Riverside 22: Better the demon you know?

[Reinholdt]

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[Beauty From Ashes]

Leah is no longer holding the hammer.

This is far from ideal for her, as it happens. The shard of Colour in her mind can still protect her from the intruding tendrils of Paarel seeking to devour her hopes and dreams and leaving her body a hollowed out shell filled with the arcane horror's intent but...

Before the hammer and the inspiration from Ohlamel, though they were opposing forces without question, were reinforcing each other's efforts to bulwark against the outside force. But now that the shard is Leah's only defense there's only one option. It has to devour the intruding mental tendrils, steadily swelling fat with power as it does. The alien voice that is somehow Leah's own returns stronger than ever.

I can't die here. I CAN'T. I can see the myriad ways before me and with each moment, each action, the options wither like vines eaten by worms as those possibilities cease. There are still choices that could lead to the Correct Path. There are secrets I know. The flow of time and stone are so alike. Imperceptibly slow and implacable. Matilda is going to try to kill me but I can use the secrets to stop her.

Light.

There's a light.

It was always there, but somehow I never saw it before. A light that glistens with liquid colour and song. I could reach for it and grasp it and use one of these secrets I always knew.

Time. The river carrying me ever on. But it has currents. Eddies. Cast Matilda into a temporal gyre and leave her frozen within a perfectly crystalline moment.
Perception. To see, to feel, to know, a window into without. Seal her senses and leave Matilda insentient. This way has dangers, she might fly into a rage.
Quality. Not perfection, no, not in the malign sense Paarel wields it. But purposefulness. How well a way meanders to the One Way. Quality can be given and so to can it be taken. Mar the claws, blunt the beak, wither the muscles.
Will. The truest, purist of intent manifested upon the world. Once a Way has been decided upon it is through WILL that it is followed. Crush the alien intent intruding upon Matilda and she will be a puppet without strings.

If I combine this Invocation with earth-bending I should be able to incapacitate Matilda. Then I... I just need my hammer. Then I can destroy Paarel's anchor and I'll be a step closer to the One Way.

Matilda, meanwhile, is having her hopes and dreams steadily eaten away at. And in their place is the alien purpose of Paarel. To create beauty above all else. The process would be progressing at a terrifying pace if not for the fact that she got clubbed with Leah's hammer earlier. As it stands now it is a steady burn rather than a raging bonfire.

The impulses are clear enough, though.

Leah is too full of the song of another Saint to be useful to Paarel. She will continue to be a danger to this shrine to Paarel's beauty even once the desecrating hammer is destroyed. The dictum flowing into Matilda's mind are simple. Mar the blasphemous symbol upon the head of the hammer until it is utterly ruined. Once that threat has been dealt with splay Leah open with claw and beak and Paarel will show Matilda how to fashion the remains into something of transcendent beauty.

Beauty from Ashes

As Leah releases the hammer, Matilda will try to knock it as far away as she can. She'll also release Leah's ear and head after the hammer, growing larger as she does until she's covered in fur and feathers, with massive claws and a vast hooked beak. Her brown feathers are bleaching to grey, and eyespots are appearing in her hide, along with flowers and vines twisting and writhing about her limbs. She's aiming to land on the hammer head with all her weight, hoping that her mass will destroy it without her needing to touch the foul thing too much.

Leah's left behind; if she's stepped on by the owlbear, it's accidental and not deliberate. She should focus on the catgirl, and part of her knows it; the hammer is too hideous to suffer in such a beautiful place, yet by itself isn't dangerous and Leah- as Matilda has learnt the hard way- is. But she can't stop herself; Leah is, though also not as pretty as the surrounding shrine, far less repulsive and therefore more tolerable in such a holy space.

[Beauty from Ashes]

Leah rises from her position on the floor, bleeding from the hole in her ear. She takes a stout stance and cries out a mighty yowl. "THERE. ARE. FOUR. WAYS!!!" She proclaims, stomping the ground hard as she both accepts and rejects the alien her inside her head in a paradoxical covenant. Her subconscious, her element, reaches out to seize the secrets of Will, drawn naturally to its allure and unable to resist its one way intermingling with her earthbending. Perhaps her three sisters can reach the other three ways. Bring about the one true way. Together apart.

Leah channels this invocation of Will into her stomp, which causes a piece of earth under the hammer to jut up suddenly, violently. Demanding and relentless, filled with purpose. This was not to retrieve her hammer, but to fling it into the source, liable to pound Matilda in the process. Even if Matilda reached the hammer first and shattered it, Leah with fling the broken pieces through the air and let each wrench Paarel from this world and back to the hell it spawned from.

Hopefully.