Pax Requiem

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IX: From the Storm

It is said they found him wandering the Des-aret after a terrible kralizec storm. His robes were torn to tattered ribbons that barely clung to his desiccated form. His pale face and hands were burned by the torrents of sand that rise during such storms, it is a wonder he survived at all. His long white hair was matted and tangled, though the plaits it had been woven in were still somewhat visible from atop his head. Such strange white hair, thick like wool, they were stunned by his appearance. No one has ever been known to survive a kralizec storm in the open des-aret. When the ancients first confronted him after what seemed an eternity of watching him stumble closer and closer, he did not seem to see them. They called to him then, wondering mayhaps if this creature was something fae, something of the otherworlde that had wandered through during the thunders that rage in the storm. To their calls he answered not, but he began to chokingly sing in a foreign tongue that these learned men have never heard before, or since.

Of course, parched as he was, it came out as the barest whisper, but there was some weird music to the pattern of his words. As they watched him stumble amidst them and sing to himself, seemingly oblivious to them all, a young priest named Yesaria approached the daeva-man with the white hair and burned pale skin, and raised a hand as if to place on this stranger's shoulder. But even as his hand drew near, the daeva-man spun about and grasped him roughly about the throat with such speed and force that the other ancients fell back in horror. With his matted white tresses falling over young Yesaria's face, he screamed out what can only be rendered in our tongue as "Khara-Seth!" And then, leaning so close as to brush the young priest's face with his own burned pale flesh, the daeva-man spoke in our language, if strangely accented by his foreign dialect, "Come closer, I can almost feel your light..." And with that, he released the young Yesaria and collapsed into a slumber that lasted many, many moons...
But that is another tale...