[SWP] gather 'round

[Pavetta]

p a v e t t a - - - Each step down the wall stairs is precise, crisp, exact. Pavetta can’t think of any point in her life where her path has mattered more. Not even when it led her from the mountain convent to the valley-- to a feral, wild husband, a lord of war and heathens. Nothing has mattered this much in her life until now. Not even when the pyre of her husband burned bright and hot in the cold, starry night. This moment is important; she can feel it in her bones, her marrow, her organs, her heart. This will define everything… She is drawn to him. Oriens. That is what Somnus calls him. Somnus speaks to the stranger like he is an old friend, like a king just awoken from a deep, undisturbed slumber. Majesty. She descends more, curious, ears flicking to and fro in a nervous, agitated matter. Flight or fight. She is back to this state again; she is in the swamplands of the Rift with that monster breathing down her neck, the shadow of death clinging to her heels...and it is live or die, live or die, live or die… She resists the urge to fly, fly far away into the rays of the dawn. Fly away from her responsibilities, from those depending on her. How could she ever think she could do this? How can she be what she is not? I am a liar, a fool, a thief, a liar… She can’t let them down, not now, not when she has come this far. Or has she come very far at all? Is she still that scared girl from the mountain convent? Is she still that frightened woman-child, wife to a husband she may or may not love? Who am I? Her mind spins, spins, spins. In a way that she can’t explain, she goes to him anyway. Oriens Perhaps it is because she was without a father as a child, without paternal guidance, without love. Perhaps it is because he does not seem like the gods of old she has known in the past. He does not seem the judging sort, not like that horrible Solis she had met that fateful day on the mountain top. She listens because that is what he asks of them, and he does not demand and asks politely. He is weary, so weary. She can feel it. See it. The way he leans on one side more than another; the manner in which the strange, alien marking on his brow pulses weakly. A star shedding its last light. Falling until it is nothing anymore. The sun disappearing behind the horizon. Fear is in her heart. Cold, strangling, gasping. She feels it because it is real—the realization of what may be haunting Delumine. The fires. She recalls the squirrel that burst into flame in the middle of a serene, green clearing; how close she came to...  Death. After Somnus says his piece, Pavetta asks: “If it is not you or your kin, is there another.” It is not a question. A demand. Her voice is strong, unrelenting, despite the tremble in her heart: delicate, like a bird trapped in a cage. “Is there another?” she repeats, this time more urgently, wildly, prying; unable to withhold the emotion in her voice—the fear, the anger, the shock. “Is there another of your kind that is not bound to the laws of balance?” Is there one who seeks to destroy it? a pearl in pigshit, a diamond on the finger of a rotting corpse, creature in whom nothing, but nothing, remains of an elven woman ---

@Random Events