#voidwalking campaign

“We’re all… fucked up,” Elanora says, and while her words slightly slur, she doesn’t say it with quite as much bitterness as she usually does. “Just in different ways.”

Maybe, Journey thinks, although Elanora would never admit it, especially once she sobers up, getting her past off her chest feels better than she thought. Her story had been… a lot. All of their stories are a lot, but Elanora’s in particular. It explains a lot. Journey wonders if she’s always been like this, or if it all changed after she lost the one person she truly had.

“We can all agree to that, I suppose,” Ven agrees beside her, her hands resting on Ari’s boots. Quite a change from their earlier predicament, with her and Mason sitting themselves between the two just in case. She’s glad.

How strange, how different her and Ven are, Journey thinks. They’re the only two of faith here, and yet they’re practically opposites. She can never understand Ven’s ways, even if she accepts them. Ven’s so traditional, and meanwhile… Journey looks at her prayer book, still on the table, covered in barnacles. Meanwhile, she’s very much not. More than that, she doubts she’ll ever be able to understand the pain Ven feels when she talks about being thrown from her temple. Temples have never meant anything to Journey. But Ven… does. And she isn’t good with emotions or empathy, but she doesn’t have to understand to know that if she can help Ven, she will.

Ophelia gives a small nod, although she still looks shaken from her earlier admission that she doesn’t know what the point of searching for a cure for the Filth for her anymore is.

She doesn’t know Ophelia. Not really. She knows what happened to her, after everything with the council of course. But they haven’t talked, not one on one. Still, Journey can’t help but feel awful. Watching the other woman visibly try not to break down in front of her and Ari while discussing her likely fate… it hadn’t sat well with her. She’d offered her assistance in whatever Ophelia needed to search for a cure even if she had no idea about anything relating to diseases, but she can’t shake the feeling that she should be doing more. Their lack of conversation hadn’t done away with how much of herself she sees in Ophelia sometimes.

The hand not playing with the ends of Ari’s hair taps the the table slowly. Across the table, Mason catches her eyes, just for a moment. Maybe it’s because she was just backed into a corner and admitted she’s from Agia Marina, maybe it’s because he now knows they’re from the same place. Maybe it’s because they both saw each other back out of confessing all their traumas while everyone else bared their scars for each other to see. Either way, she can’t help the strange pang of… kinship she feels when she looks at him. Like they’re both aware of what they just did, that they have something more in common than they thought. What specifically she isn’t sure yet, beyond the Luzinde thing, but it isn’t hard to recognize someone who’d rather leave the past in the past.

It’s not like any of it haunts her, really. It informs the way she acts, but… it doesn’t haunt her. She’s already boxed away everything and put it away in its own little place so it doesn’t bother her. It’s like she said. Life is just one fucked up thing after the other. It doesn’t do her any good to dwell on it. Just keep moving and none of it matters anymore, none of it’s her problem anymore.

(Liar, the voice in her head hisses, and she winces.)

“This is weird,” Ophelia finally says quietly, voicing what they were all thinking. A small chorus of laughter fills the table.

“It is,” Adalynn agrees.

And Adalynn is so strange to Journey, in a way she still can’t quantify. An enigma. But her story clears a lot of things up, she supposes. Makes her more like the rest of them. Unwanted, rejecting the life she was given. Journey can respect that, although Adalynn still unnerves her. She’s too… blunt. Too interrogative without ever giving her own things away until pushed by Ari.

“It’s better this way,” Journey says, dropping her eyes down from all of them to the empty table.

A crew who’d sooner turn their blades on each other isn’t a crew at all, it’s just a group of drowned people waiting to happen. It’s quite a bit drier up here, but she sees no difference between a crew at sea and a crew on land. And that’s what they are now, aren’t they? They’re a crew, like it or not.

Strange, that. To think of herself as part of a crew. Part of something.

These people are strange. Perhaps some of the strangest people she’s ever met.

And she likes them, she realizes. She likes these strange people, despite their petty bickering and eccentricities.

It’s been half intentional and half out of her control, the way she’s kept people at arm’s length. She’s always had trouble making connections, letting people be close. It’s just an invitation for them to hurt you one way or another. And she’s promised herself she won’t ever let herself hurt again.

And yet… these people. These awful, obnoxious, annoying, self-righteous, self-important, loud, nosy people. These fucked up, broken, sad, lonely people all reaching out for someone to understand them. And here she is, just as desperate for companionship as all of them, despite what she’s convinced herself.

They’re all broken pieces shattered in different ways, and maybe they don’t form a perfect picture together like a puzzle, but maybe their sharp edges fitting together is all that matters.

It’s better this way, she says in her head again, and she realizes how much she means that as she glances around the table at these people-- these friends-- as they all seem to come to the understanding that they’re all more alike than they thought.

Quite a crew. An heiress disinherited who can’t even trust her own memory. A paladin cast down from her temple by the corrupt. A runaway noble who resents the society that never let her family be a family. An exile miraculously alive despite her infection with an otherworldly disease. An assassin haunted by the ghosts of her past and the demon she thinks caused it. A wandering musician who claims nothing bad worth mentioning has ever happened to him. And her.

Journey. The tiefling cleric with her waterlogged prayer book she doesn’t know a single passage of, who hears the call of the waves, who talked to a god in her dreams, who keeps moving because if she stops moving she doesn’t know what she’ll do-- if without the constant movement the carefully constructed compartments she’s built inside her mind will break down if she’s left to dwell on them.

Her perception of herself has always been shaky at best, with nobody to solidify it for her, but--

But with these people, she feels like less of a ghost, something left over from something greater, more real. She feels like a real person.

And she isn’t a mind reader, but she wonders if they all feel the same, deep down.

“So like, this means y’all can’t be mad at me,” Ari declares, and the whole table groans.

Ah, Journey thinks with amusement. Maybe all of them haven’t been too changed by this situation after all. Perhaps that’s for the best. All they needed was an understanding of each other, in the end, and they have that now.

And Ari. Journey twirls a piece of white hair between her fingers as Ari keeps talking in her lap, not even noticing. Nearly everyone else had become annoyed with the Elven woman at some point during this partnership but… but not Journey. And maybe she’s just agreeable. She knows she’s rather neutral on most things, that it takes a lot to bother her. But she doesn’t think it’s just that. She’s patient with Ari. She listens. Ari talks a lot, of course, so it’s hard not to listen to her, but Journey listens.

Not just to her words, but to everything between them. She never would’ve guessed the full extent to Ari’kithel’s concerns regarding her memories, but she knew Ari was lonely. She thinks maybe she knew Ari was lonely more than Ari knew for a while, at least until recently.

She’s not sure why she listens to Ari as much as she does, why she pays so much attention to her. She’d been the one who started this all for her, in a way. This… opening up thing. They’d all been a muddle of faces, names she didn’t recall.

And then Ari’kithel and her swirling cloak and her strange machine that sounds like thunder had leapt up on a table and Journey hadn’t been able to stop listening.

Not just to Ari. To all of them. She knows things about them now. Not just the basics, but silly things. She knows Adalynn has reading glasses she only wears sometimes. Ophelia fiddles with her braids when she’s nervous. Ari’s cloak billows by itself, because of course it does. Elanora likes kids, but she likes cats even more. Ven bites her lip when she starts thinking really hard. Mason’s favorite colors are yellow and green.

She thinks about what Tomas said to her and sighs. Well, she ended up doing what they asked after all, didn’t she?

She trusts these… friends. She likes them.

on the fire in your chest-- or perhaps fireflies. on unexpected kinship. on fairytales.

Every child grows up hearing stories of knights in shining armor, of princesses in tall towers waiting to be saved. Journey has never thought of herself as a princess-- and who would let someone like her think like that, child or not-- but there’s something that resonates with her in those stories, of someone helpless that’s saved by a dashing stranger and whisked away.to a happy ending. A childish wish. These things are fairytales, she knows now. No one will save you, you have to pick yourself up and claw your way out yourself or else that’s all you’ll ever know. You pick up a sword and you be your own savior, you climb your own fucking tower.

It’s impossible, though, to not remember the stories of knights in shining armor when she looks at Venralei. She is light, light, light. Hard to look at directly without something painful stirring in her chest. It scares her. Ven is a wildfire, destructive and powerful and angry-- and the next moment she’s the soft, flickering flame at the end of a candle, comforting and warm.

And she’s confused. She does a good job of hiding it, but Journey knows somebody that’s lost when she sees one. There’s confidence too, but the uncertainty is hard to miss once she’s seen it, and Journey sees it in the little things.

What once was fear, of nerves and the feeling of being an impostor around someone like her, has softened, turned to a quiet understanding. She knows uncertainty, to not know your place in the world.

on broken bones left unhealed and old aches and pains. on anger and the things we bury. on reflections.

She doesn’t hate anyone. Hate is a strong emotion that... takes a lot of emotional energy. To be frank, Journey doesn't have the capacity for that much emotional energy at this point. She’s too tired. She doesn’t hate anyone, but the closest thing, maybe--

She sees too much in Elanora. A warped reflection, like a mirror turned inwards revealing all the wounds left to rot, festering with instances of it’s fine, I’m fine, if I ignore it it’ll go away, gouges stuffed full of distractions and nothingness that do more harm than good. It hurts. A dull ache of something long since broken that was never set properly.

Elanora is nothing but bruises and cuts and scrapes, open wounds and anger, so much anger. Or maybe that’s all she wants people to think she is. There’s a sadness there too, lost beneath the anger and aggression. And loneliness. It reminds her of a child, afraid and confused and desperate for any kind of attention-- for affection-- and lashing out, even if it means self-destructing and taking others with her in the process.

Journey doesn’t hate anyone. But there are some people so painful to look at, so raw and in pain, they’re hard to really see, to really focus on.

Journey sees Elanora, for better or for worse.

on the feeling of belonging-- or not belonging, for that matter. on quiet sadness and soft music in the dark. on good people.

Few people are good, in Journey’s experience. There are people who do good things, but they do them with selfish motivations. She’s not one to judge, she’s the same way. She’s driven by preservation, as are most people that walk through life. She has, however, met a handful of people that she would really, truly consider good people. Mason, she thinks, is one of them.

Oh, he’s nervous and excitable and maybe he talks too much, but there’s something truly good about him. A genuine spark of kindness for the sake of kindness, despite all that the world’s done.

She can’t help but wonder, as she looks at him, what he’s doing here with the rest of them. She wonders if he feels it too, that maybe he doesn’t fit perfectly. The rest of them are rough around the edges, even Ven. The more she thinks about it, the more she wonders less if he knows and more if he worries about it.

And the more she looks at him, the more glad she is that he’s here. Maybe he doesn’t fit perfectly with them-- but maybe he doesn’t fit anywhere else either, and maybe that thought, that possibility, hits a little too close to home. Maybe none of them fit together perfectly, but they make it work. A bunch of broken pieces fitted together like a puzzle, sharp edges against sharp edges making a bigger picture.

He’s a good person, she thinks, but a sad one. Unsure of himself, carrying something heavy on his shoulders that he doesn’t talk about, just smiles and plays through it.

She thinks of the beach, of his insistence that, “Nothing is a waste if you like it!”

He reminds her a lot of another good person she used to know, right down to the music that follows him.

She hopes he sticks around.

on the weight tied to your feet as you sink under. on exhaustion and restless nights. on inevitability.

Journey knows what it’s like to be tired. She knows the way it sinks into your bones, your blood, drags you down and holds you there, leaves you helpless as the world spins on without you.

Ophelia looks like somebody who has been tired her entire life. Broken down, reduced to nothing but the dark circles under her eyes, the weariness in her movements. Still, Journey can’t help but think that she wasn’t always like this.

She knows trauma when she sees it, and whatever happened to Ophelia, it was bad.

Opehlia is hard to focus on. She slides into the shadows, blends in and hides. Journey can’t help but wonder how much of that is intentional. It’s a good way to avoid wandering eyes-- or anything that could hurt you, for that matter. (She knows that the things that hurt you will always find their way back to you, though.) She also wonders, if she were to pay close enough attention, if Ophelia’s hands shake, or if they’re deathly still. (A clap of thunder leaves her hand and her entire arm goes numb as it shakes, her heart in her throat, vision blurring.)

Because sometimes, Ophelia seems more dead than alive to Journey. It’s unnerving. And it’s sad. It’s like she’s waiting for something, but even she isn’t sure what she’s waiting for. An endless cycle of unsureness, of weariness and heavy eyes and restlessness that persists no matter how much sleep found.

She’s somebody who left part of herself behind somewhere, with someone, with something-- and hasn’t dealt with the aching void left behind. Somebody who has accepted parts of her being ripped away.

Journey wonders less what happened to her and more what will happen when whatever it was rears its head again, as trauma inevitably does.

on the things that hold us back. on the weariness of feet that try so desperately to move forward towards something better. on masks.

There are many kinds of masks. Tiny, intricate masks in bright colors meant to catch the eyes and intrigue. Masks meant to tell a story, to seem like someone else, worn by entertainers as the weave their narratives. Rough fabric pulled over the face with holes cut out, meant to conceal quick and dirty crimes.

And there are masks that aren’t physical, masks that people carry with them with a smile even when they bare their face for all to see, and Adalynn wears one of those masks.

Adalynn is blunt. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t stick out to Journey at first. Adalynn speaks her mind, is excitable and to the point.

It’s hard to look past that, when Adalynn puts that part of her out there the way that she does. But beneath it, if Journey looks long enough, she can see the little cracks. The wistfulness of someone who doesn’t quite have what she wants-- perhaps she doesn’t even know what she wants, but it isn’t this. She’s somebody who wants something more, something better, but whatever it is, it’s just out of her grasp.

She’s somebody reaching desperately for something, somebody; somebody who doesn’t want to look back at all that’s happened, who wants desperately to move forward and untangle herself from the things holding her back.

Maybe she’ll be more successful at that than Journey has been.

on the stir of something in your stomach that you can't explain. on the taste of iron at the back of your mouth. on the unexpected.

Ari’kithel is something alien, an amalgamation of everything and nothing she’s ever known turned on its head before her. A swirl of silver and a shout of excitement, the click of boots as she leaps on a table; the thunderclap in her hand that sends shivers down Journey’s spine and makes her stomach churn as the gun fires. She is flashy, arrogant, and lonelier than Journey thinks she realizes.