Ok, you left this one on a cliff hanger. Please, PLEASE let Ardin see a mirror, or still pond, or SOMETHING that forces him to see himself as everyone else is seeing him? Pretty, pretty please with sugar on top?? PLEASE??
@internutter/challenge-02949-h026-when-you-assume -- DaniAndShali
[AN: You are petty and vicious and I love it]
Ardin had spent a solid minute scouring his body free of the offal he had seen himself as wearing. To his eyes and ears, it splattered messily on the floor. His hands were stained with rotting blood. His clothing was similarly besmirched, but more so with the ichor of evil. Now, more than ever, he had an overwhelming desire to find his reflection.
He had dropped his sword, which seemed nothing more than rotten intestines, mixed with putrid effluvium. His armour was covered with pieces of rotted flesh where it was not sprayed with anything else disgusting. Ardin wanted to strip nude and bathe, scrubbing himself raw... but he noticed his hands. They were no longer human hands, but a demon's claws...
The Clerics of Lathander shone gloriously inside an aura of blessed flames. They were as close to angels as mortal flesh could reach. The Elven wizard Wraithvine was unchanged, though the sense of his years weighed heavily in the air. The monster Wraithvine had with him was a monster no more, but a young individual of a small race. He couldn't quite tell if they were Gnome or Halfling... yet he swore it had been a Kobold mere moments ago.
"Kleff," he said, his voice sounding like a swarm of a million flies. "I know you have a mirror in your pack."
Kleff, wretched and stained, bloated with sores and infections, crawled away from him and gibbered about not wanting to be hurt. For the first time since they knew each other, the Bard turned to Lathander and started reciting many of the prayer forms he had formerly scoffed at.
Ardin stumbled from the church, finding innocent and pious peoples everywhere he turned. None of them feared his new appearance. Indeed, they treated him with kindness and a near enviable mercy. He found his reflection at last in a market stall where members of a small race had all kinds of clever devices.
What he saw sent him into fits.
He was a monster. He wasn't any one monster he could recognise. He was... everything he killed. He was Goblin and Goblinoid, he was Dragon and Kobold. He was undead and Tiefling and every kind of evil beast at once.
The story is told by others. They tell of how Ardin the Protector tried looking for a blade to end his existence. How he swore every blade he lifted became tainted by his presence. How he begged the residents of New Hope to end his existence as an instrument of evil. How so very many people gathered to make images of Ardin the Protector clinging to the robes of both Bugbear and Tiefling and begging to be purified.
Just because New Hope was a haven, didn't mean that its people weren't prone to a little schadenfreude now and then. Everyone who came to New Hope had known the wrath of someone like Ardin. Just about everyone in New Hope knew what they could face in the world outside its borders.
Gaarsh, the Bugbear Cleric, reached out his hand in an offer of assistance. "Have you learned your error?" he asked.
"I don't want to be a monster," Ardin gibbered. "I don't want to be an evil thing..."
Sunshine said, "Do you understand that your appearance is a reflection of the evil you have enacted?"
"Make me pure or end me," he sobbed. "I have suffered enough."
"You might have suffered," sighed Wraithvine, "but you do not understand. We want to be sure you understand."
The only response to this revelation was wordless keening as Ardin the Protector descended further into madness.
New Hope was protected. Especially from people like Ardin the Protector.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / frenta]
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