Evangelos Noi's Story

In the darkness she could barely be seen. A single strand, rose-gold in the light of the moons, fell from a heavy leather hood. The arrow was lowered. Her movements revealed her bulky silhouette to the four onlookers, but only for a moment. The leathers of her ceremonial garb faded in with the night once more as she moved away from the light of the distancing arrow. The four watched intently as the arrow peaked in it's arc. The landscape was dully illuminated in the trail of the thing, long shadows grasping faintly at each other before slumbering again. The figures were still as the flame revealed nothing, yet.

The descent began. It seemed to plummet faster than it had risen. Towards the stretching bottom of an elephantine lake run dry the arrow burned, and burned, and burned. The figure cloaked in dark leather did not blink, watching, waiting... Seeing.

She stiffened beneath the leather, wondering if the thick form had revealed her sudden discovery. As the arrow fell, in the last moments of it's fiery life, a new shadow had presented itself. It was lump like, with a few stick like shadows surrounding. The arrow incinerated before it could reach whatever that was, but there was no mistaking it for Iata Kononne.

For almost a thousand years, her people had lived in isolation. They thrived deep inside caves, only ever emerging for the light of a full moon to go about their surface business. They had never seen outsiders, for no outsiders bothered to brave the razor cliffs that jut from a toiling sea at their backs, nor defy the stretches of wasteland before them. Nobody had any interest in coming here, thankfully, until this night. Who were they, why had they come? Were they the dreaded Miserians come to finally bring terror to their cliffs? Iata clicked with her mouth. They must descend again.

Silently Iata Kononne descended the carved narrow stairs. They were nearly invisible to the naked eye unless you knew where to look, obscured somewhere among a formation of towering rock shards on the side of the second highest cliff. Guided by the light of the Third Moon the Warrior Oracle lead her Siblings of Celestia to the safety of their caverns. Once safe within the hollowed walls, down tunnels and far from earshot of the surface, Iata let herself speak again.

"Something new," Though she said it plainly, it was one of their greatest fears. Something new was most often nothing good. Last time there was something new was just four hundred and thirty eight years ago. Locked deep within a cavern only known to the Four Celestias, Iata Kononne shed the ceremonial cloaking garment. It was thick and leather, meant to blend her completely in with the darkness. It was rolled around a stone cylinder as she continued to share what she didn't want to.

"To approach would take the most of day. Unwise as we know it not," She looked to Evangelos, finishing the roll and stowing the leather in it's adjacent column in the wall, "Or them." Her eyes flashed warning. Deep down, she thought it would be most wise to investigate by daylight, in stealth. However, she was not the Shaman of Zola. Iata was a stranger to the intricacies of Day.