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Since the day that Cirice was spawned all she’s ever known was death.
Molded from the tainted hands of Bhaal himself and imbued with his most unholy blood, one of her earliest memories had been watching her own hands drain the essence of life from her mother’s eyes. She was raised within the darkest pits of the Bhaal Temple, had experienced horrors beyond comprehension that rewired the inner workings of her brain, and had been subjected to excruciating pain at the hands of her own murderous siblings. All things she’d known had been disguised for the sole purpose of making her resilient.
Resiliency.
Gods, how she hated the word.
Cirice wasn’t resilient – she never was. Since the day that she learned to crawl through cooled puddles of blood and gore, she had been damaged beyond repair. A deep, soul-shattered damage that could never be mended no matter how often she tried to run from it. No matter how hard she tried to escape. She longed for it, dreamt of it, even wept for it at the feet of her father. Murder and sin were all she ever knew, all she ever was, and it was all she would ever be.
The tadpole implanted into her brain at the brutal hands of her closest ally had been both the best and worst thing that could have ever happened to Bhaal’s chosen child. She remembers the sound of her own screams as it burrowed into the fragile tissue and wiggled into the nonexistent space behind her eye. She remembers how her own sister had held her down – how it had hurt. She remembers the searing pain as it settled, and the sound of her footsteps as she left her there to fate.
For the first time in her life, Cirice had been scared to die. She’d been left on that table, bleeding and cold, and she’d suffered through an entire tenday alone as her wounds attempted to knit themselves back together. Quenched and nowhere near numb, part of her wish she would’ve died. Finally, on the twelfth day, she’d passed out, and when she came back it was only to the pounding of a sword’s hilt on the outside of the strange pod she’d woken up in.
Escaping had been easy. She’d torn a pathway for herself in blood through that ship and had suffered through the agony of dragging the gith and the cleric behind her. The hurtle towards the dirt had been nothing less than exhilarating.
The ground had been hot when she’d taken her first steps on the beach. The air was warm. Everything was unfamiliar. New. There were no watching eyes, no puddles of blood, no piles of gore… She’d shivered as she stood and felt the tide lick at her ankles.
Unable to remember anything except her name, the first thing that Cirice did was run.
—
Cirice is not a good person.
One night under the stars was all it took for the tiefling to revert back to her old ways because, as it turns out, life outside the city is
agonizingly
boring.
There’s nothing to do except swat away at bugs and itch at the bites they leave on your skin. Nothing to do but walk and collect scraps of things that look useful or unfamiliar – a boot here, a backpack filled with holes there – and follow the trail of the moody gith as she stalks through the forest with a similar unfamiliarity. It’s only when the gith finds herself trapped and strung up in a cage surrounded by tieflings with longbows and shortswords that Cirice comes to the realization that perhaps this self-righteous, otherworldly creature is dumber than she initially thought.
As the sun began to descend on her first night of freedom, she wandered into the thick of the forest with the little belongings she’d gathered from the wreckage and left the river at her back, searching out a temporary place to sleep for the night. She’d been lucky that she didn’t have to wander far. A small makeshift camp and four drunken goblins were no match for the matching pair of daggers she’d looted from civilian corpses. One by one they’d fallen, flesh flayed swiftly from bone, and the last one had barely registered the silent cries of his companions before Cirice had her boot pressed between his shoulder blades and her claws shredding through the tissues of his neck.
The silence that had followed the slaughter had almost been eerie. Nothing but the sound of the crackling fire and crickets and the last of the goblin’s bated breath as it leaked from between the gashes in his butchered flesh. Her hands and her robe had been stained with crimson, the ground saturated with blood, and something had to be done about the bodies before she could allow herself to crawl into their tents and lie down. One corpse at a time, she dragged them down to the river by their ankles and let the water carry their bodies away.
For a while she watched from the rocky bank as the water ran red, then pink, then clear. And finally, with the moon high in the sky, she stripped and washed the blood and soot from her hair until it was silvery again.
—
The goblins’ rations quickly run out. As does the potential of their poor excuse for weapons.
Cirice is in no way a fighter. She’s an unholy assassin of the highest order who stalks the darkest corners of the Gate and hides within crowds of people in plain sight. She attacks with precision and only the sharpest of blades, and when her daggers fail to complete the job, she reverts back to teeth and claw until the life has drained free from her victim’s eyes. The goblin bows and scimitars left behind by their wielders are not exactly the tiefling’s choice of hardware. She’d much rather be the only one to strike, and only in the most dire of circumstances would she ever fall back to her extracurricular studies in necromancy. Living in the wilderness tests her strengths and exposes her weaknesses, and as the small amount of rations continue to dwindle, she finds herself thrown right back into the shock of reality outside the Gate.
The forest is too dense, the night is too dark, yet there is never a moment that she doesn’t feel exposed. Every sound and crunch of leaves beneath a hoof or foot sends her hair on end like she’s never experienced before and every flap of a feathered wing makes her jump. As the food supply dwindles and every interaction with a fur-covered creature sends her flat on her ass and bloodied, it’s almost as if the Gods below have been watching her struggle when they send the cleric from the ship across the river to set up her camp.
The first night that the cleric settled in Cirice had noticed fairly quickly that she hadn’t been alone. Somehow the githyanki had managed to escape and there was a brown haired man, too. As she sat from her concealed spot on the edge of the treeline she watched as the group of strangers constructed their tents and mingled over a crackling fire, but the bowls cupped in their palms and the savory smell of a warm meal was what really captured her attention. Her stomach grumbled and ached as she watched and she realized for the first time since she’d been alone just how hungry she’d become.
She’d almost waded across the river that night in search of a meal–and perhaps for the bulk of their supplies–but had forced herself back to her own camp instead. There was no fire that night, and certainly no warm bowl of stew between her palms. Sleep eluded her, and with every passing hour the deep-seeded urge returned.
By the next night a warlock had shown up to the camp, and by the next, a strong, tiefling woman. Cirice had spent hours watching the camp, observing their patterns and memorizing their habits until she knew what time they retreated to sleep in the evening and rose in the morning. She knew each stranger by name and knew where the awkward wizard called Gale snuck off to during the day only to return empty handed (when she investigated the spot all she found was a shitty collection of tarnished amulets and rings imbued with ancient magic… nothing worth taking). But there was another stranger across the river that she had a difficulty with in memorizing his behaviors. A pale elf with hair a similar silver shade to her own, yet much curlier. He didn’t eat with the others, didn’t sit around the fire after dark, and Cirice found that he often slipped from his tent once the night had gone quiet and the frogs took up their songs.
Where he went? She wasn’t sure. Most nights he seemed to disappear into the dense darkness of the forest, but once or twice she’d watched from afar as he’d wander right up to the edge of the river and stand there with his shoes off, hovering as if unsure, as if he wanted to wade but didn’t know how to swim.
Something about that man had intrigued her, but only in the way that he also managed to ruin every single aspect of her final, desperate ploy for survival.
The sky had opened up the following morning to dump heavy sheets of rain over Faerûn, and Cirice awoke in an uncomfortable puddle of wet. At some point during the night the unforgiving combination of rain and wind had ripped the canvas of her tent from its wooden skeleton and left what remained hanging from a single post, dragging back and forth in the mud like a grub. Shivering and exposed to the elements, the tiefling remained curled into a ball, robe muddied and flesh covered in chills, waiting out the moment that it would finally stop.
The rain does not stop. It continued in waves, bringing thunderous booms that bounced around her skull, and bright flashes of lightning. Around mid-day she attempts to fix her tent and realizes that every layer of canvas has either been torn or ruined beyond salvaging. The ground itself had begun to pool and in the space where she’d woken up now sat a reservoir for about three and a half inches of dirt, grime, and water. Upon further inspection, the little amount of berries and tubers she’d collected from the ground had become waterlogged and inedible. A gut-wrenching realization.
Without food and without shelter, Cirice began to fill with the overwhelming urge to hunt. To tear. To kill. Once again she had nothing. The things she’d stolen had been ripped away from her and the gnawing of the hunger in her stomach was beginning to become unbearable.
How
unfair
it all was.
She’d been ripped from her home, turned on by her own sister and operated on with hands meant to sever, not suture, had been thrown into a wilderness wholly unknown and brutally unfamiliar, and now the little amount of living she’d managed to survive on had been ripped out from beneath her by elements wholly out of her control.
A flash of heat tears down her spine and to the tip of her tail. The parasite behind her eye aches and burns, wriggling in her skull as her brain pounds and pulses against its confines. She drops to the ground and digs her fists into the earth, pulling up chunks of mud and earth until her fingers are raw and filthy.
It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair
.
There’s a voice in her skull, but it doesn’t sound like her own.
You were his chosen.
You should have been exceptional.
She tears at the ground, creating gashes that will take months to heal, and her fingers have begun to bleed. She sows droplets of crimson into the ground as the hunger in her stomach gradually dissipates, but the one rooted in her marrow only deepens. It blooms.
You are exquisite.
The tiefling rises and gathers the two rusted daggers in each hand, following the even, measured steps that her feet take as they guide her to the river’s edge. She peers through the downpour and sees nothing but walls and walls of brilliant red. Tents held up by sturdier materials, the crates where they store their provisions; they have it all. They have everything that she needs. And it will soon all belong to her.
Thunder booms overhead and she squeezes the dagger’s hilt so tight that the texture of the leather becomes imprinted on her palm. One step at a time, she begins to wade.
The water is cooler than it was yesterday. Higher. Quicker. It cuts through her ruined robes and soaks her down to the bones, threatens to sweep her feet away, but it doesn’t stop her determination as she cuts through the current with intent and a lust for blood. By the time she gets to the other side she’s exhausted and her lungs burn. Her muscles ache and her legs threaten to give out from beneath her. Her fingers continue to bleed, dripping a blood-water mixture that gets washed away by the rain pelting down on her frame. Her heels sink into the sand and dirt on the banks and she drunkenly toes through rocks with her eyes set on the githyanki’s tent.
This is it.
Someone will pay for your suffering.
It will be magnificent.
She stumbles through the rain blindly, relying on vague shapes and her own bloodlust to guide her. Daggers in each eager hand, blades positioned behind her, she calls upon her father and dedicates her forthcoming slaughter to him.
He will be proud.
She will be his chosen once again.
Let him be proud
.
Please, be proud.
She takes the last steps forward, her skull pounding, her feet squelching in the soft ground, and positions her left hand on the tent flap, the other raised to strike. She takes a deep breath in and thrusts her body forward, her weight slipping through the threshold in a blur, but something is not right. Something is terribly, terribly wrong.
Cirice hits the ground with her left shoulder, her elbow crunching against the side of her ribs as the weight of another body crashes harshly into her own. She watches through a haze as her daggers clatter against a spotted fir and go still, knocked from her hands by blades much sharper and hands equally as quick. In the edge of her vision sits the githyanki, startled yet masking it well from behind the protection of a heavy crossbow pointed at her forehead, and before Cirice can attempt an escape maneuver there's a new blade pressed to the front of her neck, right against the charcoal-colored tattoo that dons the center of it. She grins, baring her fangs in a terrible facade of defiance and boiling rage, and gasps out in sudden pain when a hand threads its way through her hair to grip and wrench her face in the opposite direction. The popping sound that her neck makes rings through her ears, but when she opens her eyes she’s met with the most gorgeous eyes that she’s ever seen.
Deep red like polished rubies and shining like fresh pomegranate, Cirice drowns in the beauty of the most perfect thing she’s ever seen. The pale elf that’s managed to topple her entire plan has a pretty face, but hidden behind his claret eyes are two centuries of something twisted. In them is a deep, deep hurt, and Cirice wants nothing more than to live long enough to explore them.
She doesn’t know why he doesn’t just end her there and then, shred his blade through her flesh as she did with the goblins however many days ago, but he doesn’t. Perhaps it’s because through the deep, void-like orbs that are the assassin’s eyes he sees something similar to his own. Maybe not a lifetime and a half of torture, but an insatiable hunger for revenge like no other. Something dangerous. Something that he realizes he needs.
The tadpole squirms in her head and she both hears and feels how the elf on her back screams and twists. The gith, too. It burns, squirming and reaching out as if it recognizes them, and then Cirice feels it–the searing pain as the blade of the elf’s dagger digs shallowly into her flesh.
On the night that Cirice had wandered into their camp looking for blood offering and redemption, she’d ended up finding the key to all of her problems with his blade pressing into the front of her neck.
The most pathetic thing she’d ever seen in her entire life: the vampire spawn, Astarion Ancunin.