Rating: Not Rated
Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category: Other
Fandom: Kingdoms of Amalur
Relationship: Fateless One & Famor | Bloody Bones
Characters: Fateless One (Kingdoms of Amalur), Famor | Bloody Bones, Sir Farrara
Additional Tags: Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Genderqueer Character, GFY
Additional Notes: thank you to Norcumi for reading this little tidbit for me, she's a damn trooper ;)
Uduath was much like every other Fae hollow sie had entered before it. Dark and so deep in the earth it felt like an entirely different realm; so labyrinthine sie had bought paper and charcoal to sketch a map; and, in its center, an enemy with rage on their tongue and blood coating their hands.
Life was strange, or perhaps it was simply the Fae. Sie still wasn't sure.
"So, the witch was right," the Fae—Bloody Bones, presumably—observed as Sir Farrara strutted into Uduath's heart, with sier cautiously following behind. He didn't sound as angry as sie had expected from the tales, but then, neither had the Widow. "Help has come for Sir Farrara the Fair, who flounders in the puddles of Uduath. Such a champion should never lose his way. Not in his own song."
Sir Farrara said nothing in return, nor did his body language portray offense. Sie had learned enough of mortals to find it a strange non-reaction, enough of the Fae to find it hardly worthy of notice, and enough of Farrara himself to not be surprised. More surprising was the lack of bite to the words, as if the Bloody Bones cared very little himself.
"You, new knight," the fae addressed sier directly, in that lilting tone of all Summer Fae. "Leave now, foresaking the last prisoners, and I will share with you my knowledge. How I came to change things. Stay, and you'll have nothing but corpses."
Sie looked askance at sier companion, who did nothing but raise his an eyebrow at sier. "What witch?" sie asked rather than answer the ultimatum quite yet.
"Oh, I don't know who she is," the Bloody Bones replied with a wave of his hand, unbothered. "I don't care. What concerns me is power—the power to end this pitiful design. In every song, the Summer champion triumphs, his enemy falls."
The Fae's voice grew heavy as he continued, but curiously, it lacked bitterness. "How long has this been the way of the Telling? This existence—it is not a life. It is not a death! It is a snare in which I have struggled for centuries. No more."
Ah, he was less like the Widow then, and more like the Knave of Coins. Only, where she had taken leave to pursue a Telling of her own design, the Bloody Bones had been cursed to truly relive his, unlike his brethren. In some ways, Fae justice was far more brutal than that of mortals.
"You won't hurt anyone," sie finally decided, tilting sier head and examining their foe. He was a Fae, of course, and thus one never really knew, but he didn't seem the type; he didn't bleed hostility or reek of vengeance. The most aggression he'd displayed so far was a weary kind of exasperation.
The Fae in question blinked and shook his head in return. "That's true," he admitted easily. "My intent was never to do harm. All I want—all I have ever wanted—was love. Not to be alone in my eternal grief." Sie marveled at how deeply men, mortal and Fae alike, seemed to experience their feelings, yet still managed to muck things up with them. "Fine," he bit off, with something like a warning glare. "The prisoners are free to go… but you shall take their place. You shall be Bloody Bones' new desire."
Sie watched Sir Farrara ready his blades out of the corner of sier eye, and shifted sier stance instinctively in response, but. In that moment when Bloody Bones stepped away and prepared himself for a fight, sie didn't feel a surge of battle-blood. Sie felt the very air shudder the way it did when sie consciously shifted Fate's design in combat; sie felt the change in sier breath and heartbeat and fingertips.
"You have a marked history of very poor decision-making," sie was intensely aware of saying, "but I accept."
Additional Notes: i always want a nonbinary rpg character-especially for games like amalur and skyrim-but using "they/them" pronouns just didn't feel like it hit the right tone for an amalur fic, so i searched around for less mainstream sets and found "sie/sier/siers/sierself" and thought they had a lovely sound to them. i have no concrete plans to actually follow up on this, but i quite like the idea and i'm doing some pretty fun world-building in the back of my mind, so i'll keep the doc open and hopefully something will come of it.
all in all, i wrote this because playing through the ballad of bloody bones, i thought the dude sounded pretty put-together for someone who hasn't been allowed to die in literal centuries, possibly millennia, and when he says "you shall be bloody bones' new desire" i'm always like "sure bruh" but then he squares the fuck up. like, give an enby a chance to reply before automatically jumping to the worst conclusion, yeah?