When Cartha opened her mouth, everyone but Alba thought she was, at best, full of shit.
Even now, the man held up a thick barrier of scepticism as she laid out her findings. He sat on one of the squeaky chairs around a wooden table in his little shack.
She liked to invade his personal space, sometimes just to see how he would react, but also because she enjoyed having someone to talk to at last.
Leaning with her back against his grand bookshelf, she recounted her story.
She detailed yesterday's 'harvest', which was bountiful to say the least. She spotted a group of newcomers to the crater. They mugged a few pilgrims on their way to the monastery. Clearly, these were men of little virtue and many vices, wandering the edges of Aethercrust[1]. She also knew men braving the Steps of Mount Shizza to get here were either mad or had a very good reason.
Most often both.
She followed them for two days straight, "with barely a little gourd to drink," she complained, but Alba didn't seem to pity her one bit.
She, too, had a good reason to follow them.
After all, it had been more than a year since she last saw men—in the previous case, Alba—enter the crater.
Under the crescent moon, the two men she followed camped in tents for the night, out of sight, or at least their kind's sight. Hidden behind a large rock, she saw their shadows dancing through the canvas homes and witnessed their…ritual.
Instead of lying and sleeping, as mankind was prone to do at night, they smudged green powder from their little coin purses around their noses.
"Lire!" they cried out. "Lire, Lire, hear me, guide me, shield me…"
Yes, those puny little men thought the goddess of knowledge spoke to them through green pixie dust that must have been, at best, narcotics from dubious sources. What kind of dunces fell for such ploys, let alone followed through on them at night in an unfamiliar environment?
So of course she robbed them blind in the night.
Fighting wasn't even necessary; their eyes widened in their delirious state as she entered their individual tents. "Lire!" one cried as she punched him in the gut. The other had been beaten up pretty bad by the powder already; all she did was finish the job. Then, finally, the both of them slept.
The clueless land-dwellers' packs were a treasure trove of information. They somehow found the location of her father's monastery and sought an audience not only with him but with Lire herself, before her fabled marble statue. The powder supposedly came from luminescent mushrooms of the Selene Forest, a woodland rumoured to be cursed amongst the most paranoid of the Silverlands.
They looked like typical religious nut-jobs but something was off. It hasn't been the first time she saw people put things up their orifices in order to commune with the divine. It happened often enough that she ended up drawing her own funny conclusions. But maybe... Maybe it wasn't just madness.
"I realised," she said before the strangely captivated Alba, "we only know about that one, nebulous thing. 'Soulbinding' we usually call it, for lack of a better term…"
"You." Alba remarked, "You're the only one to call it such."
The filaments of her gills fluttered as he interrupted her. She hated to lose her train of thought; in fact, it had now started to dwindle by the second. But the blonde wise-ass had a point. No serious scholars thought the Gods actually chose their champions via some sort of binding contract as if they were hiring you to work the fields. Not yet. Even her over-doting father didn't believe her. He only supported her research so that she would better cope with the departure of her mother.
"Ah, but you see," she continued, unfazed, "if you stepped back in your land-dweller hellhole of Dilmun, you'd know that this naming convention had become the standard, my friend."
Alba sighed.
"Stop. You don't know the first thing about Dilmun. How'd you even step foot in there anyway? I'm pretty sure maraj [2]immigrants aren't too welcomed there nowadays."
"After the Duke's sudden 'religious awakening' took the culture by storm," she continued, ignoring his silly little remarks, "talks of nocturnal squabbles involving supernatural abilities multiplied throughout the many taverns and inns of the state…"
"But it has always been there, and not without reason," he interrupted again. "Palazzos fucking over each other is nothing new, the supernatural talk is just speculation or fear-mongering."
"That's precisely my point!" Cartha said as she slammed her fist against the table. "You just couldn't let me finish, couldn't you?"
Unimpressed, Alba almost got back to his readings. He fiddled with the pages of a leather-bound tome. In what world was the thirty-fourth dead cult lament—in beautiful prose, she had to admit—of her father more interesting than her very much real, on-the-ground field studies and reports? What an idiot. She abruptly closed the book on top of his fingers before drowning under his curses.
"Heavens, calm yourself comrade," she said. "Fine then, we'll just skip to the good bit then since you can't appreciate my lectures."
Cartha dug into her leather coin purse and heaved a fistful of its contents onto the table. Alba coughed as bits of the powder she spread on the table flew freely in the air.
"Our quest is going to be a whole lot easier now," she said, "because I realised that we need not find a God, but merely a 'trigger' to one day stumble their way."
Flakes of dust flew freely around the room, and she thoroughly inspected Alba's reaction as he inhaled some stray flakes. He winced and pouted with his nose as if he had just smelled a donkey's arse.
"What the…" he coughed again and stood up. "Now you're really trying to piss me off, you loon!"
He gripped tightly at the collar of her conventical robe, uncaring of how indecent it was for a man to try to disrobe a lady so. His grip quickly faltered, though. The spores had a potent effect on humans; she'd seen it for herself.
Of course, the man cursed again but couldn't resist long before sleeping soundly on the hard floor. She knelt and stroked his hair gently.
"Sleep tight, my land-dwelling friend," she whispered. "And good luck."
Usually, there was little faith in each of her experiments. In the past, she had been too scared to try out every avenue for herself, especially when it came to…inhaling or consuming things. But since Alba had joined the monastery, obsessed as he was with soulbinding, an obsession all-consuming enough to rival her own, he had been willing to do her biddings.
Or at least he seemed willing enough.
She felt sorry for the man and what he would have to go through in the coming years, but her intuition called her, now more than ever, into action.
Oh well, she thought, It's all for the greater good, anyway. And knowledge! Let's not forget knowledge.
[1] Aethercrust is a crater inside a mountain. To access the region, one must climb up the Steps of Mount Shizza from the outside, then climb down the Steps from the inside.
[2] Marajs are a race of humanoid hybrid with fish-like properties such as gills and fins.