Talashia holds the last scroll out with her left hand. It unrolls on its own, the bottom roller is weighted. Even though this is not magical, it seems a little ominous...as if the scroll wants to be read and is deliberately making it easy to do. This sense of foreboding is not helped when Tal uses her free hand to draw her dagger.
"Your name is Shazi Al'Uphon, herald to the court of Caliph Asad; the Undying Storm."
At these words the air in the room became still, as if it had paused and was listening. The torches stopped flickering in tiny currents and breezes and burned straight. Sounds seemed a bit dampened, except for Talashia's voice.
"I stand at the mountaintop, in the eye of the eternal typhoon. From the topless towers of clouds, streaked with skyfire and weeping rain, I call you. I name you Galerider, Shriek of Wind's Fury, Harbinger of Hurricanes and I call you!"
From outside the building came a long rumble of thunder...not a sharp crack, but a low booming thrum that seemed almost as if the sky itself were issuing a grumpy warning. Inside the summoning room, the air grew thick with the acrid tinge of ozone; the scent of rain just before it starts to fall. Talashia let go of the scroll entirely, and it floated serenely before her at eye level, as eager to be read as she was to read it. She grabbed a hank of her long white hair and lopped it off with the dagger.
"By the precedent of Gratchen's Pact, I call on the Watchtower to the North; I open the way, and I open the path. I give you hair of one born to lightning's touch." She tosses her hair into the circle, where it erupts into bright blue electricity that arcs to the outer edge of the runes and keeps crackling there in a ring. Within the center of the circle a mist begins to form, and there is the sound of distant winds roaring.
On seeing this, Talashia's eyes light up and she grins an almost manic grin.
"It's working!" she caws triumphantly.
Then things start to go wrong.
An empty glass flask wings across the room, narrowly missing Talashia's head. She looks over in the direction it came from, her face darkening...then melting to confusion when she realizes there's no one over there. A book sails from the shadowy corners of the chamber next, and Caerwyn intercepts it with his shield before it can strike his sister.
Fear enters Talashia's expression, almost panic in fact.
"Protect the circle!" she screeches, and quickly gets back to the ritual.
"Shazi! By your oath to the Fathers of Stormhold, I call you to fulfill the third vow! The true blood of Asad stands at the circle! By Kirdan, by Dran, by Liral, by Iphmet, by Prince Ramas, by Asad! As it was, let it be again! Bound to blood and by blood bound!"
She holds her left hand over the circle, and has to duck as a metal rack that had held glass tubes sails at her. By now the laboratory seems almost alive...objects shudder on shelves, occasionally hurling themselves at Talashia and the summoning circle. Only the efforts of the rest of the party keep them safe...though it's unclear at this point if they're being thrown hard enough to really do damage, they could definitely break the circle.
Grimacing, Talashia jabs the dagger at her own hand, drawing a thick line of blood. She clenches her fist with a hiss of pain, and a fat drop of blood starts to gather under her curled fingers.
A gust of wind rocks the alchemist's shop, howling and battering at the windows. There's another thunderclap far above...sharper and heavier.
"Come," Talashia says with a note of finality...and the blood falls to the floor in the circle.
Thick fog billows out from the point the blood hits, quickly filling a cylinder constrained by the circle. Within the swirling tower of mist flickers tiny lightning bolts. In the light of those bolts, a silhouette becomes visible...the shape of a man with batlike wings...he seems small there in the heart of the tower...but small in the same way that something large will seem small when viewed at a distance.
A voice like a rising gale speaks out from the roiling column of storm,
"You want to follow Gratchen's path?" There's a derisive snort.
"The blood is thin in you, mortal." It says the word mortal with a sneer in it, as one would an insult.
"Check the pact if you like," Talashia replies dauntlessly.
"No mention is made of generation, purity or quality of connection. Only lineage, and mine is clear. I claim the precedent, and call on you to fulfill the vow."
There's a long, sullen pause, during which time the mysterious flying objects redouble their assault...there seems to be no source to the attacks, but it also seems to be running low on "ammunition" in terms of loose objects in the vicinity of the far end of the lab, where the phenomenon seems localized. Talashia risks a furious glare in that direction, but quickly turns her attention back to the creature she'd brought here.
"Very well," comes the rumbling voice.
"Though it costs me, I will uphold the oath that was taken. Then you will release me."
The sorceress grins.
"Not quite," she replies.
"You will uphold the oath not because I will release you, but because you MUST, or risk the wrath of your master."
"Asad is not my master anymore!" rages the voice. The clouds in the circle seem to all light up at once with crawling arcs of lightning.
"I can no longer draw on HIS power for this, so be grateful you're getting it at all and RELEASE ME!"
Talashia seems nonplussed by this, but plows on,
"Regardless, your oath is binding, and needs no compensation. For your release, we will arrange a separate bargain."
The dark shape within the circle suddenly seems to throw itself at Talashia...but stops short in midair against an invisible barrier. The same barrier that holds the swirling vortex contained. It then withdraws and sullenly asks,
"Then what ELSE do you seek of me? I'll have but a thread of power left after quickening your whisper-thin blood."
"I think you'll find the bargain mutually beneficial," Talashia assures the spirit.
"The bargain is this. You will follow where I go, do as I say, do no harm that is not in defense of yourself, me or those with me, or commanded by me. You will offer your counsel and knowledge to guide me and mine, and you will be in all ways bound to me and of me. In return you will gain power as I do, you will share and reflect what glory I attain. You will serve me as you once did Asad. Agree to this, and I will release you."
"Exactly what part of that benefits me?" the spirit demands peevishly.
"The part where you don't spend centuries locked away in some mad mage's cellar, while your rivals grow in power and influence and forget about you?" she suggests.
"Or the part where you bind your destiny to a powerful sorceress, to gain prestige with her triumphs, share her vast powers, and show the rest of the court that you are still the master of your own fate?"
"Master of my own fate," Shazi muses consideringly.
"By...being bound to you..."
"Yes," Talashia replies, with the sort of perfect confidence that made even a ludicrous idea seem halfway plausible.
"After all, it would be your choice. By choosing, you're mastering. You would be a servant, but a servant -by choice-. And," she quickly goes on, so as not to let that linger too long,
"AND I'm not Asad. I'm actually very nice, and would treat you with respect."
Shards of glass spatter over her, and she scowls.
"I need an answer right now, Shazi."
"...all right, all RIGHT! If nothing else I'll be free when you die..."
"Of course," Tal says soothingly,
"But you're not allowed to do anything that would bring that about. No plots, backstabbing...any of that."
"What do I look like," Shazi demands with wounded pride.
"A demon?!" He flaps his batlike wings irritably and tosses his head...which has little horns on it.
"Then start with the oath," she instructs.
"So be it...break the circle, or step into it."
Talashia gives Caerwyn that twinkle-eyed 'aren't I naughty' grin that he's seen on her face since they were just children...and steps into the summoning circle to be swallowed up by the clouds.
For a moment both silhouettes can be seen in the thunder-streaked storm that rages within the summoning circle. Shazi doesn't look so small anymore as he folds his wings around Talashia. Or is Talashia small too? Reality within the circle seems different somehow, as if it was a tiny slice of an entirely different universe in there. Then both of them are entirely obscured as the clouds darken and start rotating faster and faster. Wind howls and tears at books and papers scattering debris and sucking it into the funnel cloud that is rapidly forming. Talashia becomes visible again, at the very bottom of that tornado, standing up but leaning back...the vortex is streaming directly over her heart...
into her heart. Her head is thrown back, her long silver hair whipping wildly around and her delicate features contorted in a silent scream.
The vortex finally starts to dissipate, revealing something flapping in the air above her. It looks like a man with a horned head and bat wings, with smooth blue-white skin and glowing blue eyes. A man, but only the size of a halfling...a small halfling. His head would only come up to Caerwyn's waist. He's spinning rapidly around as if he'd been caught in the tornado...or perhaps
making it...but as that finishes, he seems to try to fly away. Somehow, even recovering from what happened, Talashia manages to reach quickly out and snatch his ankle.
"My turn," she says breathlessly...and lightning crawls up her arm and pours into the creature, sheathing both of them in crackling, blindingly bright haze of power.
Finally it's over, and through the green afterimages burned onto the retinas of those watching, Talashia and Shazi seem exhausted but otherwise unharmed by their ordeals.
"Well then...mistress..." Shazi says reluctantly.
"What now?"
This is punctuated by a test tube smashing into his face. He sputters and leaps up into the air.
"Alright, who threw that?!"
"That's what's next," Talashia replies evenly.
"We find out what tried to interfere with this and put a stop to it!"
(Hoo! Big one. Feel free to post reactions to it all, though I'd appreciate if the basic continuity of it wasn't interrupted.
)
