Gods forfend, this shit again?
"I'm twenty-eight!" Imogen hissed, "Twenty-eight! How is it this impossible to correct one damned record?" Karmordi blinked in polite incomprehension.
Ultimately, this was the problem with the worship of Raxen. The blessings of the God of Truth were a phenomenal boon to the Senate's inquiries, a power which kings the world over must wish they possessed. Unfortunately, she'd come quickly to realize that the power to hear lies was not at all the same as the power to discern the truth. Worse yet, once you had accepted that something was, in fact, truth... how could you ever accept that you were wrong? She wondered if every priesthood suffered from such obnoxious idiosyncrasies.
The witch sighed, then spread her arms to the side, signaling her acceptance of fate. It was a real irony that here, in Ecith, the one and only time she'd tried to accurately register with the state rather than spinning some elaborate yarn for the authorities, they'd fucked it all up anyway. Possibly some distant god thought it was a pleasing joke.
It was probably Vexhur, that ass.
"Never mind that. You want to see Karmordi's lesson, it's a free country- but in return, you've got to show me the swordfighting style of this Solunarium. You don't get many opportunities to observe a style which isn't derivative of the Arbiter's teachings. Here-"
Imogen gestured, and the air behind her shimmered. A Pact shield materialized from nothing, a great round weapon made of some indiscernible silver metal. The shield was heavily stylized, featuring raised bas reliefs of various celestial bodies around the edges, but the middle of the thing was a reflective mirror. The whole thing was, oddly, shot through with crazed lines of gold, looking for all the world like it had been shattered into a thousand pieces and reforged.
The mirrored section in the center of the shield grew brighter and brighter, and then suddenly dimmed, the light refocusing into colors and shapes. Finn and Karmordi found themselves gazing at a worn marble wall depicting stylized Orkhan warriors wielding a variety of awkward-looking swords.
"See, before the Great Conquest, Ecith was ruled by a collection of god-kings and god-queens, each offspring of some power or another. They gathered the Orkhan from Malgar's bosom and taught them each their own ways to prosecute war. This is from a temple of Ysandre, by the way, perhaps the last of the god-queens to die." The witch placed a finger on the image and turned it counter-clockwise, causing it to blur, showing several other ruins, none nearly so intact as Ysandre's temple. "But the problem is, Raxen's styles are too good, see? Everywhere he went, whatever had been practiced before fell by the wayside. Now variations and offshoots are all you see practiced in Ecith, and throughout most of Karnor too."
Imogen clapped, and the image on her Pact shield vanished, leaving the floating weapon dark. "So I've been researching what swordplay looks like without the influence of the god of swords. And at this point, I think only the elves can be trusted to have kept to their native practice after Raxen's influence began to spread."
"I'm twenty-eight!" Imogen hissed, "Twenty-eight! How is it this impossible to correct one damned record?" Karmordi blinked in polite incomprehension.
Ultimately, this was the problem with the worship of Raxen. The blessings of the God of Truth were a phenomenal boon to the Senate's inquiries, a power which kings the world over must wish they possessed. Unfortunately, she'd come quickly to realize that the power to hear lies was not at all the same as the power to discern the truth. Worse yet, once you had accepted that something was, in fact, truth... how could you ever accept that you were wrong? She wondered if every priesthood suffered from such obnoxious idiosyncrasies.
The witch sighed, then spread her arms to the side, signaling her acceptance of fate. It was a real irony that here, in Ecith, the one and only time she'd tried to accurately register with the state rather than spinning some elaborate yarn for the authorities, they'd fucked it all up anyway. Possibly some distant god thought it was a pleasing joke.
It was probably Vexhur, that ass.
"Never mind that. You want to see Karmordi's lesson, it's a free country- but in return, you've got to show me the swordfighting style of this Solunarium. You don't get many opportunities to observe a style which isn't derivative of the Arbiter's teachings. Here-"
Imogen gestured, and the air behind her shimmered. A Pact shield materialized from nothing, a great round weapon made of some indiscernible silver metal. The shield was heavily stylized, featuring raised bas reliefs of various celestial bodies around the edges, but the middle of the thing was a reflective mirror. The whole thing was, oddly, shot through with crazed lines of gold, looking for all the world like it had been shattered into a thousand pieces and reforged.
The mirrored section in the center of the shield grew brighter and brighter, and then suddenly dimmed, the light refocusing into colors and shapes. Finn and Karmordi found themselves gazing at a worn marble wall depicting stylized Orkhan warriors wielding a variety of awkward-looking swords.
"See, before the Great Conquest, Ecith was ruled by a collection of god-kings and god-queens, each offspring of some power or another. They gathered the Orkhan from Malgar's bosom and taught them each their own ways to prosecute war. This is from a temple of Ysandre, by the way, perhaps the last of the god-queens to die." The witch placed a finger on the image and turned it counter-clockwise, causing it to blur, showing several other ruins, none nearly so intact as Ysandre's temple. "But the problem is, Raxen's styles are too good, see? Everywhere he went, whatever had been practiced before fell by the wayside. Now variations and offshoots are all you see practiced in Ecith, and throughout most of Karnor too."
Imogen clapped, and the image on her Pact shield vanished, leaving the floating weapon dark. "So I've been researching what swordplay looks like without the influence of the god of swords. And at this point, I think only the elves can be trusted to have kept to their native practice after Raxen's influence began to spread."
