Sworn to the State: A Magical Quest

Last week on Sworn to the State

With Godei still gone, Vashti sought to take matters into her own hands and speak to Abbot Tado in the monastery's library about where her master was. Instead, she came face to face with Blind Man's Bluff, a vicar-killer and member of the radical religious order, The Red Penitents. Instead of killing Vashti, however, he merely sent her at high velocity into one of the library's printing presses and asked her why she was a Vicar.

Vashti also discovered that there were two vicars in the employ of the Melik besieging the monastery: A Golem-craftsman called The Builder and The Grand Sage, a master of mass blessings.

Godei is still nowhere to be found.
Rongen despised memory. To him, memory was a thing for the weak. Looking backwards would expose your front to the enemy. The act of remembering had no place in it for truth; instead, it was the construction of the past by the present, a deliberate obfuscation of how things were. It was a demon, its subordinates nostalgia and antiquarianism. He shared a parable of a scholar of Babarak who became so obsessed that he sought to build Babarak in his own mind, only to be swallowed whole by Mukhtarram the Dream Eater. The winged bull, his face so placid, fed without remorse on those who wished to remember.

Zurahna loved memory. To her, it was the canvas of the soul. Imagination was the highest level of thought that a human could have, given to them by God at the outset of creation to distinguish them from the beasts. Without remembering, nothing new could ever be created, because all was built upon a foundation begun at the start of human history and continued to the present. The present was the giggling daughter who sat on the weary shoulders of the past, half-listening to its pronouncements. If something was lost in translation, that was the most pure and normal human reaction possible. Living in fear of dreaming was no living at all.

You tended to prefer Zurahna's interpretation, but then, you were always bad at remembering. Only one thing has stood carved into your mind since the day it happened.

The air is thick with the sickening scent of sandalwood as the dust from your untimely collision with the printing press clears from the library. Abbot Tado stands a few meters away, behind one of the tables, his glare and shaking fists the sole manifestation of his deep-seated rage at the man in front of him. Bluff continues to squat, his cracked lips set in a dispassionate expression, his body bobbing up and down every so slightly as if he's growing impatient.

"I have my answer," you say as you push yourself up, supporting yourself against one of the standing beams of the printing press even as your knees shake. Bluff stares past you, waiting.

"I...I don't want anyone to be like me."

Silence punctuates your answer. Bluff takes a bit of sawdust in his hands and rolls it around on his palm. You start to lose your balance but the abbot rushes over, past Bluff and gives you a hand, stopping you from falling over.

"Why is that?" Bluff finally asks.

The abbot speaks in a voice of shaking fury. "You villain, you scoundrel, you mamzer, leave her alone already, the child has-"

"But she's not a child, is she." Bluff says as he stands up. He looms over you and the abbot like an apparition of death. You imagine each scar on his chest is the work of one sword, and then count them. There are forty-five scars.

"She's not a child," he repeats, "those are her words, not mine. After all, children just listen and do as they're told. A vicar once said that to me before he ripped out my eyes. Kids are at the mercy of adults who tell them what to do or throw them away without a thought. That's how things are."

He looks you over, up and down.

"Yeah, when it comes to that, I don't think you're a kid. But you're no adult, either. Dunno what the word for it would be. A witch in progress, maybe. So I want to hear you out. Then I leave."

"I am…" You try to find the right words, "I'm an orphan. You know for a while I...I tried to convince myself they weren't gone, or that they would come back, or some other... But I can't do that. I can't lie like that. I don't want to pretend. I admit it. They're dead. Everyone is dead. Mama, Tata, Uncle Mogo, Aisha, Yokan, Boros...they're dead. Just me and Baba now."

The beginnings of tears form on your face but you force them back at great effort, searing your eyes. You will not be weak, now, or ever.

"You're a jerk," you declare to Bluff as he raises an eyebrow, "a murderous jerk. But you had a bad time too. Almost everyone did, or does. I'm not even the only orphan in this stupid monastery. And don't say anything Tado, I get to call this place stupid if I want. It's my right, I live here. And you know what? I don't want anyone else to suffer like that. Everyone and everything is broken. I keep reading about it. How wonderful things were and how horrible things are now. Well I don't want to hear about that. I'm not going to hang my shoulders and sigh and make analogies to how the winter is as cold as the misery that afflicts us, bla bla. I'm going to do something about it."

"Do what?" Bluff asks, "unify the land?"

You blink and get flustered at him guessing you out from a mile away.

He snorts. "Yeah, that's what I thought. Not too bad, though. Could be a lot worse. Thing is, lot of people use that kind of reasoning. Core of it's making sure no one suffers as you do, sure, but how you get there can be a hell for other people. You think you won't have to kill anyone who disagrees? A lot of soldiers enjoy the whole 'slaughter peasants' thing."

"Well," you say as you pause to think about it, "I think I'll..I'll do what I have to do to make sure it happens. But I'm not going to murder people...just like that. That's not me. That's you."

"Could be," Bluff says as he sighs and rolls his neck. "I've been here too long. That was an interesting little discussion, though. Wish you luck on it."

"Wait, that's it?" You say as he starts to leave.

He stops at the doorway. "Thought you wanted me to leave, vicar." He cracks his knuckles. "You sure you want me around?"

You try to say something but the Abbot interrupts you. "No, no, we're fine, goodbye Bluff, it has been great having you, get out of my monastery now."

Bluff shrugs and walks past the doorway, but you wiggle out of the Abbot's grasp and rush out, almost falling into the doorframe as you burst out and call out after him.

"Bluff! Bluff wait. I wanted to ask you something." It's a mistake, maybe, but curiosity rankles you. You didn't come all this way, go through all this ordeal, just for him to leave as easily and quickly as he came.

He stops again in the hallway, his back towards you. The lashes of a whip scar his back from the back of his neck to his waist, forming great ridges across the landscape of his skin.

"I wanted to ask you...why you're a Red Penitent. Since you asked me, I thought it was only fair."

"You want to ask me…" he trails off and then starts to laugh. You take a step back, immediately regretting your question. "That's not something you want to ask. But since you did, I figure I might as well show it off."

He undoes the blindfold, turns around and then looks straight towards you, and in that moment you are frozen in place, unable to move. With a single glance from him, you melt away and disappear.

...You fly high above the world, and below you is a single pearl, a foaming island in the endless, shining ocean. It is so beautiful that your wings turn to tears of joy at its wonder. You fall.

...You glide across the water. Above you hangs the everpresent moon, enormous and foreboding. It is so vast and so bright that it hurts to look at. You try to avoid its gaze. You drown.

...You are a vast cloud of stars. You dance around a central axis so graceful in its movements that it coordinates all of heaven in its endless waltz. At the end of eternity, it kisses you goodbye. You fade.

You are standing on a plane of black, when on the horizon something huge and terrible rises from the edge of existence. It is the sun, but not the sun. It is the moon, but not the moon. It is none of these things, and all of them. It is a single orb, a shining jewel so luminescent it sears away your flesh. The outer rim is a blue so deep you could drown in it. The iris is the shattered bone of angels and the shining diamond of the almighty's throne. Its pupil is the eclipse of the everlasting sun, and at its corners lick the fires of eternity. You feel yourself being weighed upon the scales of infinity, and found wanting.

The eye of God gazes down at you, and you turn to dust.

Then, just like that, it's gone. Bluff closes his eyes and puts his blindfold on, leaving you with an open mouth and a trembling jaw. You want to scream, but instead just close your mouth, still trembling.

Bluff's voice echoes inside your head. "God is asleep. We will wake him up."

Then Bluff laughs like some hyena or stupid dog, as if he's just told you a very dirty joke and your only reaction is disgust.

"Scared the hell out of you, didn't I?"

"What-"

He puts a finger to his mouth and makes a 'shhh' sound before laughing again. "I figure it'll piss you off more if I tease you and then leave. You won't read about that in your books, let me tell you. They wouldn't want you to know."

"You-You-" you start to sputter, only for him to turn around and walk off, waving back to you in a non-chalant manner. You whisper a hundred curses under your breath, some of them incredibly creative and inappropriate for a seventeen year old, and then shout after him.

As he walks, his arms swinging in front of him in a merry stroll, he yells back to you. "I got places to be. Think of it as a puzzle to piece together and you'll do fine!"

You rush after him, but he turns a corner and then disappears. You can't find him anywhere.

The worst part is he's absolutely right. He just left after showing you whatever that was, and he knew it would piss you off. He absolutely knew it.

The bastard had you dead to rights, and now you're never going to be able to get over it. How could you get it over it? That wonderful, evil, good, fantastic, terrifying, horrible eye drew you in, made you see things you could never see before. And then in the moment of apoetheosis, he took it away.

You return to your room and let out a scream of frustration into your pillow, the growing back ache from him punching you against the press as the icing on this particularly disgusting cake. At least, you tell yourself, there is no way that today can get worse.
It got worse.

The monastery's infirmary is well-lit, on the first floor near the courtyard and overlooking a sheer cliff face. It turns away from the valley, towards a row of tall and snow-capped mountains. Its windows are wide and welcoming, stained yellow and styled with metal floral designs that cast beautiful shadows on the ground. In former times it held a small textile workshop, but now it houses the sick and the injured. The dull pink of the walls at least has a certain pleasantness, and the beds of sandalwood are built to obscure the smell of pus and blood that normally accompanies such a place.

Two dozen beds are arranged in rows down the narrow room from the door, six on each side. A number of stools are piled in the corner for nuns and monks to use when dealing with patients. A table piled with medicinal tools and herbs at the far end, along with a small niche for the infirmary's chapel, are the only thing standing between life and death for the patients.

Many of the tools are old and worn down, relics of a different time that the monks can barely understand how to use. Some of them have not been utilized for years.

Right now, only two of the beds have occupants. In one are the remains of the cleaner Ishin. His head is detached from his body, but instead of blood, clay dust covers the gap. Skin peels from his face like plaster from clay, and his beard and moustache look like chipped paint. His arms lay uselessly on both sides of his body, crumbled pieces of fired clay. In his left fist is a knife held by the blade, the steel crumpled like a squashed potato stem, gripped with such tightness that no one has been able to prise it out.

Ishin is a golem.

Golems are an abomination with a human face. Built from a combination of clay and blood, the golem can assume a human form and hold it easily, created with a single purpose as man's answer to angels. It can be controlled by its creator, or else allowed to commit to its purpose autonomously. Golems are not good actors, but often they do not have to be. They are almost indestructible to mortal weapons.

The golem must have been sent by the Melik's vicar, dispatched to see to it that the monastery's stores of water would not hold out and force it to surrender. Ishin must have been...murdered, and replaced, his blood filling the chasm in the golem's soul and allowing it to finish its work without attracting notice.

It all makes horrible sense now as you think back to his disappearance. One day he had simply disappeared and then returned without a word. No one would have been the wiser, for who cared for the monastery's lazy cleaner?

It was a brilliant plan, and with Godei gone, who would have been able to stop it? Maybe you could have...but…

But Tala did anyways.

She lays on the bed in front of you, wincing in pain. Her hair is disheveled, strands slick with sweat and stuck to her forehead. You grip her left hand tightly and stare at her right arm. It is a bloody, bruised red from the shoulder down, the blouse's sleeves shredded uselessly around it. A black tattoo of thorns snakes down to her hands, as if it has tied her arm in a vice. It moves, and when it does, she cries out in pain. Her eyes are closed and she is asleep.

What did you do?

Entering through the top of one of the opened windows, a large red and yellow parrot perches on the table and watches. You try to ignore it, but you can't help but think it is listening. Its very presence seems to irritate you. You want to talk to Tala when she wakes up, but you can't trust this parrot. You will have to kick it out.

After about a minute, you pick up a broom from near the doorway and try and chase it out with a 'shoo', but it just flies away and lands on one of the bedframes. You give it a glare, then shoo it again. When it just flies to one of the sconces for torches along the wall, you lift the broom up to give it a whack. It repays you by flying down, slapping you in the face with its tail, and then flying up to the bottom edge of the open window.

This insufferable parrot. It thinks it can win against you, take away your private time with your friend. Oh no, that's not going to happen. You charge all your wrath at this pigeon of a bird into your broom, ready to throw it like a javelin at the window, when you hear a weak laugh behind you.

"What...what are you doing, Vashti?" Tala asks from her bed.

You blush in surprise at her seeing you doing this and then smile sweetly at her, hiding the broom behind you. "Oh, I was just...sweeping the room."

"Oh really," Tala says, making an 'o' sound with her mouth, "that makes sense. I mean, when I sweep a room I'm always sure to throw my broom up in the air."

"Well, there's a stupid..." you point up at the window, where the parrot just was, "...parrot. It's not here. Where did the parrot go?!" You check everywhere in the room, still holding the broom in your hand like a weapon, but the parrot is nowhere to be found.

"Are you sure you don't want to have a seat down here too? The smell is heavenly and the beds are just...to die for." Tala whispers to you before drawing a sharp breath and cursing. The tattoo covering her arm shifts.

You drop the broom and rush back to her side, holding her left hand again. She smiles and breathes a weak "thanks" as her brow furrows at the pain. You help her through it with a little transference of will to stop the spikes of pain. As you draw the pain from her body and into yours, the stinging bite of thorns on your arm is blunted by the smoothing of her brow. You're just happy she's not hurting as much anymore. You breath in again, and the stinging fades away. What is momentary suffering for the sake of friends?

You sit like that for a while, on the stool. You keep expecting someone to come and check on her, but no one does. Every time someone passes by, she turns her head, almost excited, but when they pass it wilts away almost instantly.

"I don't know why I keep hoping someone will check on me." Her voice shakes, as if she's on the point of tears.

You roll your eyes theatrically at her and tighten your grip on her hand. "I'm right here, you idiot."

She pauses for a second, a flash of surprise on her face, and then she grins. "Okay, fair. I'll amend it to, 'I don't know why I keep hoping someone who isn't crazy will check on me'. Does that work?"

You give her the thumbs up. "That works."

She nods, and then you turn your attention to the moving tattoo and the condition of her arm.
"So…" You start.

"So."

"Do you want to, I don't know, talk-"

"No."

"Alright."

"I mean…" she says, "I could talk. I just don't really want to. I wish I could tell you, but…"

"But you can't." You say, entirely too much bitterness leaving your voice at that moment.

"What?" Tala says, taken aback, "you expect that just because we're friends now we'll say everything to each other? I'm not asking anything more about you. You told me something about you, I told you something about me. That's how it happened. But this…" she tries to move the fingers on her tattooed arm, only to cry out in pain. "This isn't something I can talk about."

"So that's it, then. You aren't going to tell me how exactly you, Tala, noble girl with a knife, killed an almost indestructible golem."

"Hey!" Tala says, more loudly, "What do you expect me to do? Just start blurting everything out? People don't tell you things because they don't trust you. That's just it. I don't trust you enough yet. Is that clear to you? I could tell you later, but I'm not about to spill my secrets to you! I don't even know if you'll go to Godei with it immediately once you find out!"

Heat flushes to your face and your mouth dries up as you find yourself glaring at her, despite yourself.

"Do you really think I'd want to Godei at this moment. Do you really think so. I don't even know where Godei is. But oh yeah. I'd want to go to him."

"Vashti-"

"Oh, I just love Godei. I love him, he's my master. He's great. I love the way that earlier today a crazy murderer with evil eyes just walked into the monastery and punched me into a printing press, and he wasn't anywhere. I love the way that we're under siege and the Melik is probably going to kill us if he doesn't do anything and I don't know where he is. Oh yeah. I love that."

"Okay, just hold on here-"

"Oooh, Godei and I are just best friends, Tala. We're practically father and daughter. I love the way that he doesn't tell me anything except cryptically and I keep walking into situations where I know nothing because he hasn't explained anything to me. I love the way that I was almost killed by his own master because he never even bothered to mention was hiding in an urn gathering dust for fifty years. No, I love it, Tala. How would you put it? It's fantastic."

"I think maybe you're talking this is a bit far…"

"A bit far? Oh yeah, it's pretty far. About as far as me and my Baba had to walk to get to this monastery so we could be safe. That far. But we're not safe, you know, we'll probably never be safe unless I do it myself. I have to do everything myself. I probably could have killed that golem myself, I could have...could have…" You trail off because you're speaking so fast that your words are overcoming your thoughts.

"Why are...why are you making this about you now?" Tala finally asks, more exasperated than angry. "I just wanted...I just wanted someone to talk to. They had a nun look at me briefly, poked at my arm, and then just dropped me in here. Everyone hates me because I'm a Melik's daughter. Most of them have lost someone to a Melik, and it doesn't matter if I'm not responsible. They'll make me responsible. So why...why are you doing this now? I don't care, Vashti. It might be hurtful to say, but I don't care. I just want you to stay with me. Can you do that? Please?"

You stop yourself in shock, suddenly feeling ill from the way you just offloaded your problems on her so selfishly. Before you can apologize, though, there is a knock at the open door. Abbot Tado stands there, looking terribly ragged. You can't blame him.

"Young Vicar Vashti, your master has returned. He requests your immediate attendance, as he says he does not have much time and wishes to speak with you about the recent events."

You look back to Tala, expecting her to protest. However, she just shakes her head, looking away from you with a sad expression and releasing your hand.

"Just go." She whispers.

Article:

After two weeks of seclusion, solitude, and disappearance Godei has finally returned. Unfortunately, he has done it at a bad moment, and is calling for you to come to him immediately as he will not be in the monastery long. At the same time, your friend Tala, injured by a Golem that she defeated by suspicious means, lies on an infirmary bed, lonely and abandoned by everyone else. Should you leave her and go to your master, or forego the rare opportunity to speak to him and stay with her?

[] Go to Godei. Despite everything, he is still your master, and the monastery is in a state of emergency. You can speak to Tala later, but if you miss Godei now, not only will you miss being able to say everything you desperately want to say to him, but you might miss out on important information. You have to swallow your pride and speak to him, for the sake of everyone. It might be an emergency.
[] Stay with Tala. She is your friend and is injured. Not only do you need to find out what this problem with her arm is and try and see if you can convince her to tell you what she's hiding, but she has nobody in the monastery. If you leave her now, she'll remember that as she lies by herself, her only company a disembodied golem that tried to kill her.