"No! Stay there, and make it make sense!" He saw this nobleman wince. At that moment, a ball of light shone about the book.
Huh. A man of a graceful tongue, perhaps of a more learned mind, may have thought himself at once gloriously, hopelessly, and deservedly doomed. As it were, Henry, a peasant boy, his speech boorish and unrefined, bore never a lute-string for a tongue nor the mind of a poet. As a consequence, he was of an undressed frankness. his eyes widening at the burn that crawled up his skin. Oh, no. And what is that thought that that held his mind?
Well, that he was certainly and undoubtedly bloody well fucked.
Crack! Henry wretched back sharply, but not before a fantastic surge of magic punched into his throat the earthiness of ozone. Disoriented, he tumbled onto his arse, vision whirring like a punch-drunk boozer's, and heard still the nobleman's voice â or so he believed. Fuck. But he had felt it, hadn't he now?, that last minute bauble that had found his flesh. Summery, he imagined, or like a nap in a peach grove. Guarding. He couldn't recall when last he had felt so safe.
"You're...wait, what? Liches? Why would some nothing bookkeep want with something that?" Why would you? He was played. His sword had fallen out his hand, and his helmet had clattered off where the tome had plummeted. There, it left him to nurse his head's tremendous ringing and that bedeviling rot-touch yet crawling up his arm, and as he eyed that face of his self-made savior, it thundered: he, just now, could've damn well died.
Swallowing, he missed that flurry of summer that had touched him soft.
"How did you know?" To come? Had he felt it that far off? Shit. "You could have let it have me were the book all you came for. But you didn't." Then, because he was dizzy still, magic-touched, feeling as though his brain-matter spilled wet out his ears â "Are you, ah, some sort of guardian angel?" From Hoar? He looked suspiciously at that book as his stubbornness waned. "It's Henry. Of Skalitz. A paladin, aye. I've got no gift for spellcraft and the like, but if you're no villain as you say you are, then fine. I believe you. But you have to tell me where else them components are. There are them bandits all over terrorizing, and I've got to get to them before any of themâ" he sputtered, cradling his affected arm to his chest. Fool mortal. Hero. Always in a rush to die. But that book...! "Have you come to help?" Preform miracles?