Challenge #02167-E338: A Delicate Understanding
"If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
"So, never talk to you?" -- Anon Guest
Princess Kelwynn looked up into the dark face of the Tiefling Warlock responsible for saving her life, and then assisting on the adventure that was their continued escape. "It's simple manners, Ebonn. Surely, there are nice things you can say about anyone. All you have to do is keep your nasty words to yourself."
"Bold of you to assume that simple manners is all that could stop me speaking," said Ebonn. "Manners were never paid to me, I see no reason why I should afford them to anyone else. Including you."
"I've been perfectly polite," she objected.
"You called me 'mister teef' when we first met and assumed I was going to eat your heart."
"A reasonable assumption, given the infernal populace. You note that I did use an honorific."
"Oh, that makes it so much better," he rolled his golden eyes. "Little miss I-can't-spare-a-petticoat. Honorifics are just another means of sprinkling sugar over a turd. At the end of the day, it's still shit."
"How dare you! I helped you get out of that miserable fortress."
"Yes. You did. Complaining the whole time about how Princesses were delicate and didn't do the things needed to escape. As if you were lowering yourself to being more than a helpless bauble in someone's dungeon. Granted, you proved to be remarkably competent for a newbie, and have an instinct for where to deliver the heaviest hits, but you're still a newbie and a whiner to boot."
"I am not a whiner," she whined. "This adventuring stuff is hard. The conditions in dungeons are terrible and the food was barely edible and the people were mean and I was supposed to be rescued by a tall, dark, handsome prince and--"
"I was promised power and love, and my Patron told me I could find it here," said Ebonn. "I, unlike you, have had a lifetime of never getting what I wanted, what I needed, or what I expected. We're stuck with each other until something better comes along. Deal with it."
Considering that her options were running away from the only remotely sympathetic person in the immediate area, finding a way to escape the Greater Underdark without any light, night vision, or idea of where she was going, and subsequently relying on the kindness of strangers... Princess Kelwynn grumped and pouted within the relative safety of their current shelter from the dangers untold and the hardships unnumbered that they still had to fight through.
Ebonn clearly valued honesty over prettily diplomatic lies, so she told the unvarnished truth. "You know I'm not used to this, but... I was made to be not used to this. When I was little, I'd listen to stories--"
"One," objected Ebonn, "you're still little. Two - you weren't allowed to read for yourself?"
"I was four. When I turned six, the stories stopped being about adventuring and started being about pining away in towers for handsome princes to come rescue them. That and the virtues of doing tapestries. I remember being upset at the time. I wanted to hear more about how to deal with Dragons. It... seemed more useful."
"Sounds rather dull," Ebonn allowed.
"Dull doesn't cover it. Posture, deportment, dressage, ménage, but not the messy bits like mucking out the stables... etiquette and diplomacy, how to instruct my dresser... How to get along with the husband that the court picks for me..." memory lane was overloaded with muggers, now. She mentally scurried away from it. "I was almost glad to be kidnapped, you know. At least it was interesting. It was only later that it got awful."
"You're welcome," Ebonn iced.
"No, not you. Them," she gestured vaguely at the wall, indicating the general area of the Greater Underdark. "Adventuring sounds like fun, but then it's cold stone and stinky straw and wormy hardtack and being gross because you don't even know how to get out of your clothes to wash..."
"You're a grown being," said Ebonn. "Your problem is that you're an enforced child."
Kelwynn didn't have the energy to argue. She listened instead to what his words meant rather than the sequence in which he'd said them. He was right. They had forced her to remain a child. That, and she didn't need to remind him that she was short. Everyone knew that she was a pocket-sized princess at five-foot cough-and-mumble-a-low-number.
She was tired and cold and dirty and hungry and that wasn't going to change without Ebonn's help. They couldn't do anything about cold or dirty until they got out of the Underdark, and hungry had to wait until they crossed some luckless guard's path and looted their rations again. Or carved off some of their flesh. At least she could do something about tired and even that needed assistance.
"Warlock Ebonn," she said, "please assist me in Elven meditation? If I can compress my rest, we can move further for longer, thus escaping the need for each other's unpleasantnesses all the sooner."
A fang glinted in the dim light of his Faerie Lamp. Half a smile. "The 'each other's unpleasantnesses' is a nice touch," he allowed. "Same goes for the inherent trust involved with Elven meditation. It would be an honour."
She assumed the position as comfortably as she could, and put her hands willingly in his for the first time since this debacle began. She felt tiny, but that was nothing new.
"Breathe in calm," he began. "Breathe out pain..."
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Vapi]
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