Luck favors the bold.
- First Commandment of Avandra
"It's New Dawn the day after tomorrow, is the thing," Gustav says, beaming a smile that's just a little too for-show, just a little too bright around the edges. He hasn't stopped talking since he and Molly started working three hours ago, which hasn't exactly come as a surprise. Gustav is the sort of man who fears silence the way cows fear going down a set of stairs: it's so fundamentally alien to his nature that getting into it means he'll likely never find his way out. "You know that much, surely."
Molly shugs and smiles, leaning on the signpost he's just hammered into the ground and shaking out his freshly blistered hands. Never worked a day in his life, technically, and now here he is playing 24-hour man with Gustav, plastering the roadside ahead of the carnival with signs promising the show of a lifetime. There's bound to be a couple of aches and pains.
"What do you think about papering the house?" Gustav isn't actually waiting for a response, but he pauses, politely, before launching back into his spiel. "Give away enough free seats to fill the house on night one, might be able to get some interest going on night two. Anyway, I doubt we'll pick up that much business straight away. Hasn't been much entertainment in these parts. People will be wary, I think, rather than excited, though I suppose it's always hard to tell which way it's going to swing."
Molly narrows his eyes, scrunching up his face. It takes Gustav a second, but once the penny drops, he laughs. "You're saying they might be suspicious? Yeah, that's a fair assessment. Someone shows up offering you something for nothing, you take a second look. Still, I'm thinking we seem harmless enough that nobody's going to be looking too hard. These folk are nothing if not good at making assumptions about people, so we'll just make sure we come across as simple, frivolous, fun-loving people. Which is, mind you, broadly accurate."
Stretching out the aches in his back with a yawn, Molly bends and scoops up the rest of the signposts, cocking an eyebrow at Gustav. "Yeah, two or three more down this way," Gustav says. "I'll show you the kinds of spots where the crownsguard won't notice soon enough to tear 'em down. You'll be able to do this yourself next time." He squints at Molly. "Hey, you get more ink since last week? I run a job for five days and everything changes."
Craning his neck, Molly shows off the peacock, the green even more vivid against the still-reddened edges of his lavender skin. It's one of the rare tattoos he's had that's actually going to look less impressive the longer he has it. Gustav whistles, soft and low. "Great work, that one. Mona introduce you to her artist? Lovely, lovely." He stops in his tracks. "What were we talking about? Oh! Yes, New Dawn. The Changebringer. You heard of her?"
Molly has, but he's found that not knowing things tends to lead to infinitely more interesting conversations than the alternative, so he shakes his head.
"Not an approved deity, mind you, but I've found that this close to the edge of the Empire people tend to be a little more relaxed. New Dawn's her holy day. Change and rebirth and the open road. People mostly just treat it as an excuse to get hammered, and enough of the locals are not-so-locals that they remember some of the old prayers and such. Good business for a traveling band of folks wanting to make some honest coin." He winks. "And we'll do pretty well, too."
Molly's been giving it some thought, actually. So far he's been operating on the principle of leaning into what feels right, but gods are, well. A lot. But there's something appealing about the paradox embedded in the notion of a changeless, immortal divine being dedicated to the concept of change. Doesn't make much sense at all, which feels right in a way that makes his heart race with excitement.
Experimentally, when Gustav has his back turned to resume monologuing, Molly glances up at the sky and sketches a quick bow. The flashy moment lingers a little longer than he'd expected, and he catches himself staring down at the dirt, at the tiny grains pounded by hundreds of feet and hooves and wheels into a path, a road, a thoroughfare formed by a communal desire to be elsewhere, to be in transition, to be transforming. After a moment's hesitation, he nudges off his ill-fitting boots and stands with the chill of the dirt soaking into the bottoms of his feet.
And then he laughs, loud and long and hoarse, and sprints past a bewildered Gustav down the wide-open roadway, moving forward, forward, forward.
Rise against tyranny.
- Second Commandment of Avandra
Molly's mouth is dry, his voice hoarse from yelling in Infernal. He's also got a weird pain in his back from sleeping wrong on his bedroll the night before, and, well, he's got a sword in his shoulder, which isn't exactly what he was going for when he woke up this morning, but he's aware that it's now a thing that he's going to have to deal with at some point.
The bandit who'd owned the sword is long-dead, Yasha having considerately separated his head from his body, but the battle's become frenzied enough that Molly's not sure he'll be able to snag any friendly attention without simultaneously broadcasting his position to someone who might be inclined to add another sharp, pointy object to his collection.
So he slumps back against a tree stump, dropping his own swords to get a more careful grip on the hilt of the blade, holding it steady as he sits down heavily in the grass and waits for the battle to turn one way or the other.
It's a new experience, bleeding this badly, being in this much pain. He keeps trying and failing to focus his eyes, which makes him think about the way his heart is slamming into his ribs, which makes him think about the throbbing in his shoulder, which makes it hard to focus again. This is new to him, absolutely and unambiguously not an experience he has had before, but he also knows that the person he's not, the one who lurks deep in his bones, knows this kind of pain all too well. He's breathing slowly and carefully in such a deliberate way that it had to have been learned somewhere.
His arms get a little tired holding up the sword, so he tries letting them slump to his sides, which makes the sword shift, which makes him draw in a muted hiss of breath that almost throws his rhythm off altogether. But he slips slowly, inevitably, back into the metronomic, almost hypnotic pace of breathing, in and out, in and out.
"Hey," Yasha says, staring down at him. Time must have passed, because she wasn't standing there before, and Ornna certainly wasn't crouched at his side, and, hey, no more sword, many more bloodied bandages, all good things.
"Hey yourself," he says, dreamily. "They gone? We win? That's nice."
Yasha blinks, looking nonplussed, then hesitates, as if searching for words. "You're pretty tough," she says, finally. "Looked like it hurt a lot. You didn't even yell when they pulled it out, but you were still mostly conscious for that part, I think."
He shifts, turning to meet Ornna's furrowed-brow scowl. "What did they want?"
She shrugs. "By the sorry state of their coinpurses, probably gold. Maybe some of the silks we picked up last stop. Maybe our tents. Maybe our horses. Assholes like that always feel owed the things they don't have." She sees the next question in his eyes and the hard lines of her face soften. "Nobody hurt, aside from you. Nothing serious, anyway." Apparently done with her quota for kindness for the day, she swats him on the bad shoulder, making him yelp, and walks off.
Yasha is watching him still, looming like a particularly stoic monolith. There's blood on her face that she hasn't bothered cleaning off, though her damp cloak has obviously just been scrubbed clean. "You fought really well, like you'd done it before. Scooped up those swords and just-" She motions with her hands. "-really went at it. You know?"
"Beginner's luck." Mollymauk winks. "Give me a minute to get used to not bleeding to death and I'll tell you all about how I learned that."
She snorts. "You mean, give you enough time to make up a story to fool me with." But he's pretty sure that's a smile cracking the solid wall of her face.
Unlike Gustav, Yasha appreciates the value of a good silence, so Molly lets himself fade out a bit, listening to the quiet murmur of voices, smelling the sharp tang of blood in the air, while Yasha just stands, watching him, like she's trying to make up her mind about something.
He snaps back to himself when she finally crouches down. Granted, she's still looming, but he appreciates that she's making the effort. "A friend of mine used to call the past a tyrant," she says, slowly, like she's testing each word. "That it rules cruelly when it doesn't even have the right."
Molly thinks of a half-dozen glib responses and swallows them all. "I think your friend and I would have got on well."
Yasha hesitates, then drops a heavy hand onto the top of his head, between his horns. She looks panicked for a moment, like she hadn't thought this far ahead, then clumsily ruffles his hair. "Keep the swords on the outside of you from now on," she says. "Just a suggestion."
Dazed, he watches her push to her feet and walk away.
Change is inevitable.
- Third Commandment of Avandra
Lying flat on his back some distance from the campsite, Molly cuts his deck of cards with one hand and traces new constellations in the sky with the other.
It's a habit he's been cultivating, reminiscent of children seeing familiar shapes in clouds: this little triad of stars is a stone, clearly, and the larger cluster that sprays from it is a gush of water meeting its unyielding surface. Probably deeply symbolic of standing fast in the face of overwhelming odds. Deeply symbolic of something, anyway. These things always are.
Jester, perched on a log beside him, is sketching something in her notebook, squinting to make out color in the flickering firelight, but the sounds of her scribblings are more careful and deliberate than usual, and he can feel her eyes on him. He blinks, then props himself up with one elbow, smiling. "Are you sketching me?"
"No," she says, "I'm on watch with you and doing a very good job of it and definitely not getting distracted. Definitely." She narrows her eyes. "Stop moving around."
Obediently, Molly drops back and stares at the sky again. The fog of his own breath in the cool night air is making it hard to pick out individual stars, so he has to imagine pinpricks of light in the spaces he's missing. "I wonder what it's like out there."
Jester pauses. "What, up in the stars, you mean? My momma used to tell me the night was a big blanket, but someone knew we were scared of the dark and poked some holes to let the light in."
Molly smiles, drawing back to shuffle his deck with both hands. "Thus the great theological quandary: who poked the holes?"
"I think it's different for everyone," Jester declares. "We all see the stars a little bit differently, probably. For me, it was definitely the Traveler."
"That's a nice thought," Molly says, and waits for her scribblings to slow again before sitting up. "All right, I've waited long enough. Let me see."
She grins, not a hint of shyness about her, and hands over her journal.
He was expecting something silly or obscene or both at the same time, and while there are admittedly a series of surprisingly lifelike dicks scribbled in one corner, the main subject of the painting is untouched by anything objectionable.
The figure on the page is prone, reaching up to the stars with one hand, but eclipsing even the vastness of the stellar landscape is the peacock tattoo. It runs from the side of the tiefling's face, down the shoulder, and bleeds into the earth behind and beneath, stretching outward in vivid greens and red-eyed circles that anchor the figure to the earth, with long, colorful feathers sprouting from the dirt all around like cattails.
"That's lovely, Jester," he says, softly, and hands it back to her.
"I think it's such a nice tattoo, I wanted to make it as big as your personality!" Jester frowns. "Don't you like it?"
Something of the chill down Molly's spine must have shown on his face, but he shakes it off, beaming wide. "Like it? I think it's genius. A fabulous work of art. We'll have to look for a place in town to see about converting it to a fully fledged mural or tapestry of some sort."
Jester's eyes go wide. "A tapestry? Do you think they'd do that?"
He makes a show of considering the painting. "Absolutely. Make sure they include the dicks, though. That's a vital part of the artistic oeuvre."
That sparks a genuine laugh from her. "Anyway, I think the Traveler liked it." She lowers her voice to a stage whisper. "He thinks you're weird."
Molly blinks. "He thinks I'm weird?"
"I know, right?" She winks at him, then stretches, pushes to her feet, and starts meandering in her usual first-watch circuit around the edge of the camp.
Molly stays where he is for a while longer, trying to recapture the complexity of the constellations in his mind, but all that comes to view now in the spray of stars is a set of parallel lines: long, thin feathers in the sky, planted firmly and immovably into the blackness of the void behind them, the unblinking red eyes of his tattoos drawing him down and down and down into the uncaring earth.
Rubbing some warmth back into his arms, he stands, casting an unsettled glance at the camp behind him, and stares out into the deep, dark woods, hunching his shoulders against the cold.