With one last powerful strike, you smash the bottom border of the windowsill clean off and tear the top away in an instant before pushing Mars’ body out onto the awning of the roof and jumping out after him.
Aeryna jumps out after you as you sling Mars over your shoulder and run along the most stable looking supports to the edge of the roof.
As you look back through eyes thick with smoky tears, you watch the shape of the roof over the second floor collapse in on itself and realize how narrowly you escaped with your life.
You set him down and dangle your legs off the edge of the roof before jumping off and motioning Aeryna to push Mars down to you.
With a heave, his body falls off the edge of the burning cabin and into your arms. While under normal circumstances, you’d be perfectly capable of the task, the pain, the exhaustion, and fatigue triggers all at once as his weight drives you into the dirt.
“Dra’tesh! Are you okay?” Aeryna yells as she prepares to jump off and join you.
A massive explosion detonates each other window along the corridor you just came from and sends Aeryna flying through the air over you. You only have a split second to worry about her before you are overcome with a wave of searing, nauseating alchemical heat making you lose all focus of where you are, and for a moment, who you are.
Looking behind you through eyes thick with smoky tears, you watch as the shape of the roof over the first floor collapses in on itself and realize how narrowly you escaped with your life.
Your head spins as you try to catch your breath. You shut your eyes to calm the sensation, but as the coughing subsides, you notice the burns your adrenaline had been hiding from you beginning to arise all over your body and although you live, you may yet still pay a steep price for your actions here.
Laying in the dirt, breathing as calmly as you can, you notice a hallucination. The roof of the cabin appears to slowly be lifting back upwards. You rub your eyes, raw from the heat, and blink thick tears away until you clearly recognize that you’re not hallucinating at all, the roof has completely lifted off the top of the homestead and is levitating high above anything that could support it.
As you look above the blaze, your blurry vision is strong enough to notice a single point of intense blue glowing against a dark sky. That light grows brighter and brighter until it consumes the entirety of your blurry vision as the sounds of the inferno fade into a single, high pitched note ringing in your ears. Then, it’s gone.
* * *
Gentle sounds of leaves, birdsong, and a bright natural landscape surround you. The pain is gone. The need to cough is gone. Oxygen flows to your lungs freely as you breathe at a relatively normal pace. You feel a presence close to you and you open your eyes, no longer blurry, to watch an intense blue glow like the one you saw in the night sky diminish to reveal a nullpriest pulling glowing gem on their forehead away from yours. Immediately, you recognize what has just occurred. Everything you had just seen and experienced was for the second time today as the being before you finishes reading your mind’s memory of your eyes.
Now on flat ground outside the completely doused, but still smoldering homestead of the First Blade of Ophanheim, the morning light gives you a good look at the one who saved you. A pale green/gray skinned male appearing in his early 20's with an under-bite and a pair of small lower tusks barely peeking out from behind his lower lip. He's dressed in white robes with a cobalt blue lining and a matching sash around his waist. Multiple holy symbols on wooden necklaces hang loosely around his neck. The most striking detail about him, however, is the elaborate brass circlet upon his head with amethyst crystal earplugs, small, circular, brass plates covering the eyes completely, and a deep blue gemstone of some kind of quartz, about the size of an eye, held prominently in the centerpiece over his forehead. He looks to Aeryna then back to you as if the brass plates were not obstructing his vision at all.
"Detection complete. Account of events memory verified by former general captain, Dra'tesh Stonescale. Active suspects: none. Acting lieutenant general, Aeryna Silvanus, objection to deep search noted. Mars Polyphebos transferred to Ophanheim Central Hospital for treatment. Thank you, Mr. Stonescale, for your cooperation." The blue gem on his forehead glows bright for a moment before fading again.
"...Report filed. Will that be all?"
You look around for Mars, realizing you don’t remember what happened to him, but he is nowhere to be found. You expect the twisting of the scales on your neck to be sensitive from the burns you sustained, but notice you feel nothing out of the ordinary. Looking at your arms, they look normal as well. No evidence of burns seem to remain on you or your clothes. Come to think of it, you feel great.
"Yes, that will be all, thank you," Aeryna says with a voice that doesn’t appear to have suffered the coughing fits from earlier this morning.
"Thank you, and have a pleasant day.” The orcish nullpriest looks in the air above him and a blue arcane glyph begins to materialize in the air over his brass plated eyes without any effort from his hands. The central gemstone of their brass headset glows bright blue once more, and in a flash, he disappears entirely. In the absence of hurtling horses, raging fires, and collapsing buildings, you finally take in a moment of tranquility in the dawnsong of the local robins, swaying birch branches, and cool mountain breeze.
“I hate to say I told you so”, Terri says with a raised eyebrow, “but I absolutely told you so”.
“I told you we’d be fine, and for now, we are. Did you manage to save anything from the fire?”, Aeryna says, bringing you back to reality.
“That for now sure is doing a lot of work there”, Terri mutters under his breath as you reach for your own burlap bag slung across your back, which you are relieved to find is still with you and in one piece. You set it down, pull the drawstring ropes open, and invert the bag, spilling its contents onto the forest floor.
Aeryna and Terri walk over to you as you sort through a few books and some charred papers, but unfortunately nothing of value seems to catch your eye.
Terri stands there shaking his head. “This doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
Aeryna furrows her brow. “Then perhaps we should look deeper.”
“At what?
“There’s more to this”, Aeryna continues, “a lot more.”
“Well, let’s get a move on. I don’t wanna stay here any longer than I have to.”
"There’s just one issue" Aeryna says while attempting to conceal something underneath her cloak. “We’d need a gear check plan layered enough to throw a nullpriest off, but I don’t know how to-”.
Terri laughs under his breath. Aeryna starts again. “how to show you without-”.
"I like your optimism-," he interrupts with a solemn air, "that we’re still somehow undercover or something. You’ve always been real smart, Aeryna, but do you really think gear check matters anymore?” He points over to the burning ash pile nearby. “Do you see that house, there? Do you see where you almost died? I may not be the sharpest sword in the sword thing, but even I know, if whatever you’ve got matters even a little bit, and knowing you, it does, then I also know a gear check move in a ‘burn your house down with you in it’ game... won’t…"
“Still”, Aeryna pleads, looking down, “plausible deniability can go a long way.”
He stops and puts a hand on her shoulder. "Look, I'm sorry, but no one played it safer than Mars and if they can get mr. paranoid, they can get us, too. You’ve always been good at rules, Aeryna, but the game’s changed; hiding doesn’t matter when you’re spotted, running does, so if you’ve got something to show us, just show us, and show us fast so we can do something while we still can".
Aeryna exhales with her eyes closed in concentration before looking up to the sky through a canopy of rustling birch leaves. “You’re right. Speed is the game now”. She turns to you and opens her eyes.
“I need your help with the biggest task I’ve ever asked of you and there’s no other way to put it than just to tell you. I believe there will be an attempt on the life of the new Septarch today at the Rite of Succession and this attack convinces me even more. I don’t know when, how, or by whom and neither Terri nor I will be able to investigate while on our duties. If you have questions, tell me, if this is too much for you, tell me, and if you don’t need to hear the rest and are ready to go now, tell me that, too. You’re the only one I trust for this. Will you help us?
[WHAT DO YOU SAY?]
[ACCEPT] "No questions here, I'm in" (Go to 49)
[QUESTION] “I have questions. Multiple.” (Go to 40)
[DECLINE] "I've got my own problems." (Go to 50)
