hold valor in your heart | Glowfic Constellation

ruin-of-souls

Korva knows, logically, that she can't make the teleport. She's never been able to spell kenning more than twice in one day, and it hasn't been for lack of trying. But Korva's magic has never been logical - not since Deskari's attack on Kenabres, anyway - and the current situation is dire. Ember and Daeran are dead. She's called for the party to fall back, but their line of retreat is blocked by a bunch of demons that must have greater teleported in in the last couple seconds. Also, a Maralith has just cut the inside of her thigh, and the blood loss is going to fuck her right up if she can't fix it in the next half a minute or so. She should never have gotten her party into this position. It's her fault, and if she doesn't think of something, they will die of it. They may or may not be recoverable, if demons get to play with their remains after.

She needs help. She's needed help every hour of every day for six months, and never really gotten it; she's only ever really found herself, at the bottom of any of these holes that she digs. But she does, sometimes, find more of herself there. She's been this close to losing the entire party before. Half the time, it awakens some new power in her.

Teleporting out, she says, over the still-active telepathic bond. Grab a friend. Arue, grab Daeran and get in contact.

She slings Ember's corpse across her shoulder, claps her spellcasting hand on Woljif's shoulder, and claps the one that holds Lariel's sword onto Regill's. Aivu skitters onto one of her feet, and she feels a hand on her own shoulder that she hopes to every god is Arue. She calls on the forces of Elysium, or on her own power, or on whatever the fuck it is she calls on when she does stuff like this.

The wind in the cave swirls around them. The butterflies that insistently follow her around these days flutter and land on her. She speaks a word - it's not the word she usually speaks - and she goes from the cave to somewhere else.

On the bright side, the place she lands sure looks like a crusader camp. On the not so bright side, it sure doesn't look like Drezen.

"We need a cleric!" yells Woljif, and that's about the last thing Korva hears before she collapses under Ember's corpse.

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Aivu

"I'm hungry!"

ruin-of-souls

Okay, the rest of them are fine and Aivu wants a cookie. They have actual food, she's just seeing whether they'll give her a cookie.

They'll ...look into it for her.

ruin-of-souls

Thanks.

"So... Wintersun? We're thinking?"

ruin-of-souls

"It seems like the most likely explanation. As tempting as it is to spin up wild theories about time travel, it is well within the capabilities of demons to convince a group of paladins that they're serving the mortal Iomedae during the Shining Crusade. It's not even off-theme."

"We raise Ember and Daeran tomorrow, and we do the teleport correctly, if our hosts haven't sprung a trap by then. If Drezen's as we left it, we... honestly probably come back here anyway and try to sort this out, I hate to leave them like this. And if it's not, we come back for different reasons."

Woljif Jefto

"Can you raise someone if you left their soul in the future? Like - does it work?"

ruin-of-souls

"Well. Theory bows to experimentation."

" - claim to be from the Fifth Mendevian Crusade. I don't know there to have been any Mendevian Crusades. And claimed the Queen of Mendev was your paladin, which - at first I thought just meant was a Knight of Ozem, and someone wasn't speaking very precisely, but - Derenge then claimed that he is a follower of the Order of the Godclaw, a religious order that serves, 'the Lawful deities Abadar, Irori, Asmodeus, Iomedae, and Torag, in equal measure.'"

on Death, for lives

" - that is indeed very strange. Thank you for bringing it to me. Were there any indicators in their - magic items, or their dress, or their speech, what the world they were from was like -"

"They spoke Taldane, but strangely accented, and only about half comprehensible. But - not stranger than you find in some corners of the continent - their clothes didn't stand out as of better make. They were very well-equipped - her sword might be a minor artifact, though I wasn't looking that closely, there was obviously some mutual suspicion -

"I would imagine so. I'm going to consult some wizards about whether time travel is the kind of impossible that should be expected to happen once in a while or the kind of impossible that actually shouldn't really ever happen. And while we're deciding what to do I want a dozen priests stationed with Plane Shift ready for if there's a confrontation. There is enough of a chance that there's something important and strange here that I want to be very certain our actions are retrievable." She'll pass him the tuning forks for the relevant restricted-magic dungeon plane.

"Knight-Commander." And he departs.

on Death, for lives

And shortly after -

"On the scale of impossible things, where would you say time-travel lies?"

the-monster-you-created

"You realize that archmages don't just have a standard scale by which we measure the impossibility of all impossible things, right? I'd say traveling a month into the past is more impossible than - lots of feats of magic currently believed to be impossible but that it would not surprise me to hear that an archmage could do - and less impossible than, ah - adding one and one and getting seven, under a particular sense of what 'adding,' 'one,' and 'seven' mean."

Salma-Hayek-wows-in-trailer-for-her-latest-movie-Everly-554519

on Death, for lives

"A party of injured reasonably powerful adventurers with a minor artifact showed up at camp, claiming they're from the Fifth Mendevian Crusade. From an unspecified future date, when I'm a god. - and have a militant order that also worships Asmodeus. I've set that aside as a separate confusion."

the-monster-you-created

"...Could be a bizarre infernal plot? Geryon? 'People who believe themselves to have time travelled' is much less impossible than time travel. Do they claim they did it intentionally?"

on Death, for lives

"No. They claim they were trying to return to Drezen in Mendev, by Teleport." She does not think there's a city of Drezen in Mendev.

the-monster-you-created

"Never heard of it, not that I necessarily would have if it's some small town in the middle of a backwater like Mendev - what are they supposedly crusading against up there?"

on Death, for lives

"A good question my people failed to ask and can ask when they go back to sell them the Raise Dead diamonds they've requested, unless you think we should be more paranoid than that about talking to these people...one of them is a succubus who says Desna reformed her."

the-monster-you-created

"...And read chaotic good? Almost certainly a misdirection - "

on Death, for lives

"Chaotic neutral. And she spoke to it under a Zone of Truth, but that doesn't mean that much."

the-monster-you-created

"OK so we have - someone who worships both you and Asmodeus, and a Desnan succubus. I would like to know who the rest of them claim to be, especially if they're all this surprising."

on Death, for lives

"Two dead bodies, a tiefling, a five year old havoc dragon who says, and I quote, she's ' with the Fifth Mendevian Crusade, but the kind where I help Korva and not the kind where I listen to orders, because orders are no fun!', and Korva, Knight-Commander of the Fifth Mendevian Crusade, the one whose Teleport failed and dropped them here. She's a sorcerer, my people thought. Chaotic Good."

the-monster-you-created

"We are supposed to believe they let a baby dragon go on crusade - No, I suppose we're supposed to believe that 'let' is the wrong word for that situation. We should almost certainly be more paranoid, but - selling them diamonds is probably safe enough if we check that they're not buying with cursed gold - can we get some Abadarans for that, and any future questioning, their truth spell would at least be more inconvenient to fake - someone should look over the spot where they arrived for any blood or hairs or - anything useful for a scry, if we need to scry them later, though obviously that could be the trap here so we'll have to be careful about it - "

on Death, for lives

"To be fair to them about the baby dragon, I'm not sure how I'd stop one from crusading, if reason didn't work, and I don't actually have a fully satisfactory account of why to prioritize the presumed interest of an adult dragon in getting to exist and be untraumatized over the interests of the baby dragon - with humans I can easily enough make reference to the persistent beliefs of adult humans about how they should ideally have been treated as children, but I haven't asked any dragons that.

If we're being paranoid I probably shouldn't try giving the baby dragon my headband and talking with her about this.

We've collected some blood off the ground where they landed, and have sketches made for scrying, and I can get some Abadarans in. Can you think of a reason it's a bad idea to ask Aroden what's up here, I'm inclined to."

the-monster-you-created

"Yes, lots of them, but they're all bizarrely implausible even given this - If it's a hellish plot this is obviously what they expect us to do but I don't see the mechanism by which it goes badly."

on Death, for lives