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The Hunt (Prestige Class)

ALL THE WORLD IS A VERY NARROW BRIDGE

Carefully the Candidate is studied from afar. Placid pools are stared within until they reveal the Candidate and her actions to those who are to present the Test. There is an ancient tale where one's heart, still beating and cloaked with dripping blood, is weighed upon a scale against a feather. If it is found to be heavier then a feather, and thus unworthy and too full of evil, the soul being tested never gets to enter the Ever Lasting Paradise. If the scales are balanced or tipped in the heart's favor, Eternal Death is avoided. The Candidate is tested in this fashion, always compared to a feather, always on the border between death and success.

Secret tests and puzzles are laid carefully within the path of the Candidate. If there is the hint of failure, any hesitation not gainful to mastering the obstacle, the Candidate is cast off, never to have known the narrow path she had tenuously began to tread upon.

Many of these obstacles are foes manipulated into facing the Candidate, and with their defeat, the Candidate makes another step down the path and into her destiny. Some of the obstructions presented to the Candidate are puzzles, tricks, and traps, capable of killing or maiming. The defeat of both foes of the body and foes of the mind harden the Candidate and simultaneously further the goals of the testers.

It is only after the testers chant mighty spells that the Candidate faces her final test. She wakes that morning in the Ever Paradise, the resting place of good souls and spirits, whose foundation is built upon the hopeless souls of the faithless. It is within this verdant garden of delights that the Candidate is presented with her choice; to reside within the Paradise of her reward, or to return to the Imperfect Mortal World, to face and hunt down members of a hideous cult who will surely slay and devour countless innocents. Members who happen to be her family, dearest friends and lovers.

It is said that this choice burns an indelible mark upon the very soul of the Candidate. If the Candidate relents and chooses to stay within the Ever Paradise, she will awaken normally the next dawn and remember the delights of her dreams, the passions of her imagination. No sign or token is granted; some unworthy former Candidates waste away, wrapped in their memory of just a taste of the sweet ambrosia that is the Ever Paradise. If the path of the Hunter is chosen, it will forge the Candidate into the slyest and supplest of rapiers. The forging process readies the Candidate to be plunged into the vilest hearts of evil, and to face the deadliest abominations, knowing her keen edge can prevail.

Success is not guaranteed. Neither is survival. For those who choose to step down the left hand path, the one leading back to the Ever Imperfect Mortal World Without End, their hunt has just begun. The dreamspell woven around them settles into their bones, tightening everywhere at once, marking them. During this time the candidate fully believes they are awake, back within the Mortal World, and are fulfilling their promise to Hunt each member of this vile cult. The sights, smells, sounds, feelings, breath, heartbeats, all are real and vivid. For to walk the dreamspell back to the Mortal World is to live through Hunting each of the Candidate's friends, and killing them. It means to consciously choose to Hunt each living family member, and destroy them. It means to Hunt every lover and slay them in their sleep. Those who fail in this never awaken.

Once the Hunt is over, the Candidate awakens and remembers the face of every friend, family member, and lover she has slain, and every act and considered choice that lead to each slaying. Many Candidates are frantic in their need to discover if their deed, so true and alive to them in the dreamspell, has followed them in their now realized waking. Some will taste blood in their mouth, others will have blood under their fingernails. If the candidate does not break, she is initiated.

And some of the mysteries are never explained.

All of this and more was foretold by the strange book discovered deep within the fey mound, the one with thin metal plates for pages and a strange, twisted wire binding. I remember cradling the book within my night dark hands and resting it in my lap, legs folded beneath me, absorbing me with a tale in which I could not believe I would ever take part. I have taken, since then, to calling it the Book, or Manual of Fate. All of the things it spoke of have come true. I can neither speak nor think a lie; I have walked the Hunt and become an initiate.

Those who created the Hunt, I have never met. All I know is that many of the tasks set before me in the last three years have been carefully manipulated into my way as a part of the testing. I at first suspected that it was a secret branch of the Hidden, but now my suspicions run far a field of that. I have trained with the Hidden, I have run with Whit and we have both excelled in our lessons as they have been presented to us. I have seen the Swiftwind in their eye-blurring glory. Nothing within or of either of them even approximates the Hunt.

I do not know how I caught their notice, those who guide the Hunt. I know that they snared me within their Dream, and presented me the Choice. I could not let countless innocent lives end, after I had struggled through the claustrophobic darkness to banish Arawn and foil an even older, more hideous pact. Even if that meant taking the life of gentle Sanantha, handsome Malakon, brave Thea, and all of my other friends who have now become my brothers and sisters, but in the Dream were my vilest enemies. It was the smallest of consolations that I have never held a lover in my arms; to have to have slain him also might have persuaded me to stay within the Ever Paradise. I cannot write more of those deeds, their memories are still fresh within my consciousness and too easy to call up.

My lessons are not during the daytime or the night; I am trained during the Dream, taught things that I never suspected I was or would ever be capable of accomplishing. Taught the complex matrixes of the Construct, and how to guide the Else to channel within my blade and unbind the essential forces that once held the Construct together. Instructed by deeply cowled Necromancers in robes white as bleached bones how the Undead cling tenuously to existence, and how to use the Else to sever those almost tangible bonds. Guided by faceless strangers on how to strike the most devastating of blows upon twisted aberrations, formless oozes, and fiendish denizens of far away planes. Some training locales still are fresh within my mind, their twisted hideous nature suited to support the creates that laired within them.

I have been told and shown that when a Hunt is called, it will be done so by the Dream. The name, face, mannerisms, and current location of the vile fiend I am to Hunt is to be revealed to me. There is, of course, a general mandate to use my training in furthering the Light. Those things that normally consider themselves safe, beyond the meager abilities of an Assassin, will be disabused. To all others I am a nameless face, always changing shape and direction, a member of the crowd or an ally. To my mentors I am a Hunter; deep within my soul I finally know who I am.

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