[Immortals Tongue] The Shrine of Fei

[Faith Augustin]

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For all sorts of very good reasons, Faith was usually pretty tricky to offend and now was no different. She shook her head, just slightly as he asked if he'd offended her. "Offended is too strong a word. I object to the assessment that my morality is chosen for me, but I object to it on the same grounds as if you told me I had blonde hair or was rather tall." The five foot four woman with raven black hair smiled at him. He could think it if he wanted, he was obviously wrong and that was his problem, not hers. "So no, no offence taken." On the Eternal Empire, though? Again, Faith shrugged. "Because there is a large group of people who do one thing, it does not mean everyone does. They used to have a presence on Scalvoris, quite a significant one by all accounts." They who didn't have slavery, but allowed it here, and who looked after their people but abandoned this place. Faith had a very low opinion of the Eternal Empire and frankly, she thought that they really didn't deserve Kura who was evidently the best of a very, very bad bunch and stood several people taller than the rest of them.

If this chap was a Yludih, frankly he was doing a poor job of pretending to be an Eidisi. He was all chipper and enthusiastic, which she believed them not to be but more than that, he seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. That, she knew, was wrong and the members of this race she had met had been very serious. Still, it was none of her business and so she smiled at him and said no more.

Arlo took the map from her, turned it around and Faith grinned. "I'm not very good with directions. Or spatial awareness. Maps. Navigation. None of the above." It was all something of an understatement. "Jesine is a mortalborn, isn't she? Is there a shrine to her here?" She hadn't seen one, but then she hadn't really been looking, in fairness.

All concern about the map, however, disappeared from her as they made their way into the shrine of Fei. Faith looked around in amazement and delight and she carefully examined every inch of the walls. She made sure that she slowly and carefully counted under her breath as she moved, looking at the wall and its decoration in detail. Her memory, after all, was perfect, but with something this intricate it might still be possible to mix up order. Since she wasn't sure, she took precautions and carefully counted under her breath.

When the professor spoke, Faith asked with a frown of concentration on her face. "Have these collections been compared? For stories, stylistic idiosyncrasies, that kind of thing?" It was amazing to her and, in that moment, she wished Padraig was here. "What level of science and scientific knowledge are we talking?"

[Arlo Creede]

This was all getting a little bit more than awkward, and fairly quickly. Ordinarily Arlo liked to steer clear of that sort of thing. But in this case, the subject matter interested him. "I don't know much about the empire," he said, "or why they do or believe what they do. Maybe I'll visit there sometime and then I'll know more. But for me, the worship of Cassion, the Immortal himself is about more than just traveling around and telling stories."

"It's not just about a good time. At least not for me. For me it's about learning, exploration, brotherhood," the young man considered. "A real follower of Cassion could be considered something of a road scholar I guess, and maybe he's the reason that a story told in Scalvoris ends up in Rharne or Desnind or Rynmere in just an arc's time. You can read books all you want about other places or people or strange events. But you can't really understand them till you've seen and experienced it yourself."

Jesine was a different story. But then again, his devotion to the mortalborn dreamweaver was inextricably tied to his worship of Cassion. When Faith owned up to her poor navigation skills, Arlo grinned, but shrugged. "Some of the best discoveries are made when you're lost. Take it from me. I've discovered quite a lot in the last arc or so," he assured her. "She's a mortalborn, sure," he added, referring to Jesine. As for whether there was a shrine to her on the island, Arlo frowned after studying the map a little more thoroughly. "Not that I can tell. The only shrine to a mortalborn that I see on the map is Ethelm, and I'm not familiar with that one."

When they stepped into the shrine though, Arlo fell silent and gazed round in wonder. It hadn't looked like much from teh outside. But inside? That was something else completely. The drawings were like nothing he'd ever seen before. And the more he looked at them, studied them, the more convinced he was that these weren't just random images. They told a story. Or even a number of them. Storytelling was an important part of worship to a follower of Cassion, and because he wanted to remember just what he'd seen, Arlo found a place to sit, to study the walls and to take notes in his journal. If Fei was the figure of blue, Arlo wondered if the other colored human like figures were meant to be the Immortals, maybe her children, and they all seemed to be doing battle with...what? Dragons?

He was about to ask. That and a half dozen other questions, but in a lull of quiet, Arlo frowned, looked behind him, looked at the others and wondered, "Does anybody else hear that? It's like, I dunno. Whispers or something." Possible, he figured, that it was just the breeze outside, rustling through the trees. Happened all the time out in the forest and all too easy to let one's imagination run wild. But the more he listened, the more Arlo wondered if it was something else completely.

[Tio Silver]

Arlo's insight into what it meant to be a follower of Cassion threw a new light onto how Tio thought of the travelling god. So the reason he promoted travel to those who worshiped him wasn't just for the fun of it, but for knowledge as well? That actually made quite a lot of sense. He'd always found that he learnt far better by doing something and having it blow up in his face than by reading about it in a book, which seemed very similar to how Arlo described a real follower of Cassion as a road scholar.

"Hmm... You know I've never thought about it like that. Guess I thought all of Cassion's followers were fighters like the Sojourners. I always thought those guys were kind of cool, but none of them ever seemed like the scholarly types. Maybe I'll pay Cassion a bit of reverence when I next hit the road."

With slow steps Tio walked about the shrine, his gaze flickering from one painting to another. When he'd first heard of these Original Beings he'd assumed that beings of such awesome strength were bound to be terrible and destructive, after all they were the creators of the Immortals, but the murals made out Fei to be different. Whilst the others waged war with the world around them she protected and studied it, looking for a place to fit in instead of forcing everything else out of the way.

There was one mural in particular that caught his attention, though it was hard to explain the reason for why it did so. In this mural the light blue figure representing Fei was simply sitting on the edge of a cliff, staring out across the wide sea in front of her. Sitting beside her was another humanoid figure coloured in red. In many other murals there was a being of the same red colour wielding a spear and waging war on everything around him, and who seemed to be at odds with Fei constantly, but in those pictures the red being was the same size as the figure representing Fei, whereas this red being only came up to her shoulders. Something about this mural felt so gentle to Tio; unlike in the other scenes the two figures weren't doing anything or fighting anyone, just sitting peacefully together and watching the tide flow before them.

Tio called the professor over and asked him to explain it, and after a quick glance over it Fridson's eyes lit up in recognition. "Ah yes, now this is a very rare painting indeed! The red figure we see waging war in so many other murals refers to another of the Original Beings: Anox the Conqueror. Anox was a fighter through and through, and so murals depicting him doing something other than fighting are even rarer than most."

"But why is he shorter in this one than in the rest of them?"

Fridson shrugged. "I'm afraid I don't know. It could be a difference in perspective or artistic style, or simply a mistake. There's so little information surrounding these painting that it's nigh impossible to tell when they were made or what they were trying to show. The most commonly accepted theory for this one is that it was made up and doesn't represent a real event at all, after all it's an outlier from the other depictions of Anox, and just because its painted on the walls of a temple doesn't guarantee that it's true."

He looked over to Arlo when the man mentioned hearing whispers and strained his ears, trying to catch the sound of them himself, but didn't hear anything. Last time he came to this island he remembered the wind howling in strange whisper-like ways, was that what he meant? "I don't hear anything. It's probably just the wind, there's something funny about the air around this island."

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[Faith Augustin]

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Faith glanced at Arlo and nodded. "I feel the same way. Famula, Vri and Moseke, they're all about what we all have. Life, death, souls. To understand them is to understand people. Everywhere." She gave a shrug and smiled at them both, "It's why I practice medicine. All the book learning in the world doesn't save lives. Saving lives does." She didn't know about Ethelm, either, and she grinned in a good natured fashion as Arlo assured her that some of his greatest discoveries had been when he was lost. It was a good job she loved learning things, she considered. She spent half her life lost.

The place was fascinating to her and Faith finished looking at each tiny part of the painting on the walls and then started to examine other parts of the room. It would be easy, she knew, to forego that examination in preference to just looking at the paintings but Faith didn't want to do that.

There were all sorts of spirits here, souls who had not passed on. Immortals' Tongue had a lot of souls and they had swarmed around them the whole time, but in this shrine they were old and Empty. It made the place deafening for the young worshipper of Famula. There was one, though, who was much newer and Faith turned and listened to the soul in question. To everyone else, of course, she appeared to be speaking to and looking at nothing at all. She nodded her head, listening to the soul and spoke in her usual soft tone. "I'll help, yes." Then, she continued moving around the shrine and examining it in every conceivable detail.

The piece of the painting that Tio specifically was looking at was very interesting and the professor's explanation also. "Maybe because it's peaceful?" With a slight frown, she considered. "Perhaps the perspective is showing that this is a time of sitting and thinking, of having ideas or thoughts? Maybe it's meant to represent Anox as less ... there, less solid. Faded?" It was a thought, but they would probably never know. She could, she considered, use her ability as granted by Vri to find out more about this shrine, if anyone had died here or so on. She decided against it for the moment as it seemed rather inappropriate to do that in a shrine.

Faith glanced at Arlo and frowned slightly when he said that he could hear something. "There are a lot of souls, very old ones. The longer a soul is here, not where they should be," Faith gestured to where a soul was, not that anyone could see it, "they become Empty. Unable to communicate in any lucid manner. Maybe that's what you hear, on the wind?" Faith looked at Arlo and smiled slightly. "What does it sound like?"

[Arlo Creede]

"Fair enough," Arlo declared when his fellow explorer mentioned the Sojourners. But then he shrugged and grinned. "In order for Cassion's work to get done, there must be those thick of muscle and fat of neck to do theirs. I can hold my own well enough. With a sword, a bow, my fists and my wits. But its the stories, the knowledge and the legends that are important. If not for the storytellers that carry the tales from one end of the realm to the other, then the first man who slayed the first beast, be it bravery or foolhardy luck, then his exploits would have died with him. It's the storytellers that create the legends." Meaning of course, that if any of them gathered on the island that trial, told their story to another, who then carried it with them, whether they meant to or not they were doing Cassion's work.

"I tend to agree with Faith," Arlo chimed in, regarding the topic of Fei and the red figure by her side. "If Anox was a conqueror who embodied conquest and warfare, then maybe, as Faith says, that picture in particular doesn't depict an event so much as an age. For that matter, it could as easily apply to all or most of the paintings. A time of relative peace, during which the world might've seen a explosion of knowledge, understanding and development."

As for the sounds that he couldn't quite identify, Arlo frowned and shrugged. "I don't know much about souls or ghosts," he admitted. "Except that I've seen things I can't explain, and I believe. It might just be the wind in the trees or passing across the ruins like a puff of air across the opening in a pipe. Except that it sounds different," he added when Faith asked. "More organized, more...complex. Like whispers. Conversation." He'd probably never know and it was as likely the wind as others had said. He was a dreamwalker, blessed by Jesine and a follower of the great storyteller too. Each of them required an imaginative mind and in that, the young man wasn't lacking.

[Tio Silver]

Faded? Like he had grown weaker perhaps? Tio squinted at the painting, trying to make out any details that he may have overlooked. Compared to the other pictures he was in he certainly looked weaker, but that might just be because in those ones he was fighting and laying waste to everything around him instead of just... sitting there. The others were probably right that the painting wasn't as literal as he was making it out to be, that it was a representation of a bigger picture instead of a copy of a scene, but even so something about it still bothered him.

Ah well, whatever it was he wasn't going to be able to figure it out by staring at the painting any longer. Tio dismissed the idea and let it fade to the back of his mind, turning his attention to another painting.

"Now I may not have the finest eye for art, but that..." he gestured over to another painting, in which Fei was kneeling beside one of the massive lizard-like creatures and patting its head while it slept, "looks like a dragon, which certainly can't be real. Don't get me wrong, I would love it if dragons actually existed, but everyone knows that they're fairytale creatures."

The professor raised an eyebrow. "No I'll admit, dragons being real is a bit of a stretch. What you must remember is that these paintings came from stories passed down through the ages from a time before the modern science we know, so it's likely that these stories were embellished over time. What begins as a simple lizard becomes a giant lizard to make the story more interesting, which then becomes a giant flying lizard and so on. The modern fairytales we know could likely have come from ancient stories like these, stories that changed and grew over time." He frowned. "Having said that there have been a few cases of archaeologists discovering things that they believed to be related to dragons, but their evidence has always been flimsy at best. Nothing credible has ever come to the attention of the university."

Tio could see now why the professor had chosen to run this trip; being immersed in the shrine's artwork like this was a far better way of learning than it would have been sitting in a classroom. There were so many large gaps in knowledge in the subject, and so little evidence to help fill them in, that all scientists seemed to be able to do was come up with theories about the time of the Original Beings, and to just read about unproven theories would grow tiring pretty quickly to students. In here though the unanswered questions weren't boring, they were mysterious, and they teased him to find answers to the questions no-one else seemed to be able to solve.

It was at that moment that Tio decided that he'd stick with this Immortal History course. He wanted to be the first one to discover what had happened to the creators of the gods, and learn the secrets of the world that they ruled.

His face lit up with excitement like a house on fire when Faith began talking about souls and then gestured to a space nearby that, to his eyes, seemed completely empty, as if there was something there. "Hold up a trill, are you saying that you can see the souls of the dead?!" He said eagerly. "That's so cool! How do you do that? Are they all super old looking?"

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[Faith Augustin]

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Arlo spoke of the manner of storytelling and Faith smiled at him and nodded. "Whilst that is true, I have also heard it said that history is written by the victors." She gave a slight shrug and motioned around. "The stories we tell will be coloured, I suppose, by our own thoughts and experience." Or so it seemed to her, but then she wasn't sure."Is there an expectation that stories told will be true? As far as Cassion is concerned, that is."

Arlo's description of the sounds he heard caused Faith to nod her head."It can be like that, yes. It might be those souls you are hearing. Maybe it's the whispers of the Immortals?" She didn't know, in truth, but it was interesting to her that he could hear something. She wondered whether it was the thin veil between here and Emea, for she knew that Arlo was a walker in dreams, but she did not say that because it wasn't hers to say.

Tio's questions, though, prompted a rather wry grin from her. At his question, Faith held up her hand, showing that her wrist had a delicate lace-like tattoo around it. Should he notice such things, there was an identical one of her other wrist and a similar one on her neck at her throat. She touched the tattoo with long black fingernails. "The tattoo is where Famula gave me her blessing. The nails are a gift from Vri," Faith said with a smile. "Famula allows me the opportunity to see the souls, yes. All of them. They look." She looked around with a sad smile as she tried to explain.

"There is a child over there. He looks to be maybe five or six arcs old. He died from a disease, I think, judging by how he looks. Over there, a man. I would say he died in battle. Two more there, twins I think. They don't look old, they look dead." She smiled at TIo and gestured. "But they can not hear me any more. I can't help them if I do not know their Purpose." It was her duty and her privilege and she simply did her best to do it.

"What about things like the Sohr Kahl? Might they not be related to Dragons?" Faith couldn't help but wonder.

[Arlo Creede]

"Why is it a stretch?" Arlo asked, piping up when he finished up his notes and drawing, and something about the current conversation caught his interest. Dragons, that was, and the idea that they couldn't be or have been real, just because no one living had ever seen one. At least so far as was known. "I'm a dreamwalker, and have a companion, that nobody sees but me." He saw no real reason not to reveal as much.

"But that doesn't mean that diris don't and haven't ever existed. Fairytales, most of them are just like legends. They don't usually come completely of imagination. But a combination of reality mixed with imagination. The people who painted these pictures must have seen something like a dragon, and if scientists have found old bones and the like that make them wonder, then it seems to me it's just as possible, as not."

Then again, Arlo would rather believe that they existed, than not. And by now, he'd seen much stranger things than dragons. "Besides," he added with a shrug as he stood up and dusted himself off. "Facts and truths change all the time, as soon as something comes along to disprove them." As for Faith's question, he grinned and shook his head. "I don't think Cassion's concern is that the story be true, only that it seems to be. Better if there's an element of truth mixed with fancy. But the legendary man who killed the beast, who first told the tale to the first traveler...Well it might be that he'd only killed a small fox in his garden with a shovel, and had exaggerated it all from the first telling forward."

As for ghosts, the fact that Faith could see them all around the ruins was unnerving. Arlo certainly couldn't see or hear them and was happy for it. Truth was, if it wasn't just the wind he'd been hearing, he'd rather it be the whispers of the Immortals than ghosts.

[Tio Silver]

This Famula lady sounded like fun! Maybe he should research her some time, they might end up the best of friends. Heck if she had some kind of power over souls maybe she could tell him how to live forever! That might be cool! Tio's independent research into necromancy had yet to cover anything pertaining to souls or Famula's hatred for his kind, and so the idea seemed completely feasible to him.

Still Faith's description of the souls haunting the shrine was pretty melancholy. It sounded like being a ghost wasn't very fun after all despite the increase in lifespan... or deathspan? Undeathspan? What was the technical term here? Whatever it was remaining in the realm of the living must loose its charm if nobody could see you anymore.

"Aww, poor souls. Don't suppose there's anything us non-dead seeing folk can do to help them is there? Take them out of a drink sometime? Find them a body to use? I don't imagine these guys want to stick around when no one can see them any more."

He raised an eyebrow at Arlo's theory that dragon's were in fact real, but said nothing. He was a bit too old to be believing that dragons were real, and if the university of all places had found no evidence of their existence then he saw no reason to doubt them, but there was no need to rehash the professor's words. Besides even if they weren't real the mythos of dragons were pretty cool, and that alone was worth respecting in his opinion.

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[Faith Augustin]

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Faith couldn't help but give a slight grin as Tio suggested taking a ghost out for a drink. The eidisi was most odd, she had decided, but she quite liked him. "They are souls who didn't move over when Vri came for them. They are stuck here until they move on. It must be a very difficult existence, but they usually have a purpose. Something meaningful to them which they haven't achieved. So, no, probably not." She smiled at Tio and wondered at the strange person on the course with them.

As for the existence, or not, of dragons well Faith shrugged. "I'm in agreement with Arlo. To dismiss something because we have no proof for it is most unscientific and not the way that things should be done. If we took that approach with disease then we would assume that because a disease hasn't been cured yet, it never can be. That seems to me to be foolishness." The professor blinked and looked at her and Faith realised that what she had said might be considered to be aimed right there. "And I'm sure none of us would do it?" Faith added with a smile and an apologetic glance to the professor who gave the slightest of grins.

Still, conversations about interesting things notwithstanding, it was growing later and later in the trial and the professor was starting to usher them on to leave. Faith collected together her things, neatly and carefully as she always would and she looked back at where the ghosts were. She had to try, she knew and so she said softly to Arlo. "I'll catch up. but I don't want the boat to go without me. Dawdle and hold them up, would you?" She preferred to do this alone, but she needed to do it and would whether Arlo left or not.

It was a quiet conversation with the child. Faith knelt and spoke to him, asked him questions and heard his story. If anyone had heard it, of course, they heard her speak, not the little boy. So, she asked questions and then reached out her hand to stroke a head that only she saw. With a whispered wish that Famula would always guide him, it was only her and the child who saw the lantern she created for him, too. The "Lead the Way" ability which gave her the opportunity to help him pass on.

It didn't take long, but it was a few bits later that she came out and was quite happy to make her way out and then back to the boat, stopping at the shrines of Famula, Vri and Moseke to pay her respects.