Blackgate - A DnD Story

Chapter 1 - Between Chance and the Occasional Drink

Someone played a game of pinfinger here. The splintered indents in the wood were arranged in a perfect arc, a few stray stabs dotting out gouges here and there. Placing his hand where the player's would have been, Zakariah imagined the person in his place would not have come away without a few cuts.

A wooden plate slid onto the table, followed by a mug with a frothy orange liquid sloshing over the side. Zakariah startled. A waitress stood on his left, a red apron tied around her waist and a circular wooden platter under her arm. She was a short girl with a round figure and a bright face framed by slightly pointed ears. Her lips moved quickly. A pale, freckled hand pointed to where his hand was lying on the table. She made a stabbing motion as she talked, gesturing to the marks and miming the actions of imaginary players. She smiled at Zakariah expectantly. His mouth opened and closed, but what was he supposed to say? She spoke too fast for Zakariah to catch a glimpse of the syllables on her lips. He hadn't a shadow of a guess as to what language that flurry of movement would have even been, anyway. He'd noticed the number of speakers of his native language of Sandscript had been dwindling the farther he got from Pharaway. That aligned with what he had heard about the western half of the continent, though.  He didn't expect everyone in greater Faerun to carry a language dictionary on them.

The barmaid was still waiting for a response.

"I'm deaf," Zakariah said flatly out loud in Sandscript.

She said something else, seeming confused.

"Atrash," he repeated the word. Zakariah sighed and performed the common hand sign. [Deaf.]

Her head swiveled around, searching for someone to tell her what was going on.

"I can't hear you," Zakariah muttered mostly to himself, still in Sandscript. With a sigh, he tapped his ears and shook his head with a shrug.

Oh, the shape of her lips said. She ducked her head apologetically and began backing away, rattling off something that probably contained a lot of I'm-sorrys, then abruptly stopped and blushed bright red when she realized that her customer couldn't hear those, either.

The waitress then rushed off back to the kitchen, leaving Zakariah alone with his drink and sandwich. He'd probably never hear the story of what happened at this table. Once people learned he was deaf, they rarely tried to communicate after that. Zakariah couldn't count the number of conversations he'd been left out on, jokes unexplained, and potential friendships untapped on account of his deafness. Even in his homeland of Pharaway, where he could read lips and every citizen was trained in at least basic sign language, very few had made an effort to get to know him more than passively. He could still even speak out loud if need be, though he preferred not to. Feeling his voice vibrate in his chest without hearing the sound was a strange sensation; pronunciation and syllables were left up to his best guess and muscle memory. He'd been told his speech sounded slurred at times as if he were drunk. It had been five years since he'd last heard the sound of his own voice. Five years since he'd heard anything at all, except for the ring of his perpetual tinnitus - but it didn't count as a sound. In the same way most people weren't aware of the sound of their breathing, he'd long since become numb to the false noise.

He took a bite of food and leaned back, scanning the space. A few other patrons milled about the tavern. A tall woman with purple skin and antler-like horns helped a very short person onto a stool at the bar. It took Zakariah a second to realize that the person wasn't a child, but in fact a full-grown individual. Three burly, pale men took up the corner booth opposite his. They huddled with their heads down, as if in intense conversation. There was one person, however, Zakariah kept his eye on. She leaned in the corner against the far wall. "Far" wasn't saying much; the tavern was little more than a wooden shoe box. Zakariah figured the length between them to be 5 paces - not much. Should she throw a spell at him, he was stuck in this booth. There was no way he would be able to both free himself and dodge the attack. His cause for concern was found in her eyes and the color of her skin. She was like him, dark brown, and betrayed by her golden eyes. All the Akah-Asah had those golden eyes, a mark of the phoenix soul they harbored within them that was the source of their magic. They were the enforcers of the highest law in Pharaway - the Law of Shikaar-Le. It was a slave code; they were slave hunters.