Spinning his blades to a halt, gently, Sebastion paused for a moment on the ball of one foot, ready to strike again should the crystal begin to move. Silence held sway for a breath, and then the moans of the injured sage started again, breaking the spell.
"Everybody move through the room, get clear of here before we stop - there may be others. Kale, you lead them...
Stay behind Kale!"
So saying, he moved around the thing, grasping his scabbards up off the floor, and offering a hand to Mel where she had stumbled to the floor.
"You had the courage to stand against it," he offered, with a sombre grin, "Everything else can be learnt....are you alright?"
Wyshira slumped with relief. She wondered briefly about the crystal beholder's life-force and where it had come from. The thing had been built, created (like the Arcanofex), and that concept was strange to her. Had it been truly 'alive'? And if it was, how did the creator make life? But it was just a passing thought. There were some in the group who had been wounded, including Melisande, and Wyshira turned her thoughts to triage.
Sebastian was urging them to move on however. Wyshira looked at Kale who was in the lead, and offered a recommendation.
"There may be more dangers ahead on the stairs. We should heal our wounds before we go further," she said, taking out her basket of healing supplies.
Ebri nodded to Wyshira, who was correct in her assessment. "This will only take a moment," she told the rest of them, and turned to crouch down by Melisande. Laying her hands on the injured woman, she put herself mentally in the place where the Great Prophet could work through her, and said the proper words, channelling a cure spell into the blue sorceress.
"You realize, it would hardly be worth joining a worthy and useful quest if its leader were to throw her life away needlessly and carelessly..." she murmured, raising an eyebrow and standing up again. "It would do the world little service."
As welcome as Sebastion's words of encouragement might have come, Mel could hardly stomach them. In fact, she felt seriously queasy as she struggled to her feet, wincing with pain and mortification. She'd had the courage--the foolishness--to stand against the Guardian, yes, but not much else. Her magic backfired, her sword proved useless, and her diversionary tactics hadn't prevented several of her companions (including Sebastion) from being badly hurt. And it was her own impetuous curiosity that had awoken the thing in the first place. (Had he been about to say
"chicken-brained" again as she plunged forward into the lab? Probably--and he would have been right.)
She was a paler shade of blue as she stooped gathering her cloak around the smoldering wound in her midsection and Ebri Zol approached to offer both healing and some more not-so-comforting words. Even as Ebri's healing touch took the sting away from her skin, "needlessly and carelessly" stung much deeper.
She opened her mouth to say it wasn't needless and then realized it was. Her friends didn't need her protection. They would be doing just fine without her. In fact, they'd be in rather better shape right now. Silently, she glanced around to take stock of the damage. Two of the sages were down and their bodyguard looked a lot worse for the wear. Good thing they had Ebri Zol and Wyshira, at least. She could hardly look the bodyguard in the eye. He was probably furious.
"Ebri Zol," she murmured, turning back to the priestess, "I am not suited to lead any quest. I don't want you throwing your life away needlessly by putting yourself between me and danger again. My quest is not to lead people to their deaths but just the opposite--in fact, Ebri, my quest is to put
me in danger instead of you. So next time everyone yells to run for it, let's do each other a favor and do as they say. There are people among us who have a lot more sense than we do."
It did occur to her briefly that Ebri might not appreciate being lumped into the nitwit category with her blue companion, but Mel figured if Ebri was ready to die for her she wouldn't mind that much. Yet there was something very strange about that. Mel wondered if she was really that inspiring. Even Pierre had abandoned her. Ebri Zol had been nothing but supportive of everything Mel undertook, even knowing that almost everything she undertook was an unqualified disaster. Odd....
Mentally she beckoned for her yellow-bellied toad of a familiar, and avoided the gaze of her companions.
Edgy, watchful, Sebastion kept a firm eye on the broken chunks of crystal, willing them to remain static and inert, even as Meg'anna stooped to sweep up a section for a momento. It wasn't an uncommon thing, battle-trophies, though not one he'd ever felt inclined to join in with himself - maybe she'd learnt it from some group of savages somewhere, the legacy of a lifetime staring at tooth-necklaces...
Through the nervousness - and the watchfulness - he heard Melisande's words, and grimaced slightly, recalling his own feelings of wretchedness and ineptitude after his first battle on the road. The Scyther had taken two of the mercenaries he'd been travelling with that day, and his efforts had seemed paltry - they still did, in truth.
"All the training in the world cannot instill courage. Courage is something that you either have, or you don't. So long as you look over what happened here later, and try to learn from it, it hasn't been in vain." he offered, trying to convey more than simply the words.
Those that live by the sword, die by the sword.
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
For each of us there is a day to die.
These were more than just epithets, more than just fancy words spouted by the fops that attended the fencing schools then went back to their parents guild-payed houses. These were words to live by, words that defined the life of those that depended on a quick blade, quick feet, and a quicker mind to keep them alive, and to make a difference.
Coralling mages as he went, Kale stood a moment next to Johanne. "That could have been better. If we want to avoid this in the future, we need to be clear. When it comes down, you all need to listen." He said as he looked at the wrecked room once more. "Hesitation is messy."
Regarding the sage respectfully, after a moment Kale beckoned Burl to talk for a moment. "You ok?" He asked, with more than one meaning. The dark mage seemed unscathed, but he was behaving oddly. Toranites ahead... could he be dreading company that awaited them? "You need to help me with your mage sight, if we are to encounter something like this again." That bit he said to make sure Johanne overhear. As in, everything is being attended, no need to stick your neck out and get it burned off. Sometime, these mages would have to start pulling their weight. But given the iron walls, shadow magics, and mysteries up ahead, provided they all lived long enough, the bookmen could well come in handy.
A slight motion at his feet drew Kale's attention down to Pierre. The two-headed pet thing was having trouble navigating the landscape of broken glass and unknown liquids spilled on the ground. A wounded frog would just be insult to injury. Scooping the thing up, he sincerely hoped he wouldn't get peed on. He stopped by Melisande only long enough to hand over the animal- the blue woman was going through things Kale shouldn't be a part of.
Pierre was thinking something toadishly similar to
There's a fine line between courage and brainlessness as he was passed back to his mistress' trembly hands. She was already busy sheepishly avoiding Kale's gaze when the thought from her familiar came through, and she might have sat right down in the heap of crystal shards and cried except that Sebastion seemed so very determined to be nice to her all of a sudden, and this was raising her spirits more than it probably should have.
After dumping the toad into her pocket none too carefully she gave Sebastion's arm a quick, furtive squeeze. "Thank you."
And then she needed to find something helpful to do, quickly. Wyshira had suggested the group pause to heal and patch up what they could before moving on. The first sore spot--a human-shaped sore spot, in fact--that caught Mel's eye was the mages' bodyguard, Cazamir. It seemed the group's healing energies were concentrated among Mel's own friends, who were distributing them with some predjudice to those they knew and trusted. Although she expected him, like Kale, to be slightly ill-disposed toward her, she bucked up what courage remained and headed over. Something told her she should help--she
could help. She wasn't sure how. Perhaps Naskha could offer some small token.
"You'll need more than what I can do," she said, hesitating, "but it's a start--if it works." She could not even look at the pink and black gnarled wound, so she placed her hands lightly on his shoulders. Timidly, aware how very blue her hands looked, Mel raised a meek inner plea to her adopted god.
Naskha? Is this all right? Am I allowed to heal in your name? It's just that--he was so brave--and it is my fault....
* * *
Cazamir rose to his feet slowly. The crystal guardian was destroyed, and at least one of his charges was gravely hurt. He was hurt. Pain danced along his chest like a razor-edged sword. He would survive for now, but what of the next bad encounter? He glanced over at Kale as the warrior mentioned tending to his wounds. His group alone may not have made it past the guardian without these mercenaries help, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that their misstep had activated it.
“You fought well,” he said to Kale, although his meaning applied to the entire group. Then Melisande was behind him, offering to help with his injuries. “I appreciate the healing, but if there is anything you can do for him…” he pointed towards the fallen sage lying on the floor. He doubted if they could – death was a finality even most magicks could not move beyond.
Now that the party wasn't being rushed out of the room, Wyshira was able to take stock of her charges. Mel wasn't too badly off, at least not after Ebri Zol had cast her cure spell. That still bothered Wyshira - she felt the resentment like an ache in her bones - although she tried not to let it show. She glanced at Cazamir's wounds, wondering how he managed to stand the severe pain of the massive burns. She was about to dig through her basket and offer him some herbs to chew, when he asked for aid for one of the fallen sages.
Do they not have their own healer with them? she wondered, even as she knelt down to see if there was anything she could do for the man.
* * *
Cazamir felt a stinging sensation across the scorching that Melisande placed her hands over, and the aasimar herself felt a faint surge of power not unalike that which she experienced when drawing upon her innate ability to evoke light. When she brought her hand away, he saw that, though still the wound was painful and the skin raw, the oozing blood had stopped and congealed, the injury scabbing over and making a start on the way to healing.
Unfortunately, beside her, as Wyshira knelt by the prone form of one of the mages, the two who had dragged him to cover behind the table shook their heads. "Hit by his own spell and then the eyebeast," and indeed the aged man was unmoving and his robes stained with blood. It seemed the bolt from the Crystal Eye had killed him outright befoire his comrades could give him any of their precious few healing elixirs.
The others of their band seemed unsettled but not all
that worried. "He knew the potential risks," said Johanne as he wandered the now quiet chamber, observing some of the pieces of laboratory equipment. "We all do. Umbral ruins often have traps and newer denizens within them, and it's never a safe venture. And..." he leaned over one of the desks to peer at the delicate alchemical array upon it, amazingly undamaged in the melee. "This is human work, this laboratory, not Umbral, though I can't tell who made the crystal construct. My guess is that this is the handiwork of our Carthagian thaumineer. I fear to think as to why, if he is the 'master' of this place, he no longer has control over all of his building and experiments..."
Meanwhile, Meg'anna pocketed a chunk of the crystalline creature even as the last vestiges of the nature magic which had held her summoned wolf here dissipated; Kale took one of the pitted, cracked eyestalks as well, though he found that the crystal had lost its previous, life-like ability to move and was now as stiff as a statue.
* * *
Ebri watched the transformation of Melisande with a mixture of frustration -- it was a setback, of a sort, in her progress with the quest idea-- and interest that grew by the moment... She did not reply outright, but only stared intently as Melisande moved from fear to pain to loss of confidence to guilt to self-pity to obvious pleasure at Sebastion's dubiously motivated words of comfort, to guilt again, to delusions of divinely inspired healing... all in the space of thirty breaths.
The woman is a wonder-- she thought, and then reaffirmed the statement to herself incredulously, as the injured Cazamir indeed appeared to be somewhat healed. Another instance of the mysterious phenomenon by which people were able to heal in the name of false deities and supersitious beliefs... this time spontaneous, apparently.
Her faith in Naksha must be more than trifling, then... she decided. Healing by mutual, charismatic belief; by force of will? Using her innate magical skill without her own knowledge? It was a subject debated at length every season in the monastery; Ebri knew she could not solve it now. Whatever its cause, it was real, and Mel must now be doubly watched.
Sighing inside, she cast her mind in many directions, trying to predict the effect of this new factor on their relationship and her ward's state of mind and behavior.
Giddy with confidence... she predicted, hazarding a guess.
That next, and still troubled. And slightly more cautious... today--
She had said enough for now, so she confined herself to just a few more words. They could discuss things further when the guilt rankled less.
"
I will choose the road I walk--" The words were quiet and informational, and she made her way back into the hall.
* * *
Mel drew her hands back and gaped at them in wonder. She had channeled Naskha's power! He had healed through her! She was truly a vessel of the blue Sorcerer-god, blessed among his faithful! A beatific smile passed across her face and she blinked happily over at Cazamir.
Oh. Well, it wasn't much. But it
did happen, and she knew she could do it again eventually--like the light that welled up from inside, from a different, more visceral spring than her arcane talent--and also that it would grow stronger with her faith. Regular prayer and meditation, but most of all courage in the name of her god, would feed the healing power within--
--and, with some luck, teach You a little common sense.
--and teach you a little common guts, she shot back at Pierre testily, even though it was she who was putting words to the strong sense of annoyance she felt emanating from her pocket.
"Are you all right, Melisande?" Wyshira asked in passing, truncating what promised to be a nasty sorcerer-familiar quarrel.
"Oh, I'm fine Wyshira, thank you--I'm fine!" She was forgetting her own pain, radiating the grace of Naskha (if Pierre would just quit sending her grumpy vibes), although her own wounds were far from gone even after Ebri Zol's intervention. None of that mattered at the moment.
The priestess, reassured, was moving on at Cazamir's request, and now as Mel watched her she was hit with another shock. One of the wizards had actually
died.
Johanne was casual about it, but Mel wasn't. The guilt was back, its fangs worrying her heart like a chewtoy. All right--she hadn't been the only one who pushed ahead. The wizards were also curious. She only happened to be the first to approach the crystal shards, and another would have done it shortly if she hadn't. Wouldn't they?
"He knew the potential risks," Johanne said. Mel shrank away from the sight of the corpse, forgetting now her impulse to sieze Ebri Zol and tell her all about Naskha's intervention and what she saw as the divine validation of their quest. There was a strong and childish urge to make herself invisible instead.
If he knew the potential risks in any detail, then he probably wouldn't have approached the pile of crystal shards as carelessly as I did.
"... I fear to think as to why, if he is the 'master' of this place, he no longer has control over all of his building and experiments..." Johanne trailed off, his face distorted in the bulb of an alembic as he peered at the alchemy equipment.
The arcanofex warned us that not all the defenses could be deactivated. It's no wonder its Master welcomes us. He's probably trapped in here.
Meekly folding her over-curious hands in front of herself, Melisande gave the lab an apprehensive glance.
He wouldn't have allowed us in if he didn't want something from us....
* * *
Wyshira quickly determined that the motionless sage was beyond help, and looked up at Cazamir, shaking her head sadly. She stood with a sigh, wondering what Johanne would choose to do about the body. "I can perform burial rites if you wish it," she told him. "Or cast a spell to preserve the body after we rest."
Johanne gazed solemnly at the body for a few moments. "If you could give him some rites to tide his soul over for now... I don't think we should really turn back now to give the man a burial when there'll hopefully be plenty of time to do that once we've met the tower's master."
From there, she went back to Cazamir and Melisande. "I think 'fine' is an overstatement," she told the sorceress. "Those burns require more attention. Yours do too," she added to Cazamir. She retrieved a small bowl from her pack and filled it with water. Then she began to simultaneously clean the wounds and cast healing spells. She finished with clean linen dressings, and offered them each some herbs for the pain.
She saved Kale for last, repeating the treatment she had just performed on the other two. While she worked she talked in a low voice. "If they knew the potential risks, you'd think that they would've been better prepared for them.
And that they would've been more cautious. I know, I know... it was our dear Melisande that triggered the trap. But they were only a few steps behind her. It could've been one of them just as easily." She finished tying Kale's dressing and began to put away her supplies. "I just don't like having to use our resources to heal them up!"
Kale nodded in agreement with the genasi preistess. Healing was a precious resource. "But he jumped in quick enough to make himself a target... played right, this will be a good bargain." he spoke softly to Wyshira. "I think way may be in need of these mage's expertise..." he said, still not completely sure. They were not a part of the band proper, and the professional distance the mercenary kept from them was evident. No particular loyalties to them, save what was profit to the team.
The searing burn on Kale's left side was soothed by another timely healing... he stood at the stairwell, a little less crispy. Surprisingly, Ebri walked to the fore, and Kale hesitated for a moment, unsure what she was up to. To the stairway and listening, her effort seemed a ridiculous contribution, were it not for that silver ring in her ear. What a handy device. She could be useful, too, though the young mercenary was more suspicious of Ebri than of the unknown mage trouppe.
Nothing to be done about it now... Kale waited for a report from Ebri's investigation, and he was smoothly on his way.
* * *
As Ebri listened carefully to the looming silence of the structure around her, straining to pick up some thread or whisper of noise, her enchanted earring tingled faintly and, from the path of the staircase ahead, she heard what might have been the faintest hint of a brief moment of conversation. It was definitely not from anywhere nearby, and sounded like it came from far ahead, beyond the darkness of the stairs ascending up.
"There are others ahead of us, beyond the staircase above..." she reported, as Kale eyed her with suspicion. "Two or more people are talking quietly."
I have no reason to hide such... A corner of her mouth quirked upward briefly, acknowledging Kale's paranoia.
"Two groups of two, overlapping and covering at each corner. Kale and I, Cazamir and Jarvis..." Sebastion suggested, after a few seconds thought, reaching to his hip to ensure his quiver was in place. "If any of you... wizards... have something that could aid with stealth at a time like this it would be a help..."
Ebri spoke up again. "If the mages cannot assist us with stealth, I have that which will make me invisible for a time. I or another of us should scout ahead. Unless we wish to take another path. In any case, we should not go on so injured. I have more healing energy to give, if need be."
"We'll go this way, quietly," Kale said in response to Ebri's report. She had means of invisibility? Full of surprises, everybody. And the farmboy Sebastion suggested bounding overwatch and small unit tactics... "These halls can be quite small for overwatch," Kale began, only speaking as loud as he had to. "Anyone we can hear now must have heard the din as we fought that thing. If they suspect we're coming and dig in, we may never be able to root them out. We have to be as sneaky as possible. Ebri, you and I will scout ahead- Sebastion will direct the others forward as we advance." He said levelly, pouring every bit of confidence in Sebastion with hopes to keep the mages from second guessing the farmer-soldier's judgement. As for Sebastion's judgement about what he and Ebri were to do...
Shut up Kale told himself, knowing he himself didn't even like the idea of having Ebri watch his back, and she his.
Surveying faces, Kale looked for anything that resembled consensus. But this wasn't committee, and they hadn't time. "Let's go." He said to Ebri as he tread the first stairstep. "And if you hear any fighting, we're not likely pulling back." He said frankly, conscious of his still-cooked left side.
"We can't give them any chance to strengthen any defence- we're going to push through, or give up entirely." That one had to sink in. As much as Kale thought about it, it certainly didn't seem like there were any other options.
Wyshira mirrored Kale's look of surprise at Ebri's announcement that she could make herself invisible. Sort of a surprising trick for an Immarian priestess. But perhaps she only had a (relatively) common potion that she'd picked up in her travels.
She nodded in support of Kale's plan, and moved to hand over two small crystal globes when Kale asked for a means of detecting magical traps. "These lesser eye charms need only be crushed to release a spell that will detect all forms of magic. You should be able to use them just fine, Kale, but if you'd rather, I can give them to Ebri to use."
Then she turned to Melisande and Meg'anna. "Let's stay together," she suggested. "And keep the mages behind us."
Sebastion paused a moment, contemplating Kale's suggestions. It had certain merits, not least of which was eliminating his own and Cazamir's noise from the equation, but it did leave Ebri and Kale a little exposed. Still, if they were as willing to put their ability to sneak to the test as he was to put his ability with the blade to the test, he could hardly fault them.
"Very well, if you're sure. We'll be close by, if you call..." He dropped back alongside Mel and Wyshira, tying the scabbards of his blade to his belt, keeping the steel bared in case it was needed as he tried to figure out the problem with the plan...
Next Time: Scouting reveals what lies ahead, and Melisande reveals something she probably should have told the others before...
