The Curse
The Fourteenth Day of Elnu-eza (Elnu Ascendant), 1349 A. L. (After Landfall)
The sun was high in the sky, the day a balmy promise of springtime as the ship cut the waves ever southward almost to the Mouth of the World and her captain strove to cut the air with a dagger wearing a shirt of jangling chain. "It's a little loose across the shoulders," he complained to the knight handing out advice and corrections to his posture. "Heavy across the back too. These old bones aren't what they used to you know."
"Hah, 'old' he says!" Zaia scoffed over a cup of steaming dandelion tea. "Wait until you've seen your fortieth year,
then you will know what it is to hear yourself creak every morning and need no spell to tell a change in the weather."
Fortieth year, thought the woman standing a little apart, seeking what scant shadow the ship could give at this hour thought.
So few, so very few. It took her a moment to recognize what she was feeling... pain. In thirty years the alchemist would be dead, his life's work unfulfilled like that of a hundred others who had come before him, two more decades after that perhaps for the captain, though he seemed the type to find his doom in the bottle a good bit before his time and then, a decade or two, before the knight so bold, so strong now of mind and of body, should be bent by the passing of years until at last like an old tree beneath the snow he shall break. Even the girl would pass then, called home by the shrill demands of the Power to which she owed her soul.
"Better sweat and the pain of aching muscles now than to bleed later along with the pain of a spear to the gut," Roland added as he showed him how to bend and keep a spearhead from tearing out the links.
Better pain never, Esha thought to herself but did not speak. If one was born a slave and one knew that every day a rod would be broken over one's back than one might eventually come to seek peace with it and even reason why the pain was in fact good; it made you stronger, it builds character, it makes us human. So it seemed to her it was with most and the slow death of aging, the reaper's sickle hidden in every beat of the heart. It had been strange for her indeed to see all the rushing about to mend the petty curse of swift drowning when the greater remained, the curse that if untreated would be the doom of all of them.
Twas almost as if the noonday sun had blinded them all and only she, watching half in the dark, could see. One can go blind in light as much as darkness. The realization was the last piece of the spell she had been composing in her mind, one greater than any she had cast before to seal away the senses of her foes. The triumph was bittersweet upon the tongue.
How was she now to let all these strange and unexpected companions pass blithely into their doom, her own planned undying path only setting them apart?
Almost Esha thought she might understand her father's malice, his desire to turn all that was fair and fascinating into a toy to be broken and discarded. After all, at least then it would not hurt to leave them all behind.
Almost, and in that word, so small yet infinitely vast, the whole of her life unfolded. That night she learned to whisper blessings, soft warding shadows upon the fate of others, a small thing in the balance of the war into which they all sailed, but still a balm to heart and mind.
Antonio gains 1/2 Light Armor Proficiency
Esha learns spell: Resistance
Alas, the war was closer than she might have thought for in the light of the next day as the mountains grew close on either side Inge could see by sun-blessed eyes upon the north shore a tower that had not been there before, atop it a plate of shining bronze for a banner. The Ibanorans watched the Mouth of the World now... and their ships could not be far.
What do you do?
[] Brazen your way through, the Marcella does not look like any ship of Orinilu
[] Sneak by under cover of night
[] Try to contact the Knikut of the north shore, you have that talisman and perhaps a common foe
[] Write in
OOC: I hope the transition in the last part did not feel too jarring, but I did not want to do a filler update just so we could have the vote from Roland's PoV.
