You're not less than a person because you can't walk. You're not suffering terribly just because you cannot see. There is no shame in needing help to get by. But there is shame in exploiting those who need help.

Not Broken

Summary: After an experiment to produce monstrous living weapons fails, Berlith d'Medani is asked to help care for the victims and help them live their lives as best they can. Help those who need help, as the Beggar Dane says.

Chapter One: Misery Loves Company.

5/5/997, Kythri Coterminous.

On a metal vehicle, traveling at great speed along a path of magnetically repellent stones, there were many people. One of them was Berlith - a friar from the Silver Flame church in the devout nation of Thrane. The vehicle, the lightning rail, was bound for the south, specifically to Wroat, Breland's capital. Berlith, an older khoravar, had grown used to hardship as a priestess errant. But public transportation had a way of making people miserable regardless of their tolerances.

'Be thou for the people', she thought to herself as she sat among dozens of other people on the lightning rail car. She did so mostly to keep her temper under control as a human child in the seat behind her kept pulling on her hair. She had looked over her shoulder the first time it happened and could tell that the boy's mother was not in a good state. Faded Aundarian clothes and a haunted look made Berlith suspect the woman and her son were from Thaliost - on their way to a new life in Breland.

Berlith had read the stories in the gazette. People burned at the stake, martial law, and a madman at the helm. Rather than cause the poor woman any more grief, she allowed the human child to pull on her salt and pepper hair to entertain himself. How would the woman take it, Berlith wondered, when a priestess of the Silver Flame took a chastising tone when she had just escaped a mad Silver Flame Cardinal? No, it was best for Berlith to keep her silence.

The boy was too young to actually yank hard enough to hurt Berlith, anyway. Khoravar had different pain responses than humans - the scalp was not so sensitive because of differences in their hair. A Karrnathi couple found the sight, and Berlith's non-reaction, quite amusing. They didn't laugh, Karrnathi people were deathly allergic to laughter, but they had tiny smiles on their faces which got a little bigger every time they looked Berlith's way.

A horn from the front of the lightning rail sounded out - the Wroat station was close, and the lightning rail would begin to slow down. Berlith took the opportunity to make sure her traveling papers, passport, and arcane signet were all accounted for - her dragonmark was in an unfortunate place, so she wanted to avoid using that as a means to identify herself as part of House Medani. And if she didn't, there was likely to be some problems with a Thranish khoravar in Breland. The treaty which had ended the continent-spanning war was barely a year old, old sentiments hadn't had adequate time to die down.

Berlith had no doubts that a city guard for Wroat - the capital of Breland and never directly touched by war - would see an older khoravar woman, and believe they'd found an easy target. When the lightning rail stopped, Berlith stood, ensured her cloak covered her handbag, and traced the sprawling scar from her chin to her left temple. She hadn't been an easy target back then, she told herself, she wouldn't be one now that she was old and grey.

Wroat's lightning rail station was made of rough-hewn logs tied together in the Brelish style to hold the green-shingled roof up like a massive pavilion tent. The only walled and covered areas were the restrooms and the rail cart repair depot. Breland blue banners waved too and fro with the shifting winds.

The curtain wall that surrounded Wroat had been updated since she had last visited. At the bottom of the inner wall, there was a sheen to indicate acid-protection. Clearly, they had, at some point, feared their walls being melted out from underneath them during the war. Berlith had time to inspect it and to try and determine its age while she waited in line at the check-in station. She didn't see the little boy or his mother among those who got off at Wroat - which meant that they would go on ahead to Sharn.

A House Sivis gnome operated the check-in station, flanked by four humans in half-armor. When Berlith got to the front of the line, the gnome was clearly out of sorts. From the way she kept touching her forehead, it was likely some stress headache. Healing was not Berlith's specialty in divine magic - she knew how to use it, but she was not so practiced that she could offer to treat the Sivis gnome. Nor would it be appropriate, in the given context.

"Papers, please," the gnome asked and held out her hand. She was dressed in the Brelish style, with detached sleeves and her shoulders exposed. Even the simple, down to earth fashions of Breland were luxurious compared to Berlith's own monotone cassock and cloak. When the gnome obtained the papers she asked for, the inspection started. "Do you have anything to declare?"

Berlith opened her handbag and retrieved three prism-shaped red gemstones. Spellshards. She laid these on the check-in station's desk and waited.

"Please present signet to confirm Medani membership." The gnome leaned forward to verify Berlith's signet ring, then returned to the papers. "Recognized…" There was further minutia to the check-in, made more complicated as Breland's records incorrectly documented Berlith as a member of the order of Templars - due to a battle she had participated in.

But, after repeated clarifications and implied threats of legal action, Berlith was on her way to the Medani enclave. Her luggage had been collected quietly by members of her House to be brought to the same location - they traveled separately in case one was attacked. Either she or her reports would arrive at the enclave.

House Medani, like the bankers of House Kundarak, greatly valued security. But they preferred the path of being seen as inconsequential. So the House Medani enclave was not a palatial estate but a series of disguised buildings linked by tunnels and magic. Berlith's House traded in the safety of others, evidenced in their ownership and maintenance of the Warning Guild - and to that end, they acquired information from all possible venues.

While Berlith traversed the streets of Wroat, she recalled the fiasco that had been engineered to plant her within the ranks of the Silver Flame church. She passed the scenes of public drunkenness she had participated in, and the spot where she had broken a wine bottle on a bugbear's head. All planned to paint her as a black sheep among her family.

She passed a sight on the road, around the corner from her entry point to the conclave, and paused. In an alleyway, she saw beggars, a family of goblins. They had gathered wood in the form of sticks and sheets, and some rope, to try and fashion together a shelter - in anticipation of the rain that was due to fall after sundown, no doubt. Goblins were everywhere in Khorvaire, it had been their continent once upon a time. And no doubt, they had learned to fear people who offered to 'help' them. And no doubt, her lateness would be noticed by the House. It would be ill-advised at best to waste time on the goblins.

Berlith rolled up her sleeves as she walked down the alley toward the beggars, and ran through her memory of knots.

Thirty minutes past the time she was projected to arrive at the butcher's boutique that was the face for the Medani enclave entrance, Berlith arrived. She placed an order for Karrnwood ham and demanded to watch the khoravar butcher cut it so that he didn't cheat her even a little. With looks of disdain and affront from other patrons, she was led to the back, and immediately down a flight of stairs to the underground passages adjacent to the sewer lines.

Medani khoravar went about their business in the tunnels, though Berlith had to note how skinny everyone appeared to be. Perhaps she had started to develop the grandma 'feed everyone who's skinny' instincts, or perhaps Thranish cooking made her used to seeing people with more meat and pudge on their bones than Medani rations allowed.

The tunnels were of cobblestone - they had been just rough-hewn rock when Berlith had left for Thrane. Medani khoravar were speculated to descend from the drow of Xen'drik, which influenced their darker-than-normal skin colors, and their ability to see perfectly well in minimal light - which made the tunnels' use of bioluminescent moss perfectly adequate. No magical lights meant that the tunnels were harder to detect.

She was led to a small, featureless room with a two-way mirror, a chair, and a table as its main features. They had to make sure she wasn't being spied on, or a changeling, given the lateness of her arrival. With grace born of old age, she sat with her back straight and looked dead center at the two-way mirror.

"I helped a family of goblins set up a shelter from the rains," she said, without prompting. "And it worries me that the shelters for this city, capital of a country of down-to-earth hardworking people, still have beggars." Behind her glasses, her eyes became accusatory. "I had thought, with almost a hundred years free of the restrictions of Galifar, we could have fixed that issue."

Each of the original Five Nations had their own sense of community, and whom they looked out for. Breland and Thrane had been the ones where the poorest citizens weren't considered leeches, failures, or undesirables. Under Galifar, strict laws on the treatment of poor and disenfranchised people kept such measures at bay. Prince Jarot, before he became king, famously threw acid upon food donations for Metrol's homeless populace.

The silence was Berlith's answer, as detection spells likely went on behind the glass. After ten minute's time, the door opened and a young khoravar in retainer's livery beckoned her over. "You're clear to walk the tunnels," she told Berlith, differential to a more senior House member, though the girl's lighter skin and brown hair put her in the Baron's bloodline, not Berlith's. She couldn't meet Berlith's eyes for more than a minute or two. "The Baron would like to speak with you when you have the chance."

That gave Berlith pause - nothing in her reports was so serious that the patriarch of their House would need to talk to her directly. Something had to have gone wrong.

'Be thou for the people', she chanted to herself in her mind repeatedly, as she sat in a nondescript hansom cab on its way out of Wroat. All in all, she had spent maybe three hours in the capital itself. At her side was a khoravar man fifty years her junior - the patriarch of House Medani. She had sent him birthday presents when she could because he was her cousin - their grandmothers married after their husbands had passed away from mysterious causes.

"Let me be clear," Trelib started, diplomatic in his tone. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the countryside as they passed as if his conversation with Berlith was a distraction for him. "This is not a punishment. It is an interim position until we can complete an internal investigation and present our findings to the king."

Berlith narrowed her gaze at the Medani patriarch and gripped her handbag tighter. "The fact that you start off with that makes me question its validity, sir."

"It would have been worse if I clarified after the fact, I'm afraid." A patch of mud on the road was caught in the horse's shoe and was launched right at Trelib's face as he feigned a magnanimous look.

Berlith refrained from laughter as the leader of her House had to clean mud off his face and attempt to regain his dignity.

He attempted to start his magnanimous act again and was promptly struck with another wad of mud. Trelib afterward opened the hatch to speak to the driver and instructed her to avoid the mud if possible. When he closed the hatch and turned round to sit comfortably, he was struck with mud a third time. Trelib, fed up, finally pulled the curtains on the open end of the cab, just as a fourth mud glob struck. After he had cleaned himself up, with a helpful bit of magic from Berlith, he began to speak once more.

"Anyway, we're heading to Glyphstone Keep." The fair-skinned khoravar used a pocket mirror to make sure he had no lingering flecks of mud on his face. "The House offered to fund its reconstruction in return for renting the keep per the Korth Edicts. A hop, skip, and a jump later, his majesty comes to me and asks him to help clean up a mess left by his Citadel."

Berlith arched a salt and pepper eyebrow at this information. "How odd, the Citadel usually cleans up its own messes."

Trelib's face became a mask of disdain. "Certain branches of the Citadel have abused Boranel's trust. He has since rescinded that trust, and given it to me. And I, in turn, gave it to someone who - allegedly - was not worthy of that trust." At last, the Baron met Berlith's eyes, his stare intense. "We are using Glyphstone Keep as an impromptu hospital to treat and study people afflicted with aberrant dragonmarks. The previous head of the facility, a Jorasco excoriate, had been caught abusing the patients. Boranel dislikes that."

Berlith found her face automatically tighten and work its way into a frown. During her years of study at the Twelve, the professors had an almost universal disdain for the aberrant marked. Standing policy across all the dragonmarked Houses was that services were to be refused to such people - though the militant House Deneith had a more brutal kill-on-sight policy that was authorized by the Korth Edicts. While true dragonmarks could be used constructively, aberrant marks only served to destroy. Automatically, she envisioned the facility as a glorified prison.

"He won't tell me which branch of the Citadel did it, and I don't care. But what they did was they rounded up as many aberrant marked people as they could, and tried to force their marks to grow to levels of power we haven't seen for fifteen hundred years."

The blood drained from Berlith's face.

"That is the appropriate reaction. Near as we can tell, they failed. All but one of their test subjects were left permanently crippled by the experiments. The exception broke out of containment and made her way to Sharn. Everyone sent after her has ended up dead - Boranel has ordered us to leave her be."

Berlith took a deep breath and ran her hands over her face to calm herself down. "If they've been crippled, wouldn't it be kinder to put them out of their misery?" In her mind, these test subjects foamed at the mouth like rabid beasts and strained against chains in heavily guarded cells. In her mind, their aberrant marks pulsed red like veins of hot magma under their skin.

"Perhaps," Trelib granted her, "but Boranel put to us a tiered list of objectives with these people." The Baron began to count off on his fingers. "One, ensure that these people are treated with dignity and respect. Two, try to find out as much as we can about the aberrant marks without compromising number one. And three, help these people find some way to be part of normal society again without compromising the first or second directives."

"Boranel has become either an optimist, or has forgotten that the aberrant dragonmarked are shunned for a reason." Berlith shook her head and scowled. "What happens if we succeed and then one of these… people require a doctor's help? They'd die anyway."

The Medani Baron shrugged. "The king asked, and I agreed. I would like you to inspect the facility, and hold the line with the patients until we can find a permanent viceroy on the chance that Boranel asks us to dismiss the previous one." Trelib leaned back in his seat and looked at the roof of the carriage. "There has been an uptick in the number of aberrant dragonmarks appearing - and in their strength. Of great concern is the amount of aberrants manifesting in the other dragonmarked Houses. I want to know why."

They sat in silence for the rest of the trip. The monotony was broken when Trelib opened the curtains once more and was immediately struck in the face with mud.

With the curtains pulled back, Berlith could see the rugged countryside of Breland give way to what appeared to be multiple concurrent construction sites. Humanoid figures made of metal, stone, and rare woods did most of the work, while humans worked with and supervised them. Warforged, Berlith remembered. Breland had freed them, to do as they wished. They worked on many plots of land, on houses and roads. Some of the houses were already completed, triangular homes that reached up to almost comical heights, lined with dirt that had moss just beginning to grow. Around each home were similar triangular mounds that acted like fences. As she passed, she saw some under construction as well - a layer of branches and moss, then dirt, then humus on top.

"Since we've finished reconstructing the keep," Trelib said as he waved to the workers, "we sponsored a new suburban settlement. A public relations stunt, mostly. But it keeps soldiers in work and gives them time to adjust to civilian life again."

Glyphstone Keep was built on a small, egg-shaped island in the Howling River. A gatehouse on the shore guarded a bridge that was so narrow it barely allowed the horse and cab to cross. The Keep was clearly still being repaired, as half of it looked relatively new with gleaming red shingles on the towers and topmost buildings. But the facade was mottled in color - in the process of being cleaned, and the cobbled ground was simply dirty. The keep was more or less a chateau, not a true keep - a house meant to inspire the castle aesthetic.

While they approached the Keep, an awful racket rang out. Berlith's instincts recognized it as an agonized scream - from a smaller personage, a gnome. Her mind went a mile a minute with reasons why such sounds would come from the keep, and the most likely answer that she came up with was that one of the prisoners had escaped and had begun to maul someone. She didn't wait for the cab to come to a stop at the castle steps. Out from her handbag, she drew her holy symbol - an arrowhead inscribed with the mark of silver fire - and lept from the cab while it was still in motion. Without hesitation, she moved up through the gatehouse, past the Medani aides and warforged in orderly uniforms that had arranged in a presentational fashion for her, and ascended a flight of narrow spiral stairs to the next floor.

She heard Trelib call out to her as she walked through the stone building, but paid him no heed. Someone was being torn apart by a rabid aberrant marked cretin - she had to put a stop to it since no one else clearly would. Her cloak and friar's robes billowed around her as she marched, laying layers of enhancement magic to help her fend off the aberrant when she encountered it. Berlith's voice spoke spell incantations while her mind ran through all the emergency healing options she had for the day, all while her body followed the screams until she found the source.

On the third floor, on the north side of the keep, she came to a studded, heavy wooden door and found it locked. Her thoughts went to the circumstances that would cause someone to be locked in a prisoner's cell. Fortunately, she had an enchanted ring for such occasions. She knocked upon the knob with the ring and the tumblers moved to allow her entry.

The room wasn't a cell, as it turned out. It was a private room, albeit not well kept. Boxes lined the walls, and the curtains were drawn. A small figure - the gnome she had heard - was strapped to a bed sized for a human, dressed in a hospital gown. At close range, she couldn't mistake the agonized screams as coming from any other source, but what caused the pain eluded her. At least, until she saw the vine-like scabs that covered the gnome's right leg from his ankle all the way to his hip. One of the aberrant prisoners.

Her rush to help died down almost instantly. Cautious, she approached the aberrant like he were a wounded animal - she didn't know his power or the level of control he had. She could clearly tell he was in pain - but she suddenly had less drive to help when only the aberrant suffered. However, she took a deep breath and pressed forward when it was clear the gnome was in too much pain to acknowledge her presence. Her defenses were strong in anticipation of a fight against an aberrant, so she felt confident enough to try something.

The gnome's aberrant mark lit up and bled where the scabs flaked away, so Berlith ascertained that the mark was the cause of the pain. "Irian, eternal day, shine in the fire that burns away suffering and corruption," Berlith chanted as she invoked a healing spell which didn't require her to touch the aberrant. From her fingertip, a beam of intense white light shot out and struck the aberrant mark on the gnome's thigh.

Scabs broke off as white light traced through the mark. The gnome's screaming stopped, and he froze in place with his eyes bugged out. When the spell ended, the gnome relaxed and panted, but screamed no more. However, his mark had begun to bleed rather severely since all the scabs had been removed. Berlith acted quickly and reached into her handbag for mundane medical supplies. Her hands were covered with sturdy leather gloves then she began to bandage the gnome's leg from ankle to his thigh. The hip was more unpleasant to bandage, she had to move the hospital gown and blot certain aspects out of her vision.

When she was done, she pinned the bandages together and turned to leave.

"Thank you," gasped the gnome to the khoravar's back.

Berlith tried not to make a disgusted sound as she left the room. Immediately after she had closed the door, she found a warforged in orderly's clothes behind her. But rather than feel contrite about her intrusion, she pointed right into the artificial person's face and began to make demands. "Change those bandages every day, positive energy seems to help mitigate the pain, or stop it temporarily, so a few drops of potion should work if applied as a rub. And for the flame's sake, get that man some smallclothes."

The warforged was a foot and a half taller than Berlith, and easily five times as durable. It could've easily smacked her and likely broken her arm. But when confronted with a demanding elderly khoravar, it pushed its pointer fingers into each other as if flustered. "Doctor Rachor left strict orders," it started.

"I don't care what orders a crackpot left that resulted in that thing screaming so loud it could be heard outside the keep!" Berlith hadn't shouted in years, even such a short burst hurt her vocal cords. She rubbed her throat and glared. "This is a secret operation. We don't need rumors about torture happening in our facility."

Without another word, Berlith left the area and began to trace her steps back through the castle. Not long after she'd started, she almost walked into Trelib in a tight spiral staircase. There was some satisfaction in being the one to look down on her patriarch, even if it was purely circumstantial.

"I trust," he said with an arched brow, "that you dealt with the problem?"

"I shut it up by providing basic care, yes." Her tone was clipped and professional. "If all the aberrants are kept in those kinds of conditions, we won't learn anything useful from them. I need to review the documentation and find out what else has gone wrong here, show me to the administration office."

Trelib smiled, but Berlith only saw it for a second before he turned to show her the way. There was work to be done.

For the record, khoravar is the Eberron name the half-elf race chose for themselves after their population became self-sustaining. And because this caused something of a stir when I dropped it a few chapters in for Skooma Cat, yes, this is an LGBT+ heavy cast. Some will be explicit, some will be implied, some will be left completely ambiguous.

In case you haven't picked up on it yet, I do like to gay up my stories quite a bit.

If you want to see the castle Glyphstone Keep is based off of, google 'guizhou castle'.