“…are you aware?”

The patient - the god - gazed up at the half-kin. The brown-red eyes were kind, almost pitying and so they looked out through the gazebo rather than answering the question.

“I know that I am here.”

“And when is here?”

They frowned. Above, they could hear a lark align on the ceiling of the airy structure. The wind swept the golden grass, bringing to mind a phantom of a sensation. What an odd question; odder still that they were unable to answer.

The silence lengthened.

“I don’t know,” they said grudgingly. They tapped their horns, absently trying to recall what had come before, but all that they knew was a troubling dark, a void like a starry sky with stars wheeling overhead.

“Sometimes I, too, have trouble placing myself in my memories.”

The half-kin’s eyes crinkled, the greenish wrinkles at the corner of her face granting her…suddenly they knew that once, once, they had known someone like that.

“Would you like to take a gander at some paintings I have here?”

They shrugged. An arm rose, clothed in the red of the sick and taking that as an affirmation, the healer - that was her [Affinity] they thought - brought out seven paintings.

Each square was the size of a full Goblin hand and the seven objects took up most of table’s surface. What…the table was made of a material, but this was neither stone nor wood, nor even that newfangled metal that some smiths called bronze——

“…as I was saying, I want you to look at each picture and tell me what you feel as you see them; any emotions or sentiments that accompany them, too.”

They nodded.

The first picture described a creature with skin like snow and dark hair descending down their chest.

“Human, staff, man. Wisdom…”

Another sentiment came to them. Mystic? But they did not say that out loud.

On the second picture a white whirl of something was centered on a surface of blue.”Sea, maybe ocean. Whirlpool?”

“Very good.”

The god looked down on a painting of a trueblooded Goblin, a woman. Her horns were a color akin to white jade and her skin ashen, like that of the tribes of the Great Northern Forest. Not like her paladin.

Paladin…? The word went and came; slipping through the maze of their mind.

“Goblin, true blood. Horns like jade. Great Northern Forest.”

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The next painting made them stand up.

I know thee.

The medium could not capture her; her skin was red when it should have been crimson and the blue of her eyes were just the earthly shade when it should have been crushed sapphire.

The armor, the armor was bronze, but she had never cared for the stuff of dead earth. It had been bone of her enemies that had served as her protection. And the bone was just that; bone, whereas her [Affinity] had made the ivory glitter like ice in the fullness of winter.

“Do you know her?”

“I…cannot remember the name.”

“But, do you know her?”

The god… they were god of something, this they knew, and she had been the vanguard of their faith.

“She knew me.”

The healer’s voice took on a resonating tinge. She was using a [Lot] to power her voice, creating echoes that seemed to rebound even when they should not.

“Remember her.”

The grass wasn’t golden, but hard for the Windy Plain had been aptly named. Their trek had been long and arduous; great entertainment from watching the old dance of stars that could at times become tiresome. They were Goblins, with thick horns and their skin of bright colors.

Not like the usual Persephoniacs who came to the henge for visions, these. They were new.

“…are you aware?”

The god found that they were still standing with no idea of the span of time which had passed in recollection. Moments, an eternity.

“I am here,” they said, feeling that this was true in one aspect and wholly wrong in another.

“What do you remember?”

“Stones. A henge, people - Goblin, not half-kin - walking across the Windy Plain.”

The god stopped.”Do you know where the Windy Plain is?”

“I have never been there,” said the healer whose [Affinity], they had begun to suspect, was one of healing of the mind.”But I know people who have been.”

It was there again. The pity. Something was wrong. The dark that they could recall had not been the natural darkness of winter and night sky. There was an element of force to it. Cessation.

“When is here?”

“Would you like to know?”

They couldn’t be sure that they wanted to know the answer of the question, but something urged them on.

“Here is an islet near the Worm Forest, on the island of Hheso.”

They took another step away, as if distance could remedy the gaps of what they did not know. Hheso? Worm Forest? These were unfamiliar words. They knew of the Three Continents, but not this…Hheso.

“The current Era began close to two centuries ago, though that would mean little to you. The Era that you know - the Era of Stone and Wood - ended more than four millennia ago. The time you knew, and the now of today are two very different things,”the [Breezemind Healer] said.

“No!”

They had fallen somewhere, at some point, and they couldn’t get up. “This is all wrong, all false.”

“Is it?”

She looked at them with all the patience of the world. Absolutely infuriating.

[Lot:The Depths of the Dream]. The healer vanished; the gazebo tumbled down into a crack. The world jolted; and they fell up as the ground become something distant.

They re-alighted on a length of blue dusk, gazing down on the Plain. Could…

No, they refused to believe it. The healer must have been mistaken.

What had happened? They focused on the painted image and it seemed that they were falling, hurling towards that vision of a Goblin with hide the color of blood and ocean eyes.

“This is to be the end of the Crusade, my god.”

They walked with the paladin, carried within as all gods must be, feeling the [Affinity] that had so long ago endeared a small little Goblin girl to the god of Dreams.

Oh, when had it all gone wrong? It hadn’t started like this.

Together, both god and paladin gazed out through the tower. Arrayed against them was a host out of a legend; Humans bedecked in shining bronze, horned Goblins wearing staffs of living wood, attended by their half-blood kin. Great mulching titans, Persephoniacs, strode in the corridors of the ranks only halting before men and women who carried great certainty in them, all gazing up at the tower. Paladins.

A Human, a herald made his way up to the foot of the tower.

“Hear me, [Black Paladin], bringer of madness, who brought low empire of man and the tribes of goblins. Godslayer, treeburner. Today you die.”

“We can still escape,” they said.

“No.”

“They must pay,” the mad paladin declared, issuing forth out of the window.

They startled, back in the place that wasn’t, was no gazebo but neither their old henge. Stirred seas, was it true what the healer had said?