the ruined and the tarnished

Chapter 3

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She was dead the moment you laid eyes on her. In the wharf, when she’d chased you down the streets like you wanted her to. And down here, you hear the decisive tap of her boots against wet stone, a contrast to the slow drip of the pipes above you. She’s chasing you again. Like you wanted her to, again.

You walk with her towards your promise. You look down and the body is not your own but someone else’s. Younger. Familiar. You. But not you. Idly, you wonder how her liver would taste. The glands in your mouth salivate at the thought, and you relish the illusory texture of it on your tongue.

A rat scampers and squeaks as you walk past. She matches your pace, anxiety radiating from her body. The tremor in her voice. The tic in her fingers. The scent of her fear. Without warning, she splits up and follows the beckoning rodent deeper into the labyrinthine canals.

“I’ll only be a moment, Magpie,” she says when you protest. You always liked the way she followed her inquisitive nose like a hunting dog. Hers is an unstoppable momentum. And you, the bulwark.

You catch up to her in the dank passageway, and in the darkness she had found the rotting corpse of you-but-not-you. You roll your eyes, and a voice that isn’t your own speaks. “I told you to dispose of the body properly. That will be fifty lashes, Fel.”

An unseen apparition behind you: “Yes, Master!”

“Sometimes I wonder if you’re a masochist.” You turn to her, tugging off the veil of your disguise. The fringes of the Weave prickle your fingers, and when you look down, still your body is not yours. You. But not You. “Well, Detective? Satisfied?”

“You— you tricked me. You killed all of them.”

“Indeed. Isn’t it brilliant? And you performed your role admirably, Detective. Oh, but you were so close!”

She shakes her head, disbelieving. “Was there even a real Guild or was it all just a lie?”

You laugh. “The Guild is real. My promise of safe harbour is real. If only you’d join me.” You reach out a hand. “My word is my bond.”

She scowls at you, breathing hard, and you savour her indecision in the silence. The saccharine taste of the tempted. Her mouth opens. You hold your breath. She speaks with a voice that isn’t hers, and the sound is a blur. Only a single word creeps into your cognisance: Ajax. Not Magpie, not ████, but Ajax. She speaks again, and you hear nothing else but the litany of a name that isn’t yet yours. Ajax. Ajax. Ajax.

“AJAX!”

Then: a blunt force at the back of your head.

You blink.

Daylight blinds you. Your legs become heavy and soaked and as you glance down and around, you have left the sewers and your body is yours. A gith stands beside you, holding her sword with the pommel at the ready.

“Istik! Wake up and fight!”

Ajax didn’t need to be told twice. He pressed forward, and Lae’zel and Wyll followed suit, their blades drawn and poised for attack, wading into the waters behind him. Before them, three harpies perched atop eroded rock. One flew to flank them from behind, and one sat at the top sang with the Detective’s sweet voice. The sound coiled around his skull, its tendrils burrowing around the wrinkles of his shattered memories, and a feeling of indignation began to rise in him at their encroachment. As if he needed another reason to kill them. Raising his sword, Ajax imbued his blade with divine fury, radiating it a sickly green, a mirror of the festering rot inside him. He cleaved a path of foul carnage, dispensing his judgement to those he deemed guilty, and that raging impetus pressed down on him, weighing heavier than any other thought.

The last harpy flew to escape, but Astarion caught her with an incisive arrow to her wings, sending her hurtling down on the rock. Ajax sprinted to pinion her with a heavy steel boot, and the bird shrieked and writhed, begging for her life. In response, he crushed birdbones with all the force of his muscled calf. She screamed. He watched. The rage had turned cold. A steady march of a soldier approached from behind and with one heavy swing, he plunged his sword into the harpy’s chest, and at last she laid still.

“Are you finished?”

Ajax stared at the gith. He imagined the alien arrangement of her innards, mentally conducting a vivisection with a cold curiosity.

“Yes.”

He followed her back to the shore, and only then did he notice a tiefling child cowering behind Shadowheart. As he approached them, the boy gazed at him with an amalgam of reverence and fear. The boy’s name had been Mirkon, and he would later offer his gratitude in the form of a story scrawled on parchment.

They made camp on the outskirts of the druid grove, and as night fell upon their camp, the sounds of nocturnal creatures filled the air — serene as if blood hadn’t been shed, but such was the nature of life: it went on. Their companions had settled in for the eve, and he and Wyll remained awake for first watch.

Ajax sat by the crackling campfire, his gaze fixed on the boy’s present held in his hands. The tale depicted an adventurer saving a boy from the harpies, the words riddled with both spelling errors and boundless admiration for him. Twice now he’d received a gift from the people he’d helped — a mother’s locket and now this handwritten tale. Helping them hadn’t even been his idea. It was Wyll who pushed him to save Arabella, and it was bloodrage that fuelled Ajax to kill the harpies.

Wyll sat across from him, tuning the strings of his lute, his head bent low and sideways in focus. The soft-plucked strings blended well with the evening buzz. Ajax couldn’t recall when or where Wyll had acquired the lute, but the day had been long and exhausting — what’s another memory lost to a fractured mind like his? He watched him work, noting the flexed bicep cradling the instrument; his eyes strayed from arm to shoulders to his ill-fitting clothes flaunting exposed skin. In case of a midnight skirmish he would be gravely injured, if not dead. Pinned down, defenceless, and then: a precise incision into pulse, or a rabid claw through the chest.

A curious sartorial decision.

Ajax sat on the log next to him. “You fought well today.”

“And your swordsmanship is impressive.” Wyll smiled and laid the lute by his side. “Forgive my curiosity, but where did you learn swordfighting?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, pensive. “I’m a paladin, I suppose, though with my lack of oath, I’m not sure I can call myself that.”

“Lack of oath? You’re an oathbreaker?”

“I woke up in the Nautiloid already one,” said Ajax. “The tenets are branded on my arm — a constant reminder — but it appears I still managed to violate them somehow.”

“May I see?”

Wyll gazed at him, curiosity glinting in his eye. He, too, carried the burden of an oath. Perhaps he’d understand. And so with a tense hand, Ajax lifted the sleeve of his shirt, baring the expanse of his right forearm. The campfire cast a glow on the words inked into his skin.

Douse the flame of hope.
Rule with an iron fist.
Strength above all.

The tattoo was a faded contrast against brown complexion, the ink dulled by the years sworn to this oath. These words, he knew, should carry weight. A sense of purpose. Yet, he felt nothing but the weightless gravity and primordial rot that had taken root in him.

Wyll clasped Ajax’s arm in his hand, examining the tattoo with a furrowed brow. He traced the inked lines with his thumb, exploring the textured grooves of each raised letter. His hands were firm and rugged with scars, but his touch remained gentle, a caress veiled in strength.

“Sounds ominous,” said Wyll. “It doesn’t ring a bell at all?”

“No,” he lied.

“Perhaps it’s best you don’t. Dousing the flames of hope doesn’t sound much of a good time.”

Ajax snorted. “That it doesn’t. What about you?”

“Me?”

“You mentioned you were oathbound. What are its tenets? Do you bear a mark of it, like I do?”

Wyll’s face broke into a slight, bemused smile. “That, I do not.” Then, he raised his arm for Ajax’s scrutiny: it revealed no mark, but rather a canvas of faded battle scars. “As for my oath… it’s not so much a paladin oath like yours, but more of a personal calling. My father once said, ‘One does not pursue a champion’s life. One merely answers its call.’ So it was for me.” He recounted a tale during his early years as the Blade: a child left alone in a burning village, orphaned and vulnerable, huddled amidst a horde of goblins. “I don’t remember much of the battle,” he said. “But I remember drying the boy’s tears after.”

“You must’ve felt proud, saving that kid.”

“On the contrary,” said Wyll. “It makes me angry to think about, still. Angry at the monsters preying on innocents. Angry at the so-called good gods, for tolerating the cruelty of the evil. Angry at myself that it took so long for me to see the Coast’s suffering. The frontiers demanded a blade. And so I heeded.”

Ajax gazed at him, searching for traces of repressed rage, but found only sorrow in the downturn of his lips. Loneliness too, if he dared. The campfire illuminated his scar-streaked cheek, and Ajax wondered of its source, longed to trace his fingers along its lines, committed the curves of each scar to memory.

“Is that how you ended up chasing a devil in Avernus?” asked Ajax.

“Karlach,” he said, and there it was: a flicker of fury burgeoned in his voice. “One of the archdevil Zariel’s own — chaos incarnate, a devil with pure fire for a heart. She was planning to return to Baldur’s Gate, and I had to stop her. She fled from my reach — even climbed aboard the mindflayer ship as it screeched through the Hells, and I followed in close pursuit.” He glanced at Ajax and pointed to his good eye, wiggling his finger to mimic a worm. “You already know what happened next.”

“An unwelcome insertion in the ocular region, as our good wizard friend had put it.”

“Aptly put.”

“It was quite a noble thing to do,” said Ajax, “going so far as the Hells to protect a city.”

“Not every threat to Faerûn resides in the frontiers. If Avernus is where the call takes me, then that is where I go.”

The campfire dwindled to mere embers, and Wyll prodded at it with a stick, determined to keep the flames alive. Mirkon’s tale grew creases as Ajax fidgeted with it, constantly folding and unfolding the parchment between his fingers. Wyll had been there when the boy gave it to him, he remembered.

“That boy, earlier,” said Ajax. “He gave me this.”

Wyll took the parchment and read it. Ajax observed his reaction, and the warmth emanating from his smile left him both disconcerted and disarmed. “Ah, that lad,” said Wyll. “If he keeps this up, he could very well grow up to be a charming bard. Provided, of course, he doesn’t throw his lot in with the thieflings entirely.” He handed the present back with a raised eyebrow. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

He gestured towards the parchment.

“I… don’t know,” said Ajax, and his involuntary candour caught himself off guard.

“The kid admires you,” he replied. “And for good reason — you really eviscerated those harpies.”

“They had it coming, invading our minds like that.”

He chuckled. “There’s been a lot of that happening lately.”

“The thing is,” said Ajax, the truth spilling out once again like entrails from a severed stomach, “I hardly noticed the boy during the battle. And most certainly I did nothing to shield him from harm. Why offer this to me? Why not you, a proper folk hero? Why not Shadowheart, who’d stayed by his side and mended his wounds? I had only felled the monsters, nothing more.”

It was Wyll’s turn to study him, and if it were his fingers digging around his cerebrum, he would so keenly let him. “For some, that is more than enough.”

Unable to stand his gaze, Ajax looked away.

“You helped save a boy’s life from the sharp claws of the harpies. If we weren’t there, if you hadn’t heard their song—”

“Saving him hadn’t been my intention,” said Ajax.

“Do you think that makes your deed any less worthy? Less good?”

“Does it not?”

“You rid the world of an evil — one that would have preyed on more and more children had you not found them. If that isn’t a good thing, I’m not quite sure what is.”

Ajax groaned, resignedly palming his face. “I wouldn’t feel this lost if I still had my oath. And my memories.”

“For what it’s worth, I can see you’re on the right track. You’ve saved two children from certain death. You’ve helped fight off goblins attacking the druid grove.”

He looked up at him in disbelief and disdain. How could he know that? To look at him, to hear his words, and then utter such a thing with obscene certainty? The mouldering chasm within hollowed him out with a dull, constant pain — his mind and heart and guts empty, hungry, all-consuming. He stared at him, still. Wyll only gazed back, still the same glint of curiosity in his solitary eye.

“Without an oath, I am nothing more than a suit of armour,” said Ajax. “What would you be if you weren’t the Blade?”

Wyll winced at the question, looking away. “Perhaps therein lies the advantage of a calling — it cannot be taken away from me, not by any god or fiend,” he said sombrely, a hand resting over his chest. “Don’t get me wrong — I’m well aware oathbreaking is not to be taken lightly. But in that sense, I’d also wager you had good reason to forsake yours.”

“I’m not convinced that it is good.”

“Ajax,” Wyll began, and the sound of his name on his tongue thrilled him, “what matters is you’re no longer beholden to these words. Your path is yours to forge as you see fit. Few could count themselves lucky to have freedom such as yours.”

Wyll’s fervent talk of freedom intrigued Ajax; he cocked an inquisitive eyebrow, though he remained silent on the matter. If freedom entailed being adrift in the void of a broken oath, then he wanted nothing of it.

And yet, as they held each other’s gaze, Ajax’s mind went still. A second was all it lasted, a fleeting respite before the urges returned. In that stillness, an epiphany followed in the chaos of his mind: perhaps Wyll didn’t need to understand, perhaps he needed only to guide his hand, the Blade to lead the blade, to drive the hilt to where it must carve.

NOTES

It was really fun experimenting with second-person perspective for this one! This is definitely not the last you’ll see (read) of Ajax and the Detective.

Shoutout to Sophie paarthursass for giving me the idea for Ajax to have the Oath of Conquest prior to getting tadpoled! And yeah, they do have the tenets branded on their arm. Isn’t that neat?

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