Chapter 120: Chapter 120 – A Torch; Beacon, Symbol, Weapon (Amber’s Tale)

My name is Amber Ashborn, and I have aspired, all my life, to be precisely that which I am; and no great wonder, for who I am begins with having so aspired, and fills the rest as it goes.

I see the looks on your faces; horror on my Lord’s, pity on some of yours, understanding on one. I will tear the shroud off, then. The constraints of my creation were simple: I love Adam Leviathan James with an entirely reasonable degree of unreasonableness, love him knowing that he loves me in return, knowing that the fire that burns in my loins and the heat which warms me from my toes to my eyes is returned in kind. I am a healer of some small skill and a Paladin possessed of a deep and uncomplicated faith in a God who gives me the strength to do the tasks that need doing, and who demands from me no more worship than that I do good in the world and grow great in doing so. I am a warrior, skilled with a number of weapons and a variety of shields; I am, it is simple truth, poetry in motion.

It is not the only way in which I am beautiful, but it is one of the beauties that I enjoy about the life I have been given, the person I have turned out to have become.

And all of these things which I am, I treasure. For who with any heart could see the world as it is and not desire the strength to change it for the better? Who with any heart could look at the centuries that skill and luck might grace an adventurer with, and not wish for someone to spend it with whom she loves and who loves her in return, as unreasonably as she loves him?

Some weeks ago, I was made to have been born twenty seven years ago, in a township by the name of Shale. Ours is a small town, subsisting largely on mines and some small amount of trade with the Nayyo through the deepest of the shafts, and they had struggled; there had been a persistent blight causing crop failures in the region, and Shale drew not enough out of the mines to pay for enough food at the higher prices, some years. Too, they called them the Canyons of Rushing Tides for good reason; and they were more vicious in those years than in some, and this too was a trouble. That was, and is, life in the Eastern Reaches, for it is an inhospitable land and miserly in its support for life.

I am made to have been born to Mirim Gross, Mirim the Tall, so called for she was four inches below five feet in height, and her husband Anthony the Grim, who smiled even as his hammer spun. I have four brothers, and if they are none of them heroes, neither are they villains; and I love them, and for the sake of them and my mother and father, when the Temple Lands came in my eighth year to investigate a mana anomaly, I petitioned to go.

I was nine years of age when they returned to the Eastern Reaches, and they acquiesced. I was by then already touched by Kazir, and had begun to walk the fields in the evening, feeling the loam beneath my feet and between my toes. In running, in the twists and turns of pushing my body, and in growing the strength of my muscles I grew ever closer to Him. I shed His blessings from my skin and breathed them from my lungs, and every footfall sang of the harmony of all things that grow and the vast cycles they partake in; cycles of water and its components, of the breath of plants and the breath of the kindred, of the give and take of the most fundamental things between us all.

I saved three lives, in those months of that year before the Temple took me away. One man I carried on a sled from the canyon where he near drowned until, closer to home, someone who knew how to treat the chills was able to aid him; the other two, I saved when the life-pad within Auntie Shash’s womb made to detach from its perch, and as the blood ran rich and red down her thighs, the power of Kazir flowed through me in full for the first time.

Little Amber is an adult now, terrifying though it may be to think that of the little hellion, and Shashkeva lives still with her husband; and my God remains with me, and I with Him.

My family was torn on the subject of my departure; I was determined that I should go and train and grow mighty, and only the youngest of my brothers, who hated me for usurping what was once his place in the family, made to agree. Still, they were offered a trade they could not refuse; a Paladin grown old, Dame Rafaella, who sought a quiet retirement, would take residence in Shale. She was accounted as kin amongst Nayyo, and was a quietly masterful healer, and I took her place in the procession that departed and have not been back since.

It is petty of me, and I regret it; but I knew my path, and they would have shackled me to those lands for their own sake, and I am yet to forgive them.

I was seven years in the Temple’s service before I left the Lands again. This was no great hardship; even the Eastern Demesne stretches for acres in the thousands beyond counting, from a narrow slice of the mountains down to the Anorah River, and contains forests both young and old along with grassland hills and fields. I threw myself into training and came into my second tier, becoming a Squire of Kazir; I was nothing of a prodigy, but I was diligent and motivated and determined, and I grew skilled beyond any but the most talented of my peers with the six fundamental arts of combat: weaponless fighting, the sword, the shield, the spear, the sling, and the bow. Having thus earned Core Weapons Expertise, I qualified for the Judgment teams.

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I was sixteen years of age.

In my first year as the juniormost of the Temple’s Justicars, I was dispatched thrice. Twice, we performed the routine duties we hope all such missions will involve; the slaying of monsters and encroaching arcaneous beasts, healing those in need, and training local forces, along with the evaluation of whomever we have been summoned to judge and the inevitable ruling in their favor. The third time, we arrived late.

Not late by our standards; we had made good time on the road to the nearest fork of the Anorah, and from there made better time still with the barge-crew whom we hired. We could not have bettered our travel speed, not without Neza herself or one of the Grandmasters of the Temple, and the only such in Ion busies herself with that which no other can do.

Late, however, by the standards of the work that needs doing, the work that remains whether or not you can shoulder it. Not too late; the central bastion of the town still stood against the lichwyrm’s army of the risen dead, but three in ten out of the township were dead. This is the ugly truth of the Temple Lands, and the ugly truth of Judgment: it has been centuries since a Firstborn has been found on Iavshet, but in their wake there is no shortage of threats, and we stand against them.

I was sixteen years of age when I bloodied my blade. We opened with prayer and great magics, as the Master who led us and hir two Adepts brought what seemed as the very stars down upon the army. In the wake of those strikes, when the dust cloud settled, there was only fertile soil where had been a vision of shambling, synchronized horror; and as they faced down the great wyrm, the seven of us, three Adepts, three Journeymen, and my own Apprentice self, advanced through the gate and began to clear the streets of the town, where the stars could not fall.

We saved three thousand, eight hundred, and seventeen people.

I was made to stay behind our lines at first. When the first leaper made to take me in the shoulder and I dropped my bow to skewer it upon my spear, I lost both weapons, for lack of time to set myself properly; I would go through two swords, another spear, a mace, and my mentor’s backup axe before the day was done.

And when the day came to a close, when we gathered before the seventy-foot corpse of that beast and sent up our prayers to five different Gods with the fires that would utterly consume its corpse, I was bruised and battered, and more exhausted than I had ever been in my life. I had bled and broken two small bones in my hand and one of the bones in my ribs, and despite the healing and Kazir’s grace, it hurt to breathe too deeply. Laughing nonetheless, I drank with townsfolk and comrades alike until I sickened and vomited onto the wyrmpyre, and then laughed with those who cheerfully mocked my foolishness, and took one among them for my first lover, if in truth I was not taken by her; a girl not far older than I, who had burned a ghoul off of herself that had already grasped her head, and whose new scars I traced tenderly until she slept.

It would not be the last time I stood in defense of others. I would hold the line or the gate three times more against foes great in stature or in number. I would adjudicate, in time, some hundreds of complaints and proceedings, and facilitate negotiations a dozen times for scopes that ranged from with a single family to a fragile, tenuous peace between Hyther and Ion themselves. I would put down bandits and beasts, and deliver a dozen and one babies.

This is my story, then. I have eaten meals cooked to perfection, and scavenged roots for a paltry soup. I have studied and made use of history and law both high and low, diplomacy and love and war, logistics and construction and the leading of nobility and artisans and the workers of the field. But above all, I am a Paladin of Kazir and a Justicar of the Temple Lands.

Healer and benison; sword and shield.

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