Fires Mortal and Divine
22st of July 2006 A.D.
As you take a step foward you look at the room. Dark, silent and with a heavy feel to the stagnant air. These creatures are not used to light and that might make enough of a difference. With a thought you let bright nuclear fire envelope your sword, uncounted burning eyes open above your head and your entire form is engulfed in a nimbus of green flames.
Lost 1 Essence
The next word out of your mouth does not sound like you, nor like any human voice, it is the dry, hot wind of deserts to be, the roar of infinite furnaces the sound that the world's end might make:
"Leave"
The shadows race the light outwards from you, revealing the sudden coiling of backs and hunching of shoulders, beneath the horrors of their feasting an all too human dread and in a moment scatter like yowling and hissing, calling out to each other.
"Bones come on!"
"Fuck you Lockjaw!"
As they struggle to pass through the only passage beside the one you had come from and the grate whence you were heading, a narrow tunnel still encrusted with filth and dripping a slow sluggish current, you see the smallest of the pack fall behind, no being pushed back, as if they were an offering to the wrathful power that had come to invade their domain only for another slightly larger ghoul to pull them forward and offer their own back to your sword.
"Let them go," you say to Gard, worried she might see this as a chance to clean house of the servants of her hated sister, but the warrior just looks on stone-faced as the ghouls finally manage to flee.
"We couldn't afford to fight them," you say, feeling a little defensive all of a sudden. It does not take Usum whispering in the back of your mind that they would not be the worst servants to realize that you might have spared the literal people eating monsters for their own sake.
They were people too weren't they?
Thankfully dad doesn't look like he disproves, more like he's a little bemused himself. About what to say to you or just about the whole situation? The idea that dad is in as much of a quandary as you are is itself disquieting, though you don't have long to consider it.
Click... hiss, the sound draws your eye back to the valkyrie. You are not sure what you had expected 'ward breaking' to look like, but it hadn't been like a compact handheld blowtorch coming out of the same duffel bag the flashbangs had. Not to say you could mistake it for a normal sort of tool. Here bronze cast back the light of your anima, there black iron absorbed it all covered in runes and what looks like the stylized form of a bow repeated over and over amid the black leaves.
The mark of Höðr, the blind archer and unwitting slayer of Baldr, you suddenly recall, the memory of leafing though a book of mythology for kids coming back in sudden painful focus.
A perilous thing for a servant of Odin to forge into her tools but potent...
Gain 2 Essence
When she turns it on chanting slow and sonorous the flame is blue-green rippling to purple like the northern lights. With practiced grace the draws lines in the air directed at each of the four corners. The fire passes over the steel of the grate seemingly without even heating it, at least as far as the eye can discern though you hear a wailing and a beating of chains against stone as though from some deep place . Gard keeps chanting, her voice level and her hand steady as the flame passes over lines seen only by her.
"Come on, we have to pull this clear
now!" she snaps as she draws the final mark. "Katrina would have felt that blind drunk at the bottom of Lake Michigan!"
Part of you wants to ask why she hadn't told you breaking the ward would be so loud, but mostly you are too busy rushing to do as she asked to waste breath.
There is a scream from the other side and in the light of your anima you see Cindy on the stone slab struggling against something without flesh, without form, a murk that poisons the air. The specter, it is trying to posses her... and then she screamed again. Anger, fear, pain all coiled together and hurled at the thing they flash like a magnesium flare and the darkness pulls back as if
burns.
You and dad both charge it, the Sword of Love reflecting only cold silver radiance amid a thousand whirling eyes of flame.
Alas the specter seems to know to avoid the holy sword its cursed existence cannot turn aside, but it is less careful about yours, perhaps because it does not know to fear it, perhaps because it can only fly so quickly, weightless though it be. Once,
twice you cleave as it flies from corner to corner always trying to slink closer to Cindy, then it seems to quiver and flies like a back arrow towards the floor, trying to flee... only to be struck by the arc of Gard's axe glowing with a rune like forgefire.
"That will only have banished it but it will have to do," the sighs. "It's not as though Katrina can be doubly alerted."
"Who are you? What was that thing? What did I do!" The young voice grows higher and higher with each until she sounds at the edge of panic.
Only then do you fully realize that fire at the beginning had been Cindy, had been Cindy's
magic. Heck of a way to find out you are gifted.
What do you do?
[] Try to calm her
-[] Write in Stunt (Optional)
[] Leave that to dad, you probably do not look very reassuring right about now
OOC: Welp that was a thing, I was expecting the specter to possess her and put you guys in a hostage situation... Instead the rolls were all over the place, poor Michael could not hit the thing even though he threw more dice at it than you and Gard, but on the other hand the kid literally rolled more successes for willpower than she had dice at the start. 
