Faithful in the Field

Still standing in the ruined church, the party works out what was real. The priests and paladins in the vision were the ones who came from the church of Lathander thirty years ago, answering Tüül's own call, and they were destroying every holy symbol in the building. The scratches through the sun on the wall were made by claws, with bits of nail still in the plaster; it was not one tool, the GM jokes, it was two. The handprint in the ash is child-sized. La Maestra's golden shell pulls toward the empty reliquary hard enough to fly out of her hand, and Aelion's hammer glows beside it with a warmth that feels like healing.

Behind the church, the graveyard says strange things. Some stones are marked "recovered," people Tüül remembers burying. A small stone for Ilara Vance has her name struck through and "mistake" cut beside it. Mehmet Vance's grave has fresh flowers. There are no graves at all from the last thirty years. Owlin presses one of the flowers in his notebook. Then Lavius scrapes the moss off one more stone with his javelin: "Here rests Tüül Oakencask. Keeper of the sun's office, faithful in the field." Thirty years weathered, both umlauts spelled right. "There's nothing fuzzy about that," says Tüül. "That's my name." Aelion tells him, "You are not what you seem," calls him a celestial, and will not help dig.

On the road into town for a shovel, Lavius drops asleep in the mud, and Tamsin steps out of the trees, tired and afraid. She tells Owlin to leave Mourningfall tonight: "If you dig any further, you will wake something that has been sleeping for thirty years, and it will not be gentle." The party argues it out. Lavius wants caution. La Maestra wants the root of it: "That's not life. That's not living." Tüül takes the shovel. It's his grave, and he is not in it.

Inside the coffin lies a dwarf in old priest's robes, grey beard combed, holding a sprig of barley. It is Tüül. He draws one slow breath and lets go, and comes apart into petals and green leaves. Wherever they land, the hill turns green. The GM reveals that Tüül was sent by Chauntea, the Earth Mother, to keep the peace. Aelion reburies him by hand, and Owlin lays his pressed flower on the grave.

Down in the crypt, each of Aelion's blessings draws a hidden line of Draconic out of the bell: Rest in the dark house, do not rise. Tired hearts are kept, their eyes stay closed. The sleeper dreams nothing, the sleeper is safe. Heart-kept, the dead are not yours to wake. Hush, hush, the hungry one is kept. Back upstairs, La Maestra lets the golden shard fly. It slams into the reliquary with the sound of a bell that has never rung in this world, and the church heals: roof, pews, bell tower, and the sun on the wall, burning clean. At the market, La Maestra rolls a natural twenty for a dusty rapier, and Calder Finn is due tomorrow.