It was almost near dawn, the darkest part of the night, and it seemed like the jungle was holding it’s breath before violence inevitably broke out again. Canach sat on a log next to the crackling camp fire. A welcome respite from a difficult night. His sleep had been restless and filled with unpleasant dreams.

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He pretended not to notice as pact soldiers stole away from the warmth of the fire’s glow...and his presence. No doubt suddenly remembering that they had something they had forgotten to do or somewhere better they needed to be. He drew a dagger from his boot and busied himself with polishing it, elbows on his thighs. The air was damp with humidity and if you didn’t care for your metal weapons they would be consumed by rust in no time.

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He tensed at the sound of footsteps approaching but didn’t stop in his polishing. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the feet that came with the sound and he relaxed slightly, but not completely. He knew who they belonged to, as well as the raven that landed on one of the logs across from him and looked at him, cocked its head, then flew off to land in one of the trees outside of the light of the flickering campfire rendering its dark feathers all but invisible in the shadows.

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The person sat next to him on his log. The entire area around the campfire had been vacated by now but they sat right next to him. They stretched out their feet toward the fire’s warmth and rolled their ankles and wiggled their toes in their fancy bejeweled and embroidered shoes in an attempt to relax the muscles in their feet after trodding through the jungle all day and most likely most of the night.

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He wanted to roll his eyes at their choice of footwear, no doubt they were magical or else they would have been torn to shreds but they looked more like something that should have been worn to a formal event. At least they hadn’t gone completely feral like Lord Faren who was running around in nothing but a loin cloth. Instead he said, “are you sure you should sit so close to me with a naked blade in hand?”

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“Why? I didn’t take you for the clumsy sort,” the Pact Commander said but she was preoccupied, fiddling with something in her hands. She let out a frustrated sigh. “Put that naked blade of yours to use would you.” Her pale human hand appeared and placed some kind of green and magenta spiked jungle fruit in his hand. He stared at the fruit for a beat, surprised she would trust a sylvari to touch her food, then he dropped the cloth he had been using to polish his dagger with on his knee and got to work cutting through the thick leathery skin.

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“What happened to your dagger?” he asked, slowly spinning the fruit in his hand as he pressed the edge of the blade into it.

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“This might surprise you but vampiric daggers are not much good for anything but sucking the life out of things.”

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She treats you like a servant. Said a familiar voice in his head. One that was not his own.

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She trusts me.

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She is testing you.

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Perhaps.

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They are not your people. You were created for better things. Bigger things. It would be so easy to slide the knife between her ribs. Just turn, thrust, and twist.

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He tightened his grip on his dagger. His dark knuckles turned a lighter shade of grey. He took a long steadying breath. He spun the dagger in his hand and drove it home. Into it’s sheath. Fruit juice and all. He would pay for that sticky mess later.

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You are not my master. He declared.

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He knew Mordremoth could not actually see or hear the commander sitting next to him through Canach but he had been thinking hard about her, hyper-aware of her every movement, the sound of her breathing, her thigh next to his, not touching but close enough to feel her body heat. He must have been projecting his thoughts enough for the dragon to pick up what was happening, either that or the dragon was watching them through other means. Canach flicked nervous eyes at the dark foliage around them, the firelight casting suspicious jumping shadows. The jungle suddenly seemed more ominous, more alive.

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He pulled the split fruit into two halves and held one half casually out to the commander without looking, afraid she might see the monster inside if he did.

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“Commander,” he offered. She leaned forward and took it.

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She caught his hand with her free hand before he could pull away and before he could think better of it he met her eyes. They were a pale smoky silver, made more enchanting by the contrast of the kohl she darkened her lids with. Her black hair fell about her shoulders in the smooth cascades that only magic could accomplish in this climate. She looked concerned but not in the way she might have if she had heard the conversation that had taken place in his head. And there was something else in her expression he couldn’t quite place. A crinkle around her eyes. Pain? Pleading? That couldn’t be right.

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She suspects you. Kill her now before she puts you in chains. They did it to you before. Come to me and you will never see a cage again. The voice promised. He ignored it. It was easier to do with the warmth of her skin to focus on, the scent of her permeating the space between them, something floral and heady. Perhaps her hair didn’t look they way it did only because of magic but because she had recently washed it in a jungle stream. It was just like her to come to this terrible place infested with dragon minions and find something good in it.

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“Canach, I know it’s been a struggle, and I know it will probably only get harder, but I couldn’t bear it if--” She cut herself off. Her eyes flicked away in embarrassment then back. “We,” she corrected herself. “Can’t lose any more people to this dragon.”

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“Nothing to worry your pretty head over, Commander,” Canach reassured her. “A gnat in my ear would have more sway.”

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Yes. Lie to her my child. Canach ignored the poisonous words.

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“I know the weak willed and the isolated have a harder time of it and I know that you are not weak, but be sure that you know that you are not alone.” She gave his hand one last squeeze and then she was gone. Leaving him with half a fruit and a hand that burned in the absence of her fingers as though she had branded him with the essence of her soul.

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If she could find something good in this jungle, could she see something good in him? What good was there to find in a rough former mercenary turned shining blade operative? She had not exactly been subtle in her lack of trust in him previously. But that was before the fleet fell, before they had fought the dragon minions together side by side. No. It was stupid, she didn’t care about him any more than any other pact soldier. She’s probably on her way to find another sylvari and give them the same talk. Twist and manipulate them--he stilled, were those his thoughts? Or Mordremoth’s? It was hard to tell sometimes but they had a particularly oily feel to them in his head.

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He ran his middle finger over the pad of his palm where her fingers had been, from the base of his thumb to the center of his palm, centering his thoughts as he watched her retreating into the night. Off to what ever task she was duty bound for next, not some pretend busy work like the others.

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I am not so easily manipulated beast. Canach thought, examining his half of the fruit she had left behind. While the outside was tough, the inside of the fruit had deep dark pink flesh.

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Kill her. Do it now.

 

“Commander, wait,” Canach called. She stopped at the edge of the dense leafy foliage of the forest and turned back. He set the fruit on the log and caught up to her, tucking his polishing cloth away. He opened a panel on his breastplate, he had shaped an open space within and inside of that was a set of three thorns he had been growing into knives. He was not a shaper, so the armor and weapons he grew himself were rudimentary at best. He gripped one of the thorns and with a simple directed thought it came free.

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He held it out to her on his open palm. It was a small knife, barely the length of his hand. It was a hard wood the same dark grey color as his skin with a simple straight handle that flattened out into a blade with a wicked little curve. “In case you have another fruit emergency.”

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She smiled and took the thorn from his hand, warm fingers brushing against his skin. “Thanks.”

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KILL THE PACT COMMANDER. SUBMIT. JOIN ME. The voice sounded increasingly desperate and the force of it made him wince, but she didn’t seem to notice as she tucked the knife out of sight. She lifted a dark hood into place, completely concealing her face in the void of magical darkness, and disappeared into the shadows of the night. Out of reach of Mordremoth and out of reach of Canach, in more ways than one. Her raven croaked somewhere behind him and he heard the sound of flapping wings as her pet took flight and followed her.

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‘I couldn’t bear it’, her words resurfaced and seared themselves into his mind. 'You are not alone.' He clung to them like a mantra. A mantra he would probably need in the coming days, even if it had only been a slip of the tongue.

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You can’t control me and you never will. He finally responded to the dragon. He closed the hand she had held into a fist. Something shifted inside. Resolve. I will never betray the Pact. I will never betray the Commander. Do your worst.

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******

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Canach absently ran his middle finger across his palm, from the base of his thumb to the center over and over. Jazz music and the bustling sounds of the casino around him a soothing balm of sorts. Reminding him how far he had come since those days in a deadly twisted jungle where he had been under the constant psychic assault of his own creator.

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Once the dragon had realized that he could not sway Canach to betray the commander he had switched tactics with promises to let her live if Canach came to him, promised her to Canach like a prize. But by then Canach knew that if he gave in there would be no going back, he would have become a mindless drone with little to no memory of who he had been before. He would have been a prisoner in his own mind, worse than any prison he had ever seen the inside of.

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The memory of that night in Maguuma had been brought to the surface by a nightmare that had woken him early that morning. Of living vines, circling him like snakes, dragging him beneath the surface of a sea of dark wriggling vines and deep into a suffocating darkness. Even after they had defeated Mordremoth the dragon still haunted his dreams from time to time.

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He had woken in a cold sweat in an empty bed. Skye had been called away again. Her fears of the ‘Commander’ fading into obscurity after Aurene’s disappearing act having proven unfounded.

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The bartender, a human man with silver hair and beard, set a glass of two fingers of blood whiskey in front of him. Canach picked it up and saluted the bartender with it before turning away only to be stopped short with the appearance of a human youth in his path.

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“Hey boss,” Yao greeted with an extra-ordinary amount of cheer. They had their black hair piled on top of their head in an elegant folded bun held in place with gold and jade hair sticks. “How are things?”

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“It would be better if my consoles were working again,” Canach grumped.

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“Sure thing.” Yao nodded but didn’t move. They clutched at the strap of what Canach only assumed was a bag of engineering tools hanging from their shoulder with the fingers of a jade tech prosthetic arm. They rolled up and down on their toes a couple times like they were working up courage for something. “So, you and the Commander, huh?” Yao finally said.

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“Excuse me?”

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“You didn’t think anyone would notice a prominent public figure like the Commander coming and going? Especially right after a certain tea party?”

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“It wasn’t a tea party.”

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Yao held out one hand to the side palm up. “It was at a tea house,” The engineer held their prosthetic hand out to the other side. “There was a party.”

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“We were there for Rama. For moral support.”

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“Sure. Sure.”

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------

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I hope you enjoyed this sample. (Content subject to change upon publication)

 

The completed story will be posted on AO3 when it's finished.

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Follow me on social media for updates.

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​Read the preceding short story Canach Club After Dark: In Knots (1) while you wait.

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