She blinked, trying to understand what he had said.
Planes are like worlds. Other planets. The things I showed you that circulate stars.
Stars. Each one a burning globe of bright hot gas that turned steadily in the sky, created under a force called grah’vee-tay. Not actually a bright fire in the sky. Much more than that. Like the planets - rocky or gassy (like smoke, she remembered) - that were round and rotated around the stars. Each star a sun, each world potentially livable …
“I see,” she whispered, imagining the dark, crimson land that Nevin hailed similarities to. A black soil running with rivers of scarlet thick waters - blood. Burgundy, burnt skies, hissing cleaves in the land that showed a horrid, blanched earth beneath …
“And a being from that world is bad,” she whispered. From that world … that plane. The place part of Nevin came from and to which he was gaining … more power from.
She turned it into a question. “It is bad? Why?”
“Well.” Nevin gripped the stone altar and dragged himself to his feet, swaying slightly as he did so. He seemed a bit off balance as he righted himself, and kept one hand on the stone to keep upright.
“I wouldn't say it is automatically bad. That… From why I can feel, remember, it's strange to have memories you know aren't your own…” the last words were very soft, and a frown flickered across his face. Nevin didn't know where these memories had come from, but he could feel that they were, accurate? To some degree? He shook his head and continued.
“Ahem. That place was peaceful and mostly ignored this plane, with most everything living in a fairly quiet cycle of rebirth, watched over by their God. The problem is, at some point, something foul came in. I don't know where from, and I wish I did. But that thing killed the God that was there and took its place, and began perverting the plane to suit its own darker desires.” Nevin turned his attention to his hand on the altar, which was placed in a thick puddle of blood.
“Before, the God of that plane would never have wanted sacrifices like this. Detested then, in fact, because deaths like this disrupt the Great Flow that it watched over. The Cult that made me is a twisted form of the Crimson Church, and instead of being the peaceful, accepting and tolerant individuals that the Church is supposed to espouse, well. They made me. I know what I was supposed to be now, I think.” He shuddered as he stared at the carcass by his hand. Even now, the thing looked like nothing human, just a massive collection of ‘threads’ woven together.
Stare looked at him with a fond smile in her eyes. Honestly, she felt happy for him as he said that he had found part of his being here. He knew what he ‘was supposed to be now’. In that type of knowledge, comfort could be found - personally she knew that well, having had unanswered questions for much of her life where the kenku came from. Rather than have an absolute answer the kenku-told histories, compiled in the earlier works of Karas the Wise, spoke of simply a place they had come from where a beast, or a darkness called the ‘Kage’ came from. They spoke of coming ‘across the sea’ with the ‘kami to guide them.’ But that had never been enough for Stare. Instead she had found the truth of her people - that in fact they were a discarded race from a planet so very far away, and would have died out had it not been for their enslavers taking them across an ocean to Corone.
