Griffie's party and allies were pretty sure they'd done a good job of hijacking the Alghollthu gate system, and also that it only led to other locations on the network.
But apparently, both of these assumptions were false.
Griffie has no idea where ey is, or where the rest of the party is, and isn't even underwater anymore.
Ey is standing on the ruined flagstones of an ancient crossroads, sinking slowly into a foetid swamp, under a lost and lonely hill.
Directly in front of her, in fact, where she kneels on a prayer rug, spear in hand.
She does not flinch. It's important not to, it lets them in.
"Repent. It is not too late." Her voice is quiet and firm.
"…Of what? I'm, uh, sorry about teleporting into the swamp, it was unintentional?"
Griffie puts eir 'arms' in the air, not that this really means much in elemental form.
"...You poor bastard, that's incredible bad luck." Possibly this is just a trick, but the answer remains the same, that's her dignity. "This is a secret and dangerous place, but there isn't long to go now. Do not show fear and do not listen, they will lie to you."
"You are not supposed to know this place exists, still less that it's dangerous, and certainly not that I am here. Who are you, and where do you hail from?"
It is difficult, but not impossible, to convert water elementals, presumably even strange ones like this.
"I'm Griffith, a druid from the Erlonn demiplane and more recently from the Temda region of, uh. I don't know if it has a name, the Alternative with the Unon Islands? My party was trying to use an Alghollthu gate system and it went wrong. And I have no idea who you are, if that's reassuring at all."
How can a water elemental be a druid. If this is a druid why is it using words and being polite and not even a little bit trying to rip out her tongue and eat it.
Possibly she's missing something.
"...I see. I have never heard of any of those places. You address Her Deliverance Beryllia the Most High Priestess of Sirenna. What does druidry mean, to you?"
What Griffie meant by "I have no idea who you are" is "if you want to not admit to being here, you have the easy option of just not telling me, so that all I can say is 'I saw someone using a Mind Blank, and I can try to tell you what they looked like if you care about their taste in illusions', and you don't need to do anything to silence me". This is not worth saying aloud, though.
"Being a druid is kind of like being a cleric, except instead of being empowered by a god, I'm empowered by an aspect of nature. It is a bit more complicated in some ways than being a cleric, because gods are usually intelligent beings who can help their clerics shape spells. Different druids can be empowered by different aspects of nature. My aspect includes a concern for the well-being of animals, plants, and nature spirits, but someone else's aspect might include a belief that only the best species should survive. So they'd want to introduce a beetle to a region where it would be very successful at the expense of the local forests and farms, while I would want to stop them, but we'd still both be druids. Does that help answer your questions, High Priestess?"
(Yes, there are conflicting duties here, but on this occasion there's a less-hostile druid from a demiplane, which suggests it doesn't even hate wizardry, and that's important. Besides, it doesn't actually worsen things very much in this case.)
"...That is... extraordinary." Possibly a lie, though it's a flatly bizarre lie to tell. Possibly a sorcerer telling themselves stories to explain the inexplicable. Probably a heathen cultist with a creative 'god'.
She really will not be any good at this, especially not as tense as she has to be in this place but, very well, she can try to speak sense to the probable cultist.
"Why do you think there is an aspect of nature that cares for the wellbeing of animals and plants and nature spirits?"
"A kingdom is made of peasants, but it need not care for them. It doesn't, in most places. You are the one who cares."
"It would be unwise for a perfectly selfish king to completely ignore the well-being of peasants, no? If they all die he's going to have a serious problem, and if they all hate him his life will be more difficult. I suppose I will say that it seems to me that since I continue to get spells every day, and I can even draw a little bit on the Upper Planes for a few of them, nature clearly does not disapprove of my worldview."
"Often people do not meet that happy standard of perfect selfishness and would be selfishly better off caring more. Even then - usefulness only happens incidentally to relate to wellbeing. If he could get more from them by binding them to agonising servitude beyond death, he would. Believe me, I would know. Just so with nature, left to itself it is uncaring of what horrors it produces. That is why we are entrusted with its stewardship. May I ask how you know there was an aspect of nature that cared about this, and gave you this power?"
"I am well aware. I am not fully confident, but the tradition I studied in which in fact led to me getting spellcasting and has produced other druids with a similar ethos claimed such, and also I can, say, empower my… my animal companion to mimic a celestial animal with a spell I cast using the power of nature, or shapeshift into a celestial animal myself. And the priests I've talked to haven't contradicted me, and people who were trying to pick selective truths to screw with me also haven't contradicted me."
That... is not usual for pagans, admittedly. It sounds more like wizardry, of a strange kind. "What sort of priests?" This certainly sounds like someone from distant foreign parts, it's not anything she recognises at all, but the answer will be illuminating anyway. "And - there was nobody you spoke to, to get this power? No ritual or visitation?"
"The local high priestess of Aiyuna knows about pretty much everything I've been up to. A chalkost of Torag – kind of like an angel – knows much of it and was mostly concerned for my health. Clerics of a variety of good gods were displeased when they heard a bunch of druids had been kidnapped, and the druids who were kidnapped seemed fairly normal to me. I can try to go through every celestial-aligned priest I've met but it'll be a while."
"I didn't speak to anyone. I'd rather not comment on rituals, we keep a lot of magic details secret."
She isn't stupid, this is sounding noticeably alien.
"...I see. Do you know what - Aiyuna and Torag and the... good gods... actually teach?"
It would be foolish to hope that somehow somewhere they have allies, but it's possible that "druid" simply means something different to this person. If there actually is some way of gaining great magical power without being Chosen or learning wizardry or consorting with horrors...
"Aiyuna is known as the Goddess of Good Tools. As with other celestial gods, she cares about mortal welfare, which means she likes healing and freeing slaves and such. In addition to that, she is interested in inventions, technological advancement, and, of course, existing tools also being good, both in the sense of amoral quality and in the sense of being used towards good aims. Torag is another celestial deity. Like Aiyuna, he cares about craftsmanship, but he's more conservative about technology. He has a focus on communities, honor, diligence, mining, and dwarves."
...Is it possible to imagine there are some virtuous heathens somewhere with a corrupt understanding of... maybe Mystra, and Moradin? Moradin favours technology, it's hard to imagine in fact what craft without technology means, but it's an understandable... would that technically be heresy, if they are believers but unbaptised... for a heathen to come up with.
She cannot disrupt the Rite to ask Sirenna just now.
"And... you are a druid and you worship nature but you are - on good terms with gods and priests like that? That seems to strain belief to breaking point."
"One of the core messages of the Upper Planes is that there are a lot of different good things, and people whose visions of the good are different should offer people choices, not fight over who gets to impose their vision on everyone. And, you know, if used responsibly technology can actually reduce incentives to expand into the wilderness. If you only have as many children as you want and your food situation is adequate, there's less incentive to convert more forest into farmland. So yes, I'm on good terms."
"That... is one of those things that sounds kindly and wise until you ever actually meet some people with different visions of the good. Yours - mostly just sounds at least compatible with the Word. So far. Which is startling, to say the least. Though I admit I find it hard to imagine why you would want people to not expand into the Wilderness - unless you mean it's so risky it should be banned for their own good, that would make sense. We... typically don't like to forbid people from willingly taking risks."
"The celestials refuse to let people join their coalition reasonably often! It is just the case that, say, members have different stances on when you should break laws to help others, or whether in general knowledge or ignorance is better, or whether working with as little rest as possible is the best way to accomplish things, or such."
"And, uh. If people expanded into all of the wilderness, then where would all of the things which aren't particularly horrible but which most people don't want to have right near them go? It seems difficult to build a farm or a city around, say, a dryad grove, unless you kill the dryads. And unwise to let children play outdoors somewhere where coyotes are near."
...It's talking about doctrinal disputation. Seriously.
(Working with as little rest as possible is the only feasible way to accomplish things, right now, they are subtly burning through resources by doing it but hopefully they can change something before they lose that way.)
"That was... very distinctly not what I had in mind." If, impossibly, this virtuous pagan / maybe member of a bizarre cadet branch of the Church somehow has managed not to know what she means, well, she'll hold off on explaining for now, this of all places is not somewhere to speak of such ill news unprompted.
"All of the wilderness?" That's like asking what you'd do with the stars if you were to fill all the Cosmos. "If we were somehow in a position to do that - it wouldn't be the Wilderness any more, we'd be able to safely arrange places for dryads and - 'coyote' is not familiar, some sort of predator? - beasts and so on in the world. We would be close to Heaven Itself, if we could do that."
"I am starting to wonder if we mean different things by wilderness. I would count a section of forest where the strongest creatures are, say, some bears who mostly try to avoid humanoids because humans killed the previous bears who tried to eat humans, as qualifying. And that's the sort of thing that's easy to destroy if lots of people, say, just want to cut down a few nearby trees, because they just need a bit more space for their farm, and then oops, the bears aren't getting enough food in the forest anymore, and the trees aren't creating a windbreak, and now you don't have a nice forest and your farms have problems."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post