Cleric Journal: Day Sixty-Seven
Originally published at J.A. Pitts. You can comment here or there.
I prayed as the sun rose, asking my deities for their guidance. As I considered what lay ahead of me a memory of my youth blossomed in my mind.
There was a brother once, back when I was nearing my seventh summer, by the name of Constantine. That summer he used to perform various forms of fortune telling. I remember sitting and watching him feverishly attempting to find a way out of some dilemma which he said was too tawdry for one as young as I. This did not prevent others in the monastery from gossiping, however.
Rumor had it that Brother Constantine had been performing the secret worship with one of the temple virgins. Another claimed that he had been dipping into the temple’s coffers. Both of these things would be a problem for the temple hierarchy, according to the kitchen gossip. But to make matters worse, the young woman was the sister of one of the more senior temple enforcers.
I found the whole incident funny at the time since we had no need for money, the monastery saw to all our needs, and as for women, we had worship of both men and women. It was all very confusing and ridiculous.
Each morning, as Brother Constantine tried a new form of augury, I begged him to teach me. I eventually got the gist of things. Every morning he tried a different variation from tossing jewel encrusted sticks to reading chicken entrails and even reading the secrets in the dredge left over from morning tea. Nothing changed. Every day he was one day closer to his final doom, or so he repeated to me in panicked whispers.
Then, on a whim he acquired a set of dice from one of the taverns in the next village over. It turned out that the dice were what he truly needed. They showed him a way out of his situation. The girl was with child, his child, or so the temple enforcer thought.
Brother Constantine was distraught at the thought of the young girl being with child, and it not being his. For, you see, he loved the girl. Not that it mattered in the end.
The truth of the matter only now falls into place. I was very young at the time and did not understand all that went on around me. The enforcer took Brother Constantine into the courtyard and beat him. It wasn’t until after he ripped off Brother Constantine’s robes did we all understand. I just did not comprehend why Brother Constantine had consented to the beating.
I would think that the fact Brother Constantine was born a woman, and while he did engage in the most sacred worship with the young woman he lacked the means with which to put the young woman with child.
Constantine took the punishment to save the girl the indignity. If he paid she would not have to. This he did for love. It only now dawns on me that the girl running away with the father of her child, a second temple guard, may have proved the final indignity for Brother Constantine for he threw himself in front of a team of horses the very next day, dying in the muddy streets of a filthy backwater town.
All by which of saying, I understood the usage of dice in augury.
Thrice I threw the dice, reading the runes upon the faces and piecing together the message I was to glean. Frankly augury is an inexact science, prone to the vagaries of self-delusion and hope. I saw nothing that told me to avoid the path I’d laid out with Liz the previous day. They did point to a small discovery that would lead to grand adventures, but I figure I was just over compensating.
So, onward we trudged, forward to glory.
Gods I was tired of tramping over this same ground. Seriously. This was the forth time through this area and it smelled like kobold ass, old blood and rot. Liz thought that was funny, by the way. She said I grumbled like an old woman, which she also found extremely funny. Kids.
We paused at the kobold camp. The light was different today, the sun at a different angle and our approach under vastly different circumstances. Whatever the odds, but I caught a glimpse of color unnatural in the swamp. Past the pole where I’d been tied up, up on the small rise where the kobold leader and his cronies had made their camp, I found a glint of blue, red, gold and yellow.
There were three partial walls and a broken ceiling here, providing a break from the wind and rain. The swamp was riddled with old ruins and such, but as we neared the ancient city, they were becoming more prevalent.
One of the walls held a series of tiles; some broken, some whole. The runes proved hard to read, so I placed some parchment against them and was able to take a piece of charcoal and rub it over the page which left an impression. I was able to do seven of these rubbings and you will never believe what I found.
Connections beyond rational expectations. You recall the curious statue in the basement of the monastery. The one that fell over and crushed that villager so long ago. I recall clearly that there was a ring of runes carved into the crown of the huge beast. Four of them match what I found today.
You remember the three talking heads I mentioned previously. They had spoken to me in three languages. I’ve seen Draconic written, but never Celestial, nor Fiendish. But when I touched these runes, ran my fingers along the impressions cut into ancient clay, I felt a chill like nothing I’d felt before. Fire flooded my mind here, and ancient voices were suddenly alight in my mind. They were a prayer of some sort. A way to ward against something specific. Alas, I had no way to understand the true meaning. With more study, mayhap I will understand more. I want to show the rubbings to you some day upon my return. What a wonderful conversation we will have in that time.
Liz did not like the runes when I showed them to her and bade me burn the pages, but I slipped them into the back of this journal for further research later.
I wish we still had the three heads. I bet they would know about the runes. Where could they have possibly gone? I wonder if Sparkle found them and that’s why she left. I don’t think she’d do anything to hurt us, but who knows what her real motivation is.
We wandered around the area for an hour or so, checking for more ruins, but the swamp had really taken this area apart. Time to move on. Time to head to the tower and possibly fight some Troglodytes. I was itching for a fight after the brain beast and the vision of the Mindflayer. My mace wanted to smash something and a Troglodyte skull would suit us both just fine.
There were plenty of tracks to follow once we left the kobold camp - tracks and scat from the Trogs aplenty. Between the horrid smell and the vicious reputation of Trogs, the local fauna had decided to avoid the area.
I was feeling manic. Even Liz was getting a bit twitchy. The tension had grown substantially once we grew closer to the tower. Unfortunately we did not run into anything to fight by the time we camped for the night. We had not caught up with the Trogs, but we started finding cracked bones from where they had feasted on the remains of the kobolds and anything else that had crossed their paths. We were getting close. Sleep had begun to out-weight the battle fever that coursed through me.
We would eat cold, boiled crab and build no fire; not until we found the Trog camp, or made it to the tower, whichever came first. If we cleared the tower, that would prove good defense against the Trogs.
Yeah, that was a good plan.