Holy Opposites 60

Chapter Thirty-Four:


	I felt the tremble in my voice as I said it.  I meant every word.  I knew this place, like Axio.  Unlike Axio, I had been here before, in dreams at least.  I rounded a bend in the path and fell to my knees in reverence.

	“I knew it,” Axio whispered.  He pressed his wrists together over his heart and bowed low.  “Thank you, Lord Ilmater.”

	The Eilistraeeans gasped as one as knowledge flooded their minds.  I felt it too, but I knew everything it was saying.  “The Weeping Garden,” Kyria whispered, looking faint.  “It’s real.”

	Suivi’s eyes widened as he laid eyes on what we were all now seeing.  “This…” was all he could muster.

	The space beyond the hedge was a wide orchard.  The details weren’t exactly the same as they had been in my vision of Ryaire, but they were close.  The table was gone.  In its place was a clear fountain of glass and white marble.  Eight statues surrounded it, and the fountain and statues were each weeping water into a pool.  Fruit trees ringed the garden, heavy with a variety of foods.  It was the Weeping Garden, all right; the respite to which Ilmater's champions could retreat just once in their lives, and only in need.

	“This is…” Luanea managed.  “I never thought…”

	“Somebody wants us to succeed,” Axio said gamely.  He bowed again to the fountain, and approached.  He slowly crossed the space and knelt beside it.  He reverently kissed the water and leaned back on his heels.  “Thank you, your Lordship,” he said softly.  “We accept your gifts.”


	The six of us sat in a circle beneath one of the fruit trees, mending our armor.  I had explained to the others that the passage of time didn’t really mean anything in this holy place, and we would return to the exact positions in which we had been at the moment we left them as soon as we departed.  We were taking our time to fix our gear.

	We couldn’t fix Axio’s or my armor with what we had on-hand, though Kyria did have her mending cantrip.  She was repairing the heavy armor as best she could while the rest of us worked on the leather and mail of the other four.

	Suivi hadn’t said a word since he had arrived.  The rest of us had made light conversation – it was hard to discuss heavier topics in this place of total tranquility.  The spy saw Axio sitting in silence, fixing his leather armor with what he had on hand.

	Finally, I asked the question.  “Suivi, are you alright?”

	He looked up at me and blinked.  “Huh?”

	“You’re dead quiet.”

	He looked back down again.  “I’m conflicted.  I dunno.  Ask me later.”

	Kyria finished fixing my armor and settled back against the soft, grassy earth.  “Aahhhh… this is pretty amazing,” she said sleepily.  She closed her black eyes and sighed.  “This place… it feels like it’s easy to dream here,” she murmured.

	I nodded.  “It sort of is.  We’re in the Astral Sea.”

	“Yep.”  She rose again and collected her armor from Luanea.  “Thanks.”  She slung the hardened cloth over her shoulder and ambled off into the trees, already shedding clothes.  “Imma trance.”

	Suivi watched her pert backside disappear into the trees, and then turned his eyes back down to his own mending.  Doshellas stood and stretched.  “Need a rest too,” the stoic hunter said with a yawn.  He set his armor against the tree and stretched out in its shade.  He was in biological reverie in moments.

	Axio had finished fixing Luanea’s armor and set it aside already.  He had stood and wandered off to the fountain, and was sitting beside it, watching the clear water splash about around the base of the stone.  He looked like he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, but I knew better.  I could tell he was hurting because he was alone.

	I set my own repairs aside and walked over to him.  I stood until he looked up and beckoned me to sit.  I did, leaning fully against his side and wrapping an arm around his lower back.  He closed his eyes and leaned back, and we held each other up in silence for a while.

	I could feel his emotions.  My fiendish senses are quite useful sometimes.  I could taste his longing for a better outcome.  I could taste and even hear the pain in his heart, for his sister and the hundreds of others we had briefly witnessed in that dungeon.  I could feel his bitter disappointment that such an atrocity had been allowed to occur, and even his unfailing, ironclad love for Ryaire.

	Above all the others, though, was a sense of loss.  I could smell it on him, and I tasted it when I leaned over to plant a light kiss on his cheek.  He had lost so much.  Brother Maynard, in the hit on the temple.  The children in Undermountain, the loss of whom he blamed on himself.  The children in this very temple, ripped from their parents and taken to Bane’s hellish fortress.

	He felt the loss of every parent whose child now suffered in the Blood Rift or the Banehold because Ryaire hadn’t been able to get to them in time.  He felt the loss of every Watch officer whose comrades had been cut down by the damned cult, and even loss for me.  I would never get to fly, because my appearance frightened children.

	Of course, my senses of smell and taste didn’t tell me those things in such granularity.  I could sense his distress and unhappiness like any other sensory input, and found their cause with a moment’s conscious thought.  It was marvelous, really, that I had come to learn his heart so closely so soon after meeting him.

	I did not love him, not romantically.  Instead, I wanted to rock him to sleep so he could arise in the morning refreshed and happy, ready to take on the endless problems he and his faith could solve.  I wanted to soothe his fraught emotions and heart; he had subsisted on faith for so long that there was little left but weariness.

	He could sense my own mind, I knew.  His divine senses were as sharp as my fiendish ones.  He knew I was burned by my self-loathing, however much Solen had talked me out of its depths.  He knew my forced abstinence bothered me, and the necessity of my disguise wore at my patience.  How many times in my endless life would I have to suffer shock and mistrust from people less understanding than Kyria or Doshellas?

	He could sense my confusion at how somebody could choose to be as evil as Bane or Asmodeus.  He could sense my fear of my devil creator, and my slight-but-not-insignificant fear of Ryaire, and how her world revolved around killing people like me to save the souls of children.

	Or, perhaps, he didn’t sense those things.  Maybe his divine senses could just tell him I was unhappy and alone, and maybe he was really just as good at filling in the blanks as I was.  What I know is that after we sat there in silence for a few more long, quiet, peaceful minutes, we both turned as one and kissed.

	I felt as natural and comfortable as I had ever felt.  My eyes slid shut as I felt his lips against mine.  I didn’t feel a flash of lustful heat or a dizzy sense of desire in my mind, as Ryaire had explained I would if ever I lost control of myself.  I didn’t feel a surge of predatory hunger for his soul, as I would have if her seal on my innards ever broke.  What I felt was the faint breeze on my skin, his warm hand on my back, the taste of his lips, and contentment in my heart.

	We were scared.  We were sad, alone, and scared, we two Paladins.  We were fearless in vow and afraid in reality.  We clad ourselves in a good mother’s love and struck our foes down in burning, protective wrath.  In that garden of peace and plenty in the sight of a god, we were alone, but alone happily together.

	We both leaned back after the kiss ended and regarded each other.  I wanted to thank him, kiss him more, or just tell him I didn’t care that the others were watching.  Instead, I smiled, and he smiled, and we leaned back together and watched the water flow in the fountain for a while.


	Luanea smiled as she saw her friends embrace.  That was the Eilistraeean way.  Intimacy between friends was something so many faithful of other gods denied themselves, to no real benefit in her eyes.  At least those two were happy.

	She looked over at Suivi, who was watching the two of them kiss with an unreadable expression on his face.  When he finally looked down, he had a haunted look on his face all out of nature with the elementally good place they were sharing.

	“What’s wrong?” she asked the spy.

	He looked up at her.  “What the hell am I?” he whispered.

	“What do you mean?”

	Suivi stared at the grass beneath his legs.  “I’m a spy.  I’m a hired broker of other people’s knowledge.  But… Axio showed me things.  He took me to the Temple and forced me to watch as the monks healed a child…”  He buried his head in his hands.  “I just… I don’t… the monks, they were healing a child they pulled out of a burning building.”

	“Okay…” Luanea said, just to acknowledge she was listening.

	“And the fire, the people who set it, they were a gang, and Axio couldn’t have known it, but… but I knew them!  I knew the name, and I had sold them information in the past,” Suivi babbled.  He was spilling his guts out, and Luanea felt a sinking feeling in her stomach that she was about to hear the details of the man’s confession to Axio.  “And I told… I told…”  His back heaved in a sob.  “I told Axio everything,” he managed.  “I told him about the smuggling I used to do, about the bribes I had paid the Watch and the Guard to get their spare weapons, and I told him about the espionage I did for the Baneites and the Zhentarim, and…” he sobbed again.  “And now I’m in heaven, and I don’t deserve it, and I’m going to die fighting some Baneites and and and-”

	Luanea leaned over to him and rested one dark hand on his cheek.  “Shhh, shhh, it’s alright,” she shoothed.  “Just let it all out.  Have a cry, it’s okay.”