I wasn't gonna do the October thing and then someone posted some as writing prompts and I went, "those seem like good warm-ups." And then I checked the October 1st one to get ideas and thought about it while taking the trash out, and then I ended up writing this up on my phone. It is not super spooky and it's only prompt-adjacent, but the character jumped at the word "abandoned," and I had to.
Darshanta is interesting to me because she's only a minor NPC in both Vaz's backstory and the BL campaign, but I have a whole lot of feelings about her regardless. Righteous rage is just a huge character vibe for me I guess?
(no cut cuz I'm on mobile whoops. maybe I'll remember to edit one in tomorrow)
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Her wings were always black.
Black like her hair, like her eyes; she always thought it was simply so that she'd match. Now she wonders, sometimes, if Luriel tells itself that it was a sign. If the deva has decided she was always evil.
Most of the feathers are gone, these days, when she manifests her wings, only a few swirling around the ghostly bones. Her skin turns stark-white, deathly pale, to match the skeletal pinions. Only her eyes stay the same: deep, dark, fathomless.
Maybe Luriel looks back on them, too, and thinks it should have known she would fall. There's such depths in them to fall into. People have been telling her that since she was a child.
She wants to scream, some days. On others she does. High in the crow's nest, riding out storms, she screams up at the thunderheads. She's still herself! Nothing has changed about her! She was supposed to be a protector, a shield against darkness, and she's doing just that! Is simply choosing which darkness to fight enough to call her fallen? To tear her wings and the sky from her?
The world wouldn't end if she didn't fulfill the plans Kord had for her. Luriel had admitted as much. It had 'great cosmological significance,' the deva had insisted, but Kord was a big boy. He could take care of himself. These people she was helping couldn't.
But Luriel hadn't seen it that way. It had left her, abandoned her, ripped her wings and her light from her and left her with bones and darkness. And a few black feathers, drifting in a ghostly wind.
That's all right. Darshanta will make due with spiritual bones, if she must. She'll lean into the whispers, the rumors, the assumptions of evil. She'll be the death she now looks like, at least to the bastards who fear her.
Her wings are black, what's left of them, because she's not afraid to do her work outside the light.
