9.3 Disclosure

General Summary

Days 86 - 88

Camellia and Nishvalen work together very effectively, allowing me to establish myself amongst the elves of the Twilight Garden without tiring myself out. I still leave much of the detailed arrangements to the wise judgement of Vaneili and Nishvalen and Alder.   More of my energy goes towards the library archives. Hella and Kadia find that the passage to Lone Mountain Keep requires some physical components that we don’t have access to, but we are hopeful that we might find them at the Crystal Spires. All the more reason to make haste. I can feel time ticking towards our next Shadowgate appointment.   In one of my carefully managed trips below ground, Kadia also shows me a room that I’m not able to enter without her. When she guides me in, it is clear why this is a space for her and not me. The magic contained in it is entirely Osyr, with illusions cloaking the walls to make it look like a shoreline. A deep pool of saltwater is at the centre, like a tide pool. The magic here is restorative even for me, and I feel rejuvenated. The magic of the pool itself, Kadia tells me, is to provide visions. If you enter the pool as a question, it has the power to guide you to an answer. They are hard to control, and can be dangerous as well. Although it wouldn’t transport you to the time and place where an answer takes place, you can still sustain injuries from what happens there.   Kadia’s question, when she entered the pool, was whether there would ever be more than just a handful of Osyr. The vision it showed her, clearly in the future, was of a great coastal city where elves, Osyr, and humans lived alongside one another under the banner of the Empress. At the centre of the city was a statue of me.   My heart leaps at this but I have spent too long with Thalien to feel like this is a guarantee of my mission. It is probably one of many futures, but to have seen it so clearly is still something.  

Day 89

After exactly 4 days of recovery, we leave Deldin. Vaneili accompanies us to the foot of a bridge before saying her goodbyes. With the rudimentary dreaming stone I made for her, and with her status as a member of my household confirmed, it is clear that she will stay here. People now look to her not only as a seer and an advisor (albeit a young one), but as my voice here, and her advice is taken with more gravity than before. She and Bran agree not to let the distance interrupt what they are building. A sweet promise, for as long as it lasts. At the very least, if we all live through this they will find one another, I’m sure.   And so we leave. As always, we relax on the road, especially Alder. We ride quietly with Camellia and I silently work through strategies to find and help the Severed. Maybe with her, we would be able to fight one head-on. If Bran can fight instead of heal, it would have been so much easier.   We make camp in the evening, having crossed out of the high magic area. Camellia comes to sit with me and asks a very good question: Where are we going, and why?   With everyone gathered around, the explanation begins simply enough. The elves live on the other side of the Barrier and are engaged in a bloody and nearly hopeless war. We are journeying to another city, where Kadia’s people once lived, in the hopes of finding the first of many keys that will allow us to make allies, heal old wounds, and finish the war.   “Oh! You are fighting the Great Darkness that the trolls speak of!” Camellia says, pleased to understand. The mistake in our communication crystallizes in my mind. Of course a fae would know of the war from the perspective of the trolls.   She deserves the truth, and I will give it to her and not begrudge it if she chooses to leave us. I can only hope that our behaviour so far will give her reason to listen and trust.   And so I tell her, haltingly, for I have not rehearsed, about the circumstances of the War of Fire...the atrocities that were committed, and that my first goal now is to douse the flames in the trolls’ homeland. She listens, quietly, then asks another question.   “So it was elves who set the Sacred Groves on fire?”   Once there were many groves that the fae called home. Now, there is only one. Kadia speaks here, and defends the elves as a race of changed people, and our Empress as well.   Quietly again, Camellia asks about the war we fight on the other side of the Barrier - whether they are people we seek to subjugate. I think it speaks in our favour that she asks so simply and clearly expects a truthful answer.   Alder speaks, describing the Collective in all their horrible “unification”. How they defeat enemies, extinguish the things that make a people unique, and assimilate them into the Collective. The villages of their conquered people are identical, all the Collective’s designs. Their fate spinners all spin towards the same future - a world where the Collective covers the entire world and no differences exist between peoples. Hearing him describe it thus rubs at my brain a little. I am uniting people here, with no desire to erase their differences. These are two futures that seem to differ only on a single thread, but that makes all the difference.   Still, Alder’s tone is rising and he speaks as though Camellia doesn’t understand the horror of watching one’s home wiped out and over-run by a ruthless enemy. I pull him back, and remind him that she is not a stranger to this idea, and she has no reason to believe that we are the victims and not the aggressors.   With patience and openness that I must imagine comes from being a healer and not a soldier at the moment, Camellia asks if we will go to the trolls and use their forest as leverage. Will we douse the flames because it is the right thing to do, or will we hold the possibility hostage so that they join our fight?   Perhaps I have no right to feel this way, given the history between our races, but I feel offended. I have been dreading the moment that we meet a troll. I have played the scene out in my head, wondering what I could possibly say that wouldn’t sound like a pale, worthless apology. I hope we don’t meet a troll until after the forest fire has been put out. Only then would I be able to even consider approaching whoever their leaders are, to ask forgiveness and favour.   And she begins to ask, slowly, something about the Sacred Groves. I imagine she was going to ask whether we will try to repair or regrow them...I cut her off before she finishes; of course we will do anything in our power to repair the damages of our ancestors. Kadia speaks up as well, for she knows the most about the groves.   First she asks about the Trees of Refuge - lone trees in wartime that were planted to let the fae rest even when far from a grove. Camellia doesn’t know about them, so they must be gone. Something she says worries me...about trees in a grove being connected to one another and to the dreaming by their physical roots and boughs. A tree that stands alone would not be connected to a grove...   She tells us that to begin a new grove, one must take a cutting and plant it both in the waking and dreaming worlds. As one who fought against the fae and even planted the Forest of Nightmares, she commits herself (with Hella’s agreement) to taking up this mission. This commits all of us, of course, but I agree. No one is running off alone to work on their own mission at this point.   And we conclude the evening with Camellia thanking us for our honesty. She is shaken, of course. And she needs time to think, but she says she will probably still stay with us for her allotted time. It will be a song that has never been sung before.   Overnight, I dream of storms and wings, beating in the clouds. Before the storm, an archer stands ready. I wonder if it has arrived, and whether she is ready.  

Day 90

Alder and I wake first, as usual. He apologizes for speaking so harshly the night before and I reassure him that it was something that needed to be said, but that I couldn’t say. As always, he is doing his job well.   In the quiet morning shadows, he asks me to try stepping with him so that he can lean on my connection to the Empress. As we slip through the shadow, I feel what he described - disorientation and an inability to breathe. When we emerge 30m away from our origin, he tells me that it feels like there was drag pulling on him (me, I assume). We try again and I’m still disoriented but it feels better, and he agrees. Tomorrow we can try again. I wonder whether it would help to have me wait at his destination instead of trying to slip beside him.   Finally, he shows me a curious thing that he’s found. We shadow step a ways away from the camp and I find myself slipping into his wake and finding it easier and faster. I think it would be the same for his long steps. We should try this as well...if I can stay with him but behind, rather than beside.   He leads me to a small cliff overlooking the river, 1 km wide. At the other side is a human village with a nearly buried statue head beside it. It seems...elven. There is another bit of statuary beside the head that might be an ear. But most notably, the head wears a diadem that has an enormous green gem set upon it, radiating a faint magical energy. We are too far for me to make it out .   I’m sure Bran can build us a boat to cross the water...it is probably going to be faster and more pleasant to sail downstream rather than walk, since we are headed for the coast in any case.