Asriel Dreemurr

Edrick had been about to intervene in the Beaver biting onto Link's neck, having registered the older man freeze in place at just the wrong time, when Link threw it across the clearing with seemingly little effort. Well that...certainly sorted that. It took him a moment to register what the soldier was saying, Galtean wasn't making a lot of sense to him in his addled state, but he eventually nodded and turned back towards the beaver. Which, sure enough, was coming back in for more. Well, he already had his spear turned the wrong way around. Might as well make the most of it. He started running to intercept.

A sharp, vicious "crack!" rang out as when the beaver came within his reach he swung the shaft around like a warhammer and struck it across the side of the head. The spear flexed, creaked in his hands, and eventually sprung back out straight as the world's grip on the creature was overcome. Torn from the loving embrace of gravity, the giant watery rat was sent flying back across the clearing and collided with a tree. It shook with a dull "thump," and the rodent was once more returned to the ground's embrace. A few mushrooms came loose from the trunk, and landed atop the stunned beaver. Edrick briefly considered the possibility of finishing it off to eat that evening, but remembered the steadily more nonsensical orders to not kill them. Why didn't Link want them dead anyways? Well it wasn't worth worrying about right now.

The beast dealt with, he turned and gave a thumbs-up to Adelheid before looking upstream in search of Ciela. He saw her a ways up there, almost out of sight around a bend in the river, with an enormous black...something near her. He couldn't clearly make it out, but it didn't seem hostile for now. Well, either way, better to get running now and actually get there some time soon...

Edrick was still not having so much of a good time, but at least he was getting himself a little straighter. Though now he thought of it, Link was kinda hot. All the same, his vision was a little straighter, his sight a little clearer, and he was not having quite as severe an episode as he had been just a few moments prior. So he braced himself, took a deep breath, and raised his spear. Remembering that he had been instructed not to kill, and still disagreeing with it but all the same not in the best mental state to question it, he brought the blunt end of his spear down forcefully upon the head of the beaver. It was not rendered unconscious, that much was certain, but by how dazed it looked it would not be getting up any time soon. That was good. So he turned around swiftly, trying to find Link, and eventually looked at him.

"Hei!" He shouted, once more reverting to his native tongue, "Am luat-o pe asta, ce acum?" He did not seem to register that the Galtean would not understand him, not that he cared. He was a little preoccupied with the achievement.

The Beaver releasing its hold on his spear did not do much, if indeed anything, to actually settle Edrick down from his little episode. He was too shaken, too tired, and too wet to actually do much settling down at all right now. His breath was shaky and ragged, and his stance was honestly not very good at all. Still the Beaver wasn't dead, and he wasn't anywhere close to the world making sense again. He almost didn't react in time as the thing charged at him, but a blur of motion that was strangely adorable came from outside his cone of vision and took it to the ground. He stopped for a second, tears still streaming down his face, and bothered to actually take in the world around him. Sure enough, that adorable blur of motion was TsegTseg. Oh. That...made sense. He thought. Sort of.

"Edrick!" The paternal voice of someone he could actually recognize drew his attention to the side, and he found himself looking at Link. Okay. This was mostly normal. Since when were his cheeks that puffy? "Breathe. Breath and remember what I taught you the other night!" That actually almost stunned the boy in his less-than-ideal state. What was he talking about? Was it Link that taught him that recipe for crispy fried potatoes? No...no that was his mother. "Control the battle. Don't let them pass this spot." Okay, that made more sense. Right. Breathe. Breathe. How did you breathe again? Right, with the Diaphram. Was it supposed to taste like poop?

Questions as to where the fecal taste was coming from aside (it was probably the foul nonsense running out of his hair), Edrick was at least able to get himself steady again and properly look over the battlefield around them. It felt ridiculous to think of it that way, when they were fighting off beavers of all things, but that was what it was. Right, what did Link tell him to do again? Help TsegTseg? Well, he could do that. And something about not killing the beaver? Well that didn't make sense, but he wasn't really in a mindset to do much questioning right now. Now, just to...

"Stop...squirming!" He shouted as he eventually just flipped the spear around and tried to deliver a hefty bonk onto the Beaver's head. He missed, and then he swung again and nearly caught TsegTseg in the head. It did not seem that he had noticed quite yet.

"Hey you!" Xa'Tok heard a voice call to him as he was making his way out of the hangar aboard the Finback, and he stopped. Turning about to see who it was, his gaze fell upon the strange girl from earlier, the one in the flying mech he thought, who the spirits seemed to be unaware of. Or at least less aware of than the others. There was something about this one that he would have to discover. "Would you mind explaining that weird shield you put over everyone's mecha out there?" And apparently unaware of the spirits as well. That was somewhat less surprising than the previous realization. Most of those outside of the tribes had little awareness of the mystical aspects of the universe. In fact, most of those who were not shamans seemed to have little understanding. Well, that being the case, he would explain things as simply as he could.

"The 'shield' as you called it," he began in a calm, instructing tone, "was the result of the Spirits of the Void answering my call to assist us. It is something that I can do: speak to the spirits in the universe around me and request their assistance. The," he paused as he considered the appropriate word to use, "claw upon Zu'ul-pa-tok, my Mech, acts as a conductor for this assistance, amplifying it to produce yet stronger effects." That was as simply as he could put it, and he hoped that answer would be satisfactory. It was all that he had enough time for at this moment. He had some pressing business to attend to: namely burning the appropriate offerings for the spirits in order to thank them for their help.

Some time later, he felt an unfamiliar lurch as the ship entered the gravity well of the planet that the Academy was located on. He found it difficult to qualify, but something about the gravity felt different from that aboard the ships and stations that he had spent his life on. Even those in orbit around other planets had always been far enough out that he had not been able to feel the pull of the body beneath. There was the intensity, obviously, which seemed to be atleast somewhat greater than the Chapaayan vessels, but there was more than that. He would have to spend some time in consideration over this, and share his realizations with the rest of the Tribe when he returned home. For now, he chalked it up as just one more peculiarity of the outside world.

He ultimately thought the same of many things that he experienced on this day. The peculiar greeting congratulating them and the ship on not crashing, something he thought was simple well-wishing until he learned that the ship had crashed on this same errand in years prior. The way that the Vice Principal and head of House Steel Hounds were dressed. The mechanical creature that was the head of House Bomb, and the strange way in which the nigh-legendary Warrior who headed the school entered the room, and the music that followed. This was all strange and foreign to him, and perhaps the worst of all was the reception he received from the spirits. Those around the Academy were wary of him, and obviously sizing him up as he stood in place without much certainty of what to do or desire to join in with the "party" at the moment. This wariness was shared by him, and not just about the spirits. He knew that he should, his entire purpose here was to become a leader and to learn of the universe outside to bring information back to his tribe, but he was too occupied with how strange all of this was. The Shaman simply did not know what to think of this, and he knew the spirits felt the same of him.

Beavers. They were under attack...by Beavers. Edrick had expected a great many things, and though so much of this misadventure of theirs had involved things that were, in no uncertain terms, unexpected...this took the cake. He was so utterly baffled by the hostile intentions of these beavers that he had scarcely noticed one of them approaching them. Had he died and gone to the abyss? Had he caught something from fighting the undead? Was all of this a fever dream? Was he going to wake up back home, being chided by his father for drinking too much Zeilla the night before? These and a thousand other questions ran through his mind before, inevitably, it happened. The beaver in front of him jumped up and bit him on the ankle. The pain shocked him back to reality, but first,

"Tâmpit!" He swore, kicking the creature off and spending several moments jumping in place, clutching his injured ankle. Eventually, he turned his gaze down towards the rodent with open malice. All the confusion and frustration over the past day boiled over into one thing. If he killed this beaver, the world would make sense again. He did not know how. He did not know why. All he knew was that it had to die. So he gathered up his discarded spear and, in a plainly inspired recreation of the technique Link had drilled into him, stabbed the rodent in the body.

Except it didn't die. The young Pontic was once again left questioning reality as the creature turned its head and began biting at his Iron Lance. Without thinking much, he lifted the spear and began shaking it.

"Letgoletgoletgolegoletgo!" He shouted as he shook the weapon around, failing to dislodge the creature. He was becoming so frustrated and confused that he actually started to cry as he tried in vain to shake the beasty off.

After the battle had reached its conclusion, Xa'tok was the last of the group to emerge from his Mecha. Instead he had remained inside the cockpit after re-entering the hangar, meditating on the combat and communing with the spirits around him. He would have preferred to have some piece of something taken from his foes to burn along with incense so that he might gain further insight into them, but such were the issues of combat in the void from which one's foes fled. It would not have served him well to be seen chasing down fleeing opponents to cut open their cockpits and claim trophies from them. That would likely have been unnecessarily disturbing for his compatriots from cultures which placed less importance upon the mystical.

So it was that, several long minutes after the others had disembarked from their machines, that the cockpit of Eats-the-Stars opened up and the Chapayan emerged into the Hangar. A few moments later, and he was making his way out of the place. While the others were content to stay there and get in the way of the maintenance crew, he intended to get himself out and find something else to occupy himself with. Perhaps he could find someone who would be willing to better describe the world that they were going to. He had never spent much time in a planetary gravity well, much less on one's surface, and he wanted to prepare himself as much as possible.

"I wonder what the air will be like..." he mused to himself as he began walking out. He had been told that was one of the biggest distinctions between life aboard a starship and on a planet. It would be quite the thing to experience firsthand.

The fight against the pirates was shaping up...honestly not quite as Xa'Tok had expected. It seemed that he had given these fools more credit than they deserved in terms of the proper tactical action for them, and it seemed they were simply individually engaging whatever targets they had the chance to. They were not attempting to separate them, but at the same time the disorganized manner in which the students were counter-attacking was proving difficult. Especially for the one of them that had a faint grasp on the language, something which the Chapaayan could understand. Learning the common language was not something he had found easy, and he remembered a few strange looks he had gotten when he was still learning. He could not judge her for that. He could judge her for the way she had gotten herself almost completely surrounded, but at the same time he saw an opportunity in that. One which he began to act on even as he spoke.

"All units push forward," he said even as he set Eats-the-Stars into motion towards the front of the vessel. "We will instead split their formation in half, and then collapse on the enemies towards the Starboard side of our vessel. Move with force and purpose!" That was not something that he had difficulty with in the Chapaayan Mecha. It was designed with speed in mind, and as he began his rush forward he activated the Electronic Warfare Suite within it, intending to scramble the enemies' sensors and make it all the more difficult for them to fire upon their intended targets. That, and seeing what had once been a relatively clearly visible machine suddenly dissolve into static and disappear from one's sensors could certainly have a negative effect upon the enemy's morale. With the break in the enemy's formation, if he wanted to be extremely generous and call it that, caused by Chase firing upon the most central of their units (#6) he rushed to assist Erica at the front.

"Receive the Spirits' Protection." He muttered, forgetting to shut off the comms as he re-cast the protective spell upon her machine. With that glowing, mystical claw already to the fore of his Mecha, it was a simple matter for him to lash out at one of the Banditos (#4) with that truly magical weapon.

The pair decided to mock him, and therefore the spirits. This was unacceptable. As they began laughing their heads off, Xa'Tok reached down and collected a particular charm which he had hung off of his uniform. It was one of a few of them made from mixed materials; metal, bone, and stone strung upon a crimson cord. He shook it, and began to chant in the guttural language of the spirits as it clinked and clattered. His blue eyes began to shimmer, and then shone for a moment with an almost stellar light as he did so while keeping eye-contact with the one who had called the spirits "spooky ghosts." Just as suddenly as it began the chanting ended, he closed his eyes, and shook the charm once more such that a single metallic note rung out and hung in the air for an unnaturally long time.

At this time, the boy's socks soaked themselves of their own accord.

"As punishment for your mockery of the spirits," the Shaman said as he let the charm settle back into place on the front of his uniform, "your 'socks,' as they are called, will be wet for the next month. Every pair. Every time you put them on." It was a minor infraction after all, and so a minor punishment was warranted. It would not do well for him to be unreasonable to those he expected to command.

Warning klaxons sounded and an automated voice came over the speakers. "Enemy mecha detected. Military response required." A grim smile crossed the Shaman's face as the announcement was made, and he rolled his shoulders. The first test had come. Sooner than expected, but then one could never count on things happening when they were supposed to. Though now he had to wonder if the spirits had truly been angry at their passing, or if they had been warning them of danger. All the same, it was time to do battle and time to lead.

"Damn... couldn't they have waited until we got there?" One of the others in the library, Julian if he remembered correctly, expressed what seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of fighting. Xa'Tok found that strange. They were all warriors, were they not? Warriors existed to do battle, and all those he had met before took to it fiercely and gladly. Perhaps he would have to set an example, but all the same he made his way to the hangar along with the others. It was simply impossible to miss the Chapaayan Mecha in the hangar. Much like its pilot, everything about it was alien. It even felt strange to those who passed near it, but to Xa'Tok it was familiar. He looked upon it with reverence, for this was the largest piece of home he had with him and it was auspiciously named.

"Zu'ul-pa-tok." He addressed it, dipping his head and closing his eyes. "Your journeys carried you far from your home, and you returned bearing the glory of the gods themselves. Come with me on my own." When he raised his head and opened his eyes, they were glowing once again. As was the Mecha's claw. Thus he made to board the machine, and it sprung to life as soon as his hands touched the controls. It moved in a way that seemed almost alive, and was clearly effortless in the void. As they began to deploy, he took up a position towards the rear of their formation. If it could be called as such. the other pilots were obviously inexperienced, and hardly seemed to be working as a team. That was fine for now. He recognized the Banditos on sight: Pirate Mecha. Not difficult to deal with, and often of poor renown. Save for those who flew the flag of the Broken Spiral, but these were not them.

"I will take command of this operation," he said over their communicators as he brought Eats-the-Stars's enormous claw in front of the machine's chest. "Engage the enemy as you like for now. They will likely rush down the middle of our formation in an effort to split us apart. When they do, close around them." Even as he spoke the glowing claw was twisting itself about in ways that should have been impossible for something modeled after a humanoid hand. As it did, lines began to appear glowing in the void of space. These lines twisted and wrapped together to take on an ever more complicated shape, and all those deployed might just catch the faintest hint of the guttural spirit-language in their cockpits as the symbol was completed, and the claw closed over it. "The spirits here are willing to assist us." He answered the anticipated questions as a pale blue light settled in around the assorted allied Mecha, including Eats-the-Stars. A little extra protection from the enemy's Lasers.

Things seemed to be going well, even without the Chapaayan needing to directly involve himself in the situation. That was good. A commander should not involve themselves over much in the affairs of those serving under them, even if their ways were strange. He had to remind himself that all of their ways were strange, these people whose lives had until recently been tied to the gravity wells of one of the many planetary bodies across space. A momentary thought crossed his mind as to whether or not planetary spirits affected people differently from those in the void of space, and he shook it aside. The spirits preferred to be left to their own devices more often than not.

"Well fine if it's not going to be a problem...but you didn't need to get everyone to gang up on me!" Now that was the only response in this conversation that had given him reason to be concerned, or else had been a source of confusion.

"They hardly ganged up on you, Bianca." He called out as she left, "and remember, I entered this library an hour ago. You complained about my talismans being a violation of uniform standards, and then became flustered when I commented on your lovely golden eyes. Only two of the 'group' you were speaking to arrived in such a way that they could have been such." He was very matter-of-fact about all of it, his tone of voice calm and a strange timbre about it that was, in a word, alien. It was obvious that there was something profoundly different about him, even with as little as hearing his voice. Chapaayans would have said it was because he was almost as much a Spirit as he was Living, and he thought he remembered some of the sphere-dwellers calling it "dreamlike" or something to that effect. It was hard for him to say for certain what exactly the others would say about it, but with Bianca leaving and the others around him making their introductions his attention had to go elsewhere.

"My name," he began as he looked over at Julian and Sammi, who has asked who he was and was presently looking at him, "is Xa'tok, and to answer the other questions," he turned and nodded towards Julian this time, "I am of the Xul-Tuk tribe, whose fleet travels through the void of River of the Gods- that is to say, the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy." He might have had more to say, but the ship shook a bit more violently from meteor impacts, and a grimace crossed his face. What fool of a navigator was charting this course?

"Hey, witch doctor, did you cast some kind of spell on our pilot?" He chose to ignore the mistake over his nature, for now, and turned to address the pair on the couch.

"I doubt my magics could do much. The spirits outside of this ship are angry, and not inclined to let any ship pass easily through this part of the void. It is why my people do not travel this way."

Xa'tok had probably adjusted to the conditions aboard the Finback better than most of the other prospective students. True, space being at a premium was something of a difficulty for him, considering his height, but he had spent the entirety of his life aboard spaceships of some kind or another. Even the cramped conditions of their quarters were not entirely new to him, much as it had taken time for him to adjust to such. Sharing quarters was a bit new, but so far his bunk mate, whose name he was having some difficulty remembering, had not objected to the ritualistic aspects of his life. Rituals which, thanks to quite a few pieces of legislation guaranteeing religious freedoms, he had been permitted thus far to perform aboard the ship.

So this, their penultimate day aboard the transport vessel, had begun much like every day did for the young shaman. He rose at 0743 precisely, which gave him enough time to prepare himself for the first ritual of the day. A ritual which involved burning an offering, in this case foul-smelling incense which substituted for the usual meat or other organic products that would have composed it aboard a Chapaayan vessel, for the spirits of the local region of space. This was in turn followed by throwing the contents of a small sack, which appeared to be made of leather or at least a leather-like substance, across a hard surface. The surface in question had been the floor of his room for the past few days, as he lacked the appropriate resources to create a proper tablet upon which to do this, and the sack contained dozens of irregularly shaped pieces of bone. These pieces were, in turn, inscribed with runic sigils that really only meant anything to a Chapaayan Shaman. In this way he sought to gain insight into the state of the local spirits, and learn what they would tell him. Afterwards he collected the bones, returned them to the sack, and sat in meditation surrounded by burning incense until lunch was served in the ship's cafeteria. There was more he wished he could do, but much of that required permanent facilities which he would have to establish when they reached the Academy.

Afterwards he had dressed himself in the Uniform, though he had already made certain adjustments. Dozens of strings of charms made of bone, strange gems, or the ever-present Chapaayan Smelt hung from where he had affixed them to the garments, and of course the ornate hood still covered his head. The ornately-decorated charms that had been made of his own horns hung from this hood as well, and swayed ever so slightly as he walked about.

---

After lunch, Xa'tok had made his way to the library where he had been browsing through books on the history of the Democratic Space Alliance and the species which were loyal to it. He did want to know as much as he could about the people he was going to be around in the place of his own after all. That and being in the library meant that, thanks to the large televisions, he could keep himself apprised of the news as it came in. That would serve well to give him some idea of what they could expect at the Academy, and with news coming in about renewed Heliosian activity he could only imagine that their education would be accelerated. This was good. The sooner he could get real experience instead of simply learning, the better.

A subtle whisper in what he recognized as the language of the spirits caught his attention, and he turned his head to once again regard the black haired human boy who also seemed to be touched by the spirits. Though the way in which this Aston, he thought that was the name, was affected by their touch seemed to differ in some way. Even so, he felt a sense of familiarity in the boy. It seemed the spirits flocked to him as much as they did the Chapaayan.

Of course the confrontation between the trio of others in the Library, a girl with beautiful golden eyes, a boy in a gas mask, and a third girl whom the spirits did not seem totally aware of caught his attention. For now, he resolved to simply observe and save his enlightened words in the case that they would be needed. He expected to be leading his peers among the student body eventually, and he needed to know how they would interact with each other in order to do that most effectively.

The night passed slowly and fitfully for Edrick. Gunther's soup of mushrooms and apples had gone down easily enough, but he could hardly bring himself to eat very much of it in spite of the difficulty of the day's trek along the muddy roads. After a certain point his stomach had just twisted up into a knot and he had to call it done. As the others settled in to sleep inside of the, still very wet, shelter, he could really only sit with his back against the wall and his eyes closed. Trying to sleep, but unable to find it as a thousand worried thoughts danced about in his mind. When he did manage to sleep, he was gripped by nightmares and visions which he scarcely remembered upon waking. When it was his time to take the watch, it took hardly any effort to rouse him and he found the watch itself a welcome change. Even if that was only because he could distract himself by chasing shadows with his eyes and looking off in the direction of every sound. It was only after his watch ended that he fell into a deep enough sleep that he was only properly roused in the morning, and when he woke he almost felt more tired than he had been before he slept.

When he stepped out of the shelter and into the sun, it was made quite obvious exactly how dirty his hair had been. A large, black mass still sat clumped on the top of his head, but around the rest of it strands of golden blonde hair were left shining in the light and idly blowing in the breeze. In retrospect, his hair had been remarkably stiff these past few months. No doubt Penelope was going to be giving him quite the earful over the course of the day about it. Well, at least it might give him something else to think about.

As they came to the river, Edrick was once again struck by nostalgia. It wasn't as big as the Lanti to be sure, but it was a river all the same. For a moment he could see the few small fishing boats that some of the townsfolk manned crossing it, hear the conversations of a few old, retired soldiers sat on the shores, and if he squinted he thought he could see the steeple of his home town's church on the far side of the river. Then he blinked and the vision passed. Had it really already been a year?

"Uh...Bad beaver, shoo!" Sienna's words snapped him out of his revere and brought his attention over towards the tree to which the rope had been tied...where he saw a beaver waddling up curiously. The commotion surrounding it hardly made much sense to him. He'd seen them much bigger. All the same, he turned his attention towards Link.

"Yeah don't worry about that. They're skittish." At least the ones in Pontus were. "And I'm a pretty good swimmer so I can go last." 

Edrick just looked back and forth between Penelope and Alois with an apparently confused look on his face. Clearly this wasn't anywhere near as big of an issue for him as it was for them, and he spent a good few moments looking at Alois while internally considering how well he thought he could wrestle the man and win out in the event that he had to keep from being shoved in the river. Ultimately he decided it was not worth it, shrugged his shoulders, and mentally made a note to wash his hair when he could. Not that he thought it was strictly relevant to do so right now, considering they had a shelter to finish.

---

With their somewhat baffling shelter put together, with considerably less help from Penelope than she probably felt she had rendered, Edrick stood there in the rain for a moment. Much of his face and neck were stained with streaming grime, and he had since removed his Gambeson to hang over a branch to avoid being weighed down by the soaking wet piece of nonsense. As Alois made his way in to test things out inside, an idea came to him. He looked around, and began snatching a few dead branches that hadn't quite fallen off the trees just yet. A few tugs, the sound of cracking wood, and some grunting later and he had himself a good-sized armful of fairly small bits of wood which he proceeded to get inside.

"Things'll dry off if we get a little fire going inside," he offered as an explanation, "or at least it'll warm up a bit." With that he pulled his leather gloves a bit tighter and strolled over to snatch a few coals out of the fire Sienna had gotten going, and over which Gunther and Ciela were cooking, to quickly take inside. Hopefully avoiding both extinguishing the coals and burning himself too severely, he set them onto a small stack of the mostly-dry twigs and began the slow process of trying to get a fire going.

This is me expressing tentative interest.

Edits have been made. I hope our discussion on Discord was sufficient to address the largest part of your issues. No idea how to make the mention function work.

I lied, app goes here.
 

This is now a placeholder post until I have a proper idea for my app.

With everyone splitting up to get a campsite together, Edrick took the opportunity to find a distraction from the waking nightmares he had been dealing with for most of the day. They needed a spot to actually get everything set up, and he was fairly sure he knew how to find that. So as the group split up, he began walking about seemingly without any purpose in mind. His eyes were up, mostly focused on not running into trees in the near darkness they were working in, and he stepped deliberately about the area. He was looking for a spot where the ground was more solid, something that simply required stepping on it. Nothing else would matter if they didn't have firm ground to set themselves up on. This was not exactly a quick process, which meant that the rain continued to wash steadily more and more of the filth and grime out of his hair. A few streaks of dark black traced across his face and his neck, down onto his gambeson.

Sure enough, eventually he found what he was looking for. A small rise a ways off from the road where the ground was covered in grasses and other shorter bits of undergrowth. A bit of stamping around, and he determined that the ground was firm. Or at least firm enough that they weren't in danger of sinking into it just by standing in place or laying across it. This of course had him thinking of what a gigantic pain in the ass it would be to try and till this bit of ground. Firm as it was it had to be full of roots, and probably plenty of rocks as well. It might well take half a day's work just to get it good for planting. Maybe longer.

He shook the irrelevant thoughts out of his head, creating a shower of foul black grime that fall in thick drops out of his ever brighter-growing hair. Of course Edrick did not notice himself, and turned to alert the group of the ground he had found.

"I don't want to alarm anyone." Penelope began ominously. "But this rain may be enacting physical changes in us." As Edrick heard that he gave the princess a look like she'd grown a second head, and he was about to speak up to protest the absurdity of it, when he heard Ciela gagging a ways off. He was just about to question them, when Alois answered him before he could even put his question into words.

"Eddy. Put your hair back on." A moment's confusion, and then he ran a gloved hand through his hair. Sure enough when he brought it back down there was a thick, grimy fluid on it. Now that he bothered to think about it...he actually had not washed his hair since he had left home.

"Huh. I didn't even think it got that dirty." He said aloud, and quickly shrugged it off. "But yeah, I found us a spot to set up over here. Ground's nice and firm." He kicked a bit of the grassy rise to demonstrate his point, not sparing another moment's consideration to his hair.

Color me intrigued.

Edrick had been in something like a daze since they had woken up and gotten back on the road, taking a rough dirt trail West off in search of some place they could more properly rest and recover or replenish their supplies. He hadn't been paying much attention. The world barely seemed real right now, and every step felt heavier than it ought to as they trudged along. Even the rain was strange when it started, feeling almost effervescent on his skin and filling his ears with a low hum that served to further deepen his dreamlike state as they walked along. If the thick slurry of mud that the road turned into over the course of the day troubled him any more, he barely registered it. Walking along, finding himself covered up above the knees through a mix of spatter and holes that were just a bit too deep. He barely even noticed as the rainfall soaked his hair, and the steady stream of a year's worth of grime began slowly washing off of him.

No, his mind was well-and-truly on anything but their present surroundings. Instead stuck on thoughts of home. Daydreams of playing with his sister before she had gone off to join the church, of working with his father in the field, of his mother teaching him how to work with animals. Everything had a strangely sinister feel to it now, and whether he was remembering it properly or his mind was inventing it he saw dozens upon dozens of crows and ravens as he trudged on in a dream. One of the last things he imagined was the village where they had lived for so very long in flames. Ash and cinders fell like snow around him, the sky was black with smoke and every field, tree, and building was engulfed in flickering orange fire that covered everything in a weird, sickly light. Worse still were the screams as he looked around, the villagers being cut apart by red-eyed, half-rotten facsimiles of the generations of ancestors that had until recently rested in the cemetery. His vision turned and he saw the charred-black edifice of the chapel, one of a few stone buildings in the place, and an all-too familiar figure atop it. An enormous beast, a mockery of what it had been in life, and a rider with a bow upon its back. He tried to cry out, but found that he could not as a roar filled his ears...

"...and have a way to cross set up before we break camp at sunrise.” Link's voice cut through the din, and in moments Edrick was stood there again with the group. His weight resting on the spear he had been gripping so tightly that the skin on his hand had split from the force. There was no more village burning around them, just a dark forest in the pouring rain and a river swollen almost past its blanks from it. This was not good, for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which were considerations for the future, which began bleeding in and forcing out the vision of the apocalypse.

"I," he started, finding his voice rough and hoarse in his throat. Had he not drank anything all day? A bit of fishing around and he found his waterskin, which he took a drink from and wet his mouth and throat. "I have a tent," he finally managed to say. "Might not be the best thing, but we could cut it up and use it as a tarp. Cover up a spot where we could get a fire going." He took that moment to begin looking up at the trees around them, trying to find some dead, dry branches up on their trunks. They wouldn't be finding any good wood to burn on the ground after all of this. Idly he brushed a bit of hair that had stuck to his face out of his eyes, and exposed a few golden-blonde strands from among the grime.

To say that this vision of the past was upsetting to Edrick was an understatement. True, seeing things as the way they were when this place had been in use put him at ease in the aftermath of the fighting. It reminded him of home, of the sermons that his father and the priest at the village's shrine had given almost every day. But seeing those that had come to fight with them slain, the abbot being flogged and set to be crucified, and the abbey being destroyed shook him to his core. It reminded him of the stories his sister had told him, when their parents thought they were asleep, of the destruction of Pharaon. Of the home that they should have grown up in destroyed for the very same reasons that this place had. Of the holy places in that city left desecrated and in ruins. Of his Uncle, who he had always been told he looked so much like.

In the aftermath of their battle with the awakened, which left him questioning everything that he had thought he knew about the Goddess and the world at large, this left him feeling... many things. Angry. Afraid. Confused. Most of all, though, he was tired. The soreness of a night spent fighting and losing blood was setting in in full now that the last vestiges of adrenaline were wearing out. Once more he felt like he could barely stand.

"Edrick." He turned his head to see Penelope looking at him. She sounded like she was much further away than just a few steps. "Are you alright? I know that couldn't have been pleasant to see." Understatement of the year that was. He could barely form an answer to her, but all the same he managed to reach out and shakily take her hand in his.

"I'm...alive, at least." He managed to say after a few moments spent just looking at her. "But I'm tired. Think I'll go...try and get some sleep." And he intended to do just that, letting go of Penelope's hand and turning to plod on back to the small tent he had been asleep in moments before the battle had begun.

Edrick had been quiet all this time, sat where he had fallen when his legs gave out under the combined weight of exhaustion and the revelation that had been presented to him. The Awakened had always been like this? Imperfect reflections of themselves raised only to do battle? If the young man had not been having a crisis, he would have accused the Abbot of Heresy over such a comment as that. He could certainly imagine the reception that words of that sort would have in Sinope or Amaseia; he could already smell the torches being lit. But the other claims this man made, and the literal miracles that Edrick saw him working before his very eyes, gave a weight to those words that they should not have had. A terrible weight, and an even more terrible consideration. The Goddess had been different than she was in the current time? That didn't make any sense to the young Pontic man...and then it did.

As TsegTseg went on about there being different heads of different families, and Penelope suggested that she was on to something, he remembered something that his father had taught him. A reading from a piece of scripture that every priest he had ever spoken to said was one of the oldest pieces of writing not just about the Goddess, but from anywhere on Mysia. Of course, every priest he had ever spoken to had told him that the Ancestors rising would be a time of rejoicing and injustices being settled. He obviously had reason to doubt that here and now, but if nothing else the passage that occurred to him offered some explanation. He just had to remember how to say it in Galtean...

"And so," he said as he forced himself to stand back to his feet, "all the people rejoiced in the light of the Goddess. Their fields grew full, their children grew old, and all were without sickness or injury. But then the nonbelievers came and set their twisted magics upon the faithful. The Goddess turned her eyes upon them, and her face was dark as the sea; her voice a storm that swept aside all in its path. And the faithful were taken by her rage and became invincible." He paused, mostly to catch his breath and looked around at the others. "The 2nd Book of the Divine Will, Chapter 4, verses 36 through 40. If anything I've been taught is true," he looked to the Abbot, a little less pleading and a little less confused. Edrick did not sound confident about anything he was saying. "Then that might be it. The Goddess has two...aspecte that she shows the world." He held up the iron pendant on its cord around his neck while he looked at them. "I...don't know if I understand what that means anymore, but maybe that explains..." his voice failed him, and he resorted to gesturing out to the ruins around them before looking back at the Abbot in the hopes of being given something he could understand.

To say that the battle up to this point had been exhausting for Edrick might well have been an understatement. He was young and strong, and he knew it. So why did he feel so tired? This was not the first fight that they had been in, not even the first he had gotten severely hurt in, and he felt like he could barely stand at this point, let alone move. In spite of the healing he could barely feel his arms and legs, and the soreness in his chest felt like it went all the way down through the bones and into his heart. His lungs burned with every breath, and he found himself periodically coughing or spitting up the occasional glob of blood. As the last of the enemy Awakened had been felled and the Pegasus he had borrowed faded away, a haze had settled over him and he moved with the rest of the group without even being really sure of where he was going.

Did this fight even matter? He caught himself thinking, while the others began speaking with each other. His, now very worn and dirty, lance was thrust into the ground and he rested his weight on it in an effort to catch his breath as best he could. The rest of the group around him seemed faded and indistinct as his mind returned to what they had fought. To the red-eyed Awakened, a clear mockery of the promise that Inera had made to her faithful. And yet, that power could only have come from her. No one else could turn death backwards like that, and the indistinct dread he had been suppressing all this time finally burst through to the front. Was what he had been doing up to this point an affront to the Goddess? If it was, then why had Ciela been able to heal them? Why had the white-eyed Awakened come to their aid? Nothing made sense any more. It felt like the world had been turned on its head, and for a moment he thought about running away. About turning around, running back home, and never worrying about what was to come of this group's errand ever again. Maybe it was just exhaustion, but he could not bring himself to do that. Not here, and not now. Tears came unbidden to his eyes, and his grip on the lance clenched all the tighter as he struggled to remain quiet.

Eventually, he began to step forward. After all the others had approached the Abbot and said their pieces, had whatever it was they wished done to them, and all other business was settled he came to stand before the ethereal holy man whom he could hardly lift his eyes to see. Was he tired, ashamed, or afraid? Maybe all of them.

"Părinte de preot," he addressed the Abbot with the honorific for a priest and continued in his native tongue. "What happened here? All...all my life I have been taught that when The Mistress returns our ancestors to us-" his words caught in his throat, and he could not continue to speak. All that he could manage was to weakly raise his head, and look upon the Abbot with pleading, hopeful eyes. He wanted to beg him for an answer that would put this right, to tell him that everything was as it should be and that some heretic had been behind all of this. He wanted to ask for a problem that he could solve, but exhausted and afraid as he was he could not find the words.

Posting here for easier location when I get to posting Edrick's profile in here again.

New forum, new picture, same name.