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[5E] The Age of Worms - Solid Snake's Campaign
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<blockquote data-quote="Alexander Bryant1" data-source="post: 7263072" data-attributes="member: 6916184"><p><strong>Journal of Etona - Entry Twelve</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>Coldeven 10th day</strong></p><p>When everyone woke up, we undertook the task of convincing the dragon to drink what we had wrought. We tried this line of reasoning at my urging:</p><p></p><p><em>Mistress, this potion will expel the weakness inside of you. You will be sick, you will expel this rotted blackness violently, but once even some of it is out, your immense strength of will and your tremendous vitality will overwhelm what is left utterly. You will be yourself again . . . perhaps, if we dare to hope, even better.</em></p><p></p><p>It was unpersuasive. Rey told her that she would stay for the first few days of treatment and would even drink the potion with her if it came down to that. This offer to take the potion herself, and my joining her, finally got the mistress to take the first dose.</p><p></p><p>The wyrm’s eyes snapped open in alarm. She wretched, waved her head about in great distress obliterating stalactites of ice and granite, and stormed from the cave.</p><p></p><p>“Rey?” I whispered.</p><p></p><p>“Yes, Etona?”</p><p></p><p>“Should we be here when she comes back?”</p><p></p><p>But she was adamant, her eyes calm: she knew what needed to be done, and indeed later that day when her mistress did return, she allowed Rey to hunt with her, to be her eyes. Rey found kobold tracks belonging to a half dozen of them: certainly spies from Ithane. Though she understood the traces of their passing, she was surprised to lose them again and so did not catch up to the kobolds. Her mistress, almost blind at this point, noticed none of this.</p><p></p><p>That evening as I felt shudders along my spine, my eyes kept drawing up towards Luna and the heat began to creep across my skin. I explained the <em>dorse feu</em> to Rey.</p><p></p><p>“Our people came from the Bright, what most other races including ourselves call the Fey. <em>Fey</em> is the Elven word for <em>bright home</em>. It is the Well of Life, the place from where all natural energies spring. You and I exist here in the Fade, a shadow of the Fey diluted through its touching other pure realms such as the Shadowfel, the Elemental Planes and the Astral Plane which is, I understand, a doorway to yet other planes of existence such as Hell and the Abyss.</p><p></p><p>“It is a long story how some elves came to inhabit the Fade, and how our tribe in particular came to the Mirror. Our clan to be called the Thornblood. We had always worshiped Sehanine, but before we started our journey to the Mirror we also paid tribute to Llolth. Yes, that Llolth, before She had fallen. Despite teachings against her, I have always felt a little sorry for Her, actually, and I know some of us would still hear Her people’s words if they were peaceful. But they largely are not: they are violent and cruel, though Verdre now believes that they have to be that way in order to survive. I have actually met one named Lilliam who befriended my aunt, as much as that was possible for dark elf, but that is a story for another day.</p><p></p><p>“We left behind the complex Oaths of our old lives. In following Sehanine’s edict to leave the Fey, we became free. And so to this day we resist laws: they are tyranny to us, their frequently complex wordings hearken back to the enslaving layers of the Bindings.</p><p></p><p>“And so Sehanine led my, humans call them ‘great-grandparents’, into the Fade. When they got there, they found that they had lost their long lives – we only live a few centuries now. They lost many of their powers, and for the children of these first travelers born into the Fade came the dearest loss: siring more than two or three children over our lifetime. My family, the Aspiannes, is quite large actually: my father has two siblings, and I have some fifteen blood kin.</p><p></p><p>“Additionally, they could feel the Shadowfel pushing on them as a constant pressure, slowly through the generations cooling their blood. The Children of the Mirror are yet <em>vyld</em> – humans might use the words “wild” or “uncivilized” – but it is the true wild of being part of nature and not a life of fury and violence. We use to love easily and passionately always, but that has faded. Sehanine’s gift to us, something She would not allow us to lose, She reserves now for those two arcs a cycle when Her face shines fully down upon us. That is the <em>dorse feu</em>, the time of fire in our veins; the return to fury and passion; our reconnecting with the Fey.”</p><p></p><p>“I have a hard time imaging you as cold and aloof,” says Rey. That made me smile. “So how does <em>dorse feu</em> affect you? Do you fight?”</p><p></p><p>“Different individuals among us are affected in different ways. For father, he paints madly his dreams, and they are interpreted for cycles to come by Tamyl and other leaders among us and allies in the Bright. Mother climbed trees and fashioned living art there as do several others in our tribe still. That is, when she was not straddling father and other males in the tribe. Me, I often lie under Her face and soak in Her. In that condition I am found by my kin and . . . we enjoy one another.”</p><p></p><p>“You mean –?” said Rey.</p><p></p><p>“Yes. Not by force, though sometimes it can get a little rough, particularly if a druid happened upon me. And family members are not part of it: it is not permitted.”</p><p></p><p><em>It is not permitted, Skaen!</em></p><p></p><p>“I do enjoy it very much: it satisfies a deep crav--. Oh, Rey, I see that you are very uncomfortable with this! It is your human modesty. You do not have to be. Not with me. But yes, it is a lot to take in.”</p><p></p><p>She was silent for some time as we did other things.</p><p></p><p>“Men, and women?” ventured Rey, not able to help herself.</p><p></p><p>“Oh yes! I enjoy recreating with men, but I have always fallen for women.” I smiled but this seemed to alarm Rey rather than merely answer her. I didn’t know what else to say, so we kept doing what we had been doing: I tending to the monk, washing my clothes and self, and checking the mixtures on the lab table, and she mending her armor and practicing short throws and retrievals with her new magic spear. I have said too much, I know, at least too much for Rey to hear.</p><p></p><p>The monk, I realized, was watching us both. I hadn’t noticed him awaken.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p>His name was Hilraam. He spoke with his hands – not a sound from his mouth – and in his eyes stood utter calm no matter the subject: the dragon, his torture, his fellow monks dying, our reason for being here. I questioned him on all of these, and all were returned with a serenity I have never before seen in a human. He patiently communicated through gestures that he was indeed captured by the blue dragon, and his brothers were eaten by her, though he bore her no ill will.</p><p></p><p>He and his brothers at the monastery love Luna. They track Her, study Her. They all wear tattoos of Her moods and wanderings. They have designed and created lenses that harness the power of Luna, that show much and foretell the future. They are secretive but not, if you do not harm them, dangerous.</p><p></p><p>All this time a mere stone’s throw from Diamond Lake, and I did not know.</p><p></p><p>While he was explaining through gestures something I was not grasping immediately, I impulsively kissed him. He returned it, and he and I smiled, both of us understanding something unsaid.</p><p></p><p>For the next long while I talked to him about myself and the Children of the Mirror. When his lids began fluttering somewhere after Standing, I sang him to sleep.</p><p></p><p><strong>Coldeven 11th day, full moon</strong></p><p>We finally told the mistress the truth about the mercury poisoning after Rey drank the potion again. This time the mistress drank and did not vomit.</p><p></p><p>The crystal and Rey’s spear were brought up, and the mistress said Yes to the plan of firing into it.</p><p></p><p>Whisper found and ate a couple of kobolds, it said. These could be Ithane’s. That might have solved the spy problem in the short term? What I was curious about was how swamp-dragon-aligned kobolds could survive up here. I hoped we would capture one and have the opportunity to ask.</p><p></p><p>I don’t really remember what else happened that day, for the dorse feu was only hours away. And with a human. I hoped we would not damage one another.</p><p></p><p><strong>Coldeven 11th night, <em>dorse feu</em></strong></p><p>Hilraam was skilled, responsive, and durable.</p><p></p><p>His chest, I was delighted to find (and run my fingers across) was indeed artistically rendered in lunar paths and constellations, all of which I eventually recognized. Many among our tribe render similar markings though nothing as . . . <em>mathematical</em> as this.</p><p></p><p>When we were both at the limits of our stamina, I saw an image of him, actually a projection, above his body. He was aiming the lens at me, peering at me through it. I spread my arms in welcome. He then peered in the direction of Luna, and then the image vanished. Hilraam slept on peacefully.</p><p></p><p>This has been a wonderful return to the ways of my kin. Here, in a frozen dragon cave, underground, with a mute human. No wonder my father has strange dreams: what can dreams of future events along my own timeline for just my own life look like, let alone an entire people?</p><p></p><p><strong>Coldeven 12th day</strong></p><p>Outside, the crystal was set up and Rey and the dragon were positioned by Rishka. Ah yes, the mad plan. </p><p></p><p>At his signal, Rey’s mistress reared up and spat out a bolt of lightning that passed through the crystal, exploding it. Save for stolid Rey, we all dove for cover. She was deafened for a time, a little scorched, but happy, because it worked! The lightning imbued the spear, changing its very essence from black to blue, from acid to lightning.</p><p></p><p>Afterward Rey explained to her mistress about seeing the kobolds, and that although Whisper had one or more ground into kobold paste, it didn’t get all of them.</p><p></p><p>“Well, why don’t you go find them and kill the rest,” she ordered. Rey left for some time and returned to report that she found the tracks, saw that they were leaving the area, but then she lost them in rocky, windswept terrain.</p><p></p><p>Later that afternoon we were all sparring when Whisper popped out of a stone wall, arced through the air – an arm missing – to land in a heap, motionless. A stony claw followed it out, attached to the rest of a massive earth elemental that started swinging at everything it saw.</p><p></p><p>Rey blew the side off the thing with her first shot: the new magic within the spear is puissant. I hit a couple times with my Silver, but it was Hilraam who ran in and engaged the thing. He attacked with his bare hands, thunder rolling out from his fists and feet. He dodged and parried with remarkable skill, but the stone monster’s huge size was too much: it slammed him down and then, with a sickening crunch that caused me to cry out, it crushed him.</p><p></p><p>We killed it a moment later – a moment too late – and it fell into rubble.</p><p></p><p>I pulled Hilraam out and spent time with him, praying, recommending him to Sehanine. I kissed him one last time before giving him to Rishka to take away for eating. His body would not go to waste: the dead feed the living, that is the way. I could not personally eat him, of course – that is for animals, and our more feral druids like Skaen and Tu’urka – but I think Hilraam would be pleased that he could offer one last service.</p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>Coldeven 12th – second night of the full moon</strong></p><p>My second and final night of the <em>dorse feu</em>. I could only pray this night: my skin’s yearning fled with Hilraam’s death.</p><p></p><p>“So much death all around me, My Mistress. I ask that let me heal once again. Let me your beacon once more, please, just for a time.”</p><p></p><p>I dreamed. Sehanine smiled down on me and I see my hands on fire with her moon glow, bloodied friends and lovers and kin rising towards my glow which has spread to all my body. They lay their hands on me and are healed.”</p><p></p><p>My hands tingled all over when I awoke, and I know my healing has returned. My initiate spells are clear in my head: they have come back.</p><p></p><p>All alone in my little alcove I had created to separate Hilraam and me, and then just me, from Rey and the gnome and all others, I cried. Joy, but sadness too. Each new wave of Her grace returning to me has come on the death of another. What can this mean?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alexander Bryant1, post: 7263072, member: 6916184"] [b]Journal of Etona - Entry Twelve[/b] [B]Coldeven 10th day[/B] When everyone woke up, we undertook the task of convincing the dragon to drink what we had wrought. We tried this line of reasoning at my urging: [I]Mistress, this potion will expel the weakness inside of you. You will be sick, you will expel this rotted blackness violently, but once even some of it is out, your immense strength of will and your tremendous vitality will overwhelm what is left utterly. You will be yourself again . . . perhaps, if we dare to hope, even better.[/I] It was unpersuasive. Rey told her that she would stay for the first few days of treatment and would even drink the potion with her if it came down to that. This offer to take the potion herself, and my joining her, finally got the mistress to take the first dose. The wyrm’s eyes snapped open in alarm. She wretched, waved her head about in great distress obliterating stalactites of ice and granite, and stormed from the cave. “Rey?” I whispered. “Yes, Etona?” “Should we be here when she comes back?” But she was adamant, her eyes calm: she knew what needed to be done, and indeed later that day when her mistress did return, she allowed Rey to hunt with her, to be her eyes. Rey found kobold tracks belonging to a half dozen of them: certainly spies from Ithane. Though she understood the traces of their passing, she was surprised to lose them again and so did not catch up to the kobolds. Her mistress, almost blind at this point, noticed none of this. That evening as I felt shudders along my spine, my eyes kept drawing up towards Luna and the heat began to creep across my skin. I explained the [I]dorse feu[/I] to Rey. “Our people came from the Bright, what most other races including ourselves call the Fey. [I]Fey[/I] is the Elven word for [I]bright home[/I]. It is the Well of Life, the place from where all natural energies spring. You and I exist here in the Fade, a shadow of the Fey diluted through its touching other pure realms such as the Shadowfel, the Elemental Planes and the Astral Plane which is, I understand, a doorway to yet other planes of existence such as Hell and the Abyss. “It is a long story how some elves came to inhabit the Fade, and how our tribe in particular came to the Mirror. Our clan to be called the Thornblood. We had always worshiped Sehanine, but before we started our journey to the Mirror we also paid tribute to Llolth. Yes, that Llolth, before She had fallen. Despite teachings against her, I have always felt a little sorry for Her, actually, and I know some of us would still hear Her people’s words if they were peaceful. But they largely are not: they are violent and cruel, though Verdre now believes that they have to be that way in order to survive. I have actually met one named Lilliam who befriended my aunt, as much as that was possible for dark elf, but that is a story for another day. “We left behind the complex Oaths of our old lives. In following Sehanine’s edict to leave the Fey, we became free. And so to this day we resist laws: they are tyranny to us, their frequently complex wordings hearken back to the enslaving layers of the Bindings. “And so Sehanine led my, humans call them ‘great-grandparents’, into the Fade. When they got there, they found that they had lost their long lives – we only live a few centuries now. They lost many of their powers, and for the children of these first travelers born into the Fade came the dearest loss: siring more than two or three children over our lifetime. My family, the Aspiannes, is quite large actually: my father has two siblings, and I have some fifteen blood kin. “Additionally, they could feel the Shadowfel pushing on them as a constant pressure, slowly through the generations cooling their blood. The Children of the Mirror are yet [I]vyld[/I] – humans might use the words “wild” or “uncivilized” – but it is the true wild of being part of nature and not a life of fury and violence. We use to love easily and passionately always, but that has faded. Sehanine’s gift to us, something She would not allow us to lose, She reserves now for those two arcs a cycle when Her face shines fully down upon us. That is the [I]dorse feu[/I], the time of fire in our veins; the return to fury and passion; our reconnecting with the Fey.” “I have a hard time imaging you as cold and aloof,” says Rey. That made me smile. “So how does [I]dorse feu[/I] affect you? Do you fight?” “Different individuals among us are affected in different ways. For father, he paints madly his dreams, and they are interpreted for cycles to come by Tamyl and other leaders among us and allies in the Bright. Mother climbed trees and fashioned living art there as do several others in our tribe still. That is, when she was not straddling father and other males in the tribe. Me, I often lie under Her face and soak in Her. In that condition I am found by my kin and . . . we enjoy one another.” “You mean –?” said Rey. “Yes. Not by force, though sometimes it can get a little rough, particularly if a druid happened upon me. And family members are not part of it: it is not permitted.” [I]It is not permitted, Skaen![/I] “I do enjoy it very much: it satisfies a deep crav--. Oh, Rey, I see that you are very uncomfortable with this! It is your human modesty. You do not have to be. Not with me. But yes, it is a lot to take in.” She was silent for some time as we did other things. “Men, and women?” ventured Rey, not able to help herself. “Oh yes! I enjoy recreating with men, but I have always fallen for women.” I smiled but this seemed to alarm Rey rather than merely answer her. I didn’t know what else to say, so we kept doing what we had been doing: I tending to the monk, washing my clothes and self, and checking the mixtures on the lab table, and she mending her armor and practicing short throws and retrievals with her new magic spear. I have said too much, I know, at least too much for Rey to hear. The monk, I realized, was watching us both. I hadn’t noticed him awaken. *** His name was Hilraam. He spoke with his hands – not a sound from his mouth – and in his eyes stood utter calm no matter the subject: the dragon, his torture, his fellow monks dying, our reason for being here. I questioned him on all of these, and all were returned with a serenity I have never before seen in a human. He patiently communicated through gestures that he was indeed captured by the blue dragon, and his brothers were eaten by her, though he bore her no ill will. He and his brothers at the monastery love Luna. They track Her, study Her. They all wear tattoos of Her moods and wanderings. They have designed and created lenses that harness the power of Luna, that show much and foretell the future. They are secretive but not, if you do not harm them, dangerous. All this time a mere stone’s throw from Diamond Lake, and I did not know. While he was explaining through gestures something I was not grasping immediately, I impulsively kissed him. He returned it, and he and I smiled, both of us understanding something unsaid. For the next long while I talked to him about myself and the Children of the Mirror. When his lids began fluttering somewhere after Standing, I sang him to sleep. [B]Coldeven 11th day, full moon[/B] We finally told the mistress the truth about the mercury poisoning after Rey drank the potion again. This time the mistress drank and did not vomit. The crystal and Rey’s spear were brought up, and the mistress said Yes to the plan of firing into it. Whisper found and ate a couple of kobolds, it said. These could be Ithane’s. That might have solved the spy problem in the short term? What I was curious about was how swamp-dragon-aligned kobolds could survive up here. I hoped we would capture one and have the opportunity to ask. I don’t really remember what else happened that day, for the dorse feu was only hours away. And with a human. I hoped we would not damage one another. [B]Coldeven 11th night, [I]dorse feu[/I][/B] Hilraam was skilled, responsive, and durable. His chest, I was delighted to find (and run my fingers across) was indeed artistically rendered in lunar paths and constellations, all of which I eventually recognized. Many among our tribe render similar markings though nothing as . . . [I]mathematical[/I] as this. When we were both at the limits of our stamina, I saw an image of him, actually a projection, above his body. He was aiming the lens at me, peering at me through it. I spread my arms in welcome. He then peered in the direction of Luna, and then the image vanished. Hilraam slept on peacefully. This has been a wonderful return to the ways of my kin. Here, in a frozen dragon cave, underground, with a mute human. No wonder my father has strange dreams: what can dreams of future events along my own timeline for just my own life look like, let alone an entire people? [B]Coldeven 12th day[/B] Outside, the crystal was set up and Rey and the dragon were positioned by Rishka. Ah yes, the mad plan. At his signal, Rey’s mistress reared up and spat out a bolt of lightning that passed through the crystal, exploding it. Save for stolid Rey, we all dove for cover. She was deafened for a time, a little scorched, but happy, because it worked! The lightning imbued the spear, changing its very essence from black to blue, from acid to lightning. Afterward Rey explained to her mistress about seeing the kobolds, and that although Whisper had one or more ground into kobold paste, it didn’t get all of them. “Well, why don’t you go find them and kill the rest,” she ordered. Rey left for some time and returned to report that she found the tracks, saw that they were leaving the area, but then she lost them in rocky, windswept terrain. Later that afternoon we were all sparring when Whisper popped out of a stone wall, arced through the air – an arm missing – to land in a heap, motionless. A stony claw followed it out, attached to the rest of a massive earth elemental that started swinging at everything it saw. Rey blew the side off the thing with her first shot: the new magic within the spear is puissant. I hit a couple times with my Silver, but it was Hilraam who ran in and engaged the thing. He attacked with his bare hands, thunder rolling out from his fists and feet. He dodged and parried with remarkable skill, but the stone monster’s huge size was too much: it slammed him down and then, with a sickening crunch that caused me to cry out, it crushed him. We killed it a moment later – a moment too late – and it fell into rubble. I pulled Hilraam out and spent time with him, praying, recommending him to Sehanine. I kissed him one last time before giving him to Rishka to take away for eating. His body would not go to waste: the dead feed the living, that is the way. I could not personally eat him, of course – that is for animals, and our more feral druids like Skaen and Tu’urka – but I think Hilraam would be pleased that he could offer one last service. [B]Coldeven 12th – second night of the full moon[/B] My second and final night of the [I]dorse feu[/I]. I could only pray this night: my skin’s yearning fled with Hilraam’s death. “So much death all around me, My Mistress. I ask that let me heal once again. Let me your beacon once more, please, just for a time.” I dreamed. Sehanine smiled down on me and I see my hands on fire with her moon glow, bloodied friends and lovers and kin rising towards my glow which has spread to all my body. They lay their hands on me and are healed.” My hands tingled all over when I awoke, and I know my healing has returned. My initiate spells are clear in my head: they have come back. All alone in my little alcove I had created to separate Hilraam and me, and then just me, from Rey and the gnome and all others, I cried. Joy, but sadness too. Each new wave of Her grace returning to me has come on the death of another. What can this mean? [/QUOTE]
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