[hider=Can't believe it has been 4 months since I last played this character]
A quick update on Makeda's training and actions across Galbar. 
She acts as a guardian of the mortals, but she is only one angel and the trouble is infinite
Even when she establishes a sense of gratitude and fear in a town, they are quick to forget it
She meets the undead and starts to purge them on sight
The Realta arrive and she is knocked out after taking a few of them out [Mostly merely staggering them, no confirmed Realta death]
She wakes up a few days later in a cottage owned by a Vampire, he/she informs Makeda about the damage spread all around in the last few days

1 Freepoint to give Makeda the power to cloak herself in invisibility

Khookie Status:
5
+8  [10k words] 
13kh [/hider]


For a long time, Makeda lived in a constant state of trial. The Muse had prepared dreamworlds of challenge for her and she crossed them all, multiple times. She learned to dodge the falling boulders, crush trough enemy armies and solve inscrutable puzzles, then she learned how to do the three at the same time.

And when she was exhausted, she would sit in fake windows and gaze at fake seas, the only real thing in that world was the food brought by the dark-haired diva. That alone was an extra test in her list, and sometimes she felt lonely, a different, more intense kind of what she felt back at the valley.

But she endured, and then it finally came the day in which she was given exactly what she was promised, a chance to do her duty to Galbar. It was a sudden event, Ilunabar, as always, just showed up and said she had trained enough. The information she was given was scarce, she picked up that the Horde had been defeated and that the Raka had been a bit unstable after another dreamworld collapsed. Either way, she was now free, and she longed to see real, mortal life again.

In the first week, she flew high across the skies of Galbar, getting to know the places she never had a chance to see before and taking notes of the changes that had happened in the places she knew. All that from an aloof position, away from any call for help or terrible sights.

She also took the moment to meditate on her status as an underling of the goddess Ilunabar. From all her newfound booms, the one that brought her attention was her armor, scintillated in gilded glory, but in truth, it was not made from gold, nor any aurous material, it was leather with an illusion cast on it. And if it could be colored in fake gold, it could be colored in fake nothing.

At first, the Muse was resistant to her proposal, she did not want to see what purpose invisibility could have for the heroine that was supposed to be glorious, but Makeda had learned a bit about Ilunabar in her trials, and she knew the words to use. Contrast, suddenness, discretion, legend, beauty.

And Ilunabar was convinced, and she gave Makeda the ability to control between shining in splendid armor or being little more than a blur in the vision of the mortals. With this tool, the angel was finally able to start her patrol of the mortal land.

First, she started by making random apparitions help those in need. Helping travelers lost in the Firewind's endless sea of sand, saving Rovaick from collapsed caves or helping Hain to deal with village fires.

Then one day she found herself in combat as she tried to stop a group of Heraktati from attacking a village. When she first brandished her energy hammer and hit the beast she noticed the weight of the action. Not only the metaphorical one of taking away a life but the literal, gravitational weight of what she was doing.

One of the great oversights of Ilunabar's training dreams was that they were mostly visual, there was no air resistance, crushing bones or other minor hazards common to what truly is. Now that she re-acquired experience with it, however, she felt once again confident in her combat abilities. But across these little interventions, she once again became habituated with how Reality worked.

And then she moved on to what she was really after. Thieves, murderers, highwayman and the unorganized and isolated remains of the chaos horde. It felt extremely inefficient. 

At first, she dealt with criminals the easiest way, smashing the life out of them. But the dead tells no tale, so nobody knew who or what was behind the odd deaths, merely speculation. The natural next step was to be a bit more lenient, sometimes scaring, others scarring. It worked on a local level and as the legends of a "golden watcher" or "golden angel" or "dark-haired angel" or "gold-fire djinn" or "yellow iron sister who shimmers" installed themselves, there seemed to be some semblance of peace.

For a while, a short while. There was no way she could be active in all villages at once, even on her constant patrol, memory, fear and respect could fade away in an impressively short amount of time. And even when a repentant criminal was still talking loudly about his experience, others simply decided that the danger of possibly meeting the guardian was not enough to dissuade them from taking the easy profit found in criminal behavior.

And that was only when it was considered wicked behavior. Plenty of Galbarian cultures were based on immoral behavior, the riders from the barrens and steppes, the many institutions of slavery, merchants who made a sickening profit from selling addictive substances like wine and eçarana. And those were merely from the places not warded by divinity, beyond that there were places like the changing plains or Xerxes, both areas she was forbidden to work at by the Muse herself.

Similar tolerance was applied to elementals and jvanic beings, no matter how bad things got. But across her patrol, she eventually found beings who were clearly not natural, but apparently not within Ilunabar's list of prohibitions. The first encounter was when she found a Hain attacking another one of its kind and intervened to stop the fight, for her surprise, the attacking hain crumbled to brittle pieces when she struck it, there was no gore to be found in the scene, only bones. Suddenly, however, the bones took form again, and the Hain slowly reformed back to its old, hollow self.

This was her first encounter with the undead. Many more would ensue, mostly with human, hain or rovaick , though on a single case she found an undead angel, a vampire. Since Ilunabar never gave her the order to be permissive, her typical behavior was to destroy them whenever spotted. Galbar already had so much to worry about, it surely didn't need creatures trying to escape the cycle of life.

Her quest continued across many seasons, and despite it being better than training in the Raka, she still felt one thing, loneliness. Of a different kind than the one, she felt back in the land of dreams or in the valley. She endured it for most of the time, but sometimes she lost herself in feelings of helplessness, stuck in a foolish quest to try to make the life of a miserable place better when most of its inhabitants were keen on making their own lives worse. No amount of worship and gratitude could take away the crushing pressure of trying to swim upstream.

Then the Realta attacked.

[hr]

She woke up to find herself half naked, half wrapped in cloths, inside what looked like some sort of cottage. Her memory of the last night was hazy but she quickly understood the overall idea. On the day before, some sort of creature that looked like an Angel attacked, she fought back, and she won the first, but then more came, and she battled them again, and won, but then there was even more and some of those she had defeated before had risen again from their knockout. Last she could remember, her entire back and most of her limbs were burning, then the forest bellow started to get closer and closer until finally, she crashed into darkness.

She took a minute to thank Fate and mother Niciel for her survival. After some reluctance, she also expressed gratitude towards Ilunabar. Now there was only one factor in her survival left to express her thanks. She wrapped herself in the first grab she could find, and started to look for whoever lived in that small house.

"Third day huh? I'm lucky that none of the animals of this hill know how to gamble, otherwise, I would have just lost a bet." said a voice to her left, and what she saw when she searched for it surprised her.

It was a pale figure, red eyes, and transparent wings. She couldn't see enough of its shape to distinguish gender, but it was clearly a vampire. By instinct, she moved her hand to the height of her hips and prepared to summon her holy hammer, though a quick look at the fleshy white scars on her dark skin remembered her of how much she owed this being, no matter what it was.

[color=#D4AF37]"So you are the one who saved me?"[/color]

"An overstatement. From the looks of it, you would have survived even if I hadn't bandaged you, though I did take you out of that crater in the forest before the wolves got a chance to have a feast, then again, considering how quick you heal, maybe you would be able to recover even with wild animals gnawing on your body."

The angel didn't know what even to answer, the taunting was worse and more unnecessary than the one Ilunabar provided. [color=#D4AF37]"Either way, I thank you for that. Do you know what those monstrosities from the last night were?"[/color]

"No idea, not even the end of times seems to bother coming to this hill. It's what makes it charming." the vampire sighed "But a look at the pillars of smoke and the red glow in the horizon gave me a good idea of what those falling stars brought."

The guardian looked up to the sky, her wounds were hurting more than they were before. For a few years, she had forgotten just how good Galbar was at making what was bad even worse. 

But that didn't mean she would give up. On the contrary. She would have taken flight at the moment and went for another round with the metallic devils if it were not for her wings being severely burned. For now, she would have to wait, she would also try to get in contact with Ilunabar again since the goddess would probably know more about this than anyone else.