[RPG] [FEI][Arcachon] A new resolve

[Bob]

Elerik entered the temple. He was disheveled and without soldiers, rank or
title, yet he knew that now he was home. He had cleansed himself in battle
and hardship, and emerged born again.

He spent six hours on the grounds, alternatively looking for Lechis and
waiting where he felt she might show up...

He settled into a meditative trance, indulging in his memories and feelings.
It was not, striclty speaking, the Way, yet it served to sooth his
overloaded senses. The dungeons had been dark, and he was thinner; less fit.
Less of the soldier he had been, and more of the Seeker. *Did you find what
you were Seeking?* A voice in his mind, surely just a personification of
himself, asked. *Yes... yet still I must Seek,* he answered.

A hand fell on his shoulder, bringing him back to the present. He looked up;
it was Lord Dormondt.

And it was then that he knew.

"Lechis has died," Elerik Taim said. The look on Dormondt's face was
indescribable, yet it somehow confirmed the question even as it was asked.
Elerik felt remorse, but no shock. Somehow, it was all connected. Everything
happened according to the Way.

"Tell me what happened," he asked, more to begin conversation than in need
of details...

----

After much conversing, and drinking too, Elerik Taim's face wore an
expression of determination mirroring Dormondts' own. His time in the
dungeons had indeed been a death... the death of his own aimless past, the
death of an era... and so too had the High Priestess of the Way. The time
had come for new hands to take up her cause and realize the wishes of the
gods.

So he set out that very next day, not a little hungover, still disheveled,
now dressed full in the ceremonial brown cloak of the Hand of the Blade. It
was still marked by the blood of a wild pig he had slaughtered in a
sacrifice before battle on the mainland.

He was quite the different figure as he walked through the city than the one
who had first arrived on the shores of Arcachon so many months ago. The only
thing he brought from those days was his old sword, and its blade had been
cracked by a haughty Arcaean prison guard. Seemingly useless.

But he smiled, and lifted his hood. The market square was as good as any.
And he began speaking. Speaking, at last, of a religion held til now only
amongst the nobility of the island. At first only a few passers-by stopped
idly to listen. Then more began to gather, as his voice carried out clearly
and with strength. His days as a troopleader were over, but he had lost none
of the ability to project command with his voice. Hundreds began to gather,
and ten, twenty, thirty listened with special fascination to his words.

It had begun.


--
~b
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