Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alexander Bryant1" data-source="post: 7334529" data-attributes="member: 6916184">Journal of Etona, Entry 15The changeling comes in through the window, sees the half moon I had waiting for her upon triggering the trap, and pauses.“Rocktar,” I begin weaving my spell which in Common would sound a little like this: “Draw quiet under Her immortal gaze. She holds you under Her moonlit rays. Cast no stone, and enemy hands will stay.” To the changeling, the final words: “Behold Her visage and turn away.”She hesitates again but then pushes through and attacks anew, disregarding the licking silver flames and Sehanine’s face silently commanding her elsewhere. Or perhaps Sehanine does not intend for this dim, violent human to survive this night. I know not, as I cannot see what the changeling does.“Revenge!” she yells and goes at Rocktar.“Sehanine’s child,” and I gather Voice: “Stop!” But still she disregards. “Please! Listen to your heart.”Rishkar smashes the window then, interrupting the completion of the deadly arc. He falls inside, flailing with his rapier, hissing angrily. He is under attack from outside? I cannot see anything. But it is enough for the pale woman: she dances away past Rishkar through the now-shattered window.I check to make certain Rocktar is unharmed. He is bewildered events but unscathed. Meanwhile the changeling has run down the alley, busily changing form. It is not enough, however, to shake relentless Rey who together with a gray beam from the lizardman’s outstretched palm, effortlessly catches her. She changes her entire body again, this time to a child’s form, and limps away, but we surround her – Rey posing as her angry mother for the few curious onlookers on the street with us. We will not attack her here, the woman/girl knows, so I kneel down and talk to her instead.“Why?” I ask her. “Why are you doing this? Why are killing these innocents?”“They killed my daughter.”Oh, goddess. She could not be –.“How did they do that?” asks Rey.She does not answer.“Will you follow me?” I ask. “I promise a fair hearing. In my Mistress’s name I promise you a fair hearing and no harm to you while you are in our hands.”She is sullen now, the fight drained from her. She nods and we all re-enter Rocktar’s apartment where she and sit facing one another at Rocktar’s table, Rey standing nearby. The woman places her dagger – a raptor claw and not a half-moon as I had thought – on the table and begins to speak.She told of the Peace Circus, after losing all their animals how they tried to continue on as a group employing fewer but much more dangerous creatures, the giant raptors. They employed a handler, Volin, who due to the romantic attentions of Coralina neglected his tasks in making sure the creatures were healthy and secure.When the animals broke out, the woman tried to save her child by intercepting the creature going for her, losing much of her hand and forearm in the process, but she could not stop it: it was too quick. It tore into her daughter right in front of her.“I cannot have natural-born children: we changelings are created,” she explained. “We are abominations. I found her in a dumpster. Helpless. No idea she was waiting to die alone.” She shakes her head, a single sharp motion. “Humans.” I nod. “I raised her to be better than her kind, and better than I was. She was so much more. She was –.” She regarded me, say my own wet eyes, weighed her next words. Then she looked away but decided to speak them: “She painted all these beautiful pictures inside me, and I became someone else in a way I had not known could happen. I had never loved before: I did not even know what that was. She placed the best of anything inside this shell.”She slaps her hand on the table.“And they destroyed her.”Silence for a moment.“I begin to understand. Your fury is just.”I get up off of the uncomfortable thing that must toil under the mistaken ken of chair and look out another window.“I have no children,” I say. “I do not know how to feel what you must endure. But I can tell you this: I and my mother come from a blessed and also doomed line of women speaking with Sehanine’s voice. She was not a priestess though her mother was. Or is: Ael may yet inhabit a world somewhere. Ael lived, and so my mother was not priestess.“My mother was young when she became quen’amo, pregnant. She carried me for sixteen months. She knew that like her and every other who is Sehanine’s will on earth, having me might end her. My Radiant Mistress is wickedly jealous and permits only the daughter who will be her avatar in the world to draw breath. My mother and Tamyl, our leader, and others among my people knew the odds were good that I would be our new priestess. She had me anyway.”I am shaking my head in wonder, I realize, and not for the first time.“A joyful, energetic woman with what humans call centuries ahead of her: Fiora’s art and gifts would only grow. But she sacrificed all. She died when I, a pathetic, sickly little babe that none but my father initially loved, came into the world. Father told me her face was a satisfied smile as she gazed at me, the light fading from her eyes.”In a voice rough with emotion I finish my thought with, “So I know what you are capable of, and I stand by you, Child of Sehanine.”“Zika,” says she.“Zika,” I repeat.“Child of Sehanine, which I don’t understand why you keep calling me that, is too many sounds.”We smile a little at one another.“Do you want tea?” I ask. In Elvish: “Rey, could you make us tea? Here, use these herbs. That muscle-bound clown will only have molding topsoil in his cupboard.”We drink tea. We talk for another demi-arc. In the course of it, she demonstrates her abilities, trying out different forms: Rey, and then me. Meant to startle us, but I have I known a changeling before. I compliment her, pointing out little deficiencies in the form. Why should help a changeling perfect the roles of me and my nae’aerun? Because if this conversation goes the way it frankly must, then it will be of no matter.We talked about her rage against the members of the Peace Circus, Coralina in particular. Ziki’s fury is concentrated not on the raptor tamer, Volin, whose negligence would seem to be the major contributor of the mayhem, but on the distraction from his would-be young Elven lover. I do not understand it. But I have never watched my daughter be killed by a rampaging dinosaur in what was supposed to be a safe venue, so her thoughts could be twisted in all sorts of unpredictable paths.She must move past her grief, get to life after. Or she must die. There is no other choice.“It is not about them, Ziki.,” I argue. “Not at all. That is why you mustn’t kill them.” She objects to this but I persist. “You are owed an apology and penance besides, though they may have paid that already in the terror of the murder of their friends. But I would hold they are in your debt still. You must face them, demand to be heard, tell them everything. And then you must walk away and leave this angry woman behind, stride back to your daughter’s reflection of love and hope. She would not have your every memory of her tainted with hate and vengeance. You must forgive and move on.”“Impossible.”“You must, for her sake as well as yours.”“What would you have me do?” she asks.“Meet with Coralina. Meet with Volin. I will be there but not to protect: I will be there for you. Demand that they listen. And then walk out of her and his and Rocktar’s lives forever. They are not part of your future. They no longer matter.”Silent again. She doesn’t want to hear any of this, and part of her thinks my words are folly, but she is considering, for this is a path when before she had none. I see on her face the memories of her daughter, the realization that she has tarnished this small wonder of hers.“And what of you? Do I walk out of my life forever as well?” she demands.“I sincerely hope not, s’thaya.”Earlier, Ziki had mentioned Phreet to me hinting that my little human sister was a bargaining chip. But now she slides a key cut to resemble an ornate squid across the table to me.“This is to a safe house where Phreet is being held,” she says. “It is an abandoned warehouse called The Sodden Hold. She was taken by Telalkin, master of the Cabal of Changelings. He is dangerous, that one, a perfected breed of changeling. I have heard he is a being who can perfectly replicate another down to scent, taste and even thought. Phreet will not last there long. Once they finish studying her, they will eliminate her.”“Then we will have to hurry. Rey, could we send a messenger to bring back Coralina and Volin? We will bring them, and meet you,” I nod to Zika, “at the New Moon ceremony in Sehanine’s temple not far from here?” She nods. “Will I, eh, know your face?”“You will, though I will not take this form,” she says.“Will you find me, come to me if you are feeling overcome?”“I will try.”I stand up. “Then you are free to go, Ziki.”“This cabal,” says Rey as the changeling moves to the window, “are there any in the Greyhawk government?”“At every level.”Ziki hops out through the broken window rather than the door.“Outstanding,” Rey mutters.But this is Greyhawk’s problem, not ours. When you outlaw a people just because they exist, they will not like you, and finding an ally in them later when you need them – such as ferreting out who is human and who is not among changelings – merely becomes more difficult. Humans never learn.“OK. Well, I am going to bed,” announces Rey, and she is off to the Crooked Inn.“What? But I need you. Phreet is in danger!”“She is always in danger, Etona,” she says over her shoulder. “I am done. We shall tackle her rescue in the morning.”Mel comes in then, interrupting my response. I tell her that we let the changeling go, and she to my great surprise does not become angry, merely wondering what to put in her report. My days of predicting that one may be coming to an end. She agrees to send word to retrieve Volin and Coralina.Mel also wants to act on Phreet’s rescue immediately: she may share my worry about how much time she might have left, or perhaps it is an excellent way to wrap up the case, potentially apprehending a pile of changelings and their leader.So we return to the Crooked Inn where Mel let Rey know that I went to free Phreet, alone, probably to my death. Alas! It is well that I had a steaming mug of coffee waiting for her when she runs downstairs and scowls at my grin.“Thank you, Rey,” I say on tiptoe, whispering into her ear.Mel tells us all she knows of the Sodden Hold. She knows where it is and what the outside looks like, has some ideas about the inside.“We will need reinforcements,” I say.“I know just where to go,” replies Mel.She leads us to an all-night thug dispensary where, with a flash of coin and a smile, she rents six armored men. They will remain outside the warehouse, a distance back maybe a hundred feet around the corner, while Rey, Rishkar and I creep in ahead.When we arrive at the Sodden Hold, we check the area for unwanted eyes and then quietly unlock the door after examining it for traps. We do not open it. This will be our likely escape route and possibly the avenue for the cavalry – Mel and her boys – if we sound the alarm.We draw back and investigate the rear of the warehouse which perches over the water. Rishkar scouts it for us: there is access to the aging building from underneath, but every plank of the copious amount of rotting wood there is studded with metal spikes. They all face up, though. If it is a snare, it seems to be to prevent escape. This is fortunate.We ascend to find two doors. When we examine one, the very air knocks us with the force of a falling bough. Some kind of invisible servant.Why was this a good idea again? I think back to the ornate key made with such care and probably much money. Of course any entrance will be trapped! We have set an invisible monster on us and probably triggered twelve alarms.A shot of the Silver manages to show the thing’s outline for a brief second. It is big, like an invisible ogre. It evades my faerie fire and is shrugging off those few blows Rey and Rishkar manage to land until I finally get its attention with a hit that lights it up completely. I can feel it swoop over to where I am trapped on a tiny island of dirt surrounded, as we all are, by barely-submerged spiked metal planks. Of course, I do not see the blow coming. How could I?Only twice before have I felt anything like what slammed into me then: when I fell out of a tree as a girl and was unconscious for a day – my father, aunt and only friend at the time each taking vigil waiting for me to die – and the time I made a Fae treant very angry at me.It hit me. I flew. Wall. Bad sounds. Red. Black. Out.</blockquote>

Verification