The (Hopefully Not) Last Stand of the Stranger
21
AUG/20
Mar’iya heard the door slam shut, and in that moment he felt his life flash before his eyes. It was a very short trip, since he only had any recollection of the past three weeks of his life, but it did leave him with two stark realizations: that these people were the only family this incarnation of him had ever known and that they had just left him here to die.
He didn’t blame them for their decision. Mama Paulu shutting that door was an act of desperation – she needed to look out for her blood family – and he doubted that it was an easy decision to leave Mar’iya there alone to fend off the cultists and their strange lizard pets by himself. Or, maybe it had been an easy course of action for her? Mar’iya hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to ingratiate himself to the tribe that had saved his life those few short weeks ago. He had looked down upon them from the very beginning, thinking them primitive and weak for their look and dress and crude tools and weapons. He had often pondered why he felt such disdain for them, especially in light of the fact that he had no recollection of his life prior being ignobly deposited in the desert to die. How did he know that he was of higher station than they were, in the absence of any evidence? It was as if his arrogance and elitism were shadows cast by another man; one dead and gone, but whose ghost remained behind to haunt the living with faded memories of its previous glory.
Mar’iya had felt a shift inside of him in the previous days, as if the specter of that other man was finally releasing its hold over him; an exorcism brought about by Rain’s heroic sacrifice in surrendering his freedom in order to save the tribe. Mar’iya had often looked down on Rain, even more than he did the others in the tribe; a prejudice that had reached its peak when the Waterbringer had slain Jorkhal the Defiler. But it had even predated that…why had Mar’iya constantly referred to him as Mulblooded or Mulheaded? Did he assign him these slurs because the slight dwarvish accent the young Cleric used when he spoke, a bygone relic imparted by his adopted mother, or was it just further evidence of Mar’iya’s inflated sense of self-importance?
Rain had saved their lives on multiple occasions, and when he and Oni had walked up the steps to the pyramid to try one last time in order to petition to the Cultists to release the Waterbringer back to them, Mar’iya felt fairly assured that he was willing to lay down his life for the young cleric. When they were informed that the priest had absconded with Rain the night before, rage flared within Mar’iya, and he envisioned himself burning the pyramid to the ground – in part for the contempt the two had received from the temple guards, but mostly out of a desire to avenge their friend. Fortunately, Oni’s wise council to instead pursue Rain and his captors had forestalled a fight right there; delaying a conflict which would have been a waste of lives and resources, all in the name of vengeance.
Paulu, Joe, and Pakku led the tribe after Rain and his captors, reading subtle marks in the sand in much the same manner that a Defiler might read from a forbidden tome. They stumbled upon the underground lair late in the day and immediately proceeded inside. They all knew that it was a bad decision to take on Rain’s captors in their own home base, where their enemies held every advantage, but if they wanted to save Rain, this was their only choice. It was folly, but folly brought about by necessity and a complete lack of any other good options.
They had been attacked almost immediately, beset by warriors, traps, and bad decisions. Pakku had managed to free Rain from his constraints, and was leading him away to safety; an exodus followed in short order by Joe, Paulu, and a badly wounded Oni. Mar’iya tried to make his way after them, but he was badly wounded and he had positioned himself too far behind the others. His escape route was now cut off by two of the snarling lizard creatures and the sound of a slamming door…
And now, here he was, quite literally shut off from the rest of the tribe, battered and burned and barely clinging to life. One of the strange lizards had torn a giant gash in his thigh with its fanged mouth, and the stench of death draped itself delicately over Mar’iya like a funeral shroud. He had managed to confound the creature for a brief moment, hiding the very memory of himself from the beast’s primitive animal brain; though it stood scant feet in front of him, licking Mar’iya’s lifeblood from its lips and looking around in confusion. He had bought himself but a few moments more…merely prolonging the inevitable.
Mar’iya was dying; this he knew with a strange sense of calm. He would have liked to think that he had lived a good life, but he had no way of knowing if this was true – he hadn’t exactly earned Sainthood in the three weeks he could remember. This realization shook him to his core. No! He was not going to die here, ignobly becoming a meal for these creatures, dying alone and unknown in the bowels of the earth. Mar’iya steeled himself, reaching deep within to a reserve of energy buried in the far recesses of his mind; breathing a sigh of relief when he found a faint spark of power still burning there. His white eyes crackled with psionic energy as he began to formulate a plan. He knew that he might still die here, but he would not do so without a fight…