11.5 Lost and Found

Day 109

I wake mid-afternoon, unguarded. Usually this means either everything is at peace or everyone else has died. Knowing how the probabilities have stood lately, I hasten to find someone else. Hella is in the outer room, reading a human book. Together, we join the others in the courtyard where Zadiyah is sparring against Bran, Alder, and Knotrael. For the first time in many moons, I see a memory before me:

One of the last times I saw Zadiyah. Me sitting and watching as she works with Thalien and Dal (two vs one) with her clearly out of her league against them. She’s still fighting against them well with Thalien’s magic in full effect. When it’s over and she bows to them, Thalien puts a hand on her shoulder and says “You understand, and this is part of it. But it’s not all of you getting there. Whether you get there or not, whether you accomplish this or not, your fate is with this family and it will unfold in time. You can’t force it. Be patient.”

    She is easily holding her own against the three men, and even teaching as she fights. When they finish, she remarks that Thalien had told her that to fight a Fatespinner you needed to lie with your whole being. He taught her to fight Fatespinners because he knew she would have to.   She kneels when she sees me, and stiffens at the informality when I drop to my knees and embrace her. The others leave us some privacy so that she can tell me her story:  

I’ve been in this land since shortly after the Betrayal. I took my company South as a delay guard and rear action as you, Doraal, and Mistress fled. When the Collective brought their full force against us, I nearly died. That I didn’t die is something of a miracle. The next several days I was pulled in a cart towards a group of refugees heading towards the Barrier. I think I passed through only because I was so weak that the Barrier didn’t reject me. I’ve heard that no other officers have made it through, and it has left our people disorganized and scattered. I came through just me, a cart, and a horse.

I healed slowly without mystics. I found humanity and the reception was not kind. Then the Order found me. They’ve existed for a number of years. One of their priests tried to bestow the Severing Curse upon me. There were only a dozen of them, so I killed most and escaped. If I had known...I would have made sure they all died that day. They hunted me for weeks. Evidently one of the ones I killed was someone important to them and they said they’d have their revenge. It took thirty of them to capture me and I am ashamed to have lost to so few. What followed...they tried their magics on me again and again and when they found my loyalty unbreakable, they sought to break my body. Compared to the Collective, their torture methods are crude. I’m amazed that more of their victims of interrogation don’t die. They’re not beyond the use of mystics in their questioning - they’ll injure and heal again and again. I lose track of time...it took them a year until I decided that while I could outlast them, I would never be able to get free. Finally, I let them have me. I felt that if I could give myself wholly to the deception, I would be able to find ways to destroy them from the inside.

I made a decision, and it’s one I don’t regret. I taught them how to fight properly, in the manner of the Collective. The zealotry they practice leaves them as blind as the Collective in many ways, and that sort of unswerving dedication to singular thought cannot stand against elven methods. I thought them to be better than they were, but not better than us. They were enthusiastic about what I had to teach them. When I explained the war with the Collective, I may have emphasized stories of our defeat and made us sound more desperate than we were. When I left, they were already a thousand strong and I’m sure their numbers continue to grow. They already had methods of preying upon the weak, disenfranchised, and vulnerable to join their zealotry. Turning an army of near-conscripts into an actual fighting force took doing, but I did it.

Then I learned of the Severed. The magic used on me was more potent, distinct, and different from what was done to the Severed. Once their bond is cut and the curse is laid, there is no connection between them and the one who cursed them. What was done to me required a little of the soul of everyone who cursed me. It was more intense than what was done to any other. I managed to convince them that they should let me join the Severed. Here, I engaged in deception of which I am not proud. I sought the people whose gifts were under-realized: I kidnapped two people with a strong talent for fire, and forced them to demonstrate their capabilities. I convinced the Order that the severing awakened additional powers - that they should seek to use elves instead of severing and discarding them. I felt it was better to be alive with purpose than to be dead.

It created a mythos of both careful and corrupt structure. I kept hoping that if I could show them value in our people, it would save us from being slaughtered. To turn my sword against our own...few crimes compare. I told myself, and had to truly believe, that I worked for a greater good, that what I did would let more survive. That eventually I would find a way to undo it. But the noose kept tightening and it became harder and harder to move.

I set my sights on Deldrin and the community here. I thought it was an unassailable target. By convincing Killeon and the Order to fixate on Deldrin as a source of untapped potential power, I kept them away from other peoples. I spun long plots and played with time. Then...some days ago, I heard your name on people’s lips, and that you’d been amongst them. I knew if there was one person who could win us free of this, it was you. So I altered my plans. I let them believe that we were close to victory and success, that we needed to make a large play, one grand throw of loaded dice. I sent Kristoss out, and others, in the hopes that you’d hear of the damage they did and recognize the way they fought; that you’d seek out the source of those things and it would draw you to me.

For this, I am guilty of another crime. They were humans that I involved, but when I sic them on people to convert them by the sword, people die. People who are not soldiers and had no part in this fight, but I involved them anyway. I can’t be proud of that. Again, I told myself that creating a world where you can free me from them will let us put an end to their evil forever. And that more lives would be saved than what I spent. The lessons Thalien taught me about how to deceive a Fatespinner...I used them to deceive the watchers within me. I had to make my own mind a warren of twisting, turning, winding thought. Schemes within schemes and so many feints that watchers within my own mind wouldn’t know the true intentions of my moves. In that, sometimes I got lost. Truthfully, I don’t know that what I did is for the greater good. I don’t know that my methods are justified. I spent so long lying to myself to lie to them...it’s difficult to know what truth really is. That is why I must surrender myself to your judgement, because I do not trust my own. I have taken elven lives, and the lives of human innocents who, to my mind, are every bit as valuable as our own. That I treated them as less...that I would slay a hundred humans to save a single elf...innocents are innocents. What I’ve done is a crime.

  It’s hard to tell if my instinct of forgiveness and dismissal is righteous or not. She is family now (or she will be), and her gambles and auctions have clearly paid off. The rules of war have changed on this side of the Barrier. I don’t think she needs forgiveness for the things she’s had to do. I struggle to communicate this effectively without dismissing her feelings.   Then, she tells me that she hasn’t felt the Empress’ touch even though her oaths remain unbroken, and it’s clear to me. I send for Nishvalen to retrieve the amulet, and together we descend into the archives to the Empress’ chambers   The dreamspace coalesces into a garden at first, the way it usually does for me. Then, it shifts into a formal throne room and Zadiyah kneels. I feel the shadow of the Empress drift over her for a moment before settling around me.   “What has been done to one of my children? I have felt the others and this one is different,”   I tell her of the years of deceit that Zadiyah has constructed for herself in the name of keeping her oaths, and the Empress kneels and embraces her. Zadiyah weeps as her bond is rewoven,   “In you, I sense something rare. You have been ripped away but you are no oathbreaker. They took you from me, but they couldn’t take me from you. Your lady has learned much about losing and finding herself. Listen to her, for she knows the path you walk better than you might expect,”   And she turns to me, “She is not yet part of your family. It is time,”   And then to both of us, as she sits upon her throne,   “This magic, the people who did this to her. If we were on the other side of the Barrier I would demand them brought before me. I will have the same here. Bring them to me here, and I will sit in judgement of them,”   We bow, and the throne room fades, leaving us alone. I embrace her again.   “When I bring that man before the Empress’ justice, I will consider my debt to the innocents paid,” she swears, before we ascend into the light once again. We get her proper elven clothes (robes, not a uniform), and see Bran’s delighted face when we tell him that she’ll need a proper sword as well.   And then I call my family together to discuss the way forwards - the campaign we will bring against the Order.   In the war room, Zadiyah begins addressing us with the crisp tones of a general updating her commander. It takes time for her tone to soften.   Killeon’s stronghold is two weeks’ ride, located in a canyon with a single way in and out, and an escape tunnel. It is situated over another place of deep, ancient power, though not elvish like Deldrin. It is a wellspring of magic that encourages potential. Both people and things will grow into the best version that they can be, and transmutative wizards will find it easier to transform things.   Kadia recognizes it as the Fortress of Wellspring , a place the Empress dearly wanted to capture in the War of Fire. It stood against 10’s of thousands of warriors in the past, designed for the fae and their wings. A single enormous tree of refuge stands overtop of the entire fortress. Generations of fae were born, lived, and died in that single fortress, feeding it only songs of war. Camellia in particular looks aghast at the prospect of generations living their entire life in a single warful place.   Killeon himself was cast out of the Church of the Candlemaker across the sea, and he came here to rebuild. He sees the fortress as an abbey - a place for his warrior mystics. Within the fortress, he found a piece of ancient magic that gives him his powers, and has driven him mad in the process. He hadn’t spoken the rhetoric of cleansing the world with fire until he found this place of power.   He began sending Zadiyah out to fetch elves who were ‘still pure’ to be sacrificed to this power to make armaments for himself. The armour he wears and the staff he wields simply should not exist, she tells us. They give him a power nearly like the Empress’, the power to bind people to him in light and spend their lives the way the Empress can spend ours. But he is young, and mortal, and doesn’t know the responsibility or the heavy weight that comes with such a power. He has convinced himself that this power came from his god, but it has not.   It seems like every small puzzle that comes together forms a piece of a puzzle larger still. An ancient fae magic made stronger by elvish lives being sacrificed, a relic of a war long past, between elves and fae. The fiery magic, perhaps autumnal like the magic in the Crystal Spires. Whatever Fatespinner on this side of the Barrier that has been weaving against us this whole time, and even before, for Thalien to have felt them. Remnants of a war we waged against a race so inherently tied to the Dreaming that it is instinctive and not learned...The real, only question that matters in the long-term plan is whether an opponent will meet us with a willingness to speak and negotiate. Everything begins and ends with a question we can’t even hope to ask yet.   And so we must turn back to the short-term, to an enemy who has made their answer clear.   Zadiyah tells us that the Order demands tribute from the surrounding countryside, so there is a constant flow of goods into the fortress. This, potentially, is a weakness. The only other discernible weakness is the escape tunnel, which Zadiyah had advised them to destroy. They could likely be beaten with a siege, if we could outlast them for 2-3 months.   The first wave we would face from them is just the common soldiers. The second would have some of his higher skilled warriors. Then a champion, probably someone he himself has gifted with powers. And perhaps only then would he emerge. It seems slow and painful, and a war of attrition is not one I’m interested in, not with the backdrop of...everything else that’s happening.   The flow of strategy and ideas is so familiar and comfortable. I want humans involved, so Hella thinks of Rosalia. I want to remain on good terms with the real Church of the Candlemaker, and Bran tells me that the human churches don’t often get involved in any other fights unless the Weaver is being targeted.   A plan comes together, of a heavily armoured assault, protected with both physical and magical shields against the flaming bolts. We only need to last until we reach the doors, and then the Osyr magic of the pearl will bring down the entranceway.   Inside we will face religious zealots fighting with fire, heedless of their own lives. Fire will create smoke, and smoke will give us shadows. Inside we will need to be light and nimble, evasive and deadly.   Breaching his defences will shake Killeon’s faith and he will either come out and face us or try to escape through the tunnel. Kadia and Hella will wait for him there, if the tunnel has not already been collapsed.   First, of course, we will assemble the entire group. The entire army, I realize. A small army, but an army nonetheless. With soldiers, a general, an assassin, war casters...even an engineer.   “Many threads are coming together. It forms a cable strong enough to withstand the flame of Killeon’s thread. We’ll still lose people, and each loss will be so precious, but it’s possible,”   “And when a Fatespinner says it’s possible, it’s my job to make it probable,”   The evening closes with a quiet ceremony in the garden, to add Zadiyah to my ever-strengthening family.