M'Ari
Session 1 — Sunday D&D Group
She has walked a great deal of country and she knows what a camp is for. On the first night out of Reme, in rain that had not stopped in four days, she built a lean-to against the hillside and put the fire under it — and that fire held, and went on holding, every night for nine days while the weather did its worst. Nobody made a speech about it. Corian watched her do it and said nothing, which from him is close to reverence. It is the single most useful thing anyone did on that road, and the party has been sleeping warm and dry on the strength of it ever since.
The hillside above that first camp is where she met the limit of what she knows. She read the tracks properly — heavy through the shoulder, come down the slope and gone back up, the small one setting its feet precisely inside the big one’s the way young things do when they are being taught — and then she could not name the animal. An Outlander’s memory for ground, eight kinds of country walked, and nothing in any of it matched. She did not guess. She said she could not place it and let the silence stand, which frightened everyone considerably more than a name would have. When the Leucrotta came down out of the dark she was on her feet in chain mail before she was properly awake, and she was the one who put nine points into the yearling with her first swing.
Somewhere on that road she put the longsword away and took up the quarterstaff instead, and it changed what she is in a fight. The haft comes round on the backswing now; nothing crosses into her reach for free. At the farmhouse it mattered more than she could have known — Vortigern’s skeletons came apart under bludgeoning in a way steel would never have managed, and she stood in the gap and broke them as they closed, over and over, while the casters worked behind her.
She still has the visions. She still has not told anyone what they show. She walked out of Reme because walking is what she does and a man was paying, and nine days later she has watched a wizard murder a farming family for the corpses, and watched him die in their yard for it, and she is two days from a village and a keep that nobody has opened in forty years. The disaster she keeps seeing has not happened yet. She is starting to think she is walking toward it on purpose.