Peril of Wisdom

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Wynna
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Peril of Wisdom

Post by Wynna »

Dear Sirs,
In regards to my current adventure...

With a tisk, she crossed that out, and started over.

In regards to my current venture, I submit the following peril …..

Clary sighed.

...the following pearl of wisdom.

And that was a little sarcastic for public consumption. She drew a neat line through the whole thing and lay down the quill. The implement lay between the rows of text, exactly aligned, at right angles to the corners of the fine paper. The pristine white vanes and the barely stained nib were definitely a metaphor.

Concentration refused to come. This would not do, or she would be out of another job.

She slid her fingers along her hair, touching the quill-shaped pins there without disturbing the tight knot. The carved barbs of the shafts were finely detailed, perceptible beneath her fingertips. Another metaphor. The pins pushed easily into her hair, but removing them engaged the backwards-facing barbs. What went in easily was not so easily withdrawn.

Like the point of a crossbow bolt into a worg’s hide.

She drummed ink-stained fingertips on the desktop. The quiet of the library was a hand on her back, weighing on her. She was working from the Font in order to avoid the distractions of the Guild, but it seemed to be going the other way. The silence allowed her mind to play. Except ‘play’ was a synonym for ‘enjoyable use of leisure time’ and ‘enjoyable’ would be poor word choice. Wouldn’t it?

Finding her employer at the bar of the Safehaven when she had descended, ready to go and so eager for adventure, had been a dash of cold water. She had been running off, again. She didn’t know who she was these days. What if she had gone this time, alone, into that horrible forest?

Feeling the quill in her hand, she lowered her eyes to find that she had written one word.

Exciting.

Deliberately, she dipped the nib into the pot of ink holding down the corner of the paper. She added three more words, changing it.

Exciting gets one killed.
Last edited by Wynna on Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:48 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

Post by Wynna »

Gore splashed her borrowed armor. Gore didn’t do that when one read about it. It just lay there, inert, hidden in black letters on a white page, taking the shape of some bright red concept in one’s thoughts. Or even more politely disguising itself behind the words “bodily fluids” in today’s medical text to be copied.

Here, it hit in a splattered stripe across her cheek and diagonally down across her chest. It steamed, and it stank. It crossed the angle of her bandolier at almost the same incline, making a large ‘X’ on her once shiny-scaled chest.

Blackness spun.
I promised Vana I would keep it clean.

The hobgoblin fell, eviscerated. Vale swept around, smooth as his liquid blade. She hadn’t known blades did that, either. But, like goblinoid shit from severed bowels, there it was.


Hearing footsteps behind her, Clary hastily slid a clean sheet of paper overtop of the embarrassing scribbles. What had begun as an exercise in...well...exorcizing distracting mental demons so that she could write about real ones for her employer, had burned through entirely too much expensive ink and paper.

Head bent, feeling the heat in her face go all the way around to the back of her neck, she listened to the guild members walking by, discussing their own adventure of a few days before. Or perhaps more recently. They had them all the time. Adventures.

She’d watched them go out as a troop but a tenday past. She had still been at the desk, finishing Laird’s entry on the green dragon, when they had returned, booming voices, bonhomme, unshaven and stinking of sweat and monster guts. Only she hadn’t known that was what it was, then.

Now she did.

“The route we take.....it may have dangers......Adam Payne.....would you stay near to and provide some measure of security for Mistress Gardner?” Her employer had shown none of the amusement he must have felt, at her temerity in thinking she could survive an invitation to a research contract. Vale Clearwaters’ unblinking stare, had shown nothing, actually.

Now, though, as the hobgoblin fell, his capabilities spoke volumes.

Vale was already paces away, the reversal of his blade like the most graceful dance she had ever applauded at the Halls. It cleaved through the clavicle of the next--


“Clarianna?” Vana spoke close behind her. Clary jumped, knees knocking the underside of the desk. The ink pot rocked. She made a grab, too late, of course. Her movements were not the most graceful of dances, with or without a weapon in hand.

Black ink splattered all over the contraband confabulation as well as across her nearly finished research entry for Laird.

The next moments were filled with the mopping of ink and assuring Vana it was fine, it was her own fault, and fending off the other woman’s kind attempts to pick up papers and assist in the recovery process.

She only managed to send her away by asking her to take the armor stacked by the side of the desk. Clary had brought it in to return it to Kiivan, and it required immediate protection from dripping ink.

Sinking back into her chair, mortified, Clary gazed after Vana, lugging off the scale mail.

Her heart beat fast. As fast as when seeing the wolf appear from the trees behind Adam and sink its teeth into the dark young man’s leathers.

She should really start recopying Laird’s research.

As the howl of the last worg was ended by Vale’s blade, Adam doubled over, in slow motion. His bow lowered slowly, by increments, still with an arrow to the string. Bleeding and breathing heavily, he staggered. “Clary,” he coughed, blood rising in a bubble at the corner of his mouth, followed by another, and another. “Are you all right?”

The young stranger had thrown himself into danger, stepping between her and the….
Last edited by Wynna on Mon Feb 25, 2019 5:05 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

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:-D
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Wynna
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

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Auril’s fingerprints obscured a corner of the window.

From the inside, Clary traced the frost with the feather of a quill. Yesterday she’d moved the desk against this slit of a window, for what light it gave. It was worth the chill against her shoulder. At a half story down from the street entrance of the Font, the single narrow window in the basement library gave a nose-level view of the lane outside. It felt like sitting half-buried, her chair beneath the ground level and her head at it.

All day yesterday, she had watched feet hurry by in the slop of snow and mud. Now, in the pre-dawn, darkness restricted the view to a spill of light from her guttering lamp. Unreachable wet cobbles gleamed.

In here it was warm. Dark. Hushed.

Out there, imps of ice popped into existence. They chased one about a room to hide in a corner while others saw to dismissing them back to whence they had come. Which was presumably into the streets, to flit about, hanging icicles from the eaves and skinning puddles with ice.

Tendrils of frost retreated from her sigh. Her breath fogged the dark glass, then faded, but the icy patterns had definitely shrunk to a smaller area of the glass when she brought her focus back to her work.

Speaking of Auril.

The open book before her hinted that some powers reached into warm, dark sanctuaries and closed a deadly hand around naïfs, squeezing.

Books about books within books. A biography of Erpalio, the sage of Neverwinter, stood propped up against a stack of others. Inside its pages, the author quoted Erpalio’s writings about an unnamed book that the sage had somehow acquired.

Erpalio’s words echoed, second-hand, down through the years. “The first page declares the book’s title and contains the holy symbol of Auril—a six-pointed snowflake outlined in white on a gray lozenge…. Here was also found the proper phrases to use when summoning a para-elemental from the Plane of Ice.”

Later that summer, the sage, Erpalio, had been found frozen solid in his own home, where he no doubt had felt safe. Also no doubt, he had not considered himself a naïf.

The book had not been found among his effects, and as far as Clary could determine, had never been spoken of again.

That was all. On the desk, she had headed a piece of paper:

Auril’s Book?

The rest of the sheet lay blank, awaiting Oghma’s gift of knowledge.
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Wynna
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

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After Laird had left the common room, she remained gazing down at her hand. Strange. She’d never really examined it, this tool for everything she had ever accomplished in life. The only thing unusual was that it did not hold a quill. Experimentally, she closed empty fingers and opened them again.

It looked no different than before.

The clutch of tendon and sinew functioned as expected; skinny fingers curled into bony wrists. The ink in the creases of pale knuckles, the long scar on her palm where she had stabbed herself during a required Vault course on bookbinding. All the same. Yet she had laid it upon her gnomish employer’s arm and a wound had knit beneath it.

Not a life-threatening injury, to be sure, but beneath her touch, blood had clotted and flesh had healed. She’d seen it. He hadn’t seemed surprised by it, just grateful.

Oh, she had long ago learned to apply Oghma’s knowledge to her own frailties. Knowing the structure of musculature and bone, and the flesh overlaid on them, allowed her to focus on breathing out the headache from tension in what an Ilmaterian text called her levator, or to close her eyes and sink into a relaxed state that cured her eyestrain. She had never taken a sick day in 10 years, thanks to everything she had learned while copying texts during her position in the Vault’s Medical Lore Department.

Or so she had thought. Funny how her rotating crop of coworkers, wizardling flibbertigibbets all, were out constantly with various ailments. She had put it down to long hours at the Lady’s College and a general lack of responsibility inherent in the young intelligencia of Silverymoon. They might be able to sit the exams of the College, but there wasn’t a lick of common sense among the lot of them.

This called everything into doubt.

To be sure, her experiment with the long, bloody graze down Laird’s arm hadn’t been her first hint, but it had been her first proof, planned-out in advance and waiting for an appropriate test subject.

The first time had been a knee-jerk reaction to Adam Payne’s injuries, taken on her behalf. That had been in a flush of chaos and flashing swords, so quickly diminished by Vale’s manner and his shocking disregard for the comfort of the patient. She didn’t recall much of that episode, except an overall impression of blood, and fur, and teeth. And having felt something move within her, deeper than her physicality or even her thoughts. Something vast and dizzying, as if all comprehension lay suddenly bound up in the wound beneath her fingers and at the same time an eternity away.

She had been thinking since then that had Vale not told her to give way to his own rough ministrations she might have comprehended more, might have touched the source of the vastness. But now, gazing up the stairs that Laird had ascended, absently working her hand open and closed, she thought not. Just now the bindings of knowledge had seemed as pervasive and eternally distant as before. But the wound had knit.

She wasn’t an acolyte. She was a scribe. She had always been a scribe. Until the day on the 10th anniversary of her time at the Vault, when she had walked out her door to go to work and turned left instead of right, and boarded a barge, and found herself in Waterdeep, she had thought that it would be enough.

Something was changing in her, and it was terrifying, and exhilarating.
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

Post by Peter_Abelard »

I’m really enjoying these, Wynna. Thanks for posting! It’s been fun looking at the in game reflection of her inner monologue too, even if only in too small fragments.
Character arcs are sharp, pointy little things. A little blood may spill!

Now Playing: Luva Si'nede, Olivus Angustian
Past Characters: Valyar Floshin, Sarenna Irithyl, Millicent Riverstone, Dev Revels, Catarina Helms, Fenris Estelmer, Arryn Temple, Penrose Hawke, Kara Ravensfell, Arana Belecthor
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Wynna
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

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She was quite literally dotting the ‘i’ in the signature on her report to Vale about her foray to Serpentil’s when a chill stirred her hair. The flesh on the back of her neck shriveled, rising. The rest of the Guild must have wandered in from their revels. She looked to the door, expecting to see it open, framing the falling snow.

Still closed.

A flash of pale incandescence threw Adam’s and Vale’s shadows nearly to her desk. Cold bit into flesh, straight to the bone. Her breath puffed, expanding in a slow globe, too slow to keep up with the fear that opened in her. She knew, before she looked to them.

Malevolent faces, fringed with ice. Pale leathery wings, the wind from them skirling in the ash of the fireplace, its flames suddenly dimmed and tinged with a marsh gas blue. Behind the mephits other things, larger, like waves frozen in the act of crashing onto the two men.

Hands twisting on her report, she shouted inarticulately.

Vale, the sharp profile of his face cast half in shadow, was already moving, his sword free. It took the hard light and softened it, puddling over the blade. Adam, where he had been leaning in to speak confidences to the Guildmaster that she could not hear, turned. His hand darted for an open pouch and came up with a vial, his thumb flipping off the seal as he twisted, diving aside. One of the frozen waves crested, and broke, foam of ice crystals spraying outward over the men, to her toes.

Time came crashing in.

Lights flashed. Forces rippled in the air. An arctic blast froze tears at the corners of her eyes. Vale grunted, over the ching of metal through slush. Adam threw the now empty glass of the vial at a mephit, his other hand closing on the hilt of his own sword. Clarianna stumbled back from the sheen of ice on the wooden floor, and ran. She could not help him. Blue lights flickered across Vana’s table. Them. Either of them. She was useless. Vana was gone, already fled.

A cloud of icy shards cut across her path and she swerved, catching herself on the door jamb. Flat to the door, one hand fumbled for its latch.

The two men fought silently, both of them, but where Vale’s expression was unreadable, Adam scowled. They fought back to back. Icy creatures encircled them.

The latch gave behind her.

The Safehaven. The Guild and Company both had been carousing there. Please let them still. She stumbled backwards through the doorway into a snowy night that burned like summer on her cheeks.

“To arms!” She fled. The last thing she saw through the doorway was the fury and contempt on Adam’s face as he slashed, and the lithe line of Vale’s elven spine as he lunged. “To arms! The Guild is under attack!”

Please, Lord of Knowledge. Keep them safe.
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Wynna
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

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He was closed to her now.

All she could think was that there had been so much left to know of him, and that she could have, given time. She could have learned him, a language derived from one she knew. Vale was a closed text beyond her abilities; Keryn a haiku too elegant; Sarenna a dirty limerick in which she had no interest. But Adam, he had been within her ken.

But he was dead. Around his body, the Guild and the Company picked through the wreckage, searching for clues, and all she could look for was a life that had fled.

She pushed sodden hair from his face. Bloody crystals melted on her fingertips. In death, his expression had finally softened.

So young. Such a waste. Such an inadequate description for the depth of loss.

You should stay healthier longer, to allow me longer to have pride in my work.

The last thing she had said to him, before the second attack.

You should know something Clary. The last thing he had said to her. There's no end to my hurt.

So wrong. He’d been so wrong about that.

A shadow across her shoulders registered. How long had someone been there? “Are you hurt, Ms. Gardner?” Clary looked up, into Sarenna’s face. She knew her eyes were red. She didn’t care. The tears had dried, salty crumbles in their corners.

“He’s dead.” It wasn’t an answer, but it was.

Laird and the one named Cornelius murmured, looking their way. Keryn and Aglorus stood over the remains of a creature vastly outside her comprehension, dissecting it with words and calm gestures. The sweet simpleton, Smokey, she no longer saw.

“He was a friend of yers then.” Sarenna. Still there. What did the woman want? The singer blew hot and cold, impossible to grasp. Now she seemed to be offering lyrics of flat concern, but it was all performance with this one.

“Every time we met, he saved my life.” And she had run away as he died. Belatedly, Clary heard herself say that last part out loud.

The performer had more words, but they were empty and dropped away without impact. Aglorus called something to her and she walked away and was gone. Cornelius said something about fixing something.

“What does it cost to fix this?” Clary stroked Adam’s still face. His skin was ice cold from the demon's attack and death's frigid embrace. “I know it can be done. Vale? Laird? Aglorus? You will pay 3000 for a book. Will you pay to help return this young man to the world?”
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

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So wonderful. Please continue.
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Wynna
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

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“So tell me Clary, how have I changed you?” Adam tried to hold her gaze.

Clarianna folded her hands in her lap, examining them. “I... It was seeing you lying there. I don't.... I don't really have the words.” Beneath her chin, the white quill feather hung openly on the silver chain, no longer hidden beneath her collar. It felt risky, daring.

The babble of the Safehaven insulated them from the other patrons but she could hear the creak of his chair. “It's all right. I know what you mean. I am sorry if I upset you.” Not pressing her, backing off. He was courteous, always. It was one of many things she could find to like about this young man. That and what she and Vale had dug from his pockets. That had been reassuring. Although at the time she had thought it a posthumous and bittersweet finding.

“You haven't. I'm so glad to be sitting here, listening to you. Alive.” She hesitated, then confessed. “I had never seen a dead body. And you were the first person I had ever called on the power of the Binder to heal. It was a double blow.”

Whatever he took from that, he smiled somewhat sheepishly. “I must admit, dying was not at all what I expected it to be.”

She’d made the mistake of looking up. His light tone belied his dark face.

“Am I interrupting?” The voice came from the side, startling her.

“Greetings, Aglorus.” Whether Adam’s nod meant he had seen the Halruann approaching, she couldn’t tell. The mage carried a glass of red wine, his other hand on the knob of a cane.

She put on a fast, bright smile. “Not at all.”

Aglorus took a drink, all but the mustache hidden for a moment. “Adam,” he said into the cup. “You look much better than when I last saw you.”

“Thank you. I am feeling more myself every day.”

Clarianna dredged up a work topic. “Aglorus, I still have questions about that potion.”

“Excellent! And once I answer, I have something to ask you about.”

Beyond, Sarenna sailed into the tavern, pushing through patrons. Clarianna watched her progress. There was something about the woman that put her back up. She didn’t want to be rude to her; she didn’t like the memory of being rude to her; she couldn’t seem to help it. The fact that Sarenna’s notoriously poor temper seemed unscathed by one mousey scribe’s pique didn’t help.

Abruptly, she said, “I was just telling Adam that I'm a changed woman. I had not yet told him that I am now determined to learn how to fight, however.” Adam drank some cider, giving her a look more unsettling than she'd bargained for.

“What caused you to accept such a change, may I ask?” Aglorus sounded interested. Behind him, Sarenna had picked up an ale and headed unerringly their way.

“Seeing that even the strong may fall, I thought it unwise to continue being weak.” With effort, she made that a statement, not a question, and kept the volume low enough that it was just audible to the three of them as Sarenna breezed up.

After greetings had been exchanged, Aglorus returned to the previous topic, looking right at her. “As much as it may seem unfair; the weak can be prey for the strong.”

So much for just among the three of them.

“I know,” Clary said. “Now.” And then because she was loathe to leave the woman yet another reason to think her weak, she added, “Besides, I was assaulted on an errand the other night, and it quite annoyed me.” She’d stood there when the ruffian had challenged her from the shadows near Serpentil’s, not believing it. It had been instinct to strike out at him when he’d come at her, until she realized the pain in her arm was a long slice from a knife, freely bleeding, and that the drunken thug was laughing at her empty-handed swing. And that she could die there, alone in an alley, for the few gold pieces she had to her name. So she’d run, feeling the cold burn of his blade in her back one more time, until she had outpaced him.

Telling them the story now, she couldn’t remember why she had thought it would prove anything but exactly what Sarenna thought. Surviving a mugging was hardly anything next to their daily fare of battle.

“Did you get a good look at him?” Adam asked sharply.

Clarianna found herself glaring at Sarenna, who was too busy grinning at Adam to notice. “I did not. He was nobody. Merely preying on the weak.”

She had lost her taste for the discussion that followed about what weapon she should take up. Maybe cat’s claws. Or a coquette’s fan. Angling for attention, Clary? Now who’s the performer using words to build herself into something she’s not?

People were more difficult than books. They didn’t close neatly when she was done with them, and they had motivations, back stories and interactions that grew quickly out of her capacity to control.
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Wynna
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

Post by Wynna »

Sorry, in advance. This one took a lot of words.

***************************
The topic had turned to a raven with purple eyes, who had of course turned out to be the familiar of an exotically arcane friend of Sarenna’s. Spotting Smokey about to fall off the wagon, Clarianna had murmured her excuses and swooped off to croak nevermores on his shoulder. Not arcane. Not exotic. Winging down the straight and narrow, pecking at a bulky backside to keep it on the path.

Now, outside the Safehaven with a contraband cherry tart that Smokey had reluctantly let go, Clarianna dropped it into the refuse bin. The spill of light and noise from the doorway was another plane of existence, intruding on her dark and snowy stillness.

Movement at the side of the tavern made her heart stutter, at the memory of an alley, and a thug with a knife. It was only a stranger passing with a muttered word, hailed in a familiar manner by a common looking woman at the door to the pub.

Until the two of them were inside, she studied her hands, stained with red from Smokey’s pastry. Like ink from an illuminated manuscript. Nothing worse. Her skin crawled anyway. At the Vault, she would have pots of solvent, and pristine towels. Here, although her white dress mirrored the Vault’s robes as closely as she had been able to find, it made a poor excuse for a cleaning rag.

She found a patch of frozen grass, scrubbing with a tuft of it, then with a handful of powder from a drift, then on the rough bark of a tree, until her fingertips stung.

Her pulse refused to slow.

Was she really so much of a coward that a strange man entering a pub could make her feel so vulnerable, so aware of the darkness at the corners of the square? The night felt like eyes on her. Like a fat man’s eyes, on his pastry.

Disturbed, she backed into the Safehaven, and wheeled, to see that Smokey had joined that larger group, at a table with Aglorus. The man who had caused her to quail also sat with them, his lady friend leaning over in front of Smokey to whisper in his ear.

Clarianna was no expert, but the woman had the look of commerce about her.

After one glance at Smokey’s face, pouchy eyes mesmerized by the trollop, she avoided looking at the good-hearted, red-headed warrior. Even so, she couldn’t miss his forlorn bellowing about his lost wife, and the interloping baker, and whether or not sexual congress was on the menu tonight. Nobody in the Adventurer’s Quarter could have missed it. And this vice, at least, was none of her business.

Did you ever think you would be a part of such a group as this, Clarianna Gardner?

An image interposed itself, her head bent over a text, one of a dozen scribes in a row, the only sounds the scratching of quills and apologetic echoes of footsteps on marble.

Did you ever think you would feel welcome in a group such as this?

She found herself back at the smaller table, Sarenna in her seat and Adam on his feet. Somehow that morphed into her in Adam’s seat and Adam across from her. Sarenna evaporated. The night progressed in lockstep with the tale of Smokey and the Strumpet holding center stage. The mulled cider tasted of cloves. The packed room reeked of sweat, hot and loud. She found herself leaning forward to listen to Adam, the nib of the quill around her neck scratching the boards of the table. He gave advice on how to learn the bow, and offered to help her.

What was she doing?

She looked up at a reduction in noise, to see Smokey’s backside waddling out the door.

None of your business. Remember?

He would be quickly gone, to the places the men laughed about.

She looked back, to Adam, and found herself pushing back her chair. “Where is he going?” she asked loudly, feeling the flush in her face. Suddenly, the chaos overwhelmed.

What in the name of all that was mature and hushed and straightlaced was she doing here? With a young man like the one across from her?

This was not her.

Her was the comically naive spinster. “I hope he is not getting more tarts.” It covered her first steps from between the tables. Aglorus murmured about flavors of tarts as she passed them, fleeing. Again. “I tried to be circumspect about it, but if he will push it…”

Aglorus leaned sideways to speak to the stranger, whose name she had never caught. From another, it might have been an aside lost beneath the hubbub. In his voice, trained to cut through attackers, it carried. “I wonder if she intended to have two more in their party?” The wizard’s amusement followed her out the door.

Smokey was not gone, unfortunately. Smokey also did not have a proper shirt on, more unfortunately.

Clarianna came to an abrupt halt, with a garbled exclamation.

The big man had his back to the tavern exit, steam rising under the streetlights. Snow fell on rolls of flesh. Spraddle-legged, he seemed to be trying to touch his toes. Absolutely horrifying. So much more horrifying than expected. Really. Truly. In front of him, the only problem the trollop had in touching her toes came with staying in her bodice. Clarianna jerked her eyes away from whatever exercise these curbside calisthenics portended and glanced down at her own underendowed frame. A light hand fell on her shoulder from behind.

Adam. He didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

Clarianna spun. “Am I a complete ninny?”

“No.” The warmth of a hand beside her buttoned up collar brought the unease with it. Street lamps fenced them, striving against a looming crush of shadow. “Your concern for him is touching.” She stepped away, but the grunting of exertion in the square at her back kept her from going too far that way. She would not look. Unbridled lechery behind her, ineradicable error in front. The strumpet whispered and Smokey yodelled about working out, and getting in a shape. “Go ahead, Smokey.” Adam said, and she wasn’t sure if he looked at the events unfolding behind her, or at her, because she’d had to close her eyes. The thud of pounding footsteps receded into the night.

She heard herself laugh, a strangled sound. She should go. Back to work. At midnight? Coward. “I feel for him. I have been the one who is not the smartest person in the room.”

“But a man must face his own demons.”

“What demons?” In a book, he would be the brooding hero. In front of the Safehaven, he…. Well. He was. Just that. And she was a fool, writing mental scenes she should have long outgrown. “I have known you to face an actual demon and not falter.” Who was she these days?

“Demons made flesh are easy to face.”

“I used to not know there were such things.” She resolutely kept her eyes on her toes.

“They are but larger--”

A scream interrupted. All the disturbance and darkness she had been feeling crystallized on the cry, and the sound of running feet, and panting. Clarianna turned, drawn towards the fear. “Smokey?” Somewhere nearby and approaching fast, shouting for help. Adam’s sword whispered from its sheath. She took a step towards him as the big man appeared in the circle of the streetlight, bloodied, with shadows slipping from his shoulders. Some of them didn’t. Some of the shadows draped him, fingers on his flesh, and some of the shadows propelled themselves in unlikely leaps and bounds around the streetlights and barrelled into the audience of two, outside the tavern.

She put up her arm to fend off a collision. A figure bulled into her, sending her stumbling. She didn’t understand.

The world shrank to a narrow slice of comprehension. She’d hit something. Her head felt strange, lightened of the burden of cognition. Her arm hurt. Cold, gray pain seeped around the edges. Light burst over her, and sound, most of it her screams. She was in the tavern. She’d crawled through the door. There was nothing on her but the trampling of feet and legs. She was buffeted as the patrons stampeded outside to the sounds of Smokey’s now angrier shout for aid and…

“Adam!” She scrambled, using a table to find her feet. “Where is Adam!”

Missiles of light and force sizzled through the air, from Aglorus’s cane, aimed at the door. They must have been arcanely aimed, for they did not hit her as she burst back outside, and straight into waiting arms. Adam lay on the ground.

Her first confused emotion was irritation. Again. He kept doing this. He. Kept. Hurting. Her. And then a hole opened in her heart and she fell into the bleak emptiness. For which there was only one counter. She thrashed out of the restraining arms and dropped to her knees, already opening herself, reaching for the infinite Knowledge of the Binder.

A pale arm snaked across her waist. A hand clamped down on her mouth, fingernails digging strips from her cheek, and she was pulled up bodily and hurled away.

She thought she saw Adam’s hand move as she hit the wall of the tavern.

Movement blurred, and the shadow in front of her had a man’s shape, as if a black light cast a blacker shape from herself, onto a screen of snow. The black light shifted dizzyingly fast, and the shadow leaped at her, as if recalled to her and through her.

It hit, solid, driving out all breath. She distinctly heard bones crack. Her ribs. Warm blood ran down her arms, soaking her. Wrists pinned in one uncannily strong hand, her sleeve had been torn, the pristine white work uniform ruined. She would have to get a new one. Tomorrow. When she woke from this.

The top of a black-haired head stilled, beneath her chin. She couldn’t breathe, suspended with her feet above the ground, a hand around her neck enough to hold her up. It crushed both larynx and pharynx, her throat bared.

From a distance somewhere far outside of herself, she saw him -- it was a him, a man, doing this to her -- with mouth open where her collar hung, shredded. Who would have thought it would be a bodice ripper somebody else wrote for her? Fangs as long as her pinky framed the notch of her collarbone, those in turn framed in the descending ‘V’ of her necklace, above the quill of Oghma. No breath warmed her skin. He did not bite. It did not bite. This was not a him.

It was an it.

Its eyes flicked up, finding hers. It smiled, barely, more a curl of the lip to show more fang, and released the hand around her throat. She sucked in a breath that whistled and hurt. She slid down the wall as her attacker lunged higher. She choked out a cry to the Binder, the only word she got out before her face was pressed into a chest with a heart that did not beat. Suffocating again.

The vampire battened onto her wounded arm. The ulnar artery, she thought. The ulnar, descending from the brachial, terminating in the delicate bloodways of the palm.

Currently crushed in a dead mouth, pumping in a viscid flow. Into a vampire.

The clarity of Knowledge warmed her, flooding into the worst of her injuries, the collapsing trachea. It would not be enough. To breathe, one needed access to air. To live, one needed one’s own blood, in one’s own body.

Knowledge was a two-edged sword.

And then she was falling, and the weight was off her chest. She collapsed onto her knees, and found herself beside Adam, prone. The vampire was gone. The square was filled instead with Aglorus, and Smokey, and the tavern owner, and the stranger who had been sitting with the Guild now with a sword out, for which she was sobbingly, wholly, enthusiastically grateful. Adam blinked, his eyes open. She did not know if he had been up, or down; if he had fought, or tried to. He was hurt, and she opened herself again to the divine, and reached out her hand to lay it on his wounds.
Enjoy the game
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Wynna
Dungeon Master
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

Post by Wynna »

Back atcha, Rump.

*********************************

The residents of Waterdeep were scared. She felt for them; so was she. The difference was that while they were frightened of the unnatural weather and what it meant to their livelihoods, she knew that the weather was but a harbinger of demonic worse to come.

Another difference was that she was currently also scared of the residents of Waterdeep.

The mob moved, rippling across the square. Torchlight jumbled shadows and slid down clubs and rough weapons. Calls for the Guild to put a stop to the snow came from the back ranks. Near the front, the lank-haired leader loomed over Master Peanut, who looked up at him. The white mustachioed gnome seemed unaware that he measured only to the height of the field-scarred knuckles wrapped around a pitchfork haft.

Clarianna hovered, all of the self-assurance she’d been feigning that day gone. “Be careful.” She didn’t think Master Peanut heard, but the eyes of the bully-boy shifted to her and she pulled back, letting the Witness handle it. It was his trade.

“You even dress like one of them Auril followers, all in white,” the citizen snarled. “Why you dressed like that?” He jabbed a finger at Master Peanut. She looked down at her own garb. Oghman blue and gold. Very expensive silk. Before this moment, they had seemed so daring in their cut, big city fashions. A little too much showing of a little too little to show. Although with the piercework in the bodice, it somehow hinted at curves that.... Anyway. She had burned the white work dress, stained with the bloody memory of vampires.

“These are my bedclothes. I was preparing to sleep,” Master Peanut replied calmly, although he hadn’t said anything of the sort to her before the hubbub pulled the two of them away from the fireplace. She thought he might be lying. If so, he was disturbingly good at it. “Besides, if I was what you say, why would I wear white? Wouldn’t I try to blend in?”

“Get a torch!” Someone yelled. The noise of the mob surged.

“Binder, fill my thoughts only with what is true and Known,” she whispered, wrapping her fingers around the white quill at her throat. Not a drop of blood had marred it in the vampire attack. She was positive it had given the vile creature pause, that it had deflected a bite at her jugular away to less protected arteries. “Remove my fear of what has not taken place, and give me courage--”

“Are you casting a spell on us, girl?” The accusation jerked her head up.

“Witch!” The shout drifted up in a sudden silence.

“I am not a witch!” she said, shocked, but at the same time feeling a divine steel stiffening her spine. “You should go, sir. Go home to your families.” How dare he? She had suffered assault and seen Adam fallen at the hands of a demon, an agent of the wintry forces this person could not begin to fathom. She had fought for this city as best she could and he had no right to say such things. Is this what Vale felt, whenever the same slur came his way?

Master Peanut stepped forward. "You have blasphemed a priestess, which is a violation of the--”

“I think you’re right,” the citizen said over him. “You would try to blend in.” His piggy eyes turned her way, narrowing over an unpleasant grin. “You’ve done this, witch. This is your fault.”
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jmecha
Illithid
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

Post by jmecha »

:protest: :protest: :protest: :protest:
Current Characters: Aelenta Renvanith
Rumple C
Bard
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

Post by Rumple C »

Back atcha, Wynnie.

I love you. :wink:
12.August.2015: Never forget.
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ayergo
Penguin AKA Vile Sea Tiger
Posts: 3503
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Re: Peril of Wisdom

Post by ayergo »

Image
There's a place I like to hide
A doorway that I run through in the night
Relax child, you were there
But only didn't realize and you were scared
It's a place where you will learn
To face your fears, retrace the years
And ride the whims of your mind
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