Midnight RPG - Chapter 22.187

Andrew/Durgaz

Each evening (morning?) when they set up camp, Durgaz will continue to take an hour or so to slip away from the group and set down to meditate, withdrawing back into himself and attempting to proceed into the vision he attempted to read from Sovaliss, the one that appears to be being blocked by the spirits of the Whispering Wood.

The first night after Radagug's capture and execution, however, he will make none of the mind-clearing attempts I briefly described before. To use metaphors for whatever is going on inside his mind when he does this: If he is attempting to press deeper into the woods, but a thicket of thorns and branches keeps springing up to bar his way, he will not attempt to slip under or through the thicket, but will instead stand in the clearing where he started and speak directly to the thicket.

Durgaz: "I have come not to request passage for myself, but for another.

I have come to ask that you catch the soul of Radagug the Dog as it flies north, before it is snatched up by the Scar. I ask that you catch it, bear it into the heart of the Wood and weave it into the pattern that the albai call the Whisper.

He did nothing in life to deserve this honor. He was a murderer, a liar and a coward, and he has paid for these crimes with his life. I had hoped that with my influence, he might rise above his base nature and become something better. It did not come to pass; he was not strong enough, or was I not the orc to bring him over. He could not turn away from what he was born, and so he died at my hand.

Now his body lies slain in the woods, and his soul has been set free. I know little of the nature of spirits, but they must be stronger than the bodies that hold them, for they do not die. Perhaps his spirit can succeed where his body did not. Perhaps, freed from the chains he and others worked to forge around him each day of his miserable life, he can become what he might have been if not for the weakness of his mortal shell. We are orcs, but we need not be the Shadow's slaves and killers. We can be more.

Take his spirit into the Wood, if it will go. Let it rise above the wretched creature it was in life, bent and twisted by years in the Shadow's army. Set it free to whisper not to the albai and woodsmen, but to orcs; let it whisper of freedom, and honor, and a life not tainted by the Shadow's sendings and the foul clutch of the legates and the kurasatch udareen. Radagug the Dog was not strong enough to break the chains himself, but perhaps others can, if only someone would whisper to them of the possibility.

I do not know if you can hear me, or if you will pay any heed to what I have to say. I do not know whether the Dog's spirit would even desire of what I ask; perhaps I have got it all wrong, and his soul is just as cursed and weak as his living body. You are a sea of elf-spirits, and perhaps to take among you one such as him, or such as myself, would be the ultimate blasphemy. I do not care; I will ask anyway. I will ask as a servant of the Witch-Queen and the elvish people, a warrior who fights to turn back a tide that would turn you all to ashes and smoke. Take my brother's brutalized soul into yourself, free it from its earthly bonds of fear and hate and weakness, and set it loose to do the good it could not do in life.

"Gaakh. Let it be so."