54.2 No Regrets

General Summary

Day 1099

For the ritual itself, Magdalena asks me to draw on the lessons she has taught me about moving through space. I will need to create a portal to move myself, physically, into the Dreaming while she stays here as an anchor to keep the portal open.   I will bring Thalien’s spirit back, and the ingredients I’ve accumulated will allow us to create a vessel to house it. Natural components in the Grotto will help as well — he will be similar to Treeborn. The act of creating the vessel will require some dangerous interactions:

• Multitasking and context switching
• Braiding soul grass into rope with my fae-sized and dragon-scaled fingers
• Combining the heartwood seeds, blood moon jade, and my own heartsblood to grow a physical body. I insist on my heartsblood to retain his anchor to elves.
• I draw heartsblood and lose some amount of stamina that I’ll probably regain in the next year.
• The spirit crystal should be placed at the centre of his magic. As a Fatespinner, it would have been his eyes. Now, I’ll place it in his heart — Magdalena tells me this will empower his physical might. Privately, I think it just feels…right. She suggests that we take oaths as dragon and rider to ease the transition…but I’m not ready for those oaths, perhaps ever.
• Wayin will breathe life into the vessel, and will bind to me in the process.

  The dream flowers form the gate that will let Thalien and I pass through, save for one that I use to put Artemisia to sleep. And then I step through.   Thalien is there waiting for me, clean and dressed up, looking like he should be lounging somewhere. The stiff, formal Fatespinner attitude is gone and he looks every part the wildling, ready for an adventure. But as we move towards the gate, it is cloaked in a wispy midnight barrier and Artemisia appears before it.   In her manic, half-rational voice she lays out a half-formed plan: Evismora and Sitka are trapped somewhere past death and dreams. She had been waiting for me to retrieve Thalien because the living aren’t able to pass through the door to death, so Thalien is the only one who can guide us there. Other ‘dead’ have ended their fate with the living world, but Thalien remains on the precipice, easily able to be wrapped up in fate once again. And I am free from it in a different way.  

It's my fault that the White Death is there. I told her the only way out was if she fought back, but she didn't have to. Maybe she would have fled if I hadn't told her that.

  She shakes her head as though fighting off her own hallucinations, muttering that she won’t lie to me. As interested as I am in fetching back this lost Treeborn and the best of the human gods, none of that would be worth it if Thalien is lost to me.  

I can’t promise anything — I just know that he has to open the door. Erak the Sentinel guards the prisoners, and maybe you’ll need to trade to free them but you don’t have to if you don’t want to!

  I grind my teeth, holding Thalien’s hand. I know what the answer is. I know we have to try, because otherwise we will return to the waking world knowing that we didn’t even try when it was a possibility. He squeezes my hand.  

No regrets at the end of this.

  But I see regrets for me down either path. There is no safe path. At least Thalien promises me and Artemisia that he won’t die to bring anyone else back — he owes me that much.   I fix Artemisia in the crosshairs of my aura, as strong as I can make it, and tell her that I am trusting her for the entire time we are here. She swears that she knows this, and is owing me every second that we are here. I hope whatever other part of her might want to lie to me is cowed by this as well.   Together, we head South to the head of the Great River where the soul grass grows. In the Dreaming, it tears holes in reality that stitch themselves up rapidly. Artemisia draws forth her own blood and incants a ritual in old fae to conjure a door in the air that makes my skin crawl to behold it. Bark and bone, like the bark grows overtop of a withered but living body. I can hear whispers in my mind - insidious claws that pull at my sanity and for a moment, I can’t even distinguish between the many ideas in my own mind. They all seem perfectly valid. I could step through the door, I could turn away and go home, I could leave Thalien here, I could push him through and run. But it passes after a moment, and Artemisia warns us of that very effect before we go through.  

Heiassa, you have the heart of a dragon — the madness won’t consume you. But Thalien, you’re too weak to believe in yourself. You need to believe in her instead to anchor yourself or you won’t survive.

  No pressure.   And with that, he pushes on the door and it lets us in.  

Death

Immediately, I sense elves, but not sworn ones. Only broken oaths, and one jagged broken oath stronger than all the rest. Along with that broken oath, I sense deep regret.   Around us is a dark forest with an impenetrable canopy. The only light is the glow of our own living souls…which is quite large, for me at least. The other two are smaller, just like their humanoid forms. The ground twists and curves around us with no clear sense of ultimate gravity and the magic here is not as I would expect. I try to manifest a flower in my hand the way I would in the Dreaming, but it fails. It feels like a place the Master has never touched — its rules are its own.   My sense of discernment is still struggling so I construct a mental illusion of who I am — my family, my oaths, the things I’ve done. It should play at steady intervals in my head…assuming the magic worked. Artemisia says that Evismora and Sitka will probably be far from the door, well-hidden. So without any other guide for direction, we set off in the direction of that particularly jagged oath breaker with regrets.   Along the way, we notice that the ground doesn’t shift but that it seems impossible to move between paths once one is chosen. We can backtrack and switch, but not crossover in between. Stretching out behind us, I leave a thin thread of shining magic to guide our way back to the door.   Finally, we hear the sound of battle and come upon a high-ranking officer in old, Imperial garb. He is surrounded by the corpses of trolls and fae being torn apart by the roots of trees which are absorbing them as nutrients. They’re pulling flesh off bones. The man’s flesh looks grey and cold, but his wounds are already sealing themselves up. He raises his head and calls out to us as we approach.  

You’re still rational…I wouldn’t mind a few minutes before we fight.

 

I have no desire to fight you.

 

That’s a level of rational I haven’t heard in a while.

  He turns away and I can see, instantly, the resemblance between him and Doraal. But he doesn’t remember his name — this place took it from him. I can feel the environment eagerly reaching for my memories and sense of self as well, but I push it back with a stronger thought. This is a lost Imperial, and I am the Empire.   He tells me that chose between the Empire and the Empress. If the elves were damned by their Empress to fight to the end of an unwinnable war then the Empress was the enemy, and it is the duty of an Imperial citizen to strike at their enemy. He chose the Empire and swung his enormous, two-handed, Doraal-worthy sword at her. It broke his oaths, and he died for it. As he tells his story, I recall Kaide sitting withered and weak as she stripped away her Imperial guise and told me how she regretted spending elvish lives as recklessly as she had.  

She would apologize, if she were here. You did the right thing. If you had done it a few thousand years later, you might not have been so in conflict with your oaths.

  I speak past the superficial reality that I’m the land of the dead and tell him my name and that I am sworn to safeguard the Empire even from the Empress herself. And he might have died for what he did, but he bears such a resemblance to my own brother that I know his family must not have faced punishment.   He tells me that the Empress wouldn’t need to apologize because no one was right in that war. But he looks less dead for having heard me say it. In this place, endless battles wage and the losers are torn apart by trees only to revive themselves and search the woods for their missing parts — body and mind. This elf has lost fewer battles than most, but even still, he is missing things he needs. I reach out, take his hand, and speak the opening words of a new oath.   He smiles almost neutrally as he responds, but warmth and life floods back into his flesh as his oaths are restored. He smiles truly now, and looks me in the eye.  

My name is Dorimen.

  Having this sworn elf beside me makes may own sense of self solidify enormously, and I can calmly and steadily tell him why we’ve come here. He nods — we’re looking for the Fortress, and he can show us the way.