53.6 Cloud of Opportunity

General Summary

Day 1086

The council meeting adjourns and I wander home, but I find Elsiva kneeling at the foot of the bridge leading to my home island. Her posture is humble, and the Osyr guards tell me she has been waiting for an hour.   She says she was wrong to try and force a connection with my family. When the moons rose today, she tells me that the cloud of opportunity before the moon had shrunk by half. Such a sign made it clear to her that this is her last opportunity and it is shrinking before her eyes.  

If I do not grasp this opportunity, my granddaughter is sure to die.

  Failing to connect the dots, I ask her to explain further.   Her granddaughter is very talented and it apparently that talent came with a curse. When she was young, she came into the Library with Elsiva and discovered something that responded to her but no one else. Since then, she has explored the Library in places others couldn’t access. Five years ago, she began to change and her pupils have become almost white. Now her entire eyes have gone white like the crest of a wave and the colour has drained from her hair as well, though she says that her own world is full of even more colours.   The girl Elsiva describes seems otherworldly, ocean-bound, maybe even corpse-like. She has lost control of her body, beginning with her feet. She needs to be tended to and cared for, where once she was a talented and energetic girl with a strong bloodline of the silver moons.   Elsiva speaks at length about the omens and portents pointing towards her granddaughter’s death. She says the final cloud of opportunity points towards shadows and dragons as their last hope. I don’t want to openly reject her faith’s dire predictions, but I can’t help but think that ‘death’ is a very broad category, and that shadows and dragons are very likely to be able to solve this issue.   The temple of their order is a place of study for a loose form of fate magic. They teach about portents, omens, and pulling the strings of people’s lives. It is not nearly as sophisticated as Fatespinning, but it bears some similarity.   That evening, she brings me and Eusphyra to see her granddaughter - Elnora.   The girl’s energy is very strange. Her eyes are like Kadia’s — a sorceress’ eyes that see the broader tapestry of magic. And her aura, while not nearly as powerful, is similar to Tide’s moon and ocean blend of magic.   And unfortunately she is, indeed, dying. The Osyr magic she carries is corroding her Zephyr magic just like Dawn when she was becoming fae. She is not strong enough to sustain the transformation, and so she is dying from it. It is like she is a stone tumbling in the ebb and flow between these two magicks, slowly wearing away.   Her outward appearance is so calm, but I have to imagine she is in incredible pain. Indeed, when I dip into her emotions, I can feel pain, resignation, regret. She seems sad that she will not get to see how the current events develop.   At my questioning about the development of her ‘curse’, she draws forth a small pearl from her belt.   This is the thing she found in the Library when she began to change. It was larger when she found it, and both Eusphyra and I can see immediately that she has been absorbing it in some way. The pearl, he tells us, is the gift of a master who has not yet found a disciple who is ready. A master would spend centuries creating such a pearl, and if one was not designated to a particular successor, Osyr considered them dangerous to interact with because an inheritor who was not well-suited to the pearl might suffer from it. There might be traps or defensive mechanisms in place, and even a proper inheritor would be weakened as they took on the magic until it was complete.   I use my own pearl to see the flow of time that Elnora and this small pearl have been following. I see her wandering the Library, entirely ignoring the wards that seem to pay her no mind. Like any child would, she scoops up the treasure and pockets it. But there is something that also kept her from wanting to reveal it or talk about it for so long. But it is not sinister so much as…protective. In the past, finding such a boon might have made her a target for people wanting to steal the knowledge of this ancient Master.   The pearl’s life began at the start of the War of Fire, and I see an Imperial Master working on it layer by layer. It has its own sense of regret to it, that he had never found a disciple and that he likely never would now that the war had begun. The pearl was the only way he had to pass on his teachings, and even that might fail if no worthy successor was to find it.   Elnora seems to have successfully inherited whatever gift was in this pearl, and she thinks that when the pearl is gone, she will die. Perhaps a year or two.  

The moon and sea were never meant to touch. That they appear to is only ever an illusion.

  For such a young girl, she is utterly resigned to her coming death in a way that frustrates me. It is hard to save someone who isn’t ready to work to be saved.   But I can see that she feels that sliver of regret that she won’t see how the world will shape up from here, and so I spend the rest of the day preying on that regret. I bring her to the island that she sees even when most humans don’t, and her magic resonates with the Osyr water magic all around us. It is not elementalism as one might expect, but arcane magic with a particular affinity for water.   Eventually she asks to move to the island instead of the temple, which I happily allow. We can begin moving her in tomorrow, and I’ll keep steadily working at this thread of hope that she might want to see more of the world before she dies. As a parting gift for the day, I give her one of the eggs that Bran created in his Fatespinning omen work. Perhaps it will have something to say to her that she isn’t ready to hear from another living being.