Chapter 9 - A Shadowy Past

[Black Plauge]

While the wasteland around the wizard's fort wasn't exactly home, it was far more welcoming than the wizards themselves. Factional divides, magical devices, and heady debates held no interest for Blarth and personally, he was just glad to have gotten away from the Citadel with his skin intact and his friends as well. It was some what bothersome that Cadogan had elected to stay, since he had apparently been a stalwart companion of Shade and Cadrius, but he himself was a wizard, so in some respects, Blarth was glade he hadn't come along. His presence would have likely dragged them back to the Citadel at some point.

Not that the Citadel was all that bad. The invisible servants and near luxurious accomodations that had marked the begining of their first stay were certianly something to be envied. However, the intrigue and complications that came along with it made for a bad exchange. Blarth still resented being used to retrieve that silly box of candy and he was glad he wouldn't be going through that again.

All of that was two days behind, however, and before them lay the edge of the waste. The wizards had been kind enough to provide directions that made their trek through the waste more than just random wanderings, but Blarth expected that it was more practicality than kindness. With such directions they were going to be out of the wizards' territory that much sooner.

Evidence of that was plain on the horizon before them. Where in the days before had been nothing but baked earth, stone, and the occasional near dead tree, the horizon was now marked by a clean line of green. A forest, if the information the wizards had given them was accurate, though a different one than the one they had traveled through on their way from Karkas.

Karkas, it seemed like such a lifetime ago, so much had happened since then. Yet even the thought of that town still brought back painful memories. Trak had died there, marking the end of his family. Blarth was the only one left and he wasn't sure how to proceed. He'd always been so dependant on Trak for guidance that he was practically blind without him. He had no direction, no purpose.

At least he had companions, though. Nicos, Cadrius, and Shade were certianly not individuals that Blarth would have taken up with while Trak was still alive, but they were the only thing he had now, and at least they seemed to accept him. That was far more than could have ever been said about most humans.

Hustling a bit to catch up with Shade, who was slightly ahead of the group, scouting their route as usual, Blarth asks, "How far do you figure to the tree line?"

[Gralhruk]

Shade was bitter. All that, and it would have been better if they hadn't gone at all. Cadogan never needed them to come looking for him. Their journey after that damned stone was worse than pointless, had actually done more harm than good. The rogue wasn't sure what galled her more - the fact that she'd been duped by Ysene or the fact that Gemoud had a hand in rescuing them.

Shade had kept mostly to herself and mostly quiet during the past two days. The whole debacle might be behind them, but the the repercussions weren't. Not for her, at least. She'd had more help than just Gemoud, Cadogan and her own companions. He had been the one to break her out of Ysene's cell, and he had convinced her it was in her own best interest to do him a favor.

She is shaken from thought of her shadowy benefactor by Blarth's question. It was ironic that as much as the half-orc annoyed her, Shade was beginning to prefer his simple company to any of the others travelling with them. At least with Blarth, you knew what was on his mind. She shades her eyes with one hand, not really needing another look. They'd be there tomorrow, she knew.

And then she'd be leaving them.

"If we keep on for another two hours, we can probably make it by mid day tomorrow. From there, maybe another half day south to the banks of the Chard. There are towns all along it, but you can follow it all the way to Enderin if you want."

[Black Plauge]

"The Chard?" Blarth asks, still unfamiliar with the local geography, "That's the river the wizards mentioned, isn't it? So what town are we headed to? Are we going all the way to Enderin?"

[Gralhruk]

Shade glances at Blarth, her eyes unreadable.

"Yeah, it's the river the wizard's mentioned."

She doesn't immediately answer his other question, though her eyes flick back to the group, linger on Cadrius for a moment and then return.

"I don't know. Enderin's a place, same as any I guess. What do you mean to do?"

[Black Plauge]

"Mean to do?" Blarth replies. Truth be told, he hadn't thought about that question much, and his answer reflects that. "I don't know. It was my brother's idea to leave the tribe after our father died, and I was just traveling with him. With Trak dead now, I'm not really sure what I should do next. You, Cadrius, and Nicos all seem to know what you're doing, do you think I could just stay with you three for a bit?"

[Gralhruk]

"I don't think anyone really knows what they are doing."

She pauses, debating. They'd all find out that she was leaving soon enough, but she didn't want to talk about it. She opens her mouth to lie to him, but the innocent look on Blarth's face defeats her.

"But yeah, maybe some people have a better idea than others."

Another pause.

"Look, I don't belong in the same company as people like that. I'm not like Cadrius, but I'm sure you already know that. Even Nicos has more sense than I do. Stick close to them and you'll be okay."

[Black Plauge]

Picking up on some of the implications of Shade's reply, but not her hesitancy, Blarth asks, "Just them? I thought we all might stick together for a bit. Are you leaving?"

[Gralhruk]

"Yes," she says quietly, "I'm leaving, heading for Tradeholm. I never meant to stay this long in the first place. I have things to take care of and -"

She breaks off, the thought unfinished, and stares intently at Blarth.

"And it's just better if I go. Don't say anything to the others. I'll tell them when I'm ready."

[Black Plauge]

"Okay," Blarth replies, before becoming quiet for a bit.

Truth be told, he wasn't really sure how to take the news that Shade was planning on leaving them. She had, after all, been the one who had invited him to join them as they left Karkas. As he'd stood there watching his brother's funeral pyre burn, totally unsure of what to do next, she'd offered him something to do. Certianly the trek to the Citadel to find Cadogan and the results had not been entirely plesant, but at least it was something. Really, Blarth had no idea what he'd be doing if she hadn't invited him along, and with her leaving, he was essentially back in the same boat.

Well, not quite. He did have Cadrius and Nicos this time around. Both of them had been with Shade when they'd left Karkas, and while they hadn't invited him to join them like Shade had, neither had they refused to let him join when he'd shown up trailing behind Shade.

So what really was there to do next? Contemplating that thought Blarth falls back a bit, allowing Shade to resume her scouting, as the party continues traveling.

[Cadrius]

They find Shade at the forest’s edge, leaning against an alder. She’s still as beautiful as the day Cadrius first saw her; the same day she slit the throat of a dwarf. Not beautiful like the daughter of Duke Halifax with emeralds in her golden hair, or like the girl he had seen in a brothel during his first campaign that was dark of hair and skin and full of grace. No, Shade is beautiful like a sword is beautiful: sharp and full of deadly intent.

Her features are hardly pristine, having weathered the elements for years and the scar mars her face, always standing out in the twilight. Yet he finds the mark endearing in a way. A nobleman would find a less advantageous marriage for his daughter if her face was scarred so; a whore would command a lesser price. Yet Shade seems to care little about her scar where other women would obsess over it.

Yes, Shade is as beautiful, as cold, and—most importantly—as dark as a late autumn’s night.

Cadrius pauses for a moment, recalling some of the lore she’s shared with him over the weeks and months that they have traveled together. He glances up at the broadleaf tree and then back at her.

“Water must be nearby,” he says. She watches him with steely eyes. “A lake or river perhaps. I would imagine Enderin makes use of it…but we cannot be very close. Two days is far too short, is it not?”

[Gralhruk]

The steel in her eyes doesn't change as she regards him steadily. Would he ever realize how deeply she cared, or understand the real reasons she was leaving? Probably not, because she was constantly misleading him. It was easier to make him angry, make him think she didn't care, because then she didn't have to worry about getting hurt herself.

I'd only disappoint him anyway.

She nods at his words. It pleased her more than she would admit that he shared this with her, obviously seeking her approval.

"Nice to see you actually listened to me once in a while. Yes, there is water around. I place us about half a day from the Chard. You're right, though, Enderin is still a ways off - weeks, not days. A boat would make it quicker, though."

[red_dr4g0n94]

He was travelling again. Always on the move. This time cause he got caught in the middle of some powergame at the Citadel. Ben wondered if there had always been those and he had simply been too young to remember, or if they were something that had started happening recently. Somehow Ben didn't see the second option as being nearly as lickely as the first.

In any case, it wasn't too different than his usual fare in life. Arrive somewhere, tell the family the bad news, maybe do a few things for them or someone else there, then leave. He'd been doing it for years now, years that seem to run together in his memory. Nothing in particular stands out from them. Just a town or fortress, a face or two, and the road.

The Road. THAT was what stood out in his memories. Always on the road to somewhere, or making his own path to his destination. Always some reason for travelling, for walking, for never stopping except to rest or to be the bearer of bad news, the messenger for Death's actions.

But now there was no place to go. No family or relative to inform. All of the towns and cities and fortresses had been reached. All the necessary persons had been informed. And now he was beholden to no one, not even his dead comrades. He could go out, do anything. Join another mercenary company, start his own, become a bounty hunter or a bodyguard or join a Knighthood or and Order or...anything.

And yet, here he was. Travelling with a band of what could only be described as misfits, oddballs, or any other derogatory or unkind description yo uwished to label them as. People who didn't seem to have anything in common except for a wish to not travel alone. Ben didn't even know how they had first met. Perhaps they had simply formed up simply to go to the Citadel. Perhaps once they reached a decent sized town or city they would all go their seperate ways.

It had happened before to Ben, travelling companions leaving once they reached this city or that town. He had gotten so used to traveling alone. He hadn't even spoken a word to these people since the Citadel, falling back into old habits. And yet, there was no desire to know the answers to these questions. Ben didn't care one way or the other if these people decided to up and leave once they reached Chard or Enderin.

But that was in the future. This was the here and now. And now they had only just reached the woods after traversing a wasteland. It was time to take care of a few necessities. He dusted off his hat, then turned to the others.

"Lets go find that water source. I know I at least need to refill my waterskin, and it the sooner we reach a town, the sooner I eat something other than trail rations."

[itches]

"I can't argue with that," Nicos chimed in. The events of the past week hadn't managed to dampen the bard's spirts as much as the blisters on his feet did. "We can find and Inn and I'll sing to earn some overpriced ale."

[Black Plauge]

His mouth watering at the suggestion of something other than trail rations to eat, Blarth still can't help but laugh at Nicos' comment. "Drinking and singing? Is that all you think an Inn good for?"

[itches]

"Of course not," Nicos replied with a horrified look. "They also have barmaids."

[Black Plauge]

Rolling his eyes, Blarth's laugh becomes all the more hearty with Nicos' reply. There was something to be said for laughter. It had a way of making everyone more at ease and could sooth the nerves of even the toughest thug. Blarth figured they all needed a good laugh after what they'd been through.

[Cadrius]

Even Cadrius finds some mirth in the bard’s lechery. However, the smile feels strange on his face. They’ve spent the past few weeks with little respite from the hardships that plague him and his companions. Yet even as a young man, before the flight from his homeland, he had always been dour. Sternness and practicality were well regarded by the church and master-at-arms, but they won him few friends. His marriage had been arranged solely because of his father’s status. That he had fallen in love with her was merely a pleasant coincidence.

His younger brother had been the jovial one, pursuing life with a reckless passion. Then again, as the second heir, he could afford to. Perhaps that’s why events unfolded the way that they had.

Not that it matters anymore, he thinks. The smile falters and then dies.

Readjusting the shield and bag slung across his back, he turns to face the others. “We should keep moving if we want to make the river with enough time before dark. That it has not snowed yet is a blessing. I’d not test our luck.”

[itches]

"Speaking of snow," Nicos said as they set off again towards the river. "Have any of you heard the tale of Gizark the terrible and his army of snow men?"

[Gralhruk]

Shade glares at Nicos, not wanting to hear his tale but quite certain that he'll go into it regardless of how they answer. Another day, once she had them on a trail they could follow, then she could go. How to stop them from following? A bit of a stretch that they'd actually come looking for her but, after all, they'd come all this way after Cadogan.

If she just up and left, they might get worried or curious. No, they would need to know she was going. Better yet, they ought to want her to go.

"Let's hope the weather holds or we'll be snowmen ourselves."

[itches]

They continued walking towards the river as Nicos told them the tale of a deranged wizard who magically animated an army of snowman and set out to war. Although initially successful - his opponents were too busy laughing - he quickly met defeat when his minions melted.

Once at the river the companions set up camp near an outcropping of rock, and settle in for a cold night.

[Cadrius]

Cadrius listens to the lengthy story in silence only remarking after Nicos has finished. “Quite the tale.” He doubts that this Gizark the Terrible ever lived, but even if there was a man who bore the name, Cadrius certainly doesn’t believe that he actually raised an army out of snow. “Perhaps his conquest would have been suited to colder lands.”

The river ends up being far closer than a half-day. But two hours pass before they catch sight of the swift and clear water rushing southward. However, the sun does not stay up long in autumn and even though it isn’t quite mid-day, the it has already passed its zenith and is beginning its rapid descent to the horizon.

“Enderin lies south of here,” he says, eyeing the water and grateful that their destination doesn’t sit north of their position. Running water is rarely safe to drink when a city is upstream. He’d seen it firsthand many times during his years in the Hundred Duchies. All manner of waste is cast into the water with nary a thought for those downstream. “If we had more time, or aptitude, I’d say we build a raft. But I do not fancy drowning and I have heard none of you make mention of rivercraft.”

[itches]

Sitting by the camp fire, Nicos stared into its bright centre ignorant of Cadrius' comments. Instead his thoughts were dominated by the red haired woman he had left behind and the ache that filled his chest.

-Gemoud-

Thoughts of everything he had lost flittered wildly through his mind, shattering wild fantasies where he regained opportunities and grasped a future against desperate odds. Impossible dreams of things he would never have.

-What if..-

A single night of passion. That was all it had taken to reach deep within the bard, down to depths he had thought locked away forever. One beautiful, wonderful night which had lit a fire within that burned with a terrible and wonderful rapture. A passion he carefully kept hidden behind an irreverent and humorous facade.

-Gods damned everything-

What hurt more then lost opportunities, then the yearning to be with her again, or even the pain of her betrayal was the knowledge that hurt would fade. Tomorrow he would find it a fraction more bearable. The next day it would be a little bit more and so forth time rushed past to separate him from Gemoud, until finally he would wake up to discover that all feelings had faded to a dimly lit memory.

-Why does it have to be like this?-

For now the bard held tightly to the feelings, enjoying the passion and the pain. Yet hating them just as much.

-Gemoud-

[Black Plauge]

Blarth wasn't been really been paying attention to Nicos' story. Something about melting men or something. Instead, he was far more busy trying to piece together what he should do next, and that kind of thinking took alot of effort.

It wasn't until the party was coming to a stop for the evening that Blarth finally decided that all this thinking wasn't getting him anywhere. He wasn't used to it, and it seemed largely unnecessary. He'd follow along with Cadrius and Nicos like Shade had suggested until something else presented itself. Life was always easier when you followed somebody else.

[Cadrius]

The fire does its best to ward the chill, but the autumn night demands its due. Cadrius rubs the three day stubble on his cheek and tries to recall the date. November, he thinks, huddling beneath his cloak. Or late October, perhaps. We are still up high and far north. His companions are gathered around as well, trying to warm themselves as he does, but none speak. Blarth stares downward, contemplating his feet and perhaps being puzzled by them. Nicos has eyes for naught but the flame, his features looking particularly hollow in the yellow-orange firelight. Shade casts her own gaze away, looking into the shadows beyond the weak circle of light, searching for something or someone. Lastly there is Ben, doing what a good warrior must, and what Cadrius is doing as well, sharpening his blade. The two sit on opposite sides, swords set before them and whetstones in hand. Shhhick—shhhick. The call and response of honing steel is the only sound heard beyond the crackle of the fire and the swift flow of the nearby river.

After a time Cadrius stops, satisfied with the work on the bastard sword. His armor is in need of cleaning but he leaves it. In the old days, when he was still a lord’s son and a Knight Protector of Heironeous, his greatest pride was found in his armor’s shine. He had taken to the habit while squired to Sir Cargyle Whitecastle—known as the Silver Knight—who was as much renowned for his glimmering plate as he was his steady arm in the lists.

On the eve before a tourney, Cadrius would stay awake well into the wee hours sitting with Sir Cargyle, polishing each piece of mail until it shone in the moonlight. Cadrius always suspected his lord father had squired him to Whitecastle in the hopes of shaking some of the dour from his firstborn. It hadn’t worked. Admittedly, Sir Cargyle was normally a fiery man; quick to laugh, quick to fight, and quick to forgive. His love of wine showed in his red cheeks, but when it came time to couch a lance and charge against his fellow knights, he became as solemn as Cadrius’s father. Some of Cadrius’s fondest memories were from those times when Whitecastle would grow serious and talk of the battles he had fought in.

Cargyle’s title was a point of pride to him, and he took to wearing surcoats featuring his house colors in cloth-of-silver instead of his namesake alabaster on blue. Cadrius recalls one such time when the Sir Cargyle took the field, with long azure streamers trailing from his greathelm. It had been a good day for him; the Silver Knight unseated four of the best riders from the nearby lands before being unhorsed himself by Sir Garan March.

But those were older days and older times, and Sir Cargyle Whitecastle met his ignoble end one morning when he set off to free a small village that had been pillaged and occupied by outlaws. They hadn’t spared him for a ransom; preferring to take his armor, butcher him, and leave his parts for the crows. Cadrius wished he had ridden with him on that last charge. Perhaps the man would still draw breath if he had. Instead, all that remains is the name and the memory of the Silver Knight.

But what of Sir Cadrius? There is not much left of him. Gone are feasts and jousts and melees and festivals in great castles. In their stead are cold rations, brutal skirmishes, and sleepless nights. No longer does he polish his armor with the same devotion. Nor does he enter into the tournaments to seek fame and glory for his house. All that remains is the duty, the etiquette, and the sword. He wonders which one will leave him next. Not the sword, I hope. I will need that long after the others have fled.

Setting his blade aside, Cadrius lies down and settles his cloak and blanket about him. It is going to get very cold soon and it will be best if they are all prepared for it.

[Gralhruk]

There is little noise in their camp except the crackle of flames and the rasp of stone on steel. Better that way. Less talk meant less reason to think about her companions. Tomorrow would come all too soon and she had things to do before then.

Shade keeps her eyes on the darkness around them, wondering if he was somewhere out there. Probably not. Most like he was already well on his way to Tradeholm. As she would soon be.

First the boat. That would be a good start, toward both Tradeholm and Enderin. She could leave them after a day on the river, to pursue whatever it was they were looking for. She rolls her shoulders, trying to ease the tension there. Her mind was already made up - no sense in fighting the invenitable. There wasn't anything for her here and he'd promised her good work. In any case, she owed him.

Nearby, the sounds of sword sharpening diminish. In her peripheral vision she can see Cadrius hold the sword up to the light of the fire, sight along its red tinged edge. Regret stabs at her and she slides one hand around the hilt of her blade, squeezing as if the pressure could change who or what she was. It couldn't, no more than anything could change any of them. Briefly, she had thought it might be different, that the road they'd traveled might somehow smooth the edges on each of them, turn them into something that fit together.

Foolish.

Abruptly, she stands.

"I'm going to scout upriver a ways, see if I can't get a clearer picture of exactly where we are. Don't wait up for me."

Somehow she manages to look at them without really looking at any of them, without meeting anyone's gaze. Then she's gone, another bit of night in the great dark around them.

* * *

It took longer than she thought to get there. She had seen the signs of habitation while they marched to camp the previous day and she had deliberately steered them South. Whoever it was would likely have what she wanted and she didn't need any of them messing with her plans. She had guessed two hours, given the distance and the conditions. It took twice that long, the night sky having clouded over thick enough to make the darkness near impenetrable.

In the end, she found what she was looking for - several lonely looking shacks near the river. Predictably, a few small boats were moored along sagging, poorly constructed docks.

The boats didn't look like much, but they seemed well constructed and sound despite their battered appearance. Not that she knew much about boats. The dog that challenged her presence was big, wolf-like and unfriendly. Still, she approached him steadily from the side, showing him her shoulder. Firmly but without any fear or anger, she moved next to him and his barking subsided. He looked confused, head darting back to look for his master. She waited. Nothing else stirred and she laid a hand on his head. After a moment his tongue lolled and his tail wagged slightly. Then it was merely a matter of choosing a craft that suited them . . .

The trip back was uneventful and quicker than her trek out there. It took her some muscle to get moving, and a little longer to figure out how to steer, but in a short while she had the rowboat moving well. Thanks the gods (and good planning) that she was traveling with the current.

The banks slid by and she made better time than she imagined, nearly missing the campsite. Landing the craft and disembarking proved difficult, and she ended up almost losing the boat. In the end, she got the thing secured though she was soaked from the waist down. She scrambled up the bank, reaching the top only to find Surayon watching her. Shade gave her a quick nod in greeting. The elf ignored her, turning her back and disappearing in the direction of camp.

Already shivering, and too cold and tired to care what Surayon's problem was, Shade followed. No matter the attitude, she'd rather Surayon was the one awake to greet her than any of the others. She stokes the fire, then settles in, trying to dry off. Sometime before that happens, sleep sneaks up on her and drags her to restless dreams.

[itches]

Morning came sooner then Nicos would have liked, the sun rousing him from sleep into a groggy state of half awake. Barely stopping to mumble a greeting to the others, the bard stumbled down to the river for a morning wash. Several minutes later Nicos returned; cold and wet, but awake.

"You wouldn't believe what I just found," he said shivering as he tried to warm himself with the now roaring fire. "It seems that while we were sleeping some kind soul anonymously left us a boat to use."

[Black Plauge]

"Beware the unknown giver," Blarth intones, "That's what my father always used to say. Gifts that come from enemies likely have strings attached, and no friend gives a gift without giving it to you in person."

[Gralhruk]

Shade rouses herself at Blarth's words and glances sourly up at the half-orc.

"Yeah, well, this one is from me. I was up half the night finding it."

[red_dr4g0n94]

Ben raised an eyebrow at Shade's words.

"I'm guessing you didn't just find it floating down the river."

The sarcastic tone in his voice leaves no doubt as to how Ben thinks Shade aquired the boat.

[Cadrius]

“It matters not,” Cadrius says, approaching the craft, “so long as we will not be seeing its owner again soon.” His mouth twitches and he produces a small leather pouch before fishing inside his bag. The distinctive sound of coins clinking together can be heard. A few moments later, he drops several of them inside the pouch and draws its strings. Moving close to the river’s edge, he places it on a flat rock.

The Chard runs swift in the northern highlands. Clear and cold, it rushes south toward Enderin. Up here, the river is but fifty feet across, and alive with mountain trout. The difference between the vegetation here and the scant growth on the sorcerer’s plateau is astounding. There it is brown and mostly dead; here it is verdant.

“I hope this boat will hold all of us.” He looks to Ben. “Best keep your armor off today, unless you fancy drowning that is.”

[Gralhruk]

Shade ignores Ben's remark, instead watching Cadrius as he leaves coins for the owner of the boat. Her mouth turns down, frowning.

"I don't know much about boats, but this - " was one of the larger ones " - should be big enough."

Without much fanfare, she joins the others in loading the boat. When they are just about ready to cast off and Cadrius isn't watching, she snags the pouch of coins he left on the shore.

[Black Plauge]

Satisfied with Shade's explination of where the boat came from, Blarth resigns to help load it and get on board. Boats of any size were a rare thing where he was from and he wans't sure he liked the idea of floating in the middle of the river where he couldn't stand if he fell in, but the others seemed to think that this was better than walking, so he'd go along with it.

[red_dr4g0n94]

Ben still wanted to know how Shade acquired the boat, but when Cadrius put the bag of coins on the rock he realized that he was in the minority of opinion and should just drop the subject. He nodded at Cadrius suggestion and took off his chain shirt, placing it with his backpack in the boat.

Ben wondered if it would hold them all. Even if it had just been Blarth and anyone else he would have seriously doubted the boat's ability to keep them all afloat. But not only was it Blarth, but Cadrius and himself were also fairly heavy with all the muscles they'd built over the years.

All the more reason to take the armor off, even if it was expensive. If the boat did sink, he would have a better chance without it on. He could always just buy another set, but he wouldn't be doing much of anything if the armor caused him to drown.

[Cadrius]

His family’s keep was set upon a hill overlooking a lake. Their primary, and only, town was set upon the shores. As a child he had often wanted to take some of the small boats out into the water, where the depths become too dark to see the bottom. There was rarely enough time. Between training with their master-at-arms, and his studies in etiquette, warfare, and religion, Cadrius had little time for aught else. Still, on more than one occasion he and his brother had snuck out of the keep’s walls and taken a rowboat, one such as this, and flailed around the shallow waters of Lake Castamar.

But he’s no sailor. It’s been years since he’s set foot on a boat and his unease shows in the way he eases into the body of the craft. He waits for Ben to pass their arms and armor over and then settles himself in.

“Best we make certain it can hold all of us first,” he says. The wood looks sturdy enough and there are no leaks along the bottom. Yet Cadrius is a cautious man and doesn’t fancy drowning. “Ben, Blarth. Climb in, if you would.” The two ease into the boat with a similar uncertainty as Cadrius. The boat sinks a little lower in the water, but otherwise remains sound. “Well enough. If it will hold us, it should also hold Nicos and Shade.”

The boat drifts back and forth within the length allowed to it by its tether. It bumps gently into a nearby rock. Cadrius looks at it before glancing upstream. He shakes his head and looks to the two already in the boat. “The current looks swift. We shan’t need much power, just steering. I don’t suppose either of you have rowed before?”

“Right. Shade? Nicos? Whenever you are ready.”

[Gralhruk]

Surayon watches the boat and the proceedings with a hard look in her violet eyes. No elvish craft would ever be some cumbersome or clumsy in the water. In any case, her hunt was not downriver.

She remains on the bank after Shade and Nicos have clambered aboard. Descending gracefully, she removes the tether and casts it to the others. The boat rocks gently, beginning to heel with the current.

"Nadath nâ i moe im. Dan, ú-'eveditham."

As the drift away from her and from shore, she speaks once again.

"I have my own work to do. Let the huntress be with you."

[Black Plauge]

Gripping the edge of the boat with a white knuckle grasp Blarth waits anxiously for Shade and Nicos to get into the boat. This whole traveling on the water thing was not something he was looking forward to.

[red_dr4g0n94]

"For the record," Ben said as Shade and Nicos got into the increasingly heavy rowboat, "I would have much rather preffered walking."

He deigned not to notice the elf or her words as he kept his eye on the water level relative to the edge of the boat. We're going to sink. I just know it.

[Gralhruk]

"Then walk," Shade says to Ben as she settles into the back of the boat.

Shade locks eyes with the elf, for a moment feeling a certain kinship with the reticent tracker. The current pulls them along and Surayon grows smaller with distance, until they round a bend and she disappears altogether. Her grey eyes stare back for a long while.

"I didn't get much sleep last night."

So saying, she curls up against the side of the boat and closes her eyes. In her mind, she reviews the time she has spent with each of them, wondering if anyone would care when she departed.

[itches]

"Boating isn't so bad," Nicos said as he shifted around in the cramped vessel. "You get out on to the water and then lay back and relax as the current takes you to your destination. I mean, sure there is some rowing involved and," he added with a grin. "I would be glad to help you guys out but, you know. Missing an arm."

[Cadrius]

Cadrius does not offer a farewell to Surayon. The elf, beholden to none, is free to come and go like the fierce winds that whip across the now-distant plateau. A valuable companion certainly, but the coldness permeating her makes Cadrius think it best that they part ways now. She is both otherworldly and fey, and the fallen paladin would rather not be near when death finally catches her. His eyes shift from the diminishing elf to the rock where he had left the pouch of coins and sees that it is already missing. He says nothing, having already made up his mind.

The boat is responsive enough to Cadrius’s initially clumsy steering; however, within a short while, his time upon Lake Castamar begins to return to him. The water is swift and cold, but Cadrius manages to keep the boat away from the largest of the rocks, brushing but a few. It is a tedious affair, but so long as the rapids do not become too severe, they should make good time.

“You can still serve, Nicos,” he says. Making the decision has put the typically dour Cadrius into good humor. The burden is now off his shoulders. “Should I lose an oar, I shall need a replacement. I do believe you are thin enough to fit through the oarlock.”

[Black Plauge]

Blarth wants chukle at Cadrius' comment, but he's afraid that if he does he'll lose his white knuckle grip on the boat. He can't believe that Cadrius is actually holding on to those sticks that weren't firmly attached, oars he'd called them, and using them to guide the craft.

[itches]

"As I was saying," Nicos continued as he was not quite able to contain a grin. "Clearly our best course right now is to walk. Much safer then boating."

[Cadrius]

The day passes. For some it is swift. Cadrius guides the rowboat as best he can. They flow through clear water, occasionally spotting glimpses of trout and other fish. The fallen paladin rows until his back and arms grow weary before steering into an eddy and calling a brief rest.

Over lunch and between bites of hard bread, Nicos tells the companions another tale. This one is of a cowardly baron and the singer that stole his wife. Cadrius a roll of his eyes and wonders just how much of the bard’s stories are truth and how much are fantasy.

For Blarth and Ben though, the day crawls by. It is an eternity before their first stop to eat. Ben tries to reassure himself with the thought that this means of travel is far more practical. They make far better time moving with the current than they ever could on foot. The warrior finds it to be cold comfort though as the oaken boat rocks back and forth as each new body climbs into it.

With Shade, the day is neither fast nor slow. She has reached a decision as well. All that remains is to idly wonder how each will take her departure. Some will be angry, some will be confused, but she doubts any will truly miss her. No one ever has.

There are still a couple hours of daylight left by the time Cadrius eases the boat into another eddy. He’s quite weary, despite moving with the current, and pushing himself further could only lead to a mistake. His arms have remembered what they knew of boats, but he does not trust them much. Shade is the first one out of the boat, nimbly stepping upon a large rock and tying off the rowboat to a nearby tree. The others clamor out, some of them grateful to be back on solid land. Cadrius comes last, passing their equipment to Ben and Blarth before hauling himself out. He sits upon a flat rock, his shoulders slumped.

“This looks like a fine place to stop,” he says. “Still a few hours left before dark, but I think we have made enough time today.”

[Black Plauge]

Relieved to be back on dry land, it takes Blarth a couple of minutes of flexing his hands before full manual dexterity is restored and he is able to help unload the boat.

"How much further is it to where we're going?" he asks, dreading an answer that would mean many more days of boat travel.

[Gralhruk]

Shade shrugs.

"Depends on how far you want to go."

Let them decide for themselves. She helps set up camp, her manner detached. It had become routine, everyone falling into familiar tasks without the need for discussion. Shelter, fire, food - the basics of their existence. In this case a stand of dark spruce offer dry ground and protection from the wind, as well as sufficient deadwood to feed their small fire.

Cadrius had chosen well. Somewhere beneath the bitterness, she is pleased that he is becoming more adept at woodcraft. He'd need some if he was going to live the life of an outlaw and fugitive.

After the work is done, she settles in a little outside the circle of her companions - close enough to see and be seen, but far enough away to signal she doesn't want to talk. After a little while, she pulls out her adamantine blade, the one she'd captured from the gnolls, and eyes it for a moment. The dusky metal is streaked with congealed blood, black in the firelight. Without comment, she sets to work cleaning it.

[itches]

As the companions sat around the campfire, Nicos launched into another of the tales with which had had lightened their journey. Upon some perverse impulse, he drifted away from the normal light-hearted subjects into something darker.

The bard wove the tale of a young man named Minok. Minok was a good hearted man, who possessed a quick temper of a love of the drink. One night whilst our carousing with his friends, his drunken haze caused him to mistake an innocent comment by a companion as a slight. Driven to rage, the young man turned and murdered his companion before any could stop him.

Shortly thereafter a glimmer of sense found it's way into his mind, and with horror he realised that he had murdered a friend over an imagined insult. Filled with shame and guilt, he fled those who sought him and travelled to a far distant land where none knew him.

Minok's older brother Dolson felt disgust when he learnt what had happened, but it could not undo the love that was bound within his heart. With no other surviving family each had bonded closely with the other, with Dolson looking out his Minok as often as possible. Dolson confessed to the crime to give his younger better chance at a new life. He was put to death and Minok remained ignorant of the sacrifice his brother had made.

Once in the distant land, Minok spent every ounce of energy he possessed to the service of making the world a better place, in a desperate attempt to make amends for his crime. Over time he married and had children. He made close friends, all who knew him proclaimed the purity of his sprit, and gradual he grew to despise himself less and less until one morning he woke and allowed himself to forget.

It was when Minok was an old man that his friends and family set off on a journey through the woods which grew near his adopted home. Disaster struck almost immediately. As they made their first night’s camp a long, anguished, pain filled scream was heard. Spring alert, it was quickly noticed that Minok’s daughter was missing. A searched revealed blood, but no body, so clinging to hope the companions launched an immediate search for her in the night shrouded forest.

They sought in vain for many minutes until a second scream was heard. All hurried to the source and found yet again only blood stained ground. Then they noticed that Minok’s son had disappeared as well. The desperate search continued in a frenzy for almost an hour before a third scream echoed through the forest. Brought low by dismay and fear, all crept back to the camp and cuddled close to the fires. Minok’s wife did not return.

When daylight lit the green depths of the forest, courage returned to the companions. Determined to continue the search, they set out in groups to ensure safety against their unknown attacker. But what hunted them knew no fear of numbers, and by the time the sun had set another dozen screams were heard. Another dozen people missing. The fear was almost a palatable thing as Minok and the rest of his friends huddled together that night, starting at every unidentified noise.

But for all their terror the night passed uneventfully, and in the morning the survivors made the hard decision to abandon the search for those missing. They reasoned that it was better to seek help and return with great numbers, then stay and slowly become picked off one by one.

Misfortune or some evil trick stole even this dim hope from their hearts, and once familiar paths became unknown until they were helplessly lost in the forest. Slowly – as if the hunter was relishing the terror it caused – one person after another was taken unseen. Unnoticed except for the tell tale screams and blood which littered the forest ground where they once stood.

By the time the sun fell again Minok was alone and half crazy with fear. It was as he hunched by a dim campfire that he finally gave up all hope, knowing that the unknown hunter would come for him next. As the last dregs of hope drained from his body, a figure stepped into the light. Looking up Minok saw his daughter, but his joy was cut short. Where once the girl had been a beacon of light, laughter and life, she was now a dead thing. Her body rent and tormented, he eyes staring with baleful hate. Then his son entered the light, and his wife, and one by one all the people who had been taken until he was surrounded.

In a single hollow voice each accused him of murder. Each accused him of attempting to escape the penalty of his crime and bringing the eventual doom upon others around him. Even upon his brother long left behind. Finally the shade of the man Minok murdered those long years ago appeared before him.

With a dread voice filled with promised of vengeance, the shade towered over the cowering Minok and pronounced his doom. He would not slay the man, not even lay the slightly physical hurt upon his murderer. Instead his punishment would be life! Life knowing that - because of his long ago murder - every person that he cared about had been brutally killed. Living those few years remaining in solitude and misery.

Then all stepped away from the light and Minok was alone.

Nicos let his tale fall into silence as he stared into their camp fire, staring as if the very flames were imparting secrets to the bard. Finally he spoke aloud, his voice conveying meanings lost upon all who listened.

“Sometimes, no matter how far or fast you run. No matter how you attempt to make amends, your crimes will find you. And sometimes instead of finding you, it finds those around you. Sometimes.”

Nicos’ voice became quieter, barely more then a whisper as if hushed by the aftermath of his tale.

“Sometimes ghosts of the past mistake revenge for justice.”

[Black Plauge]

"The dead always seek vengance," Blarth mumbles quietly when Nicos's tale is done, "Those who would wish us well must remember that in death as well as life. Dolson was not a true brother."

Unconciously, Blarth reaches into his backpack containing his brother's armor and removes the helmet and a rag. He then quietly begins polishing it as if his brother would put it on tomorrow.

[Gralhruk]

Shade shifts uncomfortably as the tale unfolds, her grey eyes darkening all the while. She scrubs at the blood on her sword, already a day old. The strange, dark metal sheds those stains far easier than she ever could. She stands, not looking at them, and swings her blade in a glittering arc.

"Dolson was a fool."

Her eyes find Nicos.

"What is justice but a tool of the rich, an excuse to keep down people who have less? Dolson should have helped his brother flee if he loved him, not sacrificed himself to placate people who couldn't care less about him.

"And Minok was a coward if he couldn't live with his actions. Life is punishment? Aye, for us all. That doesn't make me want to die, or let someone else judge me - I'll let you in on a little secret: everyone is a criminal in someone's eyes."

[Cadrius]

The story has the same effect that all good stories do; it breaks over him like the sea upon stone and then recedes, leaving him different than he was before. Dolson, Minok, and the rest lurk in vivid life within his mind. They leer and cry and laugh and otherwise live on after Nicos has fallen silent. Cadrius considers the obvious moral of the tale, but moves toward a different thread.

“Both were fools and cowards,” he says, folding his arms across his chest. “But they were also men who had challenges set before them. Their decisions might not be ours, but it is not hard to see why they chose their paths. The love of a sibling, of a younger brother, is…men and women alike are fools when love beckons.”

A piece of wood in the fire pops and hisses as the flames take it. Cadrius feels the brush of the heat’s hands across his face. It stands in contrast to the chill night’s air. It will be some time yet before they reach the lowlands and its more temperate climate. Further on, the river will widen and the waters will warm. They will lose time from the morning fog. But for now it is cold, and this will be another night for thick blankets.

“It is not that life is punishment. No. It is that there is always a price to be paid. Some of us are merely allowed to wait longer to pay it.”

His decision is set more than before—even more than earlier today. In this moment, Cadrius not only knows what he must do, but he believes in it as well. His peace of mind expands, granting him an odd tranquility not felt in years. He smiles, his mirth being a queer juxtaposition to the sober tale.

He has to leave them, and it must be soon, before the sins of the past come forth to take their due.

[itches]

Nicos watched as one companion after another reacted to his story, until only Ben remained silent and the man was forced to wonder whether or not he was the wisest of them all. Contemplating the hidden meanings of the tale brought another to the mind of the bard.

“Back at the monastery where I was raised, there was a crazy old man who lived there. He wasn’t a monk, just a poor beggar that non one had the heart to toss out – or so I thought.

“Until one day that is. On the evening just before I was to begin mediating for my manhood initiation, he approached me and spoke – something that had never happened before. He said in a low solemn voice ‘The tree that grows green knows no bird as a brother.’ He told me the same thing when I completed the initiation and for a third time shortly before I departed.

“’The tree that grows green knows no bird as a brother.’ A very strange statement that I spent many, many hours contemplating, trying to riddle out the meaning or reason that he told me.

“It was only after that I had become a teller of stories myself that I finally figured it out. All those tales I told finally gave me the clue I needed to unravel the mystery. And do you know what I worked out?

“He told me it because he was a crazy old man. There was no hidden meaning, just gibberish. I don’t know how much of my life I wasted before I worked that out.”

Nicos stood up at the conclusion of his second take and began to ready his bedding at a warm spot near the fire.

“I’ll take the dawn watch if no one objects.”

[red_dr4g0n94]

Ben stared at the fire, mulling over the bard's tales but not giving them too much thought. What happened to one person might not happen to you, and what worked for one man quite probably wouldn't work for another one. More often than not, you had to find your own path through the world, and couldn't follow someone else's trail.

Sometimes even that wasn't true though. The only truth about life is that your life was probably different from the guy sitting next to you. Everything else was just a fact for a certain individual's life. Nothing more.

"I'm not tired yet so I'll take first watch," Ben said as he finally looked away from the fire at the others.

[Gralhruk]

It's all just gibberish. Everything.

From the time you were born until the time you died, none of it really mattered. Beggar and Hero alike would be forgotten eventually, their names and deeds buried beneath the endless turning of the indifferent wheel. The sun rose and set, people were born and died. A day or a lifetime, it was all the same.

Better to live in the present than dwell on philosophical offal. She turns to Ben before settling in.

"Wake me at moonrise."

[Black Plauge]

"Me too," Blarth adds, not wanting to be left out of the watch cycle, and wanting to say goodbye to Shade if she choose this night to leave.

[Gralhruk]

Shade sleeps, her body entirely still, her mind exactly the opposite. Quick, sporadic dreams - more often than not disturbing - rattle through her slumber like slashes from a blade. Things that have happened, things she fears, things she wishes for - all there, all but slightly twisted - estranged from truth and fact by only the barest of margins, yet made somehow horrific thereby.

She is cold almost to the point of numbness when Ben wakes her. His watch was quiet, uneventful. She glares. He shrugs and reminds her to wake Blarth, then goes to take his own rest. Her eyes tear from being exposed to the icy wind so soon after sleep, she rubs at them absently. Breathing out a long cloud of frost, she approaches Blarth.

The half orc is sleeping peacefully, his face looking more bestial now that his eyes are closed. She had approached with her customary silence, somewhere in her sleep confused thoughts already aware that she has no intention of waking him. Yet before she can withdraw, his nose twitches and then his eyes open abruptly, see her, and he rises. No sign of sleepiness about him; for some reason that irritates her.

Shade stretches and sniffs once.

"Watch time. You take that side."

[Black Plauge]

Nodding, Blarth stretches out his back and heads to the position that Shade indicated. Once there, however, he orients himself so that he's watching not the night soaked forest around the camp but the camp itself. In particular Shade. Her decision to leave is certianly her right, and Blarth won't stop her, but he will say good bye.

Tonight, however, is not the night and it's soon time to wake the one-armed bard for his turn at the watch.

[itches]

Nicos woke slowly from his slumber, bleary eyes opening as he was shaken awake.

"It's your watch," an unidentified voice said from beyond the haze that shrouded his vision. "Time to wake up."

Forcing his eyes to focus, the bard started fully awake as he noticed the inhuman figure looming over him. With a sudden movement Nicos knocked himself free of the hand that had grasped his arm and rolled out of his makeshift bed. The bard was already on his feet and prepared to defend himself from attack by the time he belatedly recognised the figure as Blarth.

"Damnit," Nicos said through his rapid breath. "You almost gave me a heart attack!"

It took several more moments as the adrenalin dropped from his bloodstream for him to notice Shade in the background and the freezing night time temperature. Hastily getting dressed and throwing a heavy cloak over his shoulders, the man quietly asked his two companions.

"Anything happen during your watch?"

[Gralhruk]

Shade regards the bard for a moment, her eyes flat, before answering hollowly.

"Quiet as death."

Ill luck to use that expression, or at least that's what they used to say back in the guild. This disavowance of superstition gave her some small comfort, helped ease the tension she was starting to feel about returning to a den full of thieves. She was no longer the naive, awestruck youth she had once been.

[itches]

Nicos felt a chill pass through him at Shade's comment, and he hastily finished dressing.

"In my experience death tends to be anything but quiet."

Standing again and stretching out the kinks that had developed in his sleep, the bard gazed up at the stars and attempted to gauge the time by their position.

"You guys better get back to sleep and catch a couple of hours sleep; I'll be good to keep watch by myself."

[Gralhruk]

Blarth and Shade each settle in once again, trying to get some sleep before the dawn. Not long after, and well before Shade has fallen asleep, she hears the scuff of leather on leather. Looking up she sees Nicos, who scrapes one boot against the other again, obviously with the intent to wake her. The look in his eyes is one she has seen before - hard, mistrustful. The way he looked when he met them outside the Citadel after he had disappeared.

Her own eyes turn steely as she rises; graceful, this time - almost cocky, with no sign of lethargy in her slim frame. Her hands rest on her belt, near the hilts of her blades - sinuous, ready. Her voice is low and carefully controlled.

"What's on your mind?"

[itches]

After the others return to sleep Nicos found a secluded spot to keep watch. He listened to the sounds of the night around him, unseen insects chirping, trees waving in the slight breeze, the near by stream rushing past. All of it wove into a rhythm that sung to the bard, a rhythm that he carefully began to mentally construct a melody that went along with it.

It was a clever trick to help when keeping watch, the melody kept the watcher alert during the long boring hours and provided and easy way to track the minutes as they past. But tonight he found that he couldn't focus on it. After many minutes the bard gave up in disgust and turned his focus on what was bothering him.

Getting up and renetering the camp, Nicos' eyes setteled upon Shade's prone form. Walking towards her and deliberatly skuffing his boots, he was pleased to see the noise wake her but none of the others. Better to ask these questions when no one else was listening.

"What's on your mind?"

"All the normal things," he replied hesitating at the last moment. "The mysteries of the gods, the stars. Gierto's 5th Symphony. Shade, how did you get the boat?"

[Gralhruk]

She eyes the bard, outwardly cold, irritated. Inside she feels a quick jolt of adrenalaine, wills herself to stay still. This was it. Nicos was no fool and Shade wasn't surprised he was the one to get curious. However, he also wasn't easy to deceive. She needed a careful mix of truth and falsehood, delivered in a fashion that let him draw conclusions based on what they all thought was her nature. She shrugs.

"I followed the river until I found a little village, if you could call it that, and picked one that suited us."

[itches]

Inwardly the bard sighed. He had hoped that Shade would say something to belay his fears so he wouldn't have to mention it, but for once he wasn't lucky.

"Yeah, I figured that you had to steal one. I was thinking about our journey over the last couple of days, and how we've managed to avoid running into any nasty surprises. I figure that's because of your trail breaking, and I for one am glad that we didn't have to risk our necks at any point."

As he talked Nicos carefully kept his eyes on Shade, measuring the distance between them and trying to get a reading on her face. The fact that she was still wearing her blades was not lost on him.

"And yet despite that, I couldn't notice that you were cleaning blood from your swords before." Despite his attempts to keep his voice even, a note of pleading somehow found it's way in. "Shade, tell me the blood has nothing to do with you getting the boat."

[Gralhruk]

Shade resists the urge to run her hand over her thigh, where the self inflicted wound still burned. Instead, she lets her eyes get colder, assumes an even easier, more ready stance. Her voice is now colder than ice.

"The blood has nothing to do with me getting the boat."

She pauses.

"And even if it did, it doesn't matter. We needed a boat. If someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time . . ."

She shrugs, her voice angry now, louder.

"Like I said, the blood has nothing to do with me getting the boat. Do we understand one another?"

[itches]

Nicos feels his face tighten into a grimace at the woman's word. Thieving was one thing, but murder...

"No, I don't think we do understand each," he said, his vow low and eyes unblinking. "I can be a bit slow sometimes, care to explain?"

[Gralhruk]

For the first time her gaze wavers, but then she spits out an obscenity and turns blazing eyes back toward him. Her voice is a snarl.

"No, I don't care to explain. Since when are you so virtuous?"

[Black Plauge]

For some reason sleep does not come easily to the large and simple half-orc after his watch. Though he lies down and closes his eyes, sleep simply will not come. Still, Blarth lies still, trying to force his body and mind to shut down and get some rest.

His efforts, however, are defeated by the start of a conversation, or more accurately an argument at his back. Doing his best to block it out and get to sleep despite it, Blarth can't help but hear what is going on behind him. Finally giving up on the attempt, Blarth sits up and turns to face Nicos and Shade.

"Do you mind? Some of us would like to get some sleep."

[itches]

Nicos bit back most of his irritation at Blarth's interruption. It wasn't the half-orc the bard was irritated at, so forced his voice to become something that resembled a reasonable tone.

"You have my apologies Blarth. I was just trying to determine if Shade killed anyone to get our boat."

[Gralhruk]

Her gaze wavers between Blarth and the bard, her eyes only flicking once to where Cadrius is also beginning to stir. She didn't want to know what he'd think of her after this. Shade turns a murderous look on Nicos.

"Good thing you don't need two hands to play judge and jury. I'd be careful before you try the executioner bit, though."

[itches]

An unseen twitch went through Nicos' face at Shade's comment. Were it any but a companion, he would have already thrown a punch. As it was the days of travel and instances of fighting side by side restrained him - barely. instead the words were uttered between clenched teeth and a body tensed with fury.

"Advice Shade? Well you are the expert at killing people I suppose. Tell me, is that what you think when you slit someone's throat? An execution? Murder is such a dirty word after all. Almost as dirty as murderer."

[Black Plauge]

Looking back and forth between Shade and Nicos, Blarth opens his mouth as if to say something but never actually does. He's fairly certian a line has been crossed somewhere, but he's not sure who crossed it or in what direction.

[Cadrius]

Somewhere amid the first few caustic exchanges, Cadrius awakens. He lays on one side with his back to Shade and Nicos. Listening, Cadrius grits his teeth. Their petulant barbs summon a swift irritation in the fallen paladin. He focuses on the cold, hard ground separated from his shoulder and hip by only the thin bedroll spread out beneath him. His efforts are dashed against the rocks, however, as the confrontation escalates. As it threatens to boil over, he casts back the woolen blanket and pushes himself to his feet.

“Enough!” His pale blue eyes are shot with crimson. The ancient blade he’s borne for the better part of a decade lies near the rumpled blanket. “We are two weeks still from our journey’s end. You two squabble like…” he shakes his head and snatches up the sword off the ground. A baleful expression writ upon his face, Cadrius stalks toward the river.

[Gralhruk]

She watches Cadrius go, bile rising in her throat as Nicos' words ring in her ears. The dwarf had bled profusely; she had so casually slit his throat while he was helpless, yet the act itself continued to haunt her even now. What had started out as an act was all too real now. Shade knew it, could tell from the wild light in the bard's eyes that he knew it too.

Deep down, buried so deep she wouldn't even admit it to herself, Shade had hoped Cadrius would show her the compassion he seemed to find when she was at her worst, would offer some words of acceptance despite her guilt. That frail, hidden hope guttered and died, replaced by the always eager fire of her anger. She had never wanted their companionship, never wanted to be one of them. Nobody had ever looked out for her anyway, and any time she trusted anyone they ended up using her.

"So I am."

She spits the words out, snatching up her pack and slinging it over one shoulder. Her flinty gaze sweeps around the camp, where Blarth and Ben watch without expression. She moves close to Nicos, meets his gaze without blinking.

"I thought you knew how the world worked. Enjoy your innocence. While it lasts, that is."

[itches]

A quiet voice within Nicos struggled to be heard, to calm down, to consider his words, consider Shade's words and the guilt that shone from her face. To stop the whole situation before it got any further. A small voice. A voice drowned out by an anger that dominated the normally controlled man.

"Enjoy?" Nicos said matching everything Shade threw at him. "What I'll enjoy is being able to sleep without worrying about waking up dead."

[Gralhruk]

Shade retreats several steps from the bard before turning her back and walking out of the campsite, towards the river. Her path takes her near to Cadrius. She can see the anger and pain on his face as he slashes and parries at empty air. She wonders briefly who it was he saw in his mind while he attacked with such savagery. She'd never know, didn't want to know.

"It was fun while it lasted, but I'm done with all of you. I'm tired of hiding what I am. You are an outlaw now, too. Accept that fact or you'll die."

He doesn't even pause in his practice or look in her direction. It was better that way. She disappears back into the dark wood, jogs until she reaches the river. She sprints onto a spit that juts out into the water, then leaps the remaining distance, splashing into shallow water on the other side. The moonlight limns her gently as she crests the far bank, then she fades into the dark without looking back.

[Black Plauge]

A line had deffinately been crossed.

"Some one want to tell me what just happened?" Blarth asks to the tension filled air that fills the campsite.

[red_dr4g0n94]

"It's quite simple really," Ben said, rolling over to rise up and face where Nicos and Blarth were. He'd woken up when Cadrius had shouted and had only heard what seemed to have been the end of a rather heated arguement between the bard and Shade. After which the woman had promptly left.

"Our esteemed friend Nicos here has just driven Shade off." Ben looked around and noticed that Cadrius had left as well. Ben wondered if he should go and find the other warrior as he turned his attention back to Nicos. "Though the reasons for him doing so are a bit lost on me at the moment."

[itches]

Nicos restrains from glaring at Ben and kicks viciously at the ground. That was not the way he had wanted the discussion to go, and as his anger started to fade he found himself wondering whether or not Shade leaving was a good or a bad thing.

"You must have missed the part where she admitted to murder."

[Black Plauge]

"What murder?" Blarth asks, "I'm fairly certian I heard the whole conversation and I don't recall Shade admitting to a murder."

[itches]

Instead of directly answering Blarth's query, Nicos launched into an improvised mimic of the conversation he just had with Shade.

"Shade," he began with an overly deep voice to represent himself. "I accuse you of being a murderer!"

"So I am," he replied in a bad mimic of Shade's voice. "And now that you have discovered my dark secret I'm going to run away, because that never gets old. Plus the sexual tension between me and Cadrius is becoming really annoying. I don't know why I don't just @#$% him and get it done with."

Noticing the lack of comprehension in his companions, Nicos explains in his normal voice.

"I noticed that Shade was cleaning blood from her sword tonight. Blood that - as far as I could tell - had no right to be there as we haven’t fallen into any fights over the past couple of days. Stranger still is that I would swear that the blood wasn't there before she stole our boat.

"You heard our argument; I accused her of killing someone to get it. Her exact reply was 'So I am.' Not exactly a confession but closer to that then a denial."

Setting a grim look on his face, the bard adds one last thing.

"And you didn't see the look of guilt that she got when I said it."

[Cadrius]

Patience serves him more faithfully than any servant and it stays his tongue when he might otherwise lash out at Shade’s parting words. That she would lecture him even now causes him to seethe, but silence is his truest companion and he is content to whip the broadsword to and fro, cutting through the air with heavy chops. She leaves him now, responsible for the safety of the others, and still two weeks away from their destination. Cadrius might be able to navigate the perils of the river well enough, although if the reach rapids they will need to pull ashore and walk, but he is still no woodsman. In such matters he is an acolyte at best, having spent too many hours in the practice yard in his youth. Yet most of all, her departure angers him because now he cannot leave the others.

She’s going to die alone, with none that love her or will mourn her passing. The thought plays dispassionately in his mind. Pity is an emotion that is well known to him, but he wishes it would not arrive when he thinks of Shade. The ability to change, and her refusal to do so, has always been her decision to make. Instead, she embraces the darkness within. Cadrius may never walk in the light again, not as he used to know it, but he will not simply give himself over. And that is one difference which can never be reconciled between the two.

The ancient sword cuts through a thin branch easily, sending the wood spinning into the dark. His mouth twists into a wry smile. Shade has done him a boon by leaving now. Of all his companions, it would be leaving her that would have caused him the most discomfort. Love is not a thing for people like them. The best they can ever hope for is solace and to forget the sins of the past. But Shade doesn’t want to forget them.

He jams the blade back into its sheath and strides back toward camp, arriving at the end of Nicos’s explanation.

“Shade is gone,” he says. “She was free to leave at the time of her choosing, as all here are. In these lands she will do well on her own.” His eyes settle on Nicos. “I cannot say the same for others. It would be wise not to split further before we reach the lowlands.”

He lays the blade down by his bedroll and slides in under the woolen blanket once more.

Find your peace.

[Black Plauge]

Blarth is trying to work out a reply to Nicos, who he's sure is misinterpreting what happened when Cadrius comes back and puts the issue, and then himself to bed. Sullenly, Blarth follows suit. He didn't like the way things had turned out this evening one bit, but it seemed the others didn't care.

Besides, he'd really wanted to say goodbye to Shade before she left. Now he'd missed his chance.

[red_dr4g0n94]

Ben nodded with Cadrius. Everyone here was a full-grown adult, and they all could make their own decisions. Still, Ben gave Nicos a look between pity and contempt and decided to tell the bard one more thing before the warrior went back to bed.

"No one here is exactly a paragon of virtue, Nicos." Then the warrior went back to his bedroll and left Nicos alone on his watch.

[itches]

It was several hours into Nicos' solitary vidual before he replied to the now sleeping Ben.

"No, I suppose we're not."

The bard wondered at the mood to change so quickly. Earlier in the day they had been travelling in cheer, jokes and comradeship had flowed easily between them all. It had seemed that the trials of the past weeks had forged bonds between them, bonds that were apparently all too easy to break.

One argument was all it had taken to drive Shade from their ranks, how long before the others left for their own paths? Briefly the bard considered just leaving in the morning, to avoid the unpleasantness that was due to come. After all, he never had been technically invited; it was originally more a case of inviting himself.

But no, Nicos discarded the idea of leaving as quickly as it arrived. There were still stories to be learnt here, besides which he had grown to like and respect the members of this unlikely troop.

Instead the bard used the silence of the night to prepare himself for when he had to face the others in the morning. He hadn't exactally driven Shade from their midst - she certinally had been willing to leave - but things had been said which he now wished could be taken back. Things were going to be uncomfortable.

[itches]

The next day passed slowly and silently for the most part. Shade had often ranged ahead alone of the rest of the group and even when she didn't it was a rare day that she wasn't simply a silent presence. Silent or no, it was a presence that Nicos missed.

Unsure how to bring the subject up and worried about his companions reactions, the bard remained in silence for once; waiting, hoping, praying that someone else would mention it. But no one did and it was in silence that they passed the day.

At the campsite that evening Nicos found himself cooking the group meal - a stew - when he suddenly couldn't stand the silence any longer, blurting out what had been on his mind to everyone and no one.

"I didn't mean to drive her away."

[Black Plauge]

"Drive her away?" Blarth asks, confused, "I suppose she might have waited until today or tomorrow to leave if you hadn't argued with her, but she was planning on heading to Tradeholm without us anyway. I'm just dissapointed that I didn't get a chance to say good-bye properly. I don't like angry leavings."

[itches]

Nicos stared at Blarth in confusion, his wits having left him temporarily.

"What do you mean she was planning to leave us? What makes you think she was planning to leave?"

[Black Plauge]

Realizing that he's accidentally said something he wasn't supposed to, Blarth stutters for a bit as he tries to recover. It isn't long, however, before he sags in defeat and blurts out the rest of the truth, "Shade said she was heading for Tradeholm a couple of days ago. She asked me not to say anything. Said she'd tell you herself."

[Cadrius]

A sardonic laugh escapes his lips. Having spent more time with Shade than any of the others, Cadrius’s mind makes the leap before theirs. The explosion between her and Nicos was no emotional outburst. Likely she had goaded the confrontation, choosing her words carefully to get to the one-armed bard. Shade has always been wily, and perhaps manipulative, but it isn’t until this moment that Cadrius realizes just how good she is at it.

“She wanted to go,” he says, interrupting Nicos’s questioning. “She just wanted an excuse.”

[itches]

"No," Nicos said, shaking his head and refusing to believe he had been manipulated so easily. "That doesn't make sense. She didn't start the argument, I started talking to her because of the blood on her sword."

[itches]

Nicos looked down at the bubbling stew while the realization that Shade had manipulated him slowly sunk in. None of his companions spoke, so it was the bard that finally broke the silence with a grimace.

"I know, I know. I gave her the opportunity and she sized it, and I really did cross the line there. But why would she want to leave?"

Nicos looked around at the others, hoping someone would be able to provide an answer.

[Black Plauge]

Still suffering from an ego blow from having told the others something Shade had obviously not wanted them to know, Blarth further compounds the problem, "Well, she said she had some things to do."

[itches]

"But do we know what?" Nicos asked again before turning back towards Cadrius. "You've known her longer then any of us, do you have any ideas?"

[itches]

"No," came Cadrius' response, as terse and uncommunicative as the man always was. Feeling slightly intimidated, Nicos turned his attention back to the group in general.

"So she said she was going to - Tradeholm was it? - and obviously didn't want us to follow after. That's just driving my curiosity wild, I'll travel with you guys to where the rivers join then hitch a ride upstream."

"Besides which," he added trying to make it sound casual. "If I can find her, I owe her an apology."

[Black Plauge]

"I think we all do," Blarth says, still somewhat sullen.

"I'll go with you," he adds. "I like Shade and don't like the fact that I didn't get to say good bye properly."

[itches]

Nicos stepped off the barge onto the river dock with Blarth close behind him. They had left their companions behind at the river join as planned and had eventually managed to barter a lift upriver. The trip had been slow, boring and mercifully uneventful.

"It's been a few years since I passed through the city," Nicos said looking from the warehouses that surround them to Blarth. "Any suggestions on where we should start?"

[Black Plauge]

"Umm... Someplace where Shade might stay?" Blarth replies, not really sure where in a large city one would go to look for someone. "If we were back in my village I'd say we go to the center of the village and ask the elders where she was, as they'd know, but I don't know how you humans organize yourselves in such a large village."

[itches]

"If she has contacts with the criminal underworld then she might be staying in a house somewhere, not an Inn," Nicos said as he picked up his bag and began to lead Blarth into the city. "Still it's not a bad idea, I can start working at the more disreputable establishments and see if I can contact anyone. Hell we're a fairly noticeable pair; she might even notice us first."

Nicos kept up a stead stream of chatter as though wound their way through the warehouses and onto the edge of a residential district, finally stopping before an Inn denoted by a wineskin next to a winding road.

"This is the only Inn I know well enough in Tradeholm," the bard said to his companion before entering. "It's not run by thieves so we won't have to worry about being robbed while asleep, but a word on warning; don't drink the ale."

[Black Plauge]

"Then what would you suggest drinking?" Blarth asks as the pair enter in Inn.

The common room is moderately busy, given the time of day. In one corner an elderly woman is talking to a small group of older boys and girls. The youngsters are dressed in white robes trimmed with small golden chains of suns at the hem and end of the sleves. The woman wears a robe of a similar cut, but it has far more and larger golden sun adornments to the point of it being better to describe the robe's color as gold with small white accents rather than white with gold adornments. In the middle of their table is a bowl of rasins and a plate of bread and cheese from which the youngsters occasionally grab a bite.

At a table more towards the center of the common room a group of armored individuals sit, each bearing the blazon of Heironious. They're discussing something in low tones as they eat an early lunch; rabbit stew from the smell of things.

"Wah'll yah haf?" a portly woman drawls from behind the bar as Nicos and Blarth make their way over. "Yah here fa sum viddles oh yah lookin' fa a room?"

[itches]

"The cheep wine, spirits until you can no longer taste, or more ideally somewhere else."

"Ah, a room," Nicos said after spending a few moments translating the accent.

The woman didn't move as she looked at the bard, squinting slightly. "Ya look faml'ya."

"Yes it's true," Nicos said giving an ornate bow. "I am the great magician Heronzo. I departed 15 years ago to battle the legions of hell in hell itself, but I'm back here for a quick break."

"Oh, tis yoo," she said sounding distinctly unimpressed. Pulling out a key from under the bar, she tossed it over to the pair. "Secon door on ta lef."

[Black Plauge]

"Heronzo?" Blarth asks as he follows Nicos to the door the woman indicated.

[itches]

"He's a magician," Nicos explained as they quickly made their way to their room. "Lived about 15 years ago, specialised in exorcisms and removing curses. All evidence points to him being a charlatan more interested in money and fame then anything else, and he was slightly more tolerated then most real practisers of magic would have been. He had been doing this for several years when suddenly he disappeared. The official reports were that he had been lynched by those outraged by his blatant use of 'foul magics' but a rumour sprung up that he had departed to fight the demons in hell itself."

Looking around the rough - but mostly clean - room Nicos shrugged off his bag and collapsed onto the pallet that was to serve as his bed.

"The rumour caught the imagination of many, and he quickly became something of a folk hero. It's ironic that only after he was dead did he gain the type of fame that he had sought so much. Anyway, last time I was here I paid for my room by telling an extremely embellished tale about him."

Looking around the room again, Nicos took note of it. It was small, very small, and without much in the way of furniture or decoration. Besides two pallets was a small table upon which sat an unlit lamp. At the foot of each pallet was a tiny chest, and in a corner rested the chamber pot. It wasn't a lot, but the beds seemed to be bug free and the door locked from the inside, and that's all the man was asking at this point in time.

"It's seems like it's been years since I've been in anything with a passing resemblance to civilisation, I don't know about you but I need to stock up on supplies."

[Black Plauge]

"Yeah, that would probably be a good idea," Blarth replies slowly, "but I thought we were here to look for Shade? Shouldn't we start with that?"

[itches]

"We can do both," Nicos replied easily. "The market tends to be the unofficial heart of a city anyway, while shopping for supplies we can keep an eye out for her."

"Actually," The bard added suddenly sitting up right. "It might be a better idea if we split up. There are some specialty items I need to find, if you go to the main market while I look for them we can get it done much faster, as well as covering twice as much ground making it more likely one of us will run into her."

[Black Plauge]

"Okay," Blarth replies, now that he understands what Nicos wants to do. Happy to be of some use too, Blarth starts taking a mental inventory of what they need, "Rations for sure, can never have too many of those on the road. We could also use an axe or a hatchet, my foot's getting sore from stomping on branches all the time to break them. Some warmer blankets would be nice, as it has been getting colder, but those can wait a few more weeks if they're too expensive..."

His not so internal, internal monologue trailing of, Blarth turns to Nicos and asks, "Is there anything in particular that you can think of that I should get?"

[itches]

"Some thread and a sowing," Nicos said glancing down at his tunic. "Our clothes are starting to look in need of repair. The only other thing I can think of is fresh fruit."

"Do you need anything from a speciality store, and do you need any gold for the market?"

[Black Plauge]

Thinking about it, Blarth replies, "No, I have some gold already, and while I'm not sure what things are going to cost, I suppose I can trade away my brother's armor should I need some more. I'm getting kind of tired of carrying it anyway, and I'm my brother's only family so there is no one else to pass it too."

Despite his words, Blarth is clearly saddened by the idea of selling his brother's armor.

[itches]

Touched by the sadness his companion clearly felt for his recently departed brother, Nicos tried to think of a way to comfort him.

"You don't need to sell it, I mean I have more gold then I really know what to do with. What would your brother want you to do with the armour?"

[Black Plauge]

"I don't know," Blarth replies, ashamed of the admission, "The armor should be passed on to another family member, but me and my brother were it. There are no other family members."

"I mean... I'm it for the moment. I suppose their might come a time when I'll have a family again, but do I have to carry the armor around until then?"

The last is said almost plainatively, as if Blarth was struggling to keep from whining like child.

[itches]

"So it's actually your armour now?" Nicos asked. "If you don't want to get rid of it and are finding it difficult to keep carrying so much excess armour, why not wear it yourself? If the tradition is to pass it onto family members, I'm sure your brother would want you to."

[Cadrius]

Cadrius had felt much the fool as Ben helped him pull the boat onto land and into the woods. It creaked with protest, unused to travel by air, but they found a suitably dense area of underbrush to hide it. Heaping branches over its hull hardly made for an inconspicuous mound, but it provided at least a modicum of cover. A wry smile touched his lips as they examined their work. He was trying to keep his stolen boat from being thieved.

He and Ben walked in silence back to the intersection of the river and its tributary. The water there was slower and darker than it had been even days earlier. The banks were a bowshot apart, having been fed by more than one vassal stream and river. He’d paused then and gave Ben a measured glance.

“It is for the best if you and I do not arrive together,” he said at last. He did not explain further, hating the cryptic statement but unwilling to delve into his reasons. “I will do my best to find the lot of you later. Perhaps you will find another barge like Nicos and Blarth.”

He’d left Ben there, standing on the soft riverbank, and began walking toward the city.

[Black Plauge]

"Wear it?" Blarth replies, the idea clearly not having occured to him before. "I suppose I could do that..."

Mulling the idea over, Blarth begins to extract the armor from his bag and lay it out on the bed. Once that's done, he starts to try and put it on. It soon becomes clear, however, that he has absolutely no experience wearing armor and is having extrodinary difficulty with all the straps and buckles, especially since he doesn't realize that he really should have some help buckling them all up. After several minutes of frustrated effort, Blarth gives up in a huff and throws the breastplate back on the bed.

"It's no use," Blarth states, on the verge of tears, "I could never wear the armor like my brother did. I don't even know how to put it on!"

[red_dr4g0n94]

Ben sat on the edge of the river bank, ignoring the fact that his rump was getting rather damp from the soggy ground underneath him. He watched the river go by, always moving, never really stopping or even slowing down. So much like how his own life has been. Always one challange after another, none of which gave him time to do anything other than survive.

First as an urchin on the street, struggling to survive on other peoples trash. Ben hardly remembered that time of his life, only that he hated it so much he sometimes thought about just giving up to die.

Then being found by the Mercenaries. Though they were great and he didn't have to struggle for food anymore, he'd had even more work to do. Clean and polish armor, carry and maintain weapons, care for horses, cook, so many things that at the time didn't seem necessary to a hero. Now though he saw how necessary all of it was. Armor could rust unless cleaned, and weapons would shatter unless maintained. Horses could get sick or even die without proper care, and there wasn't always a good cook around when you needed it.

Then the mercenaries had all died, and so he'd been travelling from one town to the other, further and further north, for 8 years. Never stopping for a break, always seeking to inform the next family, the next friend, the next town, of their loss.

But now, over 20 years since his birth (he didn't know the exact date of his birth, so he could only guess at his approximate age) he at last didn't have anything tugging at him. Nothing that demanded his immediate attention. He could just sit here until the day he died and no one would lose anything.

Ben twirled a silver coin in his hand mindlessly, wondering what to do now. Cadrius had left, why he hadn't said and Ben didn't really think he needed to know. Blarth and Nicos had gone to find Shade in...damn, what was that place called? Trade--something. Something to do with trading.

Tradeholm. That was it. Not that it mattered. Shade had left of her own free will it seemed, and Nicos and Blarth were pretty much just butting into something they had no business butting into. The elf had just left, and that thief from the mountains had gone his own way...a week ago? Two weeks ago? Ben couldn't remember anymore. It didn't matter. He was on his own in any case, free to do whatever he wanted.

Which begged the question: What did he want?

[itches]

"I'm sorry," Nicos said out of sympathy, trying to comfort his friend. "I wish I could help, but I don't really know anything about armour myself. Maybe after we find Shade we can get someone to teach you how to wear it? I'm sure once we hook up with Cadrius or Ben again, they'll be more then happy to give you a hand.

"But come on," the bard said standing suddenly. "Sitting around here isn't going to get us anything. The sooner we get supplies, the sooner we find Shade and the sooner we can start getting on with our lives."

[Black Plauge]

"Okay," Blarth says, his voice still glum. Carefully he puts the armor back into his backpack and gets out his coinpurse to buy supplies. Not really knowing how much is in it, Blarth spills it on the bed and counts it out. He also comes across the trinkets and jewlery that he'd taken from the room with the ruin stone in it. He'd quite forgotten about them, and spends a few minutes examining them. Blarth didn't really know much about gems and precious metals, and the exotic nature of the trinkets they'd found only meant that he was even more lost than usual in identifying them. Deciding not to risk them against any possible pickpockets, Blarth takes all but one and hides them under the mattress. There was bound to be a jewler in this town and he could help Blarth figure out what these trinkets were made of.

"So, we meet back here when we're done shopping?"

[itches]

Nicos surreptitiously attempts to guess at Blarth's wealth as it spills out on the bed. Convinced that the half-orc had enough to cover the likely expensive, he moved to head out into town.

"So, we meet back here when we're done shopping?"

"Works for me, if anything else comes up I'll leave a note for you."

The bard quickly made his way out through the common room, his mind already moving ahead to what he wanted and how to get it. Some of the items would take time to acquire, time he would rather spend on enjoying being back in civilisation.

[Black Plauge]

While Blarth doesn't really see what good a note would do, considering that he can't read, he's not about to argue with what Nicos apparently considers a perfectly reasonable idea.

His coin pouch safely tucked away in his belt, Blarth heads off toward the market, where he looks around for a merchant selling some fresh food. Nicos's comment about the fruit had made Blarth hungry and food always had a way of making him feel better.

[itches]

Nicos found himself rather cheerful as he wondered down a shop lined street of Tradeholm, after what seemed like months of wilderness travel and the incident with the wizards, he finally managed to refill his flask, pick up some clean clothes, and even spend some time in a public bath to scrub off the road dirt. There were still several important items he wanted to pick up, but for now he just enjoyed being out of the wildness and in civilisation.

Passing by a shop window's expensive clear glass, the bard stopped short as something within caught his eye. The bell on the door gave a silver chime as he entered and made his way over to the item on display.

"Greeting sir," a woman said as walked over towards Nicos with a frown that said she trying to decide if he was a customer or now. "Welcome to the Lost Treasure, can I help you?"

Looking back at her, the bard instinctively smiled as cheerfully as he could, feeling out of place in the obviously expensive store and wishing he had taken the time to remove his whiskers before leaving the Inn.

"I'm afraid not," Nicos said as he examined her. Several years older then him, blond-almost-white hair done up in what he assumed to be a local fashion, very pale skin and light blue eyes. If she smiled she'd be rather attractive. "I was just passing by when I noticed what I thought was an elf-horn and couldn't resist seeing if it really was."

"Ah," the unnamed woman said in a tone that conveyed volumes. "Yes this was the instrument carried by the elven hero Alluvinus. Do you uh, play it? I've never heard of a human able to master the instrument."

"I do actually," Nicos said as the smile dropped from his face and his voice turned totally serious. "It's true that human's normally can't master an instrument as complicated as this, but I've found that the trick is to - OH GODS! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY ARM?!"

As Nicos gave a comical performance of searching for the missing arm which clearly prevented him from playing the instrument, a flush of embarrassment crept over the woman's face.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to - that is to say I didn't - your arm."

"It's alright," the bard said grinning. "To be fair, it wasn't very gentlemanly of me to make fun of your like that and I apologise. My name is Nicos."

"Lolanthe," the woman said finally smiling back at the man, and it was with no small satisfaction that Nicos noted that she actually was fairly attractive with a little colour and a smile. "And I really didn't mean to -"

"It really is alright," Nicos reassured her again. "I knew an elf years ago who used a horn like this, that's what attracted my attention to it."

"Well please allow me to start again Nicos," the woman said having regained her composure. "Welcome to the Lost Treasure. Is there anything I can do to help you?"

"Perhaps you could assuage my curiosity?" the bard said with a frown as he glanced around at the seemingly unrelated items within the shop. "What sort of store is the Treasure? I'm forced to confess that a casual glance has left me rather confused."

"Yes I suppose it does seem rather random at first," Lolanthe said as she favoured Nicos with another smile. "We specialise in rarities, one of a kind novelties and items of historical note."

"In other words, things rich merchants and nobles can buy and then grab about owning to their neighbours?"

"Well I wouldn't put say it so blatantly, but that would be the honest heart of the matter, yes."

"I have to admit that you posses an admirable collection of items," Nicos said as he leaned down closer to read a placard resting before a delicate glass shoe. "Belim's false slipper?"

"Hmm? Oh that. The previous duke of Belim had a glass slipper crafted based on some legend about a knight named Gonoith and claimed it was genuine. He was discovered of course, but the mere fact of its duplicity makes the slipper valuable."

"'Some legend about a knight named Gonoith'?" Nicos asked the woman in mock shock. "Don't tell me you never heard the take of Gonoith and the Golden Slipper?"

"I'm afraid I haven’t," Lolanthe replied playing along with the bard's shock. "My knowledge of ancient legends are sadly lacking."

"Old it may be, but not quite ancient yet. Gonoith and the Golden Slipper is one of my favourites. You see Gonoith was a knight from ages past who sought the maiden Katherine's hand in marriage. Katherine was a handsome woman of renowned virtue with an influential father, and as such she had many suitors. In order to decide which she would consent to marry, she set each of her admirers seemingly impossible tasks in order to decide who was most worthy. To Gonoith she asked him to turn her glass slipper gold.

"Gonoith at once set out with gladness in his heart, for this surely would be his chance to prove the power of his love. He passed many trials and dangers in his quest, eventually coming to hear of a legendary river deep within a forbidden mountain range that had the power to turn anything it touched into solid gold. He followed this rumour through ambush by evil creatures and treacherous terrain alike, but through it all the power of his love and righteousness of his cause saw him through unscathed, and he eventually found the river.

"Gonoith travelled back with the intent to present the golden slipper to his beloved, but when he returned our mighty knight discovered that a scandal had erupted shortly after he had departed. It seemed that the fair maiden Katherine's virtue was not quite as true as everyone had been led to believe. Apparently she had been secretly having an affair with several of the servants and guards in her father's employ. As soon as news of the scandal reached his ears, her father had swiftly married her off to an old weather Count in a distant province."

"An interesting legend," Lolanthe said. "But I'm not fond of the tragedies and tales with sad endings."

"Sad ending?" Nicos replied. "Oh no, the story of Gonoith ends with everyone happy. Katherine's father managed to get rid of a troublesome daughter and received a large dowry all at once. Her new husband had a pretty young wife to dote upon in his twilight years. Katherine herself was in a position to pursue her ... interests with more candour now she was freed from her father and the never ending line of noble suitors. Even the old Count's servants and guards found the new situation to be a lot more fun and pleasant."

"And poor Gonoith?"

"Ah Gonoith, he had the happiest ending of all. After his quest the noble knight found himself quite wealthy, as he had a practically limitless supply of gold. Not only that, once the gossip spread of the lengths he went to in the name of romance and love, Gonoith found himself at the centre of many eligible young lady's attention."

"So it was a happy ending after all," Lolanthe said shaking her head at the bard's tale and unable to restrain a smile. "You have a strange, cynical sort of optimism in you Nicos. One thing I don't understand, if Gonoith succeeded in turning the slipper gold, then why did the duke of Belim make it of glass?"

"I'm not sure," the man said with a shrug. "Maybe it was supposed to be the slipper for the other foot?"

"Oh my, yes that does seem to be the logical answer," Lolanthe burst out with a peal of laughter at Nicos' deduction, quickly covering her mouth with her hand. "Nicos I have to thank you for telling me the legend, it's not one I'm liable to forget anytime soon."

"It was my pleasure Lolanthe, indeed it was a genuine pleasure to meet you," Nicos said with another broad smile. "I just arrived at Tradeholm and had not expected to find someone as pleasant as you. I'm likely to be performing a few tales or perhaps a song or two later today at an Inn called the Traveller’s Wineskin, do you know of it?"

"I do actually, it's in what could be considered a rough neighbourhood."

"Well I find the less privileged are those most in need of my unique brand of cynical optimism," Nicos replied. "And it's my understanding that area may be rough, but it's safe enough for those passing through it. Besides which there is supposed to be a talented performer staying there if you're interested ..."

"Modestly doesn't become you Nicos," Lolanthe said with another small smile. "I shall think about it."

"That's all a gentleman can ask. Unfortunately - as much as I have enjoyed talking to you - I have business about the city that I needs my attention. A good day to you Lolanthe."

"And to you Nicos."

As Nicos left the shop he found himself absently humming a merry tune. Yes it was good to be back in civilisation.

[Black Plauge]

Finding a food vendor had proven to be an easy task. Finding one that had been selling food that Blarth was in the mood for, however had proven to be much harder. The first one that he had found had been selling fried fish and potatoes. A dish that was apparently fairly popular in Tradeholm from the buisness the man had been doing, but the smell of hot grease had actually made Blarth crave red meat, not fish. Hunting about he'd finally found a vendor selling fried meat sticks. Buying a solid dozen (easily twice what the vendor was used to selling to one person, based on the look on his face), Blarth sat down at fountian in the center of the market to eat them, stick and all.

After finishing the last one, Blarth washes his hands off in the fountian and then cups them together to take a drink. The water tasted a bit off, but Blarth had drunk worse. Nearby a couple of men pointed at Blarth and snickered. "Just like a filthy orc to be drinking from the fountian. Can't be decent enough to buy an ale or something like the rest of us," one comments in an overly loud voice, obviously meant for Blarth to overhear. Blarth, however, is used to such comments, and ignores it, knowing that only trouble would come from responding.

The group of men, however, wouldn't leave it alone. They followed Blarth as he made his way through the stalls of the market, looking to make his purchases. Everything he did, it seemed, waranted some other comment from one of the men that was clearly designed to provoke Blarth. And while for most merchants the only thing that mattered was the color and weight of Blarth's money, more than a few purchases fell through when the merchant sudennly balked after one of the men made some comment that was overheard.

Growing increasingly frustrated, Blarth decides to head back to the inn with what he's got so far. He'd stay there for a bit to give the men time to go back to whatever they were doing before they started following him and then finish his shopping.

[itches]

Nicos entered badly lit, smoke filled bar and immediately spied the trio in a corner that he was seeking. A kind word, bit of advice and a free drink had convinced a struggling performer who dealt with stolen and smuggled items on the side to give Nicos the trio's location. If his source was correct, the three knew had a contact in the church of Pelor who would be able to get him what he needed cheaply.

"Greeting 'gents," he said smiling friendly as he approached the group. "I'm seeking a man named Nathen who works for the Pelor temple. I was told that you could arrange a meeting, for the right price."

The nearest of the trio smirked at Nicos as he spoke, heavily drunk if the litter of empty mugs on the table before them was any indication.

"Why, ya lookin' to gro' ya arm back? I bet nah wimim wool touch a cripple like ya, dats why."

"I understand that life can be exceptionally hard for someone as monstrously ugly as you." It was only with a supreme act of will that Nicos kept his voice even as he replied. "So I'll let that go out of pity."

"Ugly?" the drunk man said as he lurched to his feet. "Wat you say?"

"A little slow as well I see. I'd offer to write it down for you but no doubt you're too stupid to read."

"Ya take that back!" the man yelled angry at Nicos, moving in close to the smaller man.

"Dear gods," the bard said wrinkling his nose. "Your breath smells like a dog. Tell me, was that what your mother had to lay with in order to conceive you?"

The blow caught Nicos heavily on his jaw, snapping his head back painfully and bringing tears to his eyes. Without waiting for a second the land the bard quickly stepped forward and smashed his skull against the man's face, turning his nose into a bloody pulp. As the man tottered from the headbutt, Nicos slammed his knee deep into the drunkard's belly doubling him over giving the bard an opportunity to crash an empty mug he seized from the table on the back of his opponents head, sending him to the floor in a stunned stupor.

Pausing to spit on the fallen drunk, Nicos noticed the remaining two men rising to their feet as the other occupants of the bar moved to a safe distance.

"I'm seeking a man named Nathen who works for the Pelor temple," he said in a low angry voice as the pair advanced upon him. "I was told that you could arrange a meeting, for the right price."

[Black Plauge]

"The Traveller's Wineskin... Hey kid," a rough looking man says, grabbing a passing by youngster as he barrels by. "Go to the House of Justice and tell Joachim that his teachings are wanted at the The Traveller's Wineskin." "There's a silver in it for you," he adds, holding up a silver coin, before quickly making it disappear when the boy reaches for it, "if you get back hear with Joachim quickly." Eager to earn the promised silver, the boy reverses the course he had been charging earlier and runs off down the street.

"Come on," the rough man says to his two companions, "Our quarry has had a chance by now to find his room and probably thinks he's rid himself of us. Let's make sure he doesn't have the chance to leave before Joachim gets here and have an ale on the Invincible's coffers."

Laughing as if they had just heard a good joke, the three men make their way inside the inn where Blarth had taken refuge just few minutes ago.

[Black Plauge]

"Men of Tradeholm, the Invincible is calling us to attention. The forces of chaos are gathering like a storm over the horizon. You can feel it, you can smell it in the air but the exact day of its coming is uncertian. We must prepare. We must ready ourselves and look for the signs."

Glancing up from their drinks, the few people gathered in the common room of The Traveller's Wineskin at this time of day take in the sight of a less than resplendant man with the familiar hand grasping a lighting bolt emblazoned on his chest. A couple raise their eyebrows, others shrug, but all pay barely a mind and turn back to their drinks and own conversations.

"Do not look back to your drinks! Do not bury your heads in the sand like the birds of Otresh! The know not the calamity to come, nor do they understand the signs of the present. They know not that which shall befall us, nor do they save themselves from the calamity to come."

Begrudging the near on direct address, one or two of the men in the room look up at the speaker, unable to shake years of habitual obedience to the Priests of Heironious.

"Do not all the peoples loathe iniquity? And yet it spreads among us. Does not the fame of truth issue from the mouth of all the nations? Yet is there a lip or tongue which holds to it? Which nation likes to be oppressed by another stronger than itself, or likes its wealth to be wickedly siezed? Yet it shall come to pass unless we are ready."

"The breed of iniquity waits on our borders. The await their chance to sieze what is ours and sell it down to the very dust. They shall overwhelm us and destroy us."

"And yet, this all does not have to come to pass. When the breed of iniquity is shut up, wickedness shall then be banished by righteousness as darkness is banished by the light. As smoke clears and is no more, so shall wickedness perish for ever and righteousness be revealed like a sun governing the world. All who cleave to the mysteries of sin shall be no more; knowledge shall fill the world and folly shall exist no longer."

***

Coming out of his room, Blarth is unaware of the storm that is being brewed in the common room.

That should be long enough. Those men should be gone by now and I can go back to shopping in peace.

"Behold! The race of iniquity is among us. It walks in our very midst!"

Entering the common room, Blarth is startled to see all the eyes in the room turning to him as a man on what seves as a stage points to him, a fire in his eyes.

"We must clense ourselves! Banish the race of iniquity and and crush it before it curshes us!"

Scared by the harshness of the man's words, Blarth freezes like a deer caught in the light of a bull's eye lantern.

"Yat's shnough," the portly woman behind the bar drawls loudly. "'Achimn, Yah not ganna ve shtirrin' uhp any chrouble her."

Immediately all eyes in the room find their drinks and attempts are made to resume converstations that had been left hanging. The matron of the inn was clearly not someone that anyone wanted to trifle with.

Anyone, that is, except Joachim.

"With all due respect, Mistress Mollar, I cannot be silent while that," he says, pointing again at Blarth, "is allowed to wander our streets and poision our blood."

"Yahl haf ta dat ehlswar."

Eyes locked, a battle of wills ensues between the preacher and the matron. After a few moments, the precher relents, and scurries out the door, his tail between his legs.

"Yah ta," Mistress Mollar says, turning on the three men seated in one corner. The same three men that had harassed Blarth earlier. They too get up and slink out the door.

Once they're gone, the matron turns on Blarth, a decidedly different expression on her face.

"Yah wate, 'far gann' ot. De'll stak 'round fah bit, bat whant stay lang."

Nodding blankly, Blarth turns around and heads back into his room.

***

About a half-an-hour later, Blarth is tepidly lead out of his room by Mistress Mollar and goes on his way, constantly looking over his shoulder as he goes back to shopping.

[itches]

It wasn't until later in the day that Nicos finally found what he was looking for. It hadn't been easy - his body felt like one giant bruise, his lip was split in a couple of places, his left eye was darkening noticeable and he walked with a noticable limp - but he finally managed to get an answer from the bar trio and soon was on his way, which lead him here, just outside a small chapel dedicated to Pelor.

Once inside the bard quickly found himself sitting before a minor 'cleric' of the church. Nicos sat in his chair and eyed the man sitting opposite him, slightly unkempt and slightly more unclean; nothing about the man spoke like those who had been blessed with a god's power. That told the bard everything he needed to know on how to approach the situation.

"A good day to you," the cleric began. "What can the church of Pelor do for you today?"

"I came seeking Pelor's blessing," Nicos began. "I was told the easiest way to find it was to ask you."

"It's true that I deal with those not normally considered of Pelor's flock, but our god welcomes all with pure heart into his-"

The man was cut off by Nicos dropping a sizable bag onto the desk between them, a bag that gave a metallic clink as it landed and set a greedy cast to the man's eyes.

"You'll have to forgive if I cut through the normal playing around, I had to deal with some unpleasant people to get your name and it has put me in a less then grand mood. Light 'blessings', 4."

"Ah of course," the man of Pelor said reaching out for the bag. "I'll just-"

"Not quite," Nicos interjected again, pulling the gold filled bag back towards him. "Potions first, then you get the count it."

The man gave a shrug then departed the room, quickly returning with 4 vials marked with blue wax. The pair exchanged items and the bard waited while the cleric assured himself that the asking price was in the bag.

"Excellent," he said once he had finished. "It was a pleasure doing business with you Mr...?"

Nicos ignored him as he made his way out.

[itches]

Nicos returned to the Inn just as the afternoon/evening crowd was starting to build up, his battered state drew several looks but no one commented until he drew near the bar.

"Wut happened to ya?" The woman behind the bar asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," Nicos sourly muttered back as he limped by.

"I wus gonna ask if ya were gonna work tha room tonigh' but if ya-"

"No no no," the bard quickly interjected. "I'll perform later, just give me some time compose myself."

"Up to ya," the woman said with a shrug as Nicos moved off to his room.

Once inside the bard quickly stripped off his tunic and gave his body a thorough once-over, taking note of his collection of injuries as he went. Over all it wasn't too bad, plenty of bruises that time would take care of and his knee which was already starting to swell and hurt.

During his travels Nicos had sought to learn a wide variety of skills, one he had an opportunity to learn was something most people called Magic. The bard didn't think of it in that sense, he wasn't able to perform any great feats of will, just a couple of small tricks that made life easier and helped him get by. They weren't things that came naturally or easily either, the larger the trick the more his body and mind tried to reject the energy it channelled.

The worst thing he usually attempted was forcing someone's body to heal with a speed that could be best described as unnatural - in was in the hopes of avoiding it in the future that he purchased the potions. Fortunately, over the years he had discovered that if he took the time, healing his own hurts was quite the opposite of others. Instead of it being painful and nauseating, the bard would find himself invigorated by the experience and full of energy by the end. If he took the time that is.

With that in mind Nicos carefully stretched his bruised body on his pallet, shut his eyes and began to sing an old song. It was one of the meditating chants he learnt while being raised in the monastery, the monks would sing it until they reached a serene sense of inner peace he had always eluded him.

Nicos quietly chanted the simple intonation as his body relaxed and muscles unclenched from the pain and stress of life. When his mind felt sufficiently clear the bard modified the chant, adding a new energy and life to the solemn song. The energy filled his mind and ran through his body in a terrific current, setting every nerve alight with sensation and filling his mind with a vivid array of colour and light until he lost all sense of time.

Eventually the song ended and Nicos opened his eyes to a world that somehow seemed brighter and more colourful then before. A quick examination revealed most of his hurts were gone, the black eye and split lip had faded away to nothing. The swelling in his knee was now just a dull throb that a few nights sleep would rid him of and the bruises adorning his torso were aged things.

Throwing his tunic back on the bard couldn't help but grin at the prospect of the performance he would soon give. All things considered, life was a sweet thing.

[Black Plauge]

"Should we wait for the half-orc to come out again, Joachim?"

"The seed has been planted and watered now. Too much water and it will drown."

"Huh?"

*Sigh* "Leave the half-orc alone. If you go after him too much you'll end up turning the populace against us, not him. For now we need to let people think over what I said in there and to allow them to take it home to their family and friends. Besides, if you wait out here Mistress Mollar will call the guard on you."

"Ye'sir."

****

Despite his timidity, Blarth's shopping trip for the rest of the afternoon happens without incident. It would seem that Mistress Mollar had frightened off the men who had been harrassing Blarth for good.

As the his day begins to wind down, Blarth, his confidence and manner restored by the incident free afternoon, decides that he might be able to find some one in this town who might help him learn how to use his brother's armor. After a few inquiries with some local smiths, Blarth finds himself at the door of what the last smith he'd talked to had called an "academy." Supposedly they taught people how to fight here for money. Blarth didn't quite see what would be so profitable about teaching people how to do something that their fathers would teach them, but he supposed that human fathers might not be so devoted to their children as orc fathers.

Letting himself inside, Blarth makes his inquiries and emerges after several minutes. He'd have to come back tomorrow and bring the armor with him (along with the necessary fee) but they'd show him how to put it on and wear it properly.

Satisfied, Blarth heads back to The Traveller's Wineskin.

***

Slipping out a side door of the academy, a small figure pokes his head out of the alley and follows the motions of the half-orc as he heads away. Darting from hiding place to hiding place, the little figure stays just close enough to his target to keep track of him, but not so close as to alert the orc to his presense. Heirloom armor, even if it was made by orcs, was bound to be worth a great deal. Maybe this was the tip he needed to get back into the graces of Bajinok. Surely a forgiener with expensive armor would make up for setting the scroll case afire. It had, after all, been an accident.

[Gralhruk]

It was late when they entered the inn, but in this part of the city late night arrivals and departures did not attract much notice. It was dark in the entrance hall, with only a few low burning oil lamps to see by. So much the better, to hid the stains of their ordeal. Shade keeps them out of the common room, instead garnering the information they needed from one of the servants near the door. Nicos had a way of drawing attention to his one-armed self.

The ascend to the second floor and move down to the end of the hall. Unceremoniously, Shade bangs on the door. Before anyone answers, she turns to Arjuna with a slight grimace.

"These are good people but they might not be happy to see me. Let me do the talking."

[Black Plauge]

Waking up to the banging on the door, Blarth grumbles under his breath about human manners as he shambles over to open the door. The grimace on his face, however, disappears quickly when he sees who it is.

"Shade!" he exclaims, barely resisting an urge to envelope her in a bear hug. His excitement, however, is short lived as his orcish eyesight quickly picks up on the large blood stain on her cloak, "You're hurt."

[Gralhruk]

Shade is glad that Blarth answers rather than Nicos but is once again surprised at how perceptive the half-orc could be. She hadn't wanted them to know she was hurt, having planned to drop Arjuna off without revealing too much about what had happened. She glances up and down the empty hall.

"Yes, I am. Can we come in?"

[Black Plauge]

"Of course," Blarth replies, embarassed that he hadn't thought of that first. Stepping aside from the door so that Shade and the woman behind her can come in, Blarth calls over his shoulder to Nicos, it what is probably an entirely unnecessary action.

"Wake up Nicos. It's Shade. We won't have to go looking for her after all."

[itches]

Prying open his eyes, Nicos eyed the two women - Shade and an unfamiliar one - enter the room as a short list of clever comments dashed through his mind.

"Okay, I didn't expect it to be this easy to find you."

With that said the bard fell silent again, waiting for Shade to let him know where they stood.

[Gralhruk]

"Looking for me? I think we already said whatever needed saying."

Her voice holds a hint of suspicion. Standing in the room, it had occurred to her that maybe Nicos had come looking for revenge. Blarth may well have been decieved into joining him.

[itches]

"No we didn't."

Pulling himself out of bed and looking grim, the man faced Shade from across the room.

"When we last spoke things were said. I - I was out of line calling you a ... saying what I said to you. I'm sorry."

[Gralhruk]

Murderer he had said. It hurt to hear, and now he was taking it back. After the way she had treated him, after she had all but called him a cripple and implied he couldn't take care of himself, here he was apologizing to her. It wasn't right, and she certainly didn't deserve it.

Her thoughts go back to Arjuna - the warehouse, their escape. And the one man who had been slain this night. The man she had killed without thinking twice about it. He hadn't even drawn steel. Her voice is sober and quiet.

"You weren't wrong. I have to go but -"

She looks meaninfully at Arjuna.

"- I need a favor."

It was painful to admit, and made more painful because Nicos had come here to apologize - because he thought she was a decent person. What decent person sits quietly by while an innocent woman is led to slaughter?

"This is Arjuna. She is being hunted by half the city and she needs somewhere to hide for a few days."

[itches]

"Sure," Nicos replied as he looked over Arjuna. "Our room isn't much but we should be able to keep you out of sight without any problem."

Turning his gaze back to Shade, the bard forced himself to ask the next question. "Are you going to come back?"

[Gralhruk]

Not as simple a question as it should be. Shade wasn't sure if he meant to this room or to the little group that had adventured together over the past months. There were questions of her own she wanted to ask but she feared the answers, as she feared giving him an answer of his own.

"I hope so."

It was far from certain that she would live to skip out on the Night Eyes. The key to riding out the storm that was sure to come lay in convincing Skathros she had nothing to do with Arjuna's disappearance. It wasn't going to be easy, and the longer she was away the more suspcious it would look.

[itches]

"You better,” Nicos quipped and smiled for the first time since the two women entered the room. "After all you should know by now that if you don't, we'll just come looking for you.

"And if Blarth and I are going to have a guest, I suppose I should get dressed" the bard added as if only just noticing that he was less then fully clothed.

[Kelemyn]

"Wait!" Juni interjects before Shade can disappear back out through the door. "You're hurt. You can't go out like that." She doesn't understand exactly what is going on between the three apparent friends, but the reunion seems to have been a more or less happy one. At least the two men seem to be glad to see Shade again, even if it is not clear how Shade feels about them. She turns to the first one, the one who opened the door for them (and carefully avoids looking at the one who is still dressing).

"Don't let her go. She's been shot in the back." She looks at Shade again. "Won't they be suspicious if you show up bleeding all over the place? At least take the time to let someone bandage you up better."

[itches]

"Injured?" Nicos inquired as he pulled on the last of his clothing.

"Where? What happened?"

[Gralhruk]

Shade grimaces, caught between the truth of Arjuna's words and not wanting to accept help. She shrugs, wincing as the motion sends a bolt of pain through her. Now that the chase was over she was exhausted and feeling every bit as though she had been trampled by a herd of wild horses. She rotates half a turn to the left, displaying her bloody cloak.

"I took an arrow."

[Kelemyn]

"I pulled it out," Juni says, then feels stupid and childish for having mentioned her part in it. Everyone seems so matter-of-fact about the wound - they probably pull arrows out of people's backs all the time!

"I helped her staunch the wound, but we were.. in a hurry. Can either of you do a better job?"

[itches]

"Yes," Nicos says distractedly as he dug through his bag. "I seem to spend an inordinate amount of my time stopping people from bleeding to death"

Pulling out a smallish bundle wrapped in leather, he returned his attention to others and quickly snapped off an order. "Show me the wound."

[Gralhruk]

Nicos had healed her on more than one occaision and it was never pleasant. This time, though, her reluctance stems from an unwillingness to accept more of their help. They had already done more than she deserved. For a long moment she considers simply leaving - time was running out on the small window she had to get back to Skathros. In the end it is thoughts of that meeting that drive her to remove her cloak and peel off her studded leather jerkin.

Beneath, her shirt is soaked with sweat and blood. Turning away from him, she carefully lifts the back of her shirt. Her eyes are fixed grimly on the floor.

[itches]

Nicos sucked his breath in sharply at the sight of the wound, still open and slowly bleeding. Pulling some clean cloth from the leather bundle, the man quickly set about cleaning away most of the blood so he could examine it more closely.

"It's not bad," he commented sitting back once he was finished. "It would be easy enough to stop the bleeding and then from there in time it'll heal on its own ... but I think we can do better."

Glancing side ways over at the woman Shade had escorted in - Arjuna - Nicos quietly wondered how she would react to what he was about to do. Shrugging aside the worry as something they would deal with at the time, the bard instead looked at his half-orc companion.

"Shade, I need you to lay down on the bed. Blarth, can you hold her still? This can get ...."

Leaving the end of the sentence unspoken the man dug around in his gear while the other got ready, finally pulling out a flask. Pouring some of the potent alcohol onto his fingers, the bard then moved over to the woman's back and flicked the fluid onto the cut.

"This might feel a little weird."

Without waiting for a response from anyone else, Nicos thrust his fingers into the wound, shut his eyes and began chanting all at once. The chant was an irregular thing, the beat twisting first fast then slow, the irregularity threatening to break it.

As the chant gradually came under control, the bard felt pressure build up at the back of his neck. The pressure spread, first down to his back -causing it to begin spasming - then through his arm in a twitching, painful tide of energy.

It was with gritted teeth against the sensation that Nicos struggled through the chant, feeling the energy pour into the woman before him, the flesh of her back crawling in reaction to the unnatural demands being placed upon it.

Time stopped and exploded into a million splitter like shards lancing through Nicos' mind. An angry whistle sounded in his ears and a hot white like shone into his eyes masking the world from his mortal perceptions.

Gasping for deep breaths Nicos stumbled away from Shade, ending the chant as suddenly as it had begun. Bending over as his lungs burnt for the oxygen that began to fill it, the bard blinked away tears that strangely welled up into his eyes. Once he regained composure, he returned to the woman and re-examined the wound, grinning at everyone at the room.

"I'd say that was pretty good, it's all but healed. It'll leave a scar but that's a risk you run."

[Gralhruk]

Shade is indignant at having to be held down by Blarth, but she stifles the emotion. Having received similar aid in the past she is aware of what is coming. After the last time she had all but promised herself that in the future she'd heal the normal way - the process was that unpleasant. There wasn't much choice, though; the arrow wound was a beacon. Anyone with half a brain who heard anything about the escape and then saw her with that wound would know how she got it. And Skathros was anything but stupid.

So she follows the bard's instructions and allows Blarth to keep her still, and tries to prepare herself for the pain of healing. At first, she endures without twitching a muscle. She can feel his fingers in her flesh, hear the chanting, but as yet there is nothing supernatural about the scene.

But when the magic begins to knit her flesh together her breath hisses through clenched teeth, her body twists and shudders; were it not for the strong hands holding her down she would surely have attacked Nicos. It was a feeling of a pain so pure, so intense that it drove everything else away. The world ceased to exist in the white light of agony. It was as if all the pain of the natural lifespan of the wound was condensed into that eternal moment and distilled to remove any mitigating factor, leaving only the pristine element in all its power.

She could never say how long it lasted, only that suddenly it was gone and she was free once again. The look she shoots at the bard is murderous for the instant it takes her mind to reassert control over her body. Emtion drops from her face and she looks as tired as she must feel. Two deep breaths later and she utters a ragged "Thanks" before turning away.

She needed to go, to make herself presentable and then stay sharp enough to keep the guild fooled. Just laying down on the floor and sleeping for three days seemed like a good idea but those were the thoughts of a dead woman. Instead she forces herself to stand up straight and buckle on her blades. She leaves her cloak on the floor - it could only get her in trouble.

"Keep her out of sight, and I mean completely out of sight, if you don't want two different thieves' guilds trying to kill you. I'll be back as soon as I can. It might be a couple of days. If it's longer . . . "

She looks meaningfully at Nicos and shrugs.

"If it's longer then I'm sorry I ruined your work."

[Black Plauge]

Closing his eyes as he holds Shade down, Blarth doesn't even look at what Nicos is doing, the sound in his ears is more than enough. Everything about magical healing seemed to differentiate it from the healing he had been taught. The practice of healing by use of one's third eye was merely a matter of envisioning one's state of health prior to the injury and then bringing that image back into the present. The practice took a considerable amount of mental effort, but was no more unplesant than biting into the flesh of your opponent.

Of course, one could never really envision the true state of health of another person. There were simply too many factors that didn't show on the surface. As a result, the healing that Blarth knew didn't work on others the way Nicos's did. Blarth's lerares had mastered a technique of transfering the hurts of one person to himself, a process that was supposed to involve projecting one's own health on to the other, but that was a technique that Blarth had never been able to learn. Given how discomforting this magical healing was, perhaps it was something that he should try again at some point.

The healing done, Blarth releases Shade and watches as she makes ready to go.

"We'll see you again," Blarth replies to Shade's rather ominous and forboding remark as she's about to leave, not willing to let himself entertain other thoughts.

[Kelemyn]

"I hope I never have need of your services!" Juni says, staring wide-eyed at the one-armed man.

She had at first thought he was some kind of healer or priest. But when the chanting started, with its arrhythmic beat and strangely appealing harmonies, she realized that he must be a bard. Alek had pointed one out to her when they were children, explaining that the travelling performers were able to work actual feats of magic through their music.

She glances over at the other man, hardly noticing his indistinctly orcish features. Nothing much stands out about him, in fact he seems rather ordinary. Except that Shade is his friend, and apparently he travels with a bard.

Shade's warning to the two men - "Keep her out of sight, and I mean completely out of sight, if you don't want two different thieves' guilds trying to kill you." - reminds Juni of the danger she is in. Shade risked her life to help a stranger, and now she is risking her friends' lives as well. What if they don't want to be put in such a position? What if they tell Juni to leave? Or worse, what if they just pretend that they're willing to help her? What if....

But Juni stops, aware that she just can't let herself think that way. She has no choice but to rely on these people anyway.

"I thank you all for your help." The words sound weak and meaningless, even to Juni. "I- I won't be any trouble."

Oh sure. No troulbe at all. Unless the Guild comes around. She ends up looking glumly at the floor.

[Gralhruk]

Shade eyes Arjuna as if she had forgotten that the woman she rescued was still in the room with them. Again she is filled with the desire to give some advice to help her navigate the uncertain waters ahead but finds nothing. Besides, if that warehouse were any indication, Arjuna was far from helpless. Somehow she had managed to incapacitate several of the men, turning what should have been suicide into success. The thought comes to mind that perhaps she was putting Nicos and Blarth in a lot more danger than she had imagined.

Carefully, her eyes seek out Nicos. The bard was looking at her, face unreadable. She seeks to match his demeanor and isn't sure if she does. Blarth, on the other hand, is just looking unhappy.

"You all take care."

With that, she slips out of the room. Once in the hall, her body seems to shake off the lethargy that had crept in, all her senses jumping into high alert as she sets out. The exhaustion is still present, but repressed now by the tingling surge of adrenalaine. The most dangerous part of this night was yet to come.

[itches]

Nicos continued to look at the door after Shade departed, restraining the urge to follow after her. The woman had clearly indicated that she was heading into danger and heading into it alone, but despite his earlier comments the bard knew that it had been luck more then anything that allowed them to track her down. If she didn't want to be followed she wouldn't be, the best he could do was wait and hope for the best. That and make sure her friend was safe.

Looking at the woman, Nicos silently began to take full stock of her. She was young - an impression heightened by the scared look upon her face - and pretty enough with very pale hair. Her clothing was ordinary enough except that it didn't quite fit - a distinction most men wouldn't be able to tell from looking, the bard wryly thought to himself - and contrasted with the fashionable shoes. All of that gave the impression of a rich girl who somehow ended up out of her depth in trouble, an impression totally contrasted by the very functional looking sword not-quite hidden away on her belt.

"I think taking credit for any trouble we end up in may be a little much," Nicos commented dryly. "Since I've met Shade I've been in 2 riots, kidnapped, ambushed a couple of times, tangled with a troll and embroiled with a secret group that's so conspiratorial I don't even fully understand it now. Even if you were to cause any extra trouble, I doubt it would be noticeable compared to what we do ourselves."

"I'm Nicos and he is Blarth," Nicos said as he returned the leather medical kit to his pack. "Have you eaten yet tonight?"

[Black Plauge]

Despite the lateness of the hour, Blarth is always ready for food and perks up when Nicos asks if their new guest has eaten. Expectantly, he waits for her answer.

[Kelemyn]

"Well, they gave me some bread a little while ago," Juni answers tentatively. "It wasn't very much though. And it was old and dry..." Lady Couertney would be appalled to hear her, but Juni doesn't care. Why pretend she isn't hungry when she is? All those courtly manners they'd been trying to teach her seem pretty pointless now.

And even though she knows she is in a bad situation, Juni can't help liking Nicos. His winning personality is more proof of his profession. (Alek had also warned her that bards were said to be able to charm the shoes off any woman - "and it's not your shoes that you need to worry about." She hadn't understood what he meant back then, but she does now!) Even so, she feels that Nicos is being genuinely warm. She is stunned by his laundry list of perilous adventures, but knowing the turmoils that he and the others have overcome is comforting to her too.

"You really tangled with a troll? I can hardly imagine such a creature! How long have you and Blarth known Shade?"

[itches]

"Well I didn't really do much with the troll," Nicos commented glancing back and catching sight of the interest in Blarth's eyes. The bard always found the half-orc slightly intimidating, but the simpleness of his almost childlike eagerness for food made him seem much more relatable. "As I recall it was actually Blarth there who did most of the work."

Pulling out some of the food that had been purchased earlier, Nicos handed it over the Juni and Blarth then sat back to examine the woman again.

"I think we met Shade about a month ago, although it seems like longer at times. How long have you known her?"

[Gralhruk]

Shade opened the back door - he never kept it locked - and entered silently. Without pause she made her way to the second floor and the room that Skathros used for an office. He was there, waiting, cruelty in his eyes.

"A little late, aren't you?"

Something indefinable twitched in the recesses of her mind, made the hair on the back of her neck stand up with a tingle. He didn't make a move, though, didn't alter his expression in the slightest. Steeling herself, she keeps her manner relaxed, reaches for the crystal flask on his desk and pours herself a drink. She shrugs.

"I don't take chances. I was careful on the way back, in case they had spotters on me. And I wanted to get cleaned up."

He rose and came closer, smiling like the predator he was. The hand he places on her back sits directly over the wound Nicos had so recently healed. With monumental effort she refrains from stiffening at that touch.

"Yes, it is best nothing be left to chance," he says conversationally. Just as she starts to relax his fingers tighten, digging into her shoulder like iron talons. Her pulse pounds in her ears and her breath hisses as she absorbs the pain. For a single instant, she curses all the gods that ever existed for letting her believe that this would work.

"She escaped."

His voice is low and controlled, yet filled to bursting with pure, malevolent rage. As terrifying as his anger is it releases a flood of relief. It wasn't directed at her. He didn't know. There was still a chance.

With what she hopes is her customary insolence, she pulls free of his grip. Keeping her face a mask, she takes a drink and then eyes him with equal parts concern and anger.

"Escaped? Not until after the deal was done. We're clear."

The glass in her hand suddenly explodes against the wall in a tinkling spray of amber liquid and razor sharp crystal. His backhand had been so quick she'd never even seen his hand move until after he he'd knocked it away.

"Clear? That is the sort of ignorance I'd expect from a street whore, not from one of my lietenants."

Shade pauses, oh so carefully, for the fraction of a second it takes her to weigh her odds. The mixture of anger and fear on her face is only partially feigned.

"They think we did it."

"Of course they do."

His manner has returned to the evil calm she is used to. The abrupt switch leaves her off balance but he doesn't give her any time to sort through it. He regards her with slitted eyes and indicates the door with one outstretched hand.

"Come with me. If we can't get her back it will get ugly."

[Kelemyn]

"We met briefly about a day ago," Juni answers Nicos between bites of apple flatcake sprinkled with raisins. "It seemed like chance at the time - just an accidental meeting. But maybe it wasn't after all."

The flatcake is delicious, almost as good as what Mima used to make, and Juni eats enthusiastically for a time. But Nicos has a knack for drawing out a story. Not by asking questions directly, but merely by being a good listener. He sits there quietly, expectantly. Before long Juni is talking again instead of eathing, telling him nearly everything there is to tell.

"You see, I found out that the city's biggest thieves' guild was looking for me the same day that I found out my father was dead. A friend put me in touch with Shade's people, who were supposed to help me get in touch with some other people who could smuggle me safely out of the city.

"But something went wrong somewhere. Shade's people took me to the rendezvous as planned, but after they left I discovered that the smugglers planned to betray me. Shade was there too, in hiding. And when I tried to run away, she helped me."

Juni stops then, thinking over the scenario. It is the first chance she's had to wonder why exactly Shade had been hiding at the warehouse. She remembers the sense she'd had of Shade's ambivalence toward her - Shade had seemed at first to be another enemy, but one that was not completely committed to acting against her.

"Well anyway, she did help me..." Juni seems almost to be talking to herself now. "She killed a man for me. She was shot because of me. It doesn't matter why she was there in the first place..." She looks up at Nicos again, and her eyes are sad and tired. "I'm sorry that she was hurt. What if she had died? For my sake. I hope that she's not in trouble now."

[itches]

From what Shade and Juni had said, Nicos put together the pieces that Shade's people had betrayed Juni. That the shadowy woman had risked her own life to save a stranger spoke well of her and - in Nicos' mind at least - justified the faith he had that she was a good woman.

"I'm sorry that she was hurt. What if she had died? For my sake. I hope that she's not in trouble now."

"Shade knows how to take care of herself," Nicos reassured the woman. "And she knows the risks when she takes a chance."

[Black Plauge]

Nodding his agreement, Blarth is forcibly interupted by a large yawn.

"I think we should head to bed. You look like you've had a long day, and we probably will have several long days ahead of us if Shade can't get this all sorted out."

Offering the newcomer his bed, Blarth gets out his bedroll and makes up a spot on the floor for himself.

[Kelemyn]

Juni doesn't want to take Blarth's bed, but the fact is that she is too exhausted - physically, mentally, psychically - to argue about it.

She crawls beneath the woolen blankets, and struggles at first with worrisome thoughts of Shade. Will she be able to square things with the Night Eyes? What if they figure out that it was she who helped Juni escape? What if.. what if they make Shade tell them where Juni is hiding?

But soon, even fear can't hold her eyes open any longer. Sleep overwhelms her, a welcome oblivion.

[itches]

The night passes slowly for Nicos, his dreams filled with nightmares until finally not long after dawn he awakens. Noticing Blarth sleeping on the floor, and a strange young woman in the bed, it took the bard a moment to remember Shade's late night visit.

Getting up quietly so as not to disturb the sleeping pair, Nicos padds out of the room.

[Kelemyn]

Waking in another strange room is starting to feel like the norm to Juni. She sits up in bed, and squints in the direction of the room's one window where the flimsy shade does little to keep out the growing morning light. The other bed is empty - Nicos must have gone out already. But Blarth appears to be sleeping still, curled up like a faithful hound on the floor.

Quietly, she kicks away the covers and slides out of bed. The wood slats of the floor feel cold on her bare toes as she pads across the room to peek out of the window. The neighborhood looks different by daylight than it did last night; dirtier, actually, but a little less threatening.

She sighs. There is nowhere for her to go. She has to be careful not to be seen, by anyone, really. Even going down to breakfast in the common room could get her caught by the Guild's people, or by the Night Eyes. She doesn't know what would happen if she were caught... Maybe she ought to just go see what the Guild wants with her. It doesn't seem like such a terrible idea in the pleasant light of day.

But no. Alek thought it best that she get out of the city, no matter what it cost. He knew the Guild well, and knew that she was wanted because of something having to do with her father... "You have to leave," he'd said, and so she had let him make the arrangements.

Does Alek know now that things had gone wrong with the plan?

Does it matter?

Juni sighs again. She will stay here and wait. She won't go out of the room until Shade comes back. And then...? But she doesn't know what she'll do then.

[Black Plauge]

While sighs certianly weren't the same thing a dogs barking for their breakfast, morning, and the smell of food that is finally working it's way into the room from the kitchen, are all the wake-up call that Blarth needs.

Sitting up, he stretches and yawns, shakes the final cobweb's clear and then looks around the room, smaking his lips. He first notes that the new girl was over by the window, peaking out through the curtians. Second, Nicos is gone, probably to breakfast.

Standing up, Blarth straighten's his rumpled clothes, a habit he'd found human's appreciated, though he didn't quite understand why and then asks, "So, shall we go get some breakfast?"

[itches]

Struggling through the door somehow managing to carry a trey heavily laden with food, Nicos brightened at seeing everyone awake.

"Ah good you're up, I thought that since it won't be safe for Arjuna to go to the common room, we could have breakfast up here instead. That is if one of your can give me a hand before I drop everything."

[Kelemyn]

Juni smiles, genuinely pleased to see Nicos... and breakfast. How has he managed to carry all that with just one arm? she wonders, but doesn't linger on the thought instead hurrying across the room to help him with the tray.

"You are just in time. I'm starved!" the slight girl says, eyeing the plates and bowls of food greedily. She sets the tray on a small bedside table. "My thanks, Nicos. I will pay for my share, of course." She hopes that she has enough in her little coin purse to cover it. Money worries are another problem that weigh on her, but she has something more important on her mind at the moment.

"Have you had any word of Shade?"

[Black Plauge]

While Nicos's comment about Ajura not being safe in the common room might have caused some measure of chagrin in any normal person who had quite literally just asked her to accompany them there, the sight of food is more than enough to banish those kind of thoughts from Blarth's mind.

Practically tearing into a piece of bread, Blarth responds to Ajura's question with his mouth full, "Humm hph thyg htphphe ll."

[Kelemyn]

Was I supposed to understand that? Juni wonders, staring as Blarth chews his bread noisily. She looks at Nicos for help.

"I-- What did he say?"

[itches]

"I will pay for my share, of course."

"I'm paying for our food with my performances," the bard replied. "So unless you have a pleasant singing voice with the power to reach the common room, I suspect you'll have to let me pay for this one."

"Humm hph thyg htphphe ll."

"I-- What did he say?"

Nicos gave Juni a helplessly amused look, as unable to understand Blarth's food mangled speech.

"I haven’t heard anything from her, but it's only been a night."

[Kelemyn]

Nicos and Blarth don't seem to be too worried about Shade. Obviously they believe that she is capable of taking care of herself. Juni gives in and decides to follow their example.

She saws a thick slice of bread for herself from the loaf, and slathers it with honey and clotted cream. It is a breakfast from her childhood, real comfort food. She is well-rested and on her way to having a full belly, and surprisingly she feels more relaxed than she has in months. She puts all of her worries out of her mind for the moment.

"It isn't fair," she says to Nicos, reaching for a handful of raisins and nuts. "You're going to perform in the common room? How will I get the chance to see you then?"

[itches]

Nicos gave Juni his most charming smile at her question.

"I'll save a song or two especially for you Arjuna, if Blarth has to do anything today I could tell you then and save him having to sit through yet another performance from me."

[Black Plauge]

His mouth conveniently empty this time, Blarth responds to the implied question.

"I found something called an 'academy' where they show young humans how to fight. One of the men there said they'd show me how to wear Trak's armor if I brought it along and paid him."

"You know, you humans really have strange customs, sending your children to learn how to fight from strangers."

[Kelemyn]

"Please, call me 'Juni'. My friends do," she says to Nicos with a smile. It's not really a lie. Once upon a time, before she'd gone away to live with her father, she'd had friends. But in her father's house, there had been only servants and teachers.

"You humans?" she says to Blarth, showing surprise. She looks closely at the plain man. "Aren't you human?"

[Black Plauge]

"Not quite," Blarth responds grinning widely to expose his almost tusk-like lower canines. "My father was an orc and my brother and I were raised as his sons. My mother may have been human, I've been told as much, but I never really knew her. She died before my second naming day."

[Kelemyn]

"Oh," Juni replies. "I'm sorry to hear that.

"I mean," she adds in a hurry, "I'm sorry that your mother died, not that she was human. Or that your father was an orc. I don't really remember my mother either," she says, feeling a surge of sympathy for the half-orc. "She ran away when I was very young. She was afraid of.. my father, I guess. He was... odd."

She stops speaking abruptly, reluctant to say anything more about her father's strange mental powers. But as always happens when she thinks about her mother, feelings of guilt and shame rise up inside her. She knows without anyone ever needing to tell her that she was as much responsible for her mother's departure as was her father.

[Gralhruk]

"What are we doing here?"

Her manner is irritable, the fear of discovery being pushed aside by a growing confidence that he believed her story. His manner held none of the cues she would expect from one leading her on. The look he turns on her blasts that confidence to oblivion.

"Why wouldn't we come here?"

"We should be looking for her trail."

"Oh, 'we' are. Am I the sort of man that would sit idly and wait for a scared girl to destroy my future?"

"No, but -"

"I leave nothing to chance."

He turns away abruptly and continues forward, toward the house that was the headquarters of the Night Eyes[i]. She didn't know what to believe. He made sense, but this was the last place in the world she wanted to go. If she went in, would she ever come out? And if she balked . . .

He'd know.

No way around it now, the farce had to be play to the end. She had to go, but she wasn't going to walk meekly at his side with him thinking she was cowed. She stops and folds her arms.

"Enough of this crap. If you have something to say to me, then say it. I did what [i]you wanted and made sure the delivery went well. I'm not taking the rap because they let her get away."

Even a few steps away, she can barely see him, can't read the expression on his face. All she can see are his eyes, glimmering like unholy fire in the dark while the seconds pass. Her legs are tensed, her nerves on alert, ready to spring in an instant.

"All I ask for is loyalty."

"I've been loyal - "

He holds up a hand, cutting off the rest of her reply.

"I never said otherwise. But," his voice turns suddenly harsh, "I don't run the guild. You'll talk to Ricard, and you'll convince him you aren't out to ruin him or we both get guild justice."

Ricard.

Of course by now he'd know about her. The entire incident was too big to hide, and he'd be asking questions, needing details. One of Skathros' team - or even Skathros himself - would have had to tell Ricard who she was.

As if reading her mind, he nods.

"It was me, and you're damn lucky at that. If not for me you'd be dead already or wishing you were. You just convince him you're a good little soldier and I'll handle the rest."

[itches]

"Aren't we a sad bunch," Nicos said with an amused smile. "My parents left me in the care of a monastery when I was barely old enough to walk. We should start a social club!"

[Black Plauge]

"No, not at The Traveller's Wineskin," Bajinok replies. "We've enough trouble with the abduction of that girl at the hands of the Night Eyes. They're trying to make us look like fools and push us out. If they don't return the girl soon, it'll mean war and we can't afford to be distracted by a squabble with Mistress Mollar."

"But she's just a weak old innkeeper's widow. What possible trouble could she cause us?"

"Innkeeper's widow she might be. Indeed, she is what some people might even call old. Weak, however, is an adjective that should never be applied to her. Mistress Mollar has handled her share of rough patrons in her time and she knows how to make herself heard and get people to do things. Mess with her and we'll have the City Watch so far up our asses that we'll be spitting spear tips."

"So then my information is worthless?"

"Yes," Bajinok replies, only allowing himself to smile once the informant is gone. Calling in another underling, Bajinok gives him instructions, "Contact Golan at the academy. He's to take special intrest in this half-orc and get him to part company with the armor."

* * *

After breakfast, Blarth excuses himself, and gathers up his backpack full of armor. Taking it with him, he heads to the academy he found yesterday where he was promised lessons on how to wear it.

***

"Blarth is it?" the trainer asks, "My name is Golan, let's start by taking a look at this armor that you want to wear."

"Good quality... splint mail... well maintained... specially fitted..." Golan mumbles as he studies Blarth's armor, "We'll need to have the straps modified before you can wear it. Our armourer is at a funeral this morning, but we'll see him this afternoon so that he can take the appropriate measurments and modify the armor for you. In the meantime, you'll train with one of our adjustable sets. It won't fit quite so well as your own armor will once it's modified, but it'll get you the feel and if you can use it you'll be able to use your own armor."

"Okay," Blarth replies, with little choice but to believe the obviously knowledgable trainer.

[itches]

As lunch drew near, Nicos left Juni to her own devices - after making sure she locked the door - while he descended to the common room to entertain. He returned twenty minutes later, the edge having been taken off his good mood.

"I really don't like doing that," the bard complained to the young women. "You're not there to entertain, amuse or teach anyone. You're just there to create mood music. The things we do to earn our bread eh? Say, do you feel up for a tale?"

[Kelemyn]

The morning wears away. Blarth leaves. Nicos stays for a while, and Juni wonders what Lady Couertney would say if she knew that her young student was spending the morning in a bedroom - unchaperoned - with a man. (What would she say if she knew that I shared the bedroom overnight with two men?!)

When Nicos leaves, Juni feels that she just can't sit around idle any longer. She takes out Vywodor's sword (which she had stashed under the mattress while she slept) and looks it over carefully.

It is heavier than her own sword, but it feels good in her hand. The hilt is black ivory, carved in the likeness of twining serpents; the serpents' tails form the hand guard. The length of the blade is etched with runes or symbols that Juni doesn't understand.

She spends the time while Nicos is downstairs entertaining practicing with the sword. It isn't the same as working with a partner, but it helps her get the feel of the weapon.

Nicos returns, and Juni puts the sword away before unlocking the door to let him in.

"Do you feel up for a tale?" he asks her.

"That would be wonderful!" she replies, sitting cross-legged on Blarth's bed. (She can just imagine the shocked expression on Lady Coeurtney's face!) "What sort of tale? Will you tell me about one of your own adventures? Or will it be a story from long ago?"

[itches]

"One of my own tales this time," Nicos said as he tried to find a comfortable spot on his bed.

"Do you know what Refenil Leaf is? It's a plant that grows in cooler zones, you take the leaf off it and boil ... well there's a whole process but you end up with a substance which in its pure form is a potent poison. If you dilute it enough with water or alcohol it becomes a very addictive drug instead. It's illegal to grow it pretty much everywhere that's even half civilised.

"A couple of years back I was travelling with a man - a master swordsman - best I've ever seen. I flatter myself to think that I'm above average with a blade, but I practiced with him a few times and I never came close to touching his level. We had met previously and got along well enough, so when I learnt that we were heading to the same place I jumped at a chance to travel with him, with someone that good with a blade around, protection is pretty much guaranteed.

"The pair of us had taken a shortcut deep across a rugged patch of wilderness when we came across a plantation of Refenil. In order to grow it, what-ever organisation obviously decided to set it up well away from any semblance of law. And because they were away from any laws, they apparently decided to avoid the necessity of hiring workers. Instead the fields were worked by slaves.

The swordsman I was with disliked the fact the fact that the drug was being grown, and very much was against the idea of slavery. Personally I wasn't too pleased about the drug crop, but I would have just kept on walking, except that I couldn't just ignore the people suffering. So we talked and agreed to go down there and free all of the slaves.

"I was expecting that we'd come up with a big battle plan, but instead we just wondered down into the plantation and began unchaining people. The guards obviously objected to this - violently - and a fight broke out.

"If I live to be a hundred I'll never forget that fight. It's one thing to practice with someone in a mock battle and an entirely different thing to witness them in action in a life and death situation. The swordsman was calm, graceful, efficient and deadly. Person after person attacked and was cut down in a bloody and beautiful display. I hope I never see anything like that again.

"By the time it was all over, the only people left were myself, the swordsman and the slaves. We set about freeing the rest of them, made sure they had enough supplies to make it to the neatest town then continued on our trip.

"A month or two later I was passing back through that area - alone - when I discovered that the fields were still being tended. I went in to investigate and found that the people working the Refenil were the very same slaves we had freed. They remembered me ofcourse, and I asked them what had happened. When I had last seen them they were preparing to leave for the nearest town with their newfound freedom.

"It turned out that after we had left, they started talking amongst each other about what they would do back in civilisation. The only skill most of them had was how to grow and harvest the drug, they'd be forced to do backbreaking work for little pay and no future. Instead they decided to stay where they were, keep growing the Refenil and when the people came to collect the harvest, they'd split the former plantation owners payment equally."

Looking over at the young women he was telling the story to, Nicos gave a smile and a shrug.

"I've never known what to make of that. Sure we saved them, gave them their freedom and all of that, but at the end of the day not very much had actually changed."

[Gralhruk]

Shadows dripped from the walls of the chamber like wax from a black candle. The only noise was the steady drip of a water clock, situated somewhere beyond the gloom. To her right, the banked embers of the massive fireplace provided the only illumination so that the scene was bathed in a crimson glow.

It was hard to pin down the emotion that gripped her, waiting for the man who had so altered her world. Her life had been spared but it didn't matter - the innocence that Ricard had taken away was gone forever.

At first she had been too devastated to consider revenge. Somewhere deep inside she had felt she wasn't good enough for him or anyone else. More than that, it felt like she'd done something wrong, that he had been justified. That it was her fault.

Instead of hate and vengeance, all she wanted was to die. When that didn't happen she wanted to just disappear, erase herself if she couldn't erase the shame. It had worked - as well as it could, anyway. She remained scarred, physically and mentally, unable to forgive or forget. She had submerged the shame beneath a tidal wave of anger, swearing that he would pay for his treachery. But she never followed through, never went looking for him, and in time her fury was gradually replaced by apathy as the scalding waters receded. The rage was still there - barely submerged and ready to leap out in an instant - but redirected at the world in all its varied cruelty rather than him in particular. In the years following the incident she had systematically wrapped her gentler feelings in perpetual darkness, letting the infrequent illumination show only anger and cynicism.

What would she do, confronted now by this man?

Her fingers twitched, and her eyelids squeezed shut over her tortured grey gaze. She felt naked without the familiar weight of her sword belt around her hips; the dagger she had secreted along her side was a poor subsitute. She could die here. As the thought hung in her mind, there was a sigh as the heavy door swung open on oiled hinges and a cool draft washed over her. Bootheels rang out a measured, confident tread on the stone floor then stopped directly behind her. Eyes closed, she still knew his scent.

She turned and faced him, entire body tingling with the enormity of feeling surging within. Her eyes were dead. They regarded one another for a long, cold moment before he broke the silence.

"You don't look happy to see me."

Just that. He went to the fireplace, lit a taper then moved and set alight the large braziers on either side of the desk situated facing the door. In the new light, she could see his insignia painted on the wall above the leather bound chair: a dagger skewered heart, dripping blood. He leaned against the desk and folded his arms, waiting for her to speak.

He wore a close cropped beard now and his hair was shorter, but the most startling change was his eyes. Where before they had gleamed like an onyx flame, lively and dangerous, now they looked empty. They had been jewels, those eyes, yet now it seemed they had been stolen. It was not what she expected to see and it changed the words that had been forming in her mind. Instead of a bitter torrent, her words are as empty as his eyes.

"I'm not anything."

A long silence between them, broken only by the crackling flame. For a moment, she remembered what had drawn her to him, what their brief love had been like. That short period had been the best time of her life, when she felt young and beautiful, sure of herself and in control of her future. Youthful ignorance, all of it, but it didn't make that time any less real. If she could choose a point of her life to last forever, it would have been then, before the world taught her how foolish she was. He had ended it all with his betrayal, but she knew now it would have ended anyway. Nothing was forever and no future was certain. They both waited, staring at each other as time dribbled by. Finally, he spoke.

"Then go. Your weapons are just outside the door."

Ricard seated himself behind the desk, opened a leather bound ledger, and took up a quill pen. He didn't look at her again, but she was sure she had seen something in his eyes before he turned away. It was like an echo of her own thoughts, of oppotunity lost and the passing invulnerability of youth. For a moment, she wants to believe the frail hope that somehow he hadn't been himself when he struck her down, that something else had forced his hand.

She knows better, yet still a part of her wonders if perhaps she could forgive him anyway, recapture something of the happiness she once felt. The greater part of her mind recoils in disgust, the anger starting out like fresh blood from a newly opened wound. She turns and heads for the door but her feet drag. She pauses at the threshhold, hand upon the latch. Behind her, she hears the scrape of a chair. The light of the braziers outlines his shadow clearly against the door as he rises. It grows as he approaches; her eyes blur and her heart pounds suddenly in her chest. For the briefest of moments, she believes that foolish voice that tells her everything is going to be alright.

That moment disappears as her eyes clear and are drawn once more to the shadow growing on the wall before her, and the unmistakable outline of the blade held half-concealed in his right hand. All the hate she had never vented swarms over her as she turns, whipping the dagger in an underhanded cast with the strength born of her accumulated pain. It tumbles, a streak of silver, and buries itself to the hilt in the hollow of his throat. He gags, empty hands reaching up to clutch the blade. Blood pours from his mouth and nose as he crumples to the ground. For a moment, their eyes meet and in them she sees the flame of old; then they glaze over and he is no more.

She stares at his weaponless form, dumbfounded. There had been a blade . . .

Nearby, someone claps slowly in mock tribute to her slaying. Her gaze sweeps toward the source and from the shadows steps the familiar figure of Skathros. His shadow lengthens, the long lean arms enveloping her own shadow in a tender embrace. He smiles without any emotion at this trick, his eyes never leaving her.

"Oh, well done. Well done."

[Kelemyn]

His was a life that Juni had never even imagined! Traveling with a master swordsman... Freeing slaves...

"I've never known what to make of that. Sure we saved them, gave them their freedom and all of that, but at the end of the day not very much had actually changed."

"Well..." Juni says slowly, thoughtfully. "You made their lives better, didn't you? I mean, they were better off working for themselves than working as slaves. I wonder though if any of them ever tried to find their homes again..."

Would I? she asks herself. She had nearly been dragged off to a life of slavery herself, if that was what Vywodor had in mind when he kidnapped her. Imagine being forced to work in the fields, being treated like an animal, and knowing no other life. If someone freed you from that, why wouldn't you run far, far away from the place of your enslavement? Unless you had no other skills, no way to protect yourself from the dangers of travel.

"You know how to use a sword, Nicos?" Well of course he does! He wears one, doesn't he? And he said that he was above average with a blade, didn't he?

"My father was having me learn to use one. I never believed I'd actually need to use such skills, but I liked practicing.

"I have a sword with me," she adds shyly. So far she has been careful to keep Vywodor's short sword hidden beneath her cloak, or under the mattress. "Maybe you could teach me some tricks."

[itches]

"I think I can teach you how to avoid cutting off your own foot - even if I can't promise anything about your arm," Nicos replied with a grin.

[Kelemyn]

Juni laughs uncertainly. "You didn't really . . . No, no, of course not. How did you lose your arm? If you'll pardon me for asking."

[itches]

"It's a funny story actually," Nicos began. "It all started over a game of Panash when I'd had just a little too much to drink."

Launching in a highly improbable tale of gambling debts, alcohol, con women and the wacky hijinxs that the combination creates.

"We never did find out what to her dress. That was the very last time I ever played Panash, may the gods have mercy on me if I'm foolish enough to try again."

[Kelemyn]

Juni wonders how a story that tells how a man's arm was cut off can be funny...

But she finds herself giggling a time or two during the tale in spite of her misgivings, especially when Nicos gets to the part about the drunken halfling and his avaricious mother who loses her dress!

"Maybe I should learn how to play Panash so I'll have some good stories to tell too!

"But here.. if we move the beds out of the way we'll have room for a little swordplay." After pushing Blarth's bed to the wall she takes her short sword from under the mattress again, and shows it to Nicos. "I was practicing before you came in, but I think I'm going to need lots more practice if I'm going to ... um, well, if I'm going to do whatever it is I end up doing! Somehow, I have to get out of the city, and I don't think it's going to be easy!"

[Black Plauge]

Stiff in places he didn't know he had, it takes a while for Blarth to walk back to The Traveller's Wineskin at the end of the day. The training armor that he'd been wearing most of the day had been heavy. Far heavier than it's weight. Plus it pinched and chaffed in places that Blarth wasn't used to. Golan had said that he'd get used to it in time, but Blarth wasn't sure about that at the moment.

The armorer, a queerly quiet gnome, had been quite the experience as well. He'd taken his time examining the armor, noting its different qualities and fine workmanship, but had taken only a few minutes to take the appropriate measurements. Again, Golan had said this was quite normal. The gnome was quite adept at his craft and could size an individual nearly just by looking at him from a distance. To make the adjustments properly, however, he needed to know far more about how the armor was made so that he wouldn't damage it in the process. In any event, the armor was supposed to be ready tomorrow and Golan was fairly confident that Blarth would know how to wear it by the end of the day. Getting used to wearing it could take considerably longer, however, and wasn't something that could be taught.

***

Wrinkling her nose as Blarth enters the inn, Mistress Molar immediately directs the half-orc to his room, even though he'd like nothing better than to sit right down to dinner, saying that he must wash before eating and that she'll send up a tub of water shortly. Werily, Blarth agrees, unwilling to argue.

***

Opening the door to the room, Blarth ducks reflexively as an unexpected sword blow flies towards his head. At the same time, a soft glow flares to life as the sword blow seems to strike something solid just shy of his skin and is deflected harmlessly away.

"What the hell?!?"

[itches]

"Blarth!"

Not reacting until after the strange flash of light and curse, Nicos belatedly let his sword drop to the ground and leapt forward to grab Juli's wrist despite the damage already being done.

"Shit, Blarth are you alright?"

[Kelemyn]

"I'm sorry! I didn't mean..." Juni backs away, afraid to look, certain that she has hurt Blarth badly. But where is the blood? And how has the half-orc managed to keep on his feet?

"You're not hurt?" she asks incredulously. "How...?" But then she recalls the flash of light, and a certain odd feeling in the back of her mind just as her sword had connected with...

"What was that?" she asks, talking almost more to herself than to Blarth. "It was some kind of shield or screen... a mental force screen. It was, wasn't it?" She sounds excited now. "You made it happen, didn't you, Blarth? With your mind!"

[Black Plauge]

Recovering from the blow, Blarth stands up straight and shrugs.

"I suppose you could call it that. My lerares always described it as a hardening of the air so that it was like metal. But how did you know that? Most humans don't know about the Mind Tricks."

[Kelemyn]

Posting for Gralhruk:

There was a door, somewhere in her mind, that had been closed and barred and locked the night Ricard tried to kill her. It had been so long since the things beyond had been a part of her life that she had pushed its very existence from her thoughts. Unattached, unapproachable, an island in the sea of warmer, richer lives around her. She was alone - self sufficient and strong in her solitude.

But now, standing here over the dead body of the man she had once loved, she found her mind now wandering the dusty corridors, coming once more to gaze on that stout door to her inner self. Her self imposed separation from the soft emotions of normal people suddenly seemed the act of a coward rather than the last refuge of the brave. Life was short - she knew it well. Perhaps self preservation wasn't worth sacrificing the things that made life worth living.

Ricard's face is a frozen mask of open eyed innocence. What would he have said to her?

Dimly, she becomes aware of Skathros approaching, more a feeling than anything visual. The door disappears behind her as her mind lurches back into the present moment, the danger she was in. The words she spits out are reflexive, born out of the survival instinct she could not supress.

"If you wanted him dead why the devil did you make me risk my neck coming up here?"

"You underestimate me, mirou."

Her brow furrows, already guessing what he meant. He smiles, seeing the sudden change in her eyes. He continues speaking as though her anger didn't matter.

"Yes, I know. I knew almost as soon as it happened. Salwisse, of course. Who better than a shadow to follow a shadow? Pity she chose to report the incident to me rather than follow you and the girl. It matters little. You are mine and you will tell me where she is."

Instead of responding, she whips her hand out, sending a spray of chalk dust into his face. In the same instant she bounds for the door. Before she can get there, she sees his face for the briefest of instants and then his fist smashes into her face. Rolling back to her feet, her head whips around, eyes darting, seeking him out.

Nothing.

His next blow slams into the back of her skull and stars explode across her vision. Almost before she has a chance to recover an elbow slams into the ridge above her left eye. Again, she glimpses his face for a split second before losing sight of him. He is still smiling.

She could feel sweat start out on her chest and back. This was ridiculously one sided. He could have killed her already, if he wanted. But he wanted Arjuna, wanted to know where Shade had taken her. That meant as long as he didn't know he wasn't going to kill her. He lands two more blows in rapid succession, both once more to her face. She lands in front of Ricard's desk on her hands and knees, head hung forward, fat crimson drops spattering onto the polished floor forming bloody constellations.

This was just his sadistic way of repaying her for deceit. She wouldn't stay conscious much longer at this rate. She shudders at the thought of what he'd do to wring information out of her - things which would make her long for the pain of a straightforward beating like this.

A savage kick snaps her head back, flipping her over. She struggles to rise, succeeds in rolling onto her stomach.

She hears his bootheels clicking as he walks toward her. His shadow envelops her prone form, shiny black boots appearing in her downcast gaze. She tries to rise and one boot stamps down onto the edge of cloak, pinning her down. The light of the brazier behind him paints orange highlights across his skin as she looks up.

"My thieves will be here shortly. Ricard's, too. It should be easy enough to assume leadership - you killed Ricard, I caught you for a bit of guild justice. Too bad it had to be this way. I had hopes . . ."

He trails off, eyes wandering over to the shell that was once Ricard. She doesn't follow his gaze but she can see her former lover's face in her mind. Shade ought to be finished, beaten to that point where consciousness begins to slip away. Yet somehow she is pushed to a place beyond the pain and the fear, to a place where her anger still fuels the fire that sustains her. With a sudden rush, she lunges to her feet, grasping the edge of her cloak and yanking with both hands as her shoulder collides with his midsection. Startled, he loses balance and tumbles backward. Shade pitches forward, blackness threatening to overwhelm her. She strikes the floor even as a high pitched howl sounds beside her.

She looks up, the all too familiar smell of burning flesh washing over her. Skathros leaps up from the tumbled brazier, wreathed in flame. He pounces over the desk, a sick screech like nothing human coming from his throat, and then abruptly disappears from sight. From below, Shade hears yells and the sound of feet pounding up the stairs. Somehow she finds her feet, throws the door open. The sounds are louder, coming towards her. Her blades are on a nearby bench. She siezes them, then spins back the way she came, slamming and barring the door behind her. Ricard lays where he had fallen, the desk already aflame.

She makes her way through the choking smoke and throws open the window. The ground is a dangerous four stories below. Her face is swollen almost beyond recognition, blood still streaming from her nose and temple, left eye closed. Her fingers feel weak, the brick slippery beneath them. She edges out onto the ledge, hearing heavy hands pounding on the barred door behind her. Furtive figures slip into the street below.

Steeling herself, she takes the only way open: she goes up.

[Kelemyn]

Juni's conditioned response is to keep quiet about those kinds of 'mind tricks'. Ever since she was a little girl she knew that the 'tricks' were a bad secret. If something slipped out - and often enough things did slip - she was quick to cover up the incident and pretend that nothing had happened.

And she never talked openly about her powers to anyone except Alek. Even with Vywodor, though he encouraged her to practice and to open herself to the possibilities, she wouldn't speak to him about her mental ability or admit what she could do.

Vywodor and her father were the only other human beings she'd ever known who had the type of power that Blarth had just exhibited.

"Mind tricks..." she says, looking uncertain now though she'd been eager a moment ago. "I.. do know something about tricks like that. I've.. heard of people who have the power to move things without touching them, by using only their minds. Or people who just know what's going to happen before it happens."

And don't forget about those people who can worm their way inside your head and steal your thoughts. That had been one of her father's specialties. That and inflicting punishment without the bother of having to use physical force. She'd seen him use this power on the servants of his household on several occasions. She even remembers... but no, she won't let her thoughts go back to that time so long ago.

"They call people like that 'freaks' or.. or 'devils' here in the city." Juni wishes she could confide in Blarth, but she can't be sure yet that it would be safe. "You don't want to let them know you can do those things. Right Nicos?" She looks at the bard and wonders what he would think of her if he knew what she can do.

[itches]

In his time with Blarth, Nicos had seen the man do some things which were blatantly supernatural. Shifting his face to some sort of feast form, incredible speed, now this. Not wanting to make him comfortable by drawing attention to it, the bard had just assumed that it was some sort of Orcish magic. But the magic necessary to deflect a sword blow like that ... either Blarth had been able to enchant the spell in the split second before he was struck or - perhaps the more daunting possibility - he was able to always have the spell active. Either way the man had seriously underestimated Blarth's capabilities.

"People are intolerant of things that are different, especially if they don't understand it," Nicos replied with as non-challant a shrug as he could manage. "It happens everywhere, even if it's worse here out on the frontier. It's generally not a wise idea to openly flaunt any abilities you have that ... exceed the norm, but not everyone looks down on it. Blarth, Shade and I were only recently at a school a group of wizards had set up in the wastelands, so they could learn in peace.

"Hell, even I know a couple of tricks that most people would consider to be magic and I've never had any serious problems with people. As long as you don't force the fact that you can do things they can't, most folk will mutter something bad about you under their breath and move on with their life."

[Black Plauge]

Blarth's reaction to Juni's concern is far less serious than Nicos's as he just grins and chuckles.

"I've been caused worse than a freak," he replies, "and I've been known to eat those who call me a devil."

As he finishes, Blarth's face elongates in a manner that Nicos has seen before, taking on a feral, bestial look with a mouth full of sharp teeth.

Then, just as quickly as it appeared, the besital look is gone and Blarth's normal face is back, grinning from ear to ear.

[Kelemyn]

Juni raises her eyebrows when Nicos mentions the isolated school for wizards. Wizards are something that she almost doesn't believe in, although she does believe in magic and spells. Most people know a strange little old lady who will put a hex on someone for you if you have the coin. And there are herbalists and alchemists and healers aplenty in the city. But wizards?

Still, Juni knows that even wizards don't seem so frightening to the average person on the street, not as frightening as the idea of someone with strange mental abilities.

It's odd to hear Blarth chuckle and speak lightly of being called a freak or a devil. She is about to caution him again when he does the trick of transforming his face. She gasps at the sight even though she knows it for a trick.

"You should not show that face to anyone else around here," she tells him. "The common folk would stone you!" But perhaps Blarth is not afraid of a few stones. Considering all that he and his friends have done, perhaps he is right not to be. His grin is contagious, and Juni smiles back at him in spite of her words.

Here is Nicos, a bard with strange healing powers, she thinks. And there's Blarth with his 'mind tricks'. Maybe it IS safe to tell them...

"I can't do anything like that face trick," she says after a moment, watching the pair very carefully for their reactions. "But ... "

"... I can do this." Blarth hears Juni's soft voice whisper in his mind.

Her smile becomes playful as she turns to the bard.

"Can you hear me, Nicos?"

[Black Plauge]

Mind Talking Blarth exclaims back in his head, clearly familiar with the Mind Trick that Juni is employing. Familiar, however, is not the same as adept. A fact which soon becomes clear to Juni as she gets assulted by a deluge of thoughts from Blarth. Or rather, it would have become clear if Juni could here what comes next.

Wow, it's been quite some time since I heard Mind Talking. Since leaving my lerares, if I remember correctly. He always said Mind Talking to me was like using a leaky roof to stay dry in a down pour. No matter what the rain still came down on your head. I never quite understood what he was talking about. Hmm... I wonder how my lerares is doing, it had been a while since I last saw him. Though I suppose that my brother and I knew that when we left. Poor Trak, to have died so far from home. I really miss him. You know, I'm hungry. I was working out in that god awfully uncomfortable armor all day and could use a good meal about now. Would the rest of you like to join me for supper? Oh, right. Mistress Molar said I needed to wash up first, I suppose that I should do that before heading down to the common room. She should be sending up the water soon for that. Wait, what'll we do with Arjuna when the serving girl gets here with the water? Shade said she wasn't supposed to be seen. I should tell Nicos. He'll know what to do...

[itches]

"That's ... woah," Nicos said, at the strange and slightly uncomfortable sensation of hearing another voice inside his head. "How do? Where did? Can you? That's ... awesome."

[Kelemyn]

Juni smiles at Nicos' reaction, oddly pleased. It is a relief somehow to be able to use her power instead of always trying to keep it hidden. "That is one of the first 'tricks' I can remember doing," she says. "I used to frighten my mother half out of her wits when I did it!" Her smile falters slightly at this, and she sighs.

"I can do other things - like when I use the sword, if I concentrate, I can sometimes sense my opponent's next move right before he makes it. And I can see things far away or on the other side of a closed door. And there are.. other things I can do..." She leaves the sentence hanging, but thinks to herself:...things you wouldn't like, Nicos. Like what she did to that man back at the warehouse. And what she did to Vywodor.

Blarth seems to be lost in his own thoughts, almost as if he is carrying on an internal conversation with himself. "Um... I can't read minds, so you don't have to worry that I'll do anything like that." She looks at the half-orc, waiting for him to say something.

[Black Plauge]

"Oh," Blarth replies, suddenly aware of the fact that his incoherent response had actually been a monologue, "I was just thinking that Mistress Molar said she'd be sending up a serving girl with water so that I could wash up before dinner..."

"You can Mind Talk but can't hear it?" Blarth adds, confused now that he's had a chance to work through in his mind what Juni was saying about reading minds.

[itches]

"Wait," Nicos said cutting off Juni before she could answer. "She's sending up water, to here?

[Black Plauge]

"Yes," Blarth replies.

[itches]

"Uh oh," Nicos said glancing at Juni then casting around the room in vain for somewhere to hide her. "You don't happen to have a cloak with a hood do you?"

[Kelemyn]

"Yes, I do," Juni replies, sheathing her sword and buckling it around her waist. She takes Vywodor's black cloak and wraps herself up in it. "But won't it look odd for me to be wearing this indoors?"

[itches]

"It will," Nicos admits as he reaches out to adjust Juni's cloak. "But there are enough strange things around that it wont give the people looking for you anything to lead them to us. After the water gets here, I'll go and see if I can arrange short-term use of another room for us, to give Blarth some privacy.

"There," the bard said backing up and examining the girl. "If you turn your head away when the girl arrives, there won't be anyway to tell that it's you. What do you think Blarth?"

[Black Plauge]

"Uhm... Yeah, that should work," Blarth replies, not really knowing what else to say.

I wish I'd thought of the fact that we had a guest that was supposed to remain out of sight before agreeing to let Mistress Molar send up some water.

Gazing around blankly for a bit, Blarth just kind of stands there as Nicos and Juni figure out the best position to minimize the person's view from the door for when the water arrives.

*knock* *knock* *knock*

The sound of knuckles on the door startles Blarth back to reality and he goes to the door and opens it, doing his best to stand in the way of anyone trying to enter the room.

"Mistress Molar said to make sure you scrubed all that dust off," a girl carrying a steaming pan of water says.

"Uh, sure. Thanks," Blarth replies.

"Well, are you going to stand there all day," the girl replies, "or are you going to let me pour this into your washstand? I'm not a ghost that can pass through you, you know."

"Uhm, yeah. Oh, sorry," Blarth replies, stepping back into the room with a glance over his shoulder at Nicos and Juni.

[Kelemyn]

Juni pretends to look out the window while the serving girl pours the steaming water into the pitcher on the washstand. She can hear the girl fussing with the pitcher and the strongly scented soap and the fresh linens, and it seems that she can almost feel the girl dawdling and pausing to look with intense curiosity at the mysterious, cloak-shrouded figure standing by the window.

Oh, it's all in my head, Juni tells herself. She's probably just waiting around for Blarth to remember to tip her. She wills this newly acquired paranoia away, and concentrates instead on being inconspicuous. Looking down at the floor she notices with dismay that she has not put her shoes on today - her feet are still bare!

"Ahem," says the girl behind her. Furtively, Juni glances back, catching a glimpse of the girl out of the corner of her eye. She's giving Blarth an expectant look which turns into a frown when the half-orc fails to notice. The girl rolls her eyes and folds her arms over her chest.

"Don't think I don't know what's going on here," she says, looking first at Blarth then at Nicos. "I know you only paid for two in the room. That one there," she nods at Juni, "doesn't belong up here. There's some who would be plenty pleased to hear news of her, plenty pleased!"

She pauses, a triumphant look on her face, while the other three occupants of the room each gasp in surprise.

"Mistress Molar don't hold with so-called gentlemen having floozies up to their rooms to help with their baths, or whatever other shenanigans you all have been up to. I heard the commotion before, so don't bother to deny it. She'll be only too happy to throw the three of you out on your arses!

"Of course, Mistress Molar don't have to hear about none of it. You play your cards right, and you can keep the floozy and I'll just go quietly about my business. Which, by the way, is heavy work - turnin' beds, and scrubbin' floors, and haulin' water up and down the stairs for next-to-nothing!"

At this, the girl holds out her empty palm, in case the so-called gentlemen still don't get the hint.

[itches]

Nicos instantly reacted to the girl's innuendo with a grin.

"It is strange isn't it," he said as he apparently absently dug around in his pack. "That the honourable people - like yourself - who do all the hard work get paid the least. It never did seem fair to me."

Pulling out a small silver coin from his bag, the bard held it up to examine it in such a way that it would gleam at the girl.

"It seems just as unfair to me, how too many people sometimes find out personal, things when everyone can profit by just staying quiet. For instance were someone to find out about the ... private entertainment a couple of travellers have arranged, it would be better if no one else heard about it."

Reaching out to hand over the coin, Nicos held it back at the last moment.

"Understand?"

"Yeah," the serving girl said, her eyes flicking from Juni's cloaked figure the the coin held just before her. "I got it." Grabbing the offered coin, the girl quickly hit it somewhere on her person and with one last glance at the group left the room.

Securing the door after the serving girl left, Nicos dropped down on one of the bed, the grin sliding from his face.

"Well now she'll either not tell anyone, or tell people the wrong thing. Either way our secret is safe."

[Kelemyn]

Juni has gone quite pale. The serving girl's threat to tell someone about her presence here in the room had frightened her. Even if all that came of it was that she and her friends - the nice folk who had gone out of their way to help her - were thrown out on the street, it would be bad.

She looks at Nicos, who seems satisfied that his coin and his little performance for the girl's benefit will keep them safe. His confidence in turn helps boltser her confidence a bit. A little color brightens her cheeks again.

"I've never been called a floozy before!" She laughs to think of it. "Lady Couertney would faint dead away if she heard!

"Oh, but I wish that Shade would return soon! I need to try to find a way to escape the city, and I was hoping for her advice."

[Black Plauge]

Now that the disaster is over, Blarth takes off the leather vest that he wears, being careful, as always, to keep the beads on it from catching on anything. Tossing it on his bed, he starts to unlace the stings at the front of his shirt, stopping only when he notices the startled looks on Juni & Nicos's faces.

"Oh, right. Humans don't generally bathe in front of others. I suppose that you'll want to find somewhere else to be for a bit?"

[Kelemyn]

"Just let me get my shoes on!" Juni replies, looking quickly away from Blarth as he begins to unlace his shirt.

In a moment, she is ready to go - shoes on, sword belted at her waist, and hooded cloak covering her nearly from head to toe.

"Lead the way," she says to Nicos.

[Kelemyn]

Posting for Gralhruk:

The roof above the guild was hardly the best place to try and make an escape. Sling bullets sang off the stone face of the parapet almost as soon as she cleared it - if she hadn't come over in a rush and rolled immediately, they might well have taken her out. Sticking to shadow and using the irregular projections as cover, she made it to within 10 yards of the edge without injury. She breathes a brief prayer to the god of chance, then sprints for the edge. A figure looms out before she gets there, but she stiff arms him back and he stumbles toward the edge and disappears. She leaps. The next roof is lower than this one and the alley is narrow, elsewise she never would have made it in her weakened state; she tumbles when she hits in as controlled a manner as possible. She ends up skinning her knees and banging one elbow painfully. More sling bullets snap off the stone around her and she pounces up and caromes toward the edge once more. This time the alley is narrow, the roof only slightly lower but steeply pitched. She hits near the edge and slides, saved at the last instant as her foot catches on the gutter. She starts working her way across recklessly, sliding twice more but neither as close a call as that first, and finally turns the edge, putting some cover between her and the thieves beyond. All around she can hear their calls as the relay her position to one another in code. Grimly, she eyes the next jump.

***

In the alley behind the Traveller's Wineskin, a battered figure slinks painfully. Shade was at the limit of her strength, but she had given her pursuers the slip for the moment. Every bone in her body ached, her head felt like someone had dropped a series of progressively larger bricks onto it. It was with willpower alone that she moved, exhausted yet still coherent and fearful enough to stay hidden. A single story above is the window to the room where Blarth, Nicos, and Arjuna were secreted. It felt like weeks ago since she had set out from the little room, tired but recovered from injury. In truth, it had been only hours and here she was again, in worse shape than before and ready to impose on their goodwill once again. She was too tired to care that she didn't deserve their help.

The distance is laughable and the climb should be ridiculously easy, but at this stage it is one of the most difficult ascents she can recall. The window is shuttered and she slides her dirk from it's boot sheathe; with shaking hands she moves to slide it between the edges of the wood and lift the latch. Before she can begin the task she is gripped with a sudden chill. Her hand jerks erratically as her body begins shivering uncontrollably, strength ebbing from her into the dark void that suddenly sits on her back. Even as the icy limbs wrap around her and her lips turn blue, a name skates across the frozen surface of her mind: Salwisse.

The shadow had trailed her where the others had failed, come to seek revenge for the assault on her master. Shade's already weaked fingers slip from their hold and she vainly tries to grab onto something, anything, to stop her fall. All around, the world goes from gold to grey as her eyes cloud over. The world is a silent jumble of black and silver, the bricks below made of lead and sprayed with black cobwebs. She hits in a colorless explosion of numbing pain, shocked that the impact doesn't cause her to shatter into a thousand frozen pieces. The world is fading fast now as she crosses into the shadowland where Salwisse dwells, the cold hard void where nothing human can survive.

So close

It is all she has time to think before all movement is impossible and she drifts, unfeeling, into the sleep of death. Yet there, as she hovers in numb comfort at the door, all wounds forgotten, there comes a sudden sharp pain at the hollow of her throat. She gags as lightning arcs across her brain in a red haze. Above her dying body, Salwisse is suddenly suffused with energy and howls without sound as her very being is disintegrated, the only remnant a vague black outline blasted into the brick behind her. Shade's world is now a blue white vortex of pain, an argent spear transfixing her throat cutting off speech and breath. With monumental effort, she tears at her neck, clawing fingers seizing and yanking on the silver charm that hangs there. It pulls free and her body pulls in deep, shuddering breaths of air. Next to her, the pendant of Hieroneous glitters in the sun.

***

As Arjuna turns to go, there is a sudden scrabbling at the shutters that bar the window. Then the wood rattles with a dull impact, follwed quickly by a slither and a second, more distant crash. In a tiny patch of shadow in the narrow alley below, Shade's battered body lay still as stone.

[Black Plauge]

Being the one who was supposed to be staying in the room, Blarth is quite naturally in the best position to respond to the sound at the window. Curious to a fault, he unbars the shutters, a precaution that Nicos had taken to ensure that wandering eyes in other buildings wouldn't spot Arjuna, and the looks out.

At first he sees nothing, but that's mostly because he's looking in the wrong direction, out. When it finally occurs to him to look down, Shade's form on the street below is painfully obvious to the half-orc. Painfully, because she is obviously badly injured.

Not stopping to tell Nicos and Juni what he saw, Blarth dashes from the room, heading outside in a hurry.

"You shtill havn washt!" Mistress Molar scolds as he rushes through the common room.

Out in the alley, it takes Blarth a moment to find Shade, hidden as she is behind some debris. Probably whatever remained of what she had used to shorten her climb. A top down prespective had made finding her so much easier. Rushing to her side, it doesn't take Blarth long to realize that Shade is in a world of hurt.

"By Gruumsh, she needs healing, but Nicos is still upstairs and carrying her through the common room would attract way too much attention."

Reaching into a place in his mind which he had never fully explored, Blarth summons the will to do something he had never tried before.

As the half-orc concentrates, a slimy goo forms on Shades wounds, accompanied by a low hum. As the hum gets louder, the goo migrates to Blarth's body, leaving behind clean, mostly healed flesh, and taking up positions on Blarth's body in positions which corresponded to the ones they had vacated on Shade. Finishing with a bang, the slime tears into Blarth's flesh, leaving him suddenly sore and ragged all over.

"How sweet. A mind healer sacrificing his own life to save a friend," a voice speaks stepping from the shadows to gloat, "to bad she will not be able to appreciate gesture. Neither you nor she will be of this plane much longer."

Streaks of magical power fly from the shadow, striking both Blarth and Shade with unerring accuracy. The division of power, however, left them insufficent to finish either form. Blarth's healing had been far more potent than the shadowy figure had realized, and Blarth was not a true mind healer.

Unleashing the full beastiality of his orcish heritage, Blarth grows the full snout of teeth he had teased Arjuna with earlier, and steps over the still prone form of Shade before him. If shadows had looks, it might be said that this one's turned from gloating to shock as the half-orc's teeth rip into its form.

The shadow, however, proves to have little substance for Blarth's teeth to find purchase on, and it recovers quickly, flowing back out of the light and disappearing from sight. "Nice teeth, but they will prove nothing more than a temporary inconvenice for me. Both you and she will still die, it will just take longer than I first thought. I hope you enjoy a painful death."

[Kelemyn]

Juni runs to the window to see what it is that sends Blarth dashing from the room.

"It's Shade!" she says to Nicos. "She's fallen!"

Before she can turn away to follow after Blarth, the half orc appears in the alleyway below and rushes to Shade's side. Juni watches in awe as Blarth uses psychic energy to heal Shade's wounds. Then there comes a voice that sends a chill down her spine.

"There's something else there..." Something that is difficult to see from the window, but Juni looks where Blarth is looking. "A shadow? Nicos, what is that?"

Then the thing attacks. It is like something from a child's nightmare: the shadowy, insubstantial, man-like form; the cold, unearthly voice. Juni has never imagined such a thing. Blarth's transformation is much less shocking, since she had gotten a glimpse of it earlier. But his teeth seem to have little effect on the creature other than to drive it back into the shadows where it cannot be seen.

Juni's first thought is to strike out at the thing psychically, her mind direct to its mind. But she can't seem to target it. The shadow's mind... if it has one... is too foreign.

Frustrated, but unwilling to watch while her new friends become victims of this shadow creature, Juni turns away from the window and runs for the door.

[itches]

"It's Shade!" she says to Nicos. "She's fallen!"

Moving up besides the young woman, Nicos looked out in time to catch Blarth's emergence. Turn between rushing down to help and staying to guard Juni, the bard is there in time to witness the half-orc's strange healing. Relieved that the women is safe in his care, Nicos stepped away towards their gear. If Shade was back and in such dire condition they would be leaving soon, and would need to be packed and ready.

"There's something else there..." Something that is difficult to see from the window, but Juni looks where Blarth is looking. "A shadow? Nicos, what is that?"

Rushing back to the window, Nicos peered out and spotted a shadowy figure moving, the details obscured from his vantage.

"I don't know."

Then a fight breaks out and Nicos finds himself once again torn between rushing to the aid of his friends and once more finds the decision taken from him as Juni rushed from the room.

"Juni! Wait! Don't .. Dammit!"

Grabbing a wooden bowl from a low table in the room, the bard quickly sang a simple tune over it until the stained wood burst into light. Tossing the object out the window, he then turns and raced after Juni.

[Black Plauge]

*clank* *clink* *clatterclatterclatter*

The sound of the bowl hitting the ground and settling there is secondary to the effect it has on the conditions of the battle. The alley way is now bathed in light, except for the humanoid shaped form that seems to defy Nicos's spell. A shadow with no source, it chuckles and says, "So you were not alone in that room. No matter, I will deal with as many as needs be to finish this."

Gliding forward silently a terndril of darkness snakes out towards Blarth. Instinctively the half-orc raises an arm to defend himself, a gesture that seems futile given the lack of any shield on the arm, but the glow of light as the tendril snakes forward reveals the same mental shield that deflected Juni's blow just a few minutes ago. This time, however, it proves to be insufficent, as the tendril pierces through the glow and wraps it's way into Blarth's arm.

Hissing, Blarth feels the coldness of the shadow's touch and flinches as it seems to draw the heat out of his arm. As the tendril pulls back, Blarth's arm feels heavy, tired, and falls to his side nearly useless. Cradling it with his other arm, Blarth tries to rub some feeling into it as he eyes the shadow wearily. He is tempted to lash out and bite the creature again, but doing so seemed to have no effect last time, and he certianly didn't want to give it another chance to snake its tendrils around him again. Growling like the wolf his face now resembles, Blarth focuses his mind on the air around him, hardening it into a barrier that even the shadow's touch cannot penetrate. Not caring about who notices, Blarth allows this barrier to show itself, a faint glow that seems to buzz with excitement.

"More light? Is that really the best you have?" the shadow mocks, as it reaches out to touch Blarth again. This time, however, its tendril encounters more resistance and stops short of reaching Blarth.

"Ah. A mind warrior as well as a mind healer then? You only delay the inevitable."

[Kelemyn]

Juni stands just outside the back door of the inn, breathing hard from her dash downstairs. She stares with numb horror as shadowy tendrils reach out from the main body of a dark, indistinct form hovering in the alley, weaving in a smoky dance toward Blarth.

Shade is still lying on the ground. Dead? Juni had seen Blarth heal her, but maybe it had been too little too late.

Focusing on Blarth and the shadow again, she is heartened when the half-orc throws up a glowing, mental shield between himself and the attacking creature, and the shield stops the advancing tendrils of shadow. She concentrates briefly herself and, following Blarth's lead, allows the psychic armor she calls into being to be seen also. Then she steps forward with her hand on the hilt of her sword, a small figure wrapped in a black cloak, surrounded by a faint blue luminescence.

"He is not alone."

[Gralhruk]

The frigid grip of shadow slid away as Blarth's healing energy surrounded her; within, Shade's mind is wrenched back to reality, torn away from the dew drenched world of night toward which she had been pulled. Her grey eyes are open yet still unfocused. Color had not returned to the world and her numb mind struggles to make sense of what she sees - shadows are darker than ever - alive and oily, yet somehow her eyes penetrate their depths. The world around is on the one hand hazy and indistinct, yet full of unnatural clarity.

Above her, Shade recognizes Blarth by his bulky outline alone, unable to make out his features. Facing him is a large, lean man of indeterminate age, colored entirely jet black - face, hair, cloak, teeth, eyes - all of it a gleaming, liquid onyx. His hands were abnormally large, with nails like talons. These he held like weapons, bobbing and weaving with serpentine grace.

His voice sends a shudder of recognition through her. Salwisse had never spoken aloud, but from time to time Skathros' pet shadow would project her voice into Shade's mind, with that same discordant sibilance.

She rolls back and to Blarth's left, out of range when she comes to her feet. Whatever this thing was, it stood between them and safety. Steel whispers as her blades slide free. Blinking her eyes against the light, she echoes Arjuna.

"Not alone at all."

[itches]

Half out of breath from rushing after Juni, Nicos burst into the courtyard after everyone had already spoken.

"Okay, I'm here," the bard said through his heavy gasps as he looked from the shadow to his companions who stood with their weapons drawn. "Is that the bad guy? ... What?"

[Kelemyn]

"It's ... something bad," Juni answers Nicos without taking her eyes from the scene in front of her. "I think it's dead, but not dead," she continues, trying to explain what the shadow's mind felt like when she tried to target it from upstairs. "Undead. Like an animated skeleton come to life again and walking around. Only not really like a skeleton because it's made of shadow."

[Black Plauge]

If a shadow could be said to gaze impassively, that is most likely what the one now facing the group would be doing, as it seems unimpressed by the sudden shift in the numerical odds.

"Futile efforts, all. Mere weapons cannot harm me. You will all share the same grave if but a bit later than expected."

Its smokey tendrils sliding forward again, the shadow attempts to "embrace" Blarth once again. The light from Blarth's defenses flares as the tendrils come in contact with it, repulsing them once again, but only by a very smaller margin. At the same time, Blarth snaps at the smokey tendrils with his teeth, but finds no purchase as they stream almost gently out of his mouth.

[Gralhruk]

Shade circles, as usual seeking to flank the enemy but she moves through a world of grey, her opponent the only clear thing in her view. Despite the clarity, the thing is elusive; she finds herself unable to find a weakness in its defenses. Having experienced first hand the way these creatures could sap your strength, she is wary as well.

She shakes her head in frustration, unused to being so indecisive in battle. With each passing moment the tension in her builds, willing her to strike and make some effort to break the stalemate. Instead she feints and circles, finding her eyes drawn almost hynotically to the stark blackness of the creature, the minute and subtle play of inky eddies along its body.

[itches]

Undead ... Shadow.

Nicos looked that the figure that he could quite clearly wasn't human in the light coming from the enchanted bowl. He knew about shadows, or at least he knew and had told a number of tales about them, and the bard ran over what every tale had said about defeating them. One common theme was magic, Blarth's orcish magic was in showing when the evil creature tried to attack him, but that he hadn't used any offensive meant that he couldn't. The handful of parlour tricks Nicos himself knew were all useless in a fight.

The other common theme in defeating a shadow was holy powers. Paladins and other servants of the Gods all were quite successful in calling forth the glory of their patrons to destroy the undead, or even just turning healing magic into -

"I think I know how to kill it," Nicos called out suddenly wide-eyed. "But it will take me a moment, you'll have to distract it until then!"

Not waiting for the others to respond, the bard shut his eyes and began to sing in the elven tongue that Saelyn had taught to him all those years ago.

[Kelemyn]

Distract it? All right...

Juni circles the shadow, matching Shade's movement but in the opposite direction. She can't tell which of them the shadow is watching most carefully, but it can't possibly focus on all of them at once. Its silence worries her - a moment ago it was boasting and bragging about sending them all to an early grave. Had it heard Nicos' words? If it had, it might ignore all the rest of them and go after him before he has a chance to do anything.

She advances quickly, almost before she knows what she is going to do. Vywodor's sword reflects the bluish light of her psychic armor as she holds it out and level with her own chest.

But at the last second she lets her arm drop, holding the sword down at her side. She reaches out instead with her bare left hand and swings, letting her fingers sweep through the shadow. It is like grasping at smoke. Just when she thinks that she has missed it, an icy shudder flows up her arm to her shoulder and beyond, making the hair on the back of her neck prickle; and she knows that she has made contact.

Those nearby hear a faint ringing in their minds as Juni's eyes flash silver then fade back to blue. The appearance of the shadow changes for a brief moment - its outward form seems outlined by a shimmering substance which quickly dematerializes into minute droplets that swirl and float for a second before falling through the shadow and pooling on the ground beneath it.

Juni draws back, holding her hand to her chest to warm it. But she is smiling. The shadow seems to reel and stagger slightly. "Your future looks black," she says with a smirk.

[Black Plauge]

"My future always looks black," the shadow responds, "I wouldn't have it any other way."

Feinting towards Blarth again, the shadows tendrils pull up short and snake sideways towards Juni, wrapping their way around her arm, tightening like constrictor and causing her armor to flare strongly.

Lunging in response, Blarth tries again to find purchase with his teeth on the shadow's slippery surface and plows right through the creature. Coming out the other side, Blarth keeps going, running from the fight, towards the back of the inn.

"That is quite possible the most intelligent thing I've ever seen an orc-blood do," the shadow laughs.

[Gralhruk]

Her eyes never leave the living shadow before her; it becomes the center of her world, an ebony light that pushes the rest of the world into darkness. The fascination has taken hold of her, become all the more consuming rather than lessening at all. This was a thing both beautiful and deadly, fear inducing yet magnetic. Longing and loathing join hands inside her and squeeze. Her movements are unconscious, reflexive. She is a stalking tigress, alive with the thrill of the hunt, filled with necessity and desire. When she strikes, it is a sudden blur of motion, without thought or doubt. It lets her through; she knows it and the shame lends strength to her blows.

Her right hand blade, of well made but common steel, cuts into the shadow without effect - almost as if she had thrust the blade into a pond. Not even a ripple marks its passage. Her stomach lurches but in that split second her second blow lands. This time, the creature howls. The adamantine blade slices across its midsection, the dusky metal seeming to sparkle darkly as it strikes. She feels a surge of pride and sickness as she pounces back and resumes circling, eyes still fixed on her foe.

[itches]

Trying to ignore the clash and clamour of the battle around him, Nicos focused on his singing, using it to draw in and try to hold as much energy as he could. He was about to attempt something far more dangerous and several steps beyond anything he had attempted before, and a quiet corner of his mind reminded him that he wasn't even sure if it would work.

Silencing the doubt the bard continued to sing in Elven. He sang of silver rivers, of the dancing stars in the night sky, of green trees he had never seen and the wonder of first love. As he sang his muscles twisted and twitched painfully with the power he was drawing, a vibration echoed deep in his chest and his breathing started to struggle against it.

Finally his song reached a crescendo and Nicos opened his eyes to find the flesh on the back of his hand crawling. Focusing his attention on the shadow, the man almost hesitated when he noticed Blarth's absence but pushed the issue aside. If he was hurt they could help him later.

Sliding up to the dark figure, Nicos ducked under a vicious swing and thrust his hand deep within the creature, releasing the healing energy with a shout.

An explosion of white light and noise erupted from the contact, brightening the alley well beyond that shown from the dismal light emerging from the enchanted bowl. The power tore through the undead spirit, tearing the very fabric of it's being to pieces as it let forth of soul shivering scream of agony.

A scream that Nicos matched note for note. The bard was no true mage or cleric, well learned or blessed by a god with mighty powers, he was just a clever man who had learnt to twist his mind and body in ways it was never supposed to. While helpful at times, the experience was always painful, never so much as when forcing someone's body to heal.

The pain that now burnt through him was as like to that as a paper cut was to an axe wound. The magic burnt in the shadow, twisted to a purpose it was never intended for, and in retaliation the mystic energy set fire to the bard's nerves, pushing his mind up to and then over its limit.

Then in an instant the flash of light was gone and Nicos collapsed to the cobblestones in a dazed stupor. Over him stood the shadow, diminished by the attack with it's form shifting unsteadily as if a strong would banish it forever, but whole still. Through the agony of remembered pain, the bard could feel only one thing - a cold anger directed firmly at his prone figure.

[Kelemyn]

A flash of bright light, and then screams, terrible screams. Juni shrinks away from it all, not sure if Nicos' spell had worked the way he wanted it to or not. The bard lay on the ground writhing in pain - that's NOT a good sign... But the shadow seems ... less substantial now. Thinner. Paler. Certainly still a threat, but Nicos' spell and Shade's swordstroke must have hurt it.

Where had Blarth run off to? Juni suddenly recalls the half-orc's hasty retreat. She hadn't taken him for a coward. Does he have a plan in mind perhaps?

The shadow seems to be pulling itself together, gathering its evil to itself, and looming darkly over Nicos' prone form. "You'll pay for that," it hisses, reminding Juni of the winter wind that whistles through the cracks of her bedroom shutters.

"No!" she shouts as a tendril of darkness snakes out toward the bard. She throws herself between the shadow and its intended victim, her arms stretched wide as if to block its way. But the finger of shadow easily darts around her, and streaks straight for Nicos. The bard flinches in a weak attempt to dodge the attack, but the shadow strikes unerringly, seeming to reach inside Nicos' chest, sapping his strength.

[Gralhruk]

There was no thought, only action. It was always like a dance that way, movements timed and syncronized yet unplanned, all executed in a portion of the mind that worked outside of consciousness. To be open, to trust that your body would find the right avenue - that was the crux of combat.

Shade had always found it easy to slip into that moment during battle, to let go of logic and reason and simply act and react. This was the same, yet different. The shadow turns on Nicos and she slides to the right, behind it, feet making not a sound on the cobbled ground. It is wounded but still dangerous and she is within striking distance. Simple matter to close that short space and thrust her sword between its shoulders.

She hesitates, consumed by the twisting feeling in her gut. It was something beautiful and terrible, this thing, this shadow. She should hate it, knowing its master and its mission. Yet she still felt mesmerized by its substance, its grace. For some reason she felt guilty, as if this were murder instead of battle. The moment slips away; she has waited too long, the thing has noticed her. It turns slightly, wary of her blade, and the opening is gone.

Shade feints, but they both know it for what it is. She circles back to the left, trying to force it to turn away from the gray shape that is Arjuna. Between them, the indistinct form of Nicos writhes on the ground. She grits her teeth against his pain.

[itches]

Nicos drifted through a world of pain, formless, timeless without feature of a hint of forgiveness. He knew he shouldn't be here, that he was supposed to be somewhere else doing ... something. An image of a red haired women appeared before him, quickly replaced by a silver haired women. Each image brought a new texture of pain, different to the formless substance through which he floated and the man instinctively flinched away. A name almost came to him, then they all moved away and he was alone again.

His mind sluggishly shrugged it off as the grey of his existence began to polarise. Lights and shadows began to form around him, shifting and playing against each other like tides of water until new faces began to appear. One, a women, veiled and with a scar across her face. She radiated a cold anger that made her seem vulnerable. Shade Another face, a man broadly handsome. He carried an air of one who grew weary of life but was unable to let go. Cadrius. A third face, plain and undistinguished. A half-man half orc. A sense of child-like innocence emenated from him, matched by a child's capacity for savagery. Blarth. A fourth face, an attractive young women. A shell of uncertainty masked deep potential for power and danger. Juni.

As these faces and name drifting in front of him Nicos felt the world around him grow cold as the shadows grew to dominate the lights. Something hard and unyielding pressed against his back. Slowly memories began to drift back of an alleyway, of a friend in danger. The largest of the shadows formed a dark figure, radiated a cold sense of hatred at him as suddenly the man remembered.

Struggling to rise roll out of the way, Nicos felt a cold stab of ice lance through his chest, as the creature attacked, once more driving him to the ground and into the realm of grey formless pain.

[Kelemyn]

Juni is frozen by indecision. What can she do to drive this thing off? She'd believed at first that weapons would have no effect on it, but Shade's sword had struck true. Would hers?

She swings it around, slicing through the dark, smoky form that leans in toward her. But nothing happens. Cold breath and faint laughter sound in her ears, but the shadow does not try to attack her again. Instead, it flows through her, trying to get at Nicos again.

"Shade, do something!" Juni cries, spinning around to watch helplessly as the shadow coils for another strike.

[Black Plauge]

Leaving combat, that's really what if felt like he was doing. Running, like a scared human. But his teeth couldn't hurt that thing. It was like trying to bite water, only worse. At least with water you could drink or swallow it if you got it in your mouth. Whatever that creature was made of actually flowed out of your mouth of its own volition.

Darting up the back stairs two at a time, Blarth bursts into the room that he and Nicos were sharing to the sound of a bloodcurtling scream from the alley below. Not even pausing to think, Blarth grabs his club from the bed where he had put it down earlier and dives through the window in front of him.

Gruumsh! This had better work!

Bringing the club up in front of him, Blarth focuses on the dark form rushing up to meet him. Flinching at the last second, Blarth closes his eyes in fear as he expects to pass through the shadow and hit the ground, hard.

The ground, however, is not quite so anxious to meet Blarth, it would seem. As he plows into the shadow's form, his club strikes as if against a person, and his fall is broken. It still hurts, but any groans that Blarth utters as a result of the impact are drowned out by the dying shriek of the shadow.


As the shriek dies away, other muffled sounds begin to filter into the alley where two men lie crumpled on the ground and two women stand panting from extertion. Sounds of people debating whether to investigate the source of not one, but two terrifying screams.

[Kelemyn]

The last thing Juni expected to happen was for Blarth to come flying down out of the sky to destroy the shadow- creature with a club! She hopes he hasn't broken his neck doing it.

But no, he is not dead or broken, and neither is Nicos - they are both beginning to stir and pick themselves up off the ground. Juni stands there breathing in short gasps that threaten to dissolve into tears. She is stunned; she is elated; she is still scared out of her mind.

Her eyes meet Shade's across the empty place between them, the place where the shadow had been standing a moment ago. There is a look in those grey eyes, something Juni would not have expected to see. Sorrow?

"What was that thing?" she whispers. "What brought it here?"

But before anyone can answer her, footsteps are heard at the mouth of the alley. A dark figure approaches, walking slowly, deliberately.

"Juni?" a man's voice calls softly. "Is that you?"

Deja vu. Has this meeting happened before, this man calling out to her? Moments like these are often confusing to a clairvoyant. Is she standing in a dark alley or at the top of a rickety staircase? This snippet of time - is it merely similar to a past experience, or had she actually foreseen it in a dream or by presentience?

"Alek," she says qietly. "What are you doing here?"

Ah. The feeling of deja vu is broken. Things are different this time.

Alek says nothing for a moment, only walking closer. He looks around at the others as they recover from their battle with the shadow, stopping to stare at Shade briefly. A hint of recognition crosses his face. Then he turns back to Juni.

"I heard about what happened at the warehouse. I feel as if I betrayed you, but I thought that the Night Eyes could be trusted." He glances at Shade again. "I suppose that I should have known better.

"Mistress Molar, the innkeeper here, tipped me off about your current whereabouts. She's an old friend of the family. Can we go inside and talk? I may be able to help all of you."