In the aftermath of the coliseum battles, Caelan went to check up on the man he grievously wounded in his fight. Kashlyk had tended to the man, called Nerian, and he was up and about though not entirely keen to take Caelan up on his offer to return to the circus for a few drinks and promises of no hard feelings so it was just the rowdy circus crowd who headed back to camp.
Olvir and Caelan were in good spirits though tired from the exertions and Selene took a moment to head away from the party for her caravan, returning later with two steaming rice balls which she offered to the two coliseum victors. She looked a little drained herself as they took them and tucked in, but it was evident the snacks refreshed them.
The party went on late and as most of the circus were settled around the fire telling stories Selene stood up to tell a tale of her own. She rarely entertained the circus so had a willing audience as she spun an epic story of a carefree people who saw their world torn apart and forever changed by intruders who sought only their destruction, and their valiant fight against their trangressors, led by a brilliant general with a burning red eye the light of which cut down his foes where they stood.
Song recognised the story as an old tale, the great war between the Raksha and the defenders of Creation known as the Balorian Crusade and named after the fearsome Raksha warleader. Except Selene’s tale told it from the perspective of the Raksha themselves and Song began to have more suspicions as to the secrets Selene was keeping.
She sat back and considered Selene with her essence sight and saw her for the first time in her true glory: a creature of pure Wyld energy seemingly impossibly contained in apparently mortal form. Her caravan – which Song had recognised as a Wyld aspected manse, was a waypoint – a part of the Wyld in Creation and which Selene evidently needed to spend time in to save her Raksha nature from the toll Creation would take.
Such revelations meant she was paying little attention to the rest of the circus and a momentary distraction drew Caelan’s attention elsewhere as well. As such, it was only Olvir who looked around the camp and saw Selene refreshed, as those listening to her tale succumbed to the same spell he realised she wove over the audience every time the circus put on a show, a part of their will drawn from them to bolster Selene’s own. But Olvir shrugged, and assumed it was probably nothing. He’d had a long day.
A little while later Kashlyk joined us and settled down by the fire with a drink to talk amiably about Caelan and Olvir’s efforts in the coliseum. His words were a little guarded as he referred to our natures – but Olvir was anything but guarded as he spoke easily of essence and shifting forms. He turned with a querying look to Song, who rolled her eyes in sympathy, before smiling and explaining that this time, Olvir hadn’t revealed anything the circus folk didn’t already know.
Perhaps he’d spotted something unusual in Selene’s nature, too, as a little while later he took her a little way off for a conversation we weren’t privy to. It had grown late and Song had work to do in her caravan, so she left the others to their evening. By yellow lamp light she turned the pages of her ancient family book to where details of the circus had been scribed. Descriptions of acts and how they managed their flamboyant displays were given along with lists of suppliers of yeddim feed and the best place to buy southern birch resin in every large town. A lot of it was years old and many annotations had been made in the intervening time and Song read over the notes with happy familiarity. Then she began to detail her discoveries of Selene, taking care not to mention her by name but to otherwise describe the Raksha in their midst.
Flipping the pages she found the section which dealt with gods – local deities as well as those with more general panoplies, and read what was written about the Censors – which wasn’t a lot. She took time to carefully scribe what she knew about the new Censor of the East, updating legends of the Censor which had ruled before the one we knew came to power. The knowledge laid out on the page empowered the book to perform its own magics and she turned the page to find in more detail a description of the weapons the Censors held: gifted to each of the seven Censors of the Terrestrial Bureaucracy along with their badges of office. Each weapon was modelled along a different design; and that held by the Censor of the East was formed as a scythe which could, instead of striking a mortal blow, carve off a piece of the target’s soul and capture it. She shuddered as she read it – our suspicions may well have been correct.
She had a few other notes to add to her tome still , and gave a description of Kashlyk Ashak and the coliseum before detailing what we’d found about the Moonspire and its manses, their aspects and locations, and the marvellous underwater temple manse claimed by Magnificent Jaguar. Her book had a few things to reveal about Kashlyk: some way to the South were shrines to him, probably now lost in long forgotten jungle. She nodded to herself as she read - it matched what he’d said about once being the god of somewhere much greater.
The spellbook also had notes made about Magnificent Jaguar... references were found to a god who resided east of the circus’s route and ruled over a tribe of beast men – or perhaps marauders from the Wyld. They were said to be feral but with a sense of honour, or so it was said of the few raiding parties that had been encountered many years ago. Song suspected that by swapping out ‘god’ for ‘lunar’ the description might not be far off.
She eventually drifted off to sleep in the early hours of the morning; the book carefully laid to one side. As usual she was awake early with tea brewing and sure enough Olvir soon poked his nose around the door – he’d slept in dog form and his sensitive nose had picked up the spicy smell. He scurried off to fetch Caelan who’d slept at the Ice Wolf overnight and provided him with a dog tongue to the face in place of an alarm call. Leaving the Solar to get up and come and join them he headed back to Song’s caravan where he proceeded to lap up tea from a saucer before shifting to his human form and ponder if the dog slobber in the saucer was at all palatable, given it was technically his own.
Caelan walked in a little later to find the two Lunars considering the merits of extra long tongues... and decided there were some conversations which no non-Lunar should ever be privy to...