We rest in Leilon once more. Ularan's power blocking the Three seems to have grown, for I was not able to reach them as I had only hours before the fight. Instead I found myself able to go TO them in order to speak, although Siax mentioned that I had not moved from where I had sat beside him, and my words to them had been audible. My mind, my perception then, had reached out, rather than the physical.
My time was short there, Bane telling me that it was a danger to linger too long, but I did get some answers. They thought it a mistake; an error on Ularan's part that had him not give us enough information, rather than it being malicious. It was a relief in many ways, for we are woefully short on allies.
I asked too about the 'ritual of sacrifice' that had been mentioned in Ularan's journal, and in that I had misunderstood. It was not a ritual to put the dead to rest, but it was the sacrifice of a huge amount of souls … or lives, in order to gain a vast amount of power, and if Ularan is to be believed, he will use that power to make or remake the Gods of Death. I find myself more hesitant about it, knowing that. I always knew he was more ruthless generally than I am, but it made me truly consider Merdelain once more in a different light. Ularan had mentioned putting them to rest, as if they were truly not alive, but if Thalivar was what those in Merdelain were like, he was sentient and while somewhat confused at times, he knew his own purpose, his own path, and that treads a line for me that makes me uneasy. Casting Thalivar back to where he came from, or even if we had to destroy him back at the tower, it would have been fine. He had set himself against the group, and put our mission in jeopardy. But this isn't a defence. It is potentially us going to a city, even an entire region, one filled with sentient and freely thinking people, and wiping them out. That isn't putting them to rest, that is genocide.
It sits heavily on me, the potential for that to be true, because in my agreement with the Three, I am bound to the course they set. In the larger picture, one that they and Ularan see, such a huge sacrifice of people could be justified in order to stop the material plane from breaking apart like chalk in a storm, but its necessity is a burden that I would have preferred not to have. When it comes down to it, will the others see what I have seen? Will they understand what it is they are doing, or will Ularan have kept them in just enough darkness on the topic for it to go by unnoticed?
Perhaps it is I that am wrong. Perhaps the souls in Merdelain are needing rest, but Ularan mentioned their corruption, but isn't that what the other realms do? Merely because one becomes influenced by the realm they live in does not make them any less deserving of life. Although, again, they seem to have persisted far longer than is natural I think, even for elves, so perhaps I am again wrong.
The whole situation troubles me, but it does not alter my path, not when the agreement I made binds me to it.
I think my view on agreements is not the norm, and that is also concerning.
I do not understand how someone could make an agreement, especially with someone powerful, gain the rewards for that agreement, and then intend on either not following through on their part, or try to get out of it somehow. It is duplicitous and undermines the very nature of their agreement. Even if the outcome is not as they would have wished, it was an agreement they made regardless, and they should uphold to that. And yet people seem to feel it is entirely justified that they do so. Such a world-view is alien to me and unsettling in the extreme, especially when coming from a paladin whose entire life has been devoted to his oaths. What are oaths if not agreements, and yet Idris thought he could make an alliance with a God, the very God we are pitted against, and then somehow get out of it afterwards.
We were in many ways exceedingly lucky that Talos did not see fit to respond positively to Idris's offer, because with the amount of agreements he does hold: celestial; devil; demon; the Three; his God; and then potentially Talos on top of that, I cannot see him managing to maintain his oaths and agreements for long. I've heard tell of Oathbreaker Paladins from my youth, and considering one of Idris's most redeeming features is his willingness to try and do what is right for people, the taint of becoming an Oathbreaker would likely destroy such a core part of him that he would become unrecognisable. I challenged him over the stupidity of trying to make an agreement with a God like that, and while I do not believe he understood my reasoning entirely, he has at least shown a willingness to consult the group before making decisions that affect us all. Hopefully that will keep him from turning oathbreaker for a while longer.
But I don't think that Idris's lack of wisdom is the only thing that would break agreements. I think that many in the group, if not all, would feel little at breaking a promise or agreement if they felt it was justified or inconvenient enough. It is just that Idris, out of all of them because of his calling, is the most stark. Even Ularan, who I was led to believe had agreements with the Three, seemed more than willing to change his plans and cut them out of it, using their power rather than serving their interests.
There is much about general humanity that I do not understand. Agreements should be binding, no matter how inconvenient.
I did not know what I was truly agreeing to when I first made that agreement with the Three back at the Woodland Manse. I made the best decision based on the information I had at the time, and the pressures that surrounded me. I had thought that I would do tasks for them, and that they would support me in my own tasks as I felt they had done all my life. Knowing what I do now, that it was likely the fragment of God power that I had found that had aided me, and that their tasks are so encompassing as to cut out my own, for the moment at least, I do not know whether I would have made the same agreement. It might have altered what I had agreed to, or it might not.
But that is not the life that I have lived. I have lived in this world, and made the decisions I made based on what I knew. I gained what they said I would, and I still walk this earth as their agent because of that agreement. I will continue to do so until circumstances alter and they no longer need me in that role, or they grant me rest when I grow too weary of this world.
Do I like the thought of having to follow their plans and potentially wipe out an entire capsule of civilization? No. Profoundly no. But I made that agreement with them, and that agreement stands.
I look at the rest of the group though, and indeed the humanity around me in Leilon, and I know that most, if not all others, would not look upon it the same way. Survival, the greater good, selfishness, greed, or any other host of reasons would turn them from an agreement, and make them break it. I look at them and it feels like a gulf, an even greater one, between me and them, that they would disregard something so fundamental, so important.
-==I==-
The words of the Three still linger with me as we stay in Leilon.
We have been pushing so hard and for so long that it feels odd and unsettling to suddenly have little to do, even if it is for under a full night and day. I have tried to busy myself by reaching out to Zatharius in Candlekeep about potential artifacts held there related to the Three, after something they said reminded me of a comment he made some time ago in Thundertree tower.
I met Ularan's contact in Leilon too, an older looking dwarven woman with clever eyes and a smart tongue. From her words I do not know that I can trust her, for she seemed to be testing me, to see if I would offer to lay her to rest when she had an agreement with Ularan already. Was it a test to see if I would go against her Master, or to merely test what I would do generally, I do not know. I have seen people with her type of wit before, using words like blades, testing boundaries and where they might sink them in future. She was looking for weaknesses I think, although what weakness I don't know. She made it clear she found at least some of us more of a liability than others, and I couldn't disagree.
She seemed eminently capable, and knew more about us than was comfortable. She would certainly be a formidable ally if she chose to give her loyalty to someone. But would she? From Ularan's words, and from the hints around the edges of hers, I do not know if she is loyal, or just bound into being so. She was not dead, or undead, but it was clear she followed his orders either way.
I suppose I am wary of Ularan's people, considering my other run-in with them.
I suppose too that the feeling of being lacking lingers with me when faced by people of power and competence. I have to remind myself that Ularan had not managed to deal with the Talos ships, not as we had. Emberlost would have been lost to him entirely if it were not for us. But that doesn't stop the fact that most of that time felt like a balance that tipped wildly towards us failing, right up until the moment that we didn't. Our competence often feels more like luck than a cohesive group should.
I watched as she walked away, Ularan's contact, and she went off alone; a single figure intending on clearing up the mess we had left on the coast. I had offered her any help I could give, but she had no need of it.
As I watched her go, a small but beautifully carved sending stone in my hand from her as a way of contact, I felt like a cub again, young in the knowledge of the world, and aware of how much I didn't know as a result. There was a yearning for that time, back when I'd stayed with the dwarven clan in the mountains when young, and the lorekeeper I'd learned from. There wasn't much from the past that I recall with any particular fondness, but I remember Drava the Lorekeeper when she was alive. Watching Ularan's contact walk away, the gulf of my lack of knowledge and the yearning for understanding felt familiar, even if she didn't have the same kindness in her eyes that Drava had had.
I think, too, that the Three's words influenced that feeling. I had struggled all this time through their tasks, trying to survive, trying to get stronger, but when I had asked them how I could get better, all Three of them told me: 'Die'.
I had thought, up until that point, that my ability to grow stronger was through my walking the very edge of the cusp between life and death, because many times I seemed to have come into new abilities after having done so. But now they told me that I had to die in truth in order to become stronger, and it only highlighted how much I did not know and understand. Even the wraith in the Wayside Inn that first night in the region had understood more about my state of being than I did.
I know that in some ways I am not entirely undead, not in the way that some sentient undead can be. I still need to rest, even if I do not sleep, I can still consume food should I wish to, and although I do not breathe, there is still an aspect of life to me that I would be stupid to ignore. I had thought it a good thing, since it was also the cusp between life and death that my power and skills came from, and yet I was now being told that to get stronger I was in fact to give up any living aspects somehow.
But they didn't tell me how or why. They didn't tell me if I could just end up falling fully in battle and rising again stronger, or if there was some ritual I would need to undergo in order not to lose myself in the process and end up like a mindless undead I had slain in the past, if I rose at all.
Both times I had fully died in the past I had ended up in Jergal's office, and both times he had sent me back. The chance of him doing so a third time seems unlikely, especially not without some power to fuel that transformation, one I had already gone through to become what I am.
For all that my skill is with the dead, I honestly do not have much knowledge of the more powerful undead in the world, largely because I did not need to know. My task had never been to lay them to rest; sentient and self-determining undead having never felt necessary for me to see to, unless they were wishing to pass on. So I do not know what the Three wished for me to become in order to further their goals, or to make it more likely for me to succeed in those goals. But Ularan would know. That, at least, was clear enough from what I know of him.
We are to head to the south, back into the Mere in order to help the lizardfolk reach their kin. That will take us close to Ularan's tower, and so perhaps I shall be able to speak with him then about it, or indeed if he contacts me while travelling.
Although the general populace looks at what I am able to do as a cleric with something like awe, no matter how many tasks we complete, it doesn't feel enough. It doesn't stop the feeling of ineptitude that dogs my steps. I never even remembered to cast 'speak with dead' on the Talos cultists before we left, and they will be gone, used by Ularan's contact, now.
Perhaps it is because I am not a typical cleric, or because I follow Three rather than One. I would have possibly learned more honed skills, rather than such a spread that, while useful, may have less impact as a whole. A tool that is multifunctional is generally fairly mediocre no matter how well made.
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