53.8 Homeward Bound

General Summary

Day 1087

I get home late from visiting Elnora and immediately start drafting plans for how my enormous party will splinter off when we are ready to leave Deldrin.   Some things have already been decided - Lyssa and Ausha will go to the Domain while Aestien and Vaneili stay here in Deldrin to facilitate the integration into the Outlands. Being apart from both Lyssa and Ausha…the thought feels almost unbearable. But they have work to do…and I will have Thalien. Bran will come with me to the Grotto, while Yneir and Mireen will go with the kids to Dreamfall.   Trillium Nightshade and her family will head to the Keep to have their reunion with the Demon-Dragon Clan, long overdue. Most of the others will go to Dreamfall to set up the spring water for Qishali and introduce Elnora to Moonflower. By the time the wedding comes around, I hope she will feel comfortable integrating Carthian moon magic, and Starfield and Andstella will have a framework for how it might function post-pearl-absorption.   Void is still awake and we get some quiet midnight time together as I puzzle over some of the choices I have to make. Our conversation turns to Oblivion, and he asks a favour for her. Now that she has been around people who remember her, he worries that it will hurt even more for it to disappear again. Teaching Ying Ling has been a wonderful experience for her, and one of the new islands has been facilitating that process by letting the memories of her stick deeper. He thinks it would be good for her to have more students, perhaps begin an academy here.

  One thing my sister has never had — responsibility. How can she, when people forget her

    A century or three of living here, teaching…it could be good for her. All we need to do is convince her.   Conversations with some of my family members always drifts into the territory of “when this is all over”, and Void is no different. He muses about locking away some portion of our powers and wandering the world with Ausha. I give him a nice long time to brood before tugging him out of it. My little brother has had enough brooding for a lifetime.  

Day 1088

When we broach the idea of an academy with Oblivion, she is even more excited than anticipated. Apparently she has been idly studying humans already and is eager about the prospect of studying them further as students — seeing how they grow, seeing what they learn, how they mix with other students.   Even with informal research, she’s found a magical limitation in humans that prevents them from growing past a certain point with their magic. And something else that makes them explicitly see zephyr as gods. The humans will see something different when they look at zephyr, compared to anyone else.   So Oblivion’s goal with her academy, aside from whatever academic paths she wishes her students to pursue, is to study humans. It’s not the usual motivation for opening an academy, but it is as good as any…provided that her studies are ethical.   In the process of building the school, she’ll send Void to recruit students and she’ll head out to go find teachers amongst those that she knew once upon a time. Void seems anxious at the thought of her dragging people out of their established lives, in a very big brotherly way. But it’s her school, her experiment, and she has to learn some of these things by doing them.  

Day 1089

The next day, Oblivion hands me a copy of her notes on humans and their magic. It is an enormous book, very detailed and still incomplete by her own standards. Her own thoughts on Elnora are about tidal Osyr magic, and she has notes from Darkness on the moons… from having walked upon them. Maybe one day I’ll get used to having research partners who do things like that.   He seems to think that the silver moon was a deliberate creation of some kind, covered in silvery crystal structures. Everything he knows about earth, having spoken to Earth herself, seems to imply that crystals require pressure to create. The silver moon is too small to have such pressure, so he believes that Kaie might be responsible for it…but it doesn’t seem important enough to take the risk of actually asking any of the immortals. Besides, if it is her research, best to just leave it alone.   The red moon, according to his notes, is volcanic. I have a fleeting thought about filling the red moon with Ingans and simply destroying it…but that is absurd.   Oblivion’s theory is that Sella and Mora have managed to become conduits for the raw power of these two moons, and perhaps the Candlemaker is a conduit for the sun itself. But it does imply that the Fisherman, Sentinel, and Weaver are also channeling energy from somewhere we don’t know about. It is a tidy explanation for why the human ‘gods’ are so significant compared to other zephyr.   Finally, I have lunch with Cousin Soo to wrap up the last of my post-Deldrin planning. He has been politely giving me space to manage Imperial affairs, but registers that he’s worried that holding such political power hampers the pursuit of knowledge for me, Ausha, and Kaide. He is the consummate academic elder cousin, with his gentle implication that politics are getting in the way of our research.   I speak for myself, but I imagine that my sisters would agree: Pursuit of knowledge is not the highest priority right now. And at this level of my academic progress, just being out in the world is the most effective way to learn things. Perhaps some of that is the influence of our respective teachers — my academic family is finding and preserving magic. We can’t possibly do that without wandering into places where magic might have been lost or hidden in the first place.   I tell him about Oblivion’s research and he finds it very disturbing to see what the Zephyr have wrought on humans. It may even be beyond the boundaries of what the Emperor finds acceptable…and if that happens then he will surely make some assignments to deal with it.   In the meantime, he will depart from Deldrin to go survey the Barrier and set markings for where the passageways will be. By the time Liliales’ wedding occurs, we will also be ready to do the great magic to create them. He also passes me 15 tokens of authority that would allow people to pass through the Barrier without being affected by the displacement magic. Each token has a radius of about 50m and would be able to keep many people safe if they stick together (such as on dragon-back). I almost laugh to think that covering my own dragon form would use half of the tokens). Still, it will make wedding planning much easier.   As a parting gift, he gives me a sending stone to stay in touch. Like my letter birds, the stones come in pairs. But these can communicate synchronously by projecting illusions at each end. It’s extraordinary magic, and clearly something designed for the rich magical environment of the Northern continent.