Communing with Sagaseeker
Sagaseeker lays across your lap as you close your eyes and smoldering herbs fill the room with a pungent, heady scent. The Seeress had given them to you when you spoke to her about communing with Sagaseeker and the dried herbs had been accompanied by advice.
As the Seeress says, communing with a spirit requires an elevated state of mind. These herbs will help you towards that end. All you need to do is breath in the smoke.
Opening your mouth, you do just that.
...
You feel weird.
Well, 'weird' is something of a rather large understatement.
You're still sitting there on the floor next to the brass bowl of herbs. Sagaseeker still lays across your lap with its spirit half-awake and half-asleep as it always is when combat is not at hand.
But at the same time, you sit at the top of a hill overlooking a flower-choked meadow as a large ash tree protects you from the sun's harsh rays. Laughter draws your gaze down the slope, to where a boy no older than five chases red-winged butterflies.
But the longer you look, the more things seem... not wrong, per se, just not right. Like a jar you set down just a minute ago having moved half-an-inch to the left while you weren't looking.
The boy giggles as his sharp-nailed hands clap together around one of the fluttering birds. A loud, squishing squelch sounds out across the meadow as the boy tosses the leaking, crushed butterfly into his fang-filled mouth. His hands are covered in a red liquid that you know all too well, a red liquid that he happily laps at with a hook-covered tongue.
A pair of triangular cat-like ears flick up from the boy's iron-gray hair. They twitch and swivel your way and a pair of golden, cat-like eyes swiftly follows as Sagaseeker stares directly at you.
No.
Not at you, past you
"Well, this is certainly a surprise," an all too familiar voice chuckles behind you as you turn. Chills run down your spine as you meet the eyes of death.
An old man with long hair the color of odr and sunken eyes like coldest, harshest steel stands before you. His body, though battered by time's relentless passage, is still strong and primed for combat. Thick slabs of table-wide muscle hang off his broad frame. Though you stand a full head taller than him, there exists no doubt that this is a man worth reckoning.
Even the mere crossing of his arms heralds his existence. The world screams in agony as he carves the fact that he yet lives, that his soul burns brighter than ever into the bones of the earth. Dirt crumbles as even the grass strives to get out of his way, their spirits though infinitesimally tiny still shudder at the presence of a man as fearful as that.
But even as the world bends around him, reality twisting to lay all eyes on him, your gaze is locked to a single, sole feature. From the middle of his forearm down to the finger tips of his right hand is nothing but blackened, scorched bone. Not a scrap of flesh nor blood nor muscle decorates the limb that, by all rights, should be ruined. But no matter how extensive the damage, the state of his hand troubles him not — as if such a little thing as a lack of body parts could ever stop a man like this!
"Well, Halla?" Hallr Blackhand smiles with all his teeth on display, "Do I live up to the hype?"
What an absurd question!
When faced with a question like that, what else can a woman do but laugh?
The rest of the communing passes by in a blur of barely remembered snapshots.
But at the end, you find yourself with a greater understanding of atgeirs.
(Muna: Meeting Your Grandfather gained)
(Meeting Your Grandfather - You finally met Hallr Blackhand — in person — while successfully communing with your atgeir, Sagaseeker. Unlocks Atgeir Hugareida.)
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AN: I decided to let you have this section early, as a little bit of treat. ;P
