Difference between revisions of "Aniste"

Latest revision as of 19:55, 29 September 2017

My life was not supposed to look like this. I should have been a happy little gypsy girl, plying the rivers with my father and his perfectly normal gypsy wife. I should have grown up in a loving home with parents who cared for me and raised me to be decent and kind and all of that goat shit that they spoon feed little girls in fairy stories. I should have been lots of things, but that was before fucking Madeline Shandy decided that Vistani men were sexy.

Go to any inbred waterheaded twat who likes to gossip while she hangs the washings and she will tell you. Never trust a devil-snatch with your purse or your heart. And they are fucking right, just this once. Don't wink at a Mamonil woman with red hair, don't smile at her, don't offer to help carry her parcels, don't peek at her legs as she walks away when you think she isn't looking. Not if you have known her since birth, not if you have never seen her before. Not if she is the high matron of Giselle and for damned sure not if she is fucking Madeline fucking Shandy the fucking cutwife.

I have spent half a damned decade trying to figure out who Madeline Shandy is and about all I have come up with is that she never spoke a true word to me. I am sure that you, gentle friend, have heard your share of angry stories from young runaway girls about how awful their mother was but I assure you, all of them pale in comparison to the malicious cunt that is my mother.

Oh you don't believe me? How is this for example. Do you remember when I came into this fine establishment and ordered a hot tea with syphilis? Do you remember how funny everyone else thought that was? Now imagine if your mother taught you that the word for goat's milk is syphilis, or that the word for tankard is dickhole, or that apples don't grow on trees, dungballs do. Imagine that your mother intentionally taught you the wrong words for everything so that you would be afraid to open your mouth to anyone but her, so that when you try to tell the town preacher about your mother's abuses that he will praise her in front of you because her daughter took the time to tell him that “Momma loves me so good all the time and she sings to me and teaches me scriptures until I see angels and laugh until the sun comes up.” Now imagine how much she sang to me after that one.

I am still to this day finding words that bitch poured into my head wrong. Sometimes they are just embarrassing but occasionally they are downright dangerous. You ever cheerfully call a gnome Bush Fucker? I can tell you they don't appreciate it. And I am sure that you can imagine the response when you greet a half dozen dwarf miners as Shitdiggers. But that is just some of the things she did to me, that is to say nothing of what she did to my father.

I found out that he existed from a witch hunter who mistook me for Madeline. He tried to burn me at the stake for entering a devil's pact to restore “my” youth. Turns out he was witness to the wedding. Madeline told me that I didn't have a father, that I was conceived when she got bored, turned into a hermaphrodite and fucked herself.

When the witch hunter finally let me go, he told me the real story. Boldo Samantine brought his young bride to Madeline to midwife her. Madeline supposedly did everything in her power but still lost the baby and mother both to "Gaia's care". By this time I of course knew all of Madeline's “power” and how she could still the breath of a living baby and poison a mother through the womb so I am confident that Gaia had nothing to do with their unfortunate fate.

Boldo was nearly inconsolable in his grief but Madeline managed to console her way into his bed and to the altar. The marriage was brief and ended with Boldo apoplectic from a burning log to the face. Madeline was held in dock for a time but was released when she was revealed to be with child. Boldo eventually regained consciousness but without memory of the last two years. The town elders thought it kinder to not force him to relive the traumas and told him that his young wife had called off the engagement and left him for a Yrchman pirate. He returned to his old life, never knowing my existence.

I lived with Madeline until my eleventh year, when I abandoned hope of rescue and escaped alone. I knew that she could summon monsters of shadow and hellfire to drag me back, but I stole her ritual blade and tried to put as much distance between us before she could make a new one. Sure enough, within a week I heard the baying of Hellhounds on my trail.

They ran me for a full day, making sport of me. I knew they were having fun before the kill. I was the deer, helpless to do anything but run blindly. That was when I found the first hint of good fortune in my young life. Instead of being run off a cliff, I ended up crashing through the camp of an old crone, meditating before an empty firepit like a fucking mongoloid. I nearly broke my neck when I slammed into her.

I didn't know what to do so I screamed a warning of “Puppies!” and scrambled to my feet. I saw the fire of their breath all around. Three of them, encircling the camp. I was doomed and now I had doomed the crone as well.

The crone moved calmly and without concern for the monsters. She stepped toward the largest one but when he advanced, she melted into shadow. The beast looked confused for an instant, until she crashed into his head from above. His body failed him and he became smoke and drifted away. The second one charged, but before he could belch forth his fire the crone struck him violently a half dozen times and he broke apart just as his companion had.

People think hellhounds are stupid beasts, like regular dogs rolled in flaming pitch, but they are wrong. They are malevolent spirits, calculating and cunning. The third hound abandoned his quarry and went back into the darkness.

The crone turned to me, seemingly perfectly at home in the darkness. She spoke in a voice that was neither aged nor frail, the voice of a woman only a few years my senior. “What's your name, dummy?”

“Aniste Shan… just Aniste” I swallowed hard, wondering if I was about to be pummeled like a naughty puppy.

“Well, just Aniste. It appears to me that I just saved your ass, so that means that your ass belongs to me now.”

I thought she was speaking figuratively but she meant it. I became her property for the next five years. She made me call her master and was ever cold and emotionless to me and it was the most loving relationship I had ever known.

She also taught me the ways of her order, the Daughters of Michondar. She spoke to me of finding the order in chaos, the patterns in the patternless, of listening to the universe itself and understanding the will of chance itself. She taught me that Karma is not a static thing but a current that we follow, allowing Michondar to send us without sending to the places where Karma has weakened so that we may tip the scales back and restore the natural order.

I have seen evil and I have seen how it cheats when the bill comes due. We make sure that everybody pays. We are not the good guys. We do not preach. We do not offer mercy for the recalcitrant fiend. We settle the bill in the only payment that Michondar accepts. Blood.