41.6 Like It Always Is

General Summary

Day 685

When I wake in the morning, both Qing Chen and Detoura are still passed out and Nestin is gone. I follow the smell of cooking above deck to find Liliales and Qishali chatting with a gangly young man who I instantly read as an otter.   Immediately, I collect Liliales into an enormous hug.   The otter introduces himself as Royal Clearwater City's Five Tributaries, or 'Little Five', and addresses me quite formally despite Liliales' protests. Qishali, splitting herself in two, ushers Little Five away talking about how they have only two days. After a moment, Qishali departs as well with a spirit trap that Liliales hands her to "keep him from waking".   Alone, Liliales and I settle down for breakfast and he casts his own illusion using the same type of spirit crystal magic...it's a sound illusion as well - not something I have seen him do before. It's bittersweet. I ask for an explanation of the small things (Little Five, the spirit trap) before we get to the big things.   Qing Chen, evidently, is a potential Demon King, and the sleeping greatness we have sensed within him is part of a Demon King's power. It's something like a Hand, Liliales estimates. They found this out as the Phantom Dream Spike tested each of them as they approached - in the dream life that Qing Chen led, he finished his year of apprenticeship and then returned to his family. When he inherited the mantle of 'Demon King', he was sent to capture Trillium and succeeded.  

When tested, he demonstrated a capability to be as ruthless and merciless as his people needed him to be.

  Liliales sounds aged in his analysis of the situation. It hurts to hear him describe it with such resigned nuance: Qing Chen hadn't actually experienced a year of being a fellow apprentice...the dream wasn't complete. But there is a difference between someone who fights reluctantly and seeks ways to defy orders and fate...and someone who becomes a willing participant. It's not that he's a bad person...he fought under some level of duress and the lives of his family were used to persuade him. But once he made the choice, he made it ruthlessly. They did eventually settle the sleeping Demon King inside him, but in the midst of his dream he was willing to fight Liliales and Liliales put him down fairly hard.   He was only in those dreams for a year or two before Liliales found him. But then he left the Dreaming and slept soundly for the remaining...four days.   Little Five and his chosen siblings are people of privilege from the city. They travelled together for adventure and reached the Dream Spike, but faltered in the face of their own demons like people of privilege often do. Again, he sounds aged.   The Dreamspace can't hold him, Liliales tells me. The caricatures of his family that the Dream offered him as a test didn't fool him - they made him angry. Once he broke free, he travelled and continued helping others break free. In the Waking world, dozens of people stood motionless, trapped in their own dreams. Liliales went through them all and helped them.   He begins telling me about Little Five's dream before I interrupt and say that maybe I shouldn't know these things about these people. Some might be innocuous or simple, but worst dreams are very personal things, I think.   The approval of the Dream Spike, apparently, came because he was able to help the others. That was the real test, like it always is.  

I thought about you a lot. Some of the things you always say started making a lot more sense. I just wasn't ready to hear them yet.

  It's a pang that hits deep, and I change the subject to Qishali. She's a pure spirit, not a spirit-folk, and The Soul Rending Crocodiles were weakening her to try and force a slave pact upon her. Detoura didn't want to get involved but Liliales insisted and they very nearly died taking on the dozen crocodiles. Detoura's alchemy hauled him back from the dead, and then the spirit pact tethered her and kept her from drifting away.  

I've never tried so hard to figure out magic on the fly. The pieces of her soul were scattered on a plane like the Dreaming...I think I only succeeded because I was nearly dead myself.

  Their pact was supposedly going to be temporary, but they grew into keeping it.   When I ask, he has his own well-articulated sense of what to do next: Handle Qing Chen, handle Cantha, throw a banquet to help others to feel like they've repaid their life debt to Liliales, and then send Detoura back to Clearwater City with Little Five and an escort. He even considered travelling with Detoura and then meeting us at the Red Thorn grove...but it seems that he would rather stay with our family for now. It's such a small thing, but it makes me happy.   And when we go North?   He and Qishali want to get married in Dreamfall and have our entire family there, including Trillium. It may take a few years, but he thinks the marriage is important so as not to imply that she is some secret lover or concubine. This is a cultural artefact of life in the South, where the formal recognition means so much more than it would to those of us raised in the Empire. She's a spirit, and he's a prince. It makes sense that formalities are needed in a way they never have been for me and mine.   Qishali, he tells me, is a Twin-Tailed Jade Lightning Fox Spirit. The three-tailed fox witch we encountered previously was wearing the body of spirit folk of the Nine Lives Illustrious Fox clan, in which they are born with one tail and are reborn over the course of their lives with additional tails...though growing to nine tails is apparently quite rare. A nine-tailed fox would be somewhat Undying, though clearly not 'Undying' enough for Oolee.   All of this is good to hear from him...but still overwhelming. Unexpectedly, he interrupts my lost-in-thought silence by offering me alcohol from his flask and asking if I want to talk, much like a bartender would. I tell him that of course it's hard having missed so much of his life, but that I know he's still here and he's still the same.   The two of us will have such strangely long songs to sing when we finally cycle. We plan to kick a human wizard out of their tower and take it over to hole up inside and write our songs in the last year of our decade. It's funny - this isn't the first time that time has become somewhat nonlinear for me, but Liliales doesn't know about my own strange passage of time either. It's never come up before. I laugh it off as I tell him about travelling back to meet Mistress and save Ikshafael but it eases my own mind to think of how I changed for the better after just a few nights on my own. I became more of myself, and I didn't leave anyone behind.   I warn him about the potential entanglement of fate involved in him having received this treasure. He feels like he's only just caught up to Hella in terms of his magical ability and awareness of the world. The two of them are on the same level now - they should be leading similarly sized contingents of soldiers. But still, that is such a change from the young prince he was before...and that's something he surely will have to explain to Zehi as well now that he has grown up (and gotten engaged) in such a short span of time. I don't envy him that letter...but their lives will be so long that no decision will last forever.   After topping up my drink, he reminisces more about the experiences of the dreams - being a bartender (ha!), attending war college, a purgatory of clerical work. It's like he's already had the mish-mash of youth that people go through to find out who they are and what they want to do. Something I never hand, it occurs to me. It is less like he had one continuous experience and more like he had fragments of experiences one after the other. He kept walking to the next person and entering a new dream while keeping an eye on the treasure to see if anyone else was getting close. He thought it might be up to the person who acquired the treasure to rescue everyone else, but until it seemed like someone else would grab it, he just kept working.   Detoura was the person who came closest, and Liliales ended up spending the longest in his dream. Time and time again, Detoura refused to betray himself even to save Cantha. He said that if he betrayed what they stood for, he wouldn't be worthy of her anymore.   And Mireen...she is petulant for having lost the treasure. Apparently she simply thought it was hers and was just coming to pick it up, but things in the swamp went very poorly for her. Even outside of the dreams, she was embarrassed to be rescued by Liliales from being stripped bare and robbed.   It seems that she thinks of Qishali as a rival of sorts, for having Liliales rescue her seems to mean that she thinks he ought to...have her? He encountered her repeatedly in situations in which she was vulnerable, and that made her uncomfortable. She thought she could come with Liliales and Qishali as they continued rescuing people, but she had to be rescued herself the one time they let her.  

It's not over.

  I warn Liliales that this is a very obvious threat, especially from someone dealing in fate. And then he will need to talk to Zehi.