Your vision blurs as breathing becomes more and more difficult for you. Tear ducts are not enough to clear the smoke from your eyes and only seem to feel like boiling water is being poured over your face. On top of it all, your head throbs from breathing in so much heavy smoke. You slowly close your eyelids for a quick moment of relief.
“Come on, we’re, ” Aeryna coughs, “we’re almost-”
An overwhelming wave of force explodes from down the hall as an unstable reaction of ingredients from the alchemical laboratory detonates, splintering nearby wood, shattering every window along the way, and throwing you, Aeryna, Mars, and all the burning debris across the hall and towards what’s left of the collapsed ceiling over the stairs.
You collectively smash through the twisted, burning wreckage covering the stairs and land deep within a raging blaze on the first floor.
Immediately, your breath leaves you and the moment you inhale, the intense heat of the air around you brands your lungs. The spiral of pain making you cough creating more pain forcing your cough joins the heavy smoke in making your head spin. On fire and swirling in a searing nausea of fumes from alchemical reagents, you’re able to open your eyes just enough to notice the massive crack in the support beam responsible for holding up what’s left of the second floor creak and distend with weight it wasn’t designed to handle alone.
You try to move out from under it, but fits of coughing overtake you as this floor has run out of usable oxygen to breathe. You hear a loud snap and in a moment that seems to stretch for an eternity, await the inevitable end and shut your eyes.
In a lifetime of battles, you had often thought of how your end may come and in those visions, you had always seen yourself facing your demise with your eyes open, yet here you are. Somehow, you still have time to reconsider and against the fire and the fear and the body that has become only pain, you force your eyes open to witness your final moment.
At first it doesn’t make sense to you. A large portion of a support column stands upright at an angle oddly close to you. You try to move, then, a new kind of pain arises. Your vision goes white as you let out a cracking scream from your dry, frying vocal cords doing their best to help you express yourself in the only way you know how in this moment. The column stands, partly embedded in the floor, and partly embedded in your abdomen. You lift one hand to touch the bloodied connection where the column ends and your body begins and watch it uncontrollably shake from shock.
Suddenly, it begins to lift gently upwards and as you watch the bloodied, splintered end of the column pull itself and a strand of intestine out of you, you beg for release, for an end to this, for your passage to the afterlife to be complete already.
The column along with the entirety of the roof over you lurches completely up off its moorings and gently floats to the far side of the homestead. As you look with the last of your conscious energy 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 and brighter until it consumes the entirety of your vision.
As the nerves in your body reach their limit and your senses disconnect you further and further from this moment, your body falls limp, your eyes close, and the sounds of the inferno fade into a single, high pitched note, ringing in your ears. Then, it’s gone, as you pass into unconsciousness.
* * *
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 normal pace. Your eyes well up with tears of gratitude for being free of your torment, one way or another. As a single drop rolls down your face, its refreshment in the surrounding gentle wind provides a relief so divine, you close your eyes tighter for fear of glimpsing heaven.
You feel a presence close to you and finally open your eyes, blinking away tears, to watch an intense blue glow like the one you saw in the night sky diminish to reveal a nullpriest pulling the 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.
"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, the charred remains of which hangs loosely off your shoulder from a single strap before collapsing to the ground.
As the strap continues to disintegrate at your feet in the cool, mountain wind, you slowly begin to truly register the degree to which you owe your life to Terri and the nullpriest that saved you.
“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)
