Rhapsody in Blue :: Measure #3
I was once more called upon by the Gridanian magus turned Sharlayan scholar, T’Shira Rihll the other evening. She had another levequest given her at the behest of the Stillglade Fane. This particular leve was more dangerous than our prior forays into the world of adventuring, so she chose now to introduce me to her lover and companion, Kobold “Boldy” Sarisha.
While I would never confess it to T’Shira nor Boldy, theirs is not a pairing I ever would have pictured. Boldy, for the most part, seems uncouth, uneducated, and rather coarse and careless in her ways. Put beside T’Shira’s timid but educated, refined but calm nature they seem like oil and water. “Opposites attract” as the saying sometimes goes about such things. Far be it from me to tell anyone where they can and cannot find happiness and contentment. So it was that we now had an armed guardian along, a precaution that should have forewarned me to the true hazard of this venture. If I’d had an inkling of what we would have gotten ourselves into, I would not have left the house without Koh’li Nbolo‘s strong arm and protection.
It is neither here nor there, however, as we carried on as if this were a simple errand of shepherding errant sheep into a corral instead of what it truly was: collecting the mislaid pages of a book of Necrologos, a tome of vilest Black Magic that had the tendency to call up creatures of the Void when its pages were touched. Still, we are not without our wits, so it was my suggestion that we round up the pages using my Wind magic, courtesy of my Forest Spirit guardian, Abrielle. Once the pages were thusly collected, then T’Shira could burn them one by one so as not to overwhelm us, or Boldy, with a small army of voidsent. It seemed a sound enough plan.
There were five pages in total. The first page summoned up a minor bogy that Boldy was able to dispatch in one swift stroke of her spear. The second and third pages didn’t seem to summon anything at all until an ashkin latched on to my ankle and T’Shira’s. It was only through Abrielle’s decisive action in calling upon a nearby tree to lift us up out of harms way that Boldy was able to strike down the undead as it dangled from our feet. The fourth called up another, stronger bogy this one emitting an ear-piercing screech that all but deafened and stupefied me, Boldy made a few good attempts at attacking it, but to no avail. Abrielle, in an effort to protect me, called upon thorned vines to erupt from the ground and ensnare the bogy, dragging it to ground so that Boldy could make quick work of it.
Even with all that, nothing could have prepared us for what came of Number Five. The fifth and final page called up an ahriman — a middling tier voidsent that we as novitiate adventurers likely should never have had cause to cross paths with. The ahriman didn’t seem at all bothered by the blows and feints that Boldy sent its way with her halberd. After the daze-inducing screech of the bogy before this I was really in no condition to attempt anything, not that I had much of anything to attempt. I am, at my heart, a peaceable creature but voidsent are not things that can be reasoned with. Their sole existence is to feed and to grow in power so that they might feed upon the lessers of their kind.
In the tumult, the ahriman set its gaze on T’Shira and within that dread gaze it forced her to experience visions or madness of some type as she kept screaming for it to stop. Abrielle tried to put a stop to its gaze by once again calling upon a nearby tree to fall right on top of the ahriman, even as I called for Boldy to stab the things eye out, hoping that it would break whatever power it had over T’Shira. Even with that combined attack, the ahriman was undaunted. Until T’Shira herself threw herself forward to cast a spell I have later come to know is called Xenoglossy.
According to ancient texts and no few discussions with some professors at the Studium, I have come to understand that “xenoglossy” is a phenomena in which someone speaks, reads, or writes a language they could not have feasibly learned. There are some records within the Noumenon of this phenomena as a result of voidsent possession or in other rare occurrences when one is gifted such knowledge through the use of a soulstone. Knowing that T’Shira has long had a Black Mage soulstone in her possession, I believe it to be a result of the latter and not the former, but it doesn’t really lessen the severity of what has transpired.
The spell might have enabled her to speak some other language, but it also completely vaporized the ahriman leaving T’Shira unconscious and depleted of almost all her aether. She and Boldy were completely spent after that. Abrielle had healed me at one point, so out of all of us I was the most hale. I debated going for help at nearby Camp Tranquil, but I couldn’t leave the both of them prone and vulnerable in the middle of the swamp. Thankfully, Boldy collected herself enough to be able to carry T’Shira back to the nearby Camp whereupon we could procure chocobo porters to take us with all due haste to Gridania.
There was really nothing for it. We had to take her to the Conjurer’s Guild for treatment. Whatever was wrong with her was a direct result of the spell she’d cast. In that vein of thought is why I explained to the Guild just what T’Shira had done and how she’d come to be in the condition she was. They were displeased, of course, at the presence of Black Magic within the Shroud and there would likely be repercussions from that, but without complete transparency they couldn’t help T’Shira in the ways that she would need to be treated. I would think that her life would be more important to T’Shira than being excommunicated or incarcerated, whatever the Gridanian punishments were for such transgression.
I at least secured the promise of the Guild that they would hear T’Shira out and see to her recovery before they passed any kind of judgment. She and Boldy can be angry with me over it all they want, but T’Shira’s life was paramount. No amount of punishment or banishment equates to the loss of a life and certainly not T’Shira’s life.
Boldy made her displeasure known, accusing me of telling the Guild that T’Shira was a Black Mage when I did no such thing. I explained what I was witness to, that it was a spell cast under extreme duress while afflicted by an ahriman’s gaze. Whatever conclusions the Guild came to with that information is beyond me.
My hopes and my every prayer go to T’Shira and her recovery. I will let this stand as a lesson as to why I don’t need to be an adventurer — or at least I never again need to leave home without Koh’li’s protection. Had he been with us then I have every confidence we would have been safe.
Hindsight is ever-perfect.
