A Colder Kind of Charisma

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Wynna
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A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

Steven the Coachman asks every new passenger if they are the owner of the To Do list he found fallen behind the cushions of the coach that morning. He shows it to each new passenger. It is a numbered list, each entry scribed atop a straight line obviously drawn in first for guidance.

1. Return S’s wand. *This entry is drawn through by a neat line.*
2. Bury the fallen. *This entry is drawn through by a shakier line in a differently colored ink.*
3. Plead case to Joybringer. Speak to servants of other deities (except Kiber! Orphans' safety paramount). Professional courtesy. Interdenominational cooperation.)
4. Reconsecrate defiled Sanctuary and Chancel. (Consult S the W.)
5. Go over temple accounts for discretionary budget with S the W. (Perhaps some revenue could be attained by peddling the less powerful prayers valuable in the day to day lives of our flock? Speak to Jh about scribing resources for such.)
6. Dwarven engineers? Gondian artificers? Worst case: those of natural divinity attuned to the shaping of stone and soil?
7. Warmth. Gloves. (Is it truly as frozen as it feels in those echoing depths? I am so damnably cold, all the time.)
8. The Lathanderite, Bran, may know of ways to permanently imbue worked stone with protections.
9. Delve the archives for credo, charter and rituals of Sks.
10. Become stronger.
11. Become whom I have always feared.


*At the end, there is an unnumbered addendum in a shakier hand and differently colored ink*

Clean out A’s. effects at C. (Charity? Defense of weak? Sks?)
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

Dear Joybringer Arrend,

First, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, in a personal capacity.

In our previous interactions, I have come before you as a supplicant. At the beginning of my tenure in Waterdeep, before even I had officially joined the Font of Knowledge as an acolyte, you had occasion to do do me great service. Your intercession with the gods brought back one whom I came to know and love. For the joy that followed, you have my humble appreciation.

Likewise, for your care and concern for a brave child, fallen to an icy fate, I thank you. There is a topic that I would like to broach, pursuant to that latter event. Perhaps at a meeting, which I propose below, in my professional capacity.

Re: Raising the Dead. Your abilities in this area are tangential to the main topic I would discuss as the newly appointed cleric over the local branch of the Oghmanite sect of Seekers. I fear the vampire queen may be multiplying her daylight operatives and will not develop the subject matter in a possibly intercepted written missive.

The only thing I will say is that interdenominational cooperation can only aid the flocks we serve against the depredations of the undead.

May we meet, at your earliest convenience?


Kindest regards,

Clarianna Gardner
Seeker of Truth
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

Baerim Coraddor
House Invincible
Silverymoon

Vigilant Master,

I address this to you at House Invincible, as the nearest seat of the Watcher, in the absence of a chapter of your order within the city of Waterdeep.

I hope that I am not the first to communicate the horrors that befell Helm's Hall in Waterdeep last night. If so, I regret that the Truth is that 8 of the charges of the orphanage are dead and a further 21 missing. A search has been mounted. The reaving of the shrine and orphanage by vampires is the latest and worst atrocity committed against the innocent. Please be assured that the Font of Knowledge is honored to have as a guest the noble paladin who shielded children to whom he had dedicated his life. All of the clerical cohort of Waterdeep -- indeed, all the citizenry -- knows that Brother Kiber would have died rather than see one of those children harmed. We shall care for him until such a time as the Church of Helm may do so.

I take this opportunity, also, to commend to you one who exemplifies the protections your order espouses. Without guidance, without superiors, a young sailor by the name Madog Millhouse has been blessed with the divine touch of the Vigilant One. I offer as the Binder's Truth that he is deserving of official recognition --


The sound of shuffling sandals lifted her head. Expecting her administrator with another plate of food to ignore, she lay down the quill and pinched her eyes until spots danced. "Bobboli, are they done with the brickwork in the Supply Room? I quit hearing chisels an hour ago." The candle stub on the corner of her desk, showing the last two lines of the day unmelted, told her it had been more like four hours ago.

No windows. There were no windows down here to see the sunrise or sunset. The corners of her eyes pricked at that ridiculously small loss. No windows.

"Just put it down," she said, stretching her back as an excuse to remain with it to the big, empty room that was her bedroom and office. The office of the High Seeker of the Font of Knowledge, the Temple of Oghma in Waterdeep. Her voice was steady. She was getting better at it. "On the table by the fireplace. Thank you." She was getting better and the interruptions of emotion into what must be done were getting fewer, as well. She worked stiff, cold fingers. "Is that flue drawing in the north bedroom yet? Oh, and have I had an answer from the Temple of Wonder?" It was taking Bobboli ages to go."Did the painting of the Great Glacier arrive? It should be hung above the shelves, there."

"Seeker Gardner," said an unexpected, dry, thin voice. Galvanized, she came twisting out of her chair, knocking it backwards. It hit the ground hard enough to ring on the stone beneath the carpet.

The old man stood beneath her lintel. Chandeliers through a stained glass arch above it cast angled squares of colored light across his gray hair. Behind him was Bobboli, with a baby. Her heart dropped. Bobboli's face mugged up into momentary, rueful apology.

"Loremaster." She bent her head, hiding her face. "What...what brings you down here?"

"Need I ask permission of my High Seeker?" Sandrew the Wise. Sandrew the Sharp.

"Of course not. I am happy to see you. Would you like a seat?" She gestured, thoughts churning. She wasn't ready with the ritual he had asked for. She was behind time and already underperforming. She hadn't finished researching the archives, much less begun drafting plans to fill the reconsecrated halls. This morning's hallowing of the defiled altar had been beautiful, and the power of the man before her had made her yearn for his surety and connection to Oghma's Knowledge, but she had been glad to see his narrow, robed backside climbing the stairs without certain things having had to be said.

Realizing that she had drifted off down a few of many distracting rabbit holes, she looked around, right into the eyes of Truth. Sandrew said, "The child is healthy. I have seen to him myself."

Of course he had known what was in his temple. Knowing was what he did.

"I...." I can explain. I had to bring him here. I could not leave this child that has survived goblins and vampires unprotected longer. I could not leave Diogenes. "...am glad to hear that." And she was. Her heart pounded once, soaring, then fell.

"Administrator Bobboli." Sandrew drew forward the small man, with his smaller bundle.

Clarianna watched the Administrator of the Order of the Seekers cross the floor, holding out the baby. She glanced at Sandrew, then took the child, soft and clean, smelling of talc. Heavy in her arms. The bite mark on his shoulder was gone. He swung a fist and knocked it into her chin. She folded him close, against her heart, now pounding harder for some reason, blonde wisps of hair brushing beneath her eyes, now stinging again. For some reason.

She raised her eyes to Sandrew's, no longer concerned with what he saw swimming there. Hiding it from him seemed to have been a non-starter, anyway. "Thank you," she said. "I will take him to visit Kiber." She kissed the top of the baby's head, his tiny fragile head. "In a while."

"Seeker Gardner." Sandrew's robes swayed as he turned. Bobboli scurried in his wake with a grimace of amusement back at her. "A Seeker who hides from Truth is of no use to me. A Seeker cannot Know the world if she shuts herself off from it."
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

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She distinctly heard a giggle in the darkness. Behind her. On the shadowed, empty street. A girl, or a small child. The sound was high-pitched, and brought no reflexive smile to her lips. Instead, it lodged deep within the back of her neck, raising gooseflesh.

She glanced behind and saw nobody.

The buildings pressed too close here, squeezing darkness between them, compressing it onto her. She was out too late. She should have sought shelter in the Tower of the Order, which she had passed. Blood and pride tingling with the imprint of repeated channeling of Oghma's power, she had bypassed the lights of the tower spilling onto the cobblestones. She regretted that now.

Bravery, Clarianna, is the opposite side of foolishness on Tymora's coin.

She held her holy symbol with one hand. The other she rested atop her mace, knowing that it was not just pride that it fit more comfortably there than in days before. It had shattered dry bones and cleaved immaterial spirits between the City of the Dead and the sewers today and not failed her, the spells for fire laid upon it ending the existences of whatever it struck.

At the end of the street ahead, the torches of the market flickered, fitful in the gaps between the buildings. She considered the scrolls she carried within reach, and doubled her pace.

She should not have gone back out. That they thought she had needed escort through the streets earlier still rankled. Hudol and Morgan, the two holy warriors of different deities than her own, were not tasked with her protection. Which changed nothing about the fact that she should not have set off across town on her own errands after Hudol had delivered her like a mail pouch to the Font.

It felt like weakness to comfort herself with the memory of their swords crossing in flashes of fire-lit steel before her, as she had raised holy symbol against the things that barred their exit. Things that should not be standing at all had fallen before the three of them. Weakness or not, being a contributing part of such a force almost made up for her error that had put them there in the first place. She had asked them to help deliver the body of the young man to Brother John, too close to sunset. Finding darkness upon them and the gates locked upon exiting that crypt had filled her with dread and -- she admitted it -- fear. She had never been there after sunset. Immediately upon her exit from Road's End, the clatter of walking bones converging on her had told her that all the anxieties she had held about it were deserved.

Until, alone, with the men inside the crypt, she had opened herself to the power to condemn what should be in their graves, and bones had crumbled to dust around her. After that, the only way out had been through tunnels the other two had known, where, of course, the zeal of the paladins had demanded more than simple escape. Despite her misgivings, they had advanced through skeletons and wights, zombies and ghouls. The final chamber had been filled with shifting, shambling creatures. Seeing the things hungering for their living warmth, the wave of horrors coming from all sides to engulf the three of them, she had accepted that this was it. This was where their overconfidence would tell. Somebody would die here, and if one did, then all would.

And yet all three of them had not only made it through that assault, but out through the sewers and up, to find it nighttime on the surface.

As she had made it now, to the Market, stalls bustling, carts clattering. Voices calling. She looked behind her, down the street, black as a tunnel. The hackles on her neck remained up, fine hairs prickling against the cloth of her hood.

A giggle. That was all. After all she had done that day to carry out Sandrew's mandate to Know the community and world around her, a giggle had undone her.

Pride and wisdom warring in her heart, she caught up with the stomping boots of the last patrol through the Castle Ward, and walked with them, all the way to the Font.
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

Once upon a time.

That was how her stories had started for the children. Once upon a time there was a little boy. Sometimes, the widest, most enraptured eyes belonged to a girl, of course. But the memories that darkened such clean-faced mirrors of what-could-have-beens were usually too much.

Once upon a time there was a little boy who was the bravest, strongest, cleverest little boy in a kingdom full of brave and strong and clever children. He was so brave and strong and clever that he knew how to see the things grown-ups had forgotten and when to keep that to himself. He knew that vegetables gave his sword arm strength and that the finest knights of the realm practiced the curve on the tail of a letter ‘Q’ a hundred times per lesson. Yes, Wilnen, a hundred times. A thousand if you want to be the Knight Captain of the Griffon Cavalry. Where was I?

The moment the door had opened, fairy tales had died. Until then, Hudol’s answer from his goddess could have been misinterpreted. Until then, the stolen children had sat cross-legged around her in an arc of possibility. They could have been alive. They could have been hostage. They could have escaped.

Hands pressed between her knees, staring at the black on black impressions of bookshelves, she rocked and mourned the death of self-deception. The darkness of her room threatened to swallow her down, grief and all.

Clarianna, the children miss you. They want to see you. Soon.

The vampire’s touch on her mind had left filth, and the cold of the grave. It had smeared rot over her memories of the children, themselves now replaced by giggling caricatures of what they had been. What they could have grown up to be.

Unable to sleep, paralyzed by loss, she had passed in and out of fitful dreams before throwing back the covers. Action was needed. Writing for aid. Pacing the floor. Attacking the horror with stake and mace.

She sat, taking in shuddering gasps, on the edge of her bed.

Won’t you read to them, Clarianna? They need you. Come to them.

She should have spoken the first moment she felt the brush of the unclean presence, before it took on meaning and became words inside her head. She should have recognized it for what it was. She ached, because she could never apologize to Adam, who had suffered this same assault. I am sorry, my love. The vampire had spoken in his mind, too, one night in the sewers. Her failure to feel what he had experienced then added depth and dimensions of blame now. I am so sorry. She hadn’t understood until this night what it felt like.

It felt like violation. Like rage and sickened shame that if only she had done something else, something quicker, something braver, she could have protected what she loved.

Next time, she would throw all her shattered loves in Vansa’s face like holy water, melting the flesh of the cold queen down to a grinning skull. Next time.

There she is, children. She is here. Won’t you come in, Seeker?

Half spoken, half communicated directly into her thoughts, the silken voice from within the study had been a shroud, trailing wet black gore across their souls. Sarenna’s fear had been palpable. She and Clarianna both would have taken up Shalheira’s suggestion to climb out the upstairs windows, but the men had argued for fighting.

Around her, now, alone in this room, the faintest of lights through the transom brushed the furnishings with the idea of what they had been, rather than differentiating them with texture and solidity. It lent a pale, pale glimmer to her flesh. Pulling her hands free, she rubbed warmth into them by touch, over chilled flesh, cold knuckles, protective rings loose on her fingers. She couldn’t see the blood in the creases, couldn’t feel it beneath her fingertips. Unseen or not, it would be forever there, bestowed on her by Vansa, transferred to everything she touched.

After begging them to flee, after the Kelemvorite had thrown open the door, after the choice had been made, she had advanced into the study behind the two holy warriors, falling into the chasm carved out by their zealous anger. To see the children.

Velene and Hawk. Pale creatures. Dead in all their potential. Dead and forever lost. She did not remember consciously all that came after, only impressions left by rage and terror.

Her dreams brought her those impressions as distorted flashes of giggles, the shattering of votive glass bottles filled with blessed waters, Vansa’s corpseflesh fingers in her mind. Terror, trying to drag Morgan off bodily, not budging him. Rage, screaming out for Vansa’s location, and a column of light from her own hands.

You disappoint me, Clarianna.

In the last and most coherent of the nightmares she sat in a chair. It was the chair from before the fireplace of the study, but it was centered in the midst of the orphanage floor. Unarmored, fingers bare, she wore only her holy symbol and the white shift of acolytes and sacrifices. Blood puddled the floor, slippery under her bare feet. The children were arrayed around her and she cradled Diogenes in her lap, but a Diogenes the age of Velene, of Hawk, of the older orphans. Her arm around him, she rested her cheek on his head, and read to him from a book of restricted medical lore. He clapped at passages of vivisection, open-mouthed in laughter. Looking up at her in delight, his fangs ran with a thread of pink. Beside them, a sluggish red trickle curved across the swell of her breast. It stained the edges of the quill on its silver chain.

Help them. They are hungry and thirsty.

That was the one that had sent her surging upright, fully awake, to sit on the edge of the bed and keen. Without sound, dry-eyed, but keening nonetheless, in sobbing intakes of breath that hurt all the way down to a bruisingly clenched gut.

They miss you.


Diogenes was alive, just an infant, asleep with the wet nurse Bobboli had magically produced in a room next to Kiber and the acolyte who cared for him. She curled her fingers into the mattress, holding onto it against the need to wake them, any of them. A broken High Seeker was not a High Seeker who inspired the clerical corps.

Clarianna.

Witnesses to slaughter, likely old enough to know what Vansa did to them as she did it, Velene and Hawk had been put to rest. The paladins had seen to that. They would never fear again.

Come.

Nineteen more would never hear further chapters of their own stories, never meet their handsome prince, never come into their own powers. The only happy ending she had to offer the missing were stakes through their unbeating hearts.

To.

For now, though, through this night, she would mourn them, thirty children, innocents all, lost somewhere on their journey between once upon a time and happily ever after.

Me.
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Mick »

I can’t get over how good that one is. Thanks for enriching this plot for us all.
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

My Lord of Mystery Starseer and Speaker Thammas,

I write to bring your attention to matters of interest to your Lady's domain over the Weave which also intersect with Oghma's pursuit of Knowledge.

Firstly, I formally notify both of you that Davrik Saerfynn, member of the Watchful Order of Magists and Protectors, has been offered membership into the adventuring association of the Seekers. We are not a guild, but a secular affiliate of the Temple of Oghma chiefly concerned with the pursuit of Knowledge, and I can see no barrier to his voluntary dual affiliations. Indeed, I look upon his entry into our rolls as both divine blessing and arcane wonder and a benefit to both of our houses. We are pleased to have him resident within the Font for so long as he might wish, growing his Mystra granted and trained skills within our interdenominational and cross-cultural society.

Secondly, and in the spirit of interdenominational cooperation exemplified by Master Saerfynn, I would speak directly to My Lord Starseer on another member of the Mystran denomination. A Knight of the Mystic Fire has been assigned to you from the chapter in Silverymoon, one Squire Hudol Rhyfelwr. It has pleased you to have seconded him to duty creating connections and allies within the city of Waterdeep. I offer that there could be no greater ally to Magic, than Knowledge, and would like to develop this alliance further in person, in a meeting with you at your earliest convenience.

I look forward to a close relationship between our temples. I consider the domains of our deities to be as close spiritually as their houses in Waterdeep are geographically. Magic and Knowledge inform each other without regard to the natures of their devotees, each larger in aspect than the sum of their contributors, and I hope that we may find growth and assistance in each other's roles.

Regards,

Clarianna Gardner
Seeker of Truth.
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

Dearest Brother Anton,

Of all the people I left, I regret most your loss. I know that you have it in your heart to forgive this and more from those of my blood that you have fostered and seen vanish. I do not forgive myself, however. I regret any featherweight of grief added to your dragon hoard of sorrows. You gave and gave and gave again to each successive generation of faith and faithlessness, and received only pain.

If you have read this far and not crumpled my petition for forgiveness or burned it in the censors of the Halls of Inspiration, I hope that you are over the shock of receipt. Not merely in that you thought me dead as my mother before and her mother before her, but for the seal upon it. I hope, at least, that is a happier shock, and that you take heart that I have found not only home but purpose in your Binder. Now mine as well. I stole out of Silverymoon an assistant scribe of the Vault of Sages and write you now as the High Seeker of the Vault of Seekers of Waterdeep’s Font of Knowledge.

Do you hear the bravado? I imagine your gentle reproof now. “Write it, Clarianna. The writing is more than the writer. Trim to emphasis. Nothing of yourself need enter where Oghma’s Truth already holds.”

If I could, I would. I would have already.

It is not that words fail me. It is rather the opposite. How to pick from amongst the descriptions of events that have overwhelmed? I have loved, and seen that love struck down by death, because of a plea for aid from me to him on behalf of Oghma's house. I have found children to fill the hole you know exists, and seen them taken by worse than death. These and other tragedies are courtesy of a vampire queen who holds the city in her sway by night and wishes to punish those who strive against her. Fighting this vampire queen has become my calling, personally and in my duties to the Binder.

By now you will have heard that the Oghmanite clerical ranks were decimated by her spawn. “Precision, Clarianna!” Even in the expansion of your Knowledge and fears that I am here I can hear you so chide. I therefore submit my edited version. Not decimated, for that is one in ten. Nine in ten of my – our – brethren fell to slaughter.

I have been tasked by none other than Sandrew the Wise with the restoration of the residents of the temple of Oghma in Waterdeep. To that end, in the effort to rebuild, I have recently welcomed a Deineirath monastic sent by the Berdusk Zealots of the Written Word, by name of Tilverton Coals. Do not think this my only reason for writing after all this time, but I do lay a request for Truth at your feet. You know that I cannot speak directly to a Denierath priestess or priestess by choice. Not even after all this time. I would ask you to relay any word you have of this Brother Coals, or his Abbot of Berdusk, to my attention here are the Font.

In return, I shall promise to be more faithful to my own written words to you, and all those left at the Halls of Inspiration to whom I owe my education and station, for so long as I shall live.

May the Binder’s Blessings that you provided me, fall upon you. If we never exchange one more word, I know that we shall meet again in the House of Knowledge.

Clarianna Gardner
Seeker of the Order of Seekers
Font of Knowledge
Waterdeep
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

Friend HIgh Priestess of the High Moonlight Suaril,

I write to you in hopes that Selune's glow may illuminate Knowledge. There is an ancient tale of moonlight falling upon a hidden inscription and thereby kindling its mithric message. I am sure the legend is among your temple lore, so let me just say that I hope that by entering into our first journey with an invocation to friendship, that same Truth may thusly come to light.

A member of Oghma's Seekers has recently been bitten by a rat. The immediate result was a sickness of body. A call to the Binder's knowledge to reveal the nature of the affliction and Remove said Disease was not as efficacious as could have been hoped. The subject continues to exhibit poor judgement, mild euphoria and an elevation of mood, as well as physical alteration. The latter shows a pattern of progression.

Ongoing testing reveals that in assessments of speed, agility and proprioception, his results improve daily over and above his baseline, which was already higher than standard. Dissection revealed similarity between biter and bitten. (Only the former was dissected. The latter submitted to external evaluation.) Comparitive analysis of the human subject demonstrated micromusculature development of the sternum in muscle density, as shown by increased capillary blood flow in the upper dermis. Temperature is slightly high and his color is flushed. If diametrically increased circulatory vessels are indicative of the structure of developing muscle, then the speed of development of the micromusculature is impressive. I can only compare it to adhesion scar tissue that forms when muscles and connective tissues are injured, which comparison gives me pause. Although the subject reports only positivity in regards to physical enhancements, objectively it seems to me that his body is compensating for some trauma. It would, of course, be wise to rule out lycanthropy.

Could the Seekers seek your expertise in this issue, at your earliest convenience?

Kind regards,

Clarianna Gardner
Seeker of Oghma
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

The cold of the Castle Ward seeped through her skin. It closed around her heart, a shell. She had not been outside, alone at night, in some time. The bells of the nearby temples rang in her bones. Not trembling.

Not alone, either. She had the Binder, and her loved ones in her heart, protected beneath that icy shell. She had the two for whom she was newly responsible. Tilvy and Davrik thought she did not know how closely they crowded the open door of the Font, though she had told them her cry for help would come clearly, if she needed them. She expected to need them. Should not, but did.

"Iarwynn?" she called softly, still blinded from stepping out of the light within. "You sent a parishioner in for me. I am here." It wouldn't be the child, of course. It would be Vansa, to teleport away with her, and drop her body where it hurt the most people. Her fingers brushed across a scroll, maybe a block against teleport. Maybe not. "Iarwynn?" The name hurt. The vampire used love as a weapon. The memory of the little girl, her face upturned to listen at story time, struck Clarianna, ringing her composure.

She took a step down. The protections she had called down could be warding her mind. She felt nothing in her thoughts, no crawl of maggoty intrusion.

Nothing was what she must feel. Or at least, show nothing on her face of what she couldn't not feel. "Iarwynn? Are you here? I was told you could not come in and would see me." She wet dry lips. "Outside."

"Miss Clary." The quavering voice came from the darkness.

She jerked around, hand rising to shield her eyes from the faint glow of the lights atop the Lathanderite complex.

There, at the mouth of the alley. A movement in the dark, shifting out of it to become a slight, pale figure. "Iarwynn." The girl's name dropped from her lips. For a moment, she was paralyzed, only able to stare. Then she looked, for more movement in the alley, all directions. She listened for shuffling on the eaves of the Font above.

“Miss Clary.”

“It is you.” She caught her breath, then let it out in a slow sob. “Iarwynn. I hear you. Come closer.”

“Miss Clary, can you help me?”

She held to the pillar that supported the Font entablature above her, with its cornice and frieze of interlinked scrolls. “I...can, child. I am sorry for what has happened to you. I wasn’t there for you. Come here, so I can help you.”

The shadowy girl shifted, and so quickly darted across the cobbles towards her that she let out a gasp. Horror, and absolute Knowledge. No human child could move so fast, flowing through the night to the bottom of the steps. “That’s enough. Just so I can...see you.”

The frail figure stopped, and looked up at Clarianna on the steps. A tiny face, a bloodless glimmer. Eyes of red, shiny with tears. An open mouth, showing a glint of a tooth, too long to be natural.

“Oh, Iarwynn.” She could not stifle the grief.

The expression on the face of the creature fell. They remembered their attachments, for a time. Her reaction had hurt the remnant of the child she had loved. Iarwynn sniffled. “Don’t look at me, Miss Clary. I’m not pretty anymore.” Iarwynn folded, in that boneless manner of children, collapsing into crossed legs, to sit on the bottom step.

How far did the hallowing of the Font carry down? Clarianna took a step down. It was a trap. She took another step down, the stake thrust through her belt knocking against the bottles of holy waters in their bandolier loops. “I have to look at you, Iarwynn. I have to. It shows me what we have lost.” That skinny bent neck. Stake, water or prayer…. She could end the suffering, before it came to a time when this thing before her was no longer pitiable, but a predator. She slipped a vial from a loop and poured some of what it held into a cupped palm, imagining it turning to ice in her cold hand. She could not feel. Should not feel what she was feeling now.

“I hate this! Always in the dark and rats and bats and monsters.”

“You are pretty in my memory.” Clarianna’s voice broke. “You will always be a beautiful child, face turned up to listen.” She stared at the holy water, seeping away through her fingers. Not ice. It would burn that delicate face, disfiguring that memory. “You liked the stories about brave and clever girls. Can you be a brave and clever girl, Iarwynn? For me?”

The vampire child’s shoulders shook, face in pale hands. “I....will try, Miss Clary. But I can' live like this.”

“You won't have to, child. You won't have to live like this.” She took the white quill into a hand beaded with droplets of blessed water, and raised it out flat on its chain. “From all sin, From your wrath, From sudden and unprovided death, From the snares of fiends, From anger, hatred, and all ill will, From all lewdness, From lightning and tempest, From the scourge of earthquakes, From plague, famine, and war, From everlasting death, By the mystery of your holy Truth, By your Knowledge, reveal any evil.”

In the Truth that Oghma brought, she expected to feel the chill of violence and hunger for death wafting up, tendrils of evil. She expected to sense Vansa’s despoiling touch where the soul of the little girl had been.

She felt nothing. No evil. “Iarwynn?” She took a deep breath in. No evil. The child had not yet committed evil acts. Still pure.

“You were my only momma.” Iarwynn sobbed. “Please help me.”

Her own legs folded bonelessly, then. She opened her arm, as she had a dozen times to all of them, to read, sitting on the floor of the orphanage with their warm little bodies pressed in a huddle like puppies, wrestling. Before armor. Before loss.

On the bottom step, with her boots sprawled onto the cobbles, she held the vampire child. Iarwynn crawled into her embrace, and lay her head to Clarianna’s shoulder. In a living child, that open mouth would be to breathe, because of a nose filled by crying. No breath clouded the polished breastplate under that pale cheek. A long, canine incisor dimpled the sweet mouth. “Miss Clary, can you fix me?”

“I can, child.” The frame of the shoulder beneath her hand was light and fragile. The silver rings on her fingers pressed. “But, for old times sake, first let me tell you a story.” Smiling, she transferred the half-full vial of holy water to her ringed hand, then settled her into the circle of her embrace again. “Once upon a time.” She gazed down into the upturned, tear-streaked face. “Once upon a time, there was a brave and clever girl.” She slid a stake free, and held it at her side. “Her name was Iarwynn.”
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Wynna
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by Wynna »

“I have spent the days since, closeted in my room. Writing. And thinking.” The closeness of the chamber, and the chill, brought a flatness to her voice. The stone walls soaked up sound, or curiously equalized it. The wicking of a torch in a corner hissed a constant undertone. Somewhere in the masonry above, stone clicked. New mortar, expanding still. The shifting of the bones of the earth pressing inward on it.

She shifted, too, parchment resting on her knee. She lay her head back. Behind it there was a gap in the motif of a decorative frieze. A metal quill in her hair spanned the embossments, so she slipped it free and lay it to the pavers, beside her boot. Now she could turn her skull so that the other pins allowed the indentation of stone to cradle her head. The knot of her hair cushioned it. A single loosened skein brushed her cheek. It fell across her open collar, across skin and clavicle, a strange sensation after being so long armored.

Brick, beneath her thigh. Stone, against her elbow. Gooseflesh beneath another quill, the one hanging on a silver chain around her throat. Why had she sat to the floor, after placing her weekly remembrance?

“I find it difficult to conceive of going out again, of leaving the safety of those activities.” Parchment crackled beneath her hand. The lines of text on it marched across methodically, dry since last night. Torchlight lent the ink a greater solidity than the paper on which it was writ. The words seemed fixed in place, with the substrate sublimating away around them. “I find it difficult to conceive that it is over.”

On her ring finger, a single silver band shone with the liquidity the ink no longer possessed.

I love you. “I am sorry that I failed to avenge you.”

She raised her hand to another affixation of her hair, metallic and sharp, and slid it from behind her neck. She regarded the stilletto, remembering a bead of blood on a strong, capable hand. Surprised by her holdout weapon, as she had been surprised by his touch. She closed her fingers around the cylindrical haft, light and smooth, warming to her palm. Focussing. Enchanted. Her first enchantment, after a life of mundanity. Undiminished by subsequent divine and arcane equipment, by experience. It aided her in divination, she had found. She would use it later, but not now.

She lay aside the stiletto née hairpin, to twist the promise ring, instead. She slid it over a knuckle, freeing enough space between it and her finger to see the uppers of the capitals of the inscription on the inside. Just the swooping summits. The peak of an ‘A’. A curving ‘C’. She slid it back into place, and closed her hand to secure it.

"Words center me, my love. They always have." The drifting scent of rosemary, clean and dry, from the sprig she had placed, reminded her that he would remember that. A strand of hair wanted to fall into her eyes, leaving a filament caught in her lashes. She tucked it away, into the softened tension of the greater mass caught mostly behind her ear now.

“I wrote words, trying to capture what it is that has happened, what we have lost. I thought when I first set quill to paper that I would read these words, at a celebration of continuance.” Fist at rest on the parchment. “I will not read them.” She hitched herself up, to speak from the diaphragm, as texts said a leader should. “Not publicly. Should there be a celebration, these did not turn out fit for such.”

She drew her knees up, and read.

She began softly. “Emotions are the exhalation of thought. Involuntary vaporizations of everything we take in, they are an unavoidable ramification of self-awareness." Too dryly intellectual. "Thank the gods.

"Thank the gods that we mourn; that we can mourn. Thank them that we retain the ability to feel what it is that we feel today. I feel sadness. The loss of those children — of having to participate in destroying what they could become — will be with us always.”

What would be with her always was the horror of young voices, recognized and loved, turned to shrill parody as they demanded blood, and chittered for death. The scrape of sarcophagus lids, followed by a swarm of Vansa’s greatest weapons of demoralization. The searing flashes of light arrowing into their chests, hurled from a different ring now stored away from her daily sight. Steel. Blood. Magic. The screams, so briefly lifelike once more.

She had allowed none of that into these words, still thinking she might deliver them to living ears.

“Make no mistake, though. The evil that was done to them was not part of their original condition. For some of them it was not part of their final state, either. I know that at least one of them was laid to rest while not yet turned to evil. Iarwynn, who came to me out of some memory, some vestige of recognition that what she had become was not what she wanted to be. Oghma granted me this Truth, on the steps of the Font of Knowledge before I destroyed the bodily remnant.” Her eyes blurred, but she blinked them clear. High Seeker Gardner did not cry. Who was Clarianna Gardner fooling, really? Who was Clary reading to, truly? "By that grace, she will always be the little girl who liked stories of bravery and female knights, unblemished in my heart." Crystallize hope. Validate actions. Move forward.

“We witnessed that some of the children committed an act of pure evil, but I choose to believe that some others were saved by our terrible intervention. I am not made happy by this. Because emotions are not mine to compel. Because I am human…and elven….and gnomic… and half-orc….and dwarven.”

Attempting to do exactly that. Compel emotion, with oratorial tricks from a bardic instruction attributed at the Vault of Sages to the sister of the Lady Alustriel. Eye contact. Relate to each in turn.

“Because the heart feels what it feels and I am alive and subject to its griefs.”

Last night she had decided not to inflict this on others. She had thought about balling it up, crumpling it. Setting it alight. Instead, she had brought it with her here.

To another crypt.

The chamber around her held the hush of sanctity as well as the tang of smoke. Smudges of vaporized creosote had darkened the corners long before Vansa, and would be scrubbed and relayered back on, time and time again, now that the vampire was gone. If the vampire was gone. The memory of rows of sarcophagi weighed heavily on her memory, no doubt due to those around her today.

No. She might have fallen short, but Sandrew had not. Hallowed. Always protected from such a fate.

The stone receptacles of what remained of Seekers past lined the walls. Untouched, unchanging, in their cobwebbed alcoves. So many new added in the past moon. Among them, by dispensation, the one at her back, with the frieze of stylized bats around the lid. Another beyond it, as well. Her recompense, at the time. Her grief-stricken condition to take on a purpose she would now die for, without a second thought. People she had not known at the time, now under her protection, such as it was. Life, going on.

Not diminishing or replacing that which had come before.

She stood, shoulders tense, sliding one more pin from its place. A polished wooden stake. She set the parchment to the lid of the sarcophagus, pressing the stake atop it with a palm. Feeling more vulnerable in unbound hair than she did in the absent armor, she considered the unused holy weapon, blessed by her own words before the night they had failed to bring Vansa Khalun down. She considered the undelivered oration beneath it.

She was here to read to a memory, to a man who had loved the orphans he rescued, who had loved him back. She was here to read to people who were gone. She was here to read a Truth into Oghma’s Knowledge.

She breathed in, and continued. “Neither am I made happy by the escape of Vansa Khalun. I lost….everything.” I lost you. I lost the daughter of my heart. I lost my clerical brethren. I lost my naivete. All Truths. “To her. To it. Yet I lost no more than anybody else.” Another Truth. Tears stung, and she let them come, though they made it hard to see what was written.

“All our losses are laid at her feet.” The words were blurred, but their forms carried their meaning through the liquid lenses that unshaped them. “Brother Kiber lost the children under the aegis of the Protector, insult to injury. The Lhuvenhead Trading Company lost friends, members, and their most experienced warrior, to an horrific end. The Lodge lost warrior after warrior, some of them in direct confrontation and some working to provide what was needed to take the fight to her.”

Droplets brimmed over, one after the next.

“Thank the gods, that the first of those losses hurts as badly as the most recent.” Her palm flattened, on stake, paper and stone beneath. All wavered, saline and torchlight rendering them untrustworthy. Mere matter. Less solid than the words that continued to well from her lips.

“Thank them for the continuation of our ability to feel, for when we inhale the pain and the fear, they speed the beating of our hearts. They catalyze the adrenal rush in our veins. They infuse our thoughts with the Knowledge of what we have survived, and the memories of those who did not.”

She wiped a beadwork of tears from her chin. They trickled down her wrist, to drip onto paper. Ink ran, faster than she would have credited. Letters merged. A trick of the tears, those in her eyes and those blotting what they hit? Not just blotting. Erasing. Hard to make out even the forms of what was written now. Hard to discriminate the corners of the paper from the stone on which it lay. Such things losing definition.

“That Vansa Khalun escaped the ultimate revenge does not make me happy. Nor should it. We will always wonder why, or what we could have done differently to avenge our fallen. The knowledge that this foe exists out there still will be with us, always. We will feel it. Always.” The words continued to rise from memory. She would have thought to need the discarded stiletto for this level of recall. There was something dawning in her recognition, though. Something that glimmered in outlines of pure significance. “But in the end, even if it might replace feelings of helpless grief with those of fearsome satisfaction, vengeance taken would not return to us what is lost. It would not restore to those who fell what the survivors must treasure in their stead.”

Sight faded to a pale obscurity.

It was not a physical deprivation. Somewhere, she knew, the function of her eyes went on unimpaired. She wept, and ‘saw’, through cornea, retina and pale brown irises flecked with fawn. Perception entered through dilated pupils and carried material information of shape and configuration, of color and shadow. It was simply not important any more.

Across her inner sight, a list came into being. It was invisible, and engraved in fire. It was rendered in dimensions more than she could comprehend. It rang, and shook her, and filled her with peace.

Kalo Antarus.

Axl Blint.

Shalheira Ni’Tessine.

Boltwell Copperwheel.

Morgan Thane.

Daeges Dabbentin.

Adam Payne.

Others, a list of scores, of hundreds, that she Knew in a split second. Countless beings who had fought and fallen to Vansa and her spawn through the centuries, victim or warrior. UnKnown to herself before this moment, but the Binder bound the Truth of their deeds, and granted a moment’s communion.

She was on her knees. Hands clenched on the quill around her neck, hair plastered to her throat, wet with tears. She had never stopped speaking, never stopped crying. She knew that. The stake lay before her eyes, atop the sarcophagus lid, rimmed with its frieze. The paper was gone. Not even ash remained. The words were gone. She could ‘see’ again, a sharpness to the edges of all, a reality so real it could cut with a shadow.

Her voice rang in the small room.

“So do not regret the pain. Do not regret the grief. As I will not regret the joy in memory that will return. Because feeling is the human condition. The self-aware condition. And so long as we live, then love and hope and healing may enter in, involuntarily at first, but inevitably.

“So, weep, friends, for the now. And thank the gods that we do.

“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.

“Binder’s blessings upon us all.”
Last edited by Wynna on Sat Jun 08, 2019 4:39 am, edited 4 times in total.
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oldgrayrogue
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Re: A Colder Kind of Charisma

Post by oldgrayrogue »

Amen
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