32.5 Keeping the Old Ways
General Summary
Day 494
In the uncomfortable silence that follows our dressing down of Brandwin, Lily calls all the youngsters to get ready for bed. As they prepare she walks around the perimeter of their camp singing softly in the troll language and soft grass sprouts behind her, accompanied by a feeling of peace. It's similar to in Shaelie - the sensation that we are in a place where violence simply doesn't happen. I recall learning about how trolls consider places to be so deeply important...it makes sense when I connect that to seeing how this magic affects the area around it. I play a soft lullaby from a comfortable magical hammock suspended in the air and pretty soon everyone is asleep; such is the magic of dusk.Day 495
In the morning the kids are up and setting about their camp chores, which Lily tells me are all done strictly with magic as part of their training. She asks our little group to come away and discuss our magic for a bit, asking Brandwin to supervise the kids. As we turn to leave he makes a snide remark about her spreading her legs for yet another teacher and I spin him around and drag him up to my face with the lightest touch of motion magic. He has such a pinched, bitter expression as I point out that insulting his companion is just as much an insult to me and the way that I teach. Someone once told me about how bold and unquenchable humans are, even at their own expense. I cannot fathom being confronted by someone as exponentially more powerful than me and still behaving the way this little twerp is speaking to me and my family. He is like a kitten who is getting away with playing with a cat's tail because the cat knows that slaughtering a baby is inappropriate. By the time he grows claws of his own either he will have smartened up or he will annoy someone who feels that it's a fair enough fight to send him packing with more than harsh words. Part of me hopes we run into one another again once he's seen a bit more of the world. Over tea and breakfast prepared by Jaeril Lily tells us that her teacher died getting her to Solace and that she doesn't really fit into the geometry of human magic. With a summoned magical blackboard I begin explaining how fae and elvish magic function compared to what I know of human magic. Kaide joins in to explain dwarven magic. We have a small magical review on the organic nature of fae and elvish magic and how we shape the magic to accomplish the same goal but fit in better with what exists around us, whereas dwarves would prepare the area to accept the magic before casting. Humans tend to think of magic as rigid and requiring alignment. If someone's bloodline doesn't line up with what they want to do, it simply can't be done. Where the older races seek to understand magic in a way that gives us flexibility humans rely on brute force that fails if the bloodline isn't compatible. This forms the basis of a lecture later on for all of the young human charges, led by Professor Kaide, Professor Shae'deneir'lanael, and our teaching assistant Liliales. We prepare a small amphitheatre with rings of benches and a stone lectern to speak from, explaining that any long-lived person would be willing to expend such effort even for something 'temporary' because who knows when you'll need it again, and what is the harm in having in it? A major component of this lecture is the notion that some magicks are simply too big for humans to get involved with, a message that is unpopular but still needs to be shared. When Kaide explains that if you encounter magic that screams at you to turn back, a student asks if that doesn't just mean to get stronger and return. But in the context of people who live for hundreds and maybe thousands of years, 'stronger' might be truly out of reach for someone with less than a century. The evening concludes with a culinary exchange from all of us, Trillium eagerly offering the humans spices that truly challenge them for the first time. Liliales shyly remarks to me that perhaps he would like to learn how to teach so that he can also teach people one day and have an apprentice. And the final lesson of the day is to watch me learn something. I have spent the day lecturing as an arcanist alongside my elemental colleague and now I borrow Brandwin's tiles and ask her to show me how to use them. We gather quite a small crowd as I struggle through reshaping the ground and feel it channelling through me as a connection to earth and not 'just' Transmutation. By the end I have made a malformed, dull artificial geode and I proudly label it and stow it inside my dimensional container. Many of the humans protest that it's impossible to learn elementalism as an arcane wizard and I laugh this off, reminding them that I am also a mystic - did they think I sang them to sleep last night with a mastery of sound? To prove my point I sink an orange seed into the ground and pour energy into it until a sturdy little tree to accompany our classroom.Day 496
We depart from the field trippers and end the day at the canyon last encountered about a year ago (15.5 Family Matters). From the lip of the canyon Kaide says it feels sort of familiar in construction and that perhaps there is a spiral elevator somewhere similar to in Deepest Refractions - the canyon feels like the backyard of a larger underground city. Jaeril notices the beasts prowling at the base of the canyon and says it feels like there are creatures here who have lived over and over again like the magic is cyclically feeding on itself. She seems surprised that this observation came from herself but given the cyclical nature of what she's noticed, I'm not bothered. On the other side of the canyon Liliales notices an enormous, perfectly rendered cliff face made of illusory magic, surrounded by both real and illusory brambles. I can feel which ones are living and which are facsimiles and beneath the illusion I find an elaborately carved facade describing a marketplace for interacting with outsiders much like in Deepest Refractions. But here there are still many dwarves in gold and silver collars, as well as elves who are clad in Imperial garb and...what are clearly non-Imperial elves. I recall Magdalena telling me of unbound elves and how the magic in this place feels like the Empress was here but the defensive magic is more tied to the lives spent here than to her. I don't feel a link to these non-Imperial elves though, so I project my presence as a Hand and call on the doors to open. They swing open to reveal fifty dwarven and elvish warriors made of clay drawing their weapons, led by a single ornately clad clay elf. Their weapons shimmer and begin transmuting to steel but I halt the transformation in its tracks and all the soldiers crumble to dust at the same time. Their leader (?) reshapes into a spirit and draws up all of their remaining energy to sustain himself. I step ahead of the others and raise my empty hands in a gesture of good faith, telling him that a long time has passed since they were left to guard this place, that I bear them no ill will, and won't he give me a chance to explain what has happened? He greets this with hostility, asking if elves are still bound in blood and shackled by the Empress. As I have done before, I dance around the details - we are all still sworn in shadows but the Empress who led us thousands of years ago would be unrecognizable to any elf who lives today. I point out my own wings and the fae I travel with - is this behaviour that a Hand of his time would undertake? It is a tenuous point but he allows just me to enter the cavern with him to explain while the others wait outside. I follow him inside into a space more elvish than any I've seen here...elvish not Imperial. The interior is lit with crystals so bright that they sustain growing living things draping the walls. There are fountains still hard at work and the bubbling water echoes around the cave. Grimly he tells me that he knows I won't give him what I want. I concede - he is almost certainly correct. And if he wants, I tell him, we will leave now and I will do my best to ensure that this place is never bothered by sworn elves again. But my family and I didn't come here to loot or pillage or...anything else. We came here because we had seen the space and felt its magic in passing and I am on something of a journey of discovery in a place elves have not walked freely in thousands of years since the war ended and we crossed the mountains. He smirks at this, pleased to hear of the Empress' loss and of the war that now rages in my homeland. It does not abate when I tell him gently that elves nowadays feel lost and broken without the shade of the Empress, that when I meet Severed elves they weep with joy when I can restore them to the cool shade of our Empress. As always, I struggle to convincingly articulate that I have seen the Empress of old and still trust and love the Empress in my own time. In his time the Empress slew her city of elves to bind us all, though the ones who chose to live here were those who were bound weakly and kept the the ways of Leaf and Vine. When she waged her war against the fae they refused to join for how could they fight their own people? But she called them anyway and many of them were bound to serve and die in a senseless war. He asks if elves still keep the old ways, if we sing to stones and record our lives the way we did when we were Leaf and Vine and in Avan'Nal. His eyes travel over my wings with an unfathomable expression and I begin to understand what he means. I explain that I've been to Avan'Nal and listened to their songs, traversed my own bloodline and found elves who were trying to reconnect themselves to trees. It is not just the Fae of Seasons who walk the land now, and that I am both elf and fae in a different way than we were as Leaf and Vine. I feel him soften and press further, describing my son and sister who are travelling with me - the two fae behind me as I opened the door. I tell him about how we all woke with memories of being family to one another. I tell him that reconnecting elves to trees is what I would like to do once my war is won. Hearing this, he tells me that I might bring elves here in the future to see what they left behind, hesitating when I ask he means only elves. After this he nods and leads me deeper in the canyon walls, to a cavern more enormous than I can understand. The ceiling soars out of sight and in this unfathomably large space are trees: Grove trees. They have sweeping olive green branches, unlike any of the three other Groves I've seen. These, he tells me, are the Trees of Leaf and Vine. I am stumbling over my words to ask how and why, how these came to be and why we are elves if we have these trees. He tells me that cuttings were planted both here and in a valley to the North but they took too long to grow. My cheeks are wet with tears as he shows me a tall stone pyramid at the base of each tree, studded with song gems. The first is a dwarf's voice accompanied by a chorus of his loved ones and instruments telling the epic of his life. I take in these trees and hear Uncle Red telling me at how maybe one day I will be able to plant trees of my own. I hadn't understood what it would mean for me - an elf and fae, one day maybe a dragon as well? How could I shoulder the responsibility of creating another complicated people all taking after me? But these...I wonder if I could forego my chance to grow a new cycle of fae and instead let it reconnect my people back to their trees. I think of Doraal singing to one of these trees, laying his palms against the smooth trunk. If I fail to find all the pieces I need for Thalien...I think of singing him out of a tree and into a body that will embrace the changes that fate brings. The clay spirit nods at my tears.You all may have four days here to explore, to see what we held dear.
