42.3 Into Next Week

General Summary

Day 674

And so we exit the cavern at high noon with Cereus in tow, out into the sunshine to see Magdalena. He lands a few feet away and the two of them stare at one another...awkwardly...  

It's been a long time...

  He says...and then she slaps him and there is a surge of magic.   When I come to my senses, I'm face-down on the sandy shore of the cove at nighttime, with drifting wreckage strewn around. Everyone else is present, soaking wet and unconscious. Magdalena's arm hangs uselessly at her side, broken in multiple places as though something with great claws tried to tear it off of her. Cereus, for his part, is down on one knee with a seemingly matching burn across his chest and back, like something went through him. His crown is gone, as is his dawn-coloured wing.   There are craters around the cliff, scorch marks and clear damage surrounding all of us. All Magdalena has to say is that the two of them need to have a conversation and we ought to stay in the village until they're finished. She remarks that it will be fine, as they are both hard to kill.   The rage that collects in my throat is so hot and caustic that I can nearly taste it. I set Ausha to gathering up the rest of the family and bringing them to safety as I take in  our surroundings and my wounded Treeborn.  

If the two of you are going to love mortals, you need to grow up.

  It's all I can spit at them before turning my attention back to Liliales, Qishali, Qing Chen, Starfield, and even poor Skyen. Our boat is completely destroyed, with our possessions bobbing in the water or washed up on shore. Ausha fishes out some of our hardier potted plants in the hopes of nurturing them back to health inside the cavern. Once everyone is settled in the spirit village, I leave Ausha and Starfield watching over them as I return to the cave entrance to stand guard and keep watch. As I trek back through the barriers protecting the cavern, it's hard to tell if I'm going out to help, to heal, to yell at them, or just to make sure they don't even try to come back inside until they've resolved whatever they have between them. By the time I've made camp and set up my own tea set and hammock blocking the cave entrance, I've decided that it is simply to supervise.





It is dusk, and I can see Magdalena and Cereus sitting on the shore sharing tea and talking - the remnants of our boat between them. They are unhealed, and the conversation goes on well through the night and towards dawn. Throughout the night, it's clear that they know I am here (they point several times) but rarely look directly my way. It would be insulting that they hadn't tried to explain themselves yet, if I weren't so angry and unwilling to hear anything about their personal issues until they'd come up with a proper apology and plan of action.   I can't help but think of the day I met Zeesoo, and how instantly we had both agreed that it would be irresponsible of us to do anything but lay down our magic and talk peacefully. We might have razed the mountain on which we stood if we had fought.  

Day 675 684

As the next day breaks, I can see the conversation heating up and Magdalena is clearly shouting, though I can't hear her words from beyond their sound barrier. She is so filled with care and righteous anger at something and Cereus is maintaining the most calm, neutral attitude possible. I can't imagine that this is easy, and it only infuriates her more.   By noon, they have chosen to go for a walk together. Cereus' leg is broken in multiple places and he is using a driftwood crutch (seemingly fashioned by Magdalena), with the same ramshackle magic that went into her own arm brace. Both tools are crudely made with the barest threads of magic, and I can see their magic failing multiple times as they try to fix them. I wonder if they've managed to exhaust themselves, given the ridiculous state of the surrounding landscape - gouges in the cliffs, trees burned and razed to the ground, a new island settled into the cove.   As they hobble around the cove together, I craft a proper crutch and brace to leave just outside their camp. I might not be willing to break my way into their argument and heal them, but seeing them both with primitive excuses for healing tools is too absurd to bear.
Eventually Liliales comes out of the cavern to bring me food and let me know that they've moved into the village and settled down. He only stays for a while before I send him back inside. By the time the sun is setting, the two of them finally make their way over to me, using their new crutch and brace, I note.  

I'm sorry for not checking on everyone and letting all of this spill over to all of you...

  Magdalena's apology, at least, is genuine, and she tells me that they won't hurt one another anymore. She looks exhausted, humbled, and almost...embarrassed. Cereus has his own admission - they can't hurt one another anymore. Their magic doesn't work.    Whether this is a permanent state, a state that exists between the two of them, a temporary exhaustion, or something else entirely is clearly not important enough to tell me. Regardless, Magdalena has the grace to ask if I could heal her, and she chides Cereus in the same breath for not being willing to even ask.   Ever since Wayin and Ipthina taught me the magic that lets me mend people's wounds, it has come readily to my hands almost without thinking about it. As I look at the broken bones, scabbing wounds, and burn marks on the two ancient fae before me, my magic doesn't move. There is such an icy anger around me still - it's all I can do to tell them that they are going to opposite ends of the cove to wait while I fetch Starfield to help me heal them. She and I will take turns with each of them and then reconvene to compare thoughts and figure out what to do. I'm still so angry that I don't think I can manage any of this myself with the compassion required.   At least they both have the humility to accept my rather condescending demand. But before Cereus starts trudging off to the other end of the cove, Magdalena explains just enough of what happened to wake all the immediate fury I'd been settling.  

...it's been a week. And Heiassa will have been missed - she'll probably start receiving letters soon.

  This, at least, has a clear person at fault. I'll tend to Cereus first, but I have to force my magic out through my hands to make any progress.  

You don't have to heal me....but if you have something to keep the pain at bay...

  I give him a thread of the pain relief magic from Wayin and begin the slow process of exuding magical healing into him and hearing his side of the story.   He saved his tree in a way that 'broke some rules', and Magdalena is furious that he only broke the rules for his own tree and no one else's. He offers, again, that none of us were meant to be caught up in the argument - the magic that moved us forwards in time was meant to distance Magdalena and Cereus so that he could cool down and re-engage more calmly, but he caught all of us by accident. And now, the two of them are caught at the precipice of being able to complete whatever magical workings they attempt - "unable to finish" so to speak. He describes it as more of a curse than an injury, though it's not entirely clear where it came from. The River...their respective teachers...he thinks they might both be in for a scolding later.   His ridiculous time magic has made the entire sequence of events unclear - she slapped him, certainly. And after that, the boulder that struck our ship came from the future, and nothing is clear.  

I don't care who started it.

  He tells me about the 'rules' that he broke for his tree (his tree, I think, not ours - my tree is up North and Magdalena planted it). Much like Kaie has students who are responsible for various tasks, Eternum also has students assigned to various tasks. Cereus is responsible for rewinding or spinning time. Another student governs travel through time. Another manages fate and divination - viewing or guiding is allowed, but not unmaking.   His work of rewinding the time of his tree was forbidden because he unmade fate, and Magdalena thinks he ought to have done it for others. It is an old fight, though clearly one that has only come to light now. It is still the first time they have seen one another since The Pruning.   He says he doesn't know if he would do it again. At the time, he didn't think about the consequences of his actions when he did it...or if he did, it was obscured by the pain of what he was feeling. In hindsight, he says he would tell Magdalena at the time he did it...even if it meant she tried to drag him into things. Maybe they would have preserved things differently together.  

During the Pruning, she visited abandoned and dying Groves to collect as many songs as she could. She told me we could have gone together and taken a few trees and people to keep safe. But she was alone - she and her brother, Red. They did a lot while I hid. I broke the rules to grab something precious to me and hid, while she was out there alone, hunted all the time. She tried again and again and must have failed so many times. And after what happened to her first success - the Fae of Leaf and Vine - she tried again. She kept trying, while I slept away the centuries. She's a remarkable sister, one I feel distinctly unworthy of.   It became clear, without her saying, that it hurt her tremendously that she did so much of it alone.

  He tells me he expressed his regret and sorrow as genuinely as he could, but what comes next has to be actions. There are other lost groves out there, if we could find seeds. He says he'll talk to his teacher about it, but she wants him to just do it. He hopes that he can convince his teacher to let things happen and be meant to happen.   It is a good story, and one that makes me almost certain that Magdalena threw the first spell in this ridiculous, explosive fight. Not that it matters, in the grand scheme of things, but it's just enough to keep me willing to have any sort of relationship with the sad, one-winged Treeborn of Day and Night. I think that if he had been the one to start it, I could have written him off entirely. Even now, the thought of him leaving Magdalena to collect up the remains of all the lost groves by herself fills me with a detached disinterest that it's hard to set aside. Maybe thousands of years of thinking has changed him. If he would make the same choice now, we might as well leave him here in his sad little cottage. This thought makes me ask the other thing on my mind - what he wants to be to the Fae of Day and Night.   He says he used to be a doting grandparent with wisdom to offer. Grandpa - with a door always open, a large porch, and advice when it was needed. He says he probably shaped a lot of decisions made by people who did the real work. He tried to accept the worship and reverence kindly, since he couldn't make it go away. But it probably isn't the right thing for him to be anymore, so maybe he will be a more distant grandfather - there if needed, but hard to get a hold of. It's probably the best answer I could have hoped for. I have no desire to have some Treeborn with poor judgement sweep into Dreamfall and interfere.   When Starfield and I trade off, Magdalena is completely healed. Clearly, Starfield had fewer issues with her healing magic than I did.   Magdalena tells me about the fight first - that fighting with someone involved with time, it's better to just run rather than deal with the nonsense of being hit with your own spells and things that haven't happened yet.  

He's a coward. And that's the problem. I have a hard time respecting some of his decisions. The use and misuse of his magic is between him and his teacher, as he reminded me. He just pissed me off - turtling up all these years and telling no one. It can't have been easy for him, being isolated for this long, but it's such a cowardly thing to do...to just sleep the centuries away without seeing anyone hurt, never tasting failure because he never risks anything. He disappointed me. He was also upset that I only ever showed up at the end when there was nothing left to save but songs, but he gets it. I have lots of forbidden magic that I could have used to save Groves during the Pruning...but I didn't. He finds me hypocritical for wanting him to use his forbidden magic while refusing to use mine. But he used his for his own tree, and not for anyone else's. I refused to use mine for anyone. Being able to return his origin tree...that's a gift he could have given to others.   I don't think I'm right. I don't think he's right. We're both hurt, and we both watched a lot of the world burn. Those scars flare up sometimes. He kept saying that the past is in the past, and I think he's surprised that I still hurt. He's processed his grief in his own way and it's made him numb, but I keep prodding at my wounds.

  Magdalena also thinks that they've been put on 'time-out' by their teachers. It looked as though their magic collided in a very specific way but she thinks it was an intervention, which I find remarkably amusing. After the cold, interrogative conversation with Cereus, it's a relief to hear Magdalena speak so plainly about their conflict. It still doesn't impress me that they didn't have this conversation before destroying the landscape, but at least they've arrived somewhere pragmatic.   And finally, Starfield and I reconvene. The primary thing I have taken away from the entire situation is that if there is a god-creature of Magic and a god-creature of Time then there must also be a god-creature of Managing One's Emotions, and they have not been doing their job well enough.  

What do you know about The Beginning?

  Starfield is such a wealth of interesting information. The closest thing we have to a god-creature of emotion is...The Heart of Song. The closest thing we have to a god-creature of 'Managing' is...The Master. I make a private resolution to kill both of them and take their jobs so I can do it properly. I am so drained of sympathy for The Heart, the more I learn of The Pruning. I'm sure it is short-sighted and cruel of me to think that the grief of seeing her children fight is not a good enough excuse for abandoning them. I'm sure it's harder than I can possibly know, to be a source of harmony and 'heart' and to still watch everything fall apart. Unfortunately, I think it is exactly the thing I will fight all my life to avoid experiencing, and the act of giving up is unfathomable.   The solution Starfield and I come up with for our wayward Treeborn is petty but practical: They're going to build us a new boat. Without magic. In the lower ranks of the army, we called such things "team-building exercises".