<div class="quoteheader"><div class="topslice_quote"><a href="https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=92681.msg4060890#msg4060890">Quote from: Kaizen on 28-12-2010, 17:10:28</a></div></div><blockquote class="bbc_standard_quote"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;">Fourway</span></span><br/><br/>The small town was now bustling with excitement.  Vendors shouted their wares, musicians filled the sir with the sounds from their instruments and the townsfolk danced around the bonfire.  <br/><br/>The festive atmosphere would have masked the threat hiding just within the treeline if the monster had not fumbled over a fallen branch and tumbled out of the woods.<br/><br/>A lone little girl saw the monster and shrieked, running to her mother.  Tugging on the hem of her mother’s dress, the little girl told her mother what she saw.  “Mommy, Mommy! I taw a monteh in the twees.”<br/><br/>“That’s nice dear, have some of this delicious strawberry cake.” The mother took the child’s report as nothing more than the shadows playing tricks on her and gave her one of Maeve’s family’s famous shortcakes.<br/><br/>“But mommy, I weawwy did saw a monteh.” The child didn’t give up, but when the cake was offered to her, she happily munched away, effectively distracted.<br/></blockquote><div class="quotefooter"><div class="botslice_quote"></div></div><br/>The Festival gave Deborah an excuse to leave the cloistered grounds of the Temple of Airmed for a rare outing.  Well, perhaps not quite as rare as outings had been for the past couple years.  As an acolyte, her duties on the Temple grounds were sufficient to occupy her spare time...and more on top of that.  The studies for an Initiate alone occupied several hours a day.  She had excelled at the work, and thus the High Lady of the Temple had given Deborah the backhanded compliment of additional duties assisting the Chief of Herbs and Tinctures with his labors.  For the first month, those "extra duties" had consisted of labeling and categorizing the well over a hundred different herbs the Temple accumulated from near and far.  Pure drudgery.  And if that wasn't enough, the Chief was apt to burst in with questions, to see how well young Deborah was learning her way around the apothecary.  "That jar...what herb is in it?  Where does it grow?  Does it flower in spring, summer, or autumn?  What are its appropriate uses?"<br/><br/>Fortunately, Deborah had a keen memory, and a determination not to be one of the acolytes who gathered up his or her belongings one afternoon and departed the Temple grounds, unworthy or unwilling to continue.  For down that path lay her mother, who would be only too happy to see Deborah abandon her ambitions to be a priestess, and instead settle for being a common merchant.  Only too eager would she be to sequester her daughter in the store, endlessly bussing this and straightening that or counting something or the other.<br/><br/>Now a month had passed since she had gone through the ceremony, getting her holy symbol, a silver leaf in a bronze medallion, worn around her neck on a finely wrought iron chain.  And Deborah was happy to see more of the open air, and life outside the Temple.  The Festival was a perfect place for that.  She had some coin, given to her by her father, secretly (her mother still barely spoke to her) as a present for being tonsured.<br/><br/>Deborah was walking up to a cake vendor when she heard a little girl shriek about a monster.  She remembered times she had played "monster" with her friends, before the demands and different imperatives of adolescence had displaced such games from her life.  Still, she looked out in the direction the girl was pointing, just for old time's--<br/><br/>And there it was.  Something, vague but unmistakeably humanoid.  Not human.  Looking at her for just a moment, with a bestial gaze before it righted itself and vanished back into the woods.<br/><br/>Deborah walked to the girl's mother.  Quietly, out of earshot of the girl, the priestess spoke to the mother.  "I would not be so quick to dismiss what your child saw.  I saw it too.  There, in the woods.  Only for a moment, but it was there.  I do believe it was an ogre."