***
Terredor was a quiet lad, bored and uncomfortable in the presence of Waimbrill and his rather dreary hut. There were no decorations, no colorful flowers, no toys or balls, only a bare house, vegetable garden and a few essential tools. An excess of things crowdeth the mind, and a crowded mind comprehendeth not its own feelings. Soulclaine were highly respected, but more than a little feared as well, and Terredor did not overcome that inhibition easily. Young men like him wouldn’t ordinarily approach Waimbrill’s hut, except perhaps on a dare. In fact, Waimbrill occasionally saw small shapes flitting about in the woods near his home, but calling out to them provoked a flurry of feet stampeding away from the cottage, and a chorus of scattered giggles.
Unless someone died, Waimbrill would have remained at his cottage forever. But death continued its inexorable march across the land. The ogres and goblins who preyed on the locals, the poor townsfolk, serving wenches, knights and squires, lords and ladies, merchants and vendors, the mysterious elves, and the clannish dwarves and gnomes of the mountains, the rainids of Lake Crikmere, and their snow rainid cousins, all utilized his services. Nearly every day, someone requested his ministration, and with a sigh, Waimbrill would stand, his turbulent heart demanding that he stay to calm his cleaved and pray, but his even wearier mind forcing him on. People soon stopped seeking him out, and instead told Terredor, who remained by the cottage and found Waimbrill when needed. This freed him up to meditate further away from home, and he even created a small deprivation chamber, a simple hole in the ground lined with plain white cloth. Another cloth could be draped across the top, making a ceiling. It was not a perfect deprivation room, but he had no way of achieving one like there had been back at the monastery. He ignored the smells and the humidity, the most obvious sensations, and he found that it was reasonably effective at aiding his concentration.
He had felt righteous when freeing the boy from a terrible fate, but great responsibility came with raising a boy on the cusp of manhood. He prayed for guidance, but this was outside Modroben’s purview, and his prayers were fruitless.
Terredor grew even shyer, more silentious, sometimes remaining mute for hours and communicating through gestures. He tried to engage him, but found small talk difficult. They had little in common, as Waimbrill spent much of his time meditating.
He decided then that he must take matters into his own hands. He could at least bring Terredor with him on soulcleaving trips.
“When you come with me to go soulcleaving,” Waimbrill said, “You musn’t steal. Do you understand?”
“Not even if’n I know I ken get away with it?” Terredor said.
“Not even if you know you can get away with it.”
Terredor’s Delver dialect had rapidly dwindled, and he spoke increasingly in the manner of Lommia, Waimbrill’s own accent, which the locals saw as absurdly formal and overly respectful to his lessers, while Waimbrill saw their accent as rural and old-fashioned. Terredor mixed all three dialects, but the Lommian tongue was becoming more and more prominent.
The next day, an unmarried farmhand passed a few miles north. Terredor and Waimbrill rode on the back of a horse that one of the farmer’s sons brought. He had died in a stable, kicked in the head by an angry horse. Waimbrill soulcleaved the burly farmhand while Terredor watched, smiling when he heard Waimbrill introduce him as “my assistant”. Referring to him that way didn’t prevent the hostile stares from the farmers, for they did not like Delvers any more than they liked the wolves that occasionally exacted tribute from their livestock.
The farming household included four boys about Terredor’s age, but they stared at him with undisguised disgust. Waimbrill talked to the boys’ parents, hoping that the children would get bored and play together. But the farming children ignored the outsiders, and Terredor shuffled his feet awkwardly behind Waimbrill, who found that the farmers were uncomfortable chatting with a Soulclaine. He soon gathered up Terredor and left.
On the way back to the cottage, Waimbrill said, “You could have talked to those children.”
“They dinn’t want that,” Terredor said quietly.
“How do you know?”
“C’rse they didn’t,” Terredor said, “They are no Delvers.”
“You are barely a Delver in their eyes anymore,” Waimbrill said, “You could have talked to them.”
“I will always be Delver in they eyes,” Terredor said, shrugging his shoulders, “And e’en if not, being your assistant is no better.”
“They think you are eccentric and deranged?” Waimbrill said, “Because you live with me?”
Terredor nodded. “When I go to market without you,” he said quietly, “Nobody want a-talk to me. They think I am crazy like...”
“Like me,” Waimbrill said, realizing he was falling into the trap he had been trained to avoid and fulfilling a common stereotype of Modrobenians: forced to spend much of their focus and energy in processing their inner emotional maelstrom, they become estranged, aloof, and unable to fit into normal society.
The thought was depressing, and it cascaded with other feelings that he recognized were not his own. Waimbrill spent the rest of the evening glumly meditating while Terredor set snares to catch rabbits.
Waimbrill’s reverie was interrupted by a bewildered Terredor leading a herd of small humanoids. They were about two feet tall, with black fur and white markings, short, stubby arms and hands with thumbs and sharp claws. They were humanoid-shaped skunks, primitive and barely civilized, called bofro by the locals. Their pungent smell was equally as potent and debilitating as ordinary skunks, and it wafted across the area.
The bofro jabbered in their own tongue, breaking intermittently into a barely intelligible form of Anglish, and Waimbrill deciphered enough to know his services were needed. The bofro were a curious and excitable people. Waimbrill had been trained in communicating his lord’s word to species like these, but he was too tired for that this evening, so he quietly followed them to their home.
They lived in a dense little spot in a wooded valley, surrounded by hills and shaded by luscious boughs of cypress and willow trees. Hundreds of bofro laughed and played there, climbing between the branches and vines connecting their treetop homes. The stench was overpowering, and it brought a few beads of tears to Waimbrill’s eyes. His nose burned with the odor, even as their antics brought a smile to his face. A small band of bofro in one corner stood morosely, shuffling in a shady spot under the thick forest canopy.
He walked to the cluster of mourners hugging each other around the prone body of a silver-tinged bofro whose closed eyes were lined with wrinkles. Waimbrill held his shirt against his nose to guard against the smell. A portly female with wide, black eyes brimming with tears, let out a keening wail that hurt Waimbrill’s ears, and he winced. She hugged his legs, chirping mournfully.
Waimbrill’s stomach churned, and he caught a mouthful of bofro stink and gagged. He closed his eyes, ignoring his watering eyes and wrenching throat.
Shallowly breathing through his mouth, he regained enough composure to recite the High Prayer. The bofro fell silent, more gathering to watch the magical transformation. When his face became a shining, vulturine beak, they ululated exuberantly. He bit into the primitive brain of the elderly bofro, tasting its rank, unctuous bitterness. He heard excited pounding and chanting as his cleaving ended and waves of pain and loneliness wafted into his spleen. Bofro emotions were equally passionate as other races, but more vague: intense but basic - sad, angry, lonely, and not higher feelings like guilt, regret or angst.
Resuming their boisterous play, some bofro acquired a few handfuls of berries, which they stuffed into their mouths. The juice dripped across their faces and bellies, staining the white of their fur a brilliant lavender. By the time he was done meditating over the newly cleaved soul, Waimbrill was laughing at the living bofro despite the protean sadness and pain he had gathered.
A young female offered a handful of berries to Waimbrill and Terredor in her littl
e paw, but the smell remained too nauseating to eat, so they politely declined. The bofro pulled on their pants legs, begging in broken Anglish for the “big people”, as they called all humans, to stay for supper. Waimbrill refused that invitation as well, though they stayed as long as their noses could handle the stench, playing with the younger bofro and letting them climb atop their shoulders. They thought furless skin was funny, and stroked Waimbrill and Terredor, screaming peals of laughter. It brought a few chuckles to Terredor’s stony face too, and for a moment, all the stress of Waimbrill’s actions went away, and his decision to take in Terredor seemed perfectly right. But when they left the playful bofro, and Terredor’s terse silence returned, so did Waimbrill’s wavering anxiety, and they walked home without speaking.