48.2 Memories of Tomorrow

General Summary

Compassion: Day 1 | Hope: Day 13

Starfire is very good at traditional arcane magic, but is not as strong with illusion and colour unless it involves specifically bending light to her will. She’s very good with elementalism, particularly fire. And she is just as capable an earth, river, and lake elementalist as dragons like Onyx and Haze. Her skill with fire is just incomparably brilliant that the others fade into the background. Now that I am more attuned to magic, I can see the clear signs that her magic is consuming her just from her immense power and the level of control she is using, and it is less shocking to me that No Moon and Void wouldn't have noticed it yet. I wonder, from what I've heard of them in the future, at what point they will begin to properly practice magic...does it happen before or after Starfire lets herself be taken?   It is like she is expending her own energy, permanently, as she wields it. Like other dragons, she casts her magic using sheer force of will that directs its flow, unlike the humanoids I know who are attached to circles, arrays, and other particular spells. We spend a very long time experimenting together, and much of it is knowledge I think I will be able to apply in my own time.  

Compassion: Day 4 | Hope: Day 16

Three days into my new cycle, Liva sends for me in her garden again to ask if I will participate in the celebration of life for Dakirim. I agree to sing, as I promised. And she tells me that she trusts me to look past the petty, which I think is a curious remark. The idea that I would refuse to sing for the city, on my own terms, because of a suspicion I hold for her is stange.   She remarks that she wishes Epsila was still here, as she needs advice and normally would have gone to her mage colleague for it. People in the city are going mad and lashing out, perhaps because of some sort of magic or disease. And now Liva wonders if Epsila was really a traitor, or just the first victim of what seems to be a contagious madness that has affected at least 20 people so far. They wake up from their sleep in a way that twists their minds and makes them violent. Others have packed up and fled, seemingly in paranoia from one another.   Two of them have been taken into custody - ones who have committed murder. But it is not a crime to flee, and the others who have been disruptive have paid their fines and been held accountable. She is interested in my advice, and I tell her there is hardly any point in offering advice until a proper magical investigation has been made of whatever is affecting these mad people. Truthfully, I'm tired of Liva's ever-spinning web of thoughts and theories in our conversations. If her role is to represent the hearts of her people, I think she is doing a poor job.   So Starfire and I head to the prisons to investigate the two victims, the first of which is a buzzing spirit of wind, sand, and lightning named Ixis. They are an urgently fluttering lark muttering about how people are after them, hunting them - everyone is. People are after their cores, they say, to murder them and take their cores for their own. I have not seen anything like the spirit-hunting from my time here, and this is the first I've heard of a spirit being properly afraid of the spirit folk coming after them.  

Can’t trust the folk! Can't trust the snakes!

  I'm grateful for the dragon magic flowing in me - it lets me introduce penetrating calming magic to take the edge off of his buzzing energy. Once calmed, he tells us more clearly that he remembers things that happen in the future and suddenly I start to piece together what’s happening. He sees spirits being hunted in the desert, mountains, swamp. He says he died in the mountains and then woke here in the city again. So this time, he is trying to make choices that will keep him safe in a way he wasn't in his memories.   He remembers trusting people and coming together under one banner, starting when they kill the Emperor. The people of the city fought so hard and many spirits died, but the folk were only using them for their power. The folk beat the Emperor and then turned on the spirits and the hunting started. Ixis fled then, but there was nowhere to run by then. So this time, he tried to flee sooner but Sou Lin (his folk friend and colleague) wouldn’t let him leave and betray their city. He could see in her eyes that she wanted his core to stay, not him. So he killed her, and then they caught him.   I shake my head in frustration - time magic. It really ought to be more regulated. How can I judge a spirit for acting in self-defence…but it isn’t self-defence, with the linear flow of time as it is. But at least now Starfire and I can grasp what seems to be happening.   I tell him that I’ll do everything I can to help, and it will take time. My daugther-in-law is a spirit - a Jade Lightning Fox. Starfire and I persuade him to wait and not escape yet - I have the sinking feeling that we will not be able to be fast enough but simply setting him (and the other prisoner) free without any explanation is not something I think I will be able to recover from, politically. I feel the noose of politics closing around me even in this time - it’s inescapable.   I am convinced from this single conversation that spirits are somehow seeing the future as I remember it, and that the opportunity here is to tweak it ever so slightly at its source. But Starfire, of course, doesn’t have the context to accept it so easily. So we go to the next spirit, another young one in the form of a very large lizard with elements of earth and radiant heat emanating from her. She greets us as a blessed one and an honoured dragon, with a slight bow.   She tells us that she is cursed, and she is a sinner. She killed a man to save her grandson from Paetorian - a great slayer. The folk all worshipped him for his strength, but he doesn’t exist yet. The things she does now are to affect things in the future, so she killed Paetorian’s father, but now she herself is imprisoned and her grandson probably won’t be born either. She seems utterly resigned to her fate for killing one man to save thousands, even if no one will know. She does seem mad, wondering over whether her actions have really had the effect she wanted. Again, my understanding of time magic pushes fury through me - elvish Fatespinners train for decades so that this sort of thing doesn’t consume them. Anyone who can see fate, let alone touch it, carries such a burden. And these spirits clearly have none of that guidance or support, so they feel like they have gone mad.   Starfire and I take our leave and fly far, far from the city to speak. She says she looked at them and saw strange sand magic at play that reminded her of me and the unique magic around me. She does think they are cursed, and that their memories are genuine even if they are not of the exact future that is coming. It is a relief to have her say so. I tell her, in vague strokes, about the spirits and how they are hunted in my memory and she nods in understanding.   I point out that both Dakirim and Epsila were both spirits, and Dakirim seemed concerned that Norcrack’s presence would show the folk that spirits are to be feared and hunted. With both of them killed and/or missing, I wonder if they, too, were victims of this future-seeing curse.   As before, I think the best hope for addressing a future in which one group is permanently set against another is by creating understanding as deep down as we possibly can. Maybe it is time to follow No Moon’s (future?) example and sit on some of these leaders until they can talk it out.