1.9.0 - Hannah Part One

The thing wearing Ygritte's face opened its eyes. And it fed first.

The Chosen were still kneeling when you came through the door. The oldest of them had their heads down and their hands open, and they were not looking at you. They were looking at Hannah.

She was still half inside Ygritte's body when Hanzt found a target and went first. He crossed the sanctum toward the kneeling cultists with the kind of focus that comes when there is only one answer to a room. They did not raise their heads. They did not fight back. They prostrated themselves, and root-veins snapped tight across the sanctum floor, and the kneeling figures folded inward, emptied, and were still. The newest converts broke and ran for the dark. She did not follow them.

She had already eaten.

Gunnar tried to read her from the first round. The checks came back empty every time. She was demon and divine and five hundred years of something he had never been trained for, and none of it would resolve into anything he could use.

What he could see, what all of you could see: the aura. A cold that closed over the mind thirty feet out and told you to run before you had decided anything. Brawn lost that argument and had to leave the sanctum. Hanzt lost it at a different point and had to leave too. Not pull back. Walk out. Both of them came back each time, and the cost was the ground they gave up while the line was short.

The Forsaken hunted whoever the aura had already broken. Her body turned most of what the party put into it. The damage climbed anyway, but slowly, the way stone wears in a river.

Then she stopped. The corruption pulled back like a wave drawing out, and for a handful of seconds the thing before you stilled.

It was Hannah, and you had not met her before. She had seconds, and she used them plainly: she remembered everything, both times she had lived it, and she knew what the monster wanted, and the door was almost closed on her. What she chose to spend her last seconds on was three words. Keep fighting. The veins snapped shut around her like a fist and the Forsaken was back, angrier for the interruption.

The tide took time, and then it turned. A crit connected. Brawn found her legs and she went to the floor and stayed there longer than before. Riven had spent the entire session at the far end of the room, staying far enough back to stay clear of the aura, and his shots started finding something earlier ones had not.

The session ended with her on the floor of the sanctum. A crit had opened the way, and Brawn had her legs after that. The last trip hit hard enough that everyone in the room heard it. She was not going down cleanly.

But she was down. Still there.

Remember For Next Time

• Her presence. Something at thirty feet closes over the mind and tells you to run before any decision gets made. Brawn and Hanzt both gave in to it at some point. They came back.
• Gunnar still can't read her. Every attempt to understand what she is came back empty.
• Blood Marks were stripped as they landed. She never got inside anyone's head.

Where We Are

She is on the floor of the sanctum. Brawn put her there. You are going back in.