5.4 Seeking, Not Waking

General Summary

Day -1

I think back to when I woke on the other side of the Barrier and met Dal - how frustrated and angry I was, and how difficult that must have been for him. Mistress is someone who loves me and who I evidently love(d?) and trust.   The first thing I ask is how much she is allowed to explain to me and she laughs at my use of “allowed”. Not many people would be able to forbid her from doing something. As I sit up I notice that my left arm is free from cuts and runes. Mistress’ Dread Lady garb, the lack of cuts...it dawns upon me that I am not simply transported across the Barrier and back to the elvish homeland but...back through time itself.   Before this occurs to me, Mistress asks what I remember, and I tell her about the monster, Bran, Alder, and Hella. She furrows her brow...she doesn’t even know what a human is. Cautiously, I ask Mistress to tell me what she remembers.   Two weeks ago, one of the Hands of the Empress contacted Mistress in a dream and pleaded for help. He is trapped in a mountain nearby, which I can see smouldering in the distance. He said he is trapped by “the Oldest Adversary”, and it is clear that this smoking mountain also threatens a city of hundreds of thousands of imperial citizens. We went into the mountain and were attacked and overwhelmed by a dozen small monsters of molten rock and metal. It has taken her four days to heal me to this point and it will take a few more before we can try again. In the state I am now...I have been with her for 200 years.   I believe that means we are...300 years in the past. I don’t know if this is better or worse than what I’d expected. I don’t even know what I expected!   I’m not entirely surprised that Mistress seems to take all of this calmly. She believes me from the intensity and sense of loss I have around me. I try to reassure her...I know that she’s important to me and that I am important to her. I just don’t remember the details.   After dressing and eating (some wonderful elvish food), Mistress suggests that she does a calling to help me figure out what is happening. Of course she has something that might make all of this fit together in my head...I should have known. She warns me that there is a risk of being lost in a dreaming as I search for answers and that I should anchor myself with something. Usually it would be a strong sense of who I am, but a physical object will do as well. She offers me a sword that feels familiar, but I don’t remember it. Instead, I ask for something from my family home and she offers a worn orangewood pendant. In my hands it feels instantly comforting. How wonderful to be anchored by the thought of home, and not the wars I have waged.   We sit together as she paints on both herself and me, and the world dissolves into grey and white mist. In this dream, my body is the one I had in the future - with completed runes carved into my arm. Any direction will do, so I pick one and start to walk, with Mistress following me. Shortly I find myself on a road, and then in woods that have thick ropey vines with purple blossoms that open to me. I know where I am...and I follow a smaller path through the woods to Kadia’s tree. In this dreaming, I can see it pulling magic from the surroundings and distributing it into the canopy above. I call for her and behind me, she appears in her Osyr form.   Mistress drops to her knees and gasps something about Kadia being a Hand. She is not, of course, and I am not even a Dread Lady right now but I speak to her plainly.   It becomes rapidly clear that this is the Kadia of 300 years ago, not the Kadia I met. Still, I tell her honestly of what has happened and who we are to one another. She seems quietly happy at the thought that her service is not in vain, and that the Empress knows of her service and is pleased with it. When I describe the molten creatures, she nods.   These are the Ingan, the Oldest Adversaries. They drove the Osyr from the sea and there can be no peace with them, for they are opposed by their very nature. They are eternal and undying, but they can be defeated either by being forced deep into the earth or carried far from it, like in a dragon’s claws or across the surface of the deep ocean.   That I found one lurking in a pool of magma meant that it was seeking something, not that I had woken it.   To defeat them in this present time, we might need magic of summoning and banishing to send it deep into the earth. An Osyr might know, but the only one we know of is trapped within the mountain itself. Mistress will need to dream to him once again to ask.   And when I tell Kadia of the one I fought in the human world, and that she was with me, she sees the pieces come together. She asks about Hella’s glyphs and then offers me a new one. She can hide it but she’ll recognize it when she sees it in the future and can activate it to send me back to this time when I fall to the Ingan.   The pieces feel like they are flying together. If I am here now, with this magic being placed in me, both Mistress and Kadia know that at some point in the far future, I will return to the past. Everything that happens in the next 300 years, entwined as I am with Mistress, happens with her knowledge of this moment. And in the moment when she sent me that letter and brooch, she may not have known precisely when it was, but she surely knew that there was a possibility I wouldn’t have my memories.   Having found a shred of what I needed, we let the dream fade and find ourselves back in reality (so to speak). I explain as much as I can about who Kadia is but I realize that this time is probably better spent just...talking. She reminisces about her surprise that a farm girl would become the most important person in her world, and asks if, in the future, something terrible has happened between us to separate us with such distance. No, given how she and I have both been raised to higher positions...it makes sense that the Empress has sent us to different places to serve her for now. More than ever, I’m confident that we’ll share a shadow again.   With the rest of the evening, I rest while Mistress dreams to the Hand. She emerges and says that he is weak and trapped in the dream state because he is too weak to wake. We will try to sneak past the Ingans to free the Hand.