My fears were right. I had cause to call on my
newer powers while helping members of the group against an unseen foe.
It was like I drew in air from a place beyond life, a sifting of the
ambience to surround myself with and protect us from such a foe. But it
was not just ambience, it was not just raw power itself in one way or
another. It felt alive, but not alive. Sentience watched me. Watchers
rather than raw magic that seemed… curious.
I dispelled it
immediately. I had not meant to call forth creatures from elsewhere. I
had not meant to call forth perhaps spirits themselves when my task had
always been to put such spirits to rest.
Although the spell is
gone, the memory of those otherworldly gazes remains with me in
memory. I have not slept yet. I fear for the remembrance of that
moment that I cannot distract myself from in slumber. In the nightmare
crafted just for me by that creature in the dream realm before, it had
been the lack of power that had been terrifying, the lack of power in my
grasp to put the souls to rest from their disquiet. Now I find I fear
that power itself.
I was not meant for this. No person should be
meant to wield such power over the very breach between life and death
to such an extent. I just wanted to give rest to those bodies left cold
and frozen in the mountains, but this power that has been growing in me
with each struggle to retain my own life in battle, it feels too much.
Too far from what I had been before, too far from what anyone should
hold.
I know that Shadow of the Pride also had this skill, for it
was mentioned in the tales of her, but the descriptions of what were
mentioned as spirit guardians seemed far more whimsical and benign than
what I had inadvertently summoned. She was said to have tiny
representations of a god she worshipped, and then later it was said to
change to owls with swords in their beaks. Mine though, mine held no
form, no playful visage, refusing to be anything except what they were; a
manifestation of the seeping border of life and death.
Mostly death. One does not fight with life, after all, one does not protect against foes by healing.
We
are on the move again, this time to deal with some orcs that had taken
over an old ruin of a chapel. I fear the numbers that are said to dwell
there. I fear I will have to use my powers again, and what that
continued experience will awaken in me through repetition. If we
survive to return to Phandalin I might seek to train with some of the
town guards, where the strength of my arm might be made more useful than
the power of the spells. I have some skill, after all, and if it could
be honed, I might not need to rely on magic.
The pull to the
mountains is less, and has been less, even though we were in the
foothills, in the very caves at the base of the mountain, and yet we
have moved on and the pull is barely there at all. My power grows, and
yet my path has never been so uncertain. Using it out here, away from
what my original task, was perhaps a mistake. I had thought this just a
break to find more powerful allies for my task on this mountain range,
but nothing feels right any more.
I should move on. Perhaps this
is not where I should be after all. Contending with a dragon and
hoards of orcs seems foolhardy, and there are mountains elsewhere I
could travel to, places where the perils are less and my task would be
clear. I would not have to use these powers other than minorly to put
the dead to rest, and perhaps, in time and with practice, this
unsettling power and knowledge would wane in my mind.
Shadow of
the Pride had once been cast out of her original clan, I heard. Her
father created ours, after all. A place where she would not be
subjected to prejudice due to the dark colour of her fur. But perhaps
it was not just her fur. If she wielded powers like mine, even a
little, perhaps they sensed in her the unsettling. Perhaps that is why,
too, the clan's familiarity seemed to flow around me like water around a
stone. Not hostile, but I never fitted with their daily lives in the
way I saw others do, especially after I took to my task in the
mountains. Maybe they saw in me that power, even back then, and were
rightfully unsettled by the harbinger of it in my skills, even so early.
It is foolish to have a wish to return and be welcomed, when I
never fitted with them back when I was a cub, and would certainly not be
now. Even Shadow of the Pride, who was venerated as a hero, was only
so after her death. Perhaps one day someone will sing a song of me to
our clan after I have passed, and I will be a hero in those tales, from a
safe distance. Always a distance. I will likely never know of it
though, for the chances of me dying on a mountain are by far the most
likely, in truth, and there will be no one to seek out my corpse and
give me rest.
But the mountains have always been beautiful, even
in their harsh ferocity, their bitter majesty. I do not think I would
be unhappy there, even as a restless spirit.
The others are
rousing from this short break in our travels. Our success seems
unlikely, but if we succeed, if we do not perish at the hands of what is
reputed to be around 40 orcs, perhaps I will make it back to those
pristine mountains where the winds wail so beautifully through the
trees.