Vervain/LyrasPast

Lyra's Past

Fiction: Lyra's backstory as she tells it. I kinda imagine her addressing the parts of this about her past to one of her circle-mates, probably Quilone or Echo. Obviously, the part about her circle-mates themselves is addressed to a more abstract 'you'. By the way, Quilone pointed out that Kasif actually is a character in the canon (a DB). I think I was vaguely aware of this on an almost subconscious level, but did not know that he also started life as a street-rat. They are not the same person, obviously, as he grew up in the Realm, and this is set in the West.

Childhood

I guess the first thing to say is that I was always a pretty wild kid, and I do pity whoever took the task of looking after me. There were plenty of 'em; something always went wrong, you know. Usually I ran away, but a few times they passed me off to some other family. I never really figured out how it worked, and didn't much care, either, so long as no one tried to take too much actual control of me, you know? I lived like a street-rat except when they caught me and dragged me in for a lesson in something or other, never paid any attention to what they were actually trying to teach me or tell me... maybe should've, but hell, I just wanted to be out with my mates making trouble, which of course horrified them, because a woman's place, even a young woman's, was in the house and doing suitable tasks, which didn't involve nicking food from the markets or taking other people's boats out to sea on a whim, especially as I was a girl and girls didn't sail. I resented that a load, but it wasn't like a few scoldings were going to stop me, or even slow me down much. I gave whoever looked after me absolute hell, I reckon. I never knew my real parents, but people used to tell me they'd probably abandoned me 'cause they saw I'd be nothing but trouble. If they hoped that'd bruise my ego they were disappointed... most things just seemed to bounce off me. I was a pretty thick-skulled kid, in most respects. Looking back, it's just as well, or I'd probably have been totally broken by half the things I was told and the way I was treated, but like I said, I just didn't care. I remember one time, Kasif and I -- Kasif was a kid who really did live on the street, was just like a monkey and got into about that much trouble, too... vanished sometime when I was about twelve and I never did find out where to, so he's probably dead -- had a bet that I couldn't steal the purse from some local dignitary. Needless to say, I lost, but it was a near thing. I think that was the first time I spent the night in the guardhouse, and I got a good beating from the head of the family who were looking after me that time when they let me out, too.

That was pretty much how it was. I got some good memories, some bad; but the bad ain't all that bad, more stuff that was annoying than stuff that really got to me. I didn't care enough to get upset, I was tough enough to recover pretty quick from beatings, and stuff like that. I don't think anyone was exactly surprised, either, when I went and found the Tya when I turned thirteen and got initiated. People in the West think it really should have been life-changing or something but you've got to remember, I acted like a boy even before then; it meant a lot of rituals I didn't properly understand, though I did my best to look like I did, getting the markings, drinking the fucking foul mix they throw together for you and swearing the oaths. Holding by them ain't hard, just means doing what comes naturally to me; but it's hard to make Easterners like you understand this kinda thing. Don't matter too much most of the time, 'cause you don't see the problem with a woman doing what she wants, but you do look at me like a woman, which I'm not -- not really.

Life in the West

I never left the West before I Exalted. Didn't even venture down to the South-East that often, though people say that must be where I came from. I went down a few times, you know, raids, and following trading ships. We didn't like to go down that way because of the Lintha, though; however evil people think you are, there's always a bigger shark out there in the waters, and the Lintha were just that; you didn't want to get too big yourself, either, in case you attracted their attention. I guess I'm getting ahead of myself, though. As I guess shows from what I've already told you, I really never experienced the West the way a woman does; I experienced it like a boy, then like a man. As I said, you're an Easterner, but try to think of it like this: you see my crew? They all think I'm a man. That's what the tattoos mean. I think of me as a man. The rest is technicalities, right? It's like in Chiaroscuro, if you've ever been there. They got woman who wear men's clothes and so long as they dress like that they're men, and they've got men who wear women's clothes, and they're women. It's the same for us in the west, 'cept more ritualised I think, and no man would want to be thought of as a woman that I ever met. Not enough freedom.

So I lived in the West. I told you I lived like I had no home but the street as a kid, and once I got older I really did have no home but the street, so it'll not be a real surprise that I fell in with worse and worse crowds, if you want to think of them like that, as I got older. They weren't so bad. They stole and all that, but they looked out for their own, and ain't that what really counts? Should be, anyway. Some folks would sell anyone for anything, and that wasn't how it was for us, 'cause we had to stick together. No one else gave a shit, so if we didn't look out for each other, who would? Yeah, you can say those folks were pirates if you want. Makes no odds to me, I've been called that enough times. We had a few ships, small and beat-up to start with, but some careful working of the trade-routes and we had enough to upgrade; all went up from there, really. I started out as crew, but I was high up before too long. I figure mostly because I picked up sailing real fast, had a good grasp of the way to do things and all that. The folks under me just seemed to look up to me without me having to do too much. Lucky, I guess; if you can't command the respect of your crew, what've you got? Anyway, by the end, I was sailing as captain of a ship full of the scum of the waves, as they were called, though maybe they deserved it less than people thought; it wasn't like we raided towns, and we picked on the ones rich enough to recover from it. But whatever the case, by the time I was into my twenties, we had a reputation and a price on our heads. We thought that was great; amused us no end, mostly. We had decent weapons and knew how to use them, so the ones that tried to come after us didn't get far for a while. For a while... I mentioned the Lintha, yeah? You must know who they are, even here. I don't know why, but we attracted their attention in the end. The thought of them being after the reward money is laughable, and I never did find out the reason, but whatever way it fell it was the end of us as a group. Ships smashed to pieces. Nasty business, and few survived... though I think I gave them some they won't forget. Not a good thing, mark you... I'd rather they forgot I existed.

Exaltation, and after

It all comes down to the Lintha again. You know, I really can't express what I think of them; there aren't the words, especially not in Riverspeak. But in any case; they blew us all out the water, all our ships, fifteen of them maybe, though not all at once; we lost a few at a time, without survivors for the most part, and only rumours of what'd happened to go on, like, you know, some fisherman scared shitless talking about war between pirates... not a nice sight, I'd imagine, if you're small and unarmed and think you're about to get caught in the crossfire. Enough to figure out who was doing it, but not enough to figure out why. My turn came up pretty late, after we'd lost a lot of ships and were getting cautious. We were headed back to base -- we'd set up on a small island by that time, not much nearby but tribespeople, and we got on pretty well with them; they were sympathetic to us, and had no problem with what we did -- and noticed a ship trailing us. I'd have tried to lose them but it was high noon, open sea. Not much to do but head somewhere other than home so as not to lead them straight onto us. I'd headed over towards a series of rocky islands, hoping to lose them there, but it turned out there were a lot faster than us; more streamlined ships probably, and like I said, we were heading home: we weren't exactly at our lightest. They'd caught up with us before we got there, and opened fire on us, and as they came in to close quarters and tried to drive us onto the rocks something snapped. The world, to me, seemed different; I had a different sense of things if you get what I mean. Everything looked the same, but it all felt different, and I didn't know what I was doing at the time but I knew that I had to do, hell, something... so as we scraped along the rocks I threw some part of myself into the ship's hull, willed it to hold together, and it did. It shouldn't have; I know those reefs, and they'll tear a ship up in an instant, but not ours, that day. I had a sense of someone speaking to me, and of other things high and far and distant, but I didn't have any time to think about it because the Lintha crew had got us in close and were boarding and soon everyone was dying around me. I wasn't dying, though. I was diving between enemies and my knives were flashing in the sun and the blood on them was the blood of my enemies, and I can't describe how it felt just to exist, that day. I think I killed most of the people on that ship, but I don't really know; it was all like a dream. What I do know is that my crew died that day, had died while I was still holding the ship together, in my moment of awakening when I had nonetheless been off guard and unaware of their plight. And I know that somehow, at some point, a fire started, and the flames were everywhere, and then all I know was the cool green of the sea, and sharp rocks tearing at my skin but somehow not killing me.

All I can say about that day is that I had no right to live. I awoke on one of the islets I'd tried to lead our ship past to lose our enemies, gods know how much later, and looking across the series of barren rocks I could see the wreckage of two ships, both charred remnants, with pieces scattered along the coastlines of the islands. There were a few bits of charcoal in the water at my feet, and I prodded them with a strange sense of disinterest. Anyone who had survived had gone; there was only me, and endless sea. I did realise, though, that I could figure out which way home was, without trying too hard; it seemed to come fairly naturally to me. And so I sat down on the rock, and stared in that direction, as though help would come. I don't know how many days I sat there for, honestly. Everything blurred, and the world still felt, well, surreal. At some point, one night, I realised there was a mark on my forehead which shone with the light of the sun; but it didn't mean much to me. I'd never been educated, you see, and Anathema were just whispered rumours to me. I wouldn't have recognised any of the marks, and whether I'd have spotted the mark of the Unconquered Sun himself would have been debatable. But anyway; I sat there. Day after day after day, and eventually a sail appeared on the horizon, from the direction I knew home was. It wasn't a sail of one of our large boats, all of which I knew by sight; and it wasn't one of the sails the tribespeople used on their strange coracle-like boats. I wondered, I think, if I should hide; but caution was a thing of the past, by then. I wasn't entirely convinced I was even really alive; after all, I had only the haziest ideas on what it actually would be like to be a ghost. Maybe I was here because my body hadn't been buried, or some other reason like that. Like I said, uneducated. Sure, I knew about ghosts and hungry ghosts, but who was I to say what being either felt like? Anyway. I watched the sail coming closer and closer, and it wasn't one I recognised at all, I was sure. A small boat, I guessed, probably a crew of no more than four, maybe as few as one. It was one man, as it turned out, and I did know him, and the boat he came in on. He'd changed the rig of it, to make it less recognisable, but it was one of the oldest boats our group had owned, and the smallest; and he was Farran -- who you'll have met, he's serving on this ship -- who had served under me once before, and who I valued as a friend. When he saw me, he waved, hailed me, though he seemed surprised at the mark on my forehead, which still shone. I barely noticed; he had reacted to me in such a way that I became sure that I was alive, after all, and that was such a relief to me that I threw myself into the water and swam out to him, salt water stinging small cuts on my legs, though as I scrambled aboard the boat it suddenly occurred to me that those small cuts had been great gashes not so long before. Turns out, he'd survived a wreck through chance, having been thrown clear and into the water, and then washed to shore; and he'd made his way to the island that was home, and it had been empty; and so he'd re-rigged a boat, and made ready to leave, and had seen smoke on the horizon in a direction where no-one lived and had come to see what had happened. He cursed and cursed when I told him what had happened, but mostly he seemed deeply relieved and happy to find me alive, and awed by me, all at once. He was the one who told me the first things about Anathema, although, being the kind of person he was, he wasn't about to condemn me for being one; Anathema were outlaws, but so were we already, so where was the harm?

After that, we left, pretty much. He'd got supplies enough to get one person a long way, and for two people it got us far enough before we had to stop and resupply. We changed our clothes, our names -- no, he wasn't Farran then, and I wasn't Lyra; who we were doesn't matter, that's who we are now -- and we left. We figured we'd go as far as we could, and as it turns out, that was Nexus. There, we're just a couple more newcomers, might be refugees, might just be overly hopeful folks seeking a fortune. Well, that's what we were... recent events might have changed that, I guess. Nobody gives a shit here, and that's back to the way I like it. It's true, you know; any reputation can be too much. It was stupid enough of me to wind up captain of this ship, but old habits die hard. I'd just begun to make myself a fairly honest living, too -- as honest as any, round here.

On her Circle

I don't know how I ended up with this lot, or why. Because they needed a ship and didn't want to pay to travel with one of the big convoys, I guess. That was how it was that Echo showed up, dragging Gilfer behind and some guy called Boris. Think it's a guy, anyway; it's hard to tell, sometimes. Uses magic to change his appearance all the time. Quilone appeared later.

I met Echo, as I said, when she needed a ship. She was happy enough to pay, so long as I didn't ask too high a price, which I didn't, provided she and anyone else she took with her was happy in the cargo space. Happy isn't the word, but they co-operated, so they came along. I ran them up north, through some of the worst weather I've seen in a long time; and I guess that's when they twigged that I was just like them, although the comparison isn't one I'm totally happy with, you understand. They're a weird bunch. Gilfer is off the street, but seems to lack even the level of morality most folks there have; you know, don't steal from your friends and those who can't afford it, look our for your own... stuff like that. It's a wonder he doesn't try to kill us while we sleep and hand over our bodies in the hope of getting some reward for them. He could probably sell them to some of the more dubious cults if nothing else. Echo, she's odd. Highborn, I reckon, and working for a noble lord... she kinda seems to lack any responsibility, which I wouldn't put up with in someone who reported to me, but I guess rich lords can afford to throw money around and having a resident occultist makes them look good, even if it is one who probably asks to be paid in drugs. Boris, well... I don't know what to say about him. Gilfer found him, which is just another reason to hate the little brat. He's done nothing but sleep with my men since he showed up, which is all well and good in port but is pretty much another distraction from duties at sea, and wastes their pay to boot, as I hear tell he's charging a good deal for his 'services'. Surprising just how many men seem to appreciate midgets of indeterminate gender. The one thing Boris can actually do passably which is widely considered to be acceptable in public and in front of children is dance. Surprising, really, but I guess everyone's got to be good at something.

Quilone, now. Quilone's interesting. Why he spends time with these people is a mystery to me, and I wonder how he stats sane. He's middle-aged, and civilised, and restrained; he's the only person who could be described as a devout worshiper of the god who Exalted us all, I think, which is peculiar; the others seem oblivious to the gift they've been given much of the time. I can't pretend to understand their attitudes but... no matter. Quilone seems to be the common sense of that motley group, and to be the only one who can herd them around. I've found that to achieve anything around here you need to deliver ultimatums; suggestions don't cut it, you know?

I'm still only with them because they need the transport, and I'm still deeply dubious about most of them. I've a certain fondness for Echo, these days, though the way she makes my cabin stink of drugs most days isn't my favourite trait of hers. Quilone seems alright, for all that he's an upstanding example of righteousness and probably disapproves of me deeply in private. Boris and Gilfer, now, these are good reasons for abandoning the circle and making my own way in the world. The history between me and Gilfer isn't something I care to go into, but if I see him again he'd better have some good excuses to make or I'll damn well do my best to see he ends up dead. He's been absent for a while, thankfully. I wish I could say the same of Boris.