[center][h2][color=silver]Aria Lixiss[/color][/h2][/center] To Aria the knocking was not a reprieve from the terror the nightmare, but instead a continuation. Her nakedness within it had felt so real that in the first few moments of paranoid wakefulness she believed she was about to be discovered without her glamor, so she hid beneath the covers. There she curled up, embraced by the warm furs that were made slightly damp by her sweat, and clutched at one of her shaking hands, bringing it up to her face. In the dark of her cowering spot it looked gray. Gripped by even greater panic she practically fell out of the bed, pulling the furs after her onto the floor to stay hidden, where she groped blindly under her cot till her hand found sharp metal. Aria dragged the Khopesh from its hiding place into her fur nest, cutting her hand on the sickle shaped sword edge in the process, before grasping the handle with both hands and planting the tip of the blade in the wooden floor boards. She tried to calm herself, praying that it would still work, and focused as she tried to banish her fear and loneliness. Ths caused the glyphs along the blades sies to glow with a soft, warm, golden light that revealed Gadria the dwarf to be the person hiding beneath the covers, rather than Aria the halfling. She was safe. She was hidden. He was still there for her. The illusion holds for another day. [sub]The delusion holds for another day.[/sub] She let out a gasping filled bout of laugh in relief as the fear and adrenaline faded away. [color=silver]Just a dream Aria, it was all just a dream.[/color] She reassured herself before throwing the covers back onto the bed only to find a small fairy sitting on one of the posts. Fairy was perhaps not the most accurate description, but was the closest parallel to a creature of myth she could think of. The pint sized creature had dark obsidian chitin instead of skin and were a fairy had insect wings it instead had a beetle shell covering a pair of rainbow feathered wings. Its head was of an insectile humanoid, featuring large dark eyes, a pair of antennae and mandibles where its mouth should be. It carried small composite bow and had two small quivers of arrows hanging from a belt that was the only thing the sexless creature was wearing. [color=Chartreuse]”you called?”[/color] Aria had not meant to do that. She was rather glad she had stopped the summon spell she had cast in her panic before she got someone who would make fun of her sorry state. [color=Chartreuse]”you’re a mess”[/color] [color=silver][i]Carmista damn it[/i][/color] She was a mess. Not that she looked it, Gadria hair was still immaculate braided and her skin unblemished, but Aria could feel how bad it was beneath her glamor. She felt like she needed to wash several times over, but recognized there was no time for that, having finally registered what Mira’s words had actually been. First she dealt with the consequences of her self inflicted hand injury, bandaging the wound with a strip of cloth and wiping the blade clean of her blood. Then she dried herself off as best she could with the light clothes she had worn to bed and hung it up on the same stand that her clothes had been drying on, damp as they were from the previous nights excursion into the rain. Aria’s clothes, a simple and drab shirt, worn trousers, tough boots and a long may pocketed coat all became the colorful blue and red outfit of Gadria the moment she put them on. Her journal was retrieved from the night stand, her Otmon saber hooked onto her belt and the Khopesh stored in a single sided leather sheath beneath of her jacket, where it joined a small number of knives in remaining hidden yet close at hand. The bug creature watched all this patiently. Or tried to anyway, as Aria thew a sock at it when she realised it was watching her change, which stunned it long enough for it to not see her naked. Seeing as it was here already she might as well make use of the fairy however. [color=silver]”Name?”[/color] [color=Chartreuse]”Hek”[/color] [color=silver]”... ok Hek, stay in my hair and watch my back”[/color] The little bug person compiled without complaint and ended up dangling upside down from Aria’s ponytail, hidden from sight by merging its own weak glamor into that of Gadria’s long fluffy red hair. Aria was somewhat frustrated with the fact that she felt better simply from having Hek’s silent company. Now ready she proceeded to move a chair out of the way of the door and then unlocked it. As she headed down the hall she tried to push the dream of the desert from her mind, explaining it away as but a broken recollection of her first task. Yet the voice in the temple stuck with her. Most of it she thought of as simple self deprecation, an out-welling of loathing for her lot in life, but the last part. The last part had her confused as she tried to rationalize it all away. [color=9e0b0f][i]I will devour him, and when I do...you will be mine.[/i][/color] The scruffy Aria was haunted and confused by that final line, the source of it eluding her self reflection, as the immaculate Gadria IronHeart headed downstairs to meet her fellow debtors. Those that she found already there were a dwarven gunslinger and, to her surprise, the noble woman who had almost been killed by an angry mob yesterday. She greeted them with a simple [color=silver]”Morning”[/color] and then sat down at the table, as far from the noble woman as possible, to wait for the others. What she really wanted to do was get something to drink to get the dry taste of sleep out of her mouth, but that would have to wait.