Andas - Sorrel Darkfire forgets to breathe
Jul 23, 2021 18:15:27 GMT
BB, Ser Baine Cinderwood 🔥🌼, and 4 more like this
Post by stephena on Jul 23, 2021 18:15:27 GMT
It was hot. Too damn hot. Hot as hell, pure like the devil’s breath, burning through the sky and searing the skin like love sears the heart. Sorrel flicked through her desert strategies - pull your resources inward, find moisture in seeds, send a taproot down deep, run when required, hide when necessary - go underground, the Master used to say, do not fear darkness, it's where one comes alive. Which was fine in the bloody desert, but she was in Daring Heights. What she needed was an ice cellar and at least one item of clothing that wasn’t black.
Still slightly dazed from the aftershock of the Feywild she wandered from alley to alley, trying to keep out of the midday sun. Her gift from the Fey, the choker – Autumn Warmth – now seemed like cruel joke. A gem at her throat that added just a little bit more to the heat. Honestly, fairies, thanks and everything but couldn’t it have been some flying boots? She needed some – well, she needed any boots. Three years of vengeful hunting down and murdering, one of fending off counter assassins, a long sea voyage to Kantas followed by weeks of weird stuff with chocolate cake and the odd T Rex wasn’t doing her once sturdy Carrymore Mountain Quashers any favours.
Slumped against the wall, just about ready to melt into the stones at her feet, she briefly perked up when a sturdy half-orc in a bearskin strode into view, throwing some sort of ale down her neck like a thirsty sailor with two necks. Varga! The warrior she’d faced down the unseelie ooze over the dying body of Faust Greybeard at the end of things. Stumbling along behind Varga was a halfling priest and a bustling Tiefling shopkeeper with apron pockets stuffed with apples. Apples? Well, sure, why not? Everyone likes apples.
Then, as if she was building a cathedral out of treacle, she began assembling the first glimmering of a thought, although the heat made thinking itself feel like pulling troll corpses out of derelict coal mines. Varga was damn near the best pound for pound warrior she’d seen since Sykash held back that undead beholder half way through a weird series of entirely unrelated violent tunnels in a hole near Waterdeep. If they had been built by a Mage as legend had it, there had to be questions over the wizard’s sanity. Mind flayers and vampires one floor apart in an underground apartment block was inappropriate zoning in even an amateur landlord.
And in the badly misnamed Bar of Icy Death – a painting of a yeti did not compensate for a lack of air conditioning – the barman’s last breath before she released her grip had mentioned the abandoned MacAdam warehouse as a place to hide from the heat. By which she felt he meant both the sunshine and the city watch. All the same, she let him live with a few suggestions about not deceiving future patrons and renaming his bar accordingly.
“Varga!” Sorrel stepped out from the alleyway and barely dodged the battleaxe as the half orc swung it affectionately towards her.
“Hot enough for ya?” Varga sniffed, eyeing the sable clad ranger up and down cautiously.
Sorrel bowed politely to her companions. “Sorrel Darkfire at your service and your families,” she murmured. The halfling, Kelne, bounced eagerly forward whilst the… shopkeeper? introduced herself as Celina the shopkeeper. “I keep a shop,” she smiled. “Just finished up there. Keeping it. The shop.”
Sorrel wondered if she was stoned. Or maybe recently had been.
“How about that Feywild, Varga?” Sorrel started, before remembering that she chose her line of work in part because she was terrible at small talk. “So, look, there’s this place. It’s like an entertainment place – although all it has is pit fighting and drinking…”
“That’s the complete set!” Varga’s eyes lit up. “Which way?”
“And... I thought…” Sorrel dropped her persuasive face. If you’ve got water and a man in the desert you don’t need a sales pitch. “Follow me.”
She noticed the halfling’s eager eyes light up at the idea of fighting pits, which faintly worried her, but not quite as much as the complete normality of the shopkeeper. Some things are so amazingly normal that at some point you just know they’ll kill you.
Unless the MacAdam disused warehouse did it first, she thought as they stepped through a gash in the wall that may once have been a door. If the denizens weren’t fighting, they were drinking and probably a third of them were doing both as they surged back and forth across the straw and sawdust covered floor. She admired one barbarian’s rhythmic pummelling of a battered half elf – swig, punch, swig swig, punch – and as she ducked under a kobold whistling through the air her shoulders eased a little. This sort of place she understood. No Fey, no Unseelies, just violent, drunken thugs. She was kicking it old school.
There were a few benches and rickety tables dotted around and she started to look for four spare seats when she noticed Varga’s nostrils flaring as she stared at the fighting pit. Celina, meanwhile, was waving over a goblin carrying a vast bucket of ale that seemed slightly larger than him.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome to the pit,” the goblin rasped. “My name is…” he paused and looked off into the distance as if searching wildly for something. “My name is Bucket,” he said proudly at last. “I sell ale. The best in… well, in this building.”
He served out four generous beakers for three copper each, and as the liquid poured down their parched throats taking pieces of carotid artery with it Sorrel felt they needed an ally early. “Bucket, you’re a good looking fellow and I like the cut of your jib,” she began.
“Jib? I never touched him! What have you heard?” Bucket seemed agitated.
“No, I meant, you look… impressive,” she fished out a gold piece and slipped it into his clammy hand. “Why not keep the ale coming? We’ll be here a while. And what’s the score here? How do the fights breakdown?”
Bucket pointed out the Dragonborn organising the fights and scuttled off. Varga was in the line before Sorrel could say “perhaps you would like to compete in the fights Varga?” Or, indeed, before Sorrel could say “Per.” The cheerful half orc made her way respectfully to the front of the queue by lifting all those in front of her and hurling them to one side. The Dragonborn, whilst clearly impressed with her technique, sent her to the back of the line and signed in the now severely injured contestants.
Finally Varga stood in front of him just as Celina was sliding off her chair, a good five ales deep and clearly aiming for a TKO, albeit self inflicted. Kelne, meanwhile, was gazing around the place in awe, noting each halfing with a kind of shivering glee. Sorrel felt it wiser to adopt an old drinking trick from her information gathering days – not drinking at all, and letting the brown liquid flow to the ground at her feet. Which, given the state of her boots, proved almost as stupid as drinking it.
Eventually Varga was checked in and her opponent, Tricky Otto, hove into view. All four women gaped. Tricky Otto was a halfling. They took a quick look at the odds. The halfling - red hair, tricolour hat, rocking the Captain Jack Sparrow vibe - was a favourite, by some way.
“I’ve got an idea!” Celina raised her beaker. “Let’s split the party! It always, always works.”
Sorrel quickly counted through her previous party splitting escapades then thought through the extensive tactical lessons at the House academy, did some simple addition and came up with a fat zero. “I’m not sure I agree onehunder per cent with your police work there…” she began, but Celina and Kelne were off, scouting out the opposition. Sorrel figured she should get Varga focussed and slapped the half orcs face a couple of times.
“Varga, let’s go girl, full rage, I’ve got 20 gold on you, get present, get angry, let’s see that barbarian fury!” Sorrel bounced left to right, nodding and shouting, working up her energy ready for the off.
“Actually, it’s more complicated than that,” Varga said thoughtfully. “The concept of rage is essentially a spiritual state, an essence rather than a thought, a moment to treat others as your would treat yourself, in a way. The shaman describes rage as an ecstasy – a moment of union with the godhead…”
A small crowd gathered, and Sorrel realised with some alarm that this had rapidly become a lecture. Before she could work out how to intervene, Varga’s name rang out, followed by Tricky Otto’s. “Contestants! To the pit!”
At Varga’s name, a strange ripple ran through the crowd – not anger, not support… something… indefinable. Half orc names weren’t common in Daring Heights, Sorrel knew, but this felt like recognition rather than ignorance.
Then the fight was on. Varga steamed forward, every blow appearing to land in a devastating combo of axe and hammer. But Otto wriggled and ducked and somehow shrugged off direct hits into glancing blows. Otto countered, and for a second Sorrel thought they were in real trouble. Each blow landed, taking chunks from Varga’s tough, half orc skin. Just as Sorrel was debating the ethics of a longbow based intervention, she noticed Kelne at the pitside, her body emanating a sensual glow that Sorrel found quite disturbing. She felt a familiar heat rise and was relieved to see the same effect blossom in Tricky Otto, who started visibly flirting with Kelne.
Varga sensed her moment and waded in with a flurry of blows, her weapons a blur, and Otto was down. For a second there was a deafening hush. The mood of the crowd was hard to read and Sorrel fumbled for an arrow. Then a huge, scarred, pit fighting half orc reached down into the ring and hauled Varga out – to cheers from the crowd.
Sorrel quivered. This was Baine. She was sure of it. She’d read tales in the temple, and there were still copies of the New Orc Times in the library with blow by blow accounts of his battles to keep the city safe. Sorrel was hazy on the details of the story, she’d been more taken by the pictures. Baine was like a primordial god, his muscles themselves had muscles, and he seemed to enjoy taking showers when painters were around. As she watched he deposited Varga safely on ground and eased back his shoulders, his lats sliding around each other like ships manoeuvring in a port and his biceps flexing smoothly enough to dispel any idea that he might have three large boulders under his skin.
He spoke softly to Varga in Orc, a language Sorrel was fluent in for reasons that seemed tasteless to remember at this point. Certainly none of the poor wretches she’d used as impromptu tutors were as handsome as Baine, or as alive. They were discussing Varga’s original plan to return to Faerun and how that seemed to be drifting away as Kantas seeped under her skin. Baine understood. Then he said something Sorrel didn’t understand but sent shivers down her spine – ‘We are relentless. We die on our feet.’
She figured it was best to play dumb on her linguistic skills but was horrified to discover she was acting dumb anyway, fangirling in a genuinely pathetic manner over Baine, and actually saying “I love your work.” Sweet Selune, why not say I carried a watermelon?
She caught a glimpse of Celina hauling a purse with a note out of her pocket and registered the Tiefling’s alarm as she speed read it, but before Sorrel could move towards her an enormous dog butted her from behind. She turned and briefly prepared to die as the beast towered over her, but it rapidly became clear this was Baine’s pet. Of course Baine would have a pet. He was so caring. Kind and hot. She shook her head. These were unfamiliar thoughts and it was strange to discover there was at least one man who could turn her, even if just for a night. Given that he clearly thought she was deranged every time she opened her mouth, she was taking that off the table all by herself, but still… fluidity was a new concept and not one she was entirely comfortable with.
Fortunately – it’s a sign of how troubled she was that she considered this fortunate – the giant dog which apparently had boots of purest gold decided it was taking her outside. The night couldn’t get any stranger, she shrugged, not realising how astonishingly wrong she was and how unexpectedly… but we anticipate…
By dint of unusually expressive canine features, the dog guided her to the street then seemed to be urging her to jump on its back. “Jump on your back?” Sorrel said out loud. The dog looked at her and she realised animals could look exasperated. She clambered on and was surprised to find how unsurprised she was when the dog flew off down the street.
“I’m on a flying dog,” Sorrel thought to herself. “I’ve just met Baine and now I’m on a flying dog. It is possible that I’m asleep and this is a dream, but let’s be honest, no-one in a dream ever actually thinks they’re in a dream. It’s a poor literary device for defining extraordinary events. It’s more possible that I’m dead and this dog is a messenger from the gods taking me…”
The dog stopped and she realised she either wasn’t dead or the gods were incredibly bitchy – she was outside Lucan’s Leather, a shoe shop. She looked down at the tattered straps on her feet and then at the dog. “So now everyone’s a critic,” she sighed. “This might be my actual look. Dishevelled warrior. It’s a thing.”
The dog met her gaze and she blushed. “OK, sheesh, the animals here are mean,” she grumbled and tried the door. It was locked. The closed sign was kind of obvious now she was right up close to it. She fumbled in her pocket for her lock picks and raised an eyebrow at the hound, which growled more with irritation than anger. “Right, I get it, I come back in the daytime. As quests go, quasi celestial St Bernards offering you some shopping tips isn’t…”
And then she choked her words back as the clouds above the square parted and, impossibly on this slow summer evening, the moon shone brightly down, so much brighter than the sun that it almost blinded her. She felt rather than saw the swish of dark robes, the low droning chant of a ritual, and then a vision of the temple to Selune. She felt fear and confusion race through her nervous system, by she noted them as if from a distance, realising these were not her feelings but belonged to someone else. The frustration that followed was also another’s impulse as was a rising sense of urgency. It was as if she was a jerking marionette, tugged this way and that by the terrors of others. The chanting grew louder, the voices darker and suddenly one voice – so much deeper than that others – boomed out so loudly she felt sure the windows of the square would all shatter as its rumbling bass shook the foundations of every building and made her very bones rattle. “Protect the high diviner,” echoed through her soul. Sorrel fumbled for the symbol of Selune Seraphina had given her and it seemed to glow with its own light and power.
And then it was gone.
She turned to the hound which watched her impatiently. A quick glance left and right showed no damage, just a warm sunset and slow moving townsfolk enjoying the cool of the evening.
She arrived back at the warehouse in a daze. Baine’s fight was over – he had won, of course – and Varga’s chinchilla snuggled up against his continent sized shoulders. Her canine companion growled territorially but Sorrel’s gaze was too unfocussed to follow how the face off unfolded.
She sat in silence for a long time, her companions gradually gathering around, until she realised they were the only people left in this vast, echoing space. Celina seemed preoccupied, Kelne was strangely excited and Varga was proudly flexing, discussing the complexities of half orc life in Kantas with Baine.
As they moved towards the exit, she asked Baine – “who is the High Diviner?”
Baine gave a strange smirk. “The highest cleric of Selune… Rholor Vuzehk,” he paused, thought for a second. “He’s a real arsehole.”
As the others moved into the Daring Heights dusk, Sorrel peeled off and made her way to the temple square. She stood in a shadowy corner and watched people walk by then her eyes turned to the glowing grey sunset stone columns and worn stone stairs.
What was she supposed to do now?
Still slightly dazed from the aftershock of the Feywild she wandered from alley to alley, trying to keep out of the midday sun. Her gift from the Fey, the choker – Autumn Warmth – now seemed like cruel joke. A gem at her throat that added just a little bit more to the heat. Honestly, fairies, thanks and everything but couldn’t it have been some flying boots? She needed some – well, she needed any boots. Three years of vengeful hunting down and murdering, one of fending off counter assassins, a long sea voyage to Kantas followed by weeks of weird stuff with chocolate cake and the odd T Rex wasn’t doing her once sturdy Carrymore Mountain Quashers any favours.
Slumped against the wall, just about ready to melt into the stones at her feet, she briefly perked up when a sturdy half-orc in a bearskin strode into view, throwing some sort of ale down her neck like a thirsty sailor with two necks. Varga! The warrior she’d faced down the unseelie ooze over the dying body of Faust Greybeard at the end of things. Stumbling along behind Varga was a halfling priest and a bustling Tiefling shopkeeper with apron pockets stuffed with apples. Apples? Well, sure, why not? Everyone likes apples.
Then, as if she was building a cathedral out of treacle, she began assembling the first glimmering of a thought, although the heat made thinking itself feel like pulling troll corpses out of derelict coal mines. Varga was damn near the best pound for pound warrior she’d seen since Sykash held back that undead beholder half way through a weird series of entirely unrelated violent tunnels in a hole near Waterdeep. If they had been built by a Mage as legend had it, there had to be questions over the wizard’s sanity. Mind flayers and vampires one floor apart in an underground apartment block was inappropriate zoning in even an amateur landlord.
And in the badly misnamed Bar of Icy Death – a painting of a yeti did not compensate for a lack of air conditioning – the barman’s last breath before she released her grip had mentioned the abandoned MacAdam warehouse as a place to hide from the heat. By which she felt he meant both the sunshine and the city watch. All the same, she let him live with a few suggestions about not deceiving future patrons and renaming his bar accordingly.
“Varga!” Sorrel stepped out from the alleyway and barely dodged the battleaxe as the half orc swung it affectionately towards her.
“Hot enough for ya?” Varga sniffed, eyeing the sable clad ranger up and down cautiously.
Sorrel bowed politely to her companions. “Sorrel Darkfire at your service and your families,” she murmured. The halfling, Kelne, bounced eagerly forward whilst the… shopkeeper? introduced herself as Celina the shopkeeper. “I keep a shop,” she smiled. “Just finished up there. Keeping it. The shop.”
Sorrel wondered if she was stoned. Or maybe recently had been.
“How about that Feywild, Varga?” Sorrel started, before remembering that she chose her line of work in part because she was terrible at small talk. “So, look, there’s this place. It’s like an entertainment place – although all it has is pit fighting and drinking…”
“That’s the complete set!” Varga’s eyes lit up. “Which way?”
“And... I thought…” Sorrel dropped her persuasive face. If you’ve got water and a man in the desert you don’t need a sales pitch. “Follow me.”
She noticed the halfling’s eager eyes light up at the idea of fighting pits, which faintly worried her, but not quite as much as the complete normality of the shopkeeper. Some things are so amazingly normal that at some point you just know they’ll kill you.
Unless the MacAdam disused warehouse did it first, she thought as they stepped through a gash in the wall that may once have been a door. If the denizens weren’t fighting, they were drinking and probably a third of them were doing both as they surged back and forth across the straw and sawdust covered floor. She admired one barbarian’s rhythmic pummelling of a battered half elf – swig, punch, swig swig, punch – and as she ducked under a kobold whistling through the air her shoulders eased a little. This sort of place she understood. No Fey, no Unseelies, just violent, drunken thugs. She was kicking it old school.
There were a few benches and rickety tables dotted around and she started to look for four spare seats when she noticed Varga’s nostrils flaring as she stared at the fighting pit. Celina, meanwhile, was waving over a goblin carrying a vast bucket of ale that seemed slightly larger than him.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome to the pit,” the goblin rasped. “My name is…” he paused and looked off into the distance as if searching wildly for something. “My name is Bucket,” he said proudly at last. “I sell ale. The best in… well, in this building.”
He served out four generous beakers for three copper each, and as the liquid poured down their parched throats taking pieces of carotid artery with it Sorrel felt they needed an ally early. “Bucket, you’re a good looking fellow and I like the cut of your jib,” she began.
“Jib? I never touched him! What have you heard?” Bucket seemed agitated.
“No, I meant, you look… impressive,” she fished out a gold piece and slipped it into his clammy hand. “Why not keep the ale coming? We’ll be here a while. And what’s the score here? How do the fights breakdown?”
Bucket pointed out the Dragonborn organising the fights and scuttled off. Varga was in the line before Sorrel could say “perhaps you would like to compete in the fights Varga?” Or, indeed, before Sorrel could say “Per.” The cheerful half orc made her way respectfully to the front of the queue by lifting all those in front of her and hurling them to one side. The Dragonborn, whilst clearly impressed with her technique, sent her to the back of the line and signed in the now severely injured contestants.
Finally Varga stood in front of him just as Celina was sliding off her chair, a good five ales deep and clearly aiming for a TKO, albeit self inflicted. Kelne, meanwhile, was gazing around the place in awe, noting each halfing with a kind of shivering glee. Sorrel felt it wiser to adopt an old drinking trick from her information gathering days – not drinking at all, and letting the brown liquid flow to the ground at her feet. Which, given the state of her boots, proved almost as stupid as drinking it.
Eventually Varga was checked in and her opponent, Tricky Otto, hove into view. All four women gaped. Tricky Otto was a halfling. They took a quick look at the odds. The halfling - red hair, tricolour hat, rocking the Captain Jack Sparrow vibe - was a favourite, by some way.
“I’ve got an idea!” Celina raised her beaker. “Let’s split the party! It always, always works.”
Sorrel quickly counted through her previous party splitting escapades then thought through the extensive tactical lessons at the House academy, did some simple addition and came up with a fat zero. “I’m not sure I agree onehunder per cent with your police work there…” she began, but Celina and Kelne were off, scouting out the opposition. Sorrel figured she should get Varga focussed and slapped the half orcs face a couple of times.
“Varga, let’s go girl, full rage, I’ve got 20 gold on you, get present, get angry, let’s see that barbarian fury!” Sorrel bounced left to right, nodding and shouting, working up her energy ready for the off.
“Actually, it’s more complicated than that,” Varga said thoughtfully. “The concept of rage is essentially a spiritual state, an essence rather than a thought, a moment to treat others as your would treat yourself, in a way. The shaman describes rage as an ecstasy – a moment of union with the godhead…”
A small crowd gathered, and Sorrel realised with some alarm that this had rapidly become a lecture. Before she could work out how to intervene, Varga’s name rang out, followed by Tricky Otto’s. “Contestants! To the pit!”
At Varga’s name, a strange ripple ran through the crowd – not anger, not support… something… indefinable. Half orc names weren’t common in Daring Heights, Sorrel knew, but this felt like recognition rather than ignorance.
Then the fight was on. Varga steamed forward, every blow appearing to land in a devastating combo of axe and hammer. But Otto wriggled and ducked and somehow shrugged off direct hits into glancing blows. Otto countered, and for a second Sorrel thought they were in real trouble. Each blow landed, taking chunks from Varga’s tough, half orc skin. Just as Sorrel was debating the ethics of a longbow based intervention, she noticed Kelne at the pitside, her body emanating a sensual glow that Sorrel found quite disturbing. She felt a familiar heat rise and was relieved to see the same effect blossom in Tricky Otto, who started visibly flirting with Kelne.
Varga sensed her moment and waded in with a flurry of blows, her weapons a blur, and Otto was down. For a second there was a deafening hush. The mood of the crowd was hard to read and Sorrel fumbled for an arrow. Then a huge, scarred, pit fighting half orc reached down into the ring and hauled Varga out – to cheers from the crowd.
Sorrel quivered. This was Baine. She was sure of it. She’d read tales in the temple, and there were still copies of the New Orc Times in the library with blow by blow accounts of his battles to keep the city safe. Sorrel was hazy on the details of the story, she’d been more taken by the pictures. Baine was like a primordial god, his muscles themselves had muscles, and he seemed to enjoy taking showers when painters were around. As she watched he deposited Varga safely on ground and eased back his shoulders, his lats sliding around each other like ships manoeuvring in a port and his biceps flexing smoothly enough to dispel any idea that he might have three large boulders under his skin.
He spoke softly to Varga in Orc, a language Sorrel was fluent in for reasons that seemed tasteless to remember at this point. Certainly none of the poor wretches she’d used as impromptu tutors were as handsome as Baine, or as alive. They were discussing Varga’s original plan to return to Faerun and how that seemed to be drifting away as Kantas seeped under her skin. Baine understood. Then he said something Sorrel didn’t understand but sent shivers down her spine – ‘We are relentless. We die on our feet.’
She figured it was best to play dumb on her linguistic skills but was horrified to discover she was acting dumb anyway, fangirling in a genuinely pathetic manner over Baine, and actually saying “I love your work.” Sweet Selune, why not say I carried a watermelon?
She caught a glimpse of Celina hauling a purse with a note out of her pocket and registered the Tiefling’s alarm as she speed read it, but before Sorrel could move towards her an enormous dog butted her from behind. She turned and briefly prepared to die as the beast towered over her, but it rapidly became clear this was Baine’s pet. Of course Baine would have a pet. He was so caring. Kind and hot. She shook her head. These were unfamiliar thoughts and it was strange to discover there was at least one man who could turn her, even if just for a night. Given that he clearly thought she was deranged every time she opened her mouth, she was taking that off the table all by herself, but still… fluidity was a new concept and not one she was entirely comfortable with.
Fortunately – it’s a sign of how troubled she was that she considered this fortunate – the giant dog which apparently had boots of purest gold decided it was taking her outside. The night couldn’t get any stranger, she shrugged, not realising how astonishingly wrong she was and how unexpectedly… but we anticipate…
By dint of unusually expressive canine features, the dog guided her to the street then seemed to be urging her to jump on its back. “Jump on your back?” Sorrel said out loud. The dog looked at her and she realised animals could look exasperated. She clambered on and was surprised to find how unsurprised she was when the dog flew off down the street.
“I’m on a flying dog,” Sorrel thought to herself. “I’ve just met Baine and now I’m on a flying dog. It is possible that I’m asleep and this is a dream, but let’s be honest, no-one in a dream ever actually thinks they’re in a dream. It’s a poor literary device for defining extraordinary events. It’s more possible that I’m dead and this dog is a messenger from the gods taking me…”
The dog stopped and she realised she either wasn’t dead or the gods were incredibly bitchy – she was outside Lucan’s Leather, a shoe shop. She looked down at the tattered straps on her feet and then at the dog. “So now everyone’s a critic,” she sighed. “This might be my actual look. Dishevelled warrior. It’s a thing.”
The dog met her gaze and she blushed. “OK, sheesh, the animals here are mean,” she grumbled and tried the door. It was locked. The closed sign was kind of obvious now she was right up close to it. She fumbled in her pocket for her lock picks and raised an eyebrow at the hound, which growled more with irritation than anger. “Right, I get it, I come back in the daytime. As quests go, quasi celestial St Bernards offering you some shopping tips isn’t…”
And then she choked her words back as the clouds above the square parted and, impossibly on this slow summer evening, the moon shone brightly down, so much brighter than the sun that it almost blinded her. She felt rather than saw the swish of dark robes, the low droning chant of a ritual, and then a vision of the temple to Selune. She felt fear and confusion race through her nervous system, by she noted them as if from a distance, realising these were not her feelings but belonged to someone else. The frustration that followed was also another’s impulse as was a rising sense of urgency. It was as if she was a jerking marionette, tugged this way and that by the terrors of others. The chanting grew louder, the voices darker and suddenly one voice – so much deeper than that others – boomed out so loudly she felt sure the windows of the square would all shatter as its rumbling bass shook the foundations of every building and made her very bones rattle. “Protect the high diviner,” echoed through her soul. Sorrel fumbled for the symbol of Selune Seraphina had given her and it seemed to glow with its own light and power.
And then it was gone.
She turned to the hound which watched her impatiently. A quick glance left and right showed no damage, just a warm sunset and slow moving townsfolk enjoying the cool of the evening.
She arrived back at the warehouse in a daze. Baine’s fight was over – he had won, of course – and Varga’s chinchilla snuggled up against his continent sized shoulders. Her canine companion growled territorially but Sorrel’s gaze was too unfocussed to follow how the face off unfolded.
She sat in silence for a long time, her companions gradually gathering around, until she realised they were the only people left in this vast, echoing space. Celina seemed preoccupied, Kelne was strangely excited and Varga was proudly flexing, discussing the complexities of half orc life in Kantas with Baine.
As they moved towards the exit, she asked Baine – “who is the High Diviner?”
Baine gave a strange smirk. “The highest cleric of Selune… Rholor Vuzehk,” he paused, thought for a second. “He’s a real arsehole.”
As the others moved into the Daring Heights dusk, Sorrel peeled off and made her way to the temple square. She stood in a shadowy corner and watched people walk by then her eyes turned to the glowing grey sunset stone columns and worn stone stairs.
What was she supposed to do now?
