Quoted By:
Rolled 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4 = 19 (6d6)
<span class="mu-i">Fourth Dusk vaults over a wagon, grabbing a half-cold, half-warm plank to serve as an impromptu shield, as Sal and Cardinal Sin square off against the slicerats, less nimble on their feet. They clash, one going down in a flurry of blows and Fourth Dusk's new dirk drawing less blood but more terror as the Slicerrats finds himself on the recieving end of the one thing he probably fears more than anything: someone else coming for him with a knife and then he squares off and tries to counter--
and--</span>
the world stops working correctly
<span class="mu-b"> wind shifts, hail slaps down and turn to mist and vapour, flames sputter and flicker, a sudden sunlight beam scytching through the clear skies, everything too hot, too cold, too warm, too quick, too *unchained*</span>
<span class="mu-i">In the eye of the storm, Amicus locks eye with Mistil the Flamespeaker, who is trying to speak, but as she opens her mouth her tongue is a incandescent candle and sparks the word that fly and her flame-red hair is, for once, a literalism.
The Full and Unbound Attention of the Empyreal shines down on the city streets.
In the distant days when the Theurges marched with the Legion, you'd see this. The Kindling. They draw too deep on the reservoirs and mingle their thoughtforms too closely with the benign attentions of the Near Icon of the Empyreal, the grand and becoming Eye, and the Other loves nothing so much as being here and only chains of self-control and will keep it at bay. Shocked and surprised and sometimes simply willing to let down their wards, their guards, their will, theurgic acolytes ride the starlit high of the unadultered, unfiltered attention of the High Eye.
No known material of man's make has ever been able to hold the full weight of the focus from the Icon of Fire.
Bodies don't so much disintegrate as simply... unravel.
Acolytes who live to become Theurges proper ward themselves and guard themselves and mind themselves because they know the ever-burning sensation like an ember slumbering in their souls. It would be so easy to go starmad.
To become one with the flame.
Rumour is the Theurge tried to circumvent the bonfire that becomes of a being who thinks thoughts too fulminant. That they strove to build an engine to move our world closer to the Sun itself, to bask in the Eye without, as ever, flash-vaporising in a Kindling Cascade. Because it is the most joyous thing of all, to have the undivided attention of an Icon.
And yet.
Mistil, teeth like fire, tongue like sunlight, icicles sprouting from her fingernails, is not escatic.
The Flamespeaker looks sad.
A tight-wound chain of self-control wrapped around her sense of self, slipped, for a moment, and now the temple that is her body will be ash.
Amicus puts his arm around her - Amicus loses an arm, every nerve deadening as the </span> legion plate that makes his uniform buckles and runs like a river <span class="mu-i"> and against more pain than most can reasonably image, he spins and aims and shoots ...</span>
