You’ve just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As you look around, your gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. You duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? she begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”
((How do you respond?))
Pydarria takes a seat at the crone’s request. “I suppose I am out of place. Word of my arrival must have traveled faster than I.” He sits in such a way that his boots are as far from the center of the tent as possible, subtly scraping the mud and grime of one boot with the bottom of the other. Simultaneously, he is brushing his robes to clear them of similar things that blemish his outfit. “ilMaehr'sae Ilkun'ehya.” He suddenly speaks that phrase, expecting it to be understood. ”That is the ideal I follow. It speaks of innovation as the highest virtue, and stagnation as the highest fault. To obtain the material steel is simple enough, but the immaterial knowledge and inspiration is much more sparsely found.”
“And under that philosophy, I chose to be neither idle in my mind nor on my feet. My journey itself has been short, but my story starts younger. My father was a man of the arts and spiritual in all things. My mother, a veteran of the Celia’diraar. I have them for a varied upbringing, with one providing me with a militant and regimented discipline and the other a deep appreciation for the finer touches of the world. But I also determine that there must be even more varied things to understand, and in order to build a future, I must first build myself. So I’ve reduced myself to… this.” He gestures at himself, covered in the swamp’s filth. “I don’t know what I shall find. Out there, or in my own mind, there are things I don’t know that I don’t know. There must be more than what I know, and I must find it, for then I can further so much more than if I didn’t.”
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