The Oracle prefers to receive her supplicants at night.
Well, that seemed about right; by Ryssa's reckoning, an Oracle was pretty much a kind of wizard, and a wizard pretty much a spoiled child nobody dared say "no" to. Living in the middle of a swamp and insisting travellers risk their necks to pick their way through the gathering dark was a wizardly thing to do.
She gingerly probed a patch of grass with the toe of her boot, and withdrew as it merely splashed.
Nobody has ever solved the world's problems with a little travel, good-heartedness, and a magical trinket of murky repute. But people keep trying.
Ryssa would tell you she's along because they're paying her coin. Perhaps, if pressed, might admit that she shares a little of their idealism; the service of the god is many years behind her, the great blade she'd wielded buried unmarked and unmissed. Paladin no more, but still fool enough to see these greater fools tramping on their merry way and say ugh, you're all going to get yourselves KILLED. Not like THAT. Like THIS....
So here they are, and someone suggested to the impressionable dung-kickers that what they'd best do is seek the counsel of the Oracle in the swamp, and that's so clearly the questly thing to do they seized on it immediately.
"No," Ryssa said adamantly, and then somewhat later, "well, you won't move until we do so, and I trust not a one of you to cross a swamp without drowning, nor speak to a mysterious old hermit woman without behaving abominably, so I'll go while you wait."
And that's why she has wet feet.
It's full dark by the time she bangs on the door of the decaying house, and a stooped figure in deep cowl opens the creaking door, wordlessly leading her in and gesturing her to sit by a meagre hearth.
"I'm told you utter cryptic mystic advice," Ryssa says, then considers that her travelling companions would probably object to her phrasing. But it's true, of course; that's what she's vounteered to collect for them.
"What name dost thou call to the hare in the field which hath no ears to its head?" the Oracle whispers loudly. "It matters not; he heedeth not; he heareth not—" as Ryssa blinks a few times, feeling as if she can nearly place the accent which the whisper is probably intended to occult.
"...Did you just tell me a 'what do you call a rabbit with no ears' joke?" she interrupts.
They look at each other.
"Oh, conkers," the Oracle says forlornly, and tugs her hood down.
"Where are your parents?" Ryssa adds, with more heat.
"I'm not a child, madam paladin," the Oracle says, in the tones of a youth whose deep offense at the notion calls them a liar.
"I'm not a paladin."
"You look like a paladin."
"And you look like an elf who's too young to be out in the world alone, surviving by gulling passers-by." And mercy, Ryssa can feel the old pull to righteous rage: no child should be doing this. Where is her family?
"It's not by choice." The elf closes her mouth as if it's a prison door, and Ryssa reminds herself: not a paladin. Not a paladin. "I didn't mean to," the girl adds shamefacedly; "only I stumbled by here on my way, and there used to be an old lady here, with her wits failing, and she was glad of a pair of hands. Mistook me for a grandchild, I think. And people mistook her for a witch."
Not a paladin — "And she's where?"
"Under the garden in the back," the elf says. "She was old when I came; slept one night and never woke. Easy enough to put a hood on and talk nonsense. People can find whatever they want, in good enough nonsense."
"Aye, easy — if you're worried what people might find, if they're looking for a girl instead of a crone." If you're not primed to see the lair of a hermit mystic, an empty, rotting house in a lonely swamp is just an empty, rotting house in a lonely swamp. Ryssa inhales the scent of damp and fungi, horribly aware of the sword by her side. That although it's not the sword, it's not the blade that makes the champion; that she may have dug a grave for a piece of steel, but....
Not a paladin.
"You know what would be auspicious?" she says wearily. "If some fools on a quest to the north were joined by the mystic wisdom of an Oracle."
"What? And the paladin is going to vouch for me to keep gulling folk?" the elf says, looking at her askance.
"Yes," Ryssa says, feeling certain she's swinging a great weight on a rope into her future, ready for it to come whistling back out of the dark and knock her head off. "With one condition only: you keep that word out of your mouth."
The elven girl gives her a long, long look. "Why?"
"Because if you don't," Ryssa says, with her best paladinly combination of civil tone and deadly ringing threat, "I'll put you over my knee."
There is a silence.
"What kind of a god do you follow, anyway?" the elf complains, in the sort of way that says she believes it enough not to test it. For now.
"You do not wish to know, child," Ryssa tells her serenely. And that, of course, passed off lightly without anyone taking especial notice, is the part that's true.