Valsharess

\\ Okay, still waiting for said key player(s) to return to finish this war so sorry to keep you guys waiting but it is still in effect. We've been holding back on the next official stage entitled 'Alliances' until everyone is ready to continue but as it's been two weeks and there is more than just the one plot running alongside the War that depends on it's progression I'm going to have to progress one of the developments before everyone comes after me with pitch forks and torches.

So here goes; \\

The War has come to a critical point in it’s progression, both houses have taken heavy losses, the exact numbers were unknown as the casualties were only marked by their absence and as most operated covertly the absentees went unrecorded for several ten-day so it was near impossible to see who had the advantage over the other but it was clear that someone would have to take decisive action and force an advantage before the shadow war devoured both houses to the last Yathrin.

Pau’mai Mori’hyanda could see that if she wanted to see that advantage fall to Mori’hyanda she would need to take drastic actions as the halls of the qu’ellar were growing quieter and quieter around her as each moon passed and before long the key members that remained would be whittled down to too few to act at all in a cohesive manor. So she locked herself in her chambers and paced and paced, for days she wore the tiles down calculating percentages and weighing odds with her cold and malicious intellect and as each plot fell to her perceptions of their eventual failure she was left with one final and inescapable fact, Mori’hyanda was going to loose.

There was nothing she could do, the threads of time that her beloved Eclav had woven for her all stretched out to the ruin of her house and her eventual sacrifice to Lolth as a defeated and broken Illharess. Every single conception stretched out in the same way and the web that the orbb had made seemed to envelope her inside her chambers. Her grasp on relative time seemed to fade. How long had she been in her chambers? Had the war already ended? No, it can’t of, she knew it hadn’t as she was still alive. Had the worst happened then Dev’lin would have sent one of their assassins to finish her or if they had been unable to penetrate the houses defences they would have enlisted the other qu’ellaren to finish the job as they would have seen the failing house as weak and torn it to pieces. She had considered all her options, she had been part of the house for a very long time, long enough to have met all of the previous Illharessen that preceded her and seen the house through its glory days and through its darkest hours, she had survived the tests of Lolth and countless assassination attempts during her blood drenched clawing to power and carried the houses through their return to malla in the prophecy of eight by ensuring it’s completion and she was not about ready to give up now.

Then, the epiphany. Lolth’s handmaiden had shown her favour in the return of Szith to malla, she had been so caught up in strategy and plot of the War and her impending defeat that she has not considered the alternative, She was the longest surviving Yathrin still standing in Szith, She still had the power, the influence and the determination to do it. Why had she not thought of this before? She did not have to lead her house to victory what was important was that her house was victorious and as Eclav spun his new weave the strands of her fortune revealed her fate to the Illharess and as they did a grin spread across her lips and with a quiet and hissing whisper the word passed with a new determination.

“Valsharess”