| Harker Crux |
Scars of the Past (Harker)
Harker's first thought was that it was cold.
That percolated around inside his foggy mind for a few minutes before he managed to form a second coherent thought: he wasn't wearing a shirt. His bare back was lying on a cold stone floor.
And a third: He couldn't see a thing.
It was the fourth thought that finally brushed away the cobwebs inside his mind and brought him to full alertness: none of this should be true.
"By the Herald's Acts!" he swore, sitting bolt upright.
His next utterance, as the searing pain in his chest caused by the motion shot through him, would have drawn a week's penance from Father Parris at the temple.
Had he lost a fight? If so, why was he still alive? And if he hadn't lost, where were his companions?
Gingerly, Harker worked his fingers up his chest in the darkness, feeling for where the wound was. With a hiss, he found it -- an open wound, small but bloody, on his chest. No, more than that. Over his heart.
Sitting up had caused the pooled blood to begin to seep down his chest. There was nothing he could do about that. He murmured a prayer to Iomedae for strength and, gritting his teeth, pulled himself to his feet.
The room spun around him. He reached out to brace himself on something, found nothing, and fell -- farther than he expected, landing painfully on his rear.
More oaths unbecoming of a sworn champion of the Herald. He hadn't been lying on the floor at all, but some sort of raised dais.
Harker couldn't even remember most of it, but he knew he had just had a very bad day.
Pulling himself to his feet amid a haze of pain, Harker stumbled around the blackness until his hands stumbled on something wood, not cold stone. A door. He found a handle and pulled. When that pulled some more. Was he a prisoner?
Despair settled in momentarily until he thought to push. The door swung open easily before him. And -- the Herald be praised -- light, from a flickering torch.
He staggered forward into the light and looked down at his chest. What Harker saw brought momentary relief -- the wound was small -- before his joy turned to horror. It was too small to be caused by any weapon. The only possible cause for that pair of tiny lacerations was teeth -- which the LAST thing a man wants to hear when he has just ventured into a dark mountain keep hunting a vampire.
Harker fell to his knees.
"Blessed Iomedae, fill me with your light," he prayed. "I am your servant. In your name I shield the weak from evil. Oh goddess, bring to me that same protection that I might continue to do your will."
Whatever had been done to him was beyond his power to heal -- but at least, as Iomedae granted him awareness of the pulse of evil in his chest, the dark deed done to him this day had not severed him from his goddess. He was not a vampire, not one of the abominable undead -- not, it dawned on him, that an undead would have been nearly incapacitated by pain.
He would need more help than the meager powers of an initiate paladin to bring him back into grace. In the meantime, Harker whispered another prayer, asking the Herald's grace to heal his wounds and restore his strength.
Iomedae's healing powers stopped the bleeding from his chest, but the wound remained -- as Harker had expected. Above his heart was now a pair of discolored purplish scars, marks he was sure would last as long as the evil inside him did. He only hoped he could find a cure for that evil before it consumed him.
Stripped of his shirt, Harker's muscled torso was well in evidence, as were the scars of battles past. He was low in the ranks of Iomedae's paladins, weaker in power than stripling boys half a decade his junior. But Harker, for all his relatively advanced age of 28, was still strong and fit. His time in the libraries, scorned by so many other holy warriors, had not kept him from the practice yard.
Behind him, he saw something that surprised him -- his breastplate, shield, and hammer, neatly piled on a table by the door to the stone dais room.
The paladin was not naive enough to assume that the presence of his items showed his goddess's hand at work. In the dark places of the world, it was far more likely to be a sinister force acting. But there was no trace of evil on his equipment, so Harker would not turn the gift aside no matter the nature of the giver.
Buckling on his armor and hefting his weapon, Harker turned toward the door. He had come into this keep to bring the light and found only darkness. But the darkness would not claim him -- and goddess willing, he would encounter some of the vampire's servants on his way out, so he could leave a little less darkness in his wake.