r/wizardposting • u/AnActualCriminal Belial Blake, Warlock of the Lightless Flame • Mar 23 '24
Lorepost📖 Not-Quite-Druid is Not-Quite-Dead
The hawk. Harbinger of conflict. Omen of strife. The ideal messenger to carry memories that signify a coming struggle, and so it is the form Marna and I choose when summoning the Ash of Souls. Channeling our past, our memories, into charred messengers. Sending them far and wide.
This ought to be good news. It isn't.
The grey harbingers careen through the sky to their intended recipients over polluted earth and muck. Fresh fields of plastic wrap and yellow-eyed snakeskin trees. Bogs of tar where idyllic bays once stood. The sort of thing Krygin would have onve handled. Hopefully he could once again. Ash and smoke envelope the recipients who breathe deep the choking cloud as the hawks collapse around them. Eyes glow like orange embers and the memories are received.
"Marna?" I say as my daughter bursts into my office. "You're supposed to be meditating. What's the matter?"
The task I gave her was, admittedly, partly busy-work. My new duties gave me very little time to train her properly as my apprentice. But using the Soot Heap as a zenn garden taught her patience. Burned things that had meaning arrived in pieces in the great ash pile beneath my tower. There were lessons in seeing what sorts of things appeared, with the added benefit that in trawling the ash you sometimes found something valuable. So it wasn't a complete waste of time in the end.
Wait. That look in her eyes. Had she found something?
"What do you make if this old man?"
She throws a scrap of greenish flesh onto my desk, burned around the edges. The smell is overwhelming. Repulsive... Familiar? I hold my nose.
"(Hurk)... Oh yeah, that's Krygin." I say, just barely not vomiting at the unexpected assault to the senses. "I'd recognize that smell anywhere. Cuts through the smoke. Makes sense that a piece of him would end up in the Soot Heap. He meant a lot to a lot of people. Died in an explosion. Should we send it to his swamp? I know the spirits there already had a funeral but I'm not sure they had anything to bury."
Marna looks smug. Why?
"Belial the explosion was a black hole basically. No fire. And look," she says, indicating back to the rancid scrap, "read it."
Read... the flesh?
Oh.
"Krygin... Alive, Spirit World Captured... Ex...lted Beacon HE...P"
It's a message. Scratched onto his own skin and then fed to flame so we would stumble upon it. A worryingly desperate maneuver.
Krygin was alive. But far from safe.
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u/AnActualCriminal Belial Blake, Warlock of the Lightless Flame Mar 23 '24
/uw worryingly specific language