recontact

1505 DR (ELYSIUM)
	Lumalia poked her head out of the cave that had become her refuge as she sensed something approach.  Many travelers had come and gone, up the steep side of Mount Eronia or down again, and few had moved past the first chamber of her cave.  None had found her where she had stood in the darkness, utterly still, trying desperately to find her connection to the lost divine.  For sixteen years, she had stood still, able to leave but terrorized at the thought, and it had done little for her tattered mind.

	Then, one brilliant morning, as a few anemic strands of holy light had peeked past the twists and turns of her cave into the place where she stood, she had sensed something.  A good thing, a strange and new thing; it spoke to her sense of connectivity to the Weave like a song on the breeze, or a warm towel over raw skin.  Lumalia had raised her head, for the first time in at least a decade.  Dust flaked from her metal-toned body as she sensed the presence drawing nearer.

	She took a hesitant step towards the light.  She walked slowly around the bend and into the entry cavern.  Marks on the floors showed her where travelers had rested and burned a fire, years ago, mere dozens of feet from a maddened, terrorized angel, and completely unaware.

	The light didn’t hurt her eyes as she gingerly leaned out of concealment.  They focused on a figure that slowly approached, head half-bowed, walking slowly, hands clasped at his waist.

	The Elysium layer of Eronia was a mountainous paradise, where many of the most good beings of the multiverse made their peaceful, joyous homes.  Cities of Petitioners and Celestials mingled freely on the plateaux left by the carving action of the great River Oceanus that navigated all of the Upper Planes.  Ostensibly, she was safe to leave here.  Practically, she had been too paralyzed with fear to make the attempt.

	Something about the approaching being, however, called to her.  She took a few hesitant steps out of her cave.  Her sandalled feet left marks on the grass that faded as she walked.  Harsh wind tore the air around her as she stared in astonishment at the figure of her visitor.

	He was humanoid in shape, but only casually.  Divine energy shook the air around him.  Maybe, without her divine sight, it would have been easier to mistake him for simply a man, but with it, that mistake was impossible.  He seemed to change shape slightly as he approached, but some things remained constant: his blue eyes, his above-average height, and the slow, steady vibration of the Weave as he walked.

	He was a god, or something like a god; nothing else could pluck the strands of the Weave the way he did.  Lumalia fell to her knees, bumping the ends of her dirty wings on the ground as she did, sending jolts through her back that made her flinch and hunch over.

	The figure walked slowly towards her.  The form he – it? – had taken in the moment he fixed his eyes on her was that of a strongly-built man with a bare chest and armored lower body, with strange glowing wires surrounding his back in the shape of enormous wings.  It changed as he drew closer, walking parallel to the level of the mountain.  Hair like strands of fire seemed to vanish and reappear behind him.  It reminded her oddly of a strong flame, flickering out above as it was replenished by fresh fire from below.

	He walked up to her where she crouched trembling on the stone.  He looked into her eyes, and she felt her terror lessen.  “You are far from home, angel,” he said.  Again, Lumalia knew that if she were mortal, his voice would only have been rich and spirited, even playful.  To her, it was the Weave itself rippling, filling her with strength.

	“I… am lost,” she whispered.  “I am mad.”

	“Mad?” the god asked.  He leaned over her, then stunned her by kneeling to meet her eye level.  Gods never knelt to their servants.  At least, not for the first millennium of her life.  “Are you mad, dear angel, or simply alone?”

	“What… is madness, to a being of love, if not loneliness?” Lumalia whispered.  She clasped her hands over her heart and stared blankly into the distance.  “My… creator is dead.”

	A look of understanding and patience appeared on the god’s face.  He reached out a hand and held it there before her.  He was very close, but not so close that she felt the need to take flight and leave him.  “I know that pain,” he said.  His voice was so gentle.  “I know it well.  My own creation was the design of another, and she is now dead.”

	Lumalia sucked in a ragged breath and blew it out.  “I… am sorry.”

	“Don’t be,” the god said.  “She deserved it.”  He kept his hand extended, palm-up.  “May I have your name, dear heart?  I will give you mine.”

	“I… am Lumalia,” she said.  She met his eyes again, oddly comforted by the fright she felt.  At least angels fearing strange gods was normal.  Nothing else about her was.  “Lumalia.  Of the Dweomerheart.”

	The god nodded.  “I am Axiopistos, of the Arbor of Innocence,” he told her.  “And you are not so lost as you think.  The Dweomerheart is but four days’ flight that way,” he said, pointing in the direction, but Lumalia violently shook her head.

	“No!  No, I can’t,” she hissed.

	“Very well.”  Axiopistos lowered both his outstretched hands.  “Would you stand?”

	Lumalia slowly gathered her feet and rose.  “I… I…” she stammered.  “What… are you?  What is your portfolio, Axiopistos?  From where do you hail?” she demanded in Celestial.

	He answered, in the same tongue.  “I am the god of Fatherhood, Fathers, and caring for lost children,” he said.  “I hail from Realmspace, the world of Toril.”  He rose as well, and although he was not so much taller than her, he still felt that way to her as his spiritual presence drowned out her chaotic imprint in the Weave.  It was like how a Wish spell eclipsed Thaumaturgy in comparison.

	She drew in another deep breath.  “I am… of this plane, but I was trapped in Toril… for seven centuries,” she said.  “I was stuck there, petrified but fully aware.  I felt Mystra die, and an imposter take her place, I felt the planes split and crack and the World Tree rend them apart and a plague…” she babbled.

	Axiopistos took a step forward.  His form morphed and twisted, and now he had great wings of golden feathers, long and flexible.  He wrapped his wings around her, and rested his hands on her shoulders.  “Forgive my invasion of your personal space, Lumalia, but your focus is dissolving,” he said gently.

	Lumalia could not hear him.  Her mind had turned to fuzz and her words to water as a wave of pure, unfiltered, absolute spiritual strength had washed over her, like nothing she had ever felt.  It was incomparable; beyond the love and direction she had felt from Mystra or the savage joy of battle, or the lilting happiness of fine music, or even the peaceful radiance of the brilliant Elysian summer sun on her back as she flew through the forests of the afterlife.

	Strength she had never known, firmness of spirit and purpose she had never felt… they washed over her broken spirit, and she cried silent sobs of pain.

	Axiopistos gently tugged on her shoulders, and she collapsed against his chest.  He held her there, comforting her with his feathers on her back and his warmth on her soul.  “Let it all out, dear angel,” he said softly.  “All of it.  Cry yourself clean.”

	Lumalia wept and wept as the creaking insanity of her deattuned mind grated over the orderly rhythm of his Weave-print, filing the edges of self-loathing and appalling bloodthirst from her.  The hate and confusion she had accumulated during seven centuries of neglect and torture collapsed inside her, until all she felt was empty.

	He was supporting her fully now, with his hands below her shivering wings.  Her wings hurt, in fact, where she had been tightening them by reflex against her back as she suddenly confronted her loneliness during the first moment she wasn’t alone in over a decade and a half.

	Axiopistos hugged her close.  “There it goes, Lumalia.  There goes the agony.  You are leaving it behind, do you hear me?  Leave it all behind.”

	Her wracking sobs faded into a sense of floating, detached distraction.  She tried to push out of his embrace, found it fruitless, and swiftly abandoned the effort.  “Axiopistos,” she mumbled.  “I… doubt you are any father of mine, but… I welcome your support regardless.”

	She screwed her eyes shut and sniffled.  “I am so… humiliated.  I am surely older than you, and was once of the holy order of the devas… now look at me.”  She managed to wriggle free of him and step back.  Her defiant gesture meant the soothing radiance of his divine spirit lessened with only a few steps’ greater distance between them, and the rushing cold of its absence nearly made her take a panicked step forward again to regain it.  Stubbornness kept her withdrawing, until she was at arm’s length.

	He swept his wings back against his back, and they disappeared in a rush of motes of yellow light.  “Look at me,” she repeated angrily.  “A fallen angel, weeping like a babe in the arms of some… neophyte godling.”

	He nodded.  “You are both wrong and right.  I have been a god for precious little time, and you have not fallen.”

	She glared at him.  “I have been living as a statue for seven centuries, and then froze myself to the floor of a cave for sixteen years beyond that!  I am so mad, I can’t even perceive the Weave of my creator properly!  What could I be but fallen from grace!”  Random, chaotic jolts of words and thoughts peppered her mind as she forced out the words, and she shook her head angrily again.

	Axiopistos took a long step forward, and she flinched in sudden fear as a dark look came upon his face.  “I have seen angels fall, Lumalia,” he said, and something terribly painful lurked in his nature now.  He raised a hand.  “Would you see it?  I could show you.”

	She shuddered from head to toe.  “No,” she said in a very small voice.

	“Would you fear it so if you had felt it?” Axiopistos asked.  “Do not self-flagellate.  You are not Fallen, nor shall you be if I am given any say in the thing at all.”  He rested one hand over her heart.  “Good and hope are not gone from you.  Pride has not robbed you of your mind.  All that ails you could be healed.  Do you trust that I tell you truly?”

	Lumalia managed to calm her shivers of primal fear.  “Yes… yes, I do.”

	Axio lifted his hand and stepped back.  “Where and how did you come to such harm?”

	“On… a Prime world called Toril,” she said.  “I was petrified by an evil wizard and used as… spell ingredients for making gargoyles.  This went on for… many centuries.”

	Axio bowed his head in sorrow and respect.  “I am sorry, angel.”

	“I… escaped after a mortal band freed me.”  Lumalia rubbed her eyes.  The clashing feeling of sturdy, centered strength from his gesture before clashed against her tattered focus.  It was most distracting.  “I’ve been here, ever since, trying to reattune myself.”

	Axio looked around.  They were approximately nowhere near anything.  “…By yourself?” he asked.

	She winced and looked away.  “I am a danger to others in this state,” she said.  Shame darkened her words.  “I nearly killed the adventurers who freed me.”

	The god of Fatherhood bowed his head to her.  “Then you have done something self-sacrificing.  I can respect that.  Would you now come to a place wherein you might be healed somewhat more… efficiently?  Lurking in a cave, hoping for a miracle, is not going to help you.”

	Lumalia’s shoulders and wings slumped.  “Where can I go?” she asked miserably.

	Axio looked at her, thoughtful and quiet for a moment.  “There is… one place,” he said.  “It is under construction, but when it is completed, you will fit right in.  Until then, I promise you, you are welcome to stay in my own realm, the Arbor of Innocence.  It is the most secure single plane of which I am aware, and there many of the angelic clade there, ready to aid you however they can.”

	Lumalia felt longing surge in her heart for the company of her own.  It wasn’t the first time she had felt it since her self-imposed exile began, but it was the first time she had considered giving in to it.  “I… do not… want to risk it,” she whispered.  “What if I lose control again?”

	Axio could feel some of the chaos in her mind echo into the world around her, in a way surely no mortal could.  He decided to lance the bubble before it popped.  “Do you imagine that will happen?  Do you imagine that I would allow that to happen, to one of my angelic guests?”  He took another step towards her and lowered his voice.  “More importantly, do you not think staying in a cave despite wishing to leave for sixteen years shows some measure of restraint?”

	Lumalia looked off in the direction of the Dweomerheart, then back at the god offering a way of leaving her shame behind.  “I… yes.  Yes.  If my madness can be cured…”

	Axio let her vacillate no more.  He stepped forward again and took her hand.  “Then come with me, and rest until a place for you has been made in the Ark of Remediation.”

	Lumalia hesitantly clasped his hand, then the world dissolved around her in a whorl of color.