Azren
Session 1 — Sunday D&D Group
He shouted into the dark, and the dark stopped crying.
That was the second night, and it is the thing he keeps coming back to. A child had been weeping on that hillside for a quarter of an hour, and Darla had heard it and believed it — she had every reason to; she was beaten fairly and had no way to know. Azren called out who goes there because that is what you do when someone is hurt in the dark, and the sound cut off mid-breath in the middle of a place no living throat could have stopped. Then a man began calling for help thirty feet further along, moving away, starting exactly where the child had left off. He has thought about that more than once since. Somebody’s daughter’s voice, worn by something that practises it.
The stones on the hill were nearer to his own country. He was taught history in a temple and he is not clever, which is a combination he has long since made peace with: he knows a great deal and reasons from it slowly. He could not name the people who raised that skull of boulders. He could tell them it was no grave, that it was built by hands without good iron, and — standing up there working it out fresh rather than remembering it — that the stones were older than the road, so the road had not been laid to face them. The road had simply followed something people had been walking for longer than anyone had bothered to write down. It is the first time on this journey he felt genuinely small, and he enjoyed it.
He found the boy on the last watch, an hour before dawn: barefoot in a man’s shirt, feet cut from days of walking, shaking. Azren fed him and saw to his feet, and the boy took a fistful of his sleeve and would not let go of it. He has been the one carrying that particular weight since.
Then the farmhouse, and everything his faith is actually for. Five people in a yard, killed for no reason except that a wizard needed bodies, and then made to stand up again. He burned radiance across that farmyard and kept his people upright, and when it was done Darla was one hit point from gone and he had nothing left. They barred the door of a murdered family’s house and slept in the room where three of them died, and Azren — who by every account cannot be talked out of a good mood — set his watch and did not say anything cheerful at all.