47.4 Grains of Sand

General Summary

Hope: Day 2

We get back to the city quite late in the day and Kiita is waiting with a light meal and water for us. The water feels somewhat concentrated in its magical energy - it's like they've condensed the water from the lake.   I try to respect her desire for service by requesting tea the following morning. It hardly feels like 'service' to me - tea is just...simple hospitality.  

Hope: Day 3

And indeed, in the morning, Kiita appears with four tins of tea blends and clothing laid out. It seems that we are calibrating to one another - she doesn’t insist on dressing me and I allow her to help with the final gauzy layer that I need to wind around my shoulders where my wings jut out.   Liva has requested a meeting with me, so that is the first order of business after breakfast, in a lovely sand garden with some desert plants and warm stones to bask on. Liva herself is clearly sunning herself when we join her.   Her questions are simple, but they do not have simple answers. She asks about whether triumph is possible, whether a military victory could be had, and whether they will be able to bear the cost.   The thing about costs, I tell her, is that they are always the thing that people can bear. By the time the cost is clear, you have already born it and have no choice. It is never palatable, but it is always what you are willing to pay.   Her mind has been on ceding territory and inviting Norcrack's forces to settle down somewhere along the coast and attempt to live in peace together. This seems unlikely to me, given that Norcrack has killed every envoy that has been sent to negotiate peace, but she points out that they have never had an envoy as capable as me before. And when I leave, they will rely on the truce that they were able to negotiate. All I need to do is bring the enemy to the table.  

I don't want a generation of martyred heroes. The people who come out of the crucible of war might be stronger but what is the point of victory if all it gets you is a desolate survival?

  I'm not surprised that this is her perspective, but I am surprised by her calm suggestion that they could simply take a few years to grow stronger and then break the truce and drive their enemy back again. Conspiratorially, she tells me that the more powerful long-lived spirit folk can plot in decades or centuries, but Norcrack is a spirit who has grown powerful so quickly that his mind has not caught up to his strength. She says it so confidently and it makes sense, but I imagine she has not actually interacted with him.   I ask if this is a gamble she’s willing to stake her entire people on. Her evasive answer is simply that not everyone is her people. As I consider this, she sends for a servant to fetch an instrument for me so that I can prepare to sing for the city later on, as I requested. She, too, is musical, and wishes to accompany me in my performance but I decline. Fortunately it is true that fae music is deeply personal and accompaniment would be strange.   While we wait, Liva asks me to create a different form of art with her. She lays out a smooth dish and many vials of coloured fine sand, gesturing for me to go first. I can see immediately that this game-in-sand is just as much a conversation as an art piece. I select a deep green and trace out thick, ropey vines across the dish. I miss my plants.   Liva adds purple leaves to my vine, and I extend the tendrils into brown roots. I'm curious about her statement that not everyone is her people - what did she mean by that? Some of the roots I lay out have no vines attached - an invitation to grow something new from whatever lies beneath the surface.   Instead, she begins filling out the blue sky behind the vines, and I follow with a sunset pink that brings us closer to the thicket of vines again. She continues with the sky, adding golden birds winging across the horizon. I am not terribly interested in the sky beyond ensuring that it has the soft colours of sunset, so I take up my own invitation and bring purple vines up from the lonely roots. To me, the next sensible rejoinder would be to add green leaves to this purple vine...but she returns to the original green vine and adds red berries to it.   At this point in the collaboration, I am beginning to doubt her ability as an artful conversationalist. Perhaps she is an artist first and a schemer second. With my turn, I simply blend the thicket of vines together to make one, tangled plant that shares roots. One people.   She observes this and notes that I’m complex, that reality is messy, and things blur together. It is the first open piece of this conversation: She asks if I believe that there is good in the worst people, and bad in the best.  

Of course. The spectrum of good-to-bad is a circle.

  She returns to the dish and adds thorns - mostly green with flecks of purple. It is an interesting choice...a little bit of violence on an otherwise peaceable image. And of a mixed colour, maybe a small gesture of unity? I sketch pale purple veins into the dark purple leaves, somewhat confused.   And then she returns to the sky, adding a golden setting sun. This, at least, draws me back in with deep shadows beneath the leaves. Her addition is the pale pink undersides of clouds in the sky that reminds me of my dusk markings. It is beautiful, but not connected to the conversation I am trying to have. I return to the leaves, giving us an enemy to focus on: A small brown caterpillar that is clearly consuming both of the vines.  

What an interesting invitation.

  She place delicate golden speckles along the caterpillar - surely a sign that we are seeing it differently. I am not pleased about the presence of the caterpillar and so I complete the sky with deep red for the sunset. She completes the clouds with cheerful white fluff.   It seems that both of the conversations we were having have found their closure, and I am not sure what conclusions we can draw from them. Still - I don't feel that we've resolved anything at all.   On one side of the dish, I paint the golden outline of a Grove tree stretching up from the horizon. It glows as though backlit by the sunset - my own tree of Drifting Seeds.  

Perhaps I am not as capable as I thought...

  Liva remarks as she adds grass along the horizon - a stalling move, I believe. For my part, I draw a second Grove tree on the other side of the dish - blood red against the horizon. Temira's tree, perhaps. Liva had mentioned earlier that she had heard of darker, artistic fae up North. Her response is very interesting - a golden serpent winding around the red tree trunk's outline. An invitation, I think, though I don't like the idea of another entity encircling my trees.   I fill in the dark trunk of the golden backlit tree, leaving blank spaces where another snake might fit. Liva smiles and accepts the invitation, adding a red serpent around the golden tree while I finish the trunk of the red backlit tree.  

Have you seen our trees?

  She hasn't, but she has heard of them and is curious if anyone guards us while we sleep. I think fondly of the elves who guarded Fae of Seasons, but shake my head. With a delicate tool, she adds sharp white fangs to each snake and a cluster of eggs at the base of each tree.  

The best guardians have sharp teeth and mutual interest.   Your guardians don't see a difference between these two trees?   No material difference - if they’re important to my partners, that makes them worthy of protection.

  Mutual interest and equality forms partnerships, otherwise one will dominate the other or become a leech. She says she has too many unequal relationships and doesn’t like them, doesn’t like being forced to bow her head, or being covered by leeches. She says there is value in being a ‘tree’ and providing shelter and would like to be supported by those she shelters. She wants to gain strength from those who are stronger so that she can also become stronger, without being oppressed. It is a very practical outlook, though not one I find particularly appealing.   She points out, rightfully, that people easily recognize me as being worthy of attention and that she is envious of that recognition. People are able to see my deeds more easily because of the kind of fae that I am. She's right, in this life at least. Things were certainly different when I was a farmgirl.  

I’ve done things I’m not proud of - I wasn’t always this beacon of hope. I did things I thought were necessary. But it’s always an upwards trajectory.

  In an ideal world, Liva tells me, she would count all the people she’s responsible for as ‘her people’. And she would only be responsible for her people. But she says she doesn’t live in that ideal world. It hurts her to give so much to people who would just as soon feast on her eggs as huddle behind her scales.    

Can I trust you?   A heavy burden to lay on me, but yes.

    For the first time in this somewhat uncomfortable meeting, she speaks very plainly. Not only is she responsible for the arts and hearts of the city's people, she is also the master of spies. Artists are unassuming and art is ubiquitous, so artists are either ignored or invited to walk in places of power. The rumours of unsavoury things that have been attributed to her might be true, but they are people who were eliminated not just for being rivals but because they were threats to the city. Some of them were even friends who she regretted having to kill.   I laugh at this and tell her that my personal assassin is a pasty chef. She’s envious, and surprised that I keep a personal assassin.  

Hope can be cultivated in many ways.

  I still can't quite tell what kind of spirit folk Liva is, though she is obviously a snake of some sort. She admits to me that she would like to be less of a 'viper' and connect more with the lighter side of her lineage.  

Liva, why don't you be this thing you want to be?

  There is opportunity here, but in a delicate way. The woman in front of me clearly has hope that I could stoke...but I am not sure if it is hope that I should stoke. If I were the Imperator and a force of political change, maybe I would be more cautious. But I am Drifting Seeds, and I am wandering here to show that different things are possible. It is not necessarily my job to decide which ones should come into being.   She speaks, very factually, of simply not being strong enough. The culture of their city is more competitive than collective and if she were to become stronger then she might be seen as a threat and be eliminated. On the council, at least, she thinks she sees a way for all of them to support one another. After all, a strong military needs a strong economy, wizards and scholars need to be protected by a strong military while they are learning.   Her proposal is bold - she thinks the council should cease to be a group of four equals and instead, throw their support behind an Empress as her ministers. My wings go cold for a moment in fear, hoping that she doesn't have a particular 'blessed one' in mind. Thankfully, she envisions herself in this role. She believes she has much insight into the inner workings of the city from her spies. She wants to ‘shed’ the untrustworthy version of herself and become something more worthy. And this is why she wanted to perform with me - to borrow my aura of hope.   I respect her openness in explaining that she wants my social power to rub off on her by performing together, but I think I can sense some clear manipulation in the ask and explanation both. The calculating disclosure and gentle acknowledgement that she is asking for a lot and understands if I still refuse - very shrewd.   I tell her to start with her fellows. There is no point convincing the populace if her council members won't support her.   She accepts this gracefully, and asks for some blood from both of us to create an array to solidify the sand painting we’ve done. It turns to glass, and she makes a gift of it to me.