Darla
Session 1 — Sunday D&D Group
She was the reason Corian hired anyone at all, and he said so to her face on the first night: two of you can work magic — that’s the part I needed and couldn’t advertise for. A changeling who plays to the room, being told she was the room. She has been paid worse compliments by better-spoken men.
Then the second night gave her the worst hour of the journey and it was not a fight. She drew first watch, and a child began crying up the slope, and she believed it. Completely. She has stood in enough rooms to know the difference between a thing imitating a person and a person in trouble, and every instinct she owns told her there was a girl of seven or eight dying in the dark forty feet away and running out of breath to do it with. She was wrong, and there was no way for her to have known she was wrong, and the not-knowing is what stayed. What she did was wake the camp instead of going up alone — which is the only reason this story has four people in it — and she has not once claimed credit for that, because from inside it felt like being frightened rather than being clever.
The road changed her after that. She stopped reaching for spectacle and started reaching for things that work: darkness that no longer blinds her, a spell that shoves a room away from her, a mark she can put on a thing that makes it easier to kill. And at the farmhouse it very nearly was not enough. She was the one Vortigern’s ambush found — the lowest armour in the party, seventeen hit points, and magic that comes through armour as though it were not there. She finished that fight standing, awake, and one point from the floor. One skeleton’s claw. One thug’s swing. One more missile out of the dark.
She did not go down. She has not said much about it. But she has been performing since she was old enough to notice people watching, and there is a particular quiet that comes over a performer who has just understood, precisely and numerically, how close the curtain came — and who is now walking two days to a village, and then to a keep nobody has opened in forty years, with a man who has just admitted he was too frightened to walk that road on his own.