Outentown - Dark Times

[Copper Dragon]

A Recent Happenstance
It's snowing again quietly on Outentown. Or rather it's snowing still? It was difficult to say, and little to do about it.

Were families grieving again in the village, or did they mourn still, never-ending? It was a thought Artemis could not linger on for long, and there was little to do about it. Little, but not nothing.

Together with Élisabeth Duval and Merney Valroc, Artemis D'Assanthe had set out to the meadows near the thaedar, where the Blackfinger - the priest of Beshaba taking up residence in Outentown - had informed them that a girl child had gone lost, claimed by misfortune, by Black Bes. The trio meant to rescue the girl from the dark, arachnid-infested tunnels that she'd landed in. They were too late, and when Artemis returned alone into the village, it was with a child's form in her arms, wrapped in her rosy cloak. The other two had taken other paths; but no less heartbroken.

A Girl Returned
Dawnbringer D'Assanthe brought the girl's body to the Adorned Garrmin, Outentown's Ilmatari healer. The two informed the family Sommechein of the tragedy; and as night became thicker and colder, Artemis insisted on holding a Wake, with or without the family, with or without any further onlookers. She held the wake at Chauntea's shrine, a goddess allegedly allied to her own deity, the Morninglord.

When dawn was shimmering on the sky, Artemis requested the villagers to stand with her a moment; to stand still. To listen...

An Appeal
"A life was lost tonight," she began, dark circles under the elven eyes, cheeks rosy with the cold. "Not to disease, not to hunger, but to a carefree step... a mistake. A young child played, slipped, and met her death in a den of monsters. There is nothing comforting to say about how she died. She was cold. Afraid. Alone," Artemis paused, jaws tense. She looked at the faces of the villagers.

She looked at them and saw the faces of people who'd worked hard and lost hard. She saw them all. She saw the faces of the Triadic Temple. The dead, and the living that wished they'd been dead. Her friends, her congregation, her allies, her powerlessness...

She saw enough.

"This is what the Lady Doom has done for you," Artemis sneered in Easting, "This is what her priests, and other dark gods' priests, like vultures bring! This is the misery they would cast you in, and they would drink your tears and laugh at your cries! They would have you believe that you have nothing. That for them, you will bend, bow, and break. You have lost a sweet maiden - a precious girl, a promising bloom, now quenched, trampled on, robbed of a future. Will you let her loss feed despair? Feed your fear, breed your indifference, empower evil? Will you dare let her death be in vain?

"By all the gods of light, you will not. You have a shrine to the Grainmother; a healer of the Broken God; servants of the Forest Father of whom I heard. You have the dawn returning each morning - this, which not even the winter nor its blackhearted gods can take from you! You are descendents of survivors, of noble men and women who have endured terror and punishment. You will not grow indifferent, subservient! You will be defiant! You have found a reason to rise from your bed this morning, however heavy the step was, however harsh the day will be, however - Lady Doom be damned - painful. You rose and lived, and live you must with determination, not in fear.

"Hope; hope dies last. But only because it fights to the end. Until not hope, but the knowledge remains that you have done everything in your power.

"Learn from this loss. Keep your children safe. Work together to do so, seek help or guidance if need be. You will find aid; you will."

[Obsidian Sea]

Sleep comes that night, for all in the village but for The Seeker, who remains. Those who have for any length of time lived in Outentown know of Artemis D'Assanthe. Her words have fury; a fire unlike the mildness of Brother Garrmin, made more mild still in the absence of close friends of the faith whom he has lost to holy callings elsewhere in and beyond the kingdom of Impiltur. Yet for all her fire, the High Dawnlord cannot muster vivacity from the community - not tonight. Her words land true, and they bring comfort; reassurance; a distraction from a darker path, but tonight the need is for silence and introspection. The wake ends, and the village disperses down separate roads. The Sommechein family thanks Artemis D'Assanthe with warm embraces and wet tears, and they inquire with her concerning the whereabouts of her companions, Élisabeth Duval and Merney Valroc. For their part in rescuing their niece's body, the family is obliged to give words of thanks.

"Thank you," Brother Garrmin states, watching with the Priestess of Lathander as the village spreads and searches for sleep. "Your words bring comfort, even if it is not to be seen on our faces tonight. They are hard-etched with suffering. I fear what Niall, of Black Bes, shall speak to them, and am more fearful still to see him absent on a night such as this. What calls him away?"

He unclasps his hands, letting them fall to his sides, hidden under the long sleeves of his heavy Ilmateri robe. A word of thanks is again given to Artemis D'Assanthe, and he goes.

The night is thick. Afar from one another, sitting at their fireplaces, or with their sleeping loved ones, people hope. The night is silent, but this is the most external of silences; saturated with desperate hope, and drenched in terror. It is a quiet, contained terror; terror rattling at the cage of rationality that yet restrains it. A terror of uncertain days ahead.

Upon the morrow, offerings are made at the shrine. Chauntea is hailed; Lathander too. Those whose disposition to Aleira Nemesk has warmed offer The Oakfather their prayers. The Priest of Beshaba remains absent, though the reason for it cannot be known. The Maiden of Misfortune is obscure indeed to draw Her followers away when their words might be venerated most of all. And then, the plebeian lives of farming folk resume. People go about their ordinary business, the soles of their boots pressing more heavily into the ground than on the day before.

The Sommechein family inquire with Artemis D'Assanthe concerning the whereabouts of her companions, Élisabeth Duval and Merney Valroc. For their part in rescuing their niece's body, the family is obliged to give words of thanks.

[ljuslek]

Aleira Nemesk has been absent from Outentown for more than two full tenday, a recent foray to Vlasta and the long days spent upon the roads to get there and back is one reason for her absence. One she does not speak of and is perhaps not asked on as she returns to Outentown to find the thaedar in a state of mourning; her work resumes but perhaps she is more vigilant than she had been before in guiding the folk who set out to hunt and forage near the town. The ranger does not speak as readily to those she accompanies as she has been known to before; is her reservedness brought about by the ill circumstance of a child's death or does it merely compound to a disposition already acquired? Whatever the case may be she does her work diligently, aiding the men and women where she can and how she is able. When the sun begins to set neath clouds of light grey and snow the woodsmen, foragers and hunters return from their toil; Aleira returns with them.

Discreetly, and without words beyond those needed to explain the purpose of her visit she seeks out the family who has suffered that tragic loss so recently. She offers them something, the necklace of precious blood and moonstones she had secured for herself months past. The coin the necklace will fetch won't ease the pain of loss that much is glaringly obvious; it is but a trinket they might sell for time. A precious few days, hours and minutes to be spent not thinking upon how to earn food and warmth in the harsh winter of this late summer, but spent upon attempting to reconcile with bereavement. A brief reprieve to mourn properly the passing of a child.

[Danuvis]

Strong legs carried the silhouette of a man onwards in the midst of a raging blizzard, its relentless breezes tugging at every inch of him in hopes of finding leverage where there was none to be found, for the man remained stalwart against every push and tug.

It was not urgency or a sense of self-preservation that urged the armoured figure on at a brisk pace. Rather, it was exhilaration. Blood tarnished the steel of the longsword he clutched at his side, as it did his worn surcoat that bore the emblems of a Damaran duchy. It was not the first time the fabric of it was covered in droplets of crimson belonging to man, nor would it be the last.

Merney had felt the craving for a long time, and now that the deed was done and no prying eyes were present to judge him, he could barely contain himself. But with each strenuous step taken, the thrill of it faded.

His calm was crumbling.

The mounting panic was a bittersweet reminder that his mind and fears were still there. That the trees closing around him and the crisp air clogging his lungs were part of another routine, and he could probably hold himself together just long enough to see it through.

At last he reached a well-concealed thicket, and it was there that he collapsed upon his knees. His face tilted skywards, and soon he broke into hoarse, defeaning shouting. Invigorated, he screamed and screamed to the clouds looming overhead until he could shout no more, and then he became placid again.

Nothing in the world was ever able to offer him the same kind of thrill, power, and feeling of fulfillment. Not any of the people he had grown close to, not love, not the command of a vanguard of troops; not even killing in the name of good. It had never been the same.

Murder.

It was a peculiar sensation, he thought. Something so tremendous done by something so simple. How frail the faint flicker of life was. Like his first time, the first few moments were overwhelming, teetering between discomfort and doubt, but then his muscles tensed, and realisation of the end struck his victim, and it faded in the background along with everything else. In that moment, he was all that mattered. It was just him and absolute power, nothing else.

It made him feel alive, and that moment stayed with him.

Even as the indomitable blizzard encroached ever closer and battered Merney with blinding fury, he could still see his face, when his blade tore into the Blackfinger's gut, locking his eyes and holding his gaze as the man slowly slipped away. Though he would tell others that the man's fate was deserved, that he did it for the sake of the child and others, it was not the whole truth. When his steel came loose from its scabbard, it was bloodlust that gripped his mind, not benevolence nor righteousness.

He thought he would feel guilty slipping back into old habits, especially after having come so far, but he did not.

He felt wonder.

[Obsidian Sea]

Greetings to the High Dawnlord,

The village endures. The cold and the calamity will build our character, not destroy it, in this I see Ilmater's glory and the tough, growing fruit of your toil and mine. We are thankful to stand in the sight of the sun and call Him our ally. I write not with news to vex you or draw you from your holy duties elsewhere in the kingdom. I pen only words that might provide interest; a chance for introspection, and enlightenment alike to that which I have drawn.

My brother has written to me again, as he first did when Niall Laksoyr journeyed to this region. Misguided in his faith, I fear that Niall was not without reason. He fell prey to Lady Doom and Her entreaties when suffering already in his heart and mind. His spirit was cleft apart by sorrows not of his own making. A daughter born to illness that the Priests of Chauntea who governed the local matters of his Theskan town could not repair, dying at three winters: it was a grief to heap upon griefs when the Tuigan advance ransacked the town and separated him from his wife, whom he discovered only later to have voyaged to Impiltur; the Farwater region, where dysentery claimed her life after the ravages of last Nightal and Hammer wracked the lives of even the well-landed locals of that area. My brother spoke often to Niall, and saw his suffering, yet confides in me that he thinks himself a failure in not being able to assuage the man's pained condition and draw him from Lady Doom's sight. His sudden absence boons our village and its worth in the sight of the Good Gods, but I am concerned that he suffers strangely from what happened to the Sommechein girl. For my brother's peace of mind, I shall write to our others, and pray that I can learn of where Niall traveled to, that he might find resolution away from Lady Doom.

I write in the hope that you shall think as I did upon this. In times of quiet and meditation, I see in my heart that I do not think Niall an Evil man, but a burdened one that we, the Ilmateri, have lost. What shepherd would not seek a lost lamb from his flock? And I will do so with as much effort as I can. For you, High Dawnlord, I pray. May the sun continue to inspire you and the good work that you do.

With all kindness,

Brother Garrmin
10th Elient; The Fading

[Copper Dragon]

Stoic Brother Adorned Garrmin,

May Lathander's light brighten your compassionate path.
For compassion is what filled your quill and sent your words my way, and I thank you for that humbly. You have parted information of Blackfinger Niall Laksoyr that indeed would spur scholars to thought, and philosophers; within his history lies many a lesson. To the ever-transcending, illustrious and redemptive church of Lathander, this lesson is that we are given a choice between light and darkness, between purpose and waywardness, between hope and hopelessness, each and every forthcoming day.

That Niall Laksoyr has so continuously chosen to err on the side of the latter, is as much tragic and frustrating as it is just the above - a choice; one for which others have had to pay, without the freedom of choice of their own. To not only accept but embrace that way of life cannot be forgotten, though I know, instead, you seek to forgive. It is forgiveness that the morning brings also, filled with Lathander's love, to those who accept a need for change - and decide to will it. For others, the Morninglord's sunspeared wrath - and the Broken God's and others' paladins - are ready.

Mayhaps, having spotted that regret upon the Blackfinger's face myself, I would have like to believe that his choice could have been altered on one new morning, through your brothers or mine, with enough opportunities and diligence.

Mayhaps, however unfounded the hope may seem, his passage from our midst indeed was accompanied by a change of heart.

Mayhaps, with our prayers to go with him, his spirit knows light, not only darkness.

May the Morninglord and the Broken God know for certain, even if we do not.

Everbright in friendship,

Artemis D'Assanthe, High Dawnlord.
Signed, 16th Eleint, 1363DR.

[EventHorizon]

In the dusk and midnight hours, there is, occasionally, an elf clad in an array of gold, white, black, and red, alone and undisturbing as a garden snake, who makes his way through Outentown and its surrounding areas, passing by the most hunger-pained at their homes and the boar-maimed and otherwise injured in the woods and snow. Each of them whose need is dire and means are none are offered sustenance of divine healing and magically-conjured edible food - for a price no more or less than can be afforded by one or more of the impoverished folks; where this Elf goes, the people's desperation is tested, and he leaves them sustained carrying his earned sum of Sardils or him without their collective payments and them without their bellies filled and their accidental wounds unabated until the next source of charity should cross their paths. Those who accept the fare are told to give thanks to Gargauth the Sustainer; His sustenance is steady and recompensed, but is the free generosity of Lathander, of Ilmater, and of Silvanus and Chauntea infinite? Or perhaps a want of their servants' present works leaves a market for nurturing the sick and haggard in this Time of Dusk.