Ashiya’s Song

Now I am alive; body and spirit, together yet also separate.

My physical form had been restored and the breath of life instilled into it.

My spiritual form had been summoned back from the Void and restored into its earthly temple.

But something was missing.

Like a clay cup that was fired, shattered and then repaired, what was created whole at birth, then broken upon death, cannot truly be fully repaired even with the Lady’s blessing. In that I remain but a semblance of a living person: a ghost, haunting a structure, yet the ghost is myself, and the structure is the body it once occupied. The Void had left its mark upon my spirit, never to be erased.

What has been done, had not been done for any Valarian in recent memory, had been done only in legend. Some have said that it was an act of the Lady Herself, labeling it a miracle of the Lady’s grace. Some have whispered that it was the result of a dread spell of necromancy, labeling it the blackest heresy against the natural order of the Silver Lady. All I know was that without Her blessing even the great costs and sacrifices paid to complete this working would have been in vain.

I knew not fully the cost that I have paid for this miracle. What price in material goods I had paid is easy to total: what goods I had possessed are all gone, sold to pay the cost of the ceremony and to empower the ritual, but they were but a small price to pay. The amulets and charms I had purchased with coin and blood were needed to prepare my body for its inhabitant, for it had been sore wounded unto death in the fight. The athame I had so cunningly and carefully wrought was destroyed, for it was the link between my body and my spirit; to join the two my own blood was spilled on its edge, and so it lost its ritual significance.

What price I must pay in the future has yet to be totaled.

My companions and mentors Robert Smith and Sherri paid a frightful cost themselves and of themselves. Knowing this cost, I find that I cannot blame either Robert Smith or Sherri for their actions, as wise or unwise as I thought them at the time, but I fear that I never will trust Sherri again.

I was instructed that I am now vulnerable to the powers that affect spirits, that I must fear the spells that return spirits to the spirit plane; such a small thing, these spells, yet they can momentarily or completely undo the sacrifices made on my behalf. What other changes I will discover in the fullness of time.

But whatever the sacrifice, I had returned.

If it were not for the sacrifice that the others made on my behalf, I would renounce my vows as a Valarian and seek the shelter and anonymity of the Silver Lady’s temples, to spend my days in healing and my nights in prayer, but I must honor their sacrifice, and continue the battle against the powers marshaled against us. I was told that our mission had been completed, that our fears had been confirmed: that it was indeed a Pylos Lord by whose will the land was ravaged and the dragonstorm commanded, an enemy who was defeated but not destroyed and who may yet return. Their unknowable designs have endangered this world in times past and will in times yet to come. Others, too, endanger our world: the necromancers who were the eager pupils of the Pylos Lords, the warped creatures that wander the lands, the mortal men and women who take the coin of the necromancers, or who prey upon the weak and helpless; all of whom must be battled to maintain the world.

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