# The Ravensong - Vayden's Storyhour



## Vayden (Nov 3, 2008)

Vaarkith returned to consciousness through a slow, painful haze. Every pulse of blood through his temples brought a throbbing spike of agony with it, and an attempt to move his head gave him a vicious attack of nausea. He held himself very still for a bit after that, blinking his second set of eyelids closed to block out the light. As the pain receded to a manageable level, he began trying to piece together where he was and what had happened . . .

He'd come north on what was probably a fool's errand, looking to erase a stain on his family's honor. His great-uncle Keegan, the paladin who went mad and slaughtered his whole garrison - he'd thought to find the man's ghost in the Keep on the Shadowfell, atone for his sins in some fashion, and return the luster to the scales of his family's reputation. The beginning had been promising enough - he'd made his way to the village of Winterhaven despite the hazards of the frontier roads, and joined a half-elf, an elf, and dwarf to rout the kobolds who had been raiding the town. The dwarf, a paladin named Garrow Greygrave, had his leg broken by a vicious goblin with iron teeth in the last fight, but the rest of them had come through relatively unscathed. An elven girl looking for her brother had joined them, along with human fighter and an eladrin wizardress, and they'd spent a perilous day battling a goblin tribe in the ruins of the Keep. After that, an undead attack on the town had forced them to split up - Iana the Eladrin and Argus the human had stayed behind to guard the town against any more undead attacks, while he had marched back towards the keep with Damar the half-elf and Hedron and Iceshade, the two elves. After that things started to blur a bit. There were hobgoblins, and sharp spear coming out of someone's back, and tall figure with rotting black flesh and leathery wings . . . maybe it would make sense again after he slept a bit more . . . yes, sleep seemed like a good idea. 

Darkness descended on the dragonborn fighter again, taking him back to its comforting embrace. Somewhere, on the edge of his hearing, claws clicked on stone, but they weren't important just then. 

-----

Erix stood frowning as he surveyed the bridge. Just above the rushing water, he could see good dwarven-work stone pilings jutting up, but the support pillars and the bridge itself were crude logs, lashed together with ropes. The human structure perched on the ruins of solid dwarven was like a festering boil to his eyes. 

"Damned tallfolk. Never build anything to last" he muttered under his breath. "One good flash flood would wipe that whole thing out."

After several minutes of confirming that the ramshackle structure was not collapsing under the weight of the townsfolk moving back and forth across it, the cleric nerved himself up and stomped across as quickly as he could, murmuring a prayer to Moradin under his breath that the planks would support the weight of his armored body. He let out a loud sigh of relief when he reached the other side, ignoring the curious looks of Fallcrest's residents. Back home at Silvershield Hold, they would have understood his nervousness - dwarves are, after all, not exactly natural swimmers, and the river was fast and deep at this point. This was his first time outside the homey range of mountains he knew and loved, and the loud and busy tallfolk made him nervous, though he would never admit it. 

It had been bad enough that the high priest had told him to make a two week journey south to Hammerfast to deliver this package to a dwarf he didn't know, but to make matters worse, when he'd finally made it there, he'd found the damned paladin had just left for the other side of the vale. The folk at the inn he'd stayed at last night had confirmed that he was only a few days behind his man, but he had another 3 days of hiking over the high moors before he'd reach this hamlet of Winterhaven. 

"Well, the beer won't brew any faster if you stare at it" he muttered to himself. Adjusting his shield, pack, and package on his back, he stomped up the high road into the moors.

-----

Ashadar the Crimson scowled down at the ancient book. It was clear there was something important buried beneath the old Keep on the Shadowfell, something this ancient priestess of the Raven Queen had felt should be carefully recorded, but teasing the meaning out of it was proving impossible. To begin with, the book was in old Turathian, a dead and gone scholar's tongue if there ever was one. He supposed he should have learned it in school, but Ashadar was a believer in direct force, and the language comprehension spell he'd cobbled together back during his student days had proved as effective now as it had then. Unfortunately, being able to comprehend the language didn't mean he could comprehend the book. The priestess had clearly come from a society which highly valued literary allusions and historical references, but which did not place much of a value on clarity, clear grammar structure, or even, in some places, verbs. What was even worse, he was beginning to suspect that the entire document was in a code of some sort, the muddled prose merely the blank-verse which the right key could turn into the sweet song of lost knowledge. The Raven Queen's cultists were a reserved sect at the best of times, and could get downright impenetrable during times of suspicion and persecution, which was certainly a fair definition of the last hundred and fifty years. 

He supposed he should count himself lucky his friend Jidoor had invited him to this hidden enclave of the Blackwings, and that the rest of the cultists had allowed him to dig through the dusty old texts instead of slitting his throat in his sleep. Apparently saving one of their members from an unpleasant end went a fair way with the Dark Brotherhood. Jidoor had certainly paid back the favor a time or two in their travels, but Ashadar didn't mind cashing in on it for a chance at these books. He sighed, sharpened his quill absently on one of his horns, tucked his tail back out of the way, and bent back to his studies. Perhaps that phrase about "Persephone's Luck" at the beginning of the last chapter had meant something he hadn't caught the first time? 

-----

Somewhere above the tent, the half-elf Jidoor stood on a crumbling stone parapet, his cloak wrapped tightly around him against the chill of the early autumn night. In the ruined temple below him, most of his brotherhood slept soundly - a flicker of candle-light from the tent occupied by their tiefling guest was the only sign of another living being in the ruins. Jidoor supposed their guest was spending another late night poring over the mysteries in the old texts. It mattered little to him at the moment though - far more ancient forces occupied his mind. The sky above was a crystal clear sheet of black ice, shot through with stabbing spears of tiny light, the diamonds of the firmament, the stars who whispered to him and lent him their powers. The last few nights, the insane murmur of the beings beyond the sky had been growing louder, so he had come up to this, the tallest remaining tower in what had been the Temple of Yellow Skulls, and was waiting for the stars to make their message clearer. He had been standing in the cold five hours now, but this was not the first vigil he'd kept beneath the night sky, and he could wait for hours more if needed. It took patience to understand and channel the star's insanity, and he had patience in abundance. He was fairly certain he still had his sanity too, but if he'd lost it, it hadn't bothered him much. 

With a sigh, he slipped back into his trance. Slowly, methodically, Jidoor moved through all of his senses, shutting them down one by one - the cold wind numbing his cheeks; the smell of grass, distance, and age; the sound of a pen scratching on a page in the ruins below; the dull ache in his neck, shoulders and calves from staring upwards for hours; each of these faded away to a slow dull murmur as he went through his exercises again. Finally, only two things remained - the piercing lights of the stars and the sibilant moans and whispers of the things beyond _behind/in/transcending/eat you _them. They hissed and warbled, clawing at the careful channels and walls that comprised his mental defenses - it was always a tight-rope, luring them in close enough to use them without letting them _rape/own/defecate/beautiful/fly with us/ears and hooves_ . . . without letting them do something that it was very important that they not do. He couldn't quite remember what that was right now - they were getting louder _your grandfather's shirt, smelling of the pipe he always smoked, it's moving and oh GOD! it's caught around your neck and/moths flying out of the lamp, passed through to the other side and they're so glorious now that you/burn and burn and burn and never be consumed/purple and green music and . . . _louder than they'd ever been and there was something very important that he wasn't quite grasping and then _you were flying through the night sky, a comet's tail of phosphorence spiralling drunkenly behind him, north past a little town under the hills and into an old castle in the woods and a great black bird opened its eye and she flew into its iris which was greater than the whole universe and I could see the stars inside the eye and he just had to step closer, except one of stars was purple now and was flying at us and it wrapped around your head and it burned and burned and as he screamed_ . . .

Jidoor caught himself with a startled screech when his right boot came down on empty air, his left boot shooting out from under him on the mossy parapet as his balance and his trance simultaneously disappeared (how had he gotten on the parapet?) and he pinwheeled through the air towards the rocks eighty feet below.


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## Vayden (Nov 3, 2008)

Hey all, this is my first shot at a storyhour. I've been thinking about doing this for a few months now, and I've finally nerved myself up to give it a go. This is the character introduction - next post will be mainly focused on how Vaarkith ended up unconscious on the floor of a dungeon somewhere, as well as the unfortunate after-effects of that chain of events. I believe everyone was at 3rd-4th level at this point.


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