[h3]Jaelnec, Freagon, Irah, Lhirin, Nabi, Yanin, Jordan and Madara – Bor Manor, Borstown[/h3]
Turning at hearing someone calling his name, Jaelnec paused in following his master to see what Jordan wanted, only for the young human to slide one of his iron truncheons toward the nightwalker. He followed the weapon with his eyes as it made its way across the floor, filling the air with a relatively subdued sound of metal rubbing on stone, before raising his gaze to meet Jordan's.
“Thanks!” he called back with a smile, only to then look down at his hands – the right one occupied by his sword, the left by the iron truncheon he had retrieved from the armory when instructed to do so by Freagon – and felt quite conflicted. On one hand he had far more training in swordsmanship than he did with any other kind of weapon, his sword had longer reach than the bludgeon and would generally allow for a broader variety of uses in combat. On the other the truncheon was relatively pure iron whereas his sword was mid-grade steel, which made the truncheon much more effective at countering spiritual opponents and disrupting magical effects.
In the end he decided to err on the side of caution – and on the side of not spurning Jordan's offer – by sheathing his sword and picking up the second truncheon to wield in his right hand. He figured that even if it turned out that Irah had been right in her suspicion earlier and they were dealing with a fully summoned divine, meaning that it was now physical rather than just spiritual and that disrupting its energy was no longer a viable way to stop it, another piece of iron would still be useful. Unlike frentits thalks were magic-users, after all, and having an extra thing to block offensive magic with or even just to throw at the enemy might be useful. If he needed his sword it would not take long to simply discard one or both truncheons and drawing the blade.

Pausing to retrieve the truncheon also meant that Jaelnec was facing toward the entrance of the manor hall when Madara entered, and he found himself momentarily distracted by her approach. He was not sure why she had even come given that she had essentially been a spectator so far and simply stayed back to let others fight... though the same could be said about him, of course. In fact the argument could be made that he had been even worse than useless, having been practically incapacitated by a bright light almost immediately and been reduced from the one guarding the non-combatants to a helpless burden. Irah had even said a prayer to heal his eyes, thus inflicting him and herself with divine taint just to make him vaguely useful again. A small, almost negligible amount of taint, granted, but even small amounts added up with how long it took divine taint to fade. He had been a drain on their limited resources while providing no benefit to their situation.
But what really gave Jaelnec pause was the way Madara moved. He had not really paid much attention to her previously aside from identifying her as a woman – she was a bit old for him, after all, and there was just something a bit... [i]off[/i] about her due to her palanter-blood – but the way she walked somehow managed to push through his mental filters. There was no denying that she was an attractive woman, and though her charm was of a quite different nature than the agelessly ever-young and innocent-seeming Irah, looking at her now, Jaelnec could not help but to feel something stirring in his youthful, hormonal blood.
He wondered who she was, why she was here, where she had come from and all manner of other things. At the moment he did not even know her name, and the lack of familiarity was yet another reason that he was much more interested in Irah at the moment. He knew her name and he knew at least some of her abilities as an elementalist and a Favored One (or so he thought) and suspected that she was a necromancer... and on top of that he had already shared a moment of brief and platonic intimacy with her.
Of course none of this ranked very high on his list of priorities and were categorized in his head more as fanciful daydreaming than actual concerns he had. It was far from the first time he had felt attraction, after all, but he and Freagon always moved on and left everyone else behind. A disillusioned part of Jaelnec already expected Irah, Madara and Nabi – and everyone else, for that matter – to be left behind this time, too, once Freagon had gotten what he was here after, whatever that might be. Nothing but a fantasy. A hopeless dream. The legacy of the last Knight of the Will did not have time for romance.

[hr]
Upstairs Freagon did as had been requested and accompanied Lhirin, occasionally and habitually turning Roct in his hand to switch which edge was lower and hopefully minimize the amount of blood dripping from its still-wet blade. It was because he had been told to accompany the deigan man and was specifically paying attention to him that Freagon noticed him holding up a hand and showing first five, then two fingers, which made the knight cock his head curiously and narrow his eye behind the visor of his helmet. He followed Lhirin's gaze and direction he had been showing his fingers, and found that Irah was the only one in the area that seemed poised and attentive to read this gesture. That made sense, the two seemed to know each other.
But then just a little later, when they had started congregating on the hallway leading toward the room with the divine, he noticed Lhirin making another, much subtler series of hand-gestures. It was quite covert, his hand remaining at his side rather than raising; Freagon would not have noticed had he not seen the gesture before and been asked to attend Lhirin specifically. He had no idea what the purpose of the gestures were – whether they were the visual component of casting a spell, an attempt to communicate with someone, or just a nervous tic – but they did not seem random. And since he suspected Irah to be the one Lhirin had communicated with silently before, he also caught her making deliberate eye-contact with her companion a while later and shaking her head; a gesture that could easily be interpreted as natural and insignificant on its own, but which added another instance of wordless communication between them to Freagon's list.
Freagon was not pleased. Worse, he was getting impatient with these two. He had no idea what it was that they felt the need to communicate about in secret like this – whether it had something to do with Irah's unusual ability to detect and analyze divines from afar or something else – and he did not care. If there was something important enough to need to talk about now, it was important enough to convey to everyone involved, not just each other. And if they truly had information that was sensitive enough for it to be dangerous to them if the rest of the group knew... well, that was bad, too. A hazard and a burden.
His mood was getting worse, and his opinion of the deigan pair was deteriorating fast. If secrecy was truly this paramount to them even in the midst of a situation with lives potentially at stake, Freagon had to seriously reconsider whether he could use them.

He listened to Lhirin's input and nodded his head, indifferent to the obvious conclusions he was sharing but appreciative of his brevity. Then he listened to Irah and nodded his head again, likewise satisfied with her conclusions but annoyed with her wordiness, particularly since most of what she said were things he already knew, and he had to remind himself that not everyone were as experienced with the extraordinary as him. Even so he remained painfully aware of time passing with each uttered word, knowing that every second they spent talking about this thalk would give it more divine energy to work with and make it even more dangerous. With creatures like this, [i]time[/I] was the absolute worst thing they could give it.
Yanin's words were briefer and more practical, which Freagon appreciated. He also referenced Freagon with the appropriate honorific, which he also appreciated.
“The boy can fight,” Freagon replied when Jaelnec's viability as a combatant was called into question, “but I'd prefer to avoid it.” Which was why Jaelnec had instructions to watch from a safe distance. The page had never participated in a real fight before, but he had sparred with Freagon and studied the knight fighting countless times.

The rest were more-or-less just musings on their options and what to expect, which Freagon listened to attentively more as a way to learn about the people speaking than what they were speaking about. It was interesting. But as much as he loathed spending more precious time talking, he figured he had better add his own observations and opinions to the mix.
“The Melenian is the last person here as far as we know,” he reminded everyone, not to convey new information but simply to establish the basis for the conclusions that followed. “The sobbing does not sound Melenian. And if it is fully summoned, that only leaves one person to be sacrificed for that to happen.”
Though not a practitioner of magic himself, Freagon was quite familiar with most of the basic mechanics of pretty much all schools of magic either from experience or from what he had learned to be able to know what to expect and how to deal with it. The only price exacted for summoning divine spirits into wraiths and ghouls was magical energy, meaning it could be done as long as that energy was available. A full summoning, however, required a sacrifice proportional to the divine summoned; specifically, such a summoning always required [I]life[/I]. Someone had to die and their bodies serve as the material for the divine to construct its vessel from. With a lesser divine such as a thalk a single sapient life should suffice, but whoever served as sacrifice would not only be killed in the process, but even their remains would be consumed in the process.
Add to that the clumps of bloody fur on the landing and the bloody pawprints leading to the door, and he figured the conclusion to draw was obvious.
“The Melenian is dead. This is a trap.” To him those matters were not debatable, they were certainties. “It's not going to move. I'll kill it.”