#estamba

She had had the world...well, a world at least, and lost it.

Everything she wanted. A safe, secluded space filled with beings that she and her God had created and formed to be her librarians and companions. Sometimes a mist wanderer would come through--but the occasional company and knowing full well she could expel them at her whim was not a bother. She had read and she had written and she had been content in chronicling her God and his movements.

And then darkness. She should have, by all rights, been terrified. But she had been born into darkness and it was only through her own hard work and the help of her God she had achieved the bright in-between she had made her home. A return to the darkness was...unexpected, troubling....but not terrifying, even as her twisted children and her books slipped through her hands and all sank into the void. It would have been easy, restful even, to stay there. Things would have been over, a finite end to questions--but to leave without so much as an explanation to Isambard? A high priestess could not so easily abandon her duties, even for a fellowship of one.

So she did not fade into nothingness alongside her books and her librarians and her little world. She fought and fell and woke to familiar sounds and smells. Of salt water and the bumbling cooing of a Quaggan. A while later, days, maybe weeks, found her nestled in the corner of the Inn at For Mariner, clean at the least, her pale hair whisping into soft curls, wearing soft shoes and pants under a rather too large purple shirt that had been belted at the waist, with a mug of tea in hand, listening to those around her. Soft words and falling back on old fortune telling skills from the streets of Divinity's Reach--along with no small amount of pity she was sure--had gained her a bed and enough to eat while she considered the situation she found herself in now.

"Isambard." her voice cracked as her throat closed up on her, trying to swallow down tears. "...you were right. You were always right."

Such a sweet sentence to hear from a broken dove. They all are somehow, save my wild mate. She despises them, my pretty shattered ones, and does not see their beauty. Their.. potential.

Alas for Eira. This one, Estamba.. has considerable potential.

I gave her a very old dwelling of mine and a suggestion to find greater purpose in the Mist War. To cease to flutter to the commands of lessers.

To hear only my words.

She didn’t hear it quite like that. Stepping into the small grass-roofed hut and breathing it in, she drank the simple furniture and domicile in. She did not comment that it seemed really only for a single person - me - or wonder if I’d made everything in it myself. I had.

"Well it still smells like you."

"And that arouses you."

"You...arouse me. Your smell, your touch...your wildness and your strength...your self control. In another life I might have been worthy of you...but you are already well looked after."

A flare of fury in me. Still she demeaned herself. She had given me her very soul whether she knew it or not. It was to me that her fears now called, and my advice that clung to her like a darker miasma. 

"You will never imply to me again that you are unworthy, Estamba. You have immeasurable worth."

She belonged to me. She was beginning to understand it. Spoke it. Tried to tell herself that she was not... mine. That I would not want her to be so.

"Wouldn't I? You are not my toy .. nor my pet.. And you are not my mate. But you are mine.. and have become so with every whisper of my name, every aching need you've ever felt for me. You are mine in the root of your spine... You are mine, and both of us know it."

My words were blows. 

They were meant to be blows, and the pale girl shook to hear them, her head bowing.

"It's true. You...you're everything to me."

“Yes.. your blood screams for me. And I hear it.”

I am everything to her now.

Her god.

There is something amusing in how each of the women I have.. cultivated... is herself a deadly creature. And amusing in how each one has been freed like a caged falcon, to wing free and grow all the deadlier. My Eira. My mate. Her collar burst, my half-brother’s hand shaken from it, and her ferocity manifested. A bandit chief, a savage. And mine.

My devoted, devout priestess. Estamba. Albino like I was born, blind, and kept mewed by her faith to a faithless Goddess. Now she grows. She learns. And she hates like a sweet over-ripe fruit. 

They each belong to me, and I to them in my own way. I hear echoes. Of those who would be ours. Those my priestess could twist and turn. Sculpt like clay. I walk through swirling change and I listen to their cries in the eternal night. Seeking a light in the darkness.

In my life, I offered assistance to many I would have rather killed. I made devil’s bargains with powers too great to defeat, out of harshest necessity. Palawo Joko and the Vizier Khilbron come to mind. In a very active life spent wandering this world, I found myself living in what my people call ‘interesting times’ and I made the best of what I had. 

We fought the evils, and we faced the unthinkable. We did what no one could have predicted, and I retired in my elder years from such adventures secure in the simple truth that I have stared at evil many times. I have walked through the Domain of Anguish, and experienced all that came of such things.

This new incarnation of the Shining Blade offends me deeply. Livia was ruthless when I knew her, but to spirit away people and make them vanish is the same monstrous deed as the Mantle which the Blade sought to defeat.

“Making demands to see people that may or may not even exist anymore is hardly any way to get my cooperation when you're in the domain of the Shining Blade. My domain.“

What a rude and petty little man. Had he brought the white haired girl - he named her ‘Estampa’? New Krytan is so shrill - I would have been happy to explain how he fell into a trap I’d set for more important prey. 

Instead he made it very clear through the course of our brief ‘conversation’ in his office, in between ridiculous threats, that not only does he have the girl, but that she is in a cell and likely suffering.

And in a glorious show of pettiness, when I requested that he make good on his threat to jail me beside her, he informed me that since I had asked for it, he would deny me such treatment. 

What a Naitahlen, flush with his self-importance. This Chang Eskara Ranik is one who, were I more hot headed and younger, I would quite enjoy tormenting with the spirits of everyone he’s harmed. Thank the ancestors, I have grown up considerably since my childhood in Tsumei. 

I will place safeguards as best as I am able near their warded boundaries, and I think that it is more than time that I speak with my problematic descendant. His home and name were familiar to the foolish boy, as he sought a whole name it seemed for young Isambard. This told me much: the home I trapped is Isambard’s, or was, and recent activity through an odd blend of necromancy and the same Shing Jea ritualism I taught my great-great-however many greats grandson is due to him. That home I shall ward myself, more completely than the boy did, and I believe that I shall await his inevitable visit. He may have further answers for me about this ‘Estampa’ girl, and what precisely is going on. 

In the meantime, I think I will let some petty vengeance out with some well informed rumours in rural taverns. If the Shining Blade now believes that it can behave with such impunity, it may learn the same lesson its predecessors did at the hands of Evennia’s rebellion.