Lack of Intelligence

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Wynna
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Lack of Intelligence

Post by Wynna »

“Stupid, stupid, stupid woman.” Muttering, Clarianna fell against the door, closing it with a snick of the latch. Alone in her room, bed and chests as neat as a two word put-down. She’d slunk in, past Vana’s cheerful greeting without giving a reply.

This is what she chose to do with the new chapter that began with the onset of spring? The demon Kringus had fallen, and with it the passing of the unnatural winter.

“Stupid!” Foolishness was recognizing when something felt emotionally wrong, and then doing it anyway. Foolishness had been walking into the building of the Trumpet, trusting that she could change things with Truth.

It did not matter that two nights ago, she had watched the lies of the false Watch Lieutenant unravel before Nipsy Peanut’s cleverness. The Witness would kick her in the shins for her error today and she would deserve it. He had brought about Vale’s freedom by finding a back door to the Magistrate’s own declarations that the words of a patrolman carried more weight than Vale’s. It had been perhaps the single canniest use of Knowledge she had ever observed.

Her own frontal assault just now...not so much.

I cannot recall. Three words that seemed easy to say, but weren't. Not under the influence of the Zone of Truth that she had so triumphantly called down from on high at the lying editor's first question.

Stupid. Just as the wealthy magelings skylarking their way through scribing duties at the Vault had always laughed. Poor Clarianna, struggling along without the tools to succeed. Jhasper, who winced at her Draconic. Sarenna, better with stringing original words together than her own echoes stolen from a thousand rescribed books. Kal, whom all training and instinct said was someone to be condemned. Aglorus, a strength of the Guild, driven away because of her inability to divorce her past from his sociopathic present. Vale, who offered training which she refused. Adam, who made her unable to string even two monosyllabic words together in a row, much less the ones she should be saying. Two generations of women before her, refusing to remain decently dead beneath thawing ice. Serpentil, whom she gathered had taken the Guild’s gold happily, and done exactly what she should have expected. So many characters, all condemning her.

A new chapter, not starting off well.
Last edited by Wynna on Tue Mar 26, 2019 3:00 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

Post by Mick »

I think it’s starting off well enough. 8)
Talk less. Listen more.

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Wynna
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

Post by Wynna »

Standing close, the light of the Binder cast shadows from the fragments embedded across his neck. She tweezed them out, carefully, consciously reductive. Superficial musculature. Platysma and sternocleidomastoid discriminated by the turn of his head. Shallower lacerations in the trapezious where the twist of his swing with the pick had exposed the side of his neck. She brushed a small beneficence over the bloody grooves when she was done. For the moment, she was strangely content. No fears.

Is this how one falls, Patrishal? The question rose up unbidden. A shadow decades long drifted across her thoughts.

Adam knelt to pick through the rubble, separating out a few chunks of iron ore.

“What now?” she asked, and flinched as he looked up to reply and twisted up and around, pickaxe clattering to the ground, mace in hand faster than she could turn. Pain burned along her wrist, a grey droplet hissing and bubbling there. He bludgeoned upward as she ducked sideways, aware too late of drizzling threads of slime from above. Behind him, now that she was paying attention, a glistening pocket in the rocky ceiling detached to plop to the ground. Grit or spores suspended inside its nearly transparent body, it oozed at the back of his boots. She swung with her own mace, angry, so angry at herself. She had let her guard down.

With an accompanying pop, biomass splattered around the head of her mace. It burned against the skin of her face. Is this how one dies, grandmother? Foolishness in dangerous places?

“You’re getting better.” Adam said. She wheeled, to find him decorated in strands of goo, nothing left on the ceiling but lichen and damp. Beyond, pseudopods retracted into a puddle on the floor. It was dead. And big.

The light of battle in his eyes made her heart ache. “Are there more like that?”

“Many. Especially near the Queen.” The acids of the creature left streaks on his new armor. The bat on the breastplate fit this cave, but he was no creature of the night. She wore his old leathers, cut down to fit her. Looking her over, he pulled a leaf of allcure from a pouch.

“What?” She inspected herself for further plasmodial oversights.

"Do you mind if I...." He gestured at her burned face with the leaf.

What he offered was so pure and simple. Healing. Love. It could be so. It did exist. Who had ever said it and desire were contradictory? Bothii. In every action. A past generation of mistakes. Get thee behind me, mother.

Whatever her twice-named and forever cursed mother would have done, Clarianna opted for insouciance, destined to fail. “Be my guest.” He crushed the leaf in his hands. A liniment tang cut cleanly across the smell of wet rock as he smoothed it over a burn on her cheek. Her stomach dropped, until the paste of leaf and stem ripped open a blister. She winced. “Never mind. I can do it better.”

Frowning, he offered her what was left of the mangled allcure.

“Not that way.” Closing her eyes, she called on divine healing. Her cheek warmed, and a brief itch faded as epidermal tissue renewed itself. Skin deep. Nothing more. “I could have done it better the other way, too.” Awkward humor. “ I ...need a moment.” His heat dissipated into more space between them. She opened her eyes. “Do not think me frightened. I am not.” Truth. He would never let harm come to her. Not from such small things as they had encountered tonight. Slimes and rats may be met cleaning out a fruit barrow in a wet spring.

With that unwanted thought, she completed the generational troika of bad memory. One, two, three. Grandmother, mother, daughter.

She fussed with her hair, tightening the knot of it, making a face as it crunched with dried filth. “Do not think me silly, although that I may be. I want a moment to speak to the Binder.”

He ran a glance around the surroundings. “Shall I give you privacy?”

She put her back to a wall in their cul-de-sac, and lowered herself to a knee. She did not lay down the mace that before tonight’s expedition she had neither wanted nor known what to do with. One lesson learned. “Just watch my back while I mine for divine ore.” To fashion into peace, if such armor might be cut to fit.
Last edited by Wynna on Wed Mar 27, 2019 12:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

Post by Peter_Abelard »

Amazing. That’s my favourite one yet, Wynna. So good.
Character arcs are sharp, pointy little things. A little blood may spill!

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Re: Lack of Intelligence

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Holding the baby brought the rush of emotion she’d feared. This had seemed such a good idea, on so many fronts. Now that chubby fingers clutched strands of her hair she was dizzied by the potential for loss.

Without free hands for weapons, or potions, Clarianna protected as much of him as possible in the wrap of her arms, swaddled legs tucked down the front of her loosened armor. A bloody trickle along her collarbone proved it wouldn’t turn every missile, but it was the best she had. Her back to the direction Trin had discovered the child, she huddled with the foundling between pipes, the grease of the wall against the side of her face not something to think about.

She had never felt as fiercely protective of anything, ever.

The chittering of the goblinoids had retreated. On one level she was aware of that. On another, she was visited by a vision of a newborn on icy ground, lips as blue as those now blowing bubbles on her neck. What if that long ago child had died to the monsters that had surrounded it?

She hadn’t. No less abandoned, that child had lived. To the detriment of future generations. Knowledge was never a detriment. True. But joy in that knowledge had never been promised.

“We have to go, Asher. Now.” She whispered it, unsure after a moment whether she had been heard. Fear spiked. I'm alone. They had gone ahead. She had done this, thinking she could, thinking even that she should. And she was alone down here. A turn of her head, however, showed her why the other two were silent.

Asher was rising up over the twisted limbs of a goblin, with another babe, this one lifeless. Trin Stonebender, a member of the apprentice class after hers, blurred where he stood, the potion he himself had brewed losing focus to become a sparkling mote in his hand. Another generation of Guild members. So much potential. She didn’t think the tears burning her eyes had to do with him.

Asher, mouth grim within the frame of his beard, waited. A moment passed, too long for the seconds it held. He waited for her, and for Trin, to go ahead of him towards the ladder out.

One found. One lost. The weight of Kelemvor’s scales had not shifted.

The babe in her own arms yawned, and Clarianna blotted her eyes in the hopes that neither of them had seen, and moved for the exit.
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

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The chimney did not draw perfectly. Smoke drifted out of the hearth, over a patina of decades. Enclosing stones sooted black, the underside of the mantel had darkened with the memory of ashes long gone. Atop the logs, flames danced palely in the slant of daylight through windows. Beneath them, embers writhed, undiminished in their shadows. Shoulder to mantel, the heat from the interior of the hearth baked beneath Clarianna’s chin. It glazed her cheekbones and overstretched eyes, their tears hardened to a dessicated clarity. When Kal had left, the door’s opening and closing had bowed heat, flames and smoke, all, but that breath of redirection had flexed back into the upright reach of the fire.

It should be spring by now. Perhaps this was the best that spring had to offer. Each day brought thin sunshine and sleet in equal measure, all thaws freezing again at night. Even with the natural order of seasons restored, Waterdeep remained no less cold than points farther north.

Clarianna lifted hands to the fire, against a glacial ache. Into the silence of just the two of them again, she said, “You have a way of asking questions that go right through the heart, Sergeant Peanut.” Why would she not let those questions lapse, on this side of the interruption after they had been asked?

Kal’s arrival had allowed her to flee upstairs, claiming notes to finish, returning with a freshly scrubbed smile to find him still there, and with an invitation to be put off. Later. She would visit the Company later to listen to a discussion on vampires and how to defeat them.

In despite of which here she was, exhuming dead things better let lie. “Why would you have a baby?” She repeated it, changing the inflection. “Why would you have a baby?”

Nipsy Peanut, Esquire. Gnome. Adventurer. Witness. Watchman. Slayer of Kringus. All too few hours before, abandoned through her carelessness and near fallen to a single dweomervore. So much bound up in a small, pleasant gnome with half his weight in facial hair and the other in the experience graven into his brow. Witness or Watch, he could see through her. So why had he queried if Adam had asked her to handfast? Why request her opinion on bearing a child?

He gave the reply consideration, as he considered every word he uttered. “To leave a legacy. There is a basic drive, I think, to leave offspring. We are all a product of hundreds if not thousands of just that.”

She had thought him unaffected by the close call with the dweomervore. Perhaps not. She had also thought her recent visits to Khiber's orphans unnoticed. Perhaps not, either. “More so of the ones that spawned us, and spawned them.” She disagreed on more than just the number of generations that directly shaped their descendants. The drive he meant was a corporeal procreation. Of late, she felt herself growing concerned with more internal products: the ability to love, and to be worthy of both giving and receiving it. For a moment she gazed down into the flames, before finding the phrasing to continue. “Before that, it becomes academic.”

Academic, as in a mirror held up to a Deneiran researcher of two generations past, reflecting a cold life filled with colder knowledge.

Is that the face you would see in your mirror, Clarianna Gardner? Again?

She skinned a smile onto her lips. She would not go back in time, neither two moons nor two lifetimes. She would not abandon Adam, who loved without fear, and expected the same from her. She would never allow herself to reach the crevasse that her grandmother had stumbled into. A little forward planning could have saved generations of turmoil. Did nararoot not grow on the Rheged Glacier?

Nipsy did not seem to notice her absorption, lost in his own. “Do you think I would make a good father?” Earlier, he had couched his question about babes without stating that it was on his own behalf, and his shrewd eyes had watched her have to find a chair, and sit.

She put her backside to the fire, thumbs woven behind it. “I think that any babe would be lucky to call you a father. You are clever, so intelligent. And brave. I trust you with my life, because you have saved it, and so many others.” The smell of pine smoke rose off her, leathers warmer against her chest and throat for the cool of the room. Perhaps it was that hand-me-down armor that brought out the next words. “A strong man makes a good father.” For the sake of the gods. Fantasy. Adam, cradling a babe not abandoned to goblins and sewage. Binder protect him. Adam or the imaginary beloved? From what? From loss. Her smile was fixed to her lips. “I...suppose.”

Nipsy seemed pleased. “Very well, I shall have to go about courting a suitable woman then.”

She tried to recover. “No prospects in mind? To prompt this topic?”

He shook his head. “Might I ask you a favor?”

“Anything.”

“When the time comes, will you officiate the event for us? The handfasting, that is.”

It wasn’t the request, but the deliberation behind it. That he could look into the future and accept, without any Mistress Peanut in his current sphere, that it was within the right and proper course of things that there would be. Someday. Such simple faith that love existed and was accorded to all was more foreign to her than any language she struggled with on a day to day basis.

Undone. Again. Her eyes stung, at their corners. “I would be so honored,” she whispered.

Of course, the Witness in him had to offer quid pro quo. “I would of course, be happy to arrange the legalities of any and all handfasting yourself and Adam chose to do, though I lack the religious gravitas to properly bless the event.”

“Stop.” I love you, Adam Payne. “Please, stop.” Yesterday’s words, fears crumbling. They had felt right. She felt them now, ashen residue on her heart. Nipsy had stripped her of the understanding she had come to with her present situation. “I can't handfast him. I would be happy to have you in such a role. But ... I can't. I am not the right.... I don't have the wherewithal, Sergeant Peanut, to love well enough.” What, then? An unending string of days of living only in the moment? He deserved so much better.

Nipsy cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I did not realize you and Adam were at odds.”

“We are absolutely not.” I love you, Clary. No pain or death will ever keep me from you.

Nipsy, Oghma bless him with a Truth that she couldn’t express, looked confused.

Off to the side, Mistress Wren carried an armful of bottles into the lounge with an announcement. “That half orc is outside. K….K…. Whatever his name is.”

Clarianna remained looking down, belatedly quite aware that they had held this entire conversation in a public space. What had been empty at the start was no longer. Such a disregard of personal boundary seemed to be entirely at issue these days. She lowered her voice to a decent level. “It is not Adam, Nipsy. It is all me.”

Wren busily stocked the liquor cabinet that the immoderate half orc had emptied. Apprentice Millhouse, a role model for what a moderate half orc might aspire to, wandered in, chewing on something. Another one she had nearly led to death vs. dweomervore.

Clarianna wasn’t sure she had communicated her fears adequately, but the doubt in the Witness’s eyes drained her. If he could not follow her anxieties they were senseless, but no less divisive. Disappointing another person whom she cared for was more than she could bear. She had to restore her persona in front of the newer members of the Guild. “I will see to Mister Korkoran.” Getting that one out of the vicinity couldn’t possibly be worse than enduring the reflection in the damning mirror that Nipsy Peanut held up.
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

Post by Wynna »

Guildmaster Clearwaters,

At the first hour after sunset last night, Apprentice Millhouse, Wren Bluefeather and Nipsy Peanut were attacked by a dweomorevore in the Square.

The dewomorvore was slain and its body has been added to the components cabinet.

The apprentice Millhouse took grievous damage in the fray, as did Sergeant Peanut.

By virtue of a Guild issue wand, this damage was healed, but both should be commended for their part in taking down the draconic thief.

It is my responsibility to inform you that I had intended to take the three of them to the Rat Hills, to practice live target practice in the field. To this end, I had already left the square, and was a block away before I realized that they were not with me.

By the time I retraced my steps, the attack was underway, and both Millhouse and Peanut were already in grave peril. It was thanks to the bow of Bluefeather, the actions of Millhouse and Sergeant Peanut's clockwork guard that we are all alive tonight.

Clarianna Gardner
Scribe of the Adventurer's Guild
Waterdeep


That duty done, she folded the paper in half, then creased the fold with pinching fingers. “Mistress Wren?” She held it out. “I am called away by obligation. Please see that the Guildmaster receives this.” It grew late in the day to follow the invitation from the Company, but reports needs must be written. Mistress Bluefeather took the note with a pleasantry, which Clarianna returned.

Apprentice Millhouse wiped his mouth on a sleeve. “C'n I writes sumtin', too?”

Truly, a half breed who showed so much more promise than the brute, Korkoran. She and Nipsy had spent too much time looking for that one earlier. Coincidentally, although Nipsy had not seemed to look at her face once in that time, by the time they parted, the stinging of her eyes had abated and her northern cheeks no longer felt flushed. She thought perhaps she trusted the Witness least on things he did not seem to notice. “Of course you may.” More minutes were spent fitting Millhouse with paper and quill, then observing surreptitiously as the elven amanuensis showed the tattooed apprentice which end of the quill to hold. Mistress Bluefeather also showed promise, at least in softening the male bastion around them.

Then there were devotions, which although they themselves were an arch wherethrough the evening gleamed, could not be stinted. She scribed what she knew and prayed for the benisons that might fit the topic of the meeting between Kal and Sarenna, and Adam and Clary. And lost more time yet, contemplating that pair of pairs from all the many sides. The final conclusion on that front was that so long as Nipsy Peanut kept his probing questions to himself, Clarianna Gardner could refrain for a few hours from breaking down into unscribelike tears.

When finally she came down, Cornelius had arrived from whatever hidey-hole had held him these last days. She had to return upstairs for the ingots that she was certain Adam had briefed him on, then brief him after all with the little she knew of their purpose -- including her own secret request.

After her second declaration that she was going out to the Company and her reminder to Mistress Bluefeather to give Vale her report, Apprentice Millhouse popped up from a chair too small for his bulk. “I writ me own 'port, Miss.”

“Did you, Madog?” It was very difficult not to smile at such an exhibition of potential.

Mistress Bluefeather also smiled. “Indeed, Madog wrote a report on the same incident.”

“Aye, Miss. Ye c'n reads it iff'n ye wans.”

“I would very much like to read it.” At the sound of the door opening, Clarianna glanced behind. Nobody entered immediately. The slice of the square she could see looked suspiciously dark. The last of the sun might just linger in the sky. It would be fine. “Do you have it here?” When she looked back, Mistress Bluefeather was approaching, with a sheet of paper. Even at a distance, the scrawls on it spoke of alphabet primers and hatchet-chop handwriting. She took it, hearing Vana’s thin greeting to whomever had arrived, and lost interest in whom that might be.

Sir Miss rote ye a note sayin' all sorts o bad tings bout Missseff. Dis ain' troo. Miss was evree bid de leader an' sayfd me bakkin wen de dimmerfor dun bid me. Sir shud tells Miss dat Miss be gud an nod stooped or bad. Madog Millhows

Nipsy Peanut had met his match. Fumbling out words, clamping down on feelings, Clarianna handed back the note blindly.

“Yea yea i know.... i'm leavin just a fuc-- just a second missus!” A growl announced the newcomer, and the reason for Vana’s rising tone. “Any of ye seen Clearrivers or what?” Korkoran had arrived, late and unlooked for.

“Mister Korkoran.” Clarianna turned. Here was one who would not defend her poor choices and who was unlikely to follow her trustingly to death by dweomervore.

The half orc, in all his tusked crudity, glowered into the inner chamber. “Not here, fuck.” She wondered if she imagined the slightest nod he seemed to give Millhouse, and dismissed that as bucketing them in the same privy canister simply because of an accident of birth.

“Pardon me, Luv,” Vana said.

“Yea, yea I'm gone,” Korkoran snarled, hands up.

Here was also someone who might be made useful, while also removing him. “Wait,” Clarianna said, drawing a glance from Vana. “Vana, did Vale leave instructions for Mister Korkoran?

“Didn’t, but I would ask that he close the door after coming in.”

“Ja, ist Kalt.” The long scrape of Cornelius’s chair legs on the floor grated on her spine. She couldn’t tell if the Llorhkian knight’s genial face meant he knew of Vale’s ruling on Korkoran’s presence, or not.

“We have ale.” Mistress Bluefeather piped up with an inappropriateness probably to be expected in a performer, and obviously unaware of the Guildmaster’s strictures.

“'e's salright, Miss.” Less expected was Millhouse’s endorsement. She found that she preferred to think that she needed to quash a previously unsuspected prejudicial categorization rather than that the soft-spoken apprentice and the green-skinned lout shared a racial understanding. That was somewhat unsettling, implying a level of overcompensatory societal guilt. She had never actually known anybody of mixed orc and human parentage, with all it implied as to how that had come about. Uncomfortable subject.

“I ain't staying.” Korkoran said.

Clarianna pulled her cloak tighter around herself, and felt at her belt for her hood. “Unfortunately, the Guildmaster has said he is not welcome here unless he moderates his behavior. But....”

Korkoran cut across her. “I juss need Clearrivers, he said he payin 2 gold fer fire insect guts... i want 3 gold each and be done with it. They startin to fuc-- starting to smell.”

She did not miss the change in verbiage. Perhaps, charitably, there is hope for Mister Korkoran? For the first time, she wondered if that was his first or last name, and if he had the other of whichever it was not. She raised her voice, unwilling to be talked down by such as he. “...But...I am going out and the night is dark. Perhaps I could hire you to accompany me across town?”
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

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Darkness had fallen. It had taken too long to get through what had seemed so vital. Or had she been delaying her trip to the Company, with busy work? She could call it off, until dawn.

“I watch ya missus. How much?” Korkoran shouldered out the door as she looked around the square, and up. The street lamp shamed the moon and stars from the black sky, or clouds had sealed their light out of reach. Korkoran was still settling his ill-gotten gains. Nothing more than a thug, grinning to himself, sucking on a tusk at the side of his jaw that should have served as all the evidence required as to his nature. “No one go near you with me here.”

She did not have to control her temper any further. Not on his behalf.

Nipsy’s questions overlaid a memory of the jaunty bicolor tabard of the Watch turning arterial red. Apprentice Millhouse courageously stood his ground mere feet from this spot, tattooed arms dyed in blood, holding a line he should have ceded. The razor tail of a dweomervore lashed, scales catching the streetlight here, there, then gone, as it darted about, too nimble for the inexperienced to repulse. A single dweomervore. And she had nearly taken them to the Rat Hills.

The embarrassment of setting out so confidently, expecting them to follow once they saw her round the corner towards the docks. Focussing on what prayers to beg of the Binder to protect them; focussing on the stone guardgoyle in her wake and what in Oghma’s name to do with it; focussing on the recognition that she would be the foreguard against rodentia ignis flammae and what that meant in terms of acceptable damage to take before calling the retreat. Focussing on what Adam had taught her, and what future lessons in loss she inevitably had for him. The moment she realized the clattering so far behind was clockwork spiders, in battle.

Shame washed through her, from her toes to the top of her her scalp, blood burning in her skin.

“I hope you are proud of yourself, sir!” She rounded on the half orc. Thug. Lout. A green-skinned bully, cheating his own kind. A pig, grunting at Madog Millhouse in a language in which she knew only foul curses, forcing the apprentice to give voice to answers in the same vile tongue.

Worse, the shame and the orcish language worked a terrible alchemy. She felt it rising, recognized it instantly, the tingling in her spine that started the hunch of her shoulders, that twisted in her belly and brought her to the balls of her feet, poised to flee. Childhood, redux.

From a past frozen within her, a past determined of late to thaw, she heard a man’s shout drifting through winter branches. The monster in the snowy Grove of her mind spoke a bastardized tribal tongue, northern languages peppered with borrowed insults. Where are you, witch? I will find you, and your nameless brat! Hol kurv! Skinny whore. Orcish had lent many insults outside its monstrous purview, most especially to bothii, the Uthgardt lingua familiara.

Korkoran loomed. His height and breadth seemed no longer to speak to his orcish parentage, but to the human, likely barbarian, to have come close enough to the monstrous to spawn him.

Don’t hurt her. A child’s voice, pleading, on behalf of a mother who turned victimhood to blows.

She reached for Knowledge, for objectivity. Objects. In the orcish language, when a proper noun is not known, the subject is treated as an object. The only grammatical lesson she had learned about the language before slamming the textbook closed and welcoming a Fail in the course.

Failure or not, grammar distanced the exchange between Korkoran and Millhouse.

He was not a threat. Mesomorphic. That was all. A robust muscular body-build characterized by predominance of bone and muscle and connective tissue. Medical lore, specialized knowledge, layered on the basics of her skillset, comprised of reading, writing and research.

She was Clarianna Gardner. No 'E'.

Analytical detachment trumped instinct, finally, eventually. How long had self-control taken? How long had she stood there frozen? Twenty years. Seconds? Get. Thee. Behind. Me.

Korkoran’s eyes had narrowed, glowering. “Always.” She had to think what that was in response to. “Why? What the fuc-- What I do bloody now?”

What in the world had possessed Millhouse to buy those rotting beetle parts in the absence of Vale? “You took the gold of a poor apprentice!”

“He know what he doin.”

“I cannot abide taking advantage of the weak!”

“He ain’t WEAK!” He seemed stung.

She stepped closer, into reach, into his very face, even if she had to look up to do it. “He is more so than you.” Her heart pumped too hard. “And I am not happy with you.”

“Look at him, he’s half orc kin. He ain’t weak.” Korkoran’s tone had … moderated? “Pft...look, you paying for this walk?” His eyes were almost human, at this remove, though pouched in mottled flesh. At this proximity, also, she became aware of the iron smell of blood, and stains on his armor as red as those on Nipsy’s tabard.

That was enough. It would do. She hid the shallowness of her breathing and took a step back. “I will pay you ten gold. No more.”

“Dangerous blokes about. I can head ‘em off. Eleven gold.”

“Ten and I will heal that scratch on you. Your choice. Public healing, sleep it off, or Binder’s Truth now.” Why would she do that? He was clearly not disadvantaged.

He deflected. “Listen, do you know where the elves sell them camouflaged cloaks?” To her silence, he grumbled, “Yea, yea. Heal me.”

“I doubt they will sell you one.” She covered her dangerous growing confidence in her control of this situation by studying the rents in the joints of his armor. Blood stained the slashes. “What gave you that, your beetles?” She titched at the number and depth of the holes in his protections, and at her inability to see the wounds beneath with her own eyes.

He lifted a shoe stitched with the graceful signature of some master Tel’Quessir bootmaker. “Pft, I got their boots on right now look? And naw, bustin up idiots in the docks. They didn’t think I was beautiful.”

“Then you may walk in those boots until you find your cloak.” Eyes closing, she reached within for holier senses, and the lore needed to treat a sharply-edged laceration that had severed dermis and vessels of the circulatory system beneath. “Cuts like that, they can fester,” she murmured, before Knowledge welled up, washing clean her own wounds as well as connecting to the needs of the flesh that was her momentary charge. One hand around the white quill at her throat, the other raised to the air before him, she did not need contact to know that he cringed at the first brush of holy Truth.

For a moment, she pitied. The non-physical could be as threatening as blades and blows. Words could carry the hatreds of all that had shaped those who hurled them. Power was a dynamic that did not have all to do with physical morphology, but with Knowledge of one’s victim. One’s subject. That disturbance slipped behind. All was peace, in the healing flow she channeled.

The edges of the wound knit, flesh sealing. Vein and capillary writhed, clasping severed ends. Blood pulsed along its familiar pathways, so like the others she had effected with the Binder's gifts. Oh, there were differences. A certain density of muscle tissue, an increase in arterial diameter. But familiar.

In any case, he was healed. “Yea, good on ya…. Thanks.” Not sounding very thankful, truly, Korkoran roused her from her revery.

She opened her eyes to see the vampire standing at his back.

"So lead on," he said, oblivious. "I got ya covered."
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

Post by Wynna »

So many regrets. They flashed through her mind in an instant, too fast to name, save one.

So this was how she would leave him.

Honestly, isn’t knowing it a relief? Not a regret? Her body panicking: sweat, chills, adrenal tang in a dry mouth. Her consciousness floating high above it all. She had thought it would be by inevitable volition, someday, or his death. Instead it will be mine.

“Mister Korkoran,” she whispered. “Run.”

Just as her research had described. Just as she recalled from the night the Safehaven had been attacked, but that the thing that had drunk from her that night had once been male. This was female. Or had been. Blood red lips, white complexion, bestial cast to a face without motion of any sort. No muscular twitch, no blinking, no bobbing of the throat. Dead tissue, until it smiled.

“Lovely night,” Vansa said, in a voice Clarianna had heard once before in the dark.

Conscious horror re-integrated with physical terror. Clarianna groped behind herself at the door latch, unable to find it, sobbing inside herself. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry. They only find you when you make noise. Vansa was so much worse than the fears she had been stuffing back into their coffins all night.

“Who’s this?” Korkoran turned. “Move on, missus. Ms. Gardner, who is this?” No guttural crudity. Which revealed it as what, a mask, like a pleasant smile was, for some?

Run. She tried to speak, and failed, beneath the vampire’s study.

“Pft.” Korkoran shifted a towering shield from his back to his hand, and grounded it. “Whass wrong with you? Iss juss a little girl.”

“Please don’t hurt him. He’s a guard I hired for the night.” 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. That was what she'd meant to say. What she should say.

“I said beat it.” Korkoran’s hulking figure squared. Vansa’s eyes shifted his way. Black orbs clicked into place, their pupils unmoving pinpricks.

Released from that gaze, Clarianna called on the strongest protection from the evil in front of them that she knew and felt the warming of the holy symbol beneath her hands. The vanes of its quill rooted into her palms, pouring divine power through them into the veins of her body, and so up into her heart, there to burst into intangible radiance. “Mister Korkoran, this is a vampire.” The protections would encircle Korkoran and any innocent who stumbled out of the Guild. The wrong-headed thought of going inside faded. Inside were Madog Millhouse and Wren Bluefeather, easy prey. Inside was Cornelius Tauber, who would fight and die. Inside were sleeping Guild members, who might never wake.

“Fuck what?” His exclamation drew a curl of a dead lip, and the show of a canine incisor against their crimson promise. Vansa’s smile only grew as he aimed a sword at her. “Get lost! I served yer buddy of the Blackwell to a late grave already.”

Vansa looked along the weapon and into his face. “I'll go, Lad....but I would love it, were you to come with me.” He stilled. Vansa continued to look into his eyes, and Clarianna prayed for him to hold, to not provoke the monster. Hide, and do not move. Freeze, and they can’t find you. But we are already found…. That thought faded, and the next that she was somehow outside a conversation…communion….she did not share.

The furtive, bestial cast in Vansa’s face had gone. Expressionless immobility had melted into warmth. If it had ever been there. It was hard to picture such an unflattering thing, the memory of it ridiculous, then absent. The woman was so beautiful, porcelain skin flawless, dark eyes to drown in. Lips swollen from love. In her research – what research? In some format she had encountered and discarded an inappropriate – inadequate – quote from a vic….subject. Lover. From the fortunate lover of one like this. She hadn’t felt its truth, til now. “There came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.”

The quill pricked her palm, though she did not think she had moved. “Please…” She breathed out, shaken. What...had that….? That had not been like remembering a quote. That had been feeling the seduction so described.

She looked between the undead and living gazes locked on each other, and recognized her terrible mistake. She had thought the vampire here for her. “I am going to call down a light upon you, and the Binder’s wrath." She had never attacked deliberately with divine power. Healing, protecting, guiding...yes. "If you do not leave us – all of us – alone.” She had another recognition. What she had just felt was merely the edge of what Korkoran endured.

In a leisurely fashion, Vansa leveled a look her way, as if no longer concerned with her primary prey’s escape.

“Never….” It was hard to form words. “Speak to Adam. Again.”

Korkoran swallowed audibly. Did that mean he was not yet enthralled?

“Do you truly believe your paltry blessings can keep him from me?” The soft voice was the caress of worms in grave soil.

“They are not mine. They are the Binder’s.” Every twitch of muscle against a hundred weight of resistance, she unwound a hand from her holy symbol and rested it upon the mace at her side. “And you will not touch him.” Silently, she beseeched Oghma to imbue the weapon, and as before, felt divinity flow. This time through her and into the mace, which warmed beneath her hand. The vampire’s eyes clicked downward, and then upward as Clarianna called upon a shielding. “The God of my Font; in him will I trust: He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my saviour; thou savest me from violence.” She felt something she could only describe as the thickening of air around her skin, and sent up a last, simplest prayer, for light, so that she might hit what she struck at in the coming fight.

A glow sprang into being around her, more than bright enough to see Vansa lift a long, sharp fingernail and flick it her way.

The light doused. The air thinned. The mace cooled. The circle of protection…broke. She was naked before the vampire queen. She fell back, against the door, the latch that had been elusive earlier now grinding the small of her back. Vansa chuckled.

Korkoran moved. Laboriously, he lifted shield and sword. “G-get outta here i'm warnin ya…”

Amusement unabated, Vansa considered him, and fearing for him against the charms of the vampire queen, Clarianna threw open the door.

Nobody moved inside the central room. The front desk sat unmanned. She heard no murmur of conversation over the roar of her heart in her ears, saw no guild members crossing from lounge to upper staircase. No Cornelius with his crackling hammer; no Vale with the liquid sword. It was late. They had gone to bed. Her voice cracked. “You are not invited. You are not welcome here.” Please go inside, Mister Korkoran. Please, and then she could run, too.

“Do you think I need an invitation to enter there?” Vansa’s silken query turned her head back.

“Can’t leave you missus,” Korkoran ground out. “Ye hired me to protect you, and if i die doing it, that's the job.” Not taken yet. Still fighting.

“Yes, I do,” Clarianna quavered.

“How quaint,” Vansa said, and it was unclear which of them that was in response to.

She found herself raising her hands, palms facing, fingers spread, and suddenly, all three of them were moving. Vansa took a half-step. Korkoran blocked her path. Vansa leaned forward, bloody lips at his ear, whispering. He was trying, still trying. Teeth gritted, he leaned into his shield, into the vampire, pushing. Without effect.

“Binder, bring your light into these hands, and may they sear the foulness before me.” The light that kindled at her chest in a globe pulled suddenly inward, imploding into her holy symbol and by contact through her sternum into her heart. Its energy burst along the brachial arteries of her upper arms, splitting into the radial and ulnar vessels of her forearms, and fragmenting through her fingertips. She did not scream, or cry out, and the searing lights made no sound as they wove back together into a single artifact, one pure column of radiance that struck Vansa in the join of shoulder and collarbone where a carotid would have pulsed in a living creature.

Flesh burned. The light faded. Vansa did not even look aside. “You should come with me,” she purred to Korkoran.

“Yea…yeea…. Go with you.” His sword rang on the ground, fallen from his loosened hand.
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Wynna
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

Post by Wynna »

Lightnings and fire, first one and then the other, against the dark. Shadows swallowed brief revelations of ceiling and floor, broken tiles above and bones underfoot. Skeins of gray and white and black stretched to point the way to where the front line had advanced, leaving behind a smoking carnage. Pillars loomed, then vanished, bony fingers buttressed against the roof. The taste of failure filled her mouth. Burning metal dried her tongue and vaporized rot thickened her spittle. Bile stripped her throat raw. Her stomach contents kept rising. Like the dead.

This was beyond horror. From the moment Vale had led them through the door into the Dungeon of the Crypt, all semblance of normalcy had turned upside down.

She kept her eyes on the back of Cornelius’s reddened neck, brown hairs matted with sweat to which unmentionable particles stuck, and when she could see him, on Adam. At the front. Facing all that came at them on their search for Korkoran.

Vale had said that this was where Vansa’s minions had been sighted, and this was where the vampire queen would have taken him when she had teleported away.

The thought of that cramped in her stomach. Vansa had teleported away with Korkoran, whom she had hired to take her across a square, to a coach. That was all. How could that not be safe? You knew better. Had she? She’d thought it busy work, to remove him from the Guild. Because he might cause...friction. Do not excuse yourself. You knew that darkness was coming on. You know that vampires walked.

Teleported away after Clarianna had followed invisibly and ineffectually, everything she’d had to throw thrown and dismissed, unable to do anything but press a pair of potions into his slack, heavy hand. Vansa had known she was following, and hadn’t bothered to crush her. Only to taunt her over the paltry tokens that were all she could channel of the Binder’s protections.

She kept reliving the moment of teleport. It was the dividing line. Before it, there had existed a time in which what had happened could be fixed. Afterwards was only the knowledge that she had led a man to his death, at best.

Ahead, Adam dashed into view through an arch, cloak flying as he spun to take up position to one side. Vale slid through, sweeping out as he turned. The horror that followed them sloughed flesh to the fiery strike of Adam’s weapon, then toppled at the touch of Vale’s sword. The elf did not pause, free hand beckoning Cornelius. He spun through the arch again and was gone before the Llorkhian moved.

Cornelius broke into a run to hold the door, with Adam. The thump of his boots receded at a seemingly slower pace than the loss of the blue light spitting off his hammer. The light pulled away from the four of them at the rear, leaving only the thud-thud, thud-thud of what was after all not boots, but her heart.

Vale’s voice echoed, words garbled in the echoing assault of bone and metal. Behind it came a moan like cold made incarnate. “Torch!” Adam shouted, diving out of sight. He took first her fixed gaze with himself, then Cornelius, and finally Nipsy, scampering forward with the torch that had been called for a dozen times already on this journey into madness. There were things that required burning before they would rest.

She caught herself on the frame of an arch, blocks beneath her fingers damp and gritty with the residue of ages, unaware until that moment that she had dashed after the gnome.

Nipsy’s torch wavered a line of fire into the fight in the chamber beyond. Adam, Cornelius and Vale danced with a floating wraith, the ragged edges of a hood descending over emptiness. Beyond it came the walking dead, more slowly, while from the sides of the chamber skeletal figures clattered from the depths.

Too many. She had yet to see any of the three that formed their forward ranks take any injury at all, but there were too many monsters shambling into the room. They came through a doorway on the far side, blackness beyond. Some larger room? This an antechamber? Vale cut backward at a rotting arm, severing it, before spinning through to attack the floating wraith. The chill it emanated curled in the dark, swirling in the streak of Cornelius’s hammer. The yeti horns of the big man’s helmet stretched grotesque shadows on the wall, and across her memory of another night filled with yeti.

Adam disengaged. He swung around, hand dipping into his belt pouch and coming up with a bottle, its contents throwing a pure, rippling light on his face as he spun and hurled.

The pop of glass was lost in the teeth-jarring shriek of the spirit, splashed with blessed waters. Perhaps Oghma’s clerics had provided--

The skeletons clattered into a run for Adam, who was reaching for his mace as the hooded wraith shriveled. With the example of the holy water before her, Clarianna cried out for the Binder’s aid. She had no liturgical words, no memorized quotes from the holy texts, just a devout wish that what should not be moving should stay decently prone, or return to that condition forthwith. “Binder TAKE you!” she screamed through the bile, and gave guilt a body of power.

Half a dozen skeletons exploded, shrapnel pelting the walls.

Shocked, as the remnants were battered down by the warriors, she stood like a headstone. Here lies Clarianna Gardner, who used Oghma’s name in hatred.

Nipsy finished the wraith’s ectoplasmic remains with his coup de fire, and murmured what she would swear were congratulations, passing back towards the rear. Little Mistress Wren, who should not be here at all among these things that threatened experienced members, seemed stunned, longbow clutched in her hand. Clarianna looked for Madog Millhouse, another too innocent for this expedition, and found him nocking an arrow to his own bow. Adam turned and caught her eye, giving her a smile of approval across the slurry of dead between them. The light of battle in his eyes chilled the back of her neck. Vale vanished silently into the shadows ahead. Cornelius returned to pivot on a heel, to stand where he could join the two fighters ahead, or defend the troops behind him.

Three warriors at the front. Three ranged fighters at the rear. Herself between, the lone representative of power either arcane or divine.

Her heart sank. Adam ghosted after Vale, and out of sight.

Seven. She hadn’t counted until then. They were seven beings, advancing into the depths.

She refused to contemplate the last time she had been among an expeditionary force of this number, and that the detail then dispatched had been an exploration of the halls of death. It is not germane. In any case, they would be eight when they found Korkoran. He is dead. And he would be alive. He is hers, by now. They would bring him out. He belongs to Vansa.

“We have to hurry,” she said, to quell the voice arguing that they should flee, that all was lost. “Mister Korkoran is in danger of his life and soul.”
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

Post by Wynna »

The altar exuded evil. It was an affront to all things that chose life and light. That wasn’t why she couldn’t move though, on following Cornelius into what had been until then merely another chamber in this exhausting maze of horrors.

Skulls piled the fretwork of the front plate. Skulls and rocks fallen from the ceiling and skeletal remains she couldn’t help but identify, all arranged by sentient hands or by Beshaba’s into a mound of interwoven death. A single grinning skull surmounted it. Larger bones predominated beneath. Femur. Pelvis. Humerus. A spine of still attached vertebra surfacing through a rib cage. Below these, smaller remains had sifted to the bottom, a mournful sediment embanking all. A white glimmer hung about the whole, chilling yellowed surfaces with a swampy glow. Beside this cairn of bone, a coffin. Around all, twisting runes that did not look painted so much as fused into the cobbles, crazed by time.

Vale responded to her exclamation, his lips moving, his hand gesturing at the altar.

Because they were what she could reach, she eradicated the shamanic pictograms scratched in the frozen mud first, rampant lion and elk and beasts she could not recognize, trampling them into slush until her bare feet bled, choking on silent tears and snot and airless gasps. His barbarian insult was too tall to climb, the rocks too heavy for his dead whore’s child’s hands, but the whore’s child moved them, one by one, the small ones that cemented the larger, levering at branches, until the entire mound collapsed in an avalanche that buried her for hours in stones and her mother’s corpse.

Not pictographs but runes crossed beneath her, then behind. She broke the wax seal on a bottle in her hand, preserved from the previous fight in the previous room of leaping dead things. Shaken by the flash of memory that was so strong that her feet ached with remembered frostbite, she upended the holy water over the top of the altar.

She knew what she was doing. This was not a burial mound, though obviously, clearly, worse than that. She could have stopped. It had naught to do with her personally, but everything to do with her calling. She knew that Vale had not extended an invitation to redeem what could not be redeemed. She was in full possession of her faculties, as sweat-salted lips tasted the spatter of purest water, as her shaking hand felt the lightening of the bottle, as her arm floated upward while the blessed contents emptied. She did not know if the altar had dredged up that memory by some act of motive evil or whether she had laid herself atop it as an offering of her own psyche. She did know that her act of defiance had done nothing to heal anything, past or present.

Beside her, beyond the coffin, a creature shimmered into being. Impossible not to equate her action with its arrival. Hairless, naked and emaciated, its humanoid face twisted into a scream of utter hopelessness. It could have been a woman, once. Impossible to tell, sex and other chunks of flesh merely seeping wounds. Rotting toes splayed on two runes, so centered upon them that it could have grown out of them. Perhaps it had. The strokes of the sigils on which it stood reminded her too much of the Abyssal she had been unable to translate, on the flask Aglorus had tasked her with an eternity ago.

The thing turned a luminous, hopeless gaze on Adam, as Adam’s mace crushed its chest. An arrow pierced its cheek, ripping flesh to bone, and another flew past without leaving a mark. Vale’s blade ripped into it, and Cornelius’s hammer. Clarianna let fly a bolt, because she had few more blessings, liquid or otherwise, and must conserve. Time seemed to be skipping, hard to track. She thought they fought for minutes, or mere heartbeats.

Vale instantly...eventually...stepped in to slide the final blow through it. It turned its scream on him. At the distance of a breath, the featureless wells of its eyes drained of their blackness, to hint at the definition of pupils, retina and sclera.

It fell backwards off the sword, and behind the coffin.

She knew, without doubt, that for the immeasurable transition between undeath and death, the horror in those eyes had been for what it found within itself.

“Mistress Gardner, do you know what you are doing?” Vale turned her way smoothly.

“Cleansing something foul.” She swallowed, cotton-mouthed, the flecks of holy water on her lips pointing up how dry her mouth was.

“Gods,” Adam muttered. “What was that?” He stood before the altar now.

Vale held her in his own stare. “Go to the surface. If you will not use your Knowledge and ability to study and comprehend, you are a close-minded zealot taking chances with all lives here. Now, examine these runes....and explain what danger they may be. Or leave.”

She smoothed flat palms down her legs, then stilled them. She would do it again, if the situation presented itself. “If you send me to the surface alone now, you are the same.”

“Please….” Mistress Wren said quietly, as Nipsy raised the torch and looked between herself and Vale.

“Discipline!” Cornelius admonished.

Adam stepped backwards, one pace, then another. His heel turned beneath himself. “Clary.”

She was past Vale in an instant. “Adam?” She caught his arm, found him unsteady. “What is it?”

“The altar. When I neared it...it made me feel ill.”

“Step away.” Her shoulder beneath his. His arm around her neck. She pressed his hand to her collarbone with her own and pulled backwards, past Vale. Adam’s jaw had twisted, holding in sickness, too closely resembling the pinched face of the creature just dispatched. Her heart dropped a beat. “Adam, step away.” Past Maddog Millhouse. Past Mistress Wren.

The bard, voice cracking with exhaustion, offered a truth that struck hard. “We came here for a purpose...let's not forget that someone's life hangs in the balance. We win this together, or die alone.”

That was something she should be saying, Clarianna Gardner, acolyte of Oghma.

She watched his face as he found a potion and drank it, watched until he seemed steadier. Had it been the altar itself that did this to him, as he had said? Or had it been the creature the altar had spawned? When you disturbed it. Her neck chilled. Walking on her grave, that was called. Adam's. Adam's grave. The man she loved.

What had she done? Does this room belong to Beshaba in truth, that the goddess would punish my love for an action other gods deem righteous?

Vale circled the coffin, studying the floor around it. Cornelius placed himself between the coffin and the rest of the group, hammer resting across a muscled forearm. Clarianna tightened her hold on Adam’s arm. “If you will allow me to approach, Vale?”

“No. I do not know what you have planned. So stand back.”

It hurt, more than it should have, even though she had squandered his trust knowingly. “I plan to read those symbols, if I can.”

She could, she already knew it, at least their gist. Even from here she recognized Abyssal, and Draconic, the language of power. He gave no reply, a silence she had earned, but she loosened her grip and slipped from beneath Adam's arm anyway. Not far, only a step, to see around Cornelius as she ran her fingers through her hair, and let them rest on a long pin among those that bound it up.

Eyes narrowed in thought, Vale paused above the ancient protections, or summons, or curses. All of the above, she thought, from what she could see from here. He looked up. “If you intend to study this, step forward,” he said. “If you intend to splash water about and swing your mace, I would rather you not.”

Once, she had transcribed a restricted text that illustrated the contents of the skull, which the book claimed to be the seat of mind. The brain it depicted was full of gray coils and lumps, and the book said that somewhere within that nest of matter lay immaterial knowledge. Of course, it could not point to any instance or evidence of such an unholy claim, and she doubted it entirely, but the imagery had stuck with her. It gave rise to a useful mnemonic when seeking a memory of things she knew, buried deeper than consciousness.

Concentrating, she took the shapes of the runes on the floor in through her eyes and imagined them passing into the necromancer’s coils of brain matter, until they found the matching shapes among the coils onto which they could press themselves.

And she had it, unwinding her hand from within sticky strands of her hair. The runes' crude meaning. References from other texts, also restricted, probably from the same basement shelves as the necromantic analytical text, but interspersed with now recalled mentions of other arcane areas of focus. “I know these....or something like.” Softening her surety, trying not to cause more friction after the firestick had rubbed. “These are Draconic. A language of great power. And there...the twisted shapes in the midst, those are Abyssal. I have recently seen sigils of both languages, and I am sure of those. The Abyssal are exactly where the thing that appeared was.” The thing that had gazed at Adam, and at Vale.

“You said conjuring. Do the runes trigger a conjuration spell?” Adam pressed a scroll into her hand, a lesser scribing to dispel magics.

She did not think it would be enough, but kept that to herself. “I suspect that the conjuration sigils in Draconic are what summoned the Abyssal creature. Or will summon one worse. But I cannot be sure. Let me cast a reading.” What the necromantic text had not shown in its dissective illustrations was the true division of Knowledge, or even that there were two kinds: simple lore and the Binder’s Truth. Grateful for the reason to spend some of what she had left, she called upon a very small sip of peace, to reach the meaning that went beyond any mortal definition. “The runes protect the altar and the coffin….” She trailed off as mind caught up with Truth, bringing unwelcome confirmation.

“Do the runes still hold power?” Vale asked, his watchfulness on the shadows around them. “Or did you discharge their potency when you summoned the bodak with your quick wrist?”

Bodak. She noted what he named the creature. All Knowledge was equal in Oghma’s eyes. He had named her a heedless zealot, also, and with what she saw now, he had been right. “I owe you an apology.” Lore and Truth had steadied her but both were shaken once again by guilt. Korkoran is dead. By now, she prayed that to be true, for his sake, and that of his soul. It was too late. He had been too long in Vansa's grip. An abyss opened, but to swallow her, not disgorge a bodak. “It appears that damaging the altar will summon .... something.” Other than it already had? She could not tell, which humbled her further. She could have killed them. Or worse. The sickness on Adam’s face, the twist of his mouth…. How did a bodak spawn? By taking a living creature, the same way as did a vampire? “That is... all I can read. The runes are very complex, and Abyssal twists strangely in the mind.”

“No matter what happens Gardner,” Vale said, with the steadiness that made him a leader. With the dispassion that made him cruel. “Know that you were brought on because you were smart, and I knew you may grow tougher. Know that you will never be tough enough to afford being stupid.”

In that, she heard Truth.
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Re: Lack of Intelligence

Post by Wynna »

Defeat. Vale had ended the search for Korkoran. It was over.

Laughter, sourceless and everywhere, had filled the darkness of the halls falling behind them now. Adam said it was not Vansa, that the laughter was a man's. She did not know, could not tell. All that mattered was that the cold chuckling had stopped them, brought forth a recognition in the leaders of this failed rescue. On the surface, high above, the sun had set.

She couldn’t see the difference that made. This was the land of the undead; they were the intruders. Nothing they had brought with them had made a difference, much less the light of the sun that had never shone on the things they had faced so far, and never would.

The stones beneath her hand gave way. She lost balance, caught it with a clumsy plant of a foot. The wall had been keeping her upright. The sting in her fingertips was raw skin. The air on her face moved, stale, but with the smell of recently released putridity. Another room. One they had traversed on the way down, leaving only the dead to greet them on their way back up.

Recognition kept cycling in her mind. They were abandoning the search for Korkoran. Abandoning. She needed distance. Common sense. Icy remove. All she had were the tears and the passions of guilt.

Vale said something, muffled by the distance of the room full of coffins. The blurred glow in the middle was the altar of skulls. This was the room of the bodak. Memory of its hollow eyes, looking at Adam, burned twin holes through her tangled thoughts.

Cornelius spoke, on the far side of the scattered coffins. He had halted. “New line hier.” His flat tone said enough. More resistance in the way of their return to the surface. “Is this the vampire Fraulein Clarianna saw?”

She groped for her holy symbol with one hand, and a bottle of holy water with the other. “I cannot see it,” she faltered out.

“Watch out for each other,” Nipsy said quietly.

One more vampire. One...more...vampire. She would not give in to hysteria. Only one vampire. She moved into the room, seeking Adam, and saw him taking up position off to the side, nearer the far wall. Vale faced a creature of gray shadows, a corpse standing between them and the exit. Vale tossed aside an empty elixir bottle. “Stand aside....or be removed from existence.”

In the hallway beyond the door, figures shifted. Despite the glow of the bodak’s altar that thinned to the barest hint of light at the threshold, they did not cast shadows on those behind. The entry consolidated them, though, so that the ones ahead blocked sight of those behind, showing partial faces, a shoulder, or a leg. Body parts, walking, as the altar itself was comprised of jumbled bones. Not just one. They had amassed here, the things that meant to keep them from reaching the surface.

The vampire moved. Its sideways strike with its clawed hand would have eviscerated the guildmaster, had he still been where it was aimed. “Hold the door!” Vale’s voice rose above the rush of feet, as what had awaited in them in the hall began to blow into the room.

The vampires did not stop coming. There was no counting them. Cornelius rushed into the flow, with Vale, both using bodies and weapons to bottle it up. Claws, and hissing voices, promising death, promising worse. A tempest of white faces rising above the falling strikes of the two -- only two -- who held the fore. From his vantage, Adam threw bottles of holy water larger than those she had, also throwing, lips locked down against the screams that wanted to escape. Be careful! She wanted to go to him, and didn’t. Help me. She wanted him to come to her, and clamped down on that. We are lost, like Korkoran, after all.

Arrows split the shadows to either side of her, the sound they made different from the gales of the vampire hurricane. Nipsy and Wren and Madog nocked and loosed, nocked and loosed, their missiles screaming past her, modulating with their approach and then fading after they passed, to end in a hail of wet smacks.

Impossibly, Vale and Cornelius drew together as dead things between them were hacked apart, sizzling with fire and electricity that made the shadows jump crazily in the room. They fought, Cornelius smashing the last foe between them, and shoulder to shoulder, they pushed forward, but Cornelius staggered.

Gore coated him, from beneath his armor, hands and neck, the rim of his helmet dripping. Head wound. A slice from a weapon or the touch of a vampire had laid him open from his brow to the back of his neck. In profile to her, he blinked blood away and his arms continued to rise and fall, but they bunched with effort, and he did not block the next claw that raked across his armor and deflected up under his bearded jaw. Blood sprayed. He spun around, shoulder slamming the door frame, and bounced back, away from Vale, away from the door. It wasn't just the head wound, or the last one, though both bled furiously, and freshly.

Clarianna traded holy water out with the wand stuck through a loop of an almost empty bandolier.

Cornelius was hurt, badly. In the wake of that instinct came colder reasons. If the shield wall fell, they all died. Adam. Herself. Those weaker or smaller than her.

She had only two blessings left, one a healing, but she did not call on Oghma. It had been drilled into her, the night of Yule Tide. Stay back. Come into the fray only with a wand of healing, faster, surer, a thing all could do and easier for an ally to recognize as aid in the heat of battle. Only in the end could that be thrown aside. None of that went consciously through her thoughts. All she knew, running in, was that Cornelius was injured, and she was tasked with a responsibility.

One thing that she could do right today.

Something hit her as she brought the wand towards his wounds. His shoulder? No...hers. It hurt, under a hanging flap of armor, crimson points stippling shocked white flesh, and then two long channels filling with blood. She wasn’t sure what she had been attempting to reach on him. Head wound. Bleeding terribly. She could not see whether the ragged tear on the back of his skull had closed over the bone beneath. A grayness threatened her thoughts, narrowing her vision.

She should go.

Arrows rustled past, modulating still, but only in that they grew louder and louder as they approached to hit the targets just behind her. She was at the front, but facing the rear. How? Silhouettes struggled between her and the archers. A weapon, flashing in and out of a fight, at a vampire. The enemy visibly limped, alight with the glow of the altar that did not seem distant in the middle of the room anymore, but right up behind it, framing it with power. The altar aided the creature, or just highlit its unbleeding wounds. A vampire. Behind the lines.

Again...how?

It turned, and fast as a falling stone, a blow fell by the wand in her hand, past the crossbow hanging limp at her waist, laying open a leg from knee to ankle, beneath leathers that again parted like the fogs of the past. Her head floated amidst gray thoughts. She should…. Flee. Her feet dragged, cold. Who was fighting the vampire? Adam had been...throwing….

She lost that thought, dropping it with the bow. A mace had come to her hand of its own will. Like the altar, an object with its own motivations. She struggled for comprehension, reality receding into the past. No, she had laid her hand upon it, for some reason. She could not pass. She should not be where she was. The vampire was already too close. She was in its melee range. If it killed the person fighting it….

She was aware of the archers, gnome and elf and half orc. They would die. She struck at its back, foolishly, calling its attention.

She should not be here. Run. Hide. They only hear you if you make noise.

The gray was closing in, inside her mind, the coils of matter flattening out into the immaterial, thinning into the rushing wind. She had one blessing left, and one curse. She should use the prayer for searing lights. But they had … failed … against … Vansa.

Vansa took Korkoran. The bodak gazed at Adam. Her mother died a whore. Her grandmother died a frozen soul.

She should...heal….. One responsibility. Flee. Hide. Use the wand. Stupid.

“I pray that you will comfort me in my suffering…. ” A pale face floated around, empty eyes locking on her. Cold. The glacial chill of a heartless researcher. “...and bless the means used for my cure." Her hands were up, wrapping two bony arms beneath withered dry flesh. Confusion. Stupid. Would she dispense the Knowledge of the Binder into a vampire? Why would she think to do that? Why would she try to heal this thing, a nightmare given flesh? "Give me such confidence in the power of your Truth…” Such questions did not matter, for she did not feel the touch of her god any longer, only grayness. She had no connection to the divine. It had fled. Why would she? How could she deserve such communion? Hol kurv! Skinny whore. “That even when I am afraid….” The vampire’s hands were forcing her own back, closing around her head, blocking her ears from the sound of all but the rumble of falling rock, and the words that were the only things she had left. “...I may put my whole trust in you--”

Adam.

With a sharp, brief agony in her neck, the stones and skulls of the altar mound buried her in their fall.
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