Chapter Text
It was Nightal 20, the darkest and longest night of the year, when Briar Whitesage found a newborn embedded in the snow on her doorstep. Wrapped only in a thin, patchy blanket, the little one would surely have frozen to death before the night was over had Briar not followed the quiet cries.
It must have been a gift from the Moonmaiden, the goddess of the night Selüne herself, Briar thought as she brought the babe inside where her husband Mergon was idly reading by the hearth. For years the pair had tried and tried for a child, and nothing had ever come of it. A gift the little one must have been indeed, for Briar had never seen her husband’s eyes shine brighter than when he saw the tiny creature. A fair-skinned tiefling girl, who stopped her cries the instant Briar held her and turned them to soft, giggly coos.
Though their city, Baldur’s Gate, prided itself on tolerance for all races, it came as no secret to the new parents that someone must have feared for the future when that child’s fiendish heritage was so very apparent in her little tail and sharp horn stubs. It did not matter to Briar and Mergon, and as they sat by the fire to warm the little one, they decided without many words but many meaningful glances to take the girl in and give her a home and love that would potentially be lost elsewhere.
Briar had never been a religious woman, and oftentimes only turned to the gods to curse for raised taxes or thunderstorms, but from that day forward, she would seek her guidance with the Moonmaiden, who surely must have paved the way for her to finally fulfill her wish of becoming a mother. They called the child Avanna, which meant gift in her mother’s old elven language and with that, the matter was settled.
Though the child would sleep in the marital bed with her parents for weeks to come, always snug cuddled up in Briar’s arms, Mergon began to build a nursery bed that very same Solstice evening while his wife was busy browsing his many books for what a tiefling child could eat. She quickly learned that those books were not written without prejudice, though, since Briar couldn’t imagine that such a sweet child would be content with eating scraps of raw meat.
What Briar also did not know at the time was that the Winter Solstice, being the longest day of the year, was not only a celebration for Selüne’s glorious night. No, from that year forward, it would also be an annual celebration for the few followers of the god Bhaal that remained in the city, as it was the very day that marked the birth of the only pure Bhaalspawn that would ever walk the lands of Toril.
Even at three years old, Avanna’s curiosity matched that of an adventurer in a foreign land. From building elaborate - and quite dangerous - contraptions with chairs and stools for reaching the top cupboard and the sweets hidden within to chasing butterflies across the garden gates, the girl seldom sat still for more than five minutes. Unless, of course, her father Mergon sat down with her after a long day of guarding the city as part of the Flaming Fist and read to her from his favourite books. During those times, Avanna was all pointy ears for once. She didn’t know then that her father would sometimes change the stories a little, to make them more child-friendly, but the little one didn’t care either way when there was so much to learn about far-off kingdoms, dragons and brave princesses who flew with them. It wasn’t only fairytales of course, because it turned out that Avanna would find joy and interest in pretty much any topic, from astronomy to biology, whatever her father read to her, she would listen with the fitting grave intent of a three-year-old.
The peace in their house would be quite short-lived, though, when one night her father returned later than usual from his shift at Basilisk Gate. Avanna had recognised a new emotion in her mother then, even if she didn’t yet have a name for it. Worry. Sometimes, her father would work late, but never that late.
It was well past midnight when the front door of their little brick house slammed open, and the frantic voices that emerged from down the stairs pulled Avanna from her slumber. Some part of her knew even then that she should have stayed in her room but her boundless curiosity beckoned her towards the door nonetheless.
There were people in their tiny living room, way more than the space was suited for, all of them dressed in the very same red that her father’s uniform bore, and her mother was among them. Her cries were the only thing that sounded through the mingle of male voices, loud enough that it scared Avanna. It was then that she saw all the blood on her mother’s hands as she held her husband - and she also saw where all that blood was coming from.
The scream the girl let out was enough to silence all the voices, and sent her mother to usher her back into bed.
Of course, at three years old, Avanna barely understood her mother the next day when she tried to explain through tears that her father had been injured while raiding guild activity. All those words sounded so foreign, and only like something Mergon would read her about. He was alive, but he had lost both his eyes in the attack, and would never read her anything again.
It was only logical to Briar that the nightmares of blood and gore that begun to frequent her daughter’s sleep from then on were based on what she had seen that night.
As it turned out, finding friends would prove more of a problem than Avanna would have anticipated at six years old. It wasn’t because of the other children in her neighbourhood but moreso their parents who pulled them back into their houses when the tiefling girl passed. She knew from her mother that people’s prejudices were based on old belief and Avanna paid not much mind to it. She was quite content with just her parents. As soon as she learned to read, she took to reading to her father instead of the other way around, or she helped her mother in the garden. Well, help being loosely definitioned when all she really did was spill half the contents of the watering can that was half as big as her while dragging it to the beds and then running off to find the prettiest flowers to gift to her mother. Sometimes, she also helped out in Briar’s apothecary. Those who didn’t turn from the girl with a sneer when she offered her services would be given a colourful get-well-soon card that Avanna had meticulously crafted with coloured pencil and sometimes glue and bits and bobs she found around the house.
She would later think she had a good childhood, if a bit lonely at times, but she was cared for, and she was loved to pieces by adoring parents who had wished for nothing more. She had a warm bed, and a teddy bear that was, in lack of dictionary at the time, called Teddy, and her mother was the best cook in the world.
What Avanna didn’t know, and what her parents made sure she never felt, was the problems with money that had arisen after her father could not continue his work as Flaming Fist. The apothecary was running well, but it still wasn’t nearly enough to keep up with all the taxes that came with living in a big city. But still, when it would be veggie stew and bread for days on end, Avanna was proud as a peacock nonetheless, because she had helped pull carrots and potatoes from the garden, after all.
But then one day, her loneliness was whisked away, when she went after a cat that most definitely wanted to be befriended by her - she never had a good hand for animals - and met a boy who was playing with a paper boat by the canal just as alone as she usually did. When she curtly introduced herself, he told her to go away, but after a while of collecting shiny pebbles - which was serious business, she told him, and had to happen in his immediate vicinity for reasons she could not disclose - he elected her to be his second in command for his fleet of paper ships. His name was Enver, and he was the first kid that wasn’t immediately taken from her by his parents. They did not care that he befriended a tiefling - and as Avanna would later find out, they did not care for him that much at all.
Going forward, the two of them would become nearly inseparable for a good few years. Avanna learned how to fold ships from paper, and then planes. Then they tried the same with constructions of scraps of wood they found, with sails made of handkerchiefs which earned them a half-hearted scold when those ships sank and the fabric came back to her parents ripped and muddy. That did not stop them, though. Enver was always taking notes of their endeavours, trying to improve his tinkerings. The ships needed better weight, and to be more even so they wouldn’t tip. The sails needed to be fixed on straighter branches. He was always up to something when they met, and Avanna was always ambitious to be of help. She showed him her father’s books, and when something caught his particular interest, they would spend weeks on end trying to rebuild it. Once they invented a hot-air balloon out of an old bag, and watched as the cotton caught fire in mid-air and sailed away into the sunset, and then right into a neighbouring window. With eyes as big as plates, their best sheepish smiles thrown on, they knocked on the door that belonged to the window to apologise and then were chased away promptly by the owner with a broom like stray kittens.
Another time, they built a sturdy pillow fortress in Avanna’s room with all the pillows and blankets they found around the house. Enver had made a crude drawing in advance, and they followed it to a tee, though what they had not anticipated was that the building would need more space than anticipated, so they extended a tunnel into the hallway, right up to the railing, rendering it impossible for her parents to reach their bedroom later. As they residing royalty of the fortress, the two of them of course implemented taxes for crossing said tunnel and before bedtime, her mother paid in freshly baked cookies and warm milk. After that, of course, came the plans for world domination by pillow fortress and paper fleets and they stayed up the entire night, coming up with plans that involved armies of teddy bears, with Teddy being first in command, munching on cookies, and browsing through books for more ideas. One of those ideas involved a life-sized wooden horse that was controllable from the inside, but the children quickly realised that they’d need more funds for that than cookies.
Yet as with most things, the joy was short-lived, when one day at nine-years old, Avanna waited for her friend in vain for hours. She thought he’d gotten sick and had to stay inside, but days passed and then weeks, and she didn’t see him anymore. Later, her mother would meet his mother at the market and when asking about it, Sally Flymm told her that she’d sent him off to a military school somewhere outside Baldur’s Gate to receive proper education and maybe be of use to his family, finally.
In the following years, Avanna would find out that children learned an awful lot from their parents, and that not only the good things stuck. By the time she was twelve, she had given up on trying to befriend the neighbouring kids and had been called every insult under the sun, each of them more creative than the last. As for herself, she was trying to stay kind through all of them and focused on her studies. During one summer, she'd done a few weeks of apprenticeship in the Open Hand Temple of Ilmater in Rivington, and considered going there to become a cleric once of age. Granted, it would be no profession that paid much, but with extended knowledge of healing, Avanna thought that maybe she could better help her mother in the apothecary, and maybe someday, people outside her home would take her for more than just her infernal heritage.
Now older and more understanding of the world around her, she had noticed her parents' struggle with money and had taken it upon herself to find a solution to that. From delivering newspapers first thing in the morning to selling flowers in parks, Avanna did a little bit of everything to earn some coin. Her mother insisted that her efforts were appreciated but not necessary, and that they were getting by just fine, but the girl was adamant. In the end, they agreed that Briar let Avanna help in the apothecary. So the girl sat idly by when her mother gave advice on treatments to the people that came, and took notes on which balm or tonic helped for which ailment. She helped dry flowers and herbs for powders, or distill them for oils. She learned how to make balm from tallow after rendering it, and did the errand runs to other shops. In the evenings, she read with her father or cut vegetables for her mother’s cooking. As it turned out, Avanna didn’t have that same knack for cooking Briar had, but was indeed talented in setting things ablaze on accident.
For a while, she wrote letters to Enver, about what she learned and did, about all the things they’d have to do once he got back, and gave them to his mother but not once did an answer come. He was busy in school, she used to say, not without a sneer towards Avanna who couldn’t possibly know what education would be like. But the girl couldn’t imagine it was that busy - in fact, he’d have a few minutes to write a letter, wouldn’t he? Will he be home over winter, she’d ask. Or during the High Days? But all she ever got as an answer was dismissal, and with time, the happy memories faded from her mind.
More than ever, Avanna let herself get lost in books and stories that promised a happy ending, while the reality she found herself in turned more and more grey.
The night of her fifteenth birthday, Avanna found herself torn from sleep after a particularly gruesome nightmare. Her brow slick with sweat, she found herself on the floor beside her bed instead of in it. Her heartbeat still thundered in her chest, her pulse rushed in her ears and she could barely navigate in the darkness of her room. She was used to these nightmares, ever since they’d started to occur when she was a small child, but usually, they were faceless terrors and didn’t follow her into the waking world. This time, though, she could recall each vivid, horrible detail and they replayed and replayed in front of her inner eye while she sat on the floor and tried to calm her frantic breathing.
She’d seen her parents in her nightmare - or rather what was left of them. A set of corpses, mutilated beyond recognition. She had only known it was them because when she picked up the large meat cleaver from the kitchen, they had looked as she remembered, peacefully asleep in their beds. There had been so much blood; it soaked the sheets, the floorboards, her clothes, her skin. She could still smell the metallic stench even now, even when it had just been another nightmare like so many before. Just another nightmare, she tried to tell herself while working up the courage to get up again. There was nothing cowering in the darkness, waiting to strike her. No monsters under her bed, or in the closet. Just her mind running wild. It had always all been in her mind.
She would simply slip into her parents’ bedroom and crawl between them like she had done so many times before, after so many other nightmares, and her mother would wake and comb her fingers through her hair like she always did, and once the sun rose, all would be well again. It always was.
And so she went on her way - barefoot, she stepped out of her room but something … was off. Why was the floor wet?
Avanna barely saw anything in the darkness, and her heart sped up again. The metallic stench wouldn’t go away - she could taste it on her tongue. Something was wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
She couldn’t calm the fear that petrified her body as she tried to make forward.
A thin pillar of light from the street lamp outside the window fell through the slightly ajar door, and then Avanna saw it. All the blood that soaked the floorboards, how it gleamed in the dim light. She stopped dead in her track, and doubled over, crashing to her knees with a wet thud.
Her nightgown was soaked, too. Her arms splattered with dried blood to her elbows. She let out a wail that had barely anything human to it and then she pressed her forehead against the ground and sobbed.
Hours might have passed while she sat in that hallway - she needn’t go any further to know what awaited beyond that door. She had seen it all in her dream that wasn’t one to begin with.
Something rustled behind her, quiet steps up the stairs. Surely, they were coming to take her away for her unconscious crime.
Yet when she turned, it was no member of the Flaming Fist. It was an imp-like creature, a little more than half her height, who bowed deeply before her.
“My lady of dread”, they greeted her, the adoration in their voice almost profane. “I have come to take you home.”