Letters - Ilya's Second Highcourt Letter

To the Prelate of Aspendale, Expedition Leader, Father of the Quarry.

We have been fleeing for some days now. Persuit is hot, and tempers within the party are strained.

 

I find myself feeling some malaise...my heart is very low, and the accusations of heresy have horrified me on a level that only increases the more that I think on them. In short, I have found myself becoming unaccountably bleak. In some part, this is due to being unable to explain to the non-priestly members of the party that if and when the priests of my faith turn up to attack us, I cannot in faith raise my hammer to destroy them.

 

Why I feel this inability, I am not sure, but something within me says that to do this would only compound the error I made in the Capital. Certainly, there must have been some way I could present the news without causing the deaths - yes, deaths - that followed my words.

 

My increasing depression led me to pray to the God of the Rock Himself to ask him whether what I was doing was correct. My skills have greatly increased since we left Aspendale, and the seer-spell is now available to me.

 

Apparently my actions are not too catastrophic - the augury indicated that I was indeed following the right path. After this, I was informed by Sicarius and Ethne that I need not have wasted the spell, as they were utterly convinced of my good will. Which was indeed kind of them, if amusing.

 

Phaedra has been insisting that we attack those hunting us, but so far I have managed to divert the party from this. My temper with her has been short of late, not aided by her merry shout that 'Clangeddin is mortal!' as we ride through a town. This is of course not precisely true, the mortal seeming of our God being sloughed off after his death and his ascension into his current state.

Sicarius is in a fury over the firing of the temple of B'lan, mostly out of worry over the library there. He is convinced that the lead Defender of the Faith - now the High Priest of Clan'ghddn, unfortunately, must be behind it. His curses regarding this one have become so creative that they take up entire paragraphs in his travel journal. I myself am in a quandary, as it is disheartening to have one's High Priest wish to personally kill one.

 

I fear that Ethne may herself regard me with some ill-will, due to my attempt to quiet her as she read the very words from our wanted notice off in the midst of a crowd of villagers. First, the Sorceress declared that we were worth more than this, and when I clipped her around the ear in a desperate attempt to shut her up, she protested 'But Ilya-", thus revealing my name.

 

My second blow very nearly knocked her from her horse, and indeed my irritation was such that I was eying her for a third blow, but the need to flee was too strong.

 

I must remember that Humans are considerably more fragile than Dwarves.

I took the wanted poster with me out of whimsy. The description of our party is simple - a Dwarf, Ilya, a Halfling, a Halfelf, a Human and an Elf, but it is enough to mark us. Truely, we are a varied group, and easy to recognise - there are no other Elves in this country, after all. Poor Mara. What can our innocent barbarian Elf make of all of this foolishness? Surely this cannot be good for her.

In one town, as we rode up, we espied a literal lynching mob with a Dwarf - a male Dwarf up on a platform about to be hung.

His crime? Being the heretic Ilya. Apparently these Humans cannot tell a male Dwarf from a female!

We rescued him, with Sicarius' magics and Ethne's, both of them working well to scatter the crowd. Phaedra continued her attempt to spread the word as we galloped through, but they took surprisingly little time to mount a persuit, as our heads are worth a hundred and twenty gold pieces each! Various tasteless jokes have been made where either Ethne or Sicarius puts the idea forward that the decapitation of the other would gain us gold and loose the party some dead weight. These Human mating customs are confusing.

I called upon Clan'ghddn to turn the rocky path behind us to swamp, the first time I had ever attempted such a difficult spell. To my pleasure, the ground became a morass of mud, and no more than five horses made it through. To these, Ethne yelled "Oh, for god's sake turn back! We don't want to kill people again!"

While I eyed Ethne in mixed relief and horror, they turned back. This town will undoubtably remember us as cruel and dangerous brigands. Still, what else could she have done?

Currently we stand outside a town, looking out onto a place that can lead us to an ancient Dwarven library, where we may find use of Mara's people. While the opportunity both to aid the taciturn Elf and to examine the remains of old forges is exciting for me, the hammer-wearing red clad priests we can see from here indicate that acquiring news may be more difficulty than we would like. Truely, we are being hunted with great fervour, and soon it will come to a head. There are Dwarves down there, in the preistly red and gold that is my own garb on feastdays, and I can only shake my head as I look at them.

If the blessing of Clan'ghddn be upon me, the dawn will not see Ilya with the blood of her own race and kind on her hands.

Ilya, Priest of Clan'ghddn.