Shadows of Fear
5nd of October 2006 A.D.
"One moment, I want to talk." As you close your eyes you see dad and Father Forthil looking back with apprehension. A poisoned silence falls as you listen to the voice of your own inner demon, one for whom the Night Realm is familiar torment. At the beat of your heart eyes snap open into eerie silence. "We?" The words drip with malice and inhuman contemplation twined, as might a collector speak to the insect, steel pin in hand "You have tricked a mortal child into believing you part of her soul spirit,
but I can see you"
As the girl recoils as far back as her chair will allow you see behind her bloodshot eyes a shadow, a thing that might have been a bird once or something like it, limbs now branching twisting into a web of feathered tendrils, binding and strangling, holding and keeping.
"Where have your wings gone tengu?" you mock cruelly, Usum's counsel and your own voice one. "Did the cold winds break them? Where has your daring gone deceiver? Did terror of Him of the Night Realm freeze it in your heart? Where has your freedom gone slave? Did the chains of Yomi Wan bind it?" Rather than raise your voice you drop it into a whisper so soft the demon would struggle to hear it through mortal ears. "This game ends now. Leave or suffer worse than your wretched perch from whence you cannot escape."
The blood drains from the girl's face, leaving her white as a sheet, eyes wide she screams in awfully familiar terror at what should not be. In spite of yourself you remember Splattercon, the screams, the blood and the dying.
For her I'm the fetch.
It does not make you flinch or stutter, from the outside no one would even know the thought crossed your mind, but you do hesitate just as Usum advises you add a drop of honey to the hemlock, tell the once-tengu that if it flees now it might be rewarded by its master. Any emotion that it would feel then: greed at the thought, anger at the insult would be at odds with the primal terror you had invoked in the girl, enough for her to feel it as other to try and struggle against it enough that the demon would give it up as a bad bargain.
A moment wasted is a moment too long. The demon and the girl together, the bakemono laugh, an empty despairing thing that joins them tighter than steel. "Whore of an absent God! Go back to your pimp!" the curses only grow more vile and explicit in spite of anything you might say or do.
"I think it might be best if you leave now!" Father Forthil practically has to shout the words over her.
Feeling smaller than you have in a long time you leave the church. Not even dad's sympathetic look is enough to make you feel better.
"Under slightly more favorable conditions the tactic would have been successful Merciful Herald of Darkness..."
"Shut up," you shoot back tiredly as you lean against the wall of the church. The last thing you want to hear now is him singing your praises.
"Unless you have something constructive to add..."
For a long moment he falls silent and all you can hear is the wind through the bare branches of the trees, the distant rumble of traffic. When you hear his voice again it echoes as though from a great depth and yet as clear as if spoken in your ear:
"Yours is the power to bind and to loose, yours is the power to conjure and to cast out. Reach out and take it if you will."
What do you do?
[] Reach out for the spark within, let it illuminate your path (-10 XP for this Arc; Gain Sapphire Ritual of Exorcism)
The sorcerer adorns a chamber with ritual implements reflecting the five elements, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the grave, then slowly focuses her Essence into a purifying mandala of absolute reality which splits apart any unnatural joining of matter and spirit.
System: The character enacts an hour-long ritual, then spends 5 Essence and makes an Intelligence + Occult roll against difficulty 8. Success ends any form of possession afflicting the ritual's subject, ejecting the possessing spirit or shade. Because of the ritual's length, its subject must usually be restrained in some way if they don't consent to the exorcism. This spell terminates possession by spirits and ghosts, mind and spirit-riding with powers such as high-level Animalism or Dominate, the Dragon-Blooded Charm Sense-Riding Method, and so on. It immediately evicts demons from their hosts (whether that be mortal flesh or a graven idol), and can even separate the Bane from a fomor – although fomori suffer 10 dice of lethal damage as the Bane rips its way free of their flesh, rolled at a rate of one die per minute over the course of 10
agonizing minutes.
[] No, trust that the exorcism will work
Do not spend XP on Ancient Sorcery for now
OOC: You win some, you lose some, in this case you needed 5 successes because the demon did not really have much to lose of its wretched existence. Even so you almost made it and both Molly and Usum are conscious of the fact so the most Exalted of options is available: 'reach for a bigger hammer', in this case a bigger crowbar. 
