Day 155
In the morning, we approach the Vanishing Marshes and examine them. I’m cautious this time, with the thought of the Hill in my mind. The Marshes seem to be 5 km long and wide and a nearby river branches into a stream that feeds it, forming an immense shallow swamp.
The magic hanging in the air is entirely foreign to me. I’ve never touched anything like it before, nor has anyone else in our party. It’s only 50 years old (old enough for multiple generations of humans to have felt it, Bran reminds me) and covers a wide swath of land. As I examine it, I conclude that it’s closest to my Mastery of Motion.
And with that, I set us to watching the water. Over a few hours, we determine that it’s shifting like clockwork every 15 minutes within the marsh. Then Bran points out the trees, which also seem to be changing. Not changing...vanishing. He tells me they haven’t been repeating in a pattern, and he’s been feeling out the area as well. There’s a thread here that changes whenever the trees do, it feels old, powerful, and...familiar. It feels sort of like me, he says.
I try a few things to watch the trees - tossing brightly coloured markers into the trees and watching them move about, 100m or so every change. Camellia flies up, assisted by my own magic, and tells us that there’s an unmoving centre to the Marsh with a campfire plume of smoke.
Bran says the thread he feels doesn’t mean me any harm and that seals it. Kadia and Alder stay behind on the edge of the Marsh to mark our place. Kadia sends her own crystal spire made of ice into the air and sustains it as we set off into the changing swamp.
It takes us five hours to navigate to the centre. Using the spire as a landmark helps, but the trees start changing more and more as we get closer, shifting every five minutes then every three.
When we finally emerge, it is to a small village in disrepair: Mud huts with thatched roofs and drying racks full of catfish. Communal tables sit unused, except for one - set with two place settings.
A familiar voice calls out to me -
Heiassa.
And out of hut comes...Magdalena. But not the slender, dark-haired elvish woman who taught me Blood Magic. This is Magdalena if she were a fae - tiny, winged, with longer pointed ears.
Her explanations are not forthcoming so I ask the necessary questions before settling down at the table (and then rising and setting out more place settings as she chides me).
Do you belong to a people?
- Not anymore - some siblings I fought with, some I appreciated. I was caught when I was checking on a few siblings nearby and wanted to know if their prison held them still.She and her siblings are all sort of cousins of the fae. She asks if Camellia is ready to hear this truth even if it sits uncomfortably.
- Long ago, the fae began with a song. The song created the Treeborn (original fae), who conceived other fae.
- Magdalena is a treeborn. They’re all different - from different trees, different places. They had different ideas about who they were. Ultimately “mother” (Heart of Song) decided for the fae to be as they are now - the Young Ones who live joyously and furiously, hearing pieces of other songs and writing new ones.
- The King of Summer, King of Winter, Queen of Fall, Queen of Spring. If they had reigned, some fae would live eternally with one song. When a fae would die, they would sing their entire song to a new fae to carry on where it left off.
- These undying treeborn were sealed away by other treeborn, including Magdalena and the Heart.
- The Kings and Queens are sealed in Ghost Hollow Hill! She asks me to promise that if I go there, I either wait until she’s dead or go with her.
So why did the trolls trap Magdalena here?
- Magdalena taught the Empress the rite she used to bind the elven people.
- The Empress has always felt that I have the potential to guide the Empire if she fell, and that is why she asked Magdalena to teach me as she taught the Empress herself.
- She tells me there’s a path to make me Undying if I choose. The Immortals are unslayable (destroying their physical presence disrupts them but doesn’t destroy them). The Undying can be slain.
This is a lot. I promise her I’ll either bring her with me or wait until she’s gone when I return to Ghost Hollow Hill. A small, annoyed part of me thinks that it was a fascinating, ancient mystery just yesterday and that my damned teacher has known what’s inside it for longer than I’ve been alive. Longer than the Empress has reigned, longer than the Empress has been alive, likely. That is just so incredibly infuriating on so many levels and I can’t even focus on that feeling because at the core of it is that she was the Empress’ teacher and even beyond that is that the Empress bequeaths me the elvish people.
Nanny indeed...I steadfastly ignore Magdalena’s mention of being Undying. I’m barely 600; that is a concern for a much older Heiassa.
Immortals: The Titan , and
The Storm
The Storm: Spans the whole of the world. The heart of the Storm is a manifestation of the Storm itself, and manifests as a great dragon. But that is just an avatar, and the will of the Storm is still dispersed across the world. There are those who think that if the Storm ever collects itself, the world will be destroyed. They believe the Storm must be continuously dispersed.
The Titan: The Ingan are children of the Titan the same way the treeborn and fae are children of the Heart (unknown if the Heart is Immortal), dragons are children of the Storm. The Titan was this world’s third moon and when it fell to earth, the whole world burned. Some think the Titan wants to return to the stars, or that it yearns to bring the world into flame again.
Magdalena collects songs through sacrifice and death. She has devoured both singers and collectors of song. She has destroyed trees that trolls find precious and taken their songs, so no one can hear them again.
Her existence is an anathema to the Young Ones, because she destroys Groves, eats Trees, and consumes songs. She removes things from their cycle.
The different treeborn represent the different ways that the fae could have been. The Heart chose for fae not to be like Magdalena. The Kings and Queens were dangerous to everyone and had to be stopped. Others decided that Magdalena was also dangerous and needed to be stopped.
She asks if the Barrier still stands.
I tell her we’re on our way to make peace with the fae and then the trolls.
I tell her we’ll need to put out the fires before approaching the trolls.
She tells me I could just bring down the Barrier myself. It would be ‘consuming’ but it would be possible.
I could consume 50,000 elves to destroy it, like the Empress did when she forged our bond. This hadn’t even fucking occurred to me.
She’s proud of me. Tells me I’m what the Empress could have been if she had chosen differently
She tells me that I’ve had the pieces to craft such a rite the whole time. There is a tiny, miniscule tug in my chest at the idea that I could just be done with this quest on this side of the Barrier. I could bring it down, let our people flee...to what? To unwelcoming humans and a land full of fae and trolls who remember us as terrors of night and fire? To a land bordered on all sides by enemies? It’s no wonder this hadn’t even occurred to me. It would be a surer death sentence than continuing to fight the Collective.
And it’s not what the Empress led me to. That she made this choice a thousand years ago is exactly why any faithful servant of her Empire wouldn’t make it again.
I tell her I don’t think it would be a good idea to release her before I negotiate with the trolls.
She’ll wait a year. I’ll come visit. I’ll negotiate for her release with the trolls.
I tell her about Alwen and Tira and Haze (“Haze the Wyrm?”).
She asks if I haven’t adopted Camellia yet. When I say no, she asks Bran and Camellia to give us a moment.
“This knowledge is free but comes with a great price”
A scroll. An incantation for an elf to adopt a fae.
Fae are accustomed to saying goodbye.
If I adopt her, I can break her cycle - the Grove won’t hear her song and she’ll stop as whatever she is when she swears her Oath. As long as she’s sworn, she will continue. She’ll accumulate a song like no other, but she’ll never sing it and it will never be heard. There was a time when some fae would make this choice, before the wars. When the sworn elf dies, the bond can be passed to another elf in the family to sustain the fae, or the fae will die.
We’ve spent hours speaking, and she asks if we’ll stay a while and keep her company. We can only stay a night, and she sends a Will o’ Wisp to guide Alder and Kadia into the centre of the Marsh. While we wait for them, Magdalena and I repair some areas of the village together, magic fitting together with the ease of having worked together for hundreds of years.
She tells me the village was built by lost humans. They wander into the swamp and can’t find their way out, and over time they settled down and guided more lost people to safety here. But humans are short-lived and now they’re gone and she is alone. This place was built as a perfect prison for her, but it’s possible for others to leave. Eventually she leaves me to my work and goes to spend some time with Camellia.
Over the night fire, Magdalena sings us a love story between our people - fae and elves. She sings of fae who were born from trees and elves who were the greatest gardeners in the land. She sings of a fae who fell in love with an elf and returned to them every season until their death. Then, a new fae who heard the song, fell in love all over again, and sought out the elf. Generations after generations of fae fell in love with this elf, and when the elf finally passed they were buried amongst a Grove.
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