Solo the Forivec Coup, ii: a slaver.

[Caelum]

*Follows the Forivec Coup, i: a sword.. Timestamp: 10 Fall 514 AV Fear trapped the tongue of Caracatas firmly behind her teeth. It was not an emotion with which she was much familiar. At the age of six she had tumbled off the back of her mother’s strider and straight toward shame, but not fear. No, never fear. Back then she had been Caracatas Silkspinner, a yellow haired child of the Sapphire Clan with a smile big enough to take the moon. That’s what her uncle used to say. He was her Ankal and her mentor, teaching her the mysteries of webbing while her mother tried to coax her to idle longer whiles with both boys and horses. It only ever worked when Caracatas sprung up to age sixteen and earned the element of earth in her reimancy initiation. That summer was a swelter with her flush in the middle of an age old chase, delighting in male attention and loving nothing more than to race through the tall grasses fast as sparks could fly from the surface of the sun. It never should have ended the way it did. The earth she knew was meant to nourish and water gave life and didn’t take it. Her sea was a plain the yawned in all directions and by the time they dug her out of the wreckage of her own pavilion she was at least half drowned. Deaths had come at her hand, too late to place over her ears and block out the sweet whispers. Overgiving came with a price and her pavilion had paid it. Before the world had even quite righted itself, what was left of them exiled her from Endrykas. For a long while she imagined returning herself to earth. She wasn’t afraid of Dira. She told herself she did not care. Whatever scraps of fear she had left blistered and burned off in exile. She left them in the tall grass, behind with the name of her pavilion, and became just Caracatas. When she met Haev Provedan, it took him no time at all to hear how loudly she had come to not care. Caracatas had convinced herself by then that she did not care about anything. She could not be bothered to concern herself with the secrecy of her former people and flat-eyed laid the weapon of her webbing on the table for the owner of Rattling Chains to make proper use of. Later Provedan would swear she shrugged. Night had crawled up out of the ground an hour gone. The last ten days had been of the worst and most confusing of Caracatas’ life. She had holed up that afternoon at the Kulkukan Tavern and Inn and sat cross legged in the middle of the floor, trembling hands trying and failing to remember the proper patterns to braid her hair into. As a child she had worn intricate braids but it had been so long and she had not cared so loudly that even her fingers seemed now to have forgot. She wished she could remember. She needed to feel safe again, and logic dictated that most people’s sense of safety was centered around their home. She didn’t know where her home was, but she wanted it. And she recognized it, too, when it appeared in the doorway of her room with windmarked arms and an impossibly charming smile. “I thought I might find you here,” Caelum said, and the slaver lowered her hands and swallowed.