Rask approaches Alexis in the evening, near the end of the two weeks of focusing, training, and regrouping.
“Alexis, if I may, the Inner Watch? You’ve spoken a few times about it, and every time it… stands out?”
Rask is a bit unsure of himself.
“I don’t… I don’t listen for it, but it catches my attention almost is as if I were. It seems that you have learned more about it since you first brought it up, would you be willing to share what you have learned?”
Rask seems almost called to learn more about the Inner Watch from Alexis.
4 thoughts on “Inquiries into the Inner Watch”
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Alexis sets down what he is holding and gives Rask the whole of his attention.
“Ask me whatever and I’ll answer what I can.”
“It came out of a working, during that stretch we trained and focused at camp. What I pulled from the warren was thin. Just the name, and the sense that it was old. Some kind of old, perhaps long-forgotten, sect inside Raiden.”
“I put it to Carm. He had no knowledge of it.” Alexis shrugs. “What he had was the feeling of having heard it in a sermon. ‘A call to the man himself to keep his connection to the good of the whole’.”
“Then Carm told us his dream. Raiden said there is a corruption in the order. A disease at the roots. Raiden told him to fight it, and to remember what was worth saving before he did.”
“That’s the Watch. Finding secrets, and finding what rots the faith from the inside. Not the enemies at the wall. The ones already inside it, corrupting from within, like the ‘Raidensblud’ in the Copper Hills Fort.”
“It isn’t the good work. The good work is Carm’s, and Gus’. This is necessary, but not the core mission.”
“Carm is further along in Raiden’s service than we realized. Whatever stands against Raiden in this world will discover that eventually, and when it does it will come for him.”
“Please guard Carm. I’m learning how much Raiden and humanity need him.”
Rask listens carefully and nods in undertanding, what Alexis says clearly makes sense to Rask.
“Of course.” Rask says in response to Alexis’ charge to protect Ca’armine, then pauses, smiles a bit, “The hardest part will be protecting him from his own love for battle, but I know a bit about that myself.”
“Thank you for sharing what you have learned Alexis, I think I understand a little of why it has caught my attention. But I will need more time to… think on it. Have you learned any sigils or prayers related to the Inner Watch?
Alexis nods to Rask, then clears a patch of dirt with the side of his hand and draws a sigil for Rask with his boot knife. A wall, drawn as a closed ring. Set into the inside of the wall, facing in, a single open eye.
He says the words once, slowly, and then again, so Rask can have them.
Some man the wall. We keep the watch behind it.
We find the rot before it shows.
We begin with ourselves.
What we find, we pull up by the root.
We remember what is worth saving.
We do not bend. We do not break. We hold.
Rask nods and looks at Alexis with deep appreciation. He intones the mantra to himself several times, memorizing it, and turns his attention to the sigil, copying it in the dirt, erasing it, copying it again.
Rask spends as much time as he needs to commit the sigil and the mantra to memory. The mantra is repeated in his morning prayers and exercises and his evening prayers from then on.