ST: I don't own Homestuck. Don't own Dark Souls either.
Mine Is Just Another Scene In This World of Broken Dreams
Her name is Kanaya Maryam and she happy with her life so far. She is the daughter of a well-known seamstress and a wealthy and respected merchant, or as respected as a merchant can get in the strict theocracy of Thorolund. She is just over eighteen years old, and will soon start assisting her mother in earnest, actually making cloth and designs rather than just preforming busy work and arranging contacts with buyers. In her free time she enjoys sewing her own clothes and tending to her large collections of exotic potted flora. She's very fond of plants, and would probably have some sort of garden had she not been born in the middle of a vast city. Her desire to keep her plants alive led her to learn a small spell from a talented acquaintance that made plant life resistant to all manner of pollution.
She is enamored with magic really, but would never dare reveal that. Sorcery was forbidden in Thorolund, and to express an interest in such heretic crafts would be suicidal. So instead she spends a great deal of time every night reading by candlelight, losing herself in a world of magic and wonder. She is especially fond of tales of dashing, roguish pyromancers and their torrid affairs with Astoran noblewomen. Pyromancy itself appealed to her not only because of the life of excitement and danger it entailed but also because of its philosophical and religious connections to balance and nature, something sorcery lacked. She read several biographies about a particular sorceress however, a prodigy from Vinheim named Vriska Serket who during her time was hailed as one of the greatest sorcerers of all time despite being the same age as Kanaya. Vriska Serket may have been a sorcerer but lived the fast and dangerous life of a pyromancer and her exploits were fodder for countless tales. When she was younger Kanaya dreamed of growing up to be just like her, only without the part about turning undead and being locked away up north.
She grew out of that though, and instead began to have a different dream for her future. She developed her mother's nurturing streak, and was happiest when she could help one of her friends work through one of their many problems and issues. Yes help, not meddle, she does not meddle God Damnit. But it always saddens her when she looks down an alleyway and sees abandoned children either begging for food or money or just lying there, still. There was only so much she could do for them, and she hated it. So one day she planned to use the money she made selling her clothing to open an orphanage, and to help those poor children as much as she could.
But that dream, as well as every other hope and aspiration she ever had, went right down the drain when she woke up one morning with a strange, hollow feeling in the palm of her hand. Her eyes widened when she looked down and saw the darksign on her hand. She had secretly thought it was an attractive design when she saw it in pictures in books, but actually seeing it there on her hand made her realize just how ugly and disfiguring it truly was. For about two seconds she was completely numb, empty of all thought and feeling. And then she shrieked.
She panicked and instead of wrapping her hand and hiding the mark away ran straight to her mother, shaking and crying and scared. Because growing up was hard, but not nearly as hard as realizing you may never get the chance.
Her mother held her, cried with her, and promised her that she and her father would keep their little girl safe no matter what. A promise made in vain, seeing how nearly half the servants had seen the sign on Kanaya's hand when she ran down the hall.
~)
"Sir, we have received reports of strange noises and odors emanating from your house. We have come to do a search to ensure that you are not harboring undead."
The pair of knights, soldiers of the Allfather, would have simply forced their way into any other merchant owned house, grabbed the undead, and left. No mere merchant had any right to stand in the way of the servants of the gods. Merchants, really, were ultimately just heretics who had found a way to make themselves tangentially useful and therefore were to be tangentially tolerated, as far as the knights were concerned.
"How dare you come to my house and make such accusations! I demand that you leave immediately!"
Any other merchant but this one. The Maryam clan was being observed by his Grand Highness himself, and while it made little sense that storming in to claim an undead would arouse his Highness's wrath, no one was going to take the chance. Madness was common among those closest to the light of the Allfather and it was best to be as cautious as possible whenever a high ranked church official might be involved. And the merchant knew this and intended to use it to his advantage, though it would not save his daughter. The undead must be removed, no matter the cost.
"Sir, you will move or be moved."
In the end the two knights gained entrance into the house, sinfully large for such heathens, and instead of immediately crippling and carrying away the girl merely led her roped and bound out of the house, the eyes of the servants boring holes in her back.
The mother cried and tried in vain to keep the knights from her daughter. The father shouted and made threats. The knight's instinct was to kill both of them, as interference with an undead apprehension is a sure sign of a heretic. But they feared the capricious nature of the Grand Highness and merely struck them to the ground. The mother would lose some teeth and the father's nose would be misshapen once it healed, and that would have to do.
The undead was strangely quiet throughout all this, eyes vacant and tearstained. Only her hand had become decomposed, and if you covered that up she could pass as a perfectly ordinary human. One of the knights found this disconcerting, though he would never admit it. It was easy to distance himself from the undead when they resembled corpses and attacked the living indiscriminately. But this girl was just barely past eighteen at most and clearly had yet to lose her sanity to the curse. He thought she would surely perish during the trek to the northern asylum, and then mentally chastised himself once he realized he'd been thinking of her as human. She was an undead and couldn't die if she wanted to, the poor creature.
~)~)
Kanaya was not at all happy with her life at that moment. She had been shackled to the side of a wooden carriage for nearly a month now. Her shame at being naked had faded once her body had finished dying out, her wrinkled and cracked skin turning a shade of dark brown. She'd started to bleed from where the ropes dug into her, but even that stopped as the curse spread throughout her body, her blood becoming thick and slow, merely welling up around the ropes before drying up.
She was one of only two sane hollows strapped to that particular carriage, and she was thankful for her companion, however unpleasant he might be. Without him she would have surely gone insane by now, driven mad with despair and loneliness. And hunger, a lot of hunger. Actually, she's pretty sure she might've died from starvation a few days ago. Or dehydration. Or maybe a piece of her brain rotted off. She really didn't want to think about it too much.
In an effort to make herself not think about it, she turned to her companion and attempted to restart their previous conversation.
"So it occurs to me that..."
"Oh for fuck sake, why can't you just stare off into space like the rest of these fuckwits and let me rot in peace! I…"
His rant was cut off by some painful sounding coughs. Kanaya got the feeling that were it not for his throat having the texture of sandpaper he would probably be shouting every word. As it was, his penchant for long winded speeches was causing him great pain. She felt bad for goading him into conversation, but prying into his thoughts and trying to help him sort out his shit was he all she had to take her mind off things. And she desperately need to take her mind off things.
"I wish you would be more careful."
Pause
"You know very well what happens when."
Pause
"You speak too much at once."
"Fuck…you"
"It merely occured to me that...I haven't asked for your name."
"…Karkat Vantas."
"Thorolund or Carim?"
"Carim, and since your...clearly from fucking Thorolund...i'm going to assume your about to say something...bigoted and derogative and i just...want you to know that you can...fuck right the hell off with that shit."
"Please slow down…and I've no ill will towards…carim or it's people. I was just curious."
"Yeah well curiosity's got no place…where we're headed. You best enjoy…this fuckin pleasure cruise while it lasts because…this is the last time you're ever going to get to…see anything but stone walls, metal bars, and hollows."
"How is it you came to know…so much about our destination?"
"…the knight I was apprenticed under…went hollow a few years ago. I did my…research. Curi-fucking-osity."
"Maybe you will see him again?"
He turned his head and looked at her for the first time in the trip. His skin was much paler than hers, his black empty eyes sunken into his skull giving him a strange, melancholic look. He stared into her own eyes, no doubt changed beyond recognition by now, for a few seconds before turning his head back and continuing his staring contest with the ground. She assumed she'd gotten all she would get from him, which was just as well since she could feel another bout of strange, unexplained unconsciousness coming on. Just as her eyes started to shut, she heard him mumble something.
"I fucking hope not."
~)~)~)
When she came to, they had entered a large, snowy valley. On the peak of a distant mountain was an expansive stone structure.
"What is that?" she asked, more to herself than to anyone else. Great, now she was talking to herself, that couldn't be a good sign. Karkat must have heard her though, because after a few seconds he replied bitterly.
"That gigantic fucking stone shit-hole…is where you and I are going to spend the…rest of our lives, which in case you forgot…is forever. Are you looking forward to it as much as I am?"