Mystran Dust [6]

Gathering her robes to her, Simbul placed her ear against the strider's chest. "He'll sleep for some time." Danthor examined him briefly, concurred, and lifted Krogenar easily, carrying him from the clearing. Laisha and Grandal conferred as they followed.

"I'll get his ship to where we agreed. I think I can work it well enough." Grandal nodded at Laisha. As the female drow entered the ship, he rejoined the other two wizards and their sleeping friend aboard the Mystran airship.

.....

Laying him down on the mud-cracked ground, Laisha regarded her old friend sadly. In the oppressive heat, she knelt over him as the other Mystrans looked on. Casting her mind back some eight decades, she focused on the first time she had spoken to Krogenar - the day she had extended an invitation to him, to join her family, to join Mystra's family. It was painful, but it was a necessary step in the spell's execution.

She had followed him for a few days, to discern his nature. He had recently fled the destruction of Vector, a fugitive MagiTek soldier. Finally, she had explained Mystra's role in the universe to him, and made her invitation. He accepted, and they had been friends ever since.

Laisha removed the Symbol of Mystra from around his neck.

Whispering softly in his ear, Laisha cradled his stubbled face in the palm of her right hand. Her ebon thumb swept across his wide forehead, slowly, wiping the sweat from it. As she stroked his familiar brow, the past eighty years of his life slipped away from him. Grandal, and the other Mystrans looked on solemnly.

"You will not remember Mystra, or your life in Her Church," she husked.

"We will remember you. Go without guilt, and without heartache." Her thumb was nearly across his brow now. "And most importantly, go to the east, where none will know you." She looked upon her friend for the last time. Though they had shared so many years, he only appeared half his age. He seemed to be in his early sixth decade (a newborn, in her long-lived drow eyes) but his actual age was well over a century. The age-refuting  effects of The Forest of Mysteries would no longer hold the years at bay, and age would  slowly grasp him, enfeebling him.

He would awake as though from a dream. The intervening years were now gone. Lifting her thumb from his brow, a tiny drop of sweat dangled there. Wiping it across the face of a green leaf, she stood, and placed the leaf in her waist pouch. The prostrate strider sighed, and was silent.

.....

"I feel like we're abandoning him." Lanseril said. Grandal turned to the sage, and shook his head. "His choice was to leave. Forgetfulness is our gift to him, and it protects Mystra's children as well. Krogenar saw the truth of it, I think, in the clearing."

The elder wizard walked slowly to his seat at the back of the airship. Lanseril ignited the airship's engines, and looked out the porthole once more.

Krogenar lay on his back, his strange, bamboo airship a few paces away. As the ground fell away from them, the strider's form became smaller, and then invisible. "Was there food enough for him? Water?" These thoughts, and others swam through Lanseril's mind. Laisha placed her hand against his shoulder, as though reading his thoughts. "We've left him in a position of strength. No sense of loss, and the wilderness will protect him from those who will remember his as an enemy. To leave him in a city would be far crueler." The sage nodded at this, and turned back to the controls. Lanseril banked the airship westward, back across the ocean, to The Forest of Mysteries.