57.4 Unscarred
General Summary
Day 1119
Dreamfall is full to bursting with people of all kinds once the dragons and I arrive. The next day, a few more gusts arrive — Gedrin, Charlotte, and their apprentices. Apparently there is great change afoot in the Church of the Candlemaker as Gedrin is continuing to uphold my message that dark and light can and must coexist.
But aside from my approval of where he’s taking the church, I don’t say anything about the state of human religion. I have reached the stage of ‘wise old wizard’ where it no longer behooves me to just give out answers. If any of the other young humans choose to share what they know of their false gods, Gedrin and Charlotte will have their own reckoning and perhaps will come find me afterwards for guidance.
A delegation from Deldrin arrives as well, flying aboard Black Tourmaline. Elnora’s grandmother, Elsiva, has come along and I have to imagine it is a heady experience for the scheming old bat to meet such a concentration of powerful individuals. Amytri remarks that he remembers being like that as well, centuries ago. The human kingdoms train people to think of power like this, and Sella’s bloodline is particularly prone to viewing the world as a chessboard. He invites her to visit Solace and see if she can find a different way of applying her talents.
The young ones are taking over; let them! And they’re making mistakes! Let them!
Elsiva seems aghast at this — isn’t it their job as elders to prevent the youngsters from making mistakes? And Amytri, true elder amongst humans, points out that times have changed and the traumas and tragedies of people who grew up in the old kingdoms may or may not apply anymore. The young ones live in a new world and have to make their own mistakes and tragedies.
It is good to see Amytri getting to dispense some elderly wisdom. He’s very good at it and it is just his misfortune that all his colleagues nowadays are centuries older than him. At least he still has Qing Chen to boss around…and when we’re all together as apprentices, poor Qing Chen will be the baby of the family. Teacher had always told him that her students were too spread out to ever encounter one another, and it’s a stroke of fate that he and I bumped into one another at all.
He’s going to follow the Deldrin delegation back to supervise and prod some of them into taking up new paths. He’ll try not to be a visiting king, at least. I remind him of the Library and of Oblivion’s academy there and we get a few good minutes of conversation before he forgets what we are talking about. He thinks he’ll spend a year in Deldrin to let the people of Solace get used to their king travelling and not being present, letting his granddaughter run things. He’ll take longer and longer trips…to Deldrin, to the Empire, even further. Maybe he’ll visit one of the academies and try teaching there; I think it will be good for them to learn from a human.
What’s more, he taps his eyepatch and says he’s been talking to Kaide and her own injuries. For as long as we’ve known one another, I hadn’t asked about his missing eye or how it happened. The socket is empty and I can see the wound where something must have gone through his entire skull. It’s a miracle he’s alive at all…stabbed through the eye with a fork at a state dinner by his own son.
He thought the injury was his penance for being a bad king and a bad father. But he has finally made his peace with it and knows that Drakken was…is…his own man.
Tucked away in my cottage, Onyx helps me draw the tine of gold fork out of Amytri’s skull. The soft metal is intact, not crumpled at all. Apparently it was not the first fork. He wanted to make it clear that he was so savage that he would do this to his own father, lest anyone betray him.
Once the eye has returned, he pockets the tine of fork and says he’s going to ask Ausha to make something out of it. Something to remember his son. He reflects on how he raised Drakken with responsibility, a sense of station, kept away from the people at large. Liliales has been raised normally…friends and mistakes and all. For Drakken, all he knew was the political game.
In the evening, all of Magdalena’s students gather together for drinks. Ausha is somewhat aghast that he wants to turn the tine into something to hold onto. He dithers about making metaphors and explanations about how one day he’ll give it away and it will be symbolic, how he doesn’t want to let go of something that has been part of him for so long, how there’s a message of transformation in there somewhere.
Scrabbling about trying to find support for your thesis, Amytri! Find the real reason!
He sighs with good humour — it’s a good lesson to learn at the hands of all his senior siblings. He doesn’t know why he wants to keep it. Ausha says she’ll hold onto it, but she won’t make anything with it until he knows what he wants, and why.
Poor Qing Chen, sitting amidst the whole group of us, notices that all of us have had some sort of injury or grievous wound that has stayed with us. He asks nervously if this is just part of being in the club. Magdalena’s apprentices all have this shared sense of twisted humour — we all break into big grins at this. I tell him there’s no need to rush into it…it’ll happen sooner or later without even trying.
Deep in our cups, Kaide points out that Magdalena will eventually tell him to ‘fix demons’ and that will surely leave wounds as well. As a group, we get very carried away planning for Qing Chen’s eventual book release (under his own name) and faking his own death to create controversy to make it more popular. Poor Chen boy.
Demons grew up with an expansive family with many zephyr aunts and uncles, then eventually moved out and outgrew their family. Humans has only a ‘single’ parent…and the Six were not very good at parenting. In the end, both were used in different ways and both are ready to move on.
The night falls on a Grove that has everyone in attendance, ready for Liliales’ wedding.
