“3...2...1...Now!” Aeryna yells as you jump with her over the destroyed, flaming staircase. As you land, you hear the ceiling groan and bow behind you, but you’re too busy running and trying not to drop a madly flailing body.
Beyond a curtain of flame, you see the dark space of the door you kicked in and as you both run through the finish line of fire into the night sky and collapse to the ground a safe distance away, exhausted, Mars’ still writhing body rolls away from you.
Looking behind you through eyes thick with smoky tears, you watch as the shape of the roof over the second floor collapses in on itself and realize how narrowly you escaped with your life just as an explosion of fire bursts forth towards you from the cabin wreckage, reaching for you one last time with an intense, unnatural heat.
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 observe this curiosity, blinking heavily to get a clearer view, you 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 birch leaves, birdsong, and a bright morning 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 their forehead and the source of the blue light 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. The holy symbol of the vesica pisces hangs loosely on a wooden necklace 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 nods and looks in the air above him where 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 until you find a well wrapped cloth pouch and begin to untie it.
Inside, you find multiple scattered parchment clippings. You shuffle through a few and realize they are all copied from a private dossier, likely documents accessible only to those with higher clearance among Reach personnel. After reading a few headings, you register all these clippings to be about large donations to the Piscean Order, the dominant, non-magical religion of the region. There are notable sums from various lords, the size of which one would expect from a culture of religious tithing, and then there are others. Exorbitant sums the likes of which could buy entire towns outright listed from House Nozama and House Svarog, with a smaller sum only by comparison listed from House Von Zima. There’s a message written on it in black ink. “So aggressive. Why?”
You pass it off to Aeryna as a specific clipping from a different looking publication catches your eye. The Seraphia Scribe is printed in old style block letters on dusty parchment atop an article about how the economy of Ophanheim’s sister city, Seraphia, “...is declining in the wake of having to compete with arcane merchants expanding throughout the continent, working in ways forbidden by the doctrine of the Piscean Order, and ultimately forcing the sale of lands long held by local patron families.”
Terri stands there shaking his head. “This doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
Aeryna furrows her brow looking over the clipping from The Seraphia Scribe. “Then perhaps we should look deeper.”
“At what? So Mars spent his free time collecting scraps saying the rich are rich and magic is bad for the economy. Next we’ll find clippings that water is wet and fire hurts.”
You notice there is another clipping attached to the backside of the Seraphia Scribe article. You turn it over and see an article from The Ophanheim Oracle, the local gazette, about a particularly controversial expansion of powers awarded to the Circle of Nullpriests, a penitent class among the Piscean Order who have historically been the only ones allowed to use magic in the Ophanic Empire so long as it was in self defense of themselves or of citizens and of a divine nature, that now allows them funding, arcane resources, and relaxed rules of conduct so as to promote them as the premiere security force of Ophanheim. The date the legislation was passed within the Vesiconclave is circled in black ink next to the word “Coincidence?” with an arrow pointing to the article on the other side. You turn to the side with The Seraphia Scribe clipping. The article’s date is the same.
“There’s more to this”, Aeryna continues, “a lot more.”
“Well let’s get a move on. I don’t get it, but I don’t wanna stay here any longer than I have to.”
"There’s just one issue" Aeryna says with a furrowed brow 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)
