1628, Dark Season, Movement Week, Clayday
Context
Lord Raven is aware he can take a raven’s shape, but has had no practice with it at all. Session SA3.13.
Events
He is clumsy at first, as a raven. Unused to wings, he tries to think his way through having them. Intellect should solve such a thing.
After several failures, he forms himself as a man, late at night. He climbs to the top of the Temple, where his Priest sometimes lies to look out of eaves. Then he changes, which requires his own magic, his own effort.
His body dissolves into smoke and darkness, and reforms. He has never seen himself in this form. He does not know if the peasant Priest knows. He will not accept her help.
Before he can change his mind he launches himself out, extending his wings to let them catch the air. He manages to rise heavily, his wings labouring, but he was not made for this sort of flight, and so he angles down the valley, awkwardly changing direction, veering as sudden winds hit him.
It is a sylph that is his undoing, a spirit of the wind that catches him from the side, aggressive and angry at the intrusion into its realm.
He strikes at it with beak and claws and spirit, as it throws him around and tries to crush him. A lucky, desperate strike gets through its defences. It is not killed but he tears some part of it and is released.
The sky yawns beneath him. He realises his danger but whatever it is that he hits is solid enough to hurt, and he bounces off it a few times. His body is destroyed.
He wakes to the worship of his tiny community: the fierce greed for power of Amling, the dependable calm of Darl, the proud self-sacrifice of Varaena, and the odd, broken patience of Lady Berra.
