Elfborn: The Quest

Moving without Moving

He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, mulling over the strange new memories that were without warning making themselves known to him, when Jase heard a sharp rap on the narrow door leading to his small room.

"Yes?" he called out.

"Jase Debussy, you are hereby under house arrest, by order of Lord Commander Havlocke, of the Order of St. Raphael," a deep and powerful voice boomed out from the other side of the thin wooden barrier. "Attempt to leave your quarters without authorization and in the company of appointed escorts and you will be immediately detained and placed in complete confinement. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, of course," he replied, mind working feverishly. 'The Pade's death has thrown the Ristusians into disarray,' he thought grimly. 'Forcing their military to take whatever steps they think is necessary to contain the continuing threat against the church. Which now means arresting us. At least, I'm assuming the rest of us are now under lock and key." He looked at the door as he could hear several armed men positioning themselves as guards while others continued tromping down the hallway, intent on arresting the other Hybernians.

'Burn me, we're trapped!' Hopping off the bed, he took a quick step to the window and looked out. The window afforded him a view of the Piazze and some of the Rectory of the basilica. And in that narrow slice of vision, he could see several companies of both paladin knights from several orders, if he went by the colored crosses on their surcoats and soldiers from the Bishops' Guard, gathering for some sort of event. There were several shouted orders from knights on horseback and the soldiers and knights formed up and began marching towards the gates and out of sight. 'Maker! A full scale military shut down of the city? Could they be so reckless? But why?'

Jase leaned against the wall with a frown, letting his eyes idly scan the square framed by the window. 'Why, indeed. Surely the paladin and the Guardsmen are enough to catch the assassin here, in the Vestican before they can do any more harm. Why go out into the city? Unless they think he, she or it has somehow escaped, despite their tight security. However, considering the cordon they usually have erected around the Vestican, combined with its limited number of access points, the assassin would have to be either a magician in order to scale the walls without being detected, or currently trapped inside the Vestican. Or ...'

Jase grimaced as his mind threw the third and last possibility at him. Of course what the most irritating part of this whole thing was his thinking had changed since accessing the sigil stone in the dream world. That is, now he was actually thinking, instead of wanting to rush off into action. As a constable in a small Hesivan town he didn't have to think, only react. And the journey from Hybernia courtesy of the Dark Companions didn't do much exactly to force him to think either.

The change had begun on the Cignet, after the last orc attack and the loss of Max, Ollie and Naneen. He had begun to ponder. And that slow genesis of higher thought had continued on the Dolphin, fueled in part by his conversations with Eje.

But it was the sigil stone, and the memories of what Jase now knew was a being called a 'mystic' that pushed the final evolution of his mind to what it was now. Strangely enough he found himself feeling his earlier urges of blind aggression fading away, their replacements much more calm and centered, for lack of a better description. He had noticed it first during the massacre in the healers' complex. Despite hearing the screams of the dying echoing all around him, Jase hadn't panicked. Nor had he felt anger. Only a serene need to help those that were injured.

There was only one explanation: the mystics of the Shae, an order founded long before the Shae Federation arose, in a time while the earth was still young, were completely against violence. The thoughts of the mystic he had absorbed, along with his beliefs and morals, had now become his. And that quickly resulted in a different man, one significantly apart from the young, bold and angry Hesivan that had strode from the Dolphin's deck onto the Invigilators' Landing seemingly hundreds of years ago.