What does my God want from me?
I do feel just slightly tainted... I started feeling that way shortly after back when Desh and I fought with the red vine in that cave at that one vampire's odd request and apparently blackened, shriveled heartfelt behest.
I struggle with it within.
Some sort of a psychic wound perhaps?
I do not in any way feel cut off from Yutow.
I am still an effective priest, and yet...
This is frustrating.
The call of the wild is something I can communicate, an idea my barbarian friend Th'rar understands maybe better than anyone else could.
I am also growing exceedingly tired of the druid Hewitt doing little mean things to me.*
It was quite a surprise to me to find out that apparently Ihsana is some sort of cannibal, for real actually and that this is what it was she had gotten in trouble with the Garda for.
People told me how could you not have known and to be honest well, I was out of town when it is said to have happened.
I don't keep an eye on every Vallaki decree but now that I know and Boris has told me of how he saw her eating a corpse while he was exploring the sewer system I will need to decide what if anything to do about Ihsana and her ghoulish habit.
Is this even my place to decide?
Are people simply overreacting the way they almost always do?
I was among those who witnessed Fade's public flogging. The way the crowd's reaction was out of proportion you would think they had witnessed the mute elf being flayed alive instead of just beaten and humiliated. Her crime, as explained to us by the Garda woman was apparently defiance towards the Garda.
*Of course, if I tell this to him I am certain he will tell me something to the effect of: If you don't like how I treat you then that is your problem, not mine Valachani, and you know I could just simply end you as a solution.
Why is that? Because many people are brutes.
There is no justice, there is no vengeance for this sort of bullying garbage.
Because they can, because they are stronger or more popular than you, because people are apathetically jaded and simply do not care... There is a reason life is terrible for so many.
Priests are supposed to be a voice of clarity, one of moral guidance. They are someone whom the people in a community can look up to and trust. I fulfill my acolyte duties and yet... Hmm.
I loathe this attitude by your tormentors and their supporters you should and ought to thank them for giving you unnecessary extra hardship and adversity.
If someone were to give you a sandwich which they had defecated in, then be offended when you didn't want another from them, since they had made it, for you? Yes, that would be similar.
When people scowl at you or they stare disapprovingly and gawp idiotically as so many fish... It is disgusting. You who would do this in a crowd think you are beyond reproach and there are no consequences for the ways in which you treat the other people around you.
Sometimes, such as when one is foreign, that is often the case. Unfortunately or fortunately.
Yutow bore the beatings of two armies without complaint. So too must I learn not to voice my being upset about personal mistreatment, except perhaps here in my personal journal, and even then... I do hope no one finds it.
What is incredibly stupid is the smug attitude people will oft voice that any misfortune which befalls an individual has to be entirely, completely deserved for the sufferer's own failings and flaws as a person.
Things are fated to happen in certain ways and to certain people. I of all people am well aware of that but to those who are not priests, who said it was up to them to interpret the supposed mandates of the gods? That is a high blasphemy.
If he was just simply giving me a hard time I could let that go but the bald one was also less than kind towards Annabelle.
I was born special and due to my yellow eyes, my being a cat eyes Valachani, I was put in the priestly caste by our wise women. How long has it been since the last potlach I attended?
I remember attending shaman lessons outside Ungrad and the advice of my uncle in Rotwald. Also the brutally effective training regimen I was put through as a child designed to bring out my spiritual gifts.
How many of those who would chastise and put me down can say they were trained as a young brave in the way we cat eyes are?
I'd like to see them live through such things stoically as our rites of passage demand.
Could they withstand walking through a bed of burning coals to get the fetische of the medicine men and wise women? How about being tied up and left next to a mound, a bivouac of army ants in order to hone your divinely given ability to repel insects?? Over and over. You either learn to channel the turning pests ability granted to you by Yutow and such jungle spirits as his chief friend and servant Panther or you get bitten repeatedly until you give up, pass out, die or master calling on the spirit gift. This is a blessing, you see.
Believe me, I do well know that suffering builds character. You would not if you in fact knew anything about the tribes and clans of Valachan be trying to lecture any of us about the virtue of bearing suffering considering our ancestral origin or indeed any significant part of our way of life.
Of course these outsiders do not! To expect them to speak through anything but the comfortably sheltered lens of ignorance to our ways would be a mistake.
You know who else thinks of violence and bullying as a grand solution toward solving even the most minor and inconsequential of disputes? The more corrupt and especially hidden actually monstrous members of the black leopard militia. Those whom we the priests of He who is The Peacebringer are dutied to intervene on behalf of for the peasants. Bratty nobles with a violent streak and actual werecreatures... The latter are the reason all priests are strongly encouraged to have a silver weapon in hand at all times in case of even if it is something so minor as a dagger.
An outsider asked me why the people do not simply rise up over our Baron and the oftentimes wicked militia. He suggested we deserved our ill-treatment for not doing so but without suggesting any sort of alternative regime style to replace the old and current, espousing any sort of revolution is... Untenable and not realistic. He does not understand the full scope of the power Ulrik II has. In many ways our Baron is comparable to Barovia's Count.
There is also one very good and important task the black leopards perform.
That is patrolling of the roads, keeping monsters, would-be invaders and hostile wildlife from overrunning things. Valachan is few cities and settlements surrounded on all sides by a brutally savage jungle, river rapids and dotted in unforgiving forests.
For more than 420 years the tribes and clans have had their medicine men and wise women use the nature magic granted to them by our God Yutow and his fey and animal spirit messengers. We do know something about what we are doing even those of us who are clerics and not "proper" druids. I may not understand so much what is needed to maintain the hallowed status of a grove as it marked by a circle of standing stones, this is true.
However what my people do is not deserving of extermination based on what any outside deity may have told you about the way your nature magic and blessings are supposed to work (from while you were in a different land!), I do not think.
Do people not understand there is a reason for why things in this... Plane or realm as you may call it are done as they are? To continue to assume it needs be the same fundamentally as your Krynn, Oerth, Earth, Sigil, Faerun, Athas and so on... Well, there is a reason not many outsiders tend to last so very long in our world. We natives who have survived for generations in the harsh landscape this world offers, those who have eked out a living in whatever way they could, who have survived enough to have families who also continue to persist, those with legacy... May know at least a thing or two more about the horrors this world generates than a freshly misted does.
Conversely, not every outsider is a blithering idiot who deems it their imperative to tell entire peoples that their way of life is wrong.
One of Yutow's greatest strengths is his ability to bridge peoples' differences. He is compassion and survival. All peoples, even ones not from the same worlds have at least some universal commonalities. I must strive to understand these outsiders better. Yes, think like the priest that you are and do not have these imaginary arguments with people not here such as Hewitt and the dwarf.