VEYL: First Campaign Thread

Harper hadn't moved through any of it. He'd kept writing about Mirana, every word spoken by her good friend. He held the drum soft under one hand and let the anger crack open around him without adding to it. Finished, he set the charcoal down and spoke once the others were done, not loudly, but in the way that made people stop and listen.

"She fed people for whatever they could spare. Lost money doing it but kept doing it anyway. She thought the little things fixed the world....Seeds...Roofs...Clean water." He looked up from the journal, his eyes moving from Rory's sword hand, over to Cork doing her best to stand tall, and over to Solya and her harp, but finally landing on Dorn. "She started every story with 'now, this may not be true, but.' She laughed at goats in strange places. She collected buttons because she thought they meant somebody passed through trying to hold themselves together." He let that sit......"I don't think a woman like that wants the last thing she hears to be us shouting over her."

He turned to Dorn, gentler now.

"It was your choice. It still is. Not Solya's, not the sword's. Yours. You knew her. You're the one who should decide how she goes. Whatever you choose, she won't be unmade. We have her now. All of her. She goes forward from here no matter what happens to the rest of tonight. "The choice is yours....let her linger until she's no longer Mirana, or grant her mercy while she still is."

He picked the drum back up, quiet, steady. A heartbeat under the argument. An invitation to bring it back down.

Orvyr looks over to Toil and says in common "Do you just like to listen to yourself talk?"

He turns back just in time to see Soyla throw the concoction into the fire. Why? Does she not know what is about to happen? Orvyr is about to go up to her and say something, but the others are already saying what needs to be said. He says quietly, maybe to Toil, maybe to himself. "Why? There was no reason for that? Why would she condemn Mirana to that fate." Orvyr watches as the others keep talking. 

Toil offers a low chuckle to Orvyr before telling him a short story, "I once spent time in a town in a forest that had forgotten how to make noise. The people there could not rely upon their ears to warn them for predators, or to hunt, or even to communicate amongst themselves. There I learned how to speak with hands, a language that needs no voice and one common among those who are afflicted with deafness. When I left there I had learned not to take my own voice for granted, I also left with the knowledge needed to preach even without my voice..." Looking over to Solya and the others, his eyes wide with satiation. "She makes her actions based on her beliefs, she did exactly as she wants and I will not fault her for that. But as happens often when people pursue their wants, they are not excused the wants of others to judge them nor should they be. It is a complicated matter but all is happening, action and reaction based on what each individual desires. If you watch you will learn more about them than you would have otherwise... What is it that you desire from this situation?"

Dorn watches in silent shock as the lethwyn root is destroyed in the fire.  His mouth opens, as though he's about to say something, before the heated conversation starts.  His attention shifts, and he loses interest in the talking quickly as his eyes settle on Mirana.  His face slacks.  It's clear he is distressed, knowing what is coming next.  

Mirana's eyes shift.  She looks over toward him with a shift of her eyes.  Knowing.  All he has left is a downcast look, his eyes focusing on the ground, as he slips closer to her and wraps his arms around her.  

"That is an impossible decision."  He murmurs.  There is a mixture of tired resolve, fear, worry, and somehow, compassion, on his face.  He studies the ground for a long time.  "I don't have the stones to do it myself.  I'm afraid.  Or the...I just can't.  Is there any other way to ease the pain?  She deserves a better death than what the gods have left her with."  

Toil watches, waits, observes who might step up first to offer the administration of a blow that might end suffering, he is curious of how close to death this Mirana actually is and wracks his brains for if he has seen this level of corruption previously.