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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazlow" data-source="post: 3292760" data-attributes="member: 24242">The day still looms heavily over your heads, the sun showing no sign of breaking through the oppressive clouds that still unleash a steady rain.  As you walk you try to put the black infection in your finger out of your mind, but it still gnaws away at the edge of your thoughts, looming there, waiting, like the clouds.  And you notice that though you focused your mind and healed your self-inflicted wound, you still don't feel that you're functioning at one hundred percent.As if reading your thoughts, Romanna speaks up.  "We'll swing by the apothecary in the abbey, we'll be passing right by it on the way to the lighthouse.  He'll probably have what we need for your finger...  Although I don't know if we should tell him exactly what it's for.  Some of the more senior brothers there refused to help me with the shipwreck victim who had the same affliction.  In fact, they wanted to toss him back out to sea, if you can believe that.  It was only their fear of touching him that he remained in the infirmary where I was able to at least ease his suffering somewhat.  But even then, they only ceased their demands when he finally...  Expired...  From his wounds."You walk on a ways in silence, both lost in your thoughts.  After a while Romanna lifts her head up toward the clouds, removes her hood, and begins singing, quietly at first, then louder and with more conviction, as if to push her words up through the clouds to the feet of her god by sheer force of will.Overhead the albatross Hangs motionless upon the air And deep beneath the rolling waves In labyrinths of coral caves An echo of a distant time Comes willowing across the sand And everything is green and submarineAnd no one called us to the land And no one knows the where's or why'sSomething stirs and something tries Starts to climb toward the lightShe stops then, suddenly, and looks up and lets the rain hit her full in the face again.  But her reverie is broken just as quickly as the mid-day bell rings at the abbey, now just a minute or two away.  She stirs, looks at you, then smiles warmly.  "Come," she says, in a sweet voice that makes it nearly impossible to do otherwise.  "Let's see Brother Zachariel straight away."  She leads you back in the gate, and heads immediately to the left, where nestled in a corner of the abbey's main wall is a small building surrounded nearly on all sides by what would look to be a decent garden if the rain hadn't made it much more than a mud pit.  "Good thing we don't need any herbs," Romanna muses as she knocks on the door and enters."Brother Zachariel?  Sorry to disturb you again."A rotund, red-faced man looks up from a bench and wipes the sweat off his brow with a sleeve of his monasterial accoutrements.  He smiles as he sees Romanna and again when he sees you.  "Not at all, not at all, sister.  Welcome."  He turns to you.  "Welcome indeed.  I am Brother Zachariel, the abbey's apothecary.  And you are...?"  He stretches out his hand to greet you....But before you have a chance to respond, he quickly interjects, "Oh, dear me, I'm so sorry, I wouldn't shake my hand just now - acidic unguents, don't you know."  He looks at his hands as if they've just given the queen a pinch on the fanny.  "Dearie me.  A moment, a moment...  Please, come in, come in."  He hastens over to a basin and washes his hands fastidiously with a block of sweet-smelling soap.</blockquote>

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