Quoted By:
[b:lit][blue]Winner:[/blue][/b:lit] Act with Sincerity (Spend 1 Honor to Beseech)
[b:lit][red]5 (d20) + 6 (d8) + 17 = 28 vs DC 25 and DC 30. Task Failed Successfully?[/b:lit][/red]
By the time you make your way outside, your inebriation has not fully run its course. Nine glasses of brandy do not work their way through your system in such short order, even for a woman as large as you. You know you are in no fit state to face the King, but you also know that there is no use trying to hide this from him. Oh, you can and do conceal the alcohol upon your breath and skin as a simple common courtesy, but attempting to feign sobriety serves know purpose.
The King values candor above all else. To be honest and forthright with him - especially in dereliction - is to save face with him. His disappointment in those who make mistakes is nothing compared to his wrath at a liar caught, and he rewards those who recognize their shortcomings with compassion and understanding.
On the green where once stood crude orcine barricades around the tower now sits a field of tents, where the men of the Briarcrown and your camp followers tend to the victims of the cult. The buzz of activity that had swarmed about the camp in the first days since the capture of the tower has died down to a somber calm.
People mill about upon their routine tasks, preparing soup, changing out bandages, moving supplies as needed, but most of all pacing themselves. The days of triage and the need for quick responses have largely ended, now is the slow march towards recovery for those victims who made it out of the woods. Those too far gone now await the arrival of the village elders, wrapped in specially treated cloths to stay time's decay upon their corpses and allow for their identification.
Too many lay among their number, draped in somber white.
You do not focus upon your failure to save them. Better to remind yourself of those you saved. The many who now lay in the tents, waiting for Damien and Hilde's khemicals to restore the strength they've lost, the wounds they've taken. The many more who hardly needed treatment at all, beyond a visit from Priestess Natasha to purify their souls. You catch her as she goes from tent to tent, her implements in hand, strapped with holy water drawn from the spring about which her shrine was built.
Neither of you have time for more than a short nod, but it seems that whatever bad blood hung between you has been dried overcoming the atrocities of the cult. Though you do find it somewhat odd that she is without her usual escort of Astrid (and, by way of Astrid, Squire Trevor, who has not let the young woman out of his sight).
You also find the presence of a new banner in the field odd.
