To Seek and Be Found
Elsewhere, Elsewhen
For a moment that spills out like water on polished stone the choice hangs in the balance, intrigue balanced against caution, yet in the end you sigh and turn away, too much of a risk for too little gain, even with someone to watch your back. You swim back towards the ship, resolved to wake from whatever this dream might hold. Then you hear a woman's voice pulsing from within the lights... calling your name.
"I'm hearing someone..." you say to Esha.
"Either someone who called you here, or someone in peril as deep as the sea," she replies.
You curse under your breath, viciously and yet... what would it say of you if you would not even dare a dream to help someone in need. you walk slowly into the water, it's chill growing with every step, first to the ankles sloshing in your shoes, then to the knees the fabric of your pants clinging unpleasantly then finally reaching out across the chain and padding of your armor. It is all that you can do not to turn back as every instinct screams at you that it would be madness to go out into the sea wearing his. Well so would foregoing breathing and I am about to do that. As you advance towards them the false fire does not stay where you had first seen them, but seems to float farther and deeper, beckoning.
Step by step and breath by breath you walk into the sea until at last the waters close over you. You feel lighter up here almost as if... you jump on your heels, feeling lighter than you ever had in the sea.. You take a breath, ready to rise at once... then another and another. Forests of kelp waving in the currents rise all about and fish in colors bewildering and fair dart from place to place as the dark waters come alive and still the lights lead you on.
Past spires of stone that seem to have been carved from mad imaginings, over great sweeping plains of white sand that should have taken hours to walk across and yet take moments. The sounds of the deep are also ones that had not fallen on mortal ears, whales there are certainly and their smaller kin, among the ranks of fishes the more fair musicians, tough not all are so blessed. You almost trip over what you had taken for a stone and is instead a warty
fish halfway to being a toad belching its own odd calls.
"Ah... so you are listening. I had wondered if you would care to listen to a voice unlocked for..."
Unlooked for the words may be, enough to make you jump and look about with sudden suspicion and reach for the sword that isn't there, and yet it is not unfamiliar. That is the voice of Lina Osane, she who would have been queen in Apuku but for the fact that she had gone into the sea, by all accounts at the behest of the Formless and their servants.
"I mean you no harm, I am only speaking to you now and not any of the othes because I could not be sure if any of them would hear... or care."
"Care about what... my lady?" you stumble over your words, unsure if you aught to use the honorific to a figure in a dream
Perhaps hearing the uncertainty in your voice Lina appears then before you in a haze of sand and swirling bubbles her flesh almost seeming to melt
into being. She seems for the most part unchanged despite the odd circumstances, save only that she wears a blouse and pants all tight fit to the body. Sensible enough you suppose given that most free floating clothes would float, though strange still to your eyes that she would we wearing silk dark as he stormy sky.
"Care that I was driven from my home, that I was threatened with death if I would refuse the path that was set for me before I was even born. My brother was about to sell me to the storm for fair weather at the last, 'the needs of the realm' before the heart of the man." She speaks the words with such scorn as to peel whitewash off stone. "I chose another path as you can see and now I am safe yet..."
Silence reigns, not you realize of hesitation, but making her words all the more weighty.
"He is dead now and I mourn him, but I would mourn the land of Lirman more left without a helmsman in its hour of need. Tell me sir knight how would you judge those of the Houses would take my safe return?"
"In what form my lady?"
"You are known as a great warrior yes? A slayer of beasts and daemons?" The words come faster now, as though she rushes though a plan forged of desperation. "So then this nigh perhaps your ship might be 'lost' and you should find me, free me from those who had taken me from my home and bring me back. Though the rescue would be false, still you would save the land of Lirman from much strife and ruin."
And your service would be remembered, you hear as well the words that are not spoken even here. A dishonorable bargain you would call this, rooted in lies and deceit, yet can you be sure that by not taking it worse evil would not come to pass? A war over who would rule the island would be a bloody thing, for there are no heirs of House Osane worth the name. Can fair things rise from a black seed? Can you even blame the princess for choosing to flee into the sea under her terms rather than be given away?
What do you reply?
[] Agree to the plot
[] Reject the plot
[] Write in
OOC: Saved by the missed will save so I do not have to rewrite a whole update.
