AUTHORS NOTE

TRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of attempted suicide.

Thanks for the author favourite / follow adrianwelschinger!

Readinglover3 - Thanks for the pickup! Wasn't paying attention when I added the new chapter, obviously.

Havok22 - Yup, that's the really interesting thing. Technically Tenebrae IS an evil goddess, or at least an evil power. Yet she's chosen somebody who is fairly 'good' to be her champion... Things that make you go hmmmmmm ;-)

Archer1Eye - I'm still in my warm and fluffy feeling streak at the moment. Bonus waff at the end! Tenebrae has split off a bit of her power into different places, but it's the old maxim 'don't carry all of your eggs in the one basket'. She's 'banking' her power so that it can't be taken away too easily. (Not sure she banked on her Shards voluntarily being subsumed into Sharein though!) This shard definitely had a LOT less emotions than our Shard. I wonder if that will have any effect on Sharein? Hmmmm... No, Tenebrae is still around, she doesn't need resurrecting. I wonder what else could come out of it all though? That would be a lot of godly power there.

Chapter 86

? Day of High Summer? 768 n.c?

When I came to Karalin was kneeling over me and brushing my hair from my eyes. My whole body ached and sharp pain shot through my body in waves.

"What happened?" I managed to croak out as I blinked blearily and tried to look around.

"I don't know," Karalin exclaimed in a frustrated tone, "when I walked into this room I saw my father on that altar there, although it was black instead of clear. I felt myself running towards him, even though I knew it couldn't have been him. Halfway there, he disappeared and I looked to see you behind me although the other two were still running to the altar. When they got there…" Her eyes widened in sudden remembrance and horror, and she continued more hesitantly, "they dried up and turned to dust! A woman appeared, dressed in a black dress and she sucked out all of the darkness from the altar and then came up to you and kissed you! She said something about how she 'should have tried this earlier,' before she kissed you again and you screamed out in pain!"

She was sounding more afraid and scared, so I reached over to take her hand in mine. She flinched a little at the contact, jerking her hand away, but then moved it back into my grasp.

"I tried to run towards you, but for some reason I was unable to move," she continued a little more steadily at my comforting touch, "when she finished kissing you, she gently lowered you to the ground, unconscious and walked up to me. She said that you would wake up soon and to not worry before she did the strangest thing. She turned all pale and jumped into you! Right into your chest!"

'Oh,' I thought. No wonder she was so timid near me, I'd probably be a little concerned if I'd seen something like that as well.

I looked over at the piles of dust that were Damon and Gorgrim and mentally shrugged, nothing to do there.

"We may as well get out of here," I said to Karalin, "everything is all clear up to here but there's no knowing what nasties could come up out of the underworld."

Karalin agreed, so we gingerly and slowly walked back into the main village chamber and then up the tunnel back to the square entrance room. Walking was painful at first and tiring, but Karalin held onto my arm to keep me steady and we eventually reached the room where we felt safe enough to sit and rest.

"Now we've got all of this to take back up to the surface," Karalin said, looking at the things we had gathered; including Garth's body.

"Do you still want to bury him?" I asked the ranger.

She looked almost undecided for a moment before she said, "I hardly knew him, Damon and Gorgrim knew him much better than me. But it doesn't seem right to just leave him here."

"Then we'll have to drag him up the corridor and dig a deep hole to put him in so that animals don't dig him up," I told her, remembering the time Father and Jocam had buried a diseased cow out near the tree line.

She hummed and shook her head, "maybe not. Maybe it's better that he stay down here with Damon and Gorgrim?"

I nodded, I didn't really care to drag him up the corridor either.

"We should probably take the magical items off him though," I suggested, "no point leaving them here for some monster to come along and take them."

She nodded to this after a moment, so I cast detect magic again and pulled two rings from his fingers, a dagger from his belt and his entire belt pouch.

I looked through each of the items, but didn't see any rune schemes that I recognised.

"One ring each?" I suggested and Karalin nodded agreement.

"I'll take the dagger," Karalin said, "if you don't mind, and you can have the belt pouch."

I handed the dagger to her and one of the rings, putting the other ring into my pouch. I opened the ties on Garth's belt pouch and upended it, coin after coin poured out of it and we both stopped and stared as the pile grew bigger and bigger until eventually the last copper bit tinkled out onto the top of it. There were far more coins in the pile than should have been able to fit into the pouch.

"Well," I said and pushed half of the pile towards Karalin, "we may as well split the contents."

She thanked me and deposited her share of the coins into her own belt pouch while I picked the other half up to return into my own pouch, which I then secured onto my belt.

We checked through the rest of Garth's belongings and found that he had a curious necklace stored away in one of his many pockets. It looked to be gold in the shape of a hand with a large ruby set into the middle of the palm. I felt something coming from the jewelry in my hand. The hairs on the back of my neck all prickled and I longed to just drop or throw away the necklace. It felt wrong.

"Do you know what this is?" I asked Karalin, holding up the necklace in two fingers like it was the most disgusting thing I had ever come across; which it mostly was.

She immediately went white as a sheet, and spat out, "why would he have that?"

"What is it?" I asked again.

"Before we came down here," Karalin began, "we were investigating a cult in Castlemere. It had infiltrated the nobility, the rich and powerful. They were calling on an old god, a chaos god, to give them power enough to kill the king and take over Carn. But it wasn't, strictly speaking, a god. They were all tricked into making sacrifices to this… this power, thinking that they were sacrificing to the dark god, but in reality they were worshipping a chaos power."

"A chaos power?" I asked. Even with all of Tenebrae's knowledge, I had no idea what she was talking about.

"That's what the priest of Mithras called it," she explained, "he said that this power was from outside our realm, outside of our existence."

Outside was the key, I knew immediately then what she was referring to. Like most things she had put into my head, the knowledge was sitting there and just required a trigger to bring it forward. It was as if everything she had put in there were books on a shelf and all I needed to know was the title to pull the book out and open it up.

"Oh! An Outsider Power?" I asked and she nodded, this was something that Tenebrae had shared with me, "there exists our planes of existence; where the major powers are Tenebrae, Mithras, Celestine and Luna. But there is also a Creator of those powers that exists outside of our planes. Further to that creator are also other powers. Just as we know of our gods, our gods know of these other powers," I shuddered involuntarily, "for a mortal to be calling upon them is… scary."

Karalin nodded to me, "very very scary. We didn't see the power, but we did see what it did to the people who sacrificed to it. They became… soulless murderers, cannibals and worse. The symbol that they used when calling upon it was that, the hand with a red gemstone," she shook her head in disbelief, "I just don't understand why Garth would have had this!"

"Envida," I whispered and Karalin looked at me in shock.

She stuttered, "how?"

"I know many things," I told her, "and when you mentioned that they became cannibals and worse, I guessed that it would have been the greater chaos demon Envida."

She nodded, "that's who they were praying to, the priest that was performing the ceremony had told everybody in the cult that she was an old long forgotten god.

Karalin's story was… interesting. I couldn't tell If I knew everything about the outsider powers that Tenebrae knew, or if there were many things that she had left out, but there really wasn't much known about them. To even attract their attention would take a lot to do, like an ant attracting the attention of a human. They didn't really care about the Prime Material Plane at all and only barely interacted with the other planes. I didn't know whether that was by their choice, or if we were somehow protected from them. The Creator hadn't done anything since creating Luna and while Magic comes from Outside, it has little will of its own.

If there was a cult that was able to not only break the barrier between our planes and the Outside, but also to connect to a greater chaos demon, then everybody would be in serious trouble.

"What happened to the cult?" I asked.

"We killed the priest and most of the cultists," Karalin said, "but there may have been some who were not attending at the time. We did what we were contracted to do though and collected our payment from the Church."

I hummed and wondered if there were some way to track down others in the cult. Anybody who did sacrifice to Envida would be easy to recognise though; their lust, gluttony and greed would show up in their actions very obviously.

I put it aside, I had more important things to worry about immediately and a renewed hope in my quest to restore Shard back to me.

We opened the chest, sat the barrel down inside it and between the two of us we managed to carry them both up the long tunnel. When we reached the top we realised that we had a lot of extra horses and all of the other bags and equipment that wasn't taken down. We found Gorgrim's extra wedges and hammer, and wedged closed the door to the tunnel. It looked like it was late afternoon, so we decided to rest and stay in the cave before heading out to the logging camp.

We divided up the coins in the chest between us and unpacked all of the bags on the other horses. It was mostly rations and general adventuring equipment, but we did wonder at the dress tucked into the bottom of Garth's pack.

"Maybe it was a disguise?" I offered.

Karalin hummed and offered, "maybe he wanted to be a woman?"

"I can understand that," I said and Karalin turned around on the spot to query, "you can?"

"Yes," I continued, "women are so much better than men. Don't get me wrong, I've got a father and three brothers, but women are just so much better. Shard is just… unbelievable. I don't think I'd find her anywhere near as appealing had she been a man."

"I…" Karalin began, "I think there's a difference between who you are attracted to and who you are."

I hummed, "well, I am a girl and I haven't known anything different. I couldn't even imagine how horrible it would be to actually be a boy."

"It's terrible," Karalin said quietly, so quietly that I almost missed it.

"What?" I said loudly in surprise and Karalin immediately went red and began nervously scratching at one finger with her thumb.

Her eyes were downcast as she said, "I used to be a boy. I was born a boy and grew up as a boy," she took a deep breath and let it out slowly as I waited patiently, "the night that the goblins attacked our village, the only reason my father and I survived… was because he was in the forest cutting me down from a tree where I tried to hang myself."

She paused and took another deep breath, I reached out to take her hand which she squeezed and patted with her other hand.

She smiled weakly as she continued, "I may have been born a boy and grown up as a boy, but I was really a girl. I didn't like how I was changing, beginning to turn from a boy into a man, but I didn't think that there was anything I could do about it. So I took myself out into the forest and slung a rope over a branch and climbed the tree. Father came and caught me just in time. We were sitting on a log talking when we noticed the first plumes of smoke rising."

I was a little bit confused, but didn't want to pry. She seemed to sense my unasked question.

"A girdle of femininity, it's called," she said, "it's apparently classified as a cursed item, but for me it wasn't a curse at all… it was a cure."

She rummaged around in her saddlebag and pulled out an old leather belt, which she handed to me.

I cast detect magic and looked at the rune scheme engraved into the back of it. It was very very faint, only an echo of magic. I could see runes for change though and the area where the power bank would have been looked like it was burnt out.

"It definitely won't work again," I said after a moment's study.

"I wouldn't want it to," Karalin replied, looking at me with apprehension.

I leaned in towards her and wrapped my arms around her, "well, I'm glad that you're a woman," I said into her shoulder, "and that you're alive."

I felt and heard her cry as she wrapped her own arms around me.

"Thank you," she whispered eventually.