Hello there and welcome to my latest online novel project! 

If you read Bird of Pray, Beardaughter is a whole different type of story. Less wholesome, older adult cast. Pure Fantasy darkness meets absurd comedy and queer themes and quite a lot of hidden symbolism. The fantasy setting is original, loosely based on my character’s adventure during a tabletop roleplaying campaign 2012

I’m not gonna talk about it too much, just mentioned that  some reader discretion is advised!!

⚠️ This is intended for Mature readers only. Future chapters will contain sexual acts, descriptions of death and blood and gore, the psychological stuff and power dynamics.

I plan to mark out only the chapters with really explicit stuff using the M markings. 

Chapters are ongoing and I plan to post at least once a week.

Happy Reading! / Frida

Prelude

The dark velvet robe sat heavy over Dareth's young shoulders. His tense jaw worked as he regarded his reflection in the quicksilver mirror, a heavily ornate marvel with small moon stones wedged into the woodcut, reflecting light back up at his ice-blue eyes, making him appear moon touched too. Today it felt as if Shiin's madness had cursed him. 

Couldn't feel his fingers properly. 

It felt unreal, a dream, a vision, or maybe like his ridiculous buckled shoes were floating one inch off the floorboard.

For today, at noon rather, he was to witness his best friend's hanging. Calling him best friend was a bit of an understatement. He was his brother. The wild, reckless counterpart to Dareth's stern judgement, gold where Dareth was silver, day where Dareth was night. And that day was soon coming to a close. Or so Dareth thought; or rather, refused to think of the undeniable proof: the golden boy with a bloody sword in hand, eyes foggy and distant, like the mist had been when Dareth and he first set foot on Squall's End.

Yes. Mist. He felt wrapped in it. 

Trapped. 

Lost.

Two lost and penniless orphans. Mad grin and grating laughter. When Dareth had found him missing from his bed, tracked him down the library, he had been laughing. Similar but so different from the times he'd run off on his many adventures and caused panic among the high court of Cora. Running naked with stolen chickens from the pantry. Dareth wished at times he could tell anyone who'd listen that he did not know this mad Zyr fool, who did everything in his power to avoid sitting down in the library and letting Magistrate Gray teach them the complex glyphs of the Coraneese alphabet. 

His golden haired friend would rather sneak into brothels beyond the wall, report back on the nasty things adults got up to, and smuggle brandy from the High Maester's office. Picking locks. Tracking everything and everyone that moved within Cora's high walls. 

Dareth didn't mind the gifted brandy. He did mind that his friend could never stay quiet, stay calm. Stay with him. And now Tryggve Beardaughter was spending his last hours in the horrible, cold, reeking holding cells four floors beneath the Palace's grand staircase, among rapists and criminals and folks who for various reasons wished harm upon the glorious Magistracy.

Dareth turned his head, adjusted his thick black hair, the bangs beginning to fall into a face closing in on manhood each day. Strong features from his mother's side, Arbian, or so his father had told him: dark straight brows, darker olive skin, a prominent bird-like nose. All but the blue eyes were features that made him blend well among the Coraneese, features that sometimes made Tryggve compare him to a cunning crow. 

Tryggve was in turn a stupid golden dog, freckled and grinning, sometimes with his tongue hanging out just to spite Dareth, sometimes drooling when he slept with his mouth ajar, lying next to him during the long ship ride across the frigid waters.

Dareth scuffed at the cloak’s too-long arms, heavy, thick and black, like blood dumplings. They bounced back into position. His first ceremonial appearance as the new Seer and magistrate in training. And it would be to attend his friend's execution. The proof had been undeniable. 

The Beardaughter boy had to die.

 The Magistracy and all its cunning men, the High Maester, Magistrate Gray, and the tipstaff all deemed it so. They had the Seer as key witness. Had given him truth serum; Dareth's vision was pure, his testimony worth ten of ordinary witnesses.

Futile.

Dareth had tried to find reason. Yes, the boy was a menace. Yes, he was too much at times. Yes, he definitely had questionable morals. But he wasn't a killer.

The day before, Dareth had barely glimpsed the ancient, almost godly woman as the carriers and the endless Baalian delegation rolled up the white-pebbled road to the palace gates. From the tomes he'd only recently gotten the hang of, he knew: Alloria was the last of the known high elves, having survived hundreds of wars across her three thousand years. Guest of the Coran court for precisely one night. For reasons veiled in state secrecy. 

But Dareth had seen everything. Not the killing, but the aftermath. Queen Alloria— tall and golden in ethereal white sheer clothes and a layered night dress of finest elven silk— looked like a dragonfly that had fallen from the sky and landed on the first landing of the desolate library. She lay on her back, one hand reaching out, clutching a simple herbarium. The other tall-fingered hand pressed over the red leaking hole. Orange, almost golden eyes wide as marbles. A pleasantly surprised smile on her frozen face.

Dead by the hand of a simple Zyrellian orphan, one currently mad as a hatter.

Tryggve, high on pixie, had sung a made-up ditty, then flung his sword away in a jarring clatter on the stone floor, arms raised to the sky.

"Destroyer! That's who I'll ever be. The villain's part, it's written in my name. Written in my bastard blood!" His voice cracked with that grating texture, manhood still not having hardened and filled out his boyish slender features. He spun around, blond locks whirling, hooded green eyes finding Dareth standing there pale as a ghost and stepping back. Unsure if he was looking at his friend or a demon. Perhaps both.

"Fye, hello there, Quillwit! Fancy some afternoon tea!" His limbs had gone all loose and strange; he swayed on the spot, eyes rolling back, and went down face-first.

The courtyard stank of tallow candles and too many bodies pressed together in the cold.

They had come in force. Fishwives, merchant men in their second-best coats, guards off duty. Dark velvet Magistrate robes scattered through the crowd like ink drops, white collars catching the last of the light. Dareth stood among them and couldn't feel his tongue.

He catalogued this the way he catalogued most things. No sensation in the fingertips. Toes weightless inside the buckled shoes. A low hum behind the eyes, fourth hour running. His body's considered opinion that the present moment was not something it wished to attend.

His mind had other ideas.

The guard to his left: sword sitting loose in its scabbard. Poorly buckled. One decisive movement, one shout of fire, the crowd surging. Tryggve would have thirty seconds. Not enough. He moved on. Faint. Collapse forward, cause delay. The courtyard was walled on three sides. He moved on again, deeper, more absurd: will him upward. He had moved stone and sediment with nothing but intention. Surely a boy of nine stone was not beyond hypothesis. Surely.

He had called the guards.

It returned as it always returned now. Punctual. He had seen Tryggve standing over Alloria's body and his hands had gone to the window latch and his voice had gone to the yard below and he had not hesitated. He had also wanted Tryggve alive. He was honest enough to name that: not mercy. Tryggve remained his last living link to Zyrellia, his one comforting presence. He was being selfish, to be exact. But Alloria had been three thousand years of walking history and Tryggve was one careless luminous insect by comparison, and Dareth had built his entire life on the premise that root-deep tradition mattered more than the occasional wind that rattled it's branches.

He stood there, straight-backed like an oak, unable to feel his tongue.

The sun was going behind the rooftops. The holding cells four floors below would catch only its reflection off glass and stone. A secondhand glow. He filed this too, uselessly.

Three crows sat on the gallows beam. Said nothing.

Then Tryggve was brought out.

The mustard slacks were wrong. Too loose, and the dark stain down the left leg caught the light without mercy. Waistcoat hanging open, shirt loose, buttons done badly or not at all. He walked like his body had stopped cooperating and he was negotiating with it one step at a time. His face was a ruin. Tears tracked freely through the dust on his cheeks. His green eyes swept the gallery with a wild and searching quality, darting, dismissing, seeking, until they found.

He found Dareth.

"Dareth." His voice cracked on the first syllable. Not theatrical. Not the performed crack of the ditty-singer, the pixie-drunk prophet, the golden idiot with arms raised to the sky. This was the raw register underneath all of that. "Dareth, please. Make it stop, I'm begging you, I don't want to go like this."

The crowd shifted, murmured. A woman near the front leaned to her companion.

"I was tricked." Tryggve's throat worked. "I keep telling everyone and no one is listening, why is no one listening to me, I was tricked, I didn't do it, I didn't, I would never have, you know that, you know me, you know me better than anyone alive, Dareth please." His chest heaved under the open waistcoat. The guards on either side of him were stone. "I love you. I love you. Don't let them. Please. I don't want to die, I don't want to, I'm afraid, I'm so afraid, why aren't you saying anything, why won't you say something, say something, please say something."

Dareth said nothing.

"Hang him low!" someone shouted from the back of the gallery, and the crowd came alive.

They had positioned the rope low. Dareth observed this with the portion of his mind still taking observations. Not a clean drop, not the merciful crack of a well-measured neck. Low. He was meant to take time. The crowd cheered at this. Several booed on principle, which struck him as the most civil thing he had witnessed all afternoon. The crows shifted on the beam, readjusting.

Dareth shut his eyes and found Wolflake.

Summer. The lake surface warm on his back, the green canopy overhead broken into a thousand shifting pieces of sky, the distant sound of chaff in the breeze coming from the direction of the farms, lazy and rhythmic. Tryggve had been there, all sharp elbows and relentless commentary, and the water had held and cradled them both without preference.

He opened his eyes to the trap door.

Rough hands steadied Tryggve above it, bare feet pale against the dark wood. The noose came over his blond hair with institutional efficiency and Tryggve looked down; the stain on the mustard slacks was visible from where he stood. A small sound escaped him. Mortification cutting through terror, and something in that detail, that he could still be mortified, that his dignity could still flinch at such a small particular, in that moment.

Green eyes found blue, one last and searching time.

The trap door opened.

Tryggve threw out a leg, caught the edge of the frame, scrabbling, and for one lurching moment he was neither falling nor standing but somewhere between, crying out in a high thin sound like a stuck pig, fingers clawing at the rope above his head. The crowd surged. Someone laughed. A guard moved toward the edge to kick the leg loose and Tryggve's foot slipped and he dropped.

He went quiet.

Not the silence of a clean death. A wet sound, and then a rhythmic jerking that went on too long. Far too long. The crowd quieted around it, uncertain.

Dareth looked at the feet.

He looked at the feet and did not look away and did not look up, and the feet kept moving, and then slowed, and then didn't.