The Perfumer watched over the trembling body of the Misbegotten warrior.
Their chest shook with each breath. Death’s rattle, leading them back to the roots of the Erdtree.
At least. That was how it should have been.
Stuck. That was how they all were. Stuck in a limbo they didn’t ask for, a limbo they never chose.
Forced to die unwelcomed by the Erdtree’s grace. Cursed to seep back into the ground, souls left rotted and hapless in the wake of decay.
The warrior croaked once, dark eyes staring glancing frantically up at the Perfumer. Holding tightly onto the the proffered hand that the Perfumer had held out as consolation. Pitiful, useless consolation.
Its grip tightened. Painful, desperate, a last effort to cling to reality.
Tricia slowly pulled her hand, as limp and as broken as it now felt, from the vise grip of the fallen Misbegotten, solemnly closing its eyes with her free hand.
She had come to feel the pain of the Misbegotten. The understanding that they were doomed from birth. There was no light of grace guiding them, but it did shine in the shackles that grated against their ankles. It glistened in the eyes of those who herded them towards the mines, cracking their whips against their backs.
It even glistened in her eyes. And the eyes of the Perfumers that failed to cure them.
Tricia had realised, you see. She had realised that the Misbegotten plight could not be cured. It was no curse, no malaise that could be waved away with the administration of a tincture in a vial.
Something she had refused to accept, something that had lead to her expulsion from Leyndell to the volcanic wastes of Mt. Gelmir.
Her role wasn’t to heal. It was to see them off. To smile and promise a cure
People like the Omenkiller Rollo were nothing but mud to her, those who abandoned the path of healer in order to cleanse the impurities of anything untouched by Grace.
She looked down at her hands. These were healing hands, these hands were meant to be curing the sick and stitching together wounds! Not being an unwilling witness to a death she had no power to stop.
By the time she had rose and wrapped her hand in some bandages, she’d made up her mind.
Not a single one.
Not a single one of the Misbegotten under her watch would be allowed to suffer death. Not by battle or by the wicked idea of ‘mercy’ that her compatriots held.
Some of the Misbegotten lay about, some cooking what meagre food they had in fire pits they had managed to pull together via wooden shields and formic rock.
Subconsciously, she felt the spark aromatics at her belt, unused since her journey west towards Mt. Gelmir. The road was harsh, but her pouches were full, most of the resources within being used for medicines.
The rare chance she had to kill had been shattering. She wasn’t built for war, none of the perfumers were. Many lost their minds to the atrocities they committed during the shattering, becoming Depraved.
Others began to imbibe too heavily of their medicines, becoming just as broken as those who were affected by their weapons.
If it was violence that it took to protect the Misbegotten, preserve the little sanctuary they had, deep under the ground, in a Catacomb that was avoided like Rot?
Then she would gladly choose it.
Her personal Elysium, over the war-torn chaos beyond.