Mal awoke to a pounding skull as he groggily looked round his small room wondering whether the events of yesterday really happened. Had he really turned his back on Semphine? And did he really have an epic ranked quest with a variable rarity class to boot? It all felt so surreal, and despite the events only happening a couple of hours prior, dreamlike. However, a small flashing in the rightmost corner of his vision let him know that yes indeed, the events of the prior day actually happened. With a careful flick of his will, he opened the prompts that he had minimised yesterday. A deluge of prompts assaulted his vision.
Congratulations! Garoth the god of ???? has bestowed the blessing of Garoth’s resilience upon you.
Garoth’s resilience: +2 resilience
Warning, you have broken Semphine’s compulsion, a compulsion set down by a deity the consequences of this action may be far reaching.
Congratulations! You have achieved 4 new achievements!
Compulsion breaker(divine): Congratulations, you have broken a divine compulsion, such a feat is extremely rare and the dividends for the act will vary due to individual circumstances. As you were unlevelled when you broke the compulsion your rewards will be enhanced however due to assistance from another god and the compulsion having a large target group your rewards are greatly reduced. Calculating… rewards are as follows: +10% chance of resisting compulsions up to divine rarity, +10% chance of breaking compulsions placed upon you up until the divine rarity, +1 to all primary stats.
God blessed: Congratulations, few mortals ever garner personal attention from a god and fewer still gain a blessing. For your needles legendary feat in service to a god you gain +2 to all primary stats and +10% higher reputation gains from all gods and their factions affiliated with your god, -100% reputation gain from all gods and their factions with negative relationship with your god.
Variable rarity: Congratulations, you have gained a class with a variable rarity, such a class is extremely rare and can allow you to gain power far above what would otherwise be possible. Depending on the rarity of your class you will gain the following benefits: ???
Epic Quest holder: Congratulations, you truly stand shoulder to shoulder with titans. For gaining such a quest for the first time you gain the following benefits which will be doubled if you complete the quest and reversed if you fail it: +5% fame, +2 to all stats
That, that was a lot to take in. Mal had of course heard about achievements as they were one of the few openly discussed paths to power, however he did not think that anyone in Falreath had more than a handful of minor achievements and from all accounts they took years to accumulate. Gaining so many powerful achievements on his day of awakening was, it was incomprehensible and that was not even mentioning the personal blessing of a god something that not even the head priest of Falreath had. Mal’s mind was moving at a mile a minute as he tried to comprehend exactly what had transpired, it was hard enough to accept that the events of the prior day had happened but to also accept that he had enough achievements to instantly be put in a high ranked position in the army or taken in by any noble house due to his shear potential. It was just so much. Mal closed his eyes and tried to calm himself, he didn’t even know whether he should tell his mother or Nath about what transpired yesterday. Would they be in danger as he supposed he would now be considered a heretic by Semphine’s disciples. Mal felt ill, this was what he had wanted, he had wanted the power to take care of his family just. Mal took a moment to collect his thoughts, he did not want things to be this way, he was happy before finding part of the truth of Semphine, well if not happy then at least it was comfortable and familiar. But then again now that the compulsion was gone he could finally hear the truth in Nath’s words and the vitriol in his fellow villagers. How could he have been so blind for so many years. Mal’s thoughts swirled in circles of confusion and revelations for long minutes as he tried to piece together his world until finally he heard a knock by the curtain to his room.
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It was his mother ‘Mal we need to talk.’
Mal, Rebecca and Nath were all silently sitting at the table in their small kitchen none of them saying a word or drinking the tea which Rebecca had prepared. Both Rebecca and Nath were staring at Mal as if he were an interesting forest critter that they had never seen before, the attention was making him uncomfortable as they were obviously studying his reaction for some reason. He had no idea why they were acting this way and he was about to ask them what was going on until he realised.
“How much do you know, and how?” he asked with confusion and not a small amount of hostility in his voice.
The two women looked taken aback but also disappointed by his unchanged manor of speech, however Rebecca smoothly took over the conversation as if they were having a light brunch not discussing lifechanging matters. ‘We know that yesterday you somehow broke the compulsion but we have no idea how you did so nor anything else that happened to you yesterday.’
There was a long, tense silence before Mal replied ‘If you knew that I was under a compulsion for, I don’t even know how long.’ Mal’s voice slowly grew in volume and emotion. ‘then why did you never tell me. Why could you not have warned me of the changes, talked to me about how my actions were being twisted, how I was losing myself without even noticing. Why did you not tell me, I could have fought it, broken it by myself, why did you leave me to become this.’ While his voice steadily rose through his tirade his final words were a whisper, a lament of what could never be.
“We tried.’ Rebecca spoke, subdued. ‘We tried to get through to you, to tell you that you were changing but you just shrugged us off. You told us that we were being too sensitive or that we were imagining things.’ Rebecca cut off as Nath took over
‘Or you would grow angry, you would yell and scream at us out of nowhere or rant to us about how we were not pious enough or.’ Her voice became a whisper. ‘Or you would try to hurt us, over the last few years you changed. You were not the kind of person who we could simply talk to about something of this gravity and if we dared to tell you directly of what was going on then you would have gone to the church about it, and we would be dead.’
Their words cut at Mal’s heart like razors not purely for the hurt that he had caused the most important people in his life but more because every word they spoke rung true. He had been a monster and looking back he was surprised that they were even willing to talk to him after everything he had done. All he could do was whisper a creaky ‘I’m sorry’ before his body was wracked in uncontrollable sobs.
In the end Mal told his family everything that had transpired the prior day after Nath had fled from him. After he finished dumbstruck looks were plastered on both women’s faces. Both realised the gravity of the encounters which Mal had fallen into the day before Mal had been offered a chance of power however it came at the cost of being embroiled in whatever game the gods were playing, after all they were all mere ants scurrying at the feet of giants.