It had been some time.
Gazing down at a parchment, an unmarred sere landscape, felt both familiar and half-forgotten. How had it come to this, that her fingers actually felt the shaft of the quill? It should be an unconscious extension of her self.
It was entirely due to the fact that these days she wrote with a hand grown accustomed to the swoops and curves of other capitals. After all, the crunch of a goblinoid skull beneath a mace felt nothing like the denting of a writing surface to a nib.
She followed through on the last imagined act, resolute. Purple ink wicked and some difference in viscosity separated the constituent colors. Red veins spidered outward. Blue puddled into the channel of text. She balled up the beginnings of the scroll and threw it at the shelves behind her desk.
The sudden violence of movement surprised even herself. Rigid in her seat, heart pounding against the encasement of her ribs, she hoped neither acolyte nor scribe passed the open door behind her. She listened. The sounds of the Font ticked on unabated -- voices echoing, stone breathing, somewhere a door shutting.
Her chair screeched. She flattened the recovered papyrus on her desk, rustling thickly, sounding for all the world like a swarm of jointed legs down a hot stone hall.
Quite ruined.
Her finger tapped once on the blotting pad of her desk. She was forced to tattoo Oghma’s writ upon the unsentient repositories of natural resources that could aid her people. Cryogizzards, pyrochoidae carapaces, plasmodial residue of physarum acidum … all of these things saved lives.
Bugbear blood in the hem of her cloak. Vale’s wish for her to dream a night hag’s dreams. Smokey’s shouts bouncing around corners above the thrashing of water. Her disagreement with Mister Cain over practical matters stemming from philosophical issues. Ruli’s quest to repay cultural theft in bloody coin.
The thing Sarenna had visited upon her home.
Neck crawling, she turned her eyes from a blank stare at spider-veined papyrus. Her doorway remained empty. Through it, the entry to the common room, likewise open. Not even the edge of the bookcase that had been pressed into a poor-man’s mythallar was in view...but the flicker of candles infused with holy water shifted on the patterned carpet. She had summoned every Truth of her soul to armor against evil and had still required the protection of white wings spreading above her head to even touch that thing. To lift it behind holy barriers thankfully already in place.
Knowledge of both drow and lich had entered her world in the same day. Despite the fact that with a demon bottled, she had expected to finally achieve an elusive administrative anonymity.
She picked up quill. Dipped shaft into ink. Wrote.
Vanrak Moonstar was once a noble and noted Waterdhavian explorer….
Constitutionally Challenged
Constitutionally Challenged
Enjoy the game
Re: Constitutionally Challenged
The thought of some unknown person bleeding upon the polished marble floor upstairs was only slightly less upsetting than the question of how such a person had gained entry, and then again exit, the latter after apparently hemorrhaging blood.
Not just apparently. Demonstrably. The body before her had a waxen, bloodless pallor. And thus is entry afforded again, Clarianna thought, gazing down at it. This time carried in on the mechanical arms of one of Wyk's constructs. Bypassing the common room straight for the crypt.
It offended. Everything about this offended. That their home had been violated. That the violation had perhaps breached containments put in place on terrible objects. That the person had died in such an anonymizing manner. That the intruder/victim lay here. Her attention flicked to the sarcophagi ranged in niches around the room. Her people, every one, family and Seeker.
There was no other place. The protections on the crypt made this the obvious redoubt against further intrusions. The stone floor was more easily cleaned, which was a regrettable but necessary observation. Although the body had lost a great amount of blood in having its facial features carved off -- presumably after it had fled the Font -- there had remained enough that acolytes labored in the wake of its return, under Bobboli's ire, with cleaning rags and cleansing rituals.
The human male lay atop a bier in the center of the crypt. Protections against death, disease, curse and poison laid either on corpse, chamber or self, she repeated a now familiar set of investigatory prayers. Examinations of the four who had broken into the Company's tower and likewise perished had made these examinations almost a ritual in themselves.
Detect Poison. Detect Evil. Detect Magic. The divinatory magics channeled through her, suffusing her with holy glory.
Eyes blinking away the sting of dryness from a fixed stare into visuals that others would not see, she confirmed what had been expected. As with the other bodies before, a discordant answer. Poison: no. Evil: no. Magic: yes. What was more, the lingering taint of death magics. How was such a result explicable? Death magics and evil went hand in hand.
The gray aura fading slowly around the body said that it need not be explained. It just was, by evidence of Oghma's word.
Sliding a silvered stiletto out of her hair, she used it to push back loosened tendrils of hair, absently tucking them beneath the collar of her cloak and its invisible radiance of positive energies. Lifting the stiff fingers of the corpse with the arcanely enhanced stiletto, she knew what to look for, and found it. Tiny, bruised puncture wounds pricked the fingers and thumb of the left hand. As with the body in its entirety -- with the notable exception of the face -- the rest of the hand seemed pale and unmarred. The bruising and lack thereof elsewhere was interesting. Could death magics be administered through a grip on something spiny? Fingers that gripped something that injected deadly magics (but not poison!) might bruise before the rest of the body caught up with the recognition that is had been slain. She twisted the blade to bring the point to bear, and dragged it, with enough pressure to split the skin, from the flesh between index finger and thumb all the way across the lifeline of the palm.
Tissue peeled back. No blood wept. Even in a body not fresh, there really should be blood remaining in the extremities. Just to be certain, she turned over and bisected the mottled right hand. Thick red fluid, darker for its viscosity, welled from the incision. The hand curling in rigor seemed to cup the blood, trying to hold it, but droplets drooled between the fingers.
At the least, uneven distribution of bodily fluids post mortem. At the worst, exsanguination in whole or in part.
Straightening, she turned her attention to the ravaged face. Much less to go on here. Literally. As with the others, this man's facial features had been deliberately removed. The precision edges of the grisly mask that remained argued that the surgery had been performed with a tool milled for such work. An apothecary? A chirugeon? Or merely one skilled in the act of obscuring one's victims?
She found herself smacking the stiletto into her palm, over and over, summarizing to herself.
Slain by death magic but not evil. One hand drained of blood via puncture wounds. Face removed. At least these were facts. Everything else, the hows and whys and whos, was necessarily conjecture, yet to be explained.
Not just apparently. Demonstrably. The body before her had a waxen, bloodless pallor. And thus is entry afforded again, Clarianna thought, gazing down at it. This time carried in on the mechanical arms of one of Wyk's constructs. Bypassing the common room straight for the crypt.
It offended. Everything about this offended. That their home had been violated. That the violation had perhaps breached containments put in place on terrible objects. That the person had died in such an anonymizing manner. That the intruder/victim lay here. Her attention flicked to the sarcophagi ranged in niches around the room. Her people, every one, family and Seeker.
There was no other place. The protections on the crypt made this the obvious redoubt against further intrusions. The stone floor was more easily cleaned, which was a regrettable but necessary observation. Although the body had lost a great amount of blood in having its facial features carved off -- presumably after it had fled the Font -- there had remained enough that acolytes labored in the wake of its return, under Bobboli's ire, with cleaning rags and cleansing rituals.
The human male lay atop a bier in the center of the crypt. Protections against death, disease, curse and poison laid either on corpse, chamber or self, she repeated a now familiar set of investigatory prayers. Examinations of the four who had broken into the Company's tower and likewise perished had made these examinations almost a ritual in themselves.
Detect Poison. Detect Evil. Detect Magic. The divinatory magics channeled through her, suffusing her with holy glory.
Eyes blinking away the sting of dryness from a fixed stare into visuals that others would not see, she confirmed what had been expected. As with the other bodies before, a discordant answer. Poison: no. Evil: no. Magic: yes. What was more, the lingering taint of death magics. How was such a result explicable? Death magics and evil went hand in hand.
The gray aura fading slowly around the body said that it need not be explained. It just was, by evidence of Oghma's word.
Sliding a silvered stiletto out of her hair, she used it to push back loosened tendrils of hair, absently tucking them beneath the collar of her cloak and its invisible radiance of positive energies. Lifting the stiff fingers of the corpse with the arcanely enhanced stiletto, she knew what to look for, and found it. Tiny, bruised puncture wounds pricked the fingers and thumb of the left hand. As with the body in its entirety -- with the notable exception of the face -- the rest of the hand seemed pale and unmarred. The bruising and lack thereof elsewhere was interesting. Could death magics be administered through a grip on something spiny? Fingers that gripped something that injected deadly magics (but not poison!) might bruise before the rest of the body caught up with the recognition that is had been slain. She twisted the blade to bring the point to bear, and dragged it, with enough pressure to split the skin, from the flesh between index finger and thumb all the way across the lifeline of the palm.
Tissue peeled back. No blood wept. Even in a body not fresh, there really should be blood remaining in the extremities. Just to be certain, she turned over and bisected the mottled right hand. Thick red fluid, darker for its viscosity, welled from the incision. The hand curling in rigor seemed to cup the blood, trying to hold it, but droplets drooled between the fingers.
At the least, uneven distribution of bodily fluids post mortem. At the worst, exsanguination in whole or in part.
Straightening, she turned her attention to the ravaged face. Much less to go on here. Literally. As with the others, this man's facial features had been deliberately removed. The precision edges of the grisly mask that remained argued that the surgery had been performed with a tool milled for such work. An apothecary? A chirugeon? Or merely one skilled in the act of obscuring one's victims?
She found herself smacking the stiletto into her palm, over and over, summarizing to herself.
Slain by death magic but not evil. One hand drained of blood via puncture wounds. Face removed. At least these were facts. Everything else, the hows and whys and whos, was necessarily conjecture, yet to be explained.
Enjoy the game
Re: Constitutionally Challenged
“Lathander.” Praying over the dead, once more. “Morninglord.” Hands folded, headed bowed. “I do not know how to recognize when you are listening.” There had been a time when communion would sink into her conscious awareness. When the channeling of divine energies was new. When it had rushed through her in a flood still wearing its path, tugging at the exposed roots of her being.
When had the banks become so worn, so smoothed, the channel so deep, that she barely felt its coursing while performing miracles? When had the calling of floods in exigency overwashed the trickle of daily sustenance?
Of course, she was not the issue. Oghma’s informed disappointment was not the focus. That was not a problem laid before the gods right now, any of them.
Now there was the cold upon the back of her bare neck, the unaccustomed rustle of fabric where armor had grown to feel natural. The marble of an unfamiliar temple bruising her knees. The differing quality of the echoing ecclesiastical murmur and the yellowing warmth of a sunrise where she ached for cold white clarity.
Logan. Logan Castille lay suffused in that dawn cast from an altar before them, an altar over which she had no avail. It slanted across his brow, softened his lips but not his jaw, left one eye in shadow. The eyes that she had closed last night. Forever. The light both eased and revealed the lines etched into this young man’s face.
She had brought him here to the closest thing he had left to a home, to the Spires of the Morning, a temple he had not helped to build. But he had built others for this god. That had to count for something.
She unclasped her hands, reached out to brush back a stray black lock caught in stubble. The cheek that had been wont to tighten in frustration and anger, that lively, hardened countenance, was chill, with the physical quality of congealed wax.
Still no recognition of divinity rousing in her mind, where her own god would lift his truths. The only flood awakening in her dripped from her chin, one after the other, tears from swollen eyes.
Crying over the dead, once more.
She would never know Logan Castille.
The stiffness in her spine gave, back bending. She had killed him. Trapped between calves and thighs, the white folds of her grandmother’s dress tightened to a ripping point. “Lathander. This man was good. Once, he was good. He is a ruined temple of your faith, ravaged by the enemies of your light, shattered by evil circumstance. His brokenness waited to be hallowed. It could have been. It yet can be.” She heard the stilling of the voices of acolytes and clergy, a silence rippling outward from this central altarpiece where she knelt. “Lathander, lord of rebirth as well as dawn, he is before you, violently destroyed in heart and body, and both are within your power.”
She would never know Logan Castille, but she knew why that hurt so badly. That knowledge came from within. Knowing others was impossible. Once could only know oneself.
“Lathander.” A tear in the corner of her lips carried salt. “I needed him. I needed him to remind me, to sting me to what loss could cause. To keep my own loss present within me, internally, as he bore his on his surface like a malevolent trophy. I needed to redeem him.” More than that. “He angered me. He tested me.” Me. Me. Me. All about oneself...was all the truth one could offer.
In death, his truths, his repose, contradicted his life force, the animus he had imposed upon the world around him by his angry pressure of being. His current state, sanitized for death, washed and straightened and quieted from boots to belt to unbunched shoulders, was not whom he had been. Knuckles woven on his chest managed to recall the whiteness of tension on the haft of a hammer, while her own clasped hands recalled an indentation on his skull, a clumsily healed fracture beneath her fingers, her misguided attempt to find an injury to fix. A failure. Surface vs. substance. Perceiving vs. Knowing. Shying away from what was truly needed when the merely physical came to nothing.
“I needed him to offer a way to rise up, to be the dark tide that lifted whatever rode upon its swell as it bore its own surface up into the light. I needed him to be the vision seen within a once shattered mirror, shards pieced together, the image it showed to the world again unbroken. Proof. To say: See? I am whole.” Confessions muffled in the vast silence that had dropped about them. “The image it showed to myself a happy projection.” Her voice broke, a sob wracking her from deeper than consciousness. “I...needed.”
She had come here for one purpose. Whether or not Logan’s erstwhile lord heard, she sensed the awakening of her own. Oghma listened. Her body attuned to its own truths, knowing the pounding of her blood in her veins, the ache in her throat. She sensed it as clearly as she knew Lathander’s mortal servants bore witness to her voiced plea.
She had killed Logan Castille instead of leading him back to life.
“Take me. I am ready.”
She was broken. But not beyond redemption.
Now she spoke to both who held dominion over her, in thought and clumsy act. “Take me instead. I am here to right what I have done, to reclaim what I have lost. Take me. I offer my life, my self, my Truth. Take whatever sacrifice you deem worthy. I beg you. I pray … ” Her voice thickened to an inability to speak, but the gods needed no externality. They would know.
She knelt before them, in her own house of knowledge. She had divested herself of the trappings of title, laying her armor within Adam’s sarcophagus, her mace and shield hung on their stands. Around her neck, only the simple white quill that been her office, both before and after her calling to serve as a conduit to greater powers. She was only Clarianna, an older, careworn Clarianna, in the dress that was all she had of her grandmother. She would have wed in this dress, but instead she would end the line of broken hearts of the women of her family, in emptiness.
Lives were not granted by commerce, one soul for another. She could only seal the bargain of her own fate. She could only affect her own animus. The gods and Logan’s soul had charge of his own. But still, she prayed, and knew that Oghma weighted her words for truth.
She found her hand resting on those so often clenched in violence, and remembered the feel of a living hand. A gentle touch, strong, supporting and accepting of her care in return. The only ring left on her finger shone silver as her hand tightened. “I pray...if there is anything within me worthy to pay the debts I owe to this man, take it. If there is any value in his knowing that he touched me, that I felt his pain, that he offered unbeknown to himself his sacrifice gained through sorrow … I put that into the keeping of the gods and beg that you impart it to his soul. If I go to my rest, I do so gazing into a shard of reflection in which this damaged, ravaged man, whole and alive, pursues the mortal happiness he deserved and someday merges with the sunrise in joy.”
Within her, divinity rising. The rivulets trickling through frosted ground. A thirsty self, neglected by the diversion of greater torrents to perceived priorities, absorbing a thaw.
“As for me, I am ready to see if my love found his way beyond the Wall. I am ready to be beside my god.”
The deluge gathered behind her thoughts, deeper than perception.
Both the flood and the flooded, she bowed her head and waited for divine truth.
When had the banks become so worn, so smoothed, the channel so deep, that she barely felt its coursing while performing miracles? When had the calling of floods in exigency overwashed the trickle of daily sustenance?
Of course, she was not the issue. Oghma’s informed disappointment was not the focus. That was not a problem laid before the gods right now, any of them.
Now there was the cold upon the back of her bare neck, the unaccustomed rustle of fabric where armor had grown to feel natural. The marble of an unfamiliar temple bruising her knees. The differing quality of the echoing ecclesiastical murmur and the yellowing warmth of a sunrise where she ached for cold white clarity.
Logan. Logan Castille lay suffused in that dawn cast from an altar before them, an altar over which she had no avail. It slanted across his brow, softened his lips but not his jaw, left one eye in shadow. The eyes that she had closed last night. Forever. The light both eased and revealed the lines etched into this young man’s face.
She had brought him here to the closest thing he had left to a home, to the Spires of the Morning, a temple he had not helped to build. But he had built others for this god. That had to count for something.
She unclasped her hands, reached out to brush back a stray black lock caught in stubble. The cheek that had been wont to tighten in frustration and anger, that lively, hardened countenance, was chill, with the physical quality of congealed wax.
Still no recognition of divinity rousing in her mind, where her own god would lift his truths. The only flood awakening in her dripped from her chin, one after the other, tears from swollen eyes.
Crying over the dead, once more.
She would never know Logan Castille.
The stiffness in her spine gave, back bending. She had killed him. Trapped between calves and thighs, the white folds of her grandmother’s dress tightened to a ripping point. “Lathander. This man was good. Once, he was good. He is a ruined temple of your faith, ravaged by the enemies of your light, shattered by evil circumstance. His brokenness waited to be hallowed. It could have been. It yet can be.” She heard the stilling of the voices of acolytes and clergy, a silence rippling outward from this central altarpiece where she knelt. “Lathander, lord of rebirth as well as dawn, he is before you, violently destroyed in heart and body, and both are within your power.”
She would never know Logan Castille, but she knew why that hurt so badly. That knowledge came from within. Knowing others was impossible. Once could only know oneself.
“Lathander.” A tear in the corner of her lips carried salt. “I needed him. I needed him to remind me, to sting me to what loss could cause. To keep my own loss present within me, internally, as he bore his on his surface like a malevolent trophy. I needed to redeem him.” More than that. “He angered me. He tested me.” Me. Me. Me. All about oneself...was all the truth one could offer.
In death, his truths, his repose, contradicted his life force, the animus he had imposed upon the world around him by his angry pressure of being. His current state, sanitized for death, washed and straightened and quieted from boots to belt to unbunched shoulders, was not whom he had been. Knuckles woven on his chest managed to recall the whiteness of tension on the haft of a hammer, while her own clasped hands recalled an indentation on his skull, a clumsily healed fracture beneath her fingers, her misguided attempt to find an injury to fix. A failure. Surface vs. substance. Perceiving vs. Knowing. Shying away from what was truly needed when the merely physical came to nothing.
“I needed him to offer a way to rise up, to be the dark tide that lifted whatever rode upon its swell as it bore its own surface up into the light. I needed him to be the vision seen within a once shattered mirror, shards pieced together, the image it showed to the world again unbroken. Proof. To say: See? I am whole.” Confessions muffled in the vast silence that had dropped about them. “The image it showed to myself a happy projection.” Her voice broke, a sob wracking her from deeper than consciousness. “I...needed.”
She had come here for one purpose. Whether or not Logan’s erstwhile lord heard, she sensed the awakening of her own. Oghma listened. Her body attuned to its own truths, knowing the pounding of her blood in her veins, the ache in her throat. She sensed it as clearly as she knew Lathander’s mortal servants bore witness to her voiced plea.
She had killed Logan Castille instead of leading him back to life.
“Take me. I am ready.”
She was broken. But not beyond redemption.
Now she spoke to both who held dominion over her, in thought and clumsy act. “Take me instead. I am here to right what I have done, to reclaim what I have lost. Take me. I offer my life, my self, my Truth. Take whatever sacrifice you deem worthy. I beg you. I pray … ” Her voice thickened to an inability to speak, but the gods needed no externality. They would know.
She knelt before them, in her own house of knowledge. She had divested herself of the trappings of title, laying her armor within Adam’s sarcophagus, her mace and shield hung on their stands. Around her neck, only the simple white quill that been her office, both before and after her calling to serve as a conduit to greater powers. She was only Clarianna, an older, careworn Clarianna, in the dress that was all she had of her grandmother. She would have wed in this dress, but instead she would end the line of broken hearts of the women of her family, in emptiness.
Lives were not granted by commerce, one soul for another. She could only seal the bargain of her own fate. She could only affect her own animus. The gods and Logan’s soul had charge of his own. But still, she prayed, and knew that Oghma weighted her words for truth.
She found her hand resting on those so often clenched in violence, and remembered the feel of a living hand. A gentle touch, strong, supporting and accepting of her care in return. The only ring left on her finger shone silver as her hand tightened. “I pray...if there is anything within me worthy to pay the debts I owe to this man, take it. If there is any value in his knowing that he touched me, that I felt his pain, that he offered unbeknown to himself his sacrifice gained through sorrow … I put that into the keeping of the gods and beg that you impart it to his soul. If I go to my rest, I do so gazing into a shard of reflection in which this damaged, ravaged man, whole and alive, pursues the mortal happiness he deserved and someday merges with the sunrise in joy.”
Within her, divinity rising. The rivulets trickling through frosted ground. A thirsty self, neglected by the diversion of greater torrents to perceived priorities, absorbing a thaw.
“As for me, I am ready to see if my love found his way beyond the Wall. I am ready to be beside my god.”
The deluge gathered behind her thoughts, deeper than perception.
Both the flood and the flooded, she bowed her head and waited for divine truth.
Enjoy the game
Re: Constitutionally Challenged
The bottle shattered. Crystal droplets, crystal fragments, in a motion as slowed as if she had called on Oghma to bring a foe’s movement in battle to a less dangerous speed.
But this wasn’t a fight, though she’d expected to find one. And it wasn’t fear that burst her thoughts outward in suspended fragments. Except that it was. Fear. Guilt. Sorrow. A thousand reflections in a million moments all glittering in this one. A cloud of shards that was her, unmade.
Holy water splashed the uneven floor, and ran in the grooves between blocks.
“Lass,” Logan said.
Logan was dead. She had killed him. Her god had refused her and Logan Castille was dead.
Except that he stood between sarcophagi, looking at her. Logan. Dark hair gathered away from his face. Grey eyes…. Grey? She couldn’t remember knowing that. She had only ever seen them swollen, red with rage or drink. Grey, in a light that couldn’t be merely from the torches. Strong, clean lines to a face that seemed as if slack-jowled flesh had been stripped of years of abuse, revealing the younger man beneath. Standing straight. Behind him, three figures.
Her hand, that had been outraised in a gesture to feel the shape of any evil, remained unmoving, rings winking in the firelight. The vial that had slipped from the other had been an offense planned when she’d been told that ghostly figures had been seen in the depths of the Font. In the crypt. Here. But it was just…Logan. Her eyes shifted briefly, to the three shapes behind him, two smaller flanking one taller, and womanly. Another shock exploded through her. “And the Binder shall deliver you from every evil work and will preserve you unto his knowledge.” She heard her own mumbled prayer. Plea?
“Lass, I’m here. I don’t have much time.”
“Oghma.” Her whisper was ripped from her, its roots in her heart. “I pray this is your answer. Are you here to take me to my end?”
Logan smiled. Her knees gave out. She folded. Stone bruised. Glass ground beneath an armored knee brace. The splatter of holy water darkened the stone in a rosetta around her.
He was before her, then. She didn’t recall seeing him move. He was before her, strong and tall. Unscarred. Unblemished. “How…can this be?”
“I think you know.”
“You are dead.”
“Yes,” he said, and knelt.
He reached out and a surprising and shameful fear tore through her. Terror. Failure. And so she foundered even in her plea that morning to die. She was afraid, in this now, of dying. Dying at the rocky bottom of a pit, dashed on the reef of her worst failure. A touch, from the dead, to drain her life. Did she deserve anything else? Oghma had heard her, and sent an appropriate psychopomp to guide her to the House of Knowledge.
“Yes,” he said again, and she thought he answered her, but his head turned, black hair sliding over the armor she remembered, but neat, polished. “Yes, I will tell her,” he said to the other figures. A woman. Two children. She knew, before his eyes lit, resting on them, with a fire of love and pride that made her ache to see. His dead wife, Allana, stood with a hand on each of the shoulders of his slain children, Becket and Sara. Dead. Slain. But here, seemingly solid. Unharmed. Momentarily granted leave from their afterlife to see father and husband’s final poetic role. Behind them, Adam’s sarcophagus. The juxtaposition of pain brought tears to her eyes. She had asked to be with him again. She had the evidence here before her that lovers could be reunited after death.
“Lass, my wife, she demands I tell you….”
Clarianna stiffened through her spine. Logan’s hand brushed across her brow and she flinched, before realizing that he only pushed back her hood. She had forgotten she wore it.
His hand was warm and solid. Lifelike. He lifted her face to look into her eyes. “…thank you. You reached me when she could not. She wants you to know she is eternally grateful.”
Not dead. Not drained. Instead, the feeling that flowed into her from his touch was a warmth that reached into cold regions of her heart. It unfroze her. It hurt. Her head turned, jerkily, to the others. “Your family?” She quavered. “Your family is here?” Her shoulders shook, trying to hold back sobs.
“Yes, they are here and I am with them.”
“Your family is…with you?” Her arms bent around herself, to ward off the agony of raw emotion.
He reached out to hold her hands, clasping them, strong enough to still her trembling. “Lass, it becomes so clear. The weight leaves you once you cross. Don’t despair.”
“I…killed you.”
“Don’t lose heart.”
“I killed you, when all I wanted was to heal you. To save you.”
“There is that.” He laughed, then. A full, hearty laugh she had never heard from him in life. “You did both.” Her shoulders uncurved slightly from around her clenched hands. “But look.” He nodded to the side. “My family. The path I was on before I met you….” She followed his gesture, first out of the corner of her eye, then turning her face, eyes wet but tears no longer flowing. Sara, a child snatched from life before she’d had time to live it, waved shyly from behind her mother’s skirts. “Well, I think you know,” Logan finished softly, the gravel in his voice from emotion.
“I am sorry,” Clarianna said, to Allana, and her children. “For all the pain you felt in life. I am sorry, for what you endured after.” She turned to Logan with that last.
“That is done,” he said simply. “Do not bear the weight.”
“I would have died to see you whole. I would have died rather than be the one who hurt you. Killed you. Oh, Logan.” She unwound her hands and reached out for his. “Are you real? Are you really here? Have the gods granted me this miracle?”
“I am here.” The squeeze of his hands would have been answer enough.
“Real and solid. For a minute or an hour. And then with your family…in your god’s sunrise?”
“A rebirth.” He leaned forward, placing his forehead against hers.
That hurt, too. Bittersweet. Pain and loss. Love and joy. Stiff at first, she let her neck relax, let her brow rest against his. “Oh, Logan.” Her eyes closed, lids damp with tears they had no room for. A trembling smile began, her throat and chest aching.
“Don’t lose hope,” he whispered. “Don’t let the darkness in. Know, when we leave, we are whole.” He took her hand, rising. “My time is coming to an end.”
“You have to go, so soon?” She rose with him.
“Sadly, yes.”
“Happily,” she said, catching her breath against a hitch in her voice. “Happily, you have to go. I will miss you. I already do. Logan, before you and your family….” She blinked away melting crystal on her lashes. Was it their lens that made Allana seem less substantial as the woman gathered her children to her side? “It isn’t my place.” Her heart was breaking as she smiled. “Your god has his own servants. But may I offer you a blessing to take with you? All of you?”
Allana nodded at Logan, and then reached out and took Clarianna’s hand. Logan took her other, and she knew it was not her imagination that both of theirs felt light in her own.
Nor, though, was it her imagination that joy flowed through her, as if she bridged the love between them. She laughed, and sobbed, in one breath. And then she took in a deep gulp of air and turned their hands up in her own, raising them up. “The Binder bless you and keep you; Oghma make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord of Knowledge turn his face toward you and give you peace.” They were going, without breaking away. Their hands now light as feathers, their shapes growing transparent, a glow blossomed around them, coming from nowhere and everywhere, burning in the pattern of holy water on the floor.
She had thought him a psychopomp sent to guide her to Oghma, but she could turn that on its head. As the parents and the children blurred into clouds of light, she reached within for words to summon angels, to guide them home.
“Let them see your face, my child, and thus know the meaning
of all things; let them love you and thus love each other.
Come and take your seat in the bosom of the limitless, my
child. At sunrise open and raise your heart like a blossoming
flower, and at sunset bend your head and in silence complete the
worship of the day.”*
A flare of light, a thrill of unheard horns, the smell of rain…and Logan Castille and his family were gone.
(*The quote is from Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Child-Angel”)
But this wasn’t a fight, though she’d expected to find one. And it wasn’t fear that burst her thoughts outward in suspended fragments. Except that it was. Fear. Guilt. Sorrow. A thousand reflections in a million moments all glittering in this one. A cloud of shards that was her, unmade.
Holy water splashed the uneven floor, and ran in the grooves between blocks.
“Lass,” Logan said.
Logan was dead. She had killed him. Her god had refused her and Logan Castille was dead.
Except that he stood between sarcophagi, looking at her. Logan. Dark hair gathered away from his face. Grey eyes…. Grey? She couldn’t remember knowing that. She had only ever seen them swollen, red with rage or drink. Grey, in a light that couldn’t be merely from the torches. Strong, clean lines to a face that seemed as if slack-jowled flesh had been stripped of years of abuse, revealing the younger man beneath. Standing straight. Behind him, three figures.
Her hand, that had been outraised in a gesture to feel the shape of any evil, remained unmoving, rings winking in the firelight. The vial that had slipped from the other had been an offense planned when she’d been told that ghostly figures had been seen in the depths of the Font. In the crypt. Here. But it was just…Logan. Her eyes shifted briefly, to the three shapes behind him, two smaller flanking one taller, and womanly. Another shock exploded through her. “And the Binder shall deliver you from every evil work and will preserve you unto his knowledge.” She heard her own mumbled prayer. Plea?
“Lass, I’m here. I don’t have much time.”
“Oghma.” Her whisper was ripped from her, its roots in her heart. “I pray this is your answer. Are you here to take me to my end?”
Logan smiled. Her knees gave out. She folded. Stone bruised. Glass ground beneath an armored knee brace. The splatter of holy water darkened the stone in a rosetta around her.
He was before her, then. She didn’t recall seeing him move. He was before her, strong and tall. Unscarred. Unblemished. “How…can this be?”
“I think you know.”
“You are dead.”
“Yes,” he said, and knelt.
He reached out and a surprising and shameful fear tore through her. Terror. Failure. And so she foundered even in her plea that morning to die. She was afraid, in this now, of dying. Dying at the rocky bottom of a pit, dashed on the reef of her worst failure. A touch, from the dead, to drain her life. Did she deserve anything else? Oghma had heard her, and sent an appropriate psychopomp to guide her to the House of Knowledge.
“Yes,” he said again, and she thought he answered her, but his head turned, black hair sliding over the armor she remembered, but neat, polished. “Yes, I will tell her,” he said to the other figures. A woman. Two children. She knew, before his eyes lit, resting on them, with a fire of love and pride that made her ache to see. His dead wife, Allana, stood with a hand on each of the shoulders of his slain children, Becket and Sara. Dead. Slain. But here, seemingly solid. Unharmed. Momentarily granted leave from their afterlife to see father and husband’s final poetic role. Behind them, Adam’s sarcophagus. The juxtaposition of pain brought tears to her eyes. She had asked to be with him again. She had the evidence here before her that lovers could be reunited after death.
“Lass, my wife, she demands I tell you….”
Clarianna stiffened through her spine. Logan’s hand brushed across her brow and she flinched, before realizing that he only pushed back her hood. She had forgotten she wore it.
His hand was warm and solid. Lifelike. He lifted her face to look into her eyes. “…thank you. You reached me when she could not. She wants you to know she is eternally grateful.”
Not dead. Not drained. Instead, the feeling that flowed into her from his touch was a warmth that reached into cold regions of her heart. It unfroze her. It hurt. Her head turned, jerkily, to the others. “Your family?” She quavered. “Your family is here?” Her shoulders shook, trying to hold back sobs.
“Yes, they are here and I am with them.”
“Your family is…with you?” Her arms bent around herself, to ward off the agony of raw emotion.
He reached out to hold her hands, clasping them, strong enough to still her trembling. “Lass, it becomes so clear. The weight leaves you once you cross. Don’t despair.”
“I…killed you.”
“Don’t lose heart.”
“I killed you, when all I wanted was to heal you. To save you.”
“There is that.” He laughed, then. A full, hearty laugh she had never heard from him in life. “You did both.” Her shoulders uncurved slightly from around her clenched hands. “But look.” He nodded to the side. “My family. The path I was on before I met you….” She followed his gesture, first out of the corner of her eye, then turning her face, eyes wet but tears no longer flowing. Sara, a child snatched from life before she’d had time to live it, waved shyly from behind her mother’s skirts. “Well, I think you know,” Logan finished softly, the gravel in his voice from emotion.
“I am sorry,” Clarianna said, to Allana, and her children. “For all the pain you felt in life. I am sorry, for what you endured after.” She turned to Logan with that last.
“That is done,” he said simply. “Do not bear the weight.”
“I would have died to see you whole. I would have died rather than be the one who hurt you. Killed you. Oh, Logan.” She unwound her hands and reached out for his. “Are you real? Are you really here? Have the gods granted me this miracle?”
“I am here.” The squeeze of his hands would have been answer enough.
“Real and solid. For a minute or an hour. And then with your family…in your god’s sunrise?”
“A rebirth.” He leaned forward, placing his forehead against hers.
That hurt, too. Bittersweet. Pain and loss. Love and joy. Stiff at first, she let her neck relax, let her brow rest against his. “Oh, Logan.” Her eyes closed, lids damp with tears they had no room for. A trembling smile began, her throat and chest aching.
“Don’t lose hope,” he whispered. “Don’t let the darkness in. Know, when we leave, we are whole.” He took her hand, rising. “My time is coming to an end.”
“You have to go, so soon?” She rose with him.
“Sadly, yes.”
“Happily,” she said, catching her breath against a hitch in her voice. “Happily, you have to go. I will miss you. I already do. Logan, before you and your family….” She blinked away melting crystal on her lashes. Was it their lens that made Allana seem less substantial as the woman gathered her children to her side? “It isn’t my place.” Her heart was breaking as she smiled. “Your god has his own servants. But may I offer you a blessing to take with you? All of you?”
Allana nodded at Logan, and then reached out and took Clarianna’s hand. Logan took her other, and she knew it was not her imagination that both of theirs felt light in her own.
Nor, though, was it her imagination that joy flowed through her, as if she bridged the love between them. She laughed, and sobbed, in one breath. And then she took in a deep gulp of air and turned their hands up in her own, raising them up. “The Binder bless you and keep you; Oghma make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord of Knowledge turn his face toward you and give you peace.” They were going, without breaking away. Their hands now light as feathers, their shapes growing transparent, a glow blossomed around them, coming from nowhere and everywhere, burning in the pattern of holy water on the floor.
She had thought him a psychopomp sent to guide her to Oghma, but she could turn that on its head. As the parents and the children blurred into clouds of light, she reached within for words to summon angels, to guide them home.
“Let them see your face, my child, and thus know the meaning
of all things; let them love you and thus love each other.
Come and take your seat in the bosom of the limitless, my
child. At sunrise open and raise your heart like a blossoming
flower, and at sunset bend your head and in silence complete the
worship of the day.”*
A flare of light, a thrill of unheard horns, the smell of rain…and Logan Castille and his family were gone.
(*The quote is from Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Child-Angel”)
Enjoy the game
Re: Constitutionally Challenged
Thankful for the interlocking fence of fire made by Cornelius’s hammer and Sarenna’s sword, she caught herself jarringly, slamming onto a palm. Wet grass and blood-slick stone.
Behind her, claws and teeth, lunging. From a more sensible vantage, one of Wyk’s missiles zipped past her ear, impacting with a smell of burned fur and meat. Too close. She had gotten too close. The fog of hot beast on a cold night -- breath, howls, and hunger -- enveloped this corner of slope and cliff. “Defend here!” Sarenna shouted.
Two-inch claws rang against metal, scraping along the left cuisse of her armor, catching where the knee brace jointed into the thigh protection. For a moment a furred hand, obscenely humanoid, closed around her leg. Fear tasted of iron. She kicked, cried out something that wasted breath, and was free. The werewolf began a frustrated howl, but a crunch of metal on bone and a spray of hot blood against the back of Clarianna’s neck put an end to it.
Recognition clawed more effectively, raking at her hopes as she crawled up the rise. They were too late. The Chauntean was dead. No one alone could have survived this. She should have known, by the trail of gore that had led from the wreckage of the wagon. It hurt, on a personal level...which she truly didn’t have opportunity to examine at the moment.
Finding a handhold on which to lever up, she grabbed also for the white quill around her neck. She opened herself to the final connection of rituals prepared and planned and superseded in the suddenness of what had greeted them.
Suddenness was what required mitigation. Chilling of churning waters. Ice to congeal the surge. That had been the plan. “Oghma…” Her voice lost itself in the growling that rose as a thicker arm struck at Sarenna from around the boulder. Notes made in the peace of her room now seemed insufficient to the moment. Prayer. She had spent exhortations of battle too soon, at the first worg seen. Slow them. Logically, that seemed as if it would give the front line an advantage. Finally strike from a distance with pristine divinity, Oghma's Hammer. Plain and simply, she had screwed that up. “...make thine enemies slow to strike…” A bulging shoulder of hide and bristles scraped into view at an unexpected height, taller than Cornelius’s iron-helmed head, dwarfing the half-elf as Sarenna avoided a blow. .“...by your knowledge may time’s truth be altered…” Whatever it was, Clarianna couldn’t see it, but the reek of its flesh choked her voice as much as did the lifting of Sarenna’s eyes to it. “...yeh, even upon thy foes to pass at a divisor of two from your holy base rate of six hundred thousand cubits per second…” Panic rising. Numbers were not her strength and she had never called on this power, in battle or anywhere. Cornelius bellowed, swinging at the werewolf before him. Nor should she change her target from the snarling maw that threatened him. Too much thinking.
A flat, porcine snout lunged into view, tusked jaws ripping the air in front of Sarenna’s face, shoulder driving into Sarenna’s chest. Clarianna changed her target.
Gone. So fast the creature struck and pulled back, and her reflexes nowhere near fast enough. She felt all of her preciously prepared logic and knowledge released the instant after it pulled back. The divine power recoiled into her, unspent.
Sarenna’s back hit the rock, breath punched out of her by the force of the blow but miraculously retaining her feet. The woman Clarianna thought of as a sister rolled through her back, shoving off the boulder with both scapula simultaneously, as if the wings that sometimes of late sprouted there had--
Wings. “Oghma!” Clarianna cried out. “Send your servant now a messenger bearing tidings of your truth on steel and glory!”
Light dawned above, but she could not spare the time to look. Missiles again sizzled by: one, two, three balls of sparking magic, each impacting closer and closer, marking the lumbering approach of the creature as it pulled itself forward by an arm around the stone. The fourth volley of Wyk’s magical ammunition sparked in the center of its chest as it came into full view, burning in charred, blood-matted fur. If the weres tread an uncanny valley that was too close to human form, this thing bestrode that valley as a colossus, walking upright and with a light of cunning ferocity in its piggy eyes. Taller than a man, furred as a bear, with the face of a boar, the horror opened drooling jaws and roared, spraying a cloud of fetid spittle.
Cornelius roared back. Veins standing out between helm and pauldron, jaw visible with his full-throated rage, he swung at the last werewolf between him and the new, greater foe. In a form yet more man than animal, that lesser threat would never finish its last transformation. Trailing fire, the hammer the Llorkian refugee had named Grosser Feuerhammer caved in a heaving rib cage, smashing organs and ripping through lumbar vertebrae. Bone chips fanned outward, through a shaft of light glimmering into view between Clarianna and the fray. Gore pelted white wings, unfurling now from within it. A ghaele’s voice fluted out with blessings, bringing a rush of joy to her heart.
Sarenna’s dance was beautiful. Lithe, the bard spun, ducking beneath a swipe from the curved, yellow claws of her dancing partner. Flames enveloped the end of her short sword as she saluted the beast with a hand that rose to her shoulder and drew from her back a wooden rod. Blade cut, rod blocked, feet stamped, body swayed, and the singer...sang. The melody she wove trilled up and around, wordless embodiment of mobility and avoidance, a syncopation that never fell where expected, and incorporated a third partner as the ghaele joined, blade flashing in its own light.
Wyk’s voice rose too, joining Sarenna’s in a volume too great for his form. From behind Clarianna, pure arcanity wove a counter around the bardic tune before her. In the rising of the fine hairs on the back of her neck, in the drift of smoke in memory and the heat she felt curling in her veins, it spoke of fire. Fire that she wanted to reject; fire that the others wielded to effect. Fire that was not her. Fire was uncontrolled instinct. The Winter Witch. She had heard them call her that name since before the defeat of the demon of winter, welcomed it since Adam’s death, buried herself in ice. Fire that loosened limbs, warmed hearts.
The Malarites had killed a priestess. Eaten her, in truth. She knew that, with a certainty that came from the divinity of her god.
Howling sounded from downslope. More of those who had feasted on human flesh.
Seen out of the corner of her eye, a bead of glowing red arced from Wyk’s hand. It lofted over the ghaele, wings spread across the others. Cornelius squared himself, huge, blood-spattered, dripping hammer drawing over his shoulder, an avatar of barbarity at odds to his controlled politeness in more civil surrounds. Sarenna danced. Wyk’s newest missile landed behind the immediate foe.
Fire blossomed.
The fireball that washed up and over the rear of the thing they fought rose also inside her. It consumed the screeches of the beast, incinerated flesh, blotted out enemy and friend.
She opened her own arms to the sky and called divine flames.
The shaft of fire that roared out of the sky was nothing like the clean purity which she frequently channeled against threats, and to which she had grown used. Nor did it arrive on white wings and with a scent of fresh rain.
It shook her, pouring through body and blood, kindling her bones and bellowing down as a cyclone of spinning fires. There was divinity, but it was of a violent provenance far from the scratch of quills and contemplation, a burning truth that cared not for what mundanity it seared away. The ghaele’s feathers blew back. The column of fire engulfed Cornelius and Sarenna, taking them from her sight. The beast of mixed ursine and porcine appearance went up in flames, screaming with a human voice until the fires filled its maw with a snapping and sizzle of fat, melting. A tang of burnt meat and fur roiled. It staggered, and fell.
For a moment all Clarianna felt was the exultation of retribution against creatures that had devoured clerical flesh.
The ghaele staggered. Her wings…. Realization struck. The celestial’s wings snapped out, convulsively, shaking in corded avian scapular muscles visible in the gaps of the back of angelic armor. Sparks wormed amidst charred feathers. The side of a sternly beautiful face blistered even as Oghma’s messenger turned to face Oghma’s servant for further instruction, obedient and unquestioning.
Arms spread in the gesture that had caused those injuries, Clarianna shook in its blowback. Unthinking. Uncontrolled. What had she done?
She could have killed them all. Like the dance of a half-elf with a man-bear-pig; like the dichotomy of Cornelius in battle versus Cornelius in conversation; like a tiny gnome with the vastness of the Weave at his beck, she felt that realization and its contradiction.
She could have killed them all...and she was thankful for that run of fire through her soul.
Behind her, claws and teeth, lunging. From a more sensible vantage, one of Wyk’s missiles zipped past her ear, impacting with a smell of burned fur and meat. Too close. She had gotten too close. The fog of hot beast on a cold night -- breath, howls, and hunger -- enveloped this corner of slope and cliff. “Defend here!” Sarenna shouted.
Two-inch claws rang against metal, scraping along the left cuisse of her armor, catching where the knee brace jointed into the thigh protection. For a moment a furred hand, obscenely humanoid, closed around her leg. Fear tasted of iron. She kicked, cried out something that wasted breath, and was free. The werewolf began a frustrated howl, but a crunch of metal on bone and a spray of hot blood against the back of Clarianna’s neck put an end to it.
Recognition clawed more effectively, raking at her hopes as she crawled up the rise. They were too late. The Chauntean was dead. No one alone could have survived this. She should have known, by the trail of gore that had led from the wreckage of the wagon. It hurt, on a personal level...which she truly didn’t have opportunity to examine at the moment.
Finding a handhold on which to lever up, she grabbed also for the white quill around her neck. She opened herself to the final connection of rituals prepared and planned and superseded in the suddenness of what had greeted them.
Suddenness was what required mitigation. Chilling of churning waters. Ice to congeal the surge. That had been the plan. “Oghma…” Her voice lost itself in the growling that rose as a thicker arm struck at Sarenna from around the boulder. Notes made in the peace of her room now seemed insufficient to the moment. Prayer. She had spent exhortations of battle too soon, at the first worg seen. Slow them. Logically, that seemed as if it would give the front line an advantage. Finally strike from a distance with pristine divinity, Oghma's Hammer. Plain and simply, she had screwed that up. “...make thine enemies slow to strike…” A bulging shoulder of hide and bristles scraped into view at an unexpected height, taller than Cornelius’s iron-helmed head, dwarfing the half-elf as Sarenna avoided a blow. .“...by your knowledge may time’s truth be altered…” Whatever it was, Clarianna couldn’t see it, but the reek of its flesh choked her voice as much as did the lifting of Sarenna’s eyes to it. “...yeh, even upon thy foes to pass at a divisor of two from your holy base rate of six hundred thousand cubits per second…” Panic rising. Numbers were not her strength and she had never called on this power, in battle or anywhere. Cornelius bellowed, swinging at the werewolf before him. Nor should she change her target from the snarling maw that threatened him. Too much thinking.
A flat, porcine snout lunged into view, tusked jaws ripping the air in front of Sarenna’s face, shoulder driving into Sarenna’s chest. Clarianna changed her target.
Gone. So fast the creature struck and pulled back, and her reflexes nowhere near fast enough. She felt all of her preciously prepared logic and knowledge released the instant after it pulled back. The divine power recoiled into her, unspent.
Sarenna’s back hit the rock, breath punched out of her by the force of the blow but miraculously retaining her feet. The woman Clarianna thought of as a sister rolled through her back, shoving off the boulder with both scapula simultaneously, as if the wings that sometimes of late sprouted there had--
Wings. “Oghma!” Clarianna cried out. “Send your servant now a messenger bearing tidings of your truth on steel and glory!”
Light dawned above, but she could not spare the time to look. Missiles again sizzled by: one, two, three balls of sparking magic, each impacting closer and closer, marking the lumbering approach of the creature as it pulled itself forward by an arm around the stone. The fourth volley of Wyk’s magical ammunition sparked in the center of its chest as it came into full view, burning in charred, blood-matted fur. If the weres tread an uncanny valley that was too close to human form, this thing bestrode that valley as a colossus, walking upright and with a light of cunning ferocity in its piggy eyes. Taller than a man, furred as a bear, with the face of a boar, the horror opened drooling jaws and roared, spraying a cloud of fetid spittle.
Cornelius roared back. Veins standing out between helm and pauldron, jaw visible with his full-throated rage, he swung at the last werewolf between him and the new, greater foe. In a form yet more man than animal, that lesser threat would never finish its last transformation. Trailing fire, the hammer the Llorkian refugee had named Grosser Feuerhammer caved in a heaving rib cage, smashing organs and ripping through lumbar vertebrae. Bone chips fanned outward, through a shaft of light glimmering into view between Clarianna and the fray. Gore pelted white wings, unfurling now from within it. A ghaele’s voice fluted out with blessings, bringing a rush of joy to her heart.
Sarenna’s dance was beautiful. Lithe, the bard spun, ducking beneath a swipe from the curved, yellow claws of her dancing partner. Flames enveloped the end of her short sword as she saluted the beast with a hand that rose to her shoulder and drew from her back a wooden rod. Blade cut, rod blocked, feet stamped, body swayed, and the singer...sang. The melody she wove trilled up and around, wordless embodiment of mobility and avoidance, a syncopation that never fell where expected, and incorporated a third partner as the ghaele joined, blade flashing in its own light.
Wyk’s voice rose too, joining Sarenna’s in a volume too great for his form. From behind Clarianna, pure arcanity wove a counter around the bardic tune before her. In the rising of the fine hairs on the back of her neck, in the drift of smoke in memory and the heat she felt curling in her veins, it spoke of fire. Fire that she wanted to reject; fire that the others wielded to effect. Fire that was not her. Fire was uncontrolled instinct. The Winter Witch. She had heard them call her that name since before the defeat of the demon of winter, welcomed it since Adam’s death, buried herself in ice. Fire that loosened limbs, warmed hearts.
The Malarites had killed a priestess. Eaten her, in truth. She knew that, with a certainty that came from the divinity of her god.
Howling sounded from downslope. More of those who had feasted on human flesh.
Seen out of the corner of her eye, a bead of glowing red arced from Wyk’s hand. It lofted over the ghaele, wings spread across the others. Cornelius squared himself, huge, blood-spattered, dripping hammer drawing over his shoulder, an avatar of barbarity at odds to his controlled politeness in more civil surrounds. Sarenna danced. Wyk’s newest missile landed behind the immediate foe.
Fire blossomed.
The fireball that washed up and over the rear of the thing they fought rose also inside her. It consumed the screeches of the beast, incinerated flesh, blotted out enemy and friend.
She opened her own arms to the sky and called divine flames.
The shaft of fire that roared out of the sky was nothing like the clean purity which she frequently channeled against threats, and to which she had grown used. Nor did it arrive on white wings and with a scent of fresh rain.
It shook her, pouring through body and blood, kindling her bones and bellowing down as a cyclone of spinning fires. There was divinity, but it was of a violent provenance far from the scratch of quills and contemplation, a burning truth that cared not for what mundanity it seared away. The ghaele’s feathers blew back. The column of fire engulfed Cornelius and Sarenna, taking them from her sight. The beast of mixed ursine and porcine appearance went up in flames, screaming with a human voice until the fires filled its maw with a snapping and sizzle of fat, melting. A tang of burnt meat and fur roiled. It staggered, and fell.
For a moment all Clarianna felt was the exultation of retribution against creatures that had devoured clerical flesh.
The ghaele staggered. Her wings…. Realization struck. The celestial’s wings snapped out, convulsively, shaking in corded avian scapular muscles visible in the gaps of the back of angelic armor. Sparks wormed amidst charred feathers. The side of a sternly beautiful face blistered even as Oghma’s messenger turned to face Oghma’s servant for further instruction, obedient and unquestioning.
Arms spread in the gesture that had caused those injuries, Clarianna shook in its blowback. Unthinking. Uncontrolled. What had she done?
She could have killed them all. Like the dance of a half-elf with a man-bear-pig; like the dichotomy of Cornelius in battle versus Cornelius in conversation; like a tiny gnome with the vastness of the Weave at his beck, she felt that realization and its contradiction.
She could have killed them all...and she was thankful for that run of fire through her soul.
Enjoy the game