25.2 Consequences of Gentleness

General Summary

Day 407

As the sun rises further I take stock of our surroundings and find mountains both sides. Clearly in my shadow-stepping haste I veered West when I should have gone East. It'll take a little bit to get my bearings and plot a course back towards the far side of the Northern Grove.   In meantime, Kaide wades into a nearby stream to catch some fish for lunch. She seems ill at ease in this elvish body...I imagine shifting to two arms isn't any easier than growing wings. She told me that the body is the impossibly amalgamation of all the bloodlines of my family and there is something extraordinarily eerie and comforting about that. Eventually she gives up on simply snatching fish from the water and freezes some, easily scooping them out. She remarks that it's cheating but it doesn't matter, not that I would have said anything.   As we set up an oven together (she creates bricks, I make fire and smoke) she tells me a little bit more about her history. She remembers things in my life only from after we met at the ziggurat so it is not quite as imbalanced as I'd thought.   I'm from far North of the Crystal Spires. A tiny town that probably doesn't exist anymore, near the Great Passage. A gleaming city on both sides of a mighty river not far from here. From the bottom of the riverbed to the tops of the cliffs, beautiful and bustling. South of there along the coast there's another bay and another river where I grew up.   The Longing - the thing that calls us all back to the sea. The more generations you go back the worse it is. For me it wasn't that bad but my grandparents suffered a lot, along with all the other elderly inhabitants of the town. It made me angry and I wanted to do something about it. Maybe if I'dd grown up around more people my own age it would have been easier. My parents wanted me to take over my grandparents' business, to be a jeweller. I used to spend hours at a workbench looking through crystals and engraving pearls. I was so good at it that I thought I could make it in a bigger city and earn more money. I wasn't as good at engraving as I was at matching magic with the jewellery so I started doing more magic and less artistry. Then I got the wild notion of wandering the world and seeing what was out there, leaving the sea. The Longing got worse but still manageable and then I met Magdalena, who thought I'd be a useful trinket maker.   I don't know if I was lucky to meet her or not. I had never in my life used magic for fighting. I told her I wanted to ease the Longing for my family and she told me there was no way I was going to do that as weak as I was. I spent a century following her - she dragged me all over the place. We were in the South for a while and she'd take me to some city or another, create chaos and then flutter off and leave me to clean up her mess. She called it tempering.   It is a very different side of Magdalena than what I've seen, but her story and mine have the same roots. For all that I once looked at sacrificial statues and ancient guardians with a sense of kinship, nothing prepared me for hearing a version of the Empress tell me about her humble roots in a place that might have passed for a Frontier town.   I offer up my own past - my family's orchard, leaving at such a young age, learning from Magdalena in a much more academic setting. Kaide seems amused that another version of herself specifically asked Magdalena to teach me. But Magdalena is not and never was a harsh or cruel teacher to me. She has been stern and intimidating but...nothing like what Kaide describes.   When I tell her about the Vanishing Swamp she is amazed that I simply walked away from our imprisoned teacher. She has no memories of the War at all, and so the significance of me making strides towards friendship with trolls is somewhat lost on her. Still, she appreciates the significance of what I've done with Magdalena. After she freed herself from the swamp she must have flown directly to Whitewater to save people who she had no other reason to care about aside from me. And then she came straight to Dreamfall.  

Now you have a quest and she wasn't nice about it. She's not trusting your family; she wants you alone to protect her own secrets. When I returned to my home my grandparents had already died. If I had been maybe 50 years earlier perhaps I wouldn't have missed them. She is being cruel to you.

  There is enough room in my heart to hold love for this friend-once-Empress, my teacher-turned-family, and the family that I lead as well. While I might begrudge Magdalena if she had fabricated any dangers to keep my family away from me, I have to assume that there will be dangers enough that it is indeed wise for me to be alone. Even if it is not some unspoken rule of the Undying that mortals must not know about this sort of magic, I can see the prudence in it even if she hadn't cautioned me of it. And above all, my house has work to do even while I am gone. Each person I left behind has a job, if not multiple. We cannot move forward together at all times - sometimes we have to diverge to keep going.   Seeing Kaide here and knowing how far she has travelled from her roots and how far the Empress has travelled still...things are very different for Magdalena than when Kaide last knew her. Two races of fae are waking again after centuries asleep. She has family again. And though I would never tell anyone and betray the secret, she gave me work that I fully intend to use to heal her. She wouldn't have given me that gift if she wasn't on the path to being ready for it; she knows the price of that exchange.   All of this aside, I have millennia ahead of me and we both know I will spend them with her. By now she will also know the fury I would have if I found that she was treating me with cruelty when kindness would have worked just as well. There is nothing else I need to do to reinforce that; she has already seen it.  

The way to make someone gentle is to show them the consequences if they're not.

  I'm...sensitive. Being away from both of my families is challenging.   This, too, Kaide understands. Even if she walks separately she is still tied to me and can feel what I feel. I almost laugh aloud at this, for I can think of no better way to grow than to experience all of the complex pain and joy that I have. It's enough to have her here and listen and understand. I'm grateful.  

I'm here to keep you safe. Well...I won't say it like that. I'm here to have your back while you conquer the world! I mean...while you adventure through it. Who would want to conquer the world?

  So with the rest of the day we re-orient ourselves and head North-East. Thankfully she can shadow-step, albeit clumsily, and she remarks that I shadow-step through the air without realizing and for now I will have to stay on the ground. When we slow down for a break she sits down and sketches out a cloak brooch with a few runes around it. Travelling alone so far away from the impact I've been having it will be good to stay a little more subtle.   Together we theorize about combining some principles to disguise our elvish nature as well as my wings. The wings I've thought about before but all of my theory runs into a wall with people potentially bumping into my invisible wings. Kaide tells me that in the ocean fish instinctively know to swim clear of a whale's turbulence and that we might mimic the same effect for my wings. If we combine that with some illusion and compulsion magic to let people's eyes simply glide over the area, it might work.   For a moment, we are just two students working on a project together. It is so refreshing to see her handwriting working out a creative trick and not, well, blood magic to enslave the dwarven people. It's nice.