Fifth Letter to Nysali

Your Grace,
 
Sorry I got a bit maudlin there. I’m over it, don’t worry. No hard feelings.
 
Bit of a shock to the system, sure, but a necessary reminder. I thought we were part of something big. Gears in some grand mechanism. But there is no pattern, no master plan.
 
Order always starts on a human scale, at an individual level. Some idiot gets an idea of how the world works. Not how it SHOULD work, but how it ACTUALLY works, because people who think in “shoulds” just get old and bitter at being constantly disappointed. No, this idiot thinks he’s got it figured out, that he’s glimpsed a deeper truth, and he acts in accordance with that revelation. So now he either gets himself killed running up against the complexities of reality, or he gets lucky. Let’s say he survives for a while. Now he’s fucking BLESSED, cuz there’s nothing more attractive than idealism that beat the odds. People want to be near him, to rub up against him and steal a bit of his divine charge. They want to follow him. So now he has force. And whaddayaknow? With an army at his back, the world actually DOES work the way he always thought it did. Funny, that.
 
And for a while there’s Order. Stability. Progress. Then the idiot dies and it all falls to shit.
 
Not a perfect system, obviously. Wasteful and messy as fuck, just for a start. But it’s the ONLY system. There are no shortcuts. No chosen heroes, no evil masterminds pulling the strings of history, no magical talismans of power that need destroying for the world to be saved. The true battle is between the Awake and the Asleep.
 
I thought for a long time that I was on the side of the Awake, because I was one of them. But I’m not. On their side, that is. It’s like, I remember this kid named Onk (it was short for something) who was deathly ill the night before a battle, all pale with livid cheeks, ranting and raving with fever, saying he could see the future and we were all gonna die, and he was pointing at everyone who was trying to sleep around the fire and saying through chattering teeth, “You’re gonna die. And you’re gonna die. And you.” I mean, it’s not that he was wrong. Most of those people DID die. But some of them probably died cuz he got inside their heads and freaked them out. So fuck Onk.
 
What’s the point? Why spread the misery around?
 
It’s the Asleep who change the world for the better. The delusional, the naive, the charmed somnambulists. Like Davynn. His idealism is dangerous, sure, and not just for himself but for anyone who gets caught up in it. But so what? What else is there? Let him sleep. Being awake suuuuucks.
 
Ha, we met these tieflings, one of them a bard who gave me this paltry gulp of ale and then thought it was worth a set of dimensional shackles. Girl, I really fucking WISH that was enough to knock me out. Didn’t even get a glow from it.
 
And the drugs… I think I’m gonna need a new pipe. Activated my magical senses in the library and then got high to bask in the glow of all the enchanted tomes, thinking it’d be like the good old days in the recent past, in the Treaty Woods. I’d just trip out and maybe scream at the stacks if the EPL tried to burst through them to harsh my mellow. But instead I just stared at the pipe. A flute, actually, repurposed by Corrin, still with the same mud in its holes that he forced in there with his stubby fingers. Tried to blow smoke rings. They came out looking like smushed, smeary faces.
 
And the books… the books work, somewhat. I can lose myself in them for a while. The Marans were an intriguing bunch. I don’t use the word enraptured lightly or often, but I was freakin’ enraptured by their family history. Everything I’ve been hoping to learn is here somewhere. For the first time, building the Monkinator and maybe even the Glamaratus seems achievable, given enough time to study and experiment.
 
But all I see, as I flip through these technical treatises, are the weapons I could build with this knowledge. The engines of destruction. I try to summon the enthusiasm I felt when I first hit upon the idea of changing the world peacefully, with the power of your inspirational example… and I can’t. I am painfully, irrevocably awake.
 
And who wants that. So we’ll do this Davynn’s way. Soon we’ll have a base of operations. Walls to protect us from outside threats. Every kingdom needs to start somewhere. And everyone wants a Davynn they can believe in.
 
It’s Bedtime. We’ll put the whole fucking world to sleep.
 
Sincerely,
 
Xylund
 
PS. Remind me to ask you, the next time I see you, if it’s possible to tattoo over a magical tattoo without wrecking the magic.