Today's OC Kiss Week prompt is Hands, featuring my paladin Dworic and @memetrash-coyote's forge cleric Therlin!
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"Here," Therlin says, "I'll help you with that."
"Thank you," Dworic says gratefully, letting go of the disobedient buckle to let Thorlin pull it instead. The strap had twisted and jammed it when he was trying to pull himself out from under the grick. At least it *had* been a grick; they had been afraid it might be drow snatching travelers, and he hates fighting people.
Therlin, though, knows his armor better than he does himself. She made it, after all. She knows just what other buckles to undo first to release the pressure, then takes her gloves off to handle it more delicately and undoes that buckle too. Before Dworic can reach the last two, she's undone them, fast and efficient, and his cuirass comes off in her hands.
"Thank you," he says again as she sets it aside, and reaches out before she can move to help him with his greaves or boots or gauntlets.
Her hands are warm in his own, thick with an armorer's muscle and callused, despite her thick leather gloves, where the hammer rubs when it swings. He smiles at the sight of her strong fingers in his gauntleted hands and lifts them to kiss the back. Then he turns them over to kiss the undersides too, those two callused spots at the join of her hand and thumb, once and then twice for each of them.
Laughing, she pulls her hands away before he can kiss them a third and third. Her fingers brush against her lips. She smiles at him and says, "Let's get the rest of that off you, and then you can kiss a few other places."
"Gladly," he says, low and fervent, already imagining what some of those places might be. But he can't get on his knees with his greaves still on, so he had best be swift to doff the rest of Therlin's fine armor in order to thank her for its make.
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ngl, "worship" was one of the prompts I had an idea for the earliest when I saw the list for oc kiss week. Here's Dworic being the romantic goob only a paladin of Sharindlar can be. Thankfully, it's one of the qualities Therlin likes about him.
Dworic Thragar, former acolyte of Moradin, current paladin of Sharindlar, the dwarven goddess of mercy, healing, and love. Most of her followers are healers through and through, rarely fighting, but healers do need defending--and, preferably, by defenders with even enough tempers to do the minimum possible harm to their foes. It is not merciful to pursue the retreating or slaughter the surrendering, after all, and a great many dwarves have an unfortunate tendency to such when their blood is high.
The Thragar line has long had many members in service to Moradin, so when Dworic showed signs of strong piety as a child, he was quickly given over to that temple as an acolyte. There his friendly, open nature made him many friends, but the closest was a girl named Therlin Strakeln, whom Dworic was quick to name his very best friend. (He wouldn’t have minded if their relationship had developed in other ways, too, because she was the most beautiful dwarf he knew, but their friendship was too precious to him to risk when she’d given no indication she felt the same way about him.) They were close throughout their youth, and never expected to be parted, but the gods seemed to have other ideas.
As a young adult in his mid-forties, Dworic was assigned as an attendant to an elderly priest of Moradin. When a band of raiding orcs attacked the hold, the old priest rushed to the scene of the battle to minister to the dead and dying with Moradin’s rites. The orcs had been driven away, but many still littered the battlefield, as did many dwarves; the priest’s attendants, Dworic included, were dispatched to clean up the battlefield, which meant triaging the injured, attending to dead dwarves with all reverence, piling up the orc bodies to be burnt, and dispatching any orcs who had not died quickly enough. The first three Dworic found easy enough. The last....
He found only one orc who was still alive. She was badly wounded, but might live, given a chance to flee the battlefield; she was clearly playing possum in order to seize a chance to do so. When Dworic grabbed her arm to drag her and realized she was still living, she looked up at him with such a fierce desperation in her eyes that he was struck by pity, and horrified at the idea of killing this helpless woman where she lay. Instead, he dragged her still alive to the orcish bodies, to the far side where other dwarves would not see her, and left her to try her chances at escape, for he dared do no more for her than that.
Though he could not know what her fate might have been after that, his actions didn’t seem to have been discovered. He went back to the temple with an uneasy mind, though, knowing that the orcs were foes and that Moradin would have wished him to kill her. Desperate to talk about it, he confessed to the only person he could: Therlin, whom he trusted to keep his secret. As far as he knows, she did.
But the gods often see what mortals do not. It was two days later that Dworic was called into the presence of the temple’s elders and found himself facing a priestess of Sharindlar, who told the elders that, yes, this was the dwarf whom Sharindlar had told her to take as a gift from Moradin’s temple to her own, that he might join the paladins who defended Sharindlar’s peaceful healers from the ungrateful. Dworic, very aware why he might suddenly have come to the attention of the Lady of Mercy, was in agony, but told the elders when they asked if he was willing that if Sharindlar wished him to defend her faithful, he would gladly answer her call.
The priestesses (and priests, though they were very few) of Sharindlar taught him the oaths that her paladins kept. He was grateful to find that his role first and foremost was to diffuse threats through nonviolent means if possible, whether by a show of strength or a show of goodwill, and that even in battle, killing was to be a last resort. It suited his nature better, he thought, than the uncompromising slaughter desired by most of the pantheon. He easily made friends among his new comrades and charges, and the only pang was that he no longer saw his close friend Therlin every day.
Fortunately, it seemed that Therlin, too, had been called, for in short order she had joined the forge clerics of Moradin, learning to channel divine power to create weapons and armor of great power. Out of what was doubtless her respect for Sharindlar’s faithful, given all that he’d told her of his temple and his new friends there, she was always bringing weapons and armor to their temple for their clerics and paladins, and somehow her best pieces always ended up in Dworic’s possession. She was also concerned for their repair, visiting even when she had no new pieces to bring so that she could examine and tend to it, inviting him to the halls of Moradin’s forge to do the same. While Dworic had feared that their friendship might ebb now that they no longer ate every day at the same table and slept every night across the same hall, those regular visits, along with time stolen amidst both their duties to spend time together outside of the temple, kept it vibrantly alive.
...And after three years of that, which was also three years of teasing from his new friends in Sharindlar’s temple and old friends from Moradin’s halls, it finally sank in that maybe, just maybe, her concern for Dworic’s outfitting, her generous gifts, her many excuses for them to spend time together, might have more than friendship as their motivation. Dworic will be the first to admit that he is not a clever man.
Brief mechanical bits (level 3):
Str 14 (+2) / Dex 14 (+2) / Con 16 (+3) / Int 11 (+0) / Wis 9 (-1) / Cha 16 (+3)
hill dwarf, acolyte background, redemption paladin
