It spoke, the Xerbian was stiff and heavily and hard to understand. He was a seeker of coconuts? No he must have been trying to say knowledge or maybe parsley? Also what was a Sanguken Monk, she had known a Sangu back in her own day, a charlatan prone to spouting platitudes and sleeping with his disciples wives, but the two things were probably unrelated. She needed to get things back into the canal this was, after all, a big moment for her.

Calliope drew herself up to her full majesty, somewhat unsteadily as she was still remembering how to use her legs after Tara only knew how long. She had rehearsed this moment endlessly in her mind, but in those mental fantasies she had been surrounded by her cultists as they woke her with proper ceremony and sacrifice. She stumbled over her prepared lines as several things occurred to her.


“Wait what?” she asked, eyeing the man, this ‘Beren’ apparently.

 

“How could you have woken me and not know my name? Isn’t that kind of the point of a temple?” she demanded, then deflated somewhat as she realized that he wasn’t following her words, or at least not completely. She felt tremendously thirsty, as though she hadn’t taken a drink in hundreds of years and the last place she had been before was some kind of apocalyptic battle beyond space and time that none the less managed to be damn dusty.

Fortunately, this Beren seemed not to be a complete idiot. He restated some of what she had said in halting Xerbian, leaving gaps at the parts he did not understand. She tried Taraic and Samodean, even the Temple Cant of Anu-Ishara, though in fairness he would have been put to death if he spoke a word of it. None of these languages seemed any better, though judging by the way his eyes bulged when she spoke the liquid semi-hiss, he was at least familiar with Taraic, or he didn’t like snakes.

 

“As a cultist you leave something to be desired,” Calliope grumbled, giving up on the theatrics and glancing around this place. They appeared to be in some kind of a cavern beneath the earth, though there were no obvious exits the fact that the space was scattered with pottery shards and coins suggested there must be a way out. Unless people had simply been casting offerings down from above of course.

 

“A.. cultist of who?” Beren replied. His pronunciation already improving as he gathered in her words and added to his knowledge.

 

“I was called Calliope of the Black Star,” she told him. Beren’s mouth dropped open as he stepped back and raised his staff, his eyes wide. He tried to say something, failed, then turned and fled, scrambling away over the uneven ground.

Well, Calliope thought that was more like it.