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7 mos ago
Current Back from romantic getaway! Working on replies!
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7 mos ago
Romantic weekend with boyfriend, no replies. Sorry friends
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I raised my hand. The sapphire gems in my arcane glove began to glow softly. I spoke a few quiet words. The golden channels that connected the gems pulsed with light. The air shimmered in front of me. A cat appeared. Not a real one. An image made of light and magic. It was whimsical and strange. Its grin was too wide. Its body faded in and out like smoke. Its tail curled in impossible spirals.

"But perhaps you'd like to follow the kitty instead?" I suggested.


I cast Silent Image here, made sure to check a used spell slot.
I was still trying to count heads around my grandfather's gazebo when I heard the excited whispers behind me. Children's voices. Several of them. I glanced back just long enough to see a small group gathered a few paces away. They were staring at Flurry with wide eyes and pointing fingers. The boy who led them looked about eight or nine. He seemed thrilled rather than afraid.

I turned back to the gazebo. If there were only two or three people with my grandfather, I could approach without overwhelming him. But the children's whispers grew louder. More excited. I was trying to focus on both things at once when I heard small footsteps running toward me.
"Dogie!"

A little girl broke from the group. She couldn't have been older than three or four. Her arms stretched out in front of her as she ran toward Flurry with unsteady steps. "Pet the dogie!" she called out happily.

I moved without thinking. I tried to step between Flurry and the approaching child. I kept my movements smooth and deliberate. No sudden gestures that might startle anyone.

"I'm afraid this doggie bites," I said gently. I kept my voice polite but firm. The tone my mother used when correcting behavior at formal dinners. "He's not safe to pet."

I raised my hand. The sapphire gems in my arcane glove began to glow softly. I spoke a few quiet words. The golden channels that connected the gems pulsed with light. The air shimmered in front of me. A cat appeared. Not a real one. An image made of light and magic. It was whimsical and strange. Its grin was too wide. Its body faded in and out like smoke. Its tail curled in impossible spirals.

"But perhaps you'd like to follow the kitty instead?" I suggested.

I moved my fingers slightly. The phantom cat turned and began to drift across the lawn. It moved with a bouncing, playful gait. Its tail swished back and forth. I guided the image away from me. Away from Flurry. Toward an open space on the lawn where the children could chase it safely.
The argument with your mother still echoes in your mind.

You'd just returned from meeting Bartholomew, the nobleman your parents arranged for you to marry. A solution, they called it, to your struggles with magic. Where your siblings excelled at their studies, you faltered, and so your fate was decided: if you couldn't master the arcane arts, you would secure the family's position through marriage instead.

But Bartholomew was worse than you'd imagined. Cruel, entitled, and during that disastrous meeting, he'd let something slip about your mother's work. Something about her recent magical advancements for the Crown. Something horrific.

When you confronted her, Trisha Wrenfield, your mother, had been cold. Dismissive. She refused to explain, refused to justify, simply expected your obedience as she always had. The argument escalated in her study, voices rising, until words came pouring out of you, three desperate declarations that burned in your throat as you spoke them.

You remember her cold dismissal, Bartholomew's cruel smirk still fresh in your memory, the suffocating walls of your family's estate closing in. You remember the words tumbling out of your mouth, three pleas born from frustration and pain.

Then... nothing.

Now you're here.

You wake gasping, as if surfacing from deep water. The stones beneath you are damp and cold, pressing against your palms as you push yourself up. Your fine dress (the one you wore to meet him, that awful man your parents chose) is rumpled and dirty at the hem, completely inappropriate for wherever you are now.

It's dark. Not the darkness of night in Valerith, where streetlamps burn with cold, efficient magelight. This is a warm darkness, full of shadows that seem to dance and breathe. You're in an alley, narrow and twisting, but you can hear sounds beyond: music (actual music) drifting from somewhere nearby, laughter, the clink of glasses, voices raised in song.

Music.

In Valerith, that sound would be followed by screams and the march of guards.

But something else demands your attention. Something inside you.

For years, magic has been like trying to hold water in your cupped hands, always slipping away, always just out of reach while your siblings wielded it effortlessly. Your parents' disappointment had been a constant weight, their solution a marriage you never wanted.
But now...
Now it's different.

You feel it coursing through you like liquid fire in your veins, powerful and present and yours in a way magic has never been before. It's not the structured, rigid magic of Valerith's teachings. This is something wild, something that answers to you with an eagerness that's almost frightening.

Your hand instinctively goes to your throat, and relief floods through you. Your grandmother's pendant is still there. The one piece of her you managed to claim, after weeks of childish insistence wearing down your mother's resolve. You remember the day she finally relented, how she'd knelt down to fasten the clasp around your neck with gentle fingers. "You're as stubborn as she was," your mother had said softly, and for once there had been warmth in her voice, maybe even pride. She'd tucked a strand of hair behind your ear and added, "She would have wanted you to have it."

Now this expensive heirloom (a delicate white gold chain with a star-shaped pendant, its points extending like directional markers, an emerald gleaming at its center) rests against your collarbone. At least you're not completely without resources.

But where are you?

The architecture you can see at the mouth of the alley is wrong, too organic, too flowing. Where Valerith's buildings are all straight lines, these seem to grow rather than be built. And the air... the air smells of night-blooming flowers and something sweet you can't identify. The temperature is different too, warmer than home, more humid.

The music swells again, and you hear actual joy in those voices. Your heart pounds. Nothing makes sense. How did you get here? Was it the wishes? Did something actually hear you?

And this power thrumming through you, what is it? Where did it come from?

What do you do, Kalila?

The morning procession arrives as it always does. It is a wet, shuffling mass of devotion. The sound reaches you first. The slap slap slap of webbed feet on stone. The gurgle of water being pushed from gill slits. The occasional plop of something dropping from someone's hands and being picked up quickly.

High Priest Blibdoolpoolp leads the group. His name sounds like someone drowning. He wears what might have once been ceremonial robes. Now they are just strips of rotting fabric held together by algae and faith. His bulging eyes fix on you with an intensity that makes your skin crawl. Behind him, a dozen acolytes carry offerings on waterlogged cushions. The cushions squelch with every step. They leave a trail of murky water across the cathedral floor.

"SHOOGBIMBHALD!" Blibdoolpoolp's voice scrapes out of his throat like gravel being dragged across a fish tank. He throws himself flat before your throne. The wet smack of his body hitting stone echoes through the chamber. The other kuo-toa follow. They create a sound like a dozen fish being slapped against a counter. "SHOOGBIMBHALD! SHOOGBIMBHALD! SHOOGBIMBHALD!"

The chant builds. It always builds. Their voices bubble and rasp. They layer over each other in a rhythm that is not quite music and not quite language. Your flumph companion drifts a little closer to you. Its soft glow pulses in what you have learned to recognize as concern.
After what feels like forever but is probably only a few minutes, Blibdoolpoolp rises. Water streams from his robes. His gill slits flutter with emotion.

"Great SHOOGBIMBHALD," he croaks. He gestures to the offerings. "We bring tribute! We bring glory! We bring..."
He pauses. Squints. Leans closer to one of the cushions.
"...a boot?"

Indeed, among the blind cave fish (still twitching), the glowing mushrooms (pulsing with sickly light), and what appears to be a very confused crab, there sits a single leather boot. Just the one. It is soggy, worn, and has a hole in the toe.

"The boot was making speeches in the drowned market!" an acolyte pipes up. His voice is wet with enthusiasm. He is younger than the others. His scales are still bright. "Very powerful speeches! When the water moved, the boot said 'squooolsh' and then 'glorple' and we thought... we KNEW... that you might want to eat its power!"

The acolyte holds up the boot like it is a sacred relic. Several other kuo-toa nod hard. Their heads bob in that unsettling way that makes their eyes seem to move on their own.

"It spoke with great authority," another adds seriously.
"The finest authority," a third agrees.

Your flumph does what you have come to recognize as its "here we go again" float. It rotates slightly counterclockwise while dimming its light. This might be the telepathic jellyfish version of a sigh.

Blibdoolpoolp continues presenting the offerings. Each one is announced with grave ceremony.

"Seven fish of the deep darkness, caught in the coldest waters where the screaming stones dwell!"
The fish are pale and eyeless. Their mouths are frozen in permanent gasps.
"Mushrooms blessed by the Mother of Pearl, grown in the fertile waste of the drowned!"
The mushrooms glow faintly. You have eaten these before. They taste like wet dirt and make your tongue numb.
"A crab of great wisdom!"
The crab makes a break for it. An acolyte catches it, gets pinched, and begins bleeding from the webbing between his fingers. He does not seem to notice.
"And a tribute most precious... the speaking boot of power!"

The boot squelches as it is held high.

The congregation waits. Their bulging eyes are all fixed on you. They are completely still now except for the gentle flutter of their gills and the occasional drip of water from their bodies. The silence stretches. You can hear your own breathing. You can hear the distant sound of water moving through the flooded caverns below.

They are waiting for you to speak.
They are always waiting for you to speak.

Your flumph drifts closer. The kuo-toa stare. And stare. And stare.
Blibdoolpoolp's mouth hangs slightly open. It reveals rows of needle teeth. A thin strand of drool begins to form.

What does Leo say or do?
<Snipped quote by LiLNasY>

Ah. I knew I was forgetting something. Professor Finch has sequestered herself with her bridesmaids to prepare for her walk down the isle and will only emerge when it is time for the wedding.


Haha, no worries at all! Viktor is just putting his laser focus on those three things. If the bride is sequestered away, then he wouldn't be able to see her anyway!
You wake on the same stone slab. It is wet from the chamber's constant dampness. The air sticks to your skin like a second layer of clothing. It is thick and heavy. It tastes of salt and something older. Something from deep places where light has never reached.

Your clothes were once part of a fancy costume. The embroidered patterns are now hard to see under layers of mildew. They stopped being dry long ago. The stone beneath you is cold. Always cold. It doesn't matter how many months you have been here. Three months now? Four? Time moves strangely in these flooded places. You don't measure it by sun or moon. Instead, you measure it by prayers whispered in voices that bubble and rasp.

The Kuo-toa believe you are a god. They call you SHOOGBIMBHALD.

Each day their prayers wash over you like waves. They never stop. And each day something happens. Last night you raised your hand and the waters of the flooded hall parted. You had only wished it, and it happened. The fish people threw themselves on the ground. Their bulging eyes gleamed with worship. Their sticky webbed hands pressed to the slimy floor. You saw yourself reflected in those eyes. Something bright, something vast, something different.

But the memory of last night is not what wakes you now. Your breath comes quick and shallow. Your body is covered with sweat despite the cold chamber. It is the dream.

The statue.

You cannot remember its face, if it even had a face. But you remember the weight of it, the presence. It filled your sleeping mind, vast and silent. It was carved from stone so black it seemed to swallow the darkness around it. You stood before it in your dream. Though it did not move, though it did not speak, you knew it was aware of you. Watching. Waiting.

And you knew where it stood.

The forbidden chamber.

Your followers do not speak of it. That is what they are now. When you have asked about it, their bulging eyes look away. Their gill slits flutter. The priests croak warnings in their wet, garbled language. The warriors block the passage with their crude spears. Forbidden, they say. Sacred. Death.
The cathedral itself is ancient beyond measure. You have seen enough of the building to know the fish people did not build it. The graceful arches are now broken.

The columns are carved with ancient Elvish, though time and water have worn many of the words away. You can understand a couple of words, but the full meaning escapes you. The style is elegant, cruel, beautiful in its precision. The Kuo-toa whisper that the drow built these stones. The dark elves of Lunalis, before their kingdom fled west as the sea came creeping in. That was centuries ago. The waters have pulled back since then, but the deep remains close. The sea caverns open wide in the flooded depths below. The cathedral's towers hang upside down, like roots seeking sky. In their upside-down halls, the Kuo-toa have made their home.

And you, their god.

You swing your legs from the slab. Your feet find the always-damp floor. Your fingers brush the tarnished bells that were once sewn into your costume's hem. They are silent now, waterlogged. The costume you wore when the mind flayers attacked your mistress's caravan. The costume you still wore when you and your flumph companion stumbled upon this place. Somewhere in the twisted halls beyond, you hear the wet slap of footsteps. The bubbling chant of morning prayers. They will come soon with offerings: blind fish, cavern mushrooms, trinkets pulled from drowned places.

Your flumph friend drifts nearby, a soft glow in the darkness. It has stayed with you since that day. Since you led the gas spores to the duergar slavers. Since the Kuo-toa burst from these doors and saw what they wanted to see.

And you have always been very good at going where you were not supposed to go.

As you wake up, what do you do?
[PLACEHOLDER]
The festival atmosphere pressed against me. Everywhere I looked, there were people. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They laughed and talked and moved through the decorated grounds in colorful waves. The arcane lanterns cast warm light across their faces. The music seemed to pull them together into groups.

I had attended the Arcane University until just a few years ago. Even then the campus had been full. But it had been full of students and scholars too absorbed in their studies to bother with idle talk. This was different. This was overwhelming.

For my mother and Lysander, this place was like home. They probably spent more time here than at our actual house. Lysander and I still lived with our parents. My sister, Lysander's twin, Seraphina had moved out years ago. She had her own place now. But Lysander seemed content to stay, especially when it meant being close to the University. To him, these grounds were more familiar than his own bedroom.

I retreated toward one of the towering columns. The cool marble provided some barrier between myself and the crowd. A tall window nearby caught my reflection, and I paused to examine it. At least I looked the part.

My suit was blood red, cut in the formal Moorvale style. It had a high collar and a fitted jacket. Murrey-colored thread traced patterns down the sleeves and lapels. The tailoring was perfect. Every line was crisp and clean.

In the distance, I could see the elf and dwarf founders. Andraste Amastacia stood tall and graceful even after all these centuries. Durwith Bronzebeard sat like he was part of the landscape itself. Solid, unmoving. People gathered around them in careful circles. They were drawn by history and legend. I had no intention of joining that crowd.

Movement at my side drew my attention. Flurry stood perfectly still. His form was stiff with focus as he stared into the middle distance. I followed his empty gaze. I tried to spot whatever had captured his attention this time.

My father had given me quite the lecture about bringing an undead dog to a wedding. Something about proper behavior and respect for the living. But now he sat hunched over his papers in a quiet corner. He was completely absorbed in his work. I doubted he would even remember the conversation, let alone notice Flurry here beside me.

I turned my attention to the gazebo where my grandfather sat. I tried to count how many guests were around him. This was one of his good days. He had been an old man even when I was born. His hair was already silver. His hands were already marked by time. If today was truly a good day, and if there weren't too many people crowding him, I should go to him. Spend time while I still could. Though knowing myself, if the worst happened, I would probably just try to bring him back.

I shifted my focus again. I searched the crowd for Professor Finch herself. Hoping the bride would be visible somewhere among all this display. And I kept one eye on Flurry's fixed stare, wondering what strange thing had caught his attention this time.
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