that is not dead which can eternal lie

Luzai is not aware, for the first several years of her life, that anything is wrong.

Her mother loves her and her brother dearly; her brother is a fine playmate, and the other children respond well to Luzai's incorrigibly friendly nature. Some of them are less healthy than she and Villibor are, and that is sad, and she learns to be careful with them, but it doesn't strike her as cause for concern. The governess brings all of the children out to the channel every night, so any injuries they pick up don't stick, and someone comes in to cast Remove Disease when they get sick.

She knows, in the abstract sense that children know things, without fully appreciating the context, that there are lots of kinds of people. That she and Villibor and the other children are dhampirs, and Mama is a human, and so are most of the other children's mothers, except for Miss Zora who is an elf, and Miss Q who is an Aasimar and Miss Eshe who is a tiefling. The governess is a ghoul, and so is the cleric who does the channeling. The servants are zombies and skeletons.

It takes longer for her to understand that the zombies and skeletons aren't just normal people who aren't allowed to respond to questions. That Mama and the other mothers don't come out for the evening channel, not because grownups don't need channels, but because they are quick and so the kind of energy that heals little dhampirs and ghouls and skeletons hurts them. That ghouls and zombies and skeletons, and all the other kinds of dead that roam the city like devourers and mohrgs and specters, all used to be quick, and now aren't.

That there are other ways of dividing people than by race. That the reason Mama and the other mothers can't leave the estate is because they are a kind of person called slaves.

Luzai can't remember most of this learning, later. By the time she's twelve she can't remember a time when she didn't understand the world around her well enough to be enraged by it.

Luzai gets away with avoiding necromancy as much as possible, and focusing on Enchantment instead, in her wizard studies, because by the time they've gotten past hanging cantrips all their tutors think of Luzai-and-Villibor as a unit, to the extent that Villibor's necromancy is seen as as good as hers, too, which is sort of accurate from a practical standpoint but usefully obscures the sheer rage and guilt she feels when tasked to call a soul back from their reward to enslave it to a suit of bones or rotting flesh.

They're planning to leave. They were always planning to leave; Mechitar isn't the sort of place where you can live a life, in the long run. Only a death.

When Mama dies of an injury that could have been healed, trivially, if positive energy were permitted in the country, Villibor reanimates her and the three of them run.

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promises-kept

Luzai claps at Seelah's dancing! It is good dancing even if it is less of a spectacle than Luzai made of herself.

Wrath-of-the-Righteous

Wrath-of-the-Righteous

By the time Luzai finishes preparing her spells for the next day, the breakfast crowd at the tavern is filled with an overwhelming sense of anticipation. Outrider scouts have confirmed the approach of an army from Nerosyan with the queen at the head, and news has spread through the city at the speed of rumor; several people are confidently betting that by this time tomorrow all the remaining demonic holdouts will be on the run, and are speculating about what will happen next.

promises-kept

--Oh wow that makes sense but also is kind of nerve-wracking! Objectively the queen of Mendev is much less scary than Arazni but that is kind of the reference class she has for queens!

Wrath-of-the-Righteous

And unlike with Arazni, she is probably not irrelevant enough to slide below this queen's notice!

Well, Luzai does at least seem to not be her first priority, for whatever that's worth. The queen met with the city's defenders and then immediately set to work using the army to clear the city of cultists and demons. It's a bit of a blunt force approach, but there's a significant advantage to having enough force you can both storm a building and block the exits without risking either, to say nothing of putting together a cordon across the city tight enough that you can actually keep areas clear once you check them.

promises-kept

Cool! Cool cool. Is there anything Luzai can and/or should do to help with this.

Wrath-of-the-Righteous

She's not officially employed by the Eagle's Watch yet, so she isn't being ordered to do anything, but probably there are plenty of teams that wouldn't turn down magical support. She's not exactly a wizard out of legend just yet, but Mendev is famously poor in arcane magic and she's certainly better equipped to handle demons than her median replacement.

promises-kept

She is super happy to volunteer to be magical support!

And so is Villibor. Right?

Villibor

...Hhhheee was going to spend some time winding down from the crisis by sticking his nose into magic theory for a while but this is actually really reasonable, sure.

Wrath-of-the-Righteous

They'll have to go through a pretty thorough vetting process to prove they're not demons or cultists, since apparently the army caught almost a dozen such looking to slip through the net by joining the search in the first hour alone, but after they come up clean enough that they'd have to be extremely powerful or lucky to be faking it they can get seconded to two of the squads in the eastern half of the city. The goal is, of course, for each team to have sufficiently overwhelming power to ensure that any fights end without either wizard needing more than cantrips, but there are simply so many hostiles in the city that at least one of their groups will probably manage to stumble on something.

promises-kept