53.1 To Integrate

General Summary

Day 1079

Tomorrow, we will be ready to start waking the Osyr. But tonight, I lay down to rest and find myself on the edge of dreams when Ausha speaks up in my mind’s ear. It has been a while since we’ve spoken so privately - now that she manifests freely, we have been speaking like…normal people.   She has been feeling out how my transformation has affected her, and how her own fae transformation has settled. She’s noticed that my magic is all starting to blend, and it’s time for hers to do the same. The next step for her is to rebalance herself, similar to the triangle that Rainbow had showed me of elf, fae, and dragon.   But Ausha - is it a triangle? Is she still Osyr? The mindspace she creates for us shows a forest at night with a burbling stream that flows off into the distance.   Part of her will always be Osyr - she conjures a ball of watery, salt-textured magic.   And she is still figuring out what it means to be an elf - a woody, leaf-scented ball of magic, and a spinning globe of wind. It is an unusual choice - nature and wind rather than darkness. It’s influenced by being fae and connecting to trees and air.   But the darkness is still there on its own - partly from her elvish bond but mostly from me and our bond.   So her elvish nature is split between the desire for deep roots and the ability to drift. And the darkness feels deep, watery, and natural. She doesn’t feel out of balance…more like she can be present in any space, but only one at a time. To illustrate, she shows me a library full of conversing scholars, where our shared attention is dragged from conversation to conversation and we can only focus on one thing at a time.   She has to choose, and she doesn’t want to. All of my integrations have been so easy - darkness to dusk, elf to leaf and vine, darkness to night.   Ausha wants to know how to integrate with darkness like Kaide has. Our senior sister has fully embraced darkness by giving it to elves and then giving herself to elves as well. Ausha’s darkness comes   She has been thinking about water the way Osyr think about water - pools, lakes, ocean. But Kaide mentioned Catena and Shrouded Petrichor, and it made her think of rain. Together, we work on creating rain beneath my enormous dragon wings - she conjures up storm clouds and blots out the sky, darkening the ground below almost as much as my own wings do.   She pushes more magic into the clouds and the rain turns to a deluge - an Osyr-worthy storm that brings water to every place on land. But the other varieties don’t come as naturally. I show her how to treat the clouds like her own breath and exhale gradually until the droplets are juuuuust heavy enough to fall. It’s hard at first - it’s so much gentler than she is used to being. But as we work, she gradually develops a cool, healing rain that trickles out of the sky and dims the harsh light of the sun. And the in-between: Large lazy droplets that plop down in the summer, warm and heavy.   We drop closer to the earth and she creates a citrus crop to water, interspersed with tea bushes. So I show her things my father taught me in our orchard, about how the right gentle wind will carry the scent of citrus blooms to the tea leaves and change how they taste. It’s a delicate balance - strong enough to capture the air but gentle enough to wind through the branches without harming the tree. She does it, and the scent of tea, oranges, and the petrichor of the earth rises to greet us.   This is the place I can work out from. It’s a place I can work out from as I grow. This is where I can hear it all at once.   Once the Osyr are awake, she thinks she will be ready to stand apart for a bit in a way now that she can see how it all fits together. The real homework assignment that Teacher gave her was how to be her own complete person, and she’s been figuring out how to put herself back together and be okay.   For the rest of the night, we dream together.     Day 1080 In the morning, it is time to wake the sleeping Osyr. Liliales joins us, describing their extermination as ‘almost cheating’ since the bats seemed unprepared for handling spiritual energy at all. Attempting to consume any of Qishali’s magic seemingly killed them immediately. And Detoura’s music made them all just…ready to die.   The magic around the Osyr is that of a collective dream with its own rules. It was Black Tourmaline’s design that it would be more dreamlike than my and Liliales’ adventures in the Dreaming, so that their dreams would not fundamentally change who they are. But that design may have eroded now that the dream has become shared. So now the safest thing to do is to enter the dream ourselves, and wake them one by one. There are thousands of Osyr, so if we enter with ten people, we can the count on a ripple effect to wake the rest.