The Timberpass Temple Assault

My soul burns in my crucible.
 
There was a moment of rest in the keep. We began to patch our wounds and I reflected further upon my journey through the town. With the calming of my thunderbeat heart, I found bile rising up. I've been in fights, but never like this. The smell of burning houses and, may Batis spare me, slaughter was new for me. I've grown with stories of how my people have been treated in the Empire, and here I am in an outland town sensing the horrors that were just distant words from my youth. It frightened concerned me. Mom always seemed a bit dramatic. Is this what she and dad fled from? Is this what took my sister that I've never met?
 
I found my thoughts drifted to the people we then saved. They aren't my people, true, but they are still people, and their very lives were being threatened by this cult. When I look at these smallfolk (halflings, I think? Maybe gnomes.), I see eyes so very different from mine, but also so very much the same. I may not know much about the life they had before this calamitous night, but I've seen their pain all my life.
 
My calming meditations and mantras helped the Keros tempests in my soul soothe to the healing Amohr rains. I felt my breath smooth out, my pulse become a distant drum. My mind drifted to thoughts of my mom, the smallfolk, the cantor who sang the song of our history, and to all the towns I've yet to see. This pain of loss is threaded through them all, but so is the wonder of what they had.
 
Master Sopai was right the entire time. I feel so blind; how have I heard these lessons and never heard them before? Their lives are a wonder, their histories entire worlds. The destruction of these communities is a deep tragedy, a loss that makes us all worse off. I struggle to find the words to express how angry, sad, and pitiful I feel. Sister Paemy would know what to say. I do not.
 
I feel the world is more alive now. I almost can touch the wonder of everything around me, and even the dropping of tears feels slower.
 
My achievement is my own. I do not know my comrades enough to share with them the revelation I've reached; how would they handle it? I will ponder how to share it. But first, we have to see what our prisoners know. I'm optimistic that we will find insights.
 
------
 
That was awful. That was truly awful. I'm a tough guy. I've been in a street gang, I've had alley way scraps. I've punched and kicked and bit with the best of them back home. I thought I was tough. I didn't know.
 
We interrogated the human (probably? No one actually confirmed this. Note to self: get the hang of this, it is embarrassing). Well, we tried. The wizard-scholar Avindir had the idea to play "good guard, bad guard". One of us would play upon sympathies, one would play upon fears. Alright, sure. I thought I was a scary guy, but Makaan is a giant of a man who feels almost as wide as I am tall. He is far more terrifying than I am; let him be the bad guard. Avindir is soft, gentle, and apparently a cultist want to be; a perfect good guard here. This makes sense. They have roles to perform. I'm used to performances. Etonae preserve me, this was nothing like the theater back home.
 
Avindir is, apparently, someone who wanted to join the Dark Dreamer. I know our people have a complicated history with the Nightmare Dragon, but I've not met someone who was denied to the cult. There's a lot to understand there. I shouldn't accuse him of being a traitor in waiting. I know this. But I admit, the thought that the man who can call forth lightning and flame with ease is sympathetic to the cult that caused all of this destruction worries me.
 
Makaan, similarly, seems far too comfortable with violence. I'm not referring to sporting scraps to settle a dispute then going to the local tavern to drink it out. This is the kind of violence that feels dismissive of the wonder of life in others. A cold kind of violence, one driven by acknowledging that the enemy is alive, that they have their own world of experiences, and finding no value in this revelation. This too worries me.
 
Calliope, conversely, wasn't violent. Instead, she wove magic to shape the mind of others. That has always been a sort of taboo for us kenku. Fae have taken our children for generations, warped their minds and souls, then sent them back as agents of the fae to our communities. Our greatest arcanist Nyke refused to touch another's mind in this way and many of our mystical ethics stems from his philosophies. To see Calliope do it worries me.
 
I got ahead of myself. The human was in a kind of despair, accepting a doomed fate. His name was Harold, I believe. He told us little; words about a Furia Morgath who was a dragonborn but became "more". People of all walks of life were being taken to be a hoard for the Nightmare Dragon, a possible sacrifice for the Dark Dreamer's dominion over the world. I know not how magic works, let alone dragon magic. I don't know what value a kin's life is to such a being.
 
In the course of this interrogation, I tried being the tough healer. A bit stiff with the caring manner, but still a chirurgeon. I set his broken arm, tended to his immediate wounds, and applied as much balm as I felt it safe to do. This entire process felt futile, for Makaan readily broke the bones in his right hand. It frightened me.
 
Harold fully accepted his doom at the keep and refused to elaborate. I tried expressing sympathetic, but he rebuffed my effort readily. Avindir tried a bit more forcefully, threatening with fire and lightning. He accepted the tempestuous threat. I was surprised that Avindir followed through by electrocuting him, dropping him to the edge of life.
 
We tried to talk with Smelldrop the kobold, who repeated much of the same points and confirmed things. They take people southwards (likely) to a temporary holding area. Smelldrop, more frighteningly, confirmed that the kobolds are zealous believers of the cult. I tried expressing how tragic it all was; how the community and circumstances forged such zealotry. I struggle to find the words. This would be Brother Ydu's domain; he knows all the words and all the thoughts forged of them.
 
I miss home. I feel over my head, like I am drowning in a deluge surge on the riverbank. I was harvesting reeds and the waters rise so highly over me that I barely can swim to safety. Is this what the world is like truly outside the commune? Is this why our lodge exists? Is this why my order is as it is? Truly, the world needs more mercy.
 
------
 
The lord of the keep, some governor or mayor or something, told us the dragon attacked. Krangerits the Azure Flame or something like that according to Smelldrop. Six soldiers survived, burned deeply by the lightning from the dragon. Blue means lightning, and blue comes from sands. I don't get it.
 
I applied some immediate aid to the soldiers (a bit of bees wax and barley poultice), offered them willow bark for the pain, and found the burned charcoal corpses of those who didn't make it in the courtyard. The lord of the keep provided keys to an emergency escape tunnel to the south, which was filled with particularly angry but healthy rats (who bit quite hard), and we planned to follow the stream in the shadow of night to try and approach the Temple to Aias, the divine lord of the harvest. It seems the cultist raiders were assaulting the sanctified temple to break it open and harvest the citizens taking sanctuary inside. This could not be allowed to happen.
 
Thus, we repelled a kobold-driven patrol near the stream and followed it to the temple compound. The south of the temple was being smoked out by a burning brazier, the north a battering ram. Patrolling forces were keeping an eye for both escape and rescue attempts. The battering ram was the most urgent, pressing threat to the people inside. We rapidly and swiftly disrupted the ramming attempt and prepared for the patrol to reinforce. I fired a few arrows, kicked a few heads, and so on. Typical strategies for what I was trained for. I missed quite a lot; a dragon thing exploded into petrifying dust apparently. I did beat up dragon wolf, which was pretty fun actually.