IX. YSTRIEN’S VISION
“Breathing in brown mold spores is dangerous but not deadly,” Dawnbringer Kolne once told Ystrien. Kolne had written treatises on mundane and magical diseases. Like many of the clerics, he found in Ystrien an eager but inattentive learner. ‘Lathander’s golden child,’ as they sometimes called him, loved opening a book and reading the first page; by the third, he was bored. His understanding hovered between ignorance and incompleteness in all fields but music and calligraphy. But Ystrien had a knack for recalling his teachers’ words at just the right moment. “Brown mold spores trick the body into thinking it’s cold,” he told Vahaera. A trap cleverly engineered to release such spores had caught Graddick and Cuatala as they explored the tunnel leading south, to the shore. “You feel like you’ve just plunged into a frigid lake. The sensation can make you faint.” The half-Drow leaned over the bodies with her lantern held aloft. She touched Graddick’s cheek. “He’s warm,” she said. “The cold isn’t real. It’s just a sensation,” said the novice. Then he realized that the terror he felt when he thought Cuatala and Graddick were dead was just like that.
They watched over the bodies for several hours. When the victims revived, the four returned to the room directly beneath the tavern. They were exhausted and trapped. They couldn’t risk exploring any further today, and they couldn’t risk going back through the trapdoor to the tavern. It would almost certainly be watched by the second of Corwyn’s two guards or someone else. As for Corwyn himself–his dead body now lay in a storage cave they had emptied of several meats and cheeses. Ystrien and Vahaera would keep watch while the woozy knight and halfling slept in a nearby cell.
When it was finally time for Ystrien to go to sleep, he couldn’t, despite the fact that he’d been up all night. He had come to Melvaunt as the clerics directed. He’d left the comforts of Selgaunt to fight injustice in the brutal North. He lay on a bedroll in a pirate’s cave. When would he be ready? When would Lathander find him worthy? He knew the sun would rise soon. He needed to see it.
“No,” Graddick insisted. “The tavern will be watched. Go back to bed.”
But Ystrien ignored the knight, clambered up the ladder, and opened the trapdoor. The room above was empty and still. It stank. Graddick was wrong. No one was there. He passed through into the chill autumn morning. He made his way to the docks and found the dawn.
The fire in the east rose above the coast, a coast that barely separated the plain of the sea from the plain of the land. “The sun needs no witness; the sun demands witness,” he kept repeating to himself. It was a favorite Lathanderite paradox, but why it came to him now he couldn’t tell. As he muttered the words in prayer, he gaped as Lathander himself materialized in the sun’s rays, titanic, brilliant, and beaming. Between the god and his mortal copy ran two curtains of billowing shadow. Wherever Ystrien glanced his gaze burned a hole in the fabric. In the rosy clouds floated a city, a terrible city, but as Ystrien gazed at it one of its towers fell. My work is there. Your work is there. You are my witness. You are my priest. Then the vision ended. Ystrien stood, no longer a novice.
