments her most of all. She aches for relief, and, thrashing aimlessly in his grip, she finally finds it: her little teeth sink deep into the soft tan flesh at the base of his thumb.
Her incisors find purchase against the cartilage of his knuckle. He makes a little stifled, pained sound. Even so, he doesn’t drop her as another might; he lowers her carefully to the floor and waits until she lets go, her jaw aching with effort.
Gorion turns away from her, nursing his injury. She hurt him. She wanted to hurt him. But it brings her no pleasure. The salty taste of raw meat in her mouth feels like an accusation. There’s an aching emptiness beneath her breastbone, and, looking at his blue-robed figure bent over the hearth, she only cries harder.
Sfir feels ill. She is shivering, her body suddenly cold around a small core of sickly heat somewhere deep inside of her. She clasps her own hands to her chest, but instead of fingers, twisted claws dig into her flesh. She looks down and sees a tangled mess of brown and red where her stomach should be.
Gorion kneels in front of her. He’s bandaged his hand with a bit of linen, though his blood seeps through it still, dark and sweet-smelling like molasses. He does not seem angry - only concerned. He looks at her as if it was she who was hurt.
“Sfir,” he says, in another’s voice. His injured hand gently touches her forehead, and the touch feels oddly like leather.
“Sfir,” someone says. It is not Gorion. She opens her eyes; rather than their quarters in Candlekeep, Cloakwood surrounds her, dark and quiet. The skies above her are steel-grey, hazy with rain. It is very early in the morning. The air smells sharply of water and pine resin.
Khalid is bent over her, blinking at her in open concern. It is his hand in a mud-encrusted fingerless glove that rests on her forehead. His fingertips are rough and reassuringly warm against her clammy skin.
The rest of it was a dream, but she is ill. Or is she? Sfir springs up from her bedroll and immediately stumbles, her feet sinking into the rain-bloated earth. Ignoring a wave of queasiness, she looks down at herself, searching for signs of corruption. But there are no scales erupting from her skin; no thorns protruding from her sides. She is - for the time being - human.
Khalid catches her gently by the shoulders. “You have a f-fever,” he informs her. She wobbles forward, and her nose collides with his pauldron. She feels - or imagines that she does - a faint aroma of cheese, and it makes her laugh a little.
Khalid’s arms are sure around her. He undoes his cloak with one hand and pulls it over Sfir. The beaver fur lining retains the warmth of his body, and she feels the aching chill in her bones subside in response.
“Ashes,” says another familiar voice. “Couldn’t you find a better time to get sick?”
Jaheira sounds as put out as if Sfir did her a personal injury. But when she comes over to stand next to Khalid, there’s worry etched into her features.
If there’s one thing Sfir has learned during their time together, it is that Jaheira doesn’t know how to handle being worried. Sfir sympathises. She, too, prefers swords over words.
As Khalid helps her onto a log next to the fire, Jaheira turns around, muttering something about preparing a cup of tea. Sfir leans forward and catches her by the wrist.
“Wait,” she says.
Jaheira stops. Her hand in Sfir’s grip is bony, cold, and wet with rainwater. “What is it?” she asks, a little softer.
“Gorion,” Sfir gets out, weakly but with intent. “Did he ever talk about what I was like?”
“You were a child. So dirty, noisy, and prone to getting into trouble, I expect.” But she sits down next to Sfir, stretching out her legs. “What brought this on?”
Sfir wraps herself tighter in Khalid’s cloak. The world swims before her eyes, the fire little more than a blur of blinding gold. “I couldn’t have been easy to raise.”
Jaheira shrugs with one angular shoulder. “The old man wasn’t all sunshine and roses, either. He would’ve been a hypocrite to complain.”
Although Khalid is standing behind Sfir, outside of her field of view, she guesses that his expression must be that of reproach; Jaheira averts her gaze for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she says, quietly.
“He was kind,” Sfir says, at length. Her tongue is sluggish in her mouth. “Too kind, perhaps.”
“You meant a lot to Gorion.” Jaheira looks down at her own hands. “We haven’t always agreed with him on his decision to raise you, you know. Or - I should say, I haven’t always agreed with him. Khalid has always seen things more clearly, more wisely.”
She flashes a rare unguarded smile at Khalid, her dark eyes opalescent in the light of the fire.
Sfir has an inkling as to the answer, but she asks anyway. “Why?”
“You were an unknown.” Jaheira grimaces. “I feared Gorion wouldn’t be able to stand against your father. I feared a loss of balance. I was afraid - I was foolish.”
She looks Sfir in the eye and offers an awkward lopsided grin. “He got angry at me for that. He loved you already - I think he had always loved you. He was so upset with me he wouldn’t talk to me for days.”
Sfir can and cannot imagine Gorion like that. When he was unhappy with her, it was never for long.
She remembers talking to him not long before their departure from Candlekeep. She, on the cusp of adulthood; he, now grey-haired and nearing sixty but still full of good-natured mirth, ever ready to entertain her and Imoen with some improbable story or other.
“You’ve told us so much about Baldur’s Gate,” she said to him, then. “Will you take me one day?”
“When you’re better with your swordsmanship, perhaps,” he said, unusually sternly. Then he looked briefly guilty, like a boy caught with his hand in the sugar-bowl. “I’m sorry, Sfir. I don’t mean to keep you locked up in here. It’s simply that - what I mean to say is, let’s not go just yet.”
She didn’t understand the cause of his sudden embarrassment, but, eager to undo whatever hurt she’d inadvertently caused, she stepped forward and took him by the hand. “Of course,” she said. “I will train very hard. Jondalar says I’m too small for a claymore, but he said that about longswords, too.”
“Jondalar sees you as a child still,” Gorion laughed, a little ruefully. “As, sometimes, do I, fool that I am.”
Sfir brought his hand up to her lips - half a gesture of tenderness, half a silent apology. There, in the webbing between his thumb and his index finger, was a deep half-moon scar. She kissed it, a pang in her chest echoing the pain he must’ve felt when she’d bitten him.
She was a child no more.
“How did you reconcile?” she asks Jaheira, shaking off her reverie. “Did you agree with him, in the end?”
“It took me a while.” Jaheira takes one of her pale russet-brown braids and twirls it around her index finger with an unnecessary force. “I see now that I was wrong, but then… You have to understand - we didn’t know you.”
“But G-gorion did,” says Khalid.
“Gorion did,” Jaheira agrees. “He was enraged that I’d suggest that you belonged anywhere but at his side. As I said, we didn’t speak for a while. And then we had a run-in with Zhents.”
“A b-bloody affair.” There’s a note of discomfort in Khalid’s soft voice.
“He was positively murderous. Furious. I’d never seen him look so terrifying in battle. All that anger, everything he felt-” Jaheira falters, unexpectedly. “All of that - directed at protecting me, you understand? At protecting us. He was almost inhuman. His lightning spells were like nature herself turned on the Zhentarim. Not a blade could touch me or Khalid that day. It was when he came back to us to ask if anyone had hurt us that I knew that he was the right guardian for you.”
Sfir can just see that in her mind’s eye. Though she herself has little aptitude for magic, Gorion showed his spells to her many times. He taught her to dodge fireballs, to shield herself from lightning, to resist mind tricks. There was a sense of near-boundless but tightly controlled power to it - to the smell of smoke in her hair, to the tingle of electricity on her skin. He was ever aware of the seed of destruction in the forces he wielded.
Jaheira stands up and walks away, at last, leaving her momentarily to her thoughts. Khalid joins her instead, and for a while they sit next to each other in companionable silence. Little raindrops make a soft drumming sound against his now-exposed breastplate, and Sfir feels an answering bubbling of fondness in her chest.
"At least this will wash away the ch-cheese," Khalid offers, and she bursts into helpless laughter.
"Did you truly not have a problem with Gorion taking in a child of Bhaal?" she asks him.
"Of course n-not," he says, shrugging, and sets about feeding more dried lichen to the sputtering fire. "Like any of us, you needed k-kindness. As far as I'm concerned, you had only one father."
She feels that the truth is more complicated than that, but there is something precious, bittersweet in his conviction. Without it, Sfir thinks, the Harpers may not have given her a chance. Khalid thought there was something in her worth saving; and his belief made it so.
A warm clay cup is abruptly thrust into her hands. She hasn't noticed Jaheira returning, carrying with her that tea she'd set out to make before Sfir beset her with her feverish guilt-ridden questioning.
"Thank you," Sfir murmurs, taking a sip from the cup. The familiar fragrant, nutty flavour floods her mouth. "Is this bitterroot? What happened to wanting it to survive?"
"Nothing happened." Jaheira crosses her arms on her chest. "But it's survived long enough. It's just as I said: even the strongest need help sometimes."
Sfir smiles, and gulps down more tea. Though the sickness within her burns, she feels herself breathe easier.
Death, yes. But not without reason or recourse. Anger; but not without limit. The thought that Gorion secretly shared this with her - had seen something of himself in her, perhaps - is exhilarating.
Even from the Fugue Plane, he cares after her. He has given her Khalid and Jaheira. Though she may be a monster, she is not alone.
The bitterroot is almost sweet on the tip of her tongue.