Strength in Numbers

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Wynna
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Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

She took things in through her eyes. It wasn't a unique thought; she'd had it before, but she felt it here at the edge of the sea. Wheeling birds gyred across the lines of earth and sky and water. A rotating 'v' against an arrowtip 'v" of air and water that pointed the way back to the tangled city.

There were other senses. The call of the birds amid the wind. The salt damp weighing loose hair around her face. The muck of tar and refuse and cold rain, all distinct smells, separate or blended.

A press of a heel into shaley sand let in a flow of water. White foam speckled the microcosmic flood. The indentation filled over an ochre pebble, a hard little sluice gate where the crust of sand crumbled. A ribbed white shell peeked through, a limb washed clean then buried under settling silt.

A footprint, filled with water. Not even a whole footprint at the angle she sat on the rotting boardwalk, just a heel, dug in.

Simple. One complete, single thing, beautiful and whole. There was a solidity, a strength, in its solitude.

Another wave washed in, and as it pulled back, it did not go so far out amongst the tops of the slowly submerging rocks. She had sat here through the turn of the tide, and felt the peace of it taken in through her eyes into her soul.

The long shaft of cloud on the horizon portended snow.

She had never had an ocean. She had never had an infinite horizon where the rippled glints drew together with the curling clouds. To her right, man-built structures slovenly and salted. Left, a jetsom barricade of tumbled barrows and frayed hawsers hid more noisome heaps. Ahead, the fulcrum play of elements.

The waves overran the previous high water mark before her.
She pulled up boots out of the white surf.

Distant cracks of deep bellied sails took her attention to the nearest dock, covered in wagons with their lashed canvas bales. Here today, soon to be gone for faraway places she had dreamed of. A schooner's three masts moved on the other side of the riggings of docked ships. Maybe the person she still sought for reasons she couldn't articulate was on it. Those reasons had to do with redemption, for which of them she wasn't certain. When she should be at the Font, pursuing a common foe, she'd come looking again down here instead, the wildest place she knew of within the walls. Korkoran refused to be found, so she'd kept walking, to stop at this, a square of rock and sand where a tarred boardwalk had ripped itself up in some talosian fury.

Wind and rain dappled the ocean. Her chin on her knees, she studied the cloud bank until the sun dropped beneath it and the schooner split the 'v' of light spreading across the waters.
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Wynna
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Re: Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

They were a fragmented mess, when what they needed was unity. It was easier to see from outside of it. She had the luxury of stepping out of the chaos, into the refuge of the Font, whenever she needed. Sitting here now in the quiet of the library, it seemed strange how she forgot that so often, caught up in the anger and the shattered personalities throwing shards of themselves at each other across the lengths of their own histories.

Quill poised, the dry smell of yellowed parchment in her nose, it seemed to her that the marvel was that such a maelstrom of personalities had found two centers around which many could coalesce. The Company and the Association formerly known as the Guild had given homes to those who either shared a mercantile interest in spoils or were learning to survive in an environment more physically hostile than they might have known before. Around these two collectives swirled a flotsam of witnessing Watchmen, clerical freeloaders, and the lost.

She had come to the recognition that one swirling bit of flotsam was gone. Flung away or sucked down into the void, and with it her power to raise him up. Whether dead as Aglorus thought, or taken ship to flee the Watch, Korkoran was gone, leaving with her only her own failure. She had failed in recognizing soon enough that he had required saving before Vansa had taken him. Perhaps not wanted saving, but required it. She had failed also in recognizing that in so being taken, he had gone beyond her abilities of salvation. Her stomach dropped now, at that thought. Had he? Would she have tried? If she had only been quicker to see Truth. Willfully blind. How could he have possibly escaped unscathed, removed into the crypts by Vansa? He had told so many people that was where he had been teleported, which now seemed poignant to her. Reaching out? Growling at them what his nature could not allow him to say. With these days of distance since the last time he had been observed, it was easier to see that he had not escaped the vampire queen. Could not have. Or do I now try to reconcile my failures by blackening the hopes I had for him? Hopes she had voiced poorly and with many confused reversals. She did not think so. It sickened her, but a memory kept repeating in her thoughts, over and over. A memory of the day he had refused to allow her to call down a divine area of Oghma’s truth around him, to ask him one question. Are you Vansa’s creature?

Staring blankly at a book of sorcerous designs, its pages rumpled into brown patterns that underlay the vaguely elemental sigils scribed there, she took a steadying breath. He was nobody’s creature now. Alglorus saw only darkness when scrying him. She had taken the last of her daily walks though the Docks yesterday. Today, she was left with this hole in her intentions where that search for a lost soul would have occupied them.

So, the maelstrom of those who were left. She might not be able to affect the twin gyres or stop them from shredding each other where they clashed. Indeed, she feared a future in which others more innocent were stripped away, starting with the weakest and ending in cataclysm. If she did nothing about it, though, she was again willfully blind. Worse, if she contributed to the angers and recriminations flying about this city, she was actively destructive.

The first step was to reconcile what failures she could still hope to affect.
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Re: Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

A guardgoyle seemed a very singularly constructed object. Creature? Guardian. She must make note to ask Aglorus how, precisely, one was constructed.

In the beginning there was stone -- that was clear -- and yet it moved. It had no intellect in those dull granite eyes, yet it took direction. There was no loyalty in a stone heart, yet it would destroy itself to protect the user of its control stone. It was, in short, no more than a hammer or a shovel, given motive force towards a singular goal -- that of keeping its mistress alive.

She had been holding out a hand for some time before she recognized that it would not sniff her hand like a dog, nor bend its head to be stroked like a horse. It would ward her to the Font tonight, flapping over the coach with ponderous wings. That was all it would do. It was not a pet, nor her friend. Naming it was ludicrous, and human. “Thank you, Stonescale.” She ran her hand down the edge of one outstretched wing. Stone feathers, etched beneath her fingers.

Movement in the alley sped her heart. Up and around, on her toes, poised to run. Night fears. “Vale.” She let out her breath as the shadow took on familiar shape, pale hair and expressionless face beneath the street lamp.

“Something amiss?” he asked quietly.

She would have laughed, if it hadn’t been so maddeningly dismissive. She couldn’t see him without losing her temper, and he asked if anything was amiss?

Reconciliation. Rapprochement.

Binder’s blessings were likely on this chance encounter. Instead, she cursed the opportunity silently. “You startled me is all. The night has caught me out. I was reading to Kiber’s charges and lost track of time. I would talk for a bit.”

“Where would you like to share words?”

“Here is fine.” She studied the guardgoyle, the lights on the Helmite temple, the front of the Guild...the Association of Adventurers. Not the Guild. Focus, Clarianna. “It won’t take me long to say what the Binder would have me say.” She turned her eyes on him. “Words can divide, Vale. I have said things that have not been well spoken.”

The shadows of stone wings grew on the wall behind him, shifting, crawling up the facade. A torch, behind her? She twisted, to see the Lathanderite priest, aglow with his lord’s light, stepping down from the coach. This one had greeted Vale like an old friend on the night he had graced the city with his return, and truth be told, the regard of such a one as he, for Vale, did not weigh lightly in her own decision to rebuild some of what was amiss between her and the former Guildmaster. She just hadn’t expected it to be so damnably soon.

She watched as they again exchanged greetings, Bran soon excusing himself to the Safe Haven. She turned as the light he carried with him was cut off by the closing of the inn door, to see Vale gesturing her into the side door of the Association.

She didn’t really wish to do this in front of others, but dismissed the guardgoyle with a touch, and followed.

Inside, she was glad to find the lower halls hushed, and empty. She turned to face him, wrapped in his cloak and his composure. She tried a small smile. “Where was I? Oh, yes. Finding a humble nature.” Her sally fell flat. “Words can divide, as I said, but they can also heal. I use them daily to do just that, calling on the power of Oghma to experience a wound in the moment and channel life flow to what must be done.” She took a breath. “I know this is something I could have expressed better in past.” She waited a bit, for anything, any expression he might care to contribute, then forged on. Not disappointed, she told herself. “I have found my peace with Aglorus, over words said. I would like to find that with you, as well. You were one of the first people I met upon coming to Waterdeep, and that is one reason to do so, but more to the point….” Words that had seemed so easily prepared while considering this inevitable meeting came with unexpected difficulty. “...I cannot countenance a division that can be healed.”

He shook his head. “Cannot countenance division? I do not understand your meaning.”

She ran her hand over the pins in her hair, counting them until she could speak. “I suspect you do not realize that your words were hurtful that day we met, and struck me as crude. I suspect I do not realize what you had been through, as those days seemed fraught with events that I find even now hard to arrange in my mind. I cannot countenance a division I can heal. Maybe I can’t heal it alone, but I can offer to.”

“You want to see the rift between you and I mended?” He gestured between them, palm flat and open.

“It is possible you and I are too different to ever find friendship again, or even ease in each other’s company, but I would like to be allies once more. I respect you as a leader and a warrior, Vale. I have seen you fight evil and know that we share at least an opposition to things that would harm lives and innocents.”

“Would you share with me how this rift came to be?”

“I can’t answer that.” She knit her brow. “There were times I thought your words were cutting, deliberately so. There were times I felt you were too interested in my relationship with Adam.” She lifted her chin to affirm her determination. “Then when you and Nipsy stopped by, I was hurt by your insults. Whether or not you meant them as such, that is how I experienced them.” She folded her hands, falling silent.

He nodded slowly. “Would you allow me to share words expressing to you my perspective, even though they might be unenjoyable, or insulting to yourself?”

She tensed, in spite of herself. “Yes, of course.” Words. It would take words, from both of them to bridge the gap.

“I...I do not know what you truly want.” The unanticipated stammer sharpened her attention. “I cannot see into your mind and heart. It appeared to myself that you made a very sincere effort to deny the obvious truth I saw in your potential. You appear to have invested in actively thwarting it. At first you would not join the Guild, then when you did, you refused to be trained or educated by its staff and senior members, instead insisting your lover more than capable and your preferred choice of a mentor and instructor.”

Reconciliation. Calm. She set her jaw, to hold in the retort that rose.

“I lost my patience with your self deception, and your walls of pretense and propriety. I came to you you seeking help, and I needed it.”

The press of her lips tightened at that blow. She had very little knowledge of his martial training, but she thought it had to do with using a foe’s weakness against him. Or her.

“Now, I did come to you for help you were not qualified to provide, misunderstanding that. What insults I have hurled your way, know that those were intended as intentionally aimed buckets of cold water to wake you from your sleep walking. Is it my responsibility to try and get you to pull your well pinned head from your bottom forge? No, it is not. I though, had….” He stopped, then continued “...have too much respect for you to not have made the effort, politely at first, and eventually with cruel barbs. I may be wrong. History has proven I am more than capable of it. I, though, suspect that what rift exists between us has less to do with what words I may have used, and more with you not wanting to admit I might be right. You are not my enemy, Clarianna Gardner, and never have been.”

There was much in that to unpack. She might do that unpacking, at a later time, when her hands weren’t gripped together into a white-knuckled club.

“You are insufferable in your arrogance, Vale Clearwaters.” How did he do this to her? Every time. There were things in his words that she should be focussing on. Things that could be used to build a rapport. “That you would think to judge me, without knowing of my past. It is as hard to bear as my judging you, for not living up to my expectations.” The heat in her skin began to rise. A blush was a weakness in the surface of a mask. “The propriety you speak of? It was hard won, from a childhood in mud and filth, with a woman who bore me between the roots of a tree and went right back out to whore herself.”

The back of her neck dampened, skin breaking out into the sweat of rage and humiliation.

“The insults you believe are tutorial? I heard them daily, directed at her and at me, from a man…” She shied from the grove into which these thoughts led. Run. Hide. “...a man I do not care to recall.” Control. Reconciliation. “That you would come in and insult me--”

Somewhere a door closed, the stairs up or down.

She lowered her voice to a hiss. “--it was reminiscent of days I have worked very hard to rise from. I do wish to be allies, for allies are what we need in these days. I will aid you in any way I can, in pursuit of Vansa, or anything evil.” She struggled, wrapping her arms around herself physically. “That you think yourself qualified to adjudge such things about me, or anybody, says that we will never be friends. I am sorry for that. I will, however, fight for the things we both believe in. I know that any group opposing Vansa is the stronger for your being part.”

He had lost his sword, in some manner she still did not understand. He had encountered Vansa again, the day he and Nipsy had come to the Company, or some day recently before or soon after. Something had changed in his manner entirely, in ways she could not quite put into words. This was the longest they had spoken in tens of days. He seemed both looser with emotions and more visibly wound. Unbalanced, although Aglorus said he had not lost his mind. The Lathanderite seemed to see nothing changed in him over the course of time he had been gone, at least not to show to strangers unknown to him before his recent return. Even Adam treated him with unflinching respect. Only Sarenna and Kal disliked him, in the same way he treated them poorly. Which was what she had set out to do something about. Remember?

“It does not require special insight to see what I claim to see.” He had once accused her of always seeking the last word. She would give it to him, this time. To show growth. And humbleness. To properly appreciate this opportunity to clear the air between them. Which had gone so well. Actually, it had started well. She could not fathom how it had come to this end. “The only thing unique about my perspective is that I am more interested in being honest with you than I am in being your friend.”
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Wynna
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Re: Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

After the screams and the fires, after the blood on the floor of the little house, the silence deadened all sense. Her ears pulsed with her heartbeat, rustling. Madog and Elero moved in floating strides to the last closed doorway. Little Daeges stood juxtaposed against a man’s twisted body, the corpse half hidden behind a chair. Moments before, the achingly young hin girl had hidden behind that same chair. On the corpse, enough of the wounds were visible to see that the man had died to blood loss due to sharp-edged trauma. A big sword. Numb memory: flames, burning in curtains and rug, catching on the blade. Madog had cut the man in half with a swing. Elero’s nearly simultaneous own swing at the commander of these brigands had left blood upon the walls. Wren's singing had rung out, driving back the foe. Shalheira…. Where was Shalheira?

Clarianna turned, panic highlighting the taste of char in her mouth, until she found the elven woman, still and ready to one side, shilelagh in hand. Shalheira had been a revelation tonight, resourceful in ways she herself would never have thought of. All her own prayers to the Binder to find the spirit’s mortal remains had failed.

The wand in her hand slipped, sweaty in her grip. How many times had she used it on Madog? Entering the house, seeing the flames pulling back and the young warrior on the floor, and another blast of fire coming, was a moment that would live with her. So was the moment the heat washed over her, through her clothes and skin, over hair and eyes. Harmlessly, thanks be to the Binder’s Knowledge.

All this passed through her in an instant, before Madog’s boot crashed through the last door. Screams jumbled, high and shrill, and Madog and Elero rolled in with twin great swords upraised in terrible symmetry. The usually affable Chauntean, though, drove his weapon down, an inch into the boards of the floor. “Hold!” he shouted. And then: “Children!”

Horror rippled through her, mirrored on the faces of the party. Madog’s face, still shadowed with the memory of possession by the child’s spirit, still twisted with the rage that had taken him after, darkened to a thundercloud. Wren, the leader of the group, strong and daring, lowered the violin that had blasted sound through the building, shaking the boarded windows.

Daeges slipped between the two men, into a tiny bedroom, in which two -- no three -- children cowered. Two girls, a boy, all terrified. By the time Clarianna could push by the frozen Elero, the tiny blonde hin was pulling a blindfold from a girl and hugging her at the same time, the captive’s frail shoulders shaking. “Don’t hurt us. We’ll be good.”

The depth of the fury rising in her shocked her.

Daeges, hardly larger than the child, barely older, held the little girl. Loving contact might serve to soothe, but it could never take away what had happened to these poor babes, in the hands of slavers. Slavers. The recognition burned through her, along the line of earlier instinctive fury.

The other girl and the boy shrank away from the adults crowding the exit, weapons bloody, and the stone guardgoyle mindlessly looming behind them. Wren was the only one of the adults moving, still thinking, shoving a massive chair over top a trap door. Protect the children. No more fighting. Get them out, without further trauma. With a gasp of contrition, Clarianna let the bow fall and moved to kneel before them.

Three innocents saved from violence and fear, by the commission of violent redemption. She no longer felt uncertain about the fallen brigands, doubts flashfired away in her craving for retribution. Oghma forgive her the lack. Slavers. Enslavers of children. Keegan, the spirit wandering the refuse heaps. How had he gotten there, if he had started here in this house to which he had led them? Lost children in the sewers. Kiber’s mention that some of his charges sometimes wandered away. Deliza’s statement of the same.

Her heart sinking, murmuring reassurances, reaching gently for hands holding onto each other, Clarianna doubted that the bandits that had fallen here could be the whole of such a tale, or these lucky few the only victims.
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Re: Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

It stank, a throat-coating ordure thick with sewage. Weak from loss of blood, she pressed herself into a space beneath a pipe, chewing on her forearm to keep from vomiting screams.

Run. Hide. She had done the first, blinded by tears and the extinguishment of the light of Truth. Now was time for the latter.

The ogre knew she was here. Stomping, growling threats, it patrolled between her and the direction in which the fires burned. She could hear it, but could only see it as a patchwork of blacks. A lumpen shoulder against a distant outburst of flame. A silhouetted club dragging swirls of sparks through puddles. Beyond it, the snarls of two others, arguing over a kill. Some unknown distance beyond them, the chamber where the rescuers had been smashed between two forces of giantkin. An infinity further, Adam. She had heard him calling for her between clashes of combat, his shouts wild with loss and rage.

She did not hear him now.

Too frightened to break her invisibility with whispered words of healing, she hurt. She was scared. She was alone. In the scramble to avoid a hail of boulders, the band of survivors had scattered. One...two...she wasn’t sure how many had fled this way. She’d been with Adam, maybe others? Lorrin, the stranger. Now dead. My fault. Again. Elero? Perhaps? She...couldn’t...remember. Panic jumbled the last minutes. All she knew was that Adam had found her, briefly, after everything went wrong, after the glow of Keryn's magic had suddenly winked out, after she and others of the rear echelons had fled first one way into advancing ogres, and then another, into the unknown.

The light she had called by prayer onto her person had died in that flight, but Adam had found her anyway, somehow. His shape, his voice, his strength had been beside her all of a sudden from out of the darkness, reassuring, telling her what to do. Invisible, now. Already, there had been ogres ahead of them, too. She had heard them growling, coming closer in the dark. Without his direction, she would have stood there, and died. Instead, she had fumbled with the forgotten potion, held against just such disaster as this. As she had drunk it down he had turned, leading whomever would follow back the way he had come.

But the others hadn’t had the resource she had. They weren’t invisible. The ogres that Adam had fought his way by or ghosted past had still been there, behind them.

Her eyes overflowed again and she fought back a sob. Don’t scream. Don’t cry. They will find you. He will hear you.

She’d seen Lorrin beaten down. The ogres had lumbered out of the darkness. Adam had been furthest ahead; she the farthest back. The swinging clubs had shattered Lorrin’s armor, then his skull. He had dropped, dead, obviously dead, a bloody wrack of what had been a man she had met but that morning. She didn’t know what had become of Elero. Instinct had turned her into an insensate coward, forgetting she couldn’t be seen, terrified beyond thought. Instinct told her she was cut off, and to run, anywhere.

Not knowing where she was going, she had fled until she all but slammed into an ogre warrior and had swerved into this bolt hole, crushing herself between slimy pipes and cracked stone, making herself small in a tiny niche in the wall.

A thudding in the pipe against her back she mistook for her heart until the passage ahead spat out another ogre. Running feet shuddered in the blocks of the floor. This one loomed bigger than the one that had been casting about for her. The new threat wore a necklace of black and bone, glowing around its neck to underlight a boulder of its jaw. It carried an ornately carved spear, hung with fetishes. Its eyes, cushioned in layers of flesh, blinked with malevolent intelligence. It grumbled words, and a creature of snaking fire shimmered into being at its shoulder, casting a shadow forward from its master to fall across her hiding place.

She was going to die, alone. Her invisibility must wear off soon. She had no prayers that could stop it. This shaman of ogrekind would crack her bones for their marrow. She would be eaten, as Elero had said could have happened to Kal, the reason they were all here. For nothing. Nothing redeemed from this failure at all, only further losses. Kal not found, so many injured and dead in the search for him. Hacked limb from limb and eaten. There would be no coming back this time, no refusing of her god.

She heard herself whimper, and clamped down on leather and blood between her teeth.

Their barking and grunting stopped. The shaman turned and pounded back the way it had come. She quit breathing, her heart forgetting to beat. Tree-trunk legs swept past her shoulder so closely she felt the swirl of heat in the cold air. Salamander of fire coiling behind it, it did not stop; it did not batter her or haul her out of her hiding place. Nor, though, did it go far, just to the passage it had come from. There’d been more up there. She imagined it summoning endless streams of its kin, until the darkness bristled with them, until the sewers were choked with clubs and punishing hands.

She dropped from her bent-kneed crouch, to her hands and knees, and began to crawl. Towards the only safety she knew. Towards the last place she had seen him. Towards the ogres and Lorrin's body. Towards the unknown fates of the others. Towards Adam.
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Re: Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

A note, left with Vana, addressed to Wren:

The ink is dotted with circular stains that bleed outward in paler shades of blue where watery droplets have fallen on the shaky handwriting on this note.


Dear Daeges,

Thank you for being the dear, courageous, determined young lady that inspired me. You will always be this, in my heart and the hearts of all who ever had the fortune to meet you. Forever an example of how the small may be large in spirit, and the frail mighty in heart.

I have placed your effects in the pantry, for Wren to add to the store of items that may keep other members of this Lodge alive. It is what you would have done, in a heartbeat, for those who will always be your family now.

Your clothing and those items that might bring comfort to those less fortunate, I have given to Kiber, for the orphans. Again, I feel this is what you would have done. I include in these items of comfort your hard won gold. I devoutly hope that Kiber may feed and clothe the orphans in your name, for some time.

I am weeping again, for your loss, and for the guilt I feel in not being there for you. I suspect we will all feel that loss and guilt, just as we will all love you in absentia, forever. I pray that your soul has found its home, and there greeted your mother and father, joyfully.

I have kept your silver cake coffer, as a selfish means of material memory, but your True worth is in all you taught me in our short time together, the young teaching one old enough to be her mother the worth of bravery, and love.

Love always,
Clarianna
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Re: Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

A handwidth above the floor, triangles painted the temple wall. Stars tipped the tri-partate geometry. Yellow, red, orange. Yellow, red, orange. Yellow. Red. It repeated in a row, twelve bright, joyous exclamations from the altar to the doorway out of the room. A wisp of Daeges’s hair arced across a yellow star, giving what was static a motility, turning star into comet. The seeping of a frostbitten hand smeared another corner with a bloodier hue.

Dead. A bright, joyous girl, hardly out of childhood. Dead, to Vansa’s spells.

Daeges is dead.

She said it to herself, and shrank inside. Endless potential, ended.

Somewhere across the room, the Joybringer rustled and sang beneath her breath, a heartbreaking counterpoint. It heightened the emptiness. It was how a devotee of the Lady of Joy celebrated. She found beauty.

How did a priestess of Truth cope? How do I cope? How to express the hope that Daeges engendered, and write of it? Tulia had tasked her with telling the tale. A tragedy, if she did so. How not, when she had missed the opportunity to speak while the potential for a happy ending yet existed.

She brushed the wisp of hair down into the soft tangle of the rest, tucking it behind her ears. As the girl’s mother would have done.

Tears blurred the movement of her fingers, pulling away. “Your mother loved you.” The tears thickened her whisper, as well, but Joybringer Arrend’s song quieted. “Your father loved you.” Her tears felt channeled from her heart, rising painfully from that well. “Tulia protected you, out of love. Your aunt and uncle took you in, taught you your craft, out of love. All…” Memory squeezed words to silence. The first bite of smoked crust berry tart. Sugar. Blackberries. Flaky pastry, rich with butter, and the tang of accidental smoke. Laughing over what an accomplished baker had thought was a mistake. Turning it to a fete of what was unique. Strong. A challenge to any who would dare think otherwise. “...who knew you, love you.” Salt, into the corner of her mouth. “I love you, Daeges.” In baking, a sprinkle of salt enhances the crust. It Binds the ingredients.

“Daeges, your parents died, to an enormity of horror, enslaved for their innate ability. Tulia...Tulia told me of the evil done to those born with powers, how the lord of your region enticed the citizenry to turn on the sorcerous among them with tales of demonic forces. To turn them in, for his use.” The horror of a happy family, shattered by slavery. Loving parents, ripped from a child. Clarianna wiped her eyes, to see the sweet, still face more clearly.

“I am so sorry for the evil done to your mother, who was among those so taken. Blessings upon your aunt, for raising you. Blessings upon her for sending you to safety when your own powers manifested. Blessings upon the pixies, for seeing in you the blood of their tiny, tiny own, and for sending a protector against the terrors that beset you. Blessings upon Tulia, for becoming more than protector, becoming a friend, who was ...” She faltered. “... who was with you, at your side in the last moments.”

Faltering was not what Daeges would have done. Daeges had never shrunk. Not orphaned as a babe. Not when faced with slavery and fleeing her home. Not as the frailest in body standing against a vengeful vampire queen.

Somewhere, behind her stiffening spine, Joybringer Arrend began a soft, sweet, wordless hymn.

Clarianna looked down at the fallen child, and saw things she had only been told of. Knowledge, shared. Knowledge, no matter how grim, was Oghma’s domain. Because of shared knowledge, she could see in her thoughts what had happened that night.

Vansa, standing before the group that Clarianna had not been part of. Vansa, taunting them with promises of an eye for an eye.

Vansa, calling down a storm of ice, to freeze the beloved, ephemeral body.

Forever stilled, opaque lenses, Daeges’s open eyes faced the wall. Clarianna closed the child’s lids, and with ink-stained fingers, slipped free a quill from the writing kit across her own chest. She found a clean piece of fine paper.

How does a priestess of Oghma cope? By binding truths unspoken and knowledge unrealized. By bringing them before the world and the minds of sentient creatures. By using words to turn tragedy to bravery, mistake to challenge. By salting the sweetness.

Dear Daeges,

Thank you for being the dear, courageous, determined…..


A written goodbye, and then evil would see the storms that good could bring down, with words.
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Wynna
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Re: Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

When all the footsteps of those who had cleansed the Seeker’s Vault had died away, and it was only she and him, she touched his cold face. “Adam. I know you are here with me, still.” The Font so quiet, empty of the shuffle of sandaled feet. Gone the drone of hushed prayer. Her intake of breath broke only the murmur of water, in the cistern at her back. “I should not weep. I know you will come back to me.” She fought the thickening of her voice.

Rising, she splashed her face, then scooped up a handful of cold, clean water. Dripping through her fingers, it puddled on the marble around him as she knelt. She opened her hands and let it cascade.

The holy water bathed him, running in his hair and the ridges of his armor. She used her cloak to clean the blood from his skin. Not his blood. He had been slain without a wound, one moment unharmed, the next a corpse on the ground. They said. They told her. She hadn’t been there. Her failure to call on the protections of Oghma competently had exposed others to mental dangers. Sarenna had been cowering, struck by a spell that raised uncontrollable terror. She had been with Sarenna, unable to remove those effects, either. The wrong prayers readied; incapable of even reading out those she had prepared in written form. Completely out of her depth at the forces that had invaded the Font.

Adam struck down, while she was not with him. On the quest she had begged of them all.

She cradled his head on the cloak in her lap. Taking up his limp hand, she kissed it. “Look at these hands, so strong, so gentle.” The ring on her own finger gleamed silver. A gift to her, from him. A ring to protect her against the vampires. She wrapped her hands around his, and held it to her breast.

A tear overflowed, to fall on his hand and trickle down his wrist, under the sleeve of his armor.

She shouldn’t cry. He wasn’t gone, just away. For a time. She lowered his hand and arranged it on his chest, then his other with it.

Across her own chest, she still wore the bandolier of written words, not all of them failures. Not all of them prayers for power. One of them was simply her Truth, no less powerful than her calling to Oghma. A prayer for love.

She found it now, unfolding it, soft from daily openings and creasings. From inside it, she slipped a dried flower, its petals crumbling around the edges.

"Dearest Clary." She read softly to him, in case he had forgotten. "I am so very sorry. I have fallen in love ....” Her nose stung, tissues clogging. “ I have fallen in love with you. I did not mean for this to happen. I never want to ...to hurt you." She closed her eyes for the next part, and sobbed once. "Everything I love... dies."

Her hands fell, the one holding the note tangling in his hair. The dried flower rested across the palm of the other.

“Oh Adam. Oh, Adam, you wrote that to me. And we keep doing it to each other, don't we? We keep dying. I remember when these words were new, though. You wrote them to me in the first weeks we ever knew each other.” She hurt, she realized. The pain in her heart and the pain in her muscles, tensed and abused during the horrible journey beneath the Font. It hurt to fold his love note around the flower and slip them both beneath his hands.

Her throat had closed. She couldn’t breathe, much less speak. Dizzy, she rocked above him.

Come home to me. I can't live without you.

She couldn’t imagine the time before that letter anymore, a time without him.

I remember the night you told me your story, your tragedy. How I loved you that night, though I didn't know how to say it. I didn't know how to believe it.

“Adam.” His name broke the choking paralysis. She sucked in a deep, deep breath, lungs filling enough to squeeze her bruised heart, until she let it out in a rush of tears and words. "I remember the first time you held me, outside in the square, with the dawnlight shining on your face.” Tears shone on her lashes, shadows blurred with their sparkling. “I remember you taking me on a picnic, and how anxious I was for my virtue.” Laughing and crying at the same time, weeping at the absurdity. “I didn't know you. I didn't know how good you were. How kind and loving and honorable.”

Tears landed on the paper under his hands. Tiny thumps, like her pulse in her belly, beneath the weight of his head. “I remember the first night you loved me, in our bed. There is so much more I want to do with you. I want to learn your world, make you proud of me. I want to fight by your side and dance in a beautiful gown with you.” Sobbing now, words cascading in a tumble. “I want to drink wine with you, and pretend to understand how you describe it, and taste it on your lips. We had been so busy of late, always something else keeping us from each other. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. If I could have those moments back not spent with you, I would pay anything. Do anything.” Her eyes ran freely, hot salty waters in nose and mouth, down the back of her throat, plastering her hair to her temples.

“I love you. I will always love you. If you choose to come home to me, I will never pass up a moment with you again. If you do not come home to me….” She faltered. “If you choose to stay with Tyr, I will see you soon anyway.” She bent and kissed his cold lips, trying to make them respond, to warm by the power of her will. “For I cannot live without you.”

Weeping uncontrollably, she slid her body down next to him on the cold marble and held him, his heavy head on her breast and her arms around him, through the night.
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Wynna
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Joined: Sat Jan 03, 2004 10:09 am
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Re: Strength in Numbers

Post by Wynna »

For a time, she went mad. Grief was an abyss.

Gone. He was gone. When she could think again, it was at a remove. Just as an abused body sought to flee from pain, her mind had numbed. Her heart beat, but it was muffled, buried deeper than her chest. Interred at the bottom of the inevitable. Shattered on rocks too deeply hidden in darkness to see...but, even so, she had known those rocks were waiting. Once, she had known.

She had told him at their beginning that one of them would leave the other by death’s door. Told it to his body again, over and over, through the last days. There’d been hatred, anger, rage. He had promised to come back to her. She had promised him the same...and known her own qualms. There’d been pity, for herself, for him, for weak-minded lovers. For fools who had thought to fox death with mortal promises.

She had forgotten this truth. She had lied herself into believing that as two, they had been destined to protect each other, to live together, to the end of a long and happy life. That as part of a community, as many, they were stronger.

He was dead. That was all there was now. The sluggish beat of her thoughts, over and over. She was alone. In the frigid dark, in the sewers with an ogre shaman, with her past and the vampires in her mind.

Clinging to a pylon beside where he had fallen, beneath her toes a physical abyss fell away down, down, downward into darkness. A step was all it would take. Less. She had but to unwind her arm from around a cable and she could end this fear. A silver mailed fall into darkness, and a brief agony of the body. She had nothing; left nothing. Maybe he would be waiting at the Wall for her. Maybe she would find he had gone to Tyr’s side, and she would have no reason then to refuse her own god’s House. As she had done twice, for him. As he had done twice, for her.

Tears, that she had thought cried out, welled again.

Her body weighed a thousand pounds, pushing back from the brink. A step seemed a thousand miles, but she took it, and one more. Dragging herself along the bridge, she counted heartbeats, each one proof that she had not taken the coward’s way out.

Flight was not the way, not this time. That was turning her back on terrors that would run her down. He was not there to protect her, to stand between her retreat and threats. She was not fast enough to flee nor small enough to hide, not any more. The deaths of so many senior clergy left her on the front ranks. Sandrew had made that clear, without pity for her loss or her inabilities. Her heart shrank, knowing herself tasked beyond her means. Her revered Loremaster was the madman, if he thought she had the strength to carry out the responsibilities he laid upon her. Even so, she must push frailty into the pit. She must become more, and failing that, seem more.

The echoes of her footfalls turned to thuds. The bridge had grounded itself in freshly scarred stone, the result of a great and terrible work Sandrew had done. Or rather, undone this morning, revealing secrets he had protected that night while they fought through the Seeker’s Vault.

Secrets that anchored her now, no less so than it did the bridge. A work she must protect, whether Vansa’s minions returned, or the cold queen herself came to defile what was left.
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