6.1 Braided Cords

General Summary

Day 40

We have made camp and gone to sleep, but all too quickly I wake in the dreaming, in Ipth. After a moment, Bran walks up beside me, looking both fearful and exhausted.   “Is it really you this time?” he asks. He has been falling through dreams for a while, drowning in visions and never waking in the real world.   He has had a dozen dreams of returning to Ipth, but when he reaches the gates Alder is not there, and the guards spit in his face and throw him out. Children jeer and throw rocks, and the adults encourage them. He kept trying to enter the city because it felt like something important was inside, but no one would let him in. When he found a mirror, he didn’t recognize himself...it was Bran’s face, but it felt wrong.   He travelled to the Keep, but instead of Lone Mountain Keep he found a glittering city that felt like home, but it was full of people who didn’t see or hear him.   Together, we travel to where the city is. As I suspected, it is the city I saw in the dreaming with the Hand, but the gates have fallen in and the streets are in disrepair. It looks like the sea has started reclaiming it even on land, with barnacles and deceptively deep puddles of water. Faintly, we can hear flute music but Bran says he’s never found the source. Every time he looks, he finds something unusual, such as a box of iron chains, a large pearl, a hard black spearhead, and buckets of sand.   Regardless, I follow the sound once again. As we approach the centre of the city, it becomes clearer until we reach a courtyard surrounded by planters of delicate glasslike seaweed.   In the centre sits an elf, playing a flute.   It is Thalien.   He comes and kneels before me when I see him, and I enfold him in a hug as soon as he stands. I had not expected to ever be able to see him again even in dreams. I’m in tears.   He has been here since he died, not quite dead but not alive either. Waiting in the dreaming because something is calling him to remain here and protect it. This city is full of hidden things, but it is not safe even in the dreaming - there are wards that protect it in the waking world but here, Ingans have come seeking to destroy whatever he is protecting. It feels impossibly old, but also newborn young. It feels like hope placed in a bottle. To me, it sounds like the Osyr’s hope of returning to the sea, but I don’t say that.   He tells us that he has felt the Collective in the dreaming on this side of the Barrier as well but not in this city. And he tells us of a few lost human dreamers he’s seen, as well as hundreds of dreamers in the forest to the North, which is a grove of ancient trees. They keep their powers in the dreaming in a way that we don’t, and they attack him on sight. The fae, it seems, remember their ancient battle very clearly.   I am drinking in the information as well as his presence, but Bran nearly breaks down. He has felt so inadequate and lost and seeing his mentor here has brought it to the surface. Thalien had to leave him so early in his training, relatively speaking, and now he faces the hardest part of it with no teacher. He has learned to see all the threads of fate but he’s not yet strong enough to pull them, and that is so, so difficult. And now he has found me and wants to stand with me and support me but he doesn’t know how, and he feels like he can never be as good a Fatespinner for me as Thalien was.   He will never be what Thalien was, and that’s not what I want him to be. I need the person who was strong enough to walk away from his village with me. I need the person who guided Rosalia down the rapids and sheltered her while Hella and I followed. I need him, in all his strength and gentleness, because I need him, not just a person filling the role of Fatespinner. Thalien too, says this. When Thalien found me, he wanted nothing more than to just exist in my shadow, to be an arrow from a bow. I forced him to be an archer, not an arrow, and to cast his own shade, as Bran must do now.   And gently, Thalien fades, leaving us alone.   Bran and I walk towards where I had met with the Hand, and it is just as I remembered it. Across the sea is the human kingdom, Bran tells me. When he was young he had hoped to go there in the hopes of understanding where he fits in. Now, he knows where to stand, but he doesn’t know what that makes him to the rest of the world.   We sit in silence for a while, contemplating the complexity of what we are doing. And then, like a child, he asks me to hold him while he sleeps. As he slips from consciousness, he fades back into the waking world, leaving me alone.   I know that Thalien is gone, but it’s hard to leave the dreaming with thoughts of him in my mind. Taking a pebble from the beach, I head inland, towards a storm that I see moving South, which I know is where the Valley of Storms lies. The air behind it is fresh and clean, and it feels like impossibly old and undirected magic, like the magic in the mine once we banished the Ingan. In the midst of it, I can hear tremendous leathery wings beating.   I get just a little bit too close and the storm...sees me. I glimpse a great pair of wings and a long, serpentine body before it drives me from the dreaming.   I wake, feeling cold and soaked to the soul. Was it a dragon? A Zephyr? Some other dreaming creature that I can’t possibly know about?  

Day 41

It is pre-dawn and even Alder is still asleep. It takes me nearly 30 minutes to warm up by the fire, which I tend and stoke properly.   When Alder wakes, I mention that I’ve been asleep but not resting. We do a brief patrol of the area, slipping through shadows comfortably, before returning to find Hella preparing breakfast.   Seeing us step out of the shade, she asks if we can teach her as well. I had thought that perhaps it would be possible with an oath to the Empress, but Alder shakes his head. The Carthians have also sworn oaths but their gifts are with moonlight, not shadow. Oaths take different forms.