Author's Note: Hello and thank you for opening the sequel to "When the Wizard Chased the Rogue". If you haven't read the original story, I would highly recommend reading it first. This story takes place during the winter solstice of the same year as WtWCtR though some events take place three months prior. For continuity, the battle with the Pirate Hookhand takes place in early Summer, some events in this story take place in September/October and others take place late December. All elvish words used in this story will be translated in the final chapter, but there are tools to translate them available.
A scroll lay open on a writing desk, and its reader stood some distance away, pacing the halls of the safehouse deep in thought. Occasionally she would stop pacing, turn, walk back to the table, and stare at the parchment until she was shaking and overcome with emotion Then she would walk away and resume her pacing.
Ignorance is Bliss.
When Meira first heard that phrase she had scoffed and assumed whoever had the gall to come up with such baseless nonsense must have been the dumbest rock in all the land. To her knowledge was power, used and traded and hoarded like treasure. Meira was rich with knowledge, and she constantly gathered more, soaking it up like a sponge. No rumor escaped her web, and no fact was out of her reach; she had worked hard to make ignorance a distant memory.
How she longed for it now, as the demons of her past reared their ugly heads.
The scroll was her treasure trove. Filled with knowledge and secrets, some of which men had died to keep hidden. Yet for much of the past decade it would have been useless to her, for she had found better things to do than to go digging into her past. Yet here she stood, in a safe house in Waterdeep with a wish for a strong drink that might wipe away her revelations into a haze of ignorance.
But she could never un-see those words. And one in particular had haunted her for weeks.
The scroll held many secrets, and through breaking the codes, disarming the wards and avoiding potential pitfalls to deciphering it, Meira was able to find exactly what she had been chasing for close to a year: a full list of the current membership of the Fay'ai.
Her father sat at the head of the assassin's guild. That revelation brought her no shock, and she knew that his hold on power would be as firm and indomitable as his training. Reading his code name gave her the same anxiety she felt whenever she spotted her Fay'ai mark in the mirror, a creeping nauseous realization that she would never truly be free from his reach.
That nausea was amplified when she read her own code name…. Vesi. It was madness that the Fay'ai still claimed her; the rebel and the runaway was still considered one of their rank and file members despite never completing a job for them. The blackest part of her humor wondered if she owed membership fees, and if some of the killing she had done freelance would count towards a promotion.
She had searched for the scroll to see whether her escape had been permanent, to see whether that damnable mark was the only thing left tying her to her "family". It hadn't been and deep down she had always known that.
But her name staring back at her wasn't the one that haunted her. It wasn't the kick to the gut that left her reeling and set her pacing once again. Instead it was a different name.
Sheraesia