Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)

27th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

As you recount your childhood to a very attentive audience of one, it occurs to you just how narrow that world had been, concerned with the scramble for the next meal or the best watering spot as the uneven streams wound their way under the surface of Golarion. It had more in common with the lives of the irux,i though even then there was a kind of isolation to it that perhaps with the distance of seasons and miles might help you understand if not ever forgive your own estrangement. When all around you seems hostile and shaped by distant and uncaring powers, tis easy to direct the rage it brings to one who seems to invite those inscrutable terrors into halls of home. Anippe seems sensitive to the mood and loses some of her irrepressible good cheer, though nothing of her interest:

"The elder blood?" she asks intrigued. "A sorcerer they call it in the northern lands, those touched by the power of the All Seeing Eye with eyes still closed."

"I... do not think so," you look towards where Sirim is conversing with the chief, weaving glamors to show him by glamor-craft the Blackwood Swamp as well as the forests of Verduran and the plains of Carpenden. "I can heal and foretell the future, more akin to the powers of priests than wizards."

"An oracle then, a mouthpiece of the magic of voiceless things," she nods firmly, then seeing that you apparently do not know something she does, as children often do, begins to recount, not even showing off that much. "When Lord Nethys descended onto Osyrion from the Western Desert he taught Pharaoh Azghaad the All-Seeing how to set magic to parchment and carve it into stone, thus all who follow in that art like me and the lady Mina are the students of Lord Nethys. But magic itself there was before him in the bones of the land and in the blood of great dragons, in the screams of the damned and the voices of angels, so it came into the blood of mortals. This was the Elder Blood, which makes those who bear it feel like their ancestors and it was good, but magic does not just feel, it thinks and speaks, and so it thought and spoke even in the days before Lord Nethys. So some there were who heard its voice like onto the voice of the gods and through them it spoke, but of them it asked a higher price for men are not gods to be spoken through by the soul of the universe lightly. Some age before their time, others wither under the sun or fear the touch of water, some even go mad. There is a story among the less... orthodox sects of the Nethysian Creed that the Lord of Magic himself was one such oracle before he transcended mortality and became the soul of the universe itself, so of course his madness grew with him." She pauses for breath. "That's not really the order in which it normally goes, and there's a lot of stuff about genealogies and who made what temple and when they burned down.... Did you know Nethys drove the Naga Pharaoh mad after he chose him as his successor to teach him a lesson?"

"What lesson was that?" you ask, unsure of how to take the legend, but quite sure there had been wizards before Ancient Osyrion, the High Realm had run in part by their power.

"That magic's dangerous." She looks around almost as though embarrassed for her homeland's patron god. "I know that sounds a bit ridiculous, but I think that's the point. I never quite understood that bit."

"Never mind. And here I thought I was going to be the one telling tales," you laugh, surprised at how easy the child is to talk to.

Before setting out you are asked to divine the road ahead, but Gorok is unsure what danger to ask of. The Chelish had been oddly subdued since the death of Vicio at your hands, and the iruxi even speak of the local castle lighting up the skyline with flame soon afterwards as the woodsmen of Longacre shunned the woods. Some of the hunters swear they have felt the presence of dark spirits following them, befouling their kills before they can be processed and erasing trail markers where the swamp is at its most treacherous. Devils perhaps, Sirim guesses, though if that's the case they are uncommonly shy about their displeasure with the Blackscales.

What does Akorian divine?

[] The road ahead

[] Any devils nearby

[] What happened to the local baron

[] How the Church of Asmodeus had taken one of their own being killed here not so long ago

[] Write in

OOC: Enjoy.

28th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

Words bubble to your lips like tar, a sting upon the lips and weight unbearable in the mind:

Flesh torn bones crushed to dust
Hunger to the wheel of agony broken
Naught but agony left of power's lust
Of pale wings a curse unceasing spoken
Drown in Old Blood

You stumble forward, stomach twisting and a bitter taste invading your mouth like drinking swamp water as you struggle to expel a phantom foulness. "That didn't taste like devils," you say slowly.

"I did not know thou for a connoisseur of devil flesh," Sirim jests, drawing a vaguely horrified look from Mina and a surprised giggle from Anippe.

"I'm not seeing anything around the camp," Pepper calls. The iruxi had taken the sight of a winged-cat with surprisingly few questions, less than Cob's new knives had in fact. But then the knives had an obvious use and the cat only now proves the same, eyes alight with piercing sight.

Gorok can be heard musing, half to himself: "Hunters said it comes to them when alone. Afraid of numbers? Fire? Ancestors?"

"Maybe it's nothing." Mina's words have more of hope than conviction as the Blackscales begin to move with Gorok at the chief's left side. 'Shaman's place,' you hear one of the others who had accompanied you to east say, surprisingly.

As you look towards them they explain, "Gorok Eagle-Friend two-kinds strong, arm and... dream?"

It's clear that wasn't quite the word he was looking for, though thankfully Mina is still close enough to explain. To the iruxi, magic is not a thing apart to be called with relic and ritual, it is simply a part of the world under the surface, just as the great swamp lizards of the Whisper River do and is equally dangerous

"There's crocodiles?" Annipe asks with worry that had not been there when Sirim had joked about tasting devils. "Mother told me about crocodiles, they are sacred to Sotek, but their hunger is bigger than their holiness. Maybe that's what you're seeing. Old Blood... cold blood maybe? Like your friend Gorok?"

"You think we should be 'fraid of iruxi?" Cob asks her, seeming to materialize out of the shadows under the trees, as is his wont.

"Well, not these ones. Mother said the greatest danger to man is not angels nor devils nor demons, but man himself. So I figured the same is true for the scaled folks."

"Warmblood talk," Gorok says from atop a newly restored Warty, though without rancor, more like he's trying to show her how to fish or read a trail. "It would be good for there to be so many for us to be our own worst trouble."

In the distance all you can hear is a chorus of frogs and, of course, rain just starting up. Too much to hope for that it not rain in this damnable place. At least the air's still, unlike the last time passing through here. That makes it merely miserable under oiled canvas as opposed to setting one wondering how anyone could think to live here.

Gorok had chosen to organize the tribe into a roughly arrow shaped formation, with the youngest and oldest in the middle and the most skilled warriors in front. With some reluctance you volunteer to take one of the points just as he and Cob had done. True, you can't say you're much good with a sword, but at least you can take a hit or three more than the iruxi around you, and with Pepper and Avarice patrolling in the sky above you're never too far from help.

The rain, if not the frogs, stops as the whole gathering gets moving at last while thunder booms in the distance, almost like a warning, though for all your omen-craft you cannot say if it's to stop or go. You had been walking across the swamp perhaps an hour when the warning goes up from Pepper.

"Fire! Fire to the south!" Turning quickly you realize what you had taken for thickening clouds is in fact a pal of smoke and there is only one thing there that could be burning.

"Longacre, Longacre is burning," the spectral feline adds.

"Let it burn!" the old chief hisses and many of his people seems to agree, but Gorok stops, one claw tapping the underside of his jaw in thought.

"Might be dangerous, we should see what it is at least."

To no one's surprise Cob volunteers, but should he?

[] Say nothing, Cob goes scouting

[] Argue that you should stick together, what do you care if the lumbermen who have been bedeviling Gorok's tribe for so long die

[] Write in

OOC: No visible rolls this time since you do not know what you do not know in character.