The Weeping Sky

[InTheFlesh]

- 1312 DR -

It is common-sense knowledge that a beaten and maltreated dog will eventually, invariably turn upon its owner, biting the hand that feeds it.


Captain Feargus Keane beat and lashed his most recently acquired such animal in the lowest deck of the Winsome Naiad; and it would have been difficult to stifle the loathsome howls and whimpers for benefit of the ship’s cargo, adventuring passengers.

“Yer lucky I hain’t a mind to rub more salt on yer back, pigman.” Keane spoke through reeking beard. This dynamic of power was one intended to garner compliance through the argument that “things could be worse” – And the promise that they could be, if not for the magnanimity of the man wielding the cat-o-nine. Why bite the hand feeding, after all?

The animal’s long, matted, filthy brown hair extended down to the nape of his neck, and around his face. It obscured leaking tears from grey, wild eyes and almost enough to do similar with prominently protruding lower canine teeth.

He spoke. Whined. Begged.

“P-Please… Please, milord… No more, I – I can’t f-feel my legs…”

Keane lashed the whip, but this time purposely didn’t connect home with the greyish-green, bloody skin of the animal’s back. It flinched in anticipation of a blow that didn’t come.

But it wouldn’t do for Keane’s particular brand of behavioral conditioning to be predictable. The second the flinching stopped, the lash hit home. A particularly agonized wail was the response, perhaps sweet to a particular minority of ears. It strained against the leather bindings, lashed spread-eagle to opposing beams.

“Tha’ only reason I hain’t put a blade in yer back is because of what it took tae get ye aboard, Filth.” Keane wiped his brow from the exertion of the last twenty minutes, and smiled. The dog could never know what to expect with his back forcibly turned, and breaking it would be an entertaining diversion while they made the final approach down the Shaengarne River to relieve the goblin-sieged Ten Towns.


Keane turned and began walking to the deck steps. “Yer gruel will be ready in a few hours, and ye work tomorrow, is tha –” He was distracted by the sound of steps behind him, whirling back around to face a man.

A brown-haired, loincloth-clad, pig-nosed, frenzied man.

The Captain allowed the nine-tailed whip to clatter to the ground to attempt to dislodge the fingers wrapping around his throat, kicking his legs as they left the ground. Gloved hands batted and beat furiously against wrists clad in torn leather bindings. It wasn’t clear whose pair of eyes was bulging more widely, but after a prominent snap could be heard in the deck’s room, the retired Captain’s grew no wider.

Leather bindings were replaced with heavy shipping rope; the wrists for a neck. As they hoisted the tusked man by that crucial point, he spied on the riverbank gathering humanoid figures – They looked more like him than he did. World slowing as the rope grew tighter and tighter, he could just barely make out bobbing objects – Kegs – In the river’s icy water downstream.

The arrows on the bows the figures were drawing back were barely visible to the man’s swimming vision as orange pinpricks against a dusky horizon. Suddenly the rope gave way, released in panic by a vengeful crew, sending him crashing back down to the ship’s hull; just as several of those orange lights streaked towards the purpose-set kegs that the ship had floated directly adjacent towards.


Rhaeg awoke in Thirteen-Sixty Dale Reckoning, sobbing, to his head pounding louder than the rain on the window; still hearing the boom of the explosion, and vision flashing brighter than the lightning.

[InTheFlesh]

- 20 Tarsakh 1360 DR -

He pried himself from the coziness of his clean covers and sat on the edge of his bed. Through the window, the frequency of the lightning dancing across the sky mocked his darkvision; his lidded eyes struggling to decide fully whether it was dark or cantrip-bright on the Friendly Arm’s grounds.

Wrenched out of one nightmare, cast into another.


The suite’s desk still had two sheets of parchment on it just where Rhaeg had left them; one a letter purporting to be from The Commons of Baldur’s Gate – The other the reply he’d deliver in the next coming days via a speech. As his calloused, wrinkled feet touched the floorboards and made them creak; Rhaeg peered over to the furred slippers that had grown more and more appealing to him the longer he’d used them over the past several months. No-one had to know.

Gnarled hand reaching for the latter letter, he scanned his work. It was a genuine exhortation of the depths of his soul; he believed in every word and abbreviated shorthand he’d committed to that sheet of parchment. But what about the other one? Did The Commons mean what “they” wrote, or was he being baited into playing his proverbial hand now – out of fear of what might happen if whomever else spoke “on their behalf” acted first?

Rhaeg closed his eyes and swallowed heavily – There were hazy memories of almost the same fear of the unknown that came easily to him. Forty-eight years prior, he had clutched a different letter to his chest; one whose lies and promises had nonetheless driven him to make a desperate decision…