19.4 Meant for Music

Day 264-269

Over the course of our six days of work I do manage to reach Bran in the Dreaming, to my great relief.   There is shock on both sides when we find one another. He’s cut his hair short! It makes him look older and it becomes clear as we talk that it’s representative of much of what he’s been doing in Drogna on his own.   He and Spindle have been working together and he’s rented a house in the city. It’s cozy and tall, with a garden, fountain, and elvish duelling circle in the backyard. He’s also been gathering elves to prepare for our eventual journey to Dreamfall.   I make him go first in updating me - he says that he could feel the uncertainty in the future with our work in the Grove. A maelstrom of darkness and uncertainty with a shining thing at the centre that felt like me, but then it unravelled. He and Thalien made contact in the Dreaming and watched Alder trying to thread a single needle in a pile without disturbing any of the others, so they began spinning luck to help him. After that the darkest parts of the maelstrom fell away and the shining future became more solid. Thalien told him that this was the beginning of spinning fate at a distance.   I tell him of the circumstances that led to my new appearance and they all make sense with what he described in his vision of the future. And he says that the fae court can’t have whatever they want, even though we don’t know exactly what that is. The futures where they get what they want are dimmer than those where they fail.   And as he begins to understand what I have become and what comes next in our plan to free Kadia and bring the Vanguard towards Dreamfall, he sees more of my future.   The path I’m on has shifted again and he says I might only be a Hand of the Empress long enough to learn from it. There’s a name that clings to what I’m becoming - Heartsblood of the Empire.   And he wonders what I’ll become when I set aside my sword and staff. The very idea that that might truly be an option is new to me. Even in the hopes of my future where I can lecture and teach and research, I’m still military. I’m still ready to mobilize when I have to.   But now, he says, the eventuality of needing to choose an ultimate sacrifice, of having lived my entire life with the threads that made me a perfect weapon of sacrifice and shaping people who would also be able to choose...that’s no longer there. Now he sees my entire being rejecting the requirement of giving one thing to achieve another. Now it is all attuned towards the brightness of a better future.   Like Andstella he takes my hands and examines them. He says they are meant for music now, like the flute he has been making for one of the Kiriti. Music...paintbrushes...and always a quill. I wonder if I might be better at preparing paints for Mistress’ spirit-calling now. It was always such a careful process of remembering pigment measurements and binding agents, knowing exactly the proportion because I wrote it down at some point and have it carefully recorded in the filing system of my mind. I wonder if I could just feel the texture the way she always could.   And when I wake from the Dreaming it is not only with Bran’s words and guidance, but with still more from the ancient fae that I used to be. I remember raising a child, the anxiety of parenthood and always the worry for their happiness. I remember being out of sync for the first time. And I remember being so, so proud of my child for something special that escapes me now. I remember needing to teach them something particular, something I wanted to show them myself and not have them learn from songs or trees. I don’t remember what that lesson was.