A Sinister Dexterity

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Wynna
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A Sinister Dexterity

Post by Wynna »

She could tell by the sound of it when the reservoir would run out; she could hear the level of ink in the interaction of thick parchment and nib. The long, drawn out crunch of fibers beneath a flowing stroke gradually gave way to the scritch of rat’s claws as the last droplets drained from the quill.

Soothing background to her life, returned to a semblance of what it had been. Magnified exponentially, but still based on what it should be. She was a scribe.

The surface of the ink dented to the shaft of the quill. That viscous resistance also felt familiar, translated through fingers that fell naturally into the delicate pinch on the quill shaft. She flicked off excess and put nib to paper again, precisely onto the loop of an ‘O’ from whence it had lifted.

Yes, the Waukeenar named her Oma, a lovely name, after his grandmother. No, I still have no desire to explore that tangent, lest you ask. The other foundling was called Abbey, and may she hold within her tiny self the soaring cathedral of redemption for the one who named her thus.

A long, jagged scab across her wrist scratched, too, briefly visible out from under the tapered sleeve of street clothes. She had left that wound to heal naturally, as a lesson hidden beneath the gloves she now wore constantly, for their warmth and abilities. Except when writing.

The scab snagged a thread, and pulled, and her flinch caused her hand to skitter sideways, which caused her to grab for the quill, which knocked a pot of black iron gall ink across the desk in a gloriously shiny wash of inevitability towards her lap. She leapt up. The chair went over backwards. The thick tide slowed as it broached the edge of its particular oaken world and overspilled in a single stretching stream that she managed to get her cupped hands under. Gods and Bobboli forbid it hit the Zakharan carpet.

For a moment, knowing her door on the hall behind her was open, she recounted furiously to herself where potential observers might be. Davrik – nose in an arcane scroll by staff light in his rooms. Tilvy – practicing balancework ominously improved since the incident, on some bridge strut over a casually disregarded abyss. Sir Creed – fiercely dutiful with steel in hand, in on-site training room or off-site fieldwork. Their guest – enduring. Wherever he accomplished that.

None of them would have knocked over a pot of ink. Strip mace and bow and magic from these hands, and she was clumsy Clarianna. Still. Again. Antidextrous, Brother Anton used to call her in tones of exasperation. Fond exasperation, but exasperation.

The expensive ink soaked into the parchment, blackening nicely as it wicked in. In her hands, as the drizzle thinned, the puddle of it was deep enough to reflect a murky image of the corner of the parchment sticking off the desktop above.

On that parchment had been a prophecy divined hours ago. Redivined. A single deific response to a prayer beseeching Truth, recast after a failure of preparation the other night. On this second casting, it had awaited her, written in her own hand, when she recovered from the mental blackout that seemed to be the hallmark of such divinations.

Well-earned revels await the hero throng. With life enjoyed instead of drained, you'll find night's pleasures instead of pain.

A reply to a request to Oghma to reveal to her any threats to Wren Bluefeather’s celebration of continuance. She had been enclosing it within her letter to Anton to allow him his own determination of who she had become.

Those words of prophecy now washed over by iron ink, the shinier black flood swallowing the matte ebon hope.

Not discouraging at all.
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Wynna
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

Post by Wynna »

A sacred hush, that echoed backwards from her, from this moment. It stretched from her hands, each upon a book, through the conduit of her flesh, and outward into pasts forgotten. The silence was a sensory compilation. It droned in chants beneath the ability of her ear to hear; it overlay its meaning on her eyes without letters to give it form. It was a forgotten inhalation of incense lit to begin this and the remembered now of ivory tiles beneath bare feet. It was the increasing thud of her heart in the frame of her chest.

The books lay upon the altar. Pillars framed her, rising up to the great dome above. Head bent, she called upon divinity. Before translating the unknown language, before settling in to work, the dangers had to be plumbed.

Both ancient, one newly delivered, one an artifact of her order, the materiality of the closed tomes pressed upon her, rather than her touch upon their covers. She had used the Seeker's Tome as a focus to draw up lost lore before, but never on another book. The moment she had tented fingertips atop the familiar, thick red leather, she had recognized the comforting vastness of the Knowledge it accessed, knowledge not contained in the words that were physically scribed within. Once she had placed her other hand flat to the illustration on the board cover of the other, though, the potential had leaped upward as never before, through her. It coursed from the Seeker's Tome, through the fingertips of her right hand, along the pathway of the axillary vein and so into her heart to be dispatched as distilled divinity down the arteries of the left arm. It flowed from her to resonate within 150 brittle pages of mystery that had arrived with the restored post, bound in rusty red and impressed with an image of a fiery-eyed, black-skinned goblin of fell appearance.

The divinity poured around the residue of what it found, delineating and magnifying something very faint, more foreign than the language in which the book was written.

Arcanity. Not stored power, not a spellbook, just an echo traveling up the ages, the opposite direction to her reach back for it. A wizard's view of the Weave, and a particular and very detailed corner of it, as well. The book had been owned by a wizard, written by an expert in....

Goblins. She could feel the malevolence of the goblinoid figure like a brand upon her palm. It grew, as the legends that surrounded things like it began to thrum through her.

A pulse within her mind, images complete with meaning and history grew and faded, becoming more rapid. Wars, gods, elves, goblins. Sweat on her skin, the flesh of her arms rising against the sleeves of her linen chasuble, her body subsumed in the imagery. She walked an endless battlefield. She sensed a terrible name, one she did not wish to know. She began to feel tentacles of rage and anger creeping into her via her sinister hand and welling up in her emotions. This was the opposite of the absent self of divination; there was so much sensory input to process, so much history. Too much.

With a half heard gasp of negation, she broke from the vision, but, reeling, weakened, felt herself falling sideways, somehow, into another. Flakes engulfed her, white and cold, and now she was the residue around which something poured, liquid and freezing her into its center.

Out of the swirling white above, highlights condensed into shape. Two horns, rising from a scaly head. A fanged maw and serpentine snout. Two glacial blue eyes opening in the depths. An identity she could not fend off. "Ingeloakastimizilian!" She cried out the name of a long dead dragon, and was shaken by a scene that flashed across a fully-fleshed backdrop that until that moment had only -- and always -- existed in her history.

Ingeloakastimizilian. Icingdeath. She could not face this...shying from sight of a figure before the dragon. From a detailed, suddenly revealed scene writ long before she had been borne, long before the birth of the grandmother whose ice and blood flowed in her veins. Not Patricial. Not...

"I am not my grandmother." She forced it out through teeth clenched against the cold. Nor was she the child who had suffered because of her.

Knowledge is neither good nor evil. Knowledge simply is. She called upon the equanimity of the Binder, rather than trying to fight. A cleric is a conduit. A priestess is defined by her deity. A Truth that vague family legend said a Deneirath ancestress had seemingly lost sight of...without relating in what specific regard. Rather than seeking to exert control, stripped of everything but knowledge of who she was, the High Seeker of the Seekers of Oghma gave herself, and felt divinity surge. It limned her incorporeal self, and armored her.

The storm abated. The dragon dispursed. The last thing she saw was a trio of books clutched by an old man's tatooed hands, and she finally understood.
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

Post by Wynna »

Being here awoke physiological responses. Frustrating, but true. She could not deny that merely being in the proximity of Serpentil’s bookstore reminded her of watching Nipsy Peanut fall, dead at the hands of a mob roused against an unnatural winter. It brought back slanders, printed in the Trumpet, and it recalled a knife in her own side, and the look of loathing on a soon-to-be-dead-citizen’s face.

Her heart ran too quickly through those streets of memory.

Nipsy had come back, only to disappear later, not yet to show his wise little face again. The citizen who had knifed the White Witch had paid for it at the end of Cornelius’s hammer. Serpentil, though, was still Serpentil. He had blackmailed her, personally, with threats. That it had been the Trumpet’s lies he had thought gave him leverage would not have changed.

Pushing open the door into his shop raised a chill on her neck like the breath of that deadly winter.

Inside, as always, it was dark.

Motes of figmentary light from the transition out of bright daylight swam before her eyes. She waited, a hand on the soft leather of some unseen tome, while those motes coalesced, stilling into the bright points of glow globes.

Dust tickled her nose. The smell of papers, aging to dry collections of fibers held together by inactivity. The press of knowledge, unread, gathered in the shelves that stretched away on all sides. She hoped the loathing on her face did not mirror the look on the face of that long ago citizen assailant.

Such a wealth held here, jealously, never to be read unless sold.

One thing she had was time, though, now, before this shopkeeper bestirred himself to assist any who had come through his door. She breathed, deeply, and counted five.

She was no doubt observed, darkness or not. One who vended such stock as he held would have arcane measures in place other than the constellations of floating lights. The thought of circumventing Woven alarums with Binder blessed divinations returned her composure. Indeed, it might lend her an expression of just a little too much satisfaction, she thought, pressing her lips against the beginnings of a smile.

Serpentil had blackmailed a newly arrived mouse. That was no longer whom he faced today.

Not calling out, she slipped armor made of her own collection of leather and brittle papers from a pocket within her cloak. The Book of GLODD, which Pea Keeper said Serpentil wanted.

Well, she wanted its two mates, and if Serpentil had them, she wanted them the more so.

Holding it carefully between gloved hands, clearly visible before her, she moved between an archway of overleaning shelves, into an aisle. Ahead, where a pair of glow globes floated, it crossed another. Beyond all quarters of the intersection shadow held, until the next intersection, and beyond that was visible the far wall, loaded with racks of scrolls.

She paused in one of those islands of shadow. A shifting above her presaged the lofting of a globe into view, over the top of a tower of shelving, their contents arranged with absolutely no concern for topicality, or topological stability.

The shelves seemed to grasp for her, shadows crawling longer as the light source for whatever observational method he employed dropped lower. She could do better than that. She could shift the very fabric of the plane around her.

“For that reason Oghma said He would send an angel to lead the way, since He Himself would not abide….” And where Oghma could send one, he was certainly not limited to that quantity. There was no reason that form could not be indulged as well as function.

The surroundings muffled her voice, but a competing glow began beneath her chin. The breastplate of her armor reflected a pure white glimmer at first, and then the holy symbol that had kindled flashed brighter, and drove back both shadows and glow globe’s actinic light.

A brilliant explosion lit before her, at the far wall of coiled scrolls. Another drove away all darkness behind her, in the intersection of aisles. Twin guardians blasted into this mundane plane, great wings furled tightly, swords upheld, and as one, pivoted outward from her, facing any threat.

She tamped down on the satisfaction of the moment. Dramatic, but protective as a primary reason, too, of course.

She lifted up the Book of GLODD upon outstretched hands. The illustration upon its cracked cover showed a goblin of vast size, black-skinned, with eyes of fire and clawed hands gripping a bloody axe. The leather of the binding was the color of old blood. She concentrated upon the illustration, imagining a tome of exactly the same appearance, ancient and malevolent, but of a moldy green rather than maroon. When she had the image of one of the two missing volumes fixed in her thoughts, she spoke, and no hush damped her voice.

“In the Truth of the Lord of Knowledge all things are known. If the twins to this book lie within my divinatory senses, reveal them to me, Binder, by your power which edges all ideas with existence. Locate this object, that its knowledge may be spread to all.” She calculated that her ever-growing abilities with this ritual stretched to about 720 feet, which should easily cover the cramped shop, and any cellars he might have buried below.

Serpentil would not see the power that gathered above her and speared through her, invisible to anything he might use as a sensory eye. She smiled for him, though, and appreciated the Binder’s touch as the celestials to left and right spread white wings, each as wide as a wizened, grasping shopkeeper was tall, white feather tips delicately brushing books and age-spotted display cabinets.

On the way out of the shop, she offered a polite thank you, and closed the door gently.
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

Post by Wynna »

It was an object lesson in how one might allow expectation to lead one into trouble. And others. A lesson with large pincers and a seemingly uncrackable shell.

She did not recall these lava-riddled halls as quite so infested as what they had found.

When the bear had its four legs knocked out from beneath itself, the reality of the situation had been brought home. Cormac bled, extensively, his teeth a clenched grin in a charred face. And still the heedless fool rushed ahead, into the swarming vermin.

Stumbling over Elero’s back paws, backpedaling away from the pincers lunging through the doorway, Clarianna swung wildly. Sweat ran in black channels on the back of her hand. What a masterpiece of musculatory function was a hand. Slender phalange and stubbier metacarpal bones, cushioned by cartilage in their curl around a mace haft. The puzzle that was the cluster of bone at the wrist. It was, she thought, the tiny curving plate of her lunate bone, part of that puzzle, that had been pierced and shattered. Flexor and extensor tendon, standing out in ridges, funneled those rivulets of blood and sweat beneath the wrist of her armor.

Her mace connected, by virtue of bouncing off the doorframe and into the unnaturally large pyrochoidae. A pyrochoidae that chittered beside the pincered horror at which she had been aiming. No matter. The last of this lot to choose from. Her blow cracked shell. Elero drove upward and into the larger thing that had knocked him down, returning to it the favor. Somewhere, Cormac’s exultant laughter rang out.

Idiot.

Panting, in a sudden respite, she sprawled back most ungracefully against a wall, broken hand clenched in the other, until the tingle of the Binder’s healing could do its work. Yes, it had been the lunate. Warmth coursed from holy symbol, to heart, to arm, and thence to sink into and outline the comma of calcium and bone marrow as it healed. Bodily awareness heightened, she shook, with what she chose to categorize as adrenal exertion rather than abject inadequacy to the situation.

“Gentle...men.” Her breathing came too fast. She tried again. “Gentlemen, I came for a purpose.” Heart hammering, slowing, the last remnants of the healing pulled back, fading, and with it the exquisite meld of physical and mental. She fell from an emotional height.

A shimmering blur of potentiality engulfed Elero’s bear form. What had been roaring, gaping jaw with fangs bared, shrank through a storm of change she had not yet been able to study. Nor was now the time. Fur became beard. Claws became hands, with all the human scale to them that she had just witlessly become lost in herself.

She took a more useful grip on mace and shield. “I think that my elementalist’s needs are satisfied. And more than. I am heading for the exit. Cormac!”

“Do ye nae want the shells!” Cormac’s burr came from somewhere ahead. Curls of steam and clouds of smoke obscured the view, and the bright wire of lava in that direction was too intense to make him out. Until he came running, silhouetted by the glare, taking on shape and color as he bounded lightly over dead beetles. The grinning dervish had trophies skewered along his sword blade, perhaps for speed. The glowing bellies of a dozen pyrochoidae decorated the length of the ridiculously large sword like a Calishite shish kebab.

Sweeping off the bellies into a waiting bag, the three of them ran, and fought. They had not come far, but the distance back to the exit stretched longer than recalled.

With the stairs in sight, the walls erupted in crawling, chitinous danger. Cracks between ancient blocks of stone came alive. Red light glinted on shifting bugs. They scampered over each other on the walls, and came up through the floor. She choked off a cry and ducked backwards, at a shadow dripping from the ceiling. Six black legs scraped down her front, closely enough to gather comparative anatomical knowledge of arthropod appendages.

This was quite enough.

She blessed the caution that had her praying regularly for the power to smite the worst of assailants. Meant for demons, she had never expected to call upon help against bugs, but deus vult.

Her voice rose above the clattering and curses of foe and friend. “And stay you not, but pursue after your enemies, and smite the hindmost of them; suffer them not to enter into their cities: for the Binder has delivered them into your hand!”

Light erupted above. Not at all the lurid red of the lava reflected on the walls, this was a pure source of power in itself, brilliant and blinding. As she had felt the healing earlier, she felt this, too, in magnitudes much greater. Her last word seemed to hang within her comprehension as her outstretched arms spread, palms upraised.

Light hammered down, through her, scouring her fears and weaknesses, body and soul. It hammered also into the swarm, with more visible effect.

Beetles compacted. Shells were smashed. Their interiors became glowing fragments, lit both by the oils which made them valuable, and by the illumination of Oghma. To her, the outward explosion of power left behind an echo of what they had been, an image to her mind’s eye labeled with recognition of each and every fleshly working. Life, as it functioned, in the split second before such ceased.

Echoes, fading. She wasn’t sure whether they were auditory, but the hush that enclosed her thoughts felt like the deafness after a percussive blast.

If they had noted the impact upon her, neither of the men mentioned it. Instead, the three of them ran, for the exit from Yntros.
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

Post by Wynna »

Because of what she had heard of him during her preparation for this meeting, she brought an angel. Not as a threat; he could likely dismiss anything short of a trumpet archon without disturbing a hair of his perfectly groomed head. Merely to set the tone.

“It was good of you to see me.”

Maaril, the Dragon Mage, contemplated mysteries -- mysteries apparently submerged in the basin of a fountain.

She contemplated him. Handsome. Sharp beard. Green robe. Silent to the point of sullen. By all accounts, arcanely powerful.

The winged and armed guardian behind her contemplated whatever celestials contemplated. Ambrosia. The faces of gods. Armor polish.

No, that last was her own concern. Her fingers itched to rub at a brown speckling across the left pauldron of her armor. She was aware that her appearance told a tale of her afternoon’s entertainments, in streaks of char and smears of the exploded contents of pyrochoidae intestine. Bug guts. She had not yet cleaned up when the arcane Sending tickled her tympanic membrane and started her running for the coach, scrubbing what she could from her face and hair with water summoned from thin air and an ink-splotched rag summoned from her belt pouch. She had waited for this response to her letter of introduction for many weeks.

Only to be left standing while he brooded on the fall of water into a fountain at the center of his tower’s foyer. There was a time she would not have felt slighted. A time she could not have envisioned being here. Humbleness, Clarianna. It was not your office that got you here, and you yourself are only a woman, neither greater nor lesser than any other.

“Your bodyguard is unnecessary,” he said.

“You may go, Gabby.” Dignity. The thrill of horns through her soul faded as did the scent of fresh rain on hot stone. The angel departed.

The room felt darker.

“You have a lovely foyer.” Into the silence, she offered a pointed inanity.

“This way,” he replied, and moved for the stairs that mounted towards a set of shadowed doors. She followed, taking the moment of his turned back to comb out something small and gritty from a hanging tendril of hair, then smooth it into place, too.

The second level of the tower held only an imposing dining table, set for twelve, and a guardgoyle that was dispatched for wine she did not want but said that she did. Pulling her cloak out of the way as she took a seat, she tried to think of a way forward in this difficult, sensitive, dangerous conversation. Tone set. Tick. Politenesses offered. Double tick. Masks donned and doffed as needed, whichever seemed most politic to the powers they represented. Until he reached into a fold of his robe and pulled from it a small, uncorked flask, tarnished with age and adorned with runes. He set it to his left. Her fingers tightened on the stem of her glass.

The runes tugged at her attention, a tangle of iconographies that seemed incomprehensibly interlocked when regarded with mundane eyes. She had made a study of this flask, though, and felt the remembered pull of divined configurations. Lines and curves melded together to form discrete meanings. A half dozen languages faded out of the knotted design, and the meaning of each rune, in each language was the same.

Imprisonment.

But imprisonment from which the imprisoned had escaped. A whiff of remembered brimstone seemed to drift around her, raising the hackles on her neck.

“So,” Maaril said softly, while her gaze remained locked on the flask she had only half hoped to hear of, and if so, in glancing references. “Have you found him yet?”

Aglorus. The Dragon Mage’s apprentice, who had fallen during field work -- and a favor -- performed for her. For a moment, she was stricken again by grief, but she mastered it. Now was not the time. Right now she had a difficult, sensitive, dangerous conversation … with fewer masks than expected between her and the arcanely powerful other party.

She rather wished she had not sent the celestial away.
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

Post by Wynna »

She passed a stick of incense through the flame. Smoke coiled. The musk of frankincense joined the smell of melting beeswax, a warm summer scent that did as little to lighten the crypt as did the candles. Rosemary oil, left on her fingertips from earlier, added its herbal notes, sharp and sweet at the same time. The comfort of remembrance. Also fading.

“This is north.” She whispered, laying the incense to the floor. Straightening, on the inhale, the bouquet of elements filled her. Lungs and blood, the divinatory essences infused the diviner. Not divination. “The direction of ice. Seal the doors and windows against the cold.”

North was the direction of self, as well. Her past, her lineage...northward her heart. Before her, Adam’s sarcophagus. Outside the ritual, his bones forever protected from worse things than what she did here today. Not divination. Necromancy.

There were worse things, she told herself. Many, and much worse.

Now begun, she could not interrupt to apologize for what she did in his presence. Hallowed, hushed...there was no other place for this than here. Focus.

She padded widdershins around the circle drawn on the ancient pavers, stopping at the next candle, its flame bending inward in an unfelt wind.

“West. The direction of the setting sun, and ocean.” As the incense caught, the candle flame unbent. It elongated, rising for the low ceiling, as if imagining itself a pillar. Or a wall, curving a quarter of the way around the circumference to where the north candle also lifted its unflickering flame. “Hold the last glow of dusk against fear and deceit.”

West was where she was now. Waterdeep, where her past had found her, and followed her. West was goblins, and ancient books of lost knowledge. West was why she did this. For the second time. During the first, she’d had a holy warrior and a demon hunter in the audience. Now, alone, in an ocean of potential, with hidden depths and shoals.

The powdered silver of the outlined circle led her onward, catching the light always a few paces ahead, fading away in a moonlit horizon until she stopped at the third candle. The opposite of north. “The south for heat, the shimmer of mirage, rain upsorbed into jealous clouds swollen with a hoarded threat.” Or potential. No. Storms were chaotic, uncontrollable. The destruction they brought was not the symbology she required. “Do not let the floods cross the threshold.” Her voice sounded far away to her own ears with the plea.

South was Beregost, where a caravan had been ambushed, and a young man’s life and family destroyed, setting him on a path of destruction. His own, and other’s. Logan Castille had become a project for her, somehow, since the Law had failed to take responsibility for him. There were Truths to be discovered within his lost memories. And dangers.

She could not seem to stop associating quadrants with acquaintances. So many threads, so many research topics.

Three flames now, straight as spears. Between each pair smoke drifted, ropes extending from north to west, west to south and south towards where she carried her fourth and last stick of incense now. The smoke kept pace as she reached the eastern candle.

“East for evaporation, for desert and encroaching sun. For land that ages eternal, unmoving and exclusionary.” East for everything else, truly. For a druid’s farm, an exile’s shadowy battle with evil that occupied his homeland. For elf and human and gnome and the continent that she but edged.

The incense in her hand burned blue, half gone. Its smoke had drifted into the cycle of the rest. She lay it down, to smoulder in a crack between pavers. The fourth flame stood straight. The ropes of smoke closed the gaps between the pillars of flame.

There was suddenly a without, and a within. Skin goosefleshed as she stepped to the center.

Not alone after all. She had a crowd within her thoughts, and a body within this circle. The goblin warlock’s corpse lay on a pallet of straw and herbs that would need burning later. Not for ritual, but for reasons of sanitation. There was only so much that a prayer for gentle repose could do, it seemed. The whiff of corruption seemed stronger, lingering over the decomposing thing that had been vile enough in life. Slumped jaw and sunken eyes showed the shape of the skull. Mottled skin had pulled back from wounds on its torso, each slash showing ribs beneath. Tendon curled the knees up and splayed the clawed feet backwards.

She hadn’t known. This was her first foray into this sort of thing. Second.

Necromancy, but only for the mechanics. For the knowledge of how to do this that was required, at least for a priestess of Oghma. This was not raising the dead. That could never happen in this crypt. She had spent thousands of Seeker gold ensuring that. Indeed that was the main and best reason for holding this ritual here -- that it could never be confused with interfering with the soul of a living creature.

Only its body.

There was absolutely nothing of the departed spirit left within these remains.

So why did she feel the disapproval emanating from the crowd within her mind, from dead and protected Oghmanytes around her, and from her own loved ones’ sarcophagi?

She raised her arms, sleeves falling back. For this, she discarded all rituals she had been able to discover in the archives. All of them made her uncomfortable. She had instead a poem. Oddly, calling it to mind, she found that the words chosen did not help.

Never again, after this.

Borne by the flow of realized care
the babe given breath, the maiméd healed,
By the black torrent of oblivion I watch
the ferryman break his canted stroke,
across the spate.

To hear this closéd mouth returned to speak,
voice as rapids across rocks
Throwing back a spume of mist
adrift from wareness
drained.

Imposed anchor, binding frayed
To stir the stiffly grinning lips
in summons to the truth within.
Semblance of forever lost
truth cascades.


With each line, she felt the gathering power. Water was her chosen metaphor, its shifting natural states the antithesis of death’s still grasp. By the end of the first stanza, all else had faded from her comprehension. By the middle, she and the corpse were a hub in a wheel, light and darkness spoking to the four quarters of a rim around them.

At the last word, the goblin’s jaw dropped open, and its head rolled jerkily to face her. Milky eyes did not blink. No sound issued from the dessicated throat, though she had endowed herself with the power of Tongues, to interpret the chitterings to come.

Mechanisms. Nothing of the spirit.

“I have three questions,” she said, and her voice did not quaver. “You shall answer them, creature.”
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

Post by Wynna »

Through her open door, voices drifted.

Distance erased meaning. There was only tonality, and volume, diminishing. A high, rapid voice and a lower reply. She found herself smiling down at her notes.

That wouldn’t do at all. She had work to do. Interrupted in the act of redacting suppositions too dangerous to commit to paper in their unconfirmed state, she lifted brush from paper and dipped it into the inkwell.

Voices again, this time exiting the Scribery, an exchange at the junction of hallway and chasm entry. Scribes and acolytes rarely passed that way and never without voices hushed. Footsteps hollowing on the bridge now, Pea Keeper and Mikkaalgensis seemed generally unconcerned with standard library operating procedures. Peekay offered something doubtlessly perfectly normal, by his understanding. Mikkaa…? No, too familiar. Sir Mikkaalgensis responded with bemused laughter.

She hadn’t realized what a mausoleum the Font had become, until this influx of guests. Vale studied in one room; Logan recovered from trauma in another. She hoped. She would not lose that fight to the Company. Granting that, if all continued at this pace, every room would be full.

She hitched her chair up, and attended to her shorthand, outline to more involved analyses she would get to that evening. Probably. Possibly. If there were no interruptions.

Knowing there would be bothered her less than it could have. She might try to have dinner in the Common Room, rather than at her desk.

To which she should pay attention, now.

Ranged across it lay singular items. So much to do in the next tenday, all of it with priority. A brass stopper, covered in runes. An ear, seemingly goblinoid but of an exotic color. An ecclesiastic primer she had been referencing on accoutrements of a god of strife and murder. A phrenologist’s annotated skull. According to that, the injury to Logan’s skull could be to either of two organs, either of which gave unhappy confirmation to certain changes in manner.

Assumed changes. She hadn’t known the angry, damaged victim-slash-perpetrator of tragedy when he had been a contented family man-slash-Lathanderite.

She took up the skull with two hands, palms cupped. Yes, the blow to his head by spear butt or boot had been just there, on the border between regions relating to conscientiousness and caution. Eyes closing, she prayed for perfect recall, pulling up the memory of the dent beneath her fingertips and ridged bone masses left by clumsy healing prayers.

She would not have left such mementoes. Not all had as much pride in workmanship, of course.

Perfect recall led to the memory of the moment of immersion, when the knowledge of muscle and bone, sinew and blood communicated itself. In the first instants of healing, she knew the synergy of a body, and what ailed it. Usually. Recall of that moment did not usually occupy her so. Certainly it should not occupy her more than things such as goblins and demons and a curious absence of Zhentarim where she had expected to find them. Things such as responsibilities to those under the roof of the Font. Scribes, ecclisiastics and her guests, the last good men, every one. Could she go so far as to think of them as her people?

An inexplicably warming thought. Prideful. It felt like Oghma’s Truth, though, in that moment.

Returning the skull to its cradle, she selected a quill sitting in a jar of precious argent ink, and tested the stroke. Powdered metal in the substrate did tend to clot the nib. She drew shimmering doodles, until it flowed, and then set it to paper.

A full house and laughter were balm for all. May it last long enough to do her people some good.
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Wynna
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

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Each thorn had an icy jacket. Frost whitened the walls of interwoven brush. She had patrolled these wintry boundaries forever, finding them high and cold, and endless. They were there whenever she reached out, her hand nearing but not disturbing the hedge of frozen briar.

Had they once been lower, and greener?

The strangeness of that thought was in the positioning of a before, beside this moment. It posited a chain of befores, in a direction along these walls other than the one ahead, in which she saw only mounting walls of thickening white. Eventually, this way, even the tough and thorny bramble subsided into the ice, at first reaching for the cold surface then buried in it and lost in the glacial finality of their protection.

She tested a whitened creeper, leaves frilled with rhime. She felt no difference in temperature, not cold to the touch of her hand, but her fingers stuck. Pulling away, skin ripped. Red blood on white fingertips, in the whorls more usually stained with ink.

The sting of frostburn came with identity, settling in with copper on her tongue.

She turned to look behind. Fingers in her mouth until the taste of blood was gone, she experienced a brief disappointment. The wall of thorns stretched away in that direction, too. Except.

Except.

Far in the distance, the white in the walls gave way to wood the color of ash, and thereafter to brown. Farther still, farther than she could have possibly come, a verdant interruption broke the grey march.

A patch of grass. A shady tree. Something to shade against. Sunshine and the sound of voices, of soft laughter. A man and a woman.

As is the way of dreams, she was suddenly there, without transition, or need to remark on the change except in a latent relief, and a stirring of recognition.

A dream. She was dreaming.

Fingertips unbroken, unblemished by any stain, she reached out to the two, and then she was the woman, legs folded on a cloak spread on the grass. Adam's cloak, and it was Adam beside her, teasing her story out of her, new, unknown, a smile on lips not yet familiar. Seated, he leaned back against a tree.

Brush filled the gaps between trees. She didn't remember that. It seemed vaguely ominous, a prickly border weaving through this copse outside a city she did not know.

Pain welled, like thorns had pierced her heart. "I miss you."

His eyes folded at their corners, over a deepening smile.

"You are dead. You died." Although in this place, in this memory, she had retained her distance, she crawled closer. "I wasn't with you. Somebody needed help. Sarenna. It was my first true fight and I was ill-eqipped to provide it, but I stayed with her, unable to dispel her fears. I wasted your death on a gesture."

He asked if she was cold, the words spilling out of the past and over her, and though she hadn't been then, she shivered suddenly with a bone deep ague.

Her jaw shaking, teeth clenched against clattering, she felt it welling up within her, heart pumping an icy slush through her body. "Stop this. Stop it. Talk to me. Be Adam, not a memory of Adam."

He looked down into her face. "Kiss me."

It jolted. He hadn't ventured that far. She moved against his shoulder, expecting insubstantiality, and found it solid, warm. The sun touched her again and the cold receeded. His arm went around her and she rested in it, melting into hot tears.

She did not wish to wake, in spite of the ache in her heart.

He hadn't held her before, when this memory had been an untreasured, naive, present reality.

Her pleading had changed that, in this dream.

A thousand breaths, a single heartbeat, a lost eternity to say what had never been possible to say. The image of the moment crystalline in mind, the instant of stepping out onto a bridge recently delivered from the evil that had invaded the Font, then unknown surroundings. His body, fallen where he had dropped. Between one beat and the next, heart stopped; between one thought and the next, gone. Twice before, he had fallen; twice also herself. Each time, a pair of pairs, once separate each and once together, they had defied their deaths and returned to each other. She had thought, in that frozen moment, it would be that way again.

She had thought wrong.

"I loved you." She felt the arm around her ease. "I love you." His hand slid up her back, cupping the nape of her neck. She turned her face into his shoulder, which seemed cooler. His fingers in her hair, brushing the pins, digging through their bound up tresses as he had done so many times, seemed more distant. "Don't go."

A chill ran up her spine, against the armor she wore. She had fallen asleep, in armor, and only dreamed of a time before. When the armor she wore daily, waking, had been his.

His warmth but a memory against her chest, he was slipping away, dead because she had asked him to help cleanse the Font.

"Goodbye, my love."

She thought his lips brushed the top of her hair, as it fell down around her neck, and he was gone.

A breeze blew over her, with the breath of winter.

It brought words, different from memory, or dream forced into new paths. It brought words, in a voice inside her head. Clarianna...are you well? Can you hear me? Can you tell me where you are?
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

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The dream had changed.

"Kiss me," he had said, and she had hidden her face. If she hadn't, if she had taken his offered kiss, would he have stayed? Or would she have?

Would that be wrong?

Could she choose a new truth, different from waking reality? No. That would be choosing to drift, untethered by any reality at all, and may Oghma forgive her for the sacrilege of how appealing that seemed.

Shaken, dream cheek to seemingly substantive knee, figmentary spine protected by assumed armor from fabricated thorns, she longed to feel that sense of sacrilege with the same certitude as she felt her surroundings. Her body seemed so real. The cold grass crunched. The wall stretched away, ice spreading by vine and briar, mistletoe and creeper. Inside, though, in comparison to all this material proof, she felt no connection to the Lord of Truth. She had realized that absence only in the fading of Sandrew's words in her mind, and the fading of what he had brought with him. Or, rather, what had brought him to her.

She had known the Loremaster immediately, his wisdom and power. She had known also what he channelled, a thread of absolute knowledge in his contact, pointing up the lack within her.

Just as she had known Adam, instantly.

In a reflex of fear, she had quailed. Was this truly Sandrew the Wise, reaching into a dream from which she could not seem to wake? Or was it another symbol of safety given form by this dreamscape? From the little she had read while researching Logan's affliction, one's hidden fears and needs took shape in dreams.

In that moment of doubt, Sandrew and the second-hand divinity she craved for herself had vanished.

The dream had changed.

She kept returning to that base truth of her new condition, whatever it was. That was all she had. As yet, too strong to chase oblivion in a lost love, too weak to reach her god, but she had willed this dream to change. Unable to trust the shifting materiality of things around her, her mind --thoughts, perspective, focus...what was a mind when stripped of incarnation? Her self -- had altered the text of the tome around her, rewriting it to hold the character she wanted.

Could it do the same with scene?

If this place in which she sat was a representation of a stand of trees outside the city of Waterdeep, then was there a city of Waterdeep here? And within it was there a temple, where within that, she presumably slept?

The contemplation of seeing herself sleeping at her desk dizzied her.

What then? Could dream self reach out and shake real self awake from her hour's nap? Or were both the stuff that dreams are made of?

She could have lost herself further down this recursive rabbit hole, perhaps, had a man not howled in rage and loss somewhere near.

And the dream changed.
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

Post by Wynna »

The dream changed.

"No, no. Oh gods not again...." The deep-voiced desperation tore at her. It wasn't night, but all light had fled, all color, leaving only graduations of gray, from iron to ash. The man's cry came from beyond the wall. "I got you. I got you...." He was weeping. Logan. Drunk. Rage killer. Grief haunted. Logan Castille.

She reached out to the wall between her and his anguish. Briar writhed away from her hand. Vines lashed, first apart and then together with others, like serpents fighting. Thorns shrank, then sprouted at new angles. A gap opened, but as the brush separated, ice rushed in. Frosted jaws gnashed together from above her head and below her knees, and where those teeth bit at eye level they merged and melded, into a flat pane that sheeted across the growing hole in the hedgerow. She saw her face reflected there, as in a dusky mirror.

Reflected there, too, beside her, was Tasma. The dream walker's hideous face loomed at her shoulder. A moment later, the lumpen figure manifested at her side, as if willed there by its own observation from out of the cold glass.

Clarianna saw the night hag only for a moment before the mirror cleared to become a window on so much worse.

Out there, outside of her walls, Logan clutched the burned bodies of his children and wife. On his knees, he rocked, trying to draw all of them into his arms. Blood coated him. Char blackened their remains. Between his hands, against his side, where he cradled those he loved, their injury showed as a glimpse of cracked flesh, or teeth bared by lips burned back. "Dad is here." Soot crumbled as he shifted a small body.

Through the horror, recognition stirred. This was not the first time she had seen this.

"Oh, Tasma. Let me help. Please. Allow me." Fingers spread to the ice for support, she pleaded, and knew what the answer would be. She had a sense that she had been pleading with the dream walker for some time, though these were the first words she remembered speaking...weren't they?

The bramble continued to unweave and weave itself as a frame. The ice beneath her hand shifted, giving way. For a moment she thought it had cracked, but it had merely moved. The living wall had moved, away from her. She closed the distance, one step.

"They are gone, Clarianna." Tasma's voice, so mournful, had never matched her disfigured visage.

"No, no, no...." Logan mumbled.

"For all but him," Tasma said softly.

She knew what was happening without needing to be told. Or had she been told before? He was dreaming, too. Tasma had brought her into Logan's nightmare, as an observer. Separated by the wall of ice and thorn, he didn't know he was being watched. He never did.

Shamed by it, she couldn't look away from his grief. It was as if his flesh, too, had burned away, leaving only his raw and ragged heart open to her sight. "Please, if this is what he sees, I can heal this." How? These were not wounds of flesh. She had failed in all attempts at healing him before. Knowing what demons he saw...could that change anything? "I can stop this in him." She stepped forward again as the wall continued to grow itself away from her, towards the terrible tableau. "I can't bear his pain."

"Wake up, wake up." Logan begged roughly.

"Wake up," she echoed. "Wake up from this."

His hand, that made a hammer small and so often gripped the neck of a bottle, moved to cup his dead child's cheek. "Oh, Sara, what have they done to you?"

"You are in the Font, under my protection. Wake up and know it," Clarianna called, but her voice faltered. Her gaze shifted to the reflection of Tasma's burning eyes. "He isn't in the Font, is he?"

"No, he's not, which is why that can can find him." Tasma's clawed hand motioned. Clarianna followed the gesture and saw a floating, spectral figure, hovering in front of burned wagons that she noticed only now. A chill went through her, the touch of the grave. A ghost watched Logan's mourning, and it smiled with bloody lips. Head twisted on a broken neck, forehead misshapen, face blackened in death, it hovered. A woven belt of red fabric hung across its insubstantial chest from one shoulder, fluttering behind, threads dripping beads of slow blood upon the ground.

"Logan." One hand clenched on her holy symbol. "Where are you? Wherever you are, wake up." She pushed with that hand, with the white quill on its silver chain, shoving at the air between her and the wall. The crackling, living hedge bowed outward from her, responsive to her gesture, but with resistance. "And come back. Come to where you are safe." She stepped into the space before the thorns, pressing now with her whole presence, without touching the spikes and writhing creepers. The wall shifted, slowly, so slowly, growing itself towards Logan.

But it was too late. "Oh, wicked spirit, I know you are here," Logan said, his gaze turning from the bodies of his family to the shade of the one he had punished for their deaths. He sat back on his heels, tears streaking in the char, eyes bloodshot, rough hewn like the ruin of a cathedral his hammer might once have helped shape. He was shadowed, black of hair and unshaven jaw, but deeper, too, the acts he had been pushed to darkening his soul. She could heal that, too. Couldn't she?

The ghost of Turlan, the former red sash, bared its teeth in a grin. "I would not miss this for anything, mate."

"Get the hence, spirit," Clarianna cried, knowing it wouldn't hear her, but hot fury rising. "Or I will call such truth on you that you shall be burned into ash and left as an emptiness within the vault of all knowledge." She stopped pressing at the wall and raised a hand to the gray sky, in a gesture that should call down the power of her god upon the monstrous. And did not.

Nothing. As she had known would happen. Her empty fingers curled, and fell. Before her, because she no longer fought to move it, the progress of the wall had come to a stop, tendrils and shoots intertwining more slowly.

She looked to Tasma for an explanation, first the reflection and then to her side, and found the dream walker gone from both. Vanished, as she had....when? That has happened before. A memory slipped away, unformed.

Alone.

"I will find you again," Logan said, over her sudden flood of despair, and not knowing how, she could have mimed his words that followed. "I will rip you limb from limb." She lifted her hands again to the air before the wall and tested it. The resistance felt stronger than it had before, an invisible force countering her intangible touch. She pushed harder, then with all her strength, opposition growing. One step, muscles bunched; two steps, spine locked, before the strain of forward progress became to much. Whatever impeded the wall's movement exceeded her strength to move it.

Her head dropped, brow to the ice, hearing Turlan's chuckle. "But mate, you already did that."

"I will follow you to the pits of all the hells for this," Logan replied, an echo of the words she heard in her head the instant before he spoke them.

So familiar.

And with that, though she couldn't reach Oghma, a Truth managed to reach her.

He had spoken those words before. She knew it. Just as she knew she had heard them from his lips before. It was a dialogue that had happened before, and would happen again and again in his nightmares. And hers. Her nightmares, too. This was not the first time she had dreamed this.

They were trapped in a cyclical nightmare, he reliving the murder of his family, she watching his anguish over and over. Tasma had brought her here, the first time. How many times had she seen this scene since? Tasma had brought her here and vanished, leaving her in the plane of dreams.

Dizzy with revelation, she missed something the ghost said, but she followed its reorientation towards the shadowed wagons. It turned, revealing a gaping wound in the side of its skull, crushed from ear to nape.

From behind the wagons, a woman wearing all black emerged, surveying the scene with a hooded face.

"You.... I know you," Logan gasped. "You told him to do this." Clarianna came to the tips of her toes to see him, so close to him had she forced the wall. But not close enough. He remained outside of their protections, she within them.

"Not this, specifically...but, yes." The woman said, with a chill carelessness. "Wasted effort on his part."

"Did you find what you sought?" he demanded. "Because I will hunt you until you share the same fate as Turlan. Are you in the Deep? We can make the transition quick."

"Imagine what I would become were you to do the same to me." Beneath the hood, only the curve of a wicked grin showed. "I mean, after what that fool has become. You would be doing me a favor. But for now, your daughter needs you."

In Logan's arms, his dead child's eyes opened, scarred milky from heat. Black lips tore, parting. "Daddy, don't go."

Clarianna flinched away at the same time he recoiled. When they both looked up, the wagons, the woman and the ghost were gone.

Logan cried out as the bodies around him crumbled to ash.

"Logan!" Clarianna buried both arms into thorns, expecting agony, surprised when her hands went through as if nothing was there.

Knowing this was new, this was another change to the dream, she stumbled in up to her shoulder, reaching out for him through her walls, her grasping hand almost brushing the top of his head, his own unable to hold his family, sifting through his shaking fingers.

And then, mercifully, he and his pain dissolved.
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Re: A Sinister Dexterity

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Color returned, pale blue ice, the brown of a bud knotting on a vine where it crossed a corner of the frame. Even a blush of pink at the tip of the woody bud.

Light returned, too. Framed from the shoulders up by the window in the wall, she knew herself exposed suddenly, the anonymity of separation broken. She pulled back her hand. Thorns stabbed. Mithril vambraces protected her to her wrist, but the gloves Sarenna had fashioned for her ripped, snagging on the sharpened materiality of the briar rose tangle. A spine pricked deeply into her finger.

Blood welled, shockingly red. It soaked into the silk of the gloves, and dripped upon the flower bud, which bloomed, opening to a white blossom with a red throat.

The gap in the wall had knit, leaving no sign that she had broken through it. She flexed her fingers into her palm. The wounded finger stung with heat, but at the same time a languor flowed down her hand and into her limbs.

She did not know if the gray lens over her view of him was the ambiguity she felt towards Logan or a condition of his own dream, but the wall, she knew, was all her own. The resistance to expanding it around him mirrored his resistance to her protections in the waking world. And yet when she had dared breach them for him, there had been no such resistance. Where dreams collided, surely both dreamer’s dispositions held equal sway. So, no walls around Logan. But her hand, reaching out for him, must be acceptable…to both?

Vaguely disturbed, she wondered if wherever he woke now, he brought with him a memory of a distance half-surmounted from their dream. If gray was halfway between black and white, what lay at the midpoint of evil acts and good intention?

Disturbance faded. She was sleepy. Did that mean she was surfacing, like Logan? Or entering another iteration? She lifted her eyes and found no window any more, only a bank of bloody-throated flowers. More than the one blossom nodded there now, buds swelling.

“Logan?” she called, and willed herself to a memory of the horror and pity and hope in his former strength that defined him to her. Logan. The pain in her hand throbbed, a heat that fought the cotton wool comfort of being behind unbroken walls again. Logan, I’m here. I want to wake up. I want to help. You are not alone. I did not abandon you by choice. Can you hear me?

Eyes drooping, she studied a ripped and raveled glove as if his reply lay in it, and instead saw someone else. Sarenna. Sarenna kept Logan from her oversight, by suborning him into the Company’s grip. Sarenna had been Tasma’s friend. Sarenna was her friend…? Friend and foe. Past experience and current knowledge. More ambiguity. More confusion. But waking complexities were better than sleeping avoidances. Sarenna. Not sure if she should be reaching out or warding off, she repeated it out loud. “Sarenna.”

Again, no hint of response.

Sleep wanted to come. If she slept, though, the green that had begun to spread from the stems of the blooming flowers outward in both directions would fail. The frost that now melted in droplets would recover. She would dream-sleep and she would dream-wake into Logan’s torment, and perhaps not recall the agency she had written for herself into the pages of that scene.

While she had that agency, she lifted both gloves to her temples. It was more of a struggle than it should be, but she touched fingertips to her hairline.

Clarity’s Touch, Sarenna had named them, and clarity rushed through her. An invisible light casting sharpness where sleep had shadowed before, they accomplished in dream what they did in the waking world. She was the High Seeker of the Font of Knowledge in Waterdeep. She was Clarianna Gardner, no “E”. She was Adam Payne’s love and the leader of the Seekers of Oghma. She possessed strength to pull Logan back from the brink and conviction to stand beside Sarenna’s complexities. She had had quite enough of meandering in circles and she would find the way out by the straightest path.

Lucidity dispelled drowsiness. Colors brightened. She felt the stir of every loosened hair on the back of her neck, and the chill wafting off the wall onto her throat was that of frost breathing its last into spring air. The pain in her finger was no longer needed, so she healed it with a thought, removing the bloodstains from the silk with a glance.

This was her dream, to do with as she wished.

The classics were called for. Structure made for common ground. The hedge folded around her into an overgrown facsimile of her bedroom. That was the easiest way of getting there, where she needed to be. The bookshelves crawled with runners, titles obscured by shifting leaves. Chandeliers dripped mistletoe. Cattails and rushes sprang from the half-open canals that lined the walls, carrying the gurgling of the water that ran through all the Font. Instead of pillars and stained glass, leg-thick trunks supported living friezes of flowers and vines. All still thatched with thorns that made them impenetrable and looked suspiciously like quills, to be sure, but no frost to be seen. No ice. No cold. Her bed was a bower, roses blooming out of the wooden frame and canopied in leafy green.

She saw the translucent outline of herself, sleeping there, and lay down into the impression it held, arms crossing on her armored breast, conjuring mace and quill to either hand. She believed that someone, Peekay or Mikkaalgensis, Wyk or Vale, would have laid her there. Probably all of them. Pray the gods they were alive, and unharmed, without her there to look after them, to heal their injuries. No question that so long as they lived, no matter how long this somnambulistic sidetrack had gone one, she would have been cared for, and watched over. Not alone.

Vale would not sleep, but the others would have to. She took a breath, and reached out.
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