300 AV
The walled-off niche was deep underground and isolated, an ancient part of the sewage system of Crossing, possibly dating back to Imperial times as far as anyone reckoned or cared. The space, while mostly dry and long unused, nonetheless bore the grime of centuries, and even the light felt dirty, leaving greasy shadows on everything it touched. It was another crumbling safehouse, another hidden bolthole they'd abandon in a week or a month or whenever the sniffing of the Hounds came too close for comfort. For now, though, it was home or something like it, and half a dozen men and women -- mostly Human, in more than one sense -- slept, read, gambled, or drank, unspoken anxiety wringing every figure into tense and distrusting demeanors.
Suddenly the door flew open and in ran a Halfling in threadbare clothing, soaked from the rain outside and panting to catch his breath. Without pausing, he blurted out, "Kigot's dead."
The tiny room fell silent for a long moment before everybody began abruptly talking and shouting over one another all at once. Sour ale flooded the top of a filthy table and chairs fell backwards with loud bangs as people leapt to their feet, a pall of anger and confusion and fear gripping the room.
A single woman, tall and fair and dark of hair, stood up and strode forward. She made a sharp gesture and the room fell into reluctant, uneasy silence. She turned back to the Halfling.
"When?" she asked evenly.
"A few days ago they're sayin', they caught up to him out west somewhere."
"Days?" barked one young man. "They'd be shouting it in the streets by now if it was true."
"They said it was real bad," babbled the Halfling. "He didn't go quiet."
"Damn right he wouldn't," muttered one woman, to a general murmur of assent.
"Everybody just calm down," she said, pulling on a heavy mantle and raising the hood. "It's just possible that somebody is playing silly buggers. And I intend to go show them we're better at it."
She glanced around the wreckage of the room and added, "Clean this up while I'm gone."
The woods were quiet and dark that night, the sliver of Xibar in the sky lending depth and sharpness to the shadows rather than chasing them away. There were remnants of old buildings peeking through the brush in places, echoes of old farmhouses and other buildings long ago reclaimed by the forest. She moved cautiously through the trees, peering into shadows, her expression tense and expectant.
A brilliant silver light lanced through the darkness, missing her by inches, and by its brief illumination she saw who she had been looking for lurking in the trees: a tall man in a priest's cassock; a white grin in a dark face.
The abrupt brightness seared blinding afterimages into her eyes and she struggled to relocate him. She flung her hand at her best guess and an acerbic reek and loud sizzle heralded the trunks of several trees being eaten away by a strong conjured acid. Blinding silver light flared from scant feet away from where she'd aimed and she flinched; a second later a roiling bolt of silver flame grazed her side, hot enough to melt flesh and fill her bones with white-hot agony. She screamed.
Bent double and clutching her bleeding side, she watched him slip out of the trees, cassock dragging across the ground, steel emblem of the Hounds shining over his breast, hand raised to prepare another spell. Too late, he noticed the sharp smell of burning flesh, and she whipped her bloodied hand at him with a triumphant snarl. The droplets exploded scant inches from his head, broiling layers of skin off one side of his face and sending him flying backwards with a howl of pain, where he hit his head on part of a crumbling stone wall and slid to the ground.
She advanced, moonlight glinting off the short blade clenched in her hand; in his dazed vision she was little more than a great looming shadow silhouetted against the sky, her knife a splinter of frozen light. Mere paces from him, she slowly reached into a bag at her side and withdrew a large pear, slicing it easily into two halves, one of which she tossed at him. He caught it as she slid to the ground next to him, grimacing visibly from the sluggishly bleeding wound in her side.
"I'll take a drink, too, if you've got it," he said in a voice strained by pain and fatigue.
Smiling thinly, she produced a large flask and two battered tin cups, sloshing a generous amount of amber liquid into both and handing one to him. He sipped, cautiously, then looked surprised despite himself. "Where'd you get Rissan brandy?" he asked incredulously.
"I have my ways," she said wryly, waggling her eyebrows. He laughed.
"So," she said, shifting her weight with a wince. "How's Tess?"
"Well enough," he replied, prodding gingerly at the burns on his face. "Due in a few more weeks. Empath says it's twins."
She laughed, freely, happily. "That's bound to give you both a run for your money. Serves you right, too."
He nodded agreeably. "Esk was asking about you," he said lightly. "Wanted to know if I'd seen you."
She eyed him warily. "Did you tell her?"
"No," he said quietly, sighing. "It'll just hurt her feelings. If she knew what you were up to."
The smile on her face faded. "I suppose it would."
"Yeah, well." He drained the cup, screwing up his face briefly and sucking in a breath through his teeth. "You really messed her up when you left the way you did."
She nodded mutely. "So," she said eventually, twirling a bit of grass between her fingers. "Rumor has it Kigot's dead."
He sighed. "Is that how it's to be, now?"
"Is it true?" She was pressing her luck, she knew, but she -- they -- needed to know.
Pursing his lips, he nodded. "It was...very bad, apparently, but yes, we got him."
She cocked an eyebrow. "Any survivors?"
He eyed her curiously. "One," he said after a moment. "A Paladin. Nobody has seen him though. Nobody I know even knows his name."
"You don't find that strange?"
"Probably hiding on account of you people."
"Or maybe," she said pointedly, "he knows something he shouldn't know."
He rolled his eyes. "That's crap and we both know it."
"Wouldn't exactly be the first time. You remember why I left--"
"I'm not having this argument with you again," he snapped, cutting through her.
An awkward silence stretched on, filling the space between them. "I'm sorry," she said finally.
"Yeah. Me too."
368 AV
A priest and priestess of Alamhif and Eylhaar huddled by a bed in a richly furnished room, chanting orisons, waving censors and annointing with holy oil the elderly man that lay in it. There was a deep pain in him, an ache in his bones and a crackle in his chest that made it hard to do anything but gasp for breath. It was a tumor, they said, and after every effort they told him it was beyond the skill of mortals to cure. His wife had passed on some ten years prior, and with his children grown with children of their own, he felt this mortal veil of tears held little for him now anyway, so he lay in bed and waited to die, today, tomorrow, a week from now.
A flicker of annoyance lit his features. "Go," he rasped, with a gesture that still managed to be imperious and commanding. "The gods will be merciful or they won't, prayers will change nothing now." Exchanging anxious glances, the clerics retreated, leaving him to his solitude and the last moments of dusk's light streaming into the room.
It was well past nightfall when he awoke abruptly, a familiar but gnawing sense of unease creeping up his spine. He could see nothing strange or out of place in the room around him, now lit by pale moonlight, but after a moment where before there was nobody there now stood the figure of a cloaked woman. The bed shifted as she sat next to him and drew back her hood, and he gasped despite himself. Time had not touched her; save for a single streak of grey in her dark hair, she didn't appear to have aged a day, and her skin had a luminosity to it that was not quite the glow of youth but something unsettlingly like it.
"You're dying," she said finally, barely above a whisper.
"Such a talent for observation you've always possessed," he wheezed.
"You're also still a jackass." She glanced around the room: at the rich furnishings, at the remnants of incense and candles around the bed, at the basin of water made pinkish by rags soaked with old blood. "So this is what faith buys you. A comfortable place to die."
"The greatest sin, and the greatest source of mortal misery," he said ponderously after a moment, "is wishing that things were other than what they are, and refusing to let go of what we cannot change."
"I wish you could have been less stubborn," she said quietly.
He studied her face. "I wish you could have been happy."
She pressed her lips together into a thin line. "There's still time," she said, but her voice lacked conviction. "There are still things we could do to prolong your life, make you young--"
"No," he said, firmly but without rancor.
She nodded her head slightly and fell silent. There wasn't really anything else to say.
Minutes passed, and then hours, the only sound the crackle of his breathing and the occasional burst of weak coughs that wracked his body. Finally, in the last moments of the night, she bent over him, her dark hair brushing his face as she pressed her lips to his forehead.
An acolyte found him shortly after dawn. Blood, black and sticky, pooled around his head, streams dried from a thin slash drawn from ear to ear. But for the apparent violence of his death, the expression on his wan face was peaceful and beatific, and his open eyes stared upward, glassy and rapt with sightless wonder.
Thayet
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