54.5 Protected By Conscience
General Summary
Day 1100
While I don’t feel the loss of the magic that has gone into Evismora, I do feel a strange kinship with her. She feels like a fellow fae of Day and Night, but also Leaf and Vine, also Drifting Seeds. Other fae of multiple cycles (the Vanguard, Jaeril) have felt like they are sequential or even enrobed in one cycle over another. My own myriad cycles would let me cycle with any tree, and Evismora feels like she could cycle as well…unlike any other Treeborn. Even Jaeril’s cycling was not innate to her.
The feeling is faint, but noticeable. Is she the first fae of Myriad Cycles? Am I her Treeborn? What does it mean to be ‘Treeborn’ to another Treeborn who is also my wing mother’s sister…so many fascinating questions arise, but none are pressing enough to warrant immediate investigation. Instead, Magdalena collects her little sister up again and gives me some privacy with Thalien. Elsewhere in the Grotto, Ipthina has been hard at work preparing a hosting space to make everyone feel comfortable and safe, with several other Eldritch spirits providing food, shelter, and resting spaces. In one corner of the Grotto, Qing Chen continues to be borderline worshipful of Sitka as he works on her chains. For her part, Sitka is still fascinated with demon culture and is full of questions for him about his family, his siblings, their homeplace.
In the shelter of one of the larger Eldritch trees, Thalien and I lean against one another while I tease Bran, trying to get him to guess who we ran into during our adventure. His guesses are pretty good, leading him to the idea of a familial ancestor after only a few false starts. But, as I tell him, this is a loss before a win since we met two people and I was trying to have him guess the other one. The other one is unrelated, but is an elf.
An elf that isn’t in your family…but who you think I’d know. Did Nucifera mess with you?
Bran said he spoke with her recently and she said she needs to find a true apprentice, an inheritor. He thinks we should do something about her before she tries anything else and I have to agree. She did try to trick him into entangling his fate with hers…had he done any of the ritual, it would have brought them closer and closer to a shared fate that would have allowed her to attempt to possess him. Or at least exit the Dreaming using him as a vessel.
He thinks she’s falling apart because her mission is complete. All that’s left is the obsession. I know she’s dangerous; I know I shouldn’t think of her as another easily solved problem. But all I want to do is collect her up beneath my wings, let her be part of the Empire she worked so hard to create, and let her relinquish her grip on a world that doesn’t need her anymore.
Thalien pats Bran’s shoulder.
Good job seeing it and getting yourself clear before things got tangled.
He says that if Bran is ever ready to put down his connection to fate, then Thalien will be his teacher for that. But now, we are all just family.
Day 1102
I sleep until noon and wake up in Thalien’s arms. What a glorious hard-earned sensation. He is so full of energy and life, asking me what adventure is next for us. I can feel the wildling energy in him just bubbling at the surface, eager to spill over. But now, and for a long time, I have a to-do list more than adventures to go on. Mec Ales, the thicket in the Northern Grove, dealing with the other zephyr…
For now, all I want to do is settle in Dreamfall for a bit. And we can swing by Avan’Nal on the way home. Shale is sure to be awake by now and I’m eager to meet her.
When the pair of us finally emerge from our nook, Evismora is waiting with a proposition.
Can I call you my little aunt?
A charming suggestion, easily accepted. And honestly, it might be the most sensible of all the strange relational titles that have sprung up.
But the real request for aid is from Magdalena on her behalf. Evismora hasn’t eaten, and she needs better vision before she can feed by herself. Teacher and I can work on creating spectacles to help, but she still needs some nourishment. Fortunately Artemisia is here, and her madness is evidently a convenient snack. Evismora’s nature is to feed on components of a person’s nature, and her habit has been to feed on the pieces people are better off without — greed, hatred, even trauma. In the early days, Magdalena says it was hard for her to feed without destroying people entirely, but now there are so many people with such complexity that Evismora will probably be able to just siphon off the negative parts of people and leave them happier than before.
With Artemisia, I guide my big niece to find the energy that fuels her ‘madness’ and she cuts it away with a sharpened fingernail before devouring it. Like Sitka said, she seems to purify it as she consumes it, avoiding being tainted by the madness itself.
After some rest, they’ll head to Brighton. The city is sure to be a feast for someone who feeds on wickedness. Though Magdalena remarks that if there’s not enough left after the wickedness is gone, they become an idiot afterwards. Especially if their wickedness is the only way they know how to leverage their intelligence.
I have a hard time containing my own impulse to sic Evismora on any evildoers who might be better off drained dry. The Three Great Trunks, Ailanthus…but that’s not really in our nature. Instead, I wonder if I could devise some magic that would just absorb the wickedness in a person and save it for later. Without a way to eliminate it entirely, saving up wickedness would be unwise…but being able to pack snacks for Evismora would be two birds with one stone.
As for Ailanthus, she says he only has his Tyranny cycle left. She didn’t want to unleash Anarchy on the world, and she left him with the piece that would give him the least freedom. Tyrants can’t last forever.
One day, I’ll get the rest of him.
Evismora says she thinks she lost a lot in the hazard realm. She feels very instinctive, but the practice is gone. She wants to relearn things, and Magdalena suggests that she spend time with Alder. She was, after all, one of the first assassins.
Across the Grotto, I can see that Qing Chen has been working nonstop and is very tired. His notes have ended, he is drooping with only his weak white tea to keep him awake. When I settle down with them to listen in, Sitka continues to pester him with questions which he dutifully answers. After about an hour, he notices me and apologizes if I’ve been waiting long. Before I can even respond, Sitka acknowledges how rude she has been to take up his attention and touches him gently on the head, sending him into a deep sleep purely by relaxing his muscles. There’s no magic that I see…just reflexes.
I am already deeply suspicious of her.
Seemingly ignorant of my suspicion, she chatters away about what she has learned from my junior brother. She says she didn’t realize that demons would come to revere the zephyr, and she’s disappointed that they’ve learned to hate anyone at all (“dragons” she says, but I correct her to say that they hate my family specifically).
Something tainted the chains she had designed to let demons pass on the best parts of themselves to the next generation. Instead, they’re passing on dark things. Demon king seeds weren’t supposed to work the way they do right now.
There is an awkward silence as she takes a breath and I lean in towards her to make myself perfectly clear. I have no reason to trust her, her fellows, or her people. And she herself should know better than to keep Qing Chen awake under her spell when he needs to sleep. It is her job to break down the bonds of reverence between them, and she is not doing a good job of it.
With that out of the way, I let her tell me her story. After a while, Magdalena drifts over to listen as well.
Sitka says she’s not a healer, not really. She was a researcher specializing in inheritance, bloodlines and racial characteristics, including magic. Demons were meant to be a way to break the rules of Chaos that prevented races from mixing. She thought there would be less war that way. Better to marry each other than to fight.
But I lost control of the project. People were more interested in what demons could accomplish with more involvement and guidance from the zephyr.
She was tending a garden and thinking perhaps she should just breed plants when Isurus approached her. She recalls the mountains shaking and dragons all around their home…she says it was frightening. Isurus said he’d found a new people who could keep them safe, but they needed the right magic and the inheritance had to be strong because they could only be infused so often. It needed to only be recombined with other people who carried the inheritance.
I feel a baffled sense of rage, hearing her describe this to me. It rings false, but I can’t tell if she is lying to me or herself.
Where is the logic? You thought that humans could keep you safe from dragons?
The strongest of them, yes, she tells me, the ones with the most direct infusions. I struggle not to roll my eyes as I tell her about the scion my family killed, even before I was a dragon.
According to Sitka, who is becoming more and more repulsive to me the longer she speaks, the scions are brought to her lab as infants and infused with extracted pieces of the zephyr ‘gods’. They return the children to their homes and let them grow up. She said she thought they were helping those humans reach an ‘exalted’ state by accessing more sources of power, just like the zephyr had.
I see now that Isurus just wanted stronger soldiers.
Her entire attitude is so…ignorant. So irresponsible, as a researcher. And while she moans about how she was wrong and hurt a lot of people and now she knows she’s ‘experienced’ not ‘wise’, I still harbour such a horror and disgust for her. My first piece of advice (or perhaps ‘instruction’) to her is that she needs to learn to disguise herself properly, especially from humans and demons who are liable to worship her for things she doesn’t deserve. They are the ones she really needs to hide from.
Don’t I need to hide from dragons? Don’t they still hate?
I am a dragon of Sky and Darkness. Ever-expanding, cool, calm, peaceful and quiet. Now I feel the shadow fall across the land as thunderstorms roll in, sharp with electricity and buzzing fury.
As far as Sitka knows, some zephyr stole dragon eggs to experiment with them. She hears that there are demon-dragons now, but knows nothing about the eggs themselves.
I wouldn’t dare…
Magdalena cuts in — she wouldn’t dare experiment on something that could actually threaten her. But aside from that, Sitka says she wasn’t high ranked enough to work with dragons. She was happy working on the Lesser Races and “improving” them. She points at Qing Chen, asleep beside us, as an example of how much happy her projects are. I give her such a withering look, the kind a professor would have given me if I was happy about a statistically insignificant result after my very first course in research basics. He is one demon, with one story, told to a person he reveres as a god.
But Sitka makes it even worse. She looks at Magdalena as though the Treeborn might understand.
I thought we were learning from your example! The Treeborn had stopped planting trees…there were no more new people…someone needed to —
But it wasn’t needed at all. Even the Treeborn, with their desperate acts of creation borne from a desire to feel less alone in the world — none of this needed happen. So few things ever
need to happen.
I tell her about dragon eggs in the shell. I tell her about how those children might not have even known they were stolen. All the would have known is that one moment, they were safe and protected and speaking with their parents and the next, the world was silent. I haven’t spoken to any of the ones who were taken. I don’t know where they’ve ended up, aside from my brother. I see her shrink before my rage as Magdalena calmly points out that she does seem to have a habit of stealing children.
Bran wants to make her a proper illusory necklace, make her a human, and apprentice her to Gedrin for a while. Magdalena thinks she needs to learn about real ethical research. We’ll see if Rainbow will take her. We’ll see if Nightshade can tolerate being around her.
In the meantime, she’ll never speak with Qing Chen again until Rainbow says she’s safe. He is too easily influenced, too willing to see her as a god.
Before Magdalena transports her directly to Rainbow, I fix Stika in the same unyielding stare that I had for Erak before I destroyed him
There will never be a time when I cannot kill you, Sitka. So you will continue to exist, protected only by conscience and whatever personal growth you are able to achieve.
