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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1413537" data-attributes="member: 645">[OOC note:  The following is an account of Fjorent of Beskarn's recent spirit journey. Unlike some stuff I've created freeform in the past for other characters, this is actual content from an actual RP session.]Witch’s Hour in Scorn’el The chalk screeches on the floorboards as the star grows its fifth arm, and Fjorent sits back to contemplate her work.  Five points, five tallow candles.  It’s not as if the shape mattered for the efficacy of the focus;  but someone might enter despite bolts and warnings, and a Witch has a reputation to maintain – and a body to protect while she is away from the Pale.  Superstition may still stay a hand where other barriers fail.  The pouch.  Fjorent shakes a few desiccated, woody slivers into her palm and stirs through them with a finger.  Skin-thin for an easy ride – trunk-thick for death and truth and night.  Which one to choose?  The rich food and wine at Scorn’el Mayor Maxilio’s dinner table have left her light-headed, and the lures of the True are not to be trifled with.  Yet she needs answers tonight.  Two smooth thick slices go back into the pouch.  They would leave a Witch out for a night even without the wine to account for;  too long, too dangerous here and tonight.  Most of the other slivers are thin enough to see through, potent enough for a brief dip into the True but no serious work.  Which leaves that lumpy one, slightly uneven at the end where the mushroom from which was cut curved around its tree, long unchosen because of it.  Fjorent sighs.  Shape doesn’t matter … The lumpy bit of mushroom bends and cracks between the Witch’s teeth, tasting of dust and leather.  The candles spit and flicker.  Then as the mushroom starts releasing its deeply stored juices, her gums tingle and go numb and she settles back to welcome the acrid taste of the True.  The taste of forest.  The taste of Beskarn.  Each and every time again, the first time.  Spring again, a fly whirling insanely through the sunbeams among --- ***Whirling mists at first, merely.  The sensation of her own skin more sharply defined.  Then the curtain of mists draws back from a grey, bleak landscape.  Bleakness that, in the True, hurts the eye.  The Witch, still in human form, draws her sickle and raises her free hand.  Two parallel cuts in the fleshy base of her left thumb, two drops of bright blood drawn.  Where her blood drips on the barren ground – One, a skull cracks against a castle wall – flowers spring up from the ground, spread like ripples on a lake – Two, her sickle slits a prone man’s throat – a carpet of a thousand colours and impossibly brilliant greens grows up – a living forest.  The Witch breathes.  One answer has been given and it is what she had hoped.  Far off a village nestles among the trees.  Here and tonight, that village is Arkand.  The Witch selects her form for keen vision and speed and changes.  Feet claw and fingers feather, and (a strand of moss whirling off a talon) the Witch-eagle rises on the air and speeds towards the village to investigate.  The village appears healthy and at peace.  Bear guards patrol with pikes and spears, gazelles are chatting in the marketplace.  As the Witch-eagle spirals down searching for a certain spirit she wishes to see, she suddenly feels agitation boil up from below.  The landscape changes again, unforested hills stretch away from the village, an immense dark cloud moves rapidly up from the west.  Strong current, unasked for.  Here is the Present changing into a Future.  Must learn more.  The Witch leaves Arkand be and speeds towards the looming cloud.  A gigantic shadow flits across her from above and behind, the whirl of a wingtip buffets her and sends the ground spiralling crazily up towards her until, bruised but intact, she manages to catch air under her wings and right herself.  The creature is a great eagle, which just now reaches the cloud and swoops down at it, sending lightning flashing from its talons.  Fire billows upwards from the cloud:  battle has been joined.  Cold seeps strength from the Witch-eagle as she flies.  She is far from her Pale body and this cloud is dark and strong.  Yet she must see more.  Answers.  She presses on.  Faces swim in the cloud as she expected:  thousands upon thousands of Mongali faces contorted with the fear and lust of battle.  The horde is immense and beyond it stretches rank upon ghostly rank of Mongali ancestors, as far as eagle eyes can see and farther.  Only with her mind can the Witch reach to that faraway, point of utter darkness from which this neverending, never vanquished stream pours:  Mon Gal, the first Mongali ancestor.  Tales told in the Pale claim that Mon Gal destroyed the gods who made him, though he himself was but a man.  More eagles have joined the first to battle the cloud.  Some fall, defeated.  The cold so close to the Horde makes the Witch’s wings tire.  She has seen as much as she dares, and wheels away.  The Arkand village lies in her path and this time freely offers what lay hidden in it before:  a sheep stands in deep talk with a slim greyhound.  The Witch recognises the Margravine (no murderess after all) with Captain Jethis.  As the Witch-eagle sinks low enough to overhear their words, the sheep glances up briefly and frowns:  sharp senses, that one has.  The Witch rises on the wind to not disturb her further.  As the Witch-eagle travels north towards the faint call of her body in the Pale, the sun drowns and the moon flies up into the night sky.  A white-domed city spreads, dominating a lake.  In through a window of the Temple of Carthea she flies, to check on the spirits of both her old friends in passing.  The badger Raven is hunkered down and snores peacefully;  the gazelle Cailin lies curled up, magic patterns glimmering along her forelegs, graceful even in sleep.  Maybe, the Witch thinks, the two of them in themselves should be enough to keep her with her new allies?  Yet, too many doubts remain.  The world is at a turning point.  So many Futures will be discarded, at each further step one takes ...  She has strength left to seek more answers, and flies off to find the spirits of those men that puzzle her.  The first bedchamber the Witch enters has a sleek black cat stretched happily along her rich, soft bed.  Wrong room, obviously, this is the High Priestess and not the Margrave.  She finds Kanor at her second attempt:  a kestrel pacing tensely back and forth, wings held tautly as if the man has his hands clamped behind his back as he is thinking furiously.  As she watches he takes a sharp turn and looks straight at her, through her.  Blind to her hovering spirit’s presence.  Ambitious.  Also, a man in sore need for guidance.  She wonders fleetingly why he has not brought his advisor witch Grimhelda to a council of this importance, then forgets.  Captain Xiang next – a man of many voices, many faces.  Again, she hopes for clarity.  It takes her a while to locate him in the whirling mists of the guest quarters.  Then, without warning, the Panther.  It paces back and forth madly, imprisoned by invisible, intangible walls, claws gouging the flagstones where it walks, lines sharply discrete, mass impossibly focussed even for the True --- Too much, this is too much!  The Panther turns its head and stares at her with eyes completely blank, with nothing and nothing beyond them.  More swiftly than a wing beats they join into a maelstrom that tears at her very spirit and soul.  The Witch flutters and with an effort of will, flees.  After this experience it costs her to draw up courage and seek out more knowledge.  What hidden agenda, what dark secret may she find in that other man who has struck her as dangerous, although for very different reasons?   None, as it turns out.  The priest Tarquin is a plump little mole, all four legs splayed in the oblivion of sleep.  The Witch’s body in the Pale calls more persistently now as her True strength wanes.  She slips into her chamber, settles into her sprawling body and stretches, testing sensation.  Still brimmingly sharp and defined, still True.  She sits up straighter and concentrates, hoping she may accomplish one more thing this night.  The pentagram and sputtering candles dim and swim and make way for what she needs:  a forest, clearing, a still pool.  As she bends forward to look in, as always her True skin crawls with the old memory –  Not.  Now.  Stay.  Away.  I.  Took Your.  Head!   The question.  Stay with her new companions;  or go?  The pool shivers.  Conflict.  Her conflict, their conflict?  Unclear.  This is puzzling.  Then, in quick succession, images storm her.  Evil, huge, shapeless, ancient, of immense power.  Evil, smaller, younger but just as powerful.  She has never met him but she recognises the Cambion.  Her companions face them – the Panther here, the mole there.  The Witch is with them, an unsettling echo of the Witch watching through the pool echoing the Witch on the ground echoing the watching Witch …  Powerful cold magic streaks from the group but does not reach its target – it is deflected off the ancient evil and rebounds on the group.  The Witch’s life spark dies, Just like when the ogre – She wrenches her mind from this intrusion of a memory from the Pale, irrelevant here, back to the vision in her pool.  More people have died from the deflected cold.  The mole is frozen solid, fur spiky with frost.  The Panther steps up to battle the Cambion – and with the certainty of one drifting outside the Rivers of Time, the Witch above the pool knows that the warrior will lose, loses and has already lost.  ***One by one, the candles burn down, strangely insipid after the vividness of the True.  The Witch summons the strength to blink.  A hand.  Reluctantly she flexes its fingers, retakes possession of her Pale flesh.  Black bruises run up her arm where the giant eagle’s wing buffeted her in the True.  The bitter aftertaste of mushroom fills her mouth.  To curl up and forget … Yet there is nothing for it.  She has received guidance.  Without thinking further, as a Witch must, she picks herself up giddily to go to the man who needs guidance more than anyone.  A dragon, she reflects as she strides down the corridor towards the Margrave’s quarters.  That was what the shapeless form would have been.  Cold spells against a red dragon … that do not work?  Impossible …  And yet.  A red dragon has been seen destroying a fortress that stood in the way of the Cambion’s army.  A dragon that was reported not once to have used its fire breath …</blockquote>

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