The Morning Light

	In her room, Viri slowly, painfully, sadly confessed the words of her argument in that same room the previous night.  “I stayed here all night, and I just… oh, Linus, I feel so stupid,” she cried.  It was an unbearable sight for the young Paladin.  The sunlight didn’t glint off her curls like it was supposed to.  She was just a scared, angry, injured young lady with no clothes and a hole in her smile.

	“Damn it all,” Linus muttered, and he leaned over to hug her, then noticed that that would injure her thanks to the iron content of his magic armor.  Instead, he quickly pulled his helm off and nuzzled her the way he had seen her do to others.

	Linus, Viridian noted, did not know the subtle language of facial submission and respect.  Perhaps he thought he was simply making her feel better, but he was actually signaling that it was her turn to watch the fire.  There was no fireplace in the room.  Still, the sheer incongruity of the moment was enough to earn him a tiny laugh from her.

	“I, um.  I’m sorry I called you back from whatever you’re doing.  It sounded like I was interrupting you in something important,” Viri said.

	Linus sat back.  “Well… yes, but it ended as well as it could have.”

	“You flew in, smote wrongdoers, saved the day,” Viri said with a miserable smile.

	“Something like that.”  Linus sighed.  “I’m sorry you’re hurting, sweetheart.  No, I shouldn’t call you that, should I?” he corrected himself as she opened her mouth.  “Sorry.  You look, to human eyes… much younger than you are.”

	She nodded.  “Is that why you were so uncomfortable in the revel you attended?  Because we look like children?”

	“No, no, not children,” Linus hastened to assure her.  “Children aren’t as… er, womanly as faun and satyr females are,” he said, awkwardly looking over her lovely breasts and hips.  In fact, she had filled back in beautifully since returning to her preferred diet in the Feywild.  She didn’t look like an anemic refugee any more.  It somewhat undercut the look of almost childlike sorrow written on every line of her body.

	“After I saw Lumira go back into the revel after she said she wouldn’t, I just… I just sat here and felt numb all over,” Viri said softly.  She moved to sit beside the window and looked out in bitter sadness at the three dozen Primes that lay sprawled over the empty building.  A few town guards were kicking the feet of the hung-over partygoers, trying to stir them to wakefulness, and Father August was there to tend to the ones who couldn’t wake up on their own.  A man with a bear-like build sat up in one corner, looking dazed under his pile of female conquests, and looking at a well-loved drum like it was full of snakes.

	Linus saw the strange shadows her horned head cast on the bedspread as she moved between him and the sun.  If she weren’t so adorable, he’d have called it a positively devilish silhouette.  “Was everything you said true?” she asked quietly.  “Are… are we just monsters?”

	Linus sighed heavily.  He walked up behind her and helped her to her hooves.  “Please take my hand, Viri,” he said in gentle Sylvan.  She did, and she met his big, soft, brown eyes.  “I have never called you a monster.  You are not a monster, Viridian,” he said softly.  “You never have been.  Lumira… I don’t know.  But you?  No sane person can call you monstrous.  You’re not.”  He very gently squeezed her hands.  “You’re a good person.”

	Her eyes watered.  She had never heard the word ‘righteous’ used to describe a person generously.  It always had the tang of cockiness attached, or the word ‘self-‘ appended to the front.  Not him.  Linus was righteous, and it filled her broken heart with warmth.  He wasn’t moving.  He wasn’t waving his holy symbol of the armored hand in her face.  He wasn’t reaching for his sword or casting his spells or summoning his bonded psychic Celestial spirit, or raising the dead, or crusading for a cause.  He was just looking her in the eye and telling her she was as much a person as he was.  He was telling her the honest truth when she had been scared of it, and he was doing it because it was what he felt he had to do, at a level as instinctual as breathing.

	She didn’t know Prime religion.  Suddenly, she wondered what her ancestors and countrymen could have ever done to enrage the Paladins of old so much that they had felt the need to make war on them so long ago.  That didn’t change the fact that he was still terribly dangerous, and that, at some level, she was still slightly frightened of him.

	Of course, that was a line of reasoning that could very well make her sad again, and she didn’t want to interrupt this crystal moment with self-doubt.  Instead, she rose up on her hooves as high as she could and nuzzled him submissively.  Properly, this time.  “Thank you,” she whispered.

	Linus held still until she was done.  “Come on.  Let’s find your satyress friend.”


	Outside, the whole town was filled with glaring people, and all of them directed their glares at Viridian.  She huddled under Linus’ shadow, feeling each hateful stare like a sting from a needle.  “Oh, this is the worst,” she mumbled.

	Linus puffed up his chest and made ready to call out for the attention of all, but Viri sensed his intent at the last moment and grabbed his hand.  “Wait wait wait wait, no, no, don’t,” she said hastily.  No, stop.  It’s alright.”

	“You are innocent,” Linus snarled under his breath.  “They hate you for no good reason.”

	“I look like a satyr,” Viri said awkwardly.  “I get it.”

	“That doesn’t make it right,” Linus said curtly.  He wrapped one arm around her shoulder after taking a moment to hang his cape over her shoulders so he didn’t make her uncomfortable.  “Come.  Let’s get this over with.”

	When they arrived at the scene of the revel, Linus felt his stomach churn.  He was no master of the sexual arts, but he knew the aftersight of an orgy when he was standing in it.  “Triad’s mercy,” he whispered.  Some of the people on the floor were bloodied, others were covered in vomit.  Worst were the women.  Some had passed out with blood on their legs and bottoms.  One had a spot of blood on her cheek by her mouth, and a broken bottle in her bloody hands.  Had she been so inebriated that she had broken a bottle and then tried to drink from it, or had she broken it defending herself from a man who had then had his way with her?  In all likelihood, she would never know.

	Others were nearly as bad off.  Two half-elves, twins perhaps, were sitting on opposite sides of a broken chair, naked back to naked back.  Had they done something unforgivable in their inebriated state the previous night?  Who could know?

	Father August looked up from the scene of carnal oblivion and cast a look of helpless rage at Linus, who did the same to him.  To Linus’ relief, August seemed indifferent to the faun who stood beside him.

	“Find the bitch,” August said coldly.  He turned his gaze on Viri next.  “How can you live like this?” he demanded.

	Linus set a gentle hand on Viri’s shoulders.  She jumped.  “She doesn’t speak Common, Father, and she would never, ever do something like this,” he said firmly.

	August shook his head.  “She still brought this on us, Paladin.  Her bodyguard did this.  You know it.”

	Linus scowled, but August was indisputably right.  “Yeah.”

	August probed the wound on one groggy teenage boy.  “Hmmph.  Claws did this,” he said.  “Not satyr ones.  Bestial ones.  Grips.  She was holding him.”

	“Sure was,” the lad mumbled.  “Fuckin’ A.”

	“Shut up, boy,” Linus said.  He took three long, clomping steps over the floor and grabbed the lad by the shoulder.  He scoffed when he saw the boy’s pupils dilating asymmetrically in the morning light.  “Bah!  This one’s got something in his system,” he said.  “Kid, who did this to you?” he demanded, pointing at the matching sets of claw marks on his flanks and back.

	“Heh.”  The boy rubbed his eyes.  “Goat-leg lady.  Nice pussy.  Long hair.”

	Linus left him to August and slowly turned back to the door.  “So, it would seem that this was something of a dereliction of duty on Lumira’s part,” he said flatly.

	“Linus… I’m so sorry,” Viri said.  Well, to her eyes, it looked like the whole village had had a really good time, but she understood better than most what the mixture of Feywild magic and Prime concerns for things like consent meant.  To her, this looked like a lovely party, to him, it probably looked like the aftermath of torture.

	“Your long-haired friend is not long for this plane if I catch her doing this again,” Linus said darkly as he walked past her.

	“Who?”

	“Lumira,” Linus said.

	“Lumira doesn’t have long hair,” Viri said.  “She has hair like mine.”

	Linus looked back at Viri’s close-cut, springy golden curls.  “…How many bodyguards did you have?” he asked.

	“One.”

	Linus looked around.  He knelt before one particularly alert-looking partygoer and snapped his fingers in front of the man’s eyes.  “Wake up!” he said loudly.  “This is an emergency.”

	The man, who Linus recognized as the storage room worker at the new village crafthall, managed to focus on him.  “Huh?”

	“What musical instrument was the satyress playing last night?” Linus demanded.  “I command you, tell me at once!”

	“Uh… there were two,” the man mumbled.  Linus gritted his teeth as the man answered.  “A… flute… and pipes.”

	Linus gently laid the man back down and quickly healed his wounds.  “Here,” he said.  The man sighed as some of the alcohol toxin in his system disappeared before Torm’s vast magical might.

	“Thanks, Linus,” the man said with a yawn.

	Linus stood and looked around.  “There’s no satyresses here,” he observed.

	Viridian looked around too.  “Uh… they may have left to go somewhere more open when this room filled up,” she said.

	“We search the farm fields, then,” Linus said.