46.2 Flightless
General Summary
Days 1028 - 1048
Travel is mostly uneventful and gives me plenty of time to review and respond to some of the more direct letters remaining for me. My family collectively did a very good job reassuring everyone that this absence of mine was akin to a fae sleep cycle and that the danger had passed. I have many letters in cheerful tones, updating me on things happening as I slept.
And from Alder, a small box carefully shepherded by Onyx. Inside is a candle imbued with complex light magic that creates beautiful, layered shadows that envelope me in a warm shade. It’s impressive work and the message is clear: He’s doing well.
As we travel, my little dusk tree has been moving from planter to planter on the deck to meet all the other plants. Eventually it settles down in the shade with some other greenery that enjoys the additional shade it provides, though ever evening it stretches up beside the main mast to watch the sun set. It becomes a nightly habit for the two of us to watch the day end together.
Along our trip towards the stump, we collect on additional passenger: Ying Ling.
She comes to us alone in a boat that magically reeks of death, a sense that I’m now incredibly sensitive to given my connection to life magic. Her condition is dire - poisoned, diseased, wounded. As I begin examining her, Starfield uses her barrier magic to set up a bubble to keep any contaminants contained while I work.
I gather that she must have been tortured upon returning to her tribe - her feet have been repeatedly broken and her back is torn up as though someone was going after her wings in her crow form. Once I flood her with my pain relieving magic, she promptly passes out and I can observe the incredible toxins that have built up in her body. She was a master of toxic plant magic in her own right, and I can see that ten of the poisons lurking in her have been carefully chosen to work together or not counteract one another. The final one is something Magdalena recognizes as the venom of a particular snake - Wizard’s Death Adder. She thought they were hunted to extinction centuries ago.
The venom attacked Ying Ling’s magic so that she couldn’t use her own powers to moderate the other toxins. It takes two Heart Cleansing Spirit Drops to purge the damage, and then Ausha and I work together to make a pewter pendent I can enchant to drain the Wizard’s Death venom into using some of my unusual elementalism.
When she finally wakes, I let her tell me the story in between sips of tea.
She and Shao Yang went home to their father to face their punishment rather than being hunted down for fleeing. They made the case that they were too valuable to the clan to be killed, but that only led to them being tortured and imprisoned while they waited for execution.
Being extraordinarily competent by normal standards, they escaped and lived for two months even though they were severely crippled. Ying Ling focused her energy on trying to undo the poisons running rampant on her body while Shao Yang carried her as they fled, and eventually they were recaptured.
Shao Yang killed himself while being tortured and they took it out on her, using her to practice her own toxin theories on, as a guinea pig. It is a senseless, orchestrated cruelty that is hard to really understand. In the end, her father exiled her with only a knife that she could use either to kill herself, or to kill him if she survived and dared return for revenge.
When Ying Ling is mostly recovered, she comes to prostrate herself before me and tell me that her life is mine. After so long in Harmony and around family, I am not only dismissive of such a gesture but almost offended. For once, I have a straightforward, brusque answer.
The payment for something like this, in our family, is to become a good person with the support of those around you. It’s not living how your saviour wants you to live - it is figuring out how you ought to live, and making it happen.
