Laughing Skull

[Tahara]

She woke up from the poison sometime in the night. At least, it must have been night by her best guess. With the soot and ash making up for most of the area’s lighting, it was tough to tell. Though she reckoned she would have noticed dawn and that ought to be a few hours away.

There was a weight on her back as she shifted, trying to get up and trying to get the ash out of her mouth. And all of that from one stupid knife. Tahara groaned, pushing against whatever was lying on her back and woke up Chuckles, whose annoyed snort cleared up the mystery. She’d been sleeping with her head on her back. Not a trick she’d taught her, but something Chuckles just… started doing, since the first time Tahara had gotten sick, off some bad stew when the dry season had chased off all game and they’d been too poor for a proper meal. The hyena had spent her fever with her head on her chest, so that the minute her chest stopped moving, she’d know. Checking for a heartbeat. Chuckles had always been smarter than her, anyhow. “Buddy, can you just...Thank you.”

Right now she could have done without the fussing as the large animal yawned, finally lifting her head and allowing Tahara to get up and spit out what ash had made it into her mouth.

She wasn’t fond of this place. Not at all.

Tahara staggered to her feet, groaning. The world stopped turning and her skin wasn’t on fire anymore - her sight had returned as well, although still a bit hazy, but more so from sleep and ash than envenomation. Her throat was on fire now. The ash really had gotten everywhere. Blech.

The rest of camp was quiet and yet surrounded by snoozing orcs Tahara didn’t feel like sleeping, much. Not after what she’d dreamed.

She stretched her back and started to walk, trying to find solace in the little aches and pains that always plagued her body. That's how she could always tell the difference between her dreams and her waking hours.

Her sight returned fully after a while, the uncomfortable nightly glare of the Blackrock lighting a path well enough until she found a small hollowed out piece of rock on the outskirts of camp. Not a cave, not like the ones she'd called home, but enough for a bit of cover.

Chuckles ambled after her, the hyena faithfully carrying her supplies. She untied the sleeping mat and rolled it out on the floor, sitting down on the furs and opening her water skin with her teeth.

She didn't want to go back to sleep. She didn't.

The smell of seared fur and lightning in the air, Chuckles' pained yip as the paladin's sacred blade cuts into her. Sharp pain in Tahara's own chest as she watches her stumble and fall. And then… nothing. No sound, no roar of battle, no explosion on the mountain just her and that paladin and the arrow who slips through his armour and punches through his throat. Tahara doesn't feel herself shooting, just watches the arrow and the human and the last breath he ever takes. The laugh that bubbles up in her throat, sheer and unabashed happiness washing over her as the human chokes on his own lifeblood and she keeps laughing…

… But it's not the paladin anymore. It's the boy, the stupid, stupid elven boy who sees her hunting - just a supply run! Not an attack! Please, it's not - but he isn't listening and she's too far into darkshore, she can't run if he sounds an alarm and Tahara doesn't feel herself shooting, she just watches as the arrow flies and punches through his chest. She didn't mean to. She didn't-

The tree lights on fire and the world ends in white.

Tahara shakes her head. It was a nightmare. A stupid, antivenom-induced nightmare.

But it wasn't a lie.

She remembered her last conversation with Kyra, talking about far too many things that she shouldn't have been thinking about in the first place, her words poking at her heart like a dozen small needles.

"Dat's their fault for not seein' the real you."

Tahara wasn't sure she wanted anyone to see the real her. To know of her, to meet her, to-

She laughed, bitterness in her throat, from the ash, she told herself. Nah. She'd rather stay the moron.

When the fever took her down in outland and she'd thought of the invasion she would have traded for a life of slavery she'd wondered, idly, if she was evil.

When Morgkha told her of her ancestors, she'd believed, for a day, that she could be better.

When Gaar'thok had told her of the Laughing Skull, of what others would see in the mask, it had shaken her enough to lie to Vraxxar about why she needed to hunt and went behind his back to get permission from someone else.

When she killed that paladin in the barrens and felt her face split into a wide grin, enjoying every second of his agonizing end, she knew.

Tahara pulled the mask from the top of her head, staring at the face of the man she’d murdured to claim her heritage. Fun hadn’t been part of it that day. She hadn’t enjoyed killing them, neither of them. She had enjoyed not telling anyone less so. She’d liked making the mask, yes, but not for the brutality of the act but because it was the first thing she had, the first thing she was, that wasn’t stupid, or weak, or slave.

She had a heritage. A complicated one, perhaps even a dark one, but she had one. She had a name to cling to and a past beyond chains and Tahara wanted so hard to believe that she could be different. That she could be someone and be good.

The good Laughing Skull.

The memory of the blood spurting from the human’s throat still brought a smile to her face and Tahara realized that there was no such thing.

The truth, she thought, was that if anyone ever saw the real her, they’d turn away.

All of them.

Chuckles shuffled herself closer, the hyena’s head poking out from where she had snuck her way between Tahara’s knees and chest, large brown eyes looking up at her.

Well. Maybe not all of them.

Tahara stared at the mask, Kroz’ dead rictus grin mocking her until her brows furrowed and she snarled, throwing it away, hardened bone connecting with the age old rock and clattering to the ground, unbroken. Tahara had known anger but she had never known the seething rage buried under her chest, hiding, waiting, biding its time.

The man she made her mask of had told her when she was a child, that she would have been drowned at birth in his clan. It was the first time she wished he’d been right.

She sat there for an hour, two maybe, head buried in her hands, pulling at her hair and trying to breather, trying to think about anything else, until she crawled under the furs of the bed roll and prayed to every spirit she’d ever known not to dream.

They didn’t hear her.

The paladin lies on the ground, blood gushing out of his throat and Tahara laughs until, in his final moment, the man’s blade grazes her arm. She stares down at the wound, watches it growing fangs and pulling into a wide smirk, bursting out into laughter and Tahara is terrified, tries to stab the grotesque maw with her own dagger but she only cuts herself again and again and again and each time another smile joins the others, another set of teeth another high pitched laugh until she’s covered in them and she slits her own throat but then she’s choking helplessly and just not dying as the laughter drowns her and her ears ring, her own voice not cutting above the uproarious laughter and no one is coming. No one can help. No one wants to.

She wakes up sometime past noon by her own scream.