Lady of Poison_ The Priests - Bruce R. Cordell [117]
One had to forgive oneself.
The Daughter's horn nearly removed his head from his torso as he skirted its bulk, bringing him more fully to the present. Taking the knife-sharp blow along the haft of his spear, Marrec ran on, rounding the flank of the Daughter. There was the Rotting Man, still sitting upon his throne, concentrating upon the corrupted aspect, possibly controlling its actions, or at least preventing it from lapsing into unrestrained destruction.
There was Ash, defenseless and alone in the Court, looking up into the blank expanse of the Daughter's flesh, as if searching for something. Despite having no eyes or any other organs for sensing its environment, the corrupted aspect paused, seeming to study the slip of a girl on the ground before it.
The Rotting Man commanded, "Take what is yours, Cystborn. Take the capstone of your power and your sentience. Become what you should have been these last six years. My scourge, Talona's Step-Daughter."
The Daughter moved forward, as if to engulf the defenseless child, but slowly, tentatively, as if the Rotting Man wished to relish his final victory.
Marrec, his head still spinning with his own personal revelation, knew that his own revelation applied, too, to Ash.
"I forgive you, Ash," yelled Marrec. "That's right. We all forgive you for allowing the Rotting Man to steal away your purpose, your form, and your power, but you have to forgive yourself."
Ash's gaze slowly swiveled upon Marrec and focused. She was listening.
"Let yourself off the hook-put your mistake behind you and learn from it. Take back what is yours. You didn't mean for things to come to this."
Ash's eyes narrowed, and her tiny head began a slow nod, as if in grudging understanding.
"Enough of this. Consume her!" thundered the Rotting Man.
The Daughter fell upon Ash, absorbing her entirely into its shambling husk.
The Rotting Man laughed. The cleric despaired, crying out his frustration.
The Daughter lay splayed across the ground where it had leaped upon the child.
Then a change came over it. The Daughter's body began to throw off mass in great rotting layers, one after another, like an onion. Every layer broadcast images into all the living minds nearby-the layers were like records of the sordid malice the Talontyr had committed against the world. The first few were only insults and aggravations. Then came violence and death, and rot followed after. It was Talona's influence, psychically manifest as each section of the Daughter fell away. The next layers revealed the Rotting Man gathering to his side minions versed in spells and foul sorceries. Marrec saw piles of skulls left behind where the Talontyr's forces triumphed; he saw living trees burned with torches, the tree-dryads locked within, screaming; he saw crimes without number, and creatures rotting from the inside; he saw sacrifices made to Talona in all their gruesome detail. Marrec saw the war of the Green Powers against Talona, and the secret plan the Rotting Man and his goddess drew up to subvert those plans and redirect those efforts to decay. Every layer that fell away from the Daughter revealed fragments of the past to Marrec, as if he were remembering something he'd always known.
Then the molting layers revealed more recent occurrences. Marrec saw blightlords releasing poisonous spells, rots of terrible efficacy, and magical diseases spreading across the Rawlinswood and across the forest of Lethyr. He saw the cruel new sorceries devised by the Rotting Man Seeing, the cleric understood what the Rotting Man intended should the Daughter ever achieve complete integration; he saw the massacres, the deaths, the plains strewn with slain armies left to decay and disintegrate in the noon-day sun. He saw the Rotting Man's hope for final triumph.
Little of the Daughter was left now. The core of rot remaining scrambled like a live thing, trying to escape. Marrec stabbed it with Justlance. Screaming, the blot skittered away but Marrec stabbed it gain. It lay quivering, and Ususi, stepping out of the surrounding mist