Chapter 44: Operation: Cursed Elf
Valyne was starting to seriously question her life choices.
Not because she was riding into a foreign kingdom alone, or because she’d been given a mission with as many details as a blank scroll, but because she was stuck on a Synod trader ship, full of Shadows who treated personal space the way some people treated taboos: they acknowledged it existed and then wisely ignored it.
The ship itself was functional, sleek, and disturbingly quiet, like it was carved from midnight and built solely for moving suspicious goods and even more suspicious passengers. The wood groaned in all the wrong places, the crew spoke in all the wrong tones, and the entire thing smelled vaguely like someone had boiled leather and smugness into the hull.
The crew had been polite and at least helpful with luggage, silent as ghosts, and vaguely judging every breath she took. One of them had offered to carry them with the air of someone handling a moldy artifact. Another had nodded at her once and then maintained eye contact for far too long.
They gave her a room. It had a chair, a cot.
She sat down on the chair which groaned like it was dying of boredom and dropped her bag with theatrical exhaustion.
She folded her arms and glared at the wall like it owed her answers. "Why me? Out of all the children of the mother in Synod, they pick me to track down an unpredictable mercenary with the social grace of a cave troll. Couldn’t they send one of the Shadows? You know, the emotionless ghosts who apparently double as interior décor? Or, here’s a thought... someone not currently trying to figure out whether Corvin Blackmoor is a tactical nightmare." Like everyone else in the Arcanum, she as well heard the rumors of Corvin’s deep pool of forgiveness and soft heart.
She rolled her eyes. "But nooo, let’s send Valyne. She’s calm. She’s professional. She’s expendable."
Right on cue, a shadow near her wardrobe shimmered, it seems her sanity has reached it’s limits. Her fingers rubbed at her temples with the urgency of someone trying to massage reason into their brain.
"All this for one cursed elf," she muttered under her breath.
A long exhale. A sharper inhale.