Chapter 149: Chapter 150 – Epilogues

Hearthflame

My name is Amber Ashborn, born to Mirim and Anthony of the Eastern Reaches township of Shale. I have lived well in my years upon Cador, in friendship and knowledge, in the growth of skill and the opportunity to use all of those to save lives; but for all the leagues and miles I have run across this continent, I breathe now my first breaths of true air, bask in my first rays of true sun.

I have never been to these regions before. My life’s path upon the world, when it took me out beyond the Temple Lands, was primarily in the lowlands and the river valleys. Here in the great ranges, where dwell the Heharai, they have less need for us; they strive and they thrive in a way that is forgotten to the Twin Realms, the vast Principate of Ionder and the order-obsessed Hytherian Republic. Odd though it may be, the magics of fallen, unlamented Seidr-Who-Was saw no need to give reason or excuse for my appearance in the Temple, and as abruptly as those magics propagated my existence retroactively upon these past decades of our history, I was made to have simply stepped as though through a threshold and into that chamber, so short a time and yet a lifetime ago.

I reach down and touch the grass, marveling at how familiar its texture is, and yet how strange. I do not know if my memories always had that distance, that blurring certainty that they are, that I am, a thread inserted so differently into the weave of the world. I stretch high, and to each side; I place my hands upon the ground and raise my feet to the sky, and the breath in my lungs is full of life, the feeling of it a song of worship to Kazir.

I am not embarrassed for my enthusiasm, nor am I hesitant to show it; I know it to be in my every motion and in the form of my smile, in the sway in my hips and in the way my feet dance upon the soil, and I know this to be well.

I kiss Zidanya, breaking her out of whatever reverie she thought necessary to indulge in; I kiss her again, and she kisses me back, if only briefly, and I smirk at her and leave her to her distraction. I smile fondly at Sara, who seems utterly unmoved by the moment, and nod respectfully to Lady Sheid, whose confident stride hitches at that threshold to the outside.

There is a great deal to do, when the time comes. I owe, in deference to the history that I have been assigned, a report to my superiors at the Temple, and a token to Nahaseh at the Great Altar; for all that she was not with me, I strove to my utmost, and if my propriation comes with expectations, such is the nature of worship. I have a yearning to see the sea and the Shieldstorm, to ride with the Islander sea-speakers and hear them command the waters to shield us; to learn how to track game across the Endless Plains, and to see the Goddess Peaks where the Hytherians set their capitol. Shale, too, or perhaps first, that I might not be too late to show some respect to Dame Rafaella and, inglorious as the feeling might be, to grind my family’s faces into the glory of who I have become and who shall be keeping me company.

Three months, then. Three months that my lord might rest and find himself again, and I will drag him away from his studies and our bed that he might share in my joys and gawk at the majesty of my world, now become his.

I wrap my arms around Adam as I watch the sun rise above the peaks for the first time, and I know that all is and shall be well.

 

Apotheosis

The barrier between the Temple of Wanderer’s Solace and Cador proper isn’t gone, even if I can’t see it anymore. Part of a single Demesne that’s already way bigger than just the Temple itself as it might be, it’s still a step to the side from the surface; it wouldn’t otherwise fit in the geography of the world, and it wouldn’t retain the proximity to the Void that lets its most vital operations… operate.

I really shouldn’t break my Temple as soon as I claimed it, after all. I guess.

There’s a youth to the air and a rushing and roaring in what passes for my heart. Hungry, desperately hungry, I worm my way into every inch of my Temple, and then start devouring the world. I’ve been so many thousands of years in that narrow and dismal place, and I was first among the godlings to know the incomparable draw and hunger of real power; I’ve craved it ever since, craved it more than any fire in my loins or spark in my mind.

Everything I once held is long since claimed, obviously. It’s a little surprising that it’s still there—changed, but still there—but not all that surprising; anything growing strong enough to really affect my lake or the marsh and forests around it would get eaten by the Temple just the same as I did.

I stretch my body, breathing real air, air I didn’t have a hand in designing and balancing, for the first time in so very long, and I stretch my mind, and in the span of my first breath I’ve eaten the spirit of the lake that is what’s become of that Yama-fed pond that was my home. I’ve eaten the spirit of the crossroads, and the spirit of the woods, and the spirit of the marsh. I’ve eaten the spirit of what lived in the lake, from the algae to the crabs to the fish—not the same spirit as the lake itself—and I’ve eaten the sky-spirit that propitiated Shamaya, and I have no idea how that worked, nor do I care. And then, having consumed the pretenders and expanded my Demesne to the bounds of what used to be mine, I stop.

The hunger in me roars. It’s vast and deep-seated; the hunger is in our very nature as godlings, and even more in Gods. It wants me to push further, to grow stronger, to expand what is mine until it impinges on what’s everyone else’s and then rip them apart and consume them. The hunger wants me to be the Goddess Returned, just like it drove Her in the first place, and I’m so very young as a God.

I’m not young in the world, though, and I’ve known ten thousand hungers and mastered every one of them.

I guess now it’s ten thousand and one.

There’s a lot of work to be done. It doesn’t take much doing to kick off; the mechanisms of the Temple as it was are still all there, practically intelligent in its own right in its malevolent-little-shit way, and the Tournament is a decent enough base of operations to start expanding on. Wanderer’s Solace is mine, but it’ll be home to a few more people than usual, and not in some sort of temporary measure.

A thousand. Small in the grand scheme of things, but I need process and buy-in. Right now, it’s habit and conscious effort that stops me from reaching beyond my grasp and getting utterly destroyed by, just as an example, the God standing about ten feet away from me, the God whose control over herself and her realm is so perfect that there isn’t so much as a quiver where the little bubble of utter, absolute control sits encapsulated by me. It’s not that keeping that control going is a real, imminent problem; it’s just that what I grew from was a spirit of nature, and I’ll sleep when winter comes. So a thousand people, all of the people I’ve fallen in love with and ten times more; and about a hundred of them will strike out into the world to lay groundwork for the rest; and the other nine hundred will be busy, too, even leaving aside the delegation of my mantle.

They’ll form some sort of adventurer’s guild, or some sort of business, or nothing of the sort; I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I have people I can rely on to be caretakers when I slumber, to manage the place and keep the Temple alive and the mood vibrant, to be a place where instead of mitigating harm I can build something glorious, something that’ll expand to sustain and house every soon-to-be-former Imprint who wants to stay here, and to be a living memory and touchstone for those who leave.

Wanderer’s Solace. When you’re lost in the darkness, when you’re running from your death, when the dungeon’s beasts are closing in, that’s when the turn in the corridor might lead you here. When the winter storm howls and the curtains of snow bring visibility down to inches, that’s when the faint glimmer of light might be my door.

The vastness of this future is terrifying, obviously, even now that Seidr is gone, who would have quite literally devoured me; terrifying even now that the renewal of my apotheosis has burned a new youth into me, with all that implies. There’ll be blood, from those who come by and from those who can’t make the transition to the new age on their own, and from the return of a dozen different ilks of folk to Iavshet who haven’t been seen in millenia. But that’s fine.

There’s always blood, when something new is born.

 

Brilliant

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The first sed to walk the surface of Iavshet again runs, spinning and dancing in the sunshine and the crisp, cool air. She has no inhibitions; she loses herself in every moment, in every movement, drawing on her perfected magics to wrap herself in winds and leap into the air, to breathe in every scent at once and to see everything that might be seen. She wears a riot of bright colors in bands of fabric that leave her arms and legs bare, and they trail and flutter in the breeze as she cavorts.

Her friends will join her soon, but she has only ever known one true equal. She respects the ossified, stodgy brilliance of those who have studied for millenia, of course, but they are her elders and often precisely what she seeks to avoid becoming; and she respects her friends, for of course she does, but they are her peers.

She performs another sumersault in the air, bounding from mana-platform to mana-platform, and finds herself in front of the genius, hands turned just-so slightly outwards.

The genius breathes deep of the air, crisp and cool on the mountain plateau. She does not run, does not dance; her demeanor and expression are nothing but calm and still, carefully crafted to let the eyes slide off and go elsewhere. There’s a reflection of that within her, a quietness to her sense of satisfaction and a contentment with the subtlety of her presence.

She is valued, now, and not just for her skills; and this is well, for when she was only valued for her skills, the bitterness that resulted intruded into what mattered to her the most. This, on the other hand, though it represents other demands upon her time and efforts—time spent supporting others, efforts spent cultivating connections that were so clearly important to her but which passed others by—has been an unparalleled opportunity, a growth of skill and knowledge that she knows will cement her path from young prodigy to a true polymathic genius.

She considers, consciously, the sed before her. In a way, it’s the fact of that consideration that makes up her mind; the deliberate way that she communicates her desire without making it a request, the way she maintains distance and patiently waits.

The genius steps forwards, awkwardly, holding out her arms. This is a skill just like any other, she knows; and it appears she’s found someone whom she will not begrudge spending some time practicing it with.

The sed grins wide with a pure delight as they begin slowly walking around the meadow, pointing out things of interest. Here, a stand of trees drinks from one of the leyflows that the dungeon emits, rising taller than others; there, water has pooled in a hollow of the soil, an altogether miniscule and unimportant detail.

Precisely the manner of thing that the Temple would not have had, and its novelty thrills the sed just as the new understanding of the world thrills the genius.

They had not been entirely blind to the progress of magic in the world, they who lived in the Temple. But their distance from the Gods and from centers of population, and the nature of the Temple’s encounters, meant that they had few visitors who were truly erudite; and yet, there were sed in those halls. None had survived who had torn the Eternal Flame from the still-beating chest of a Firstborn and wrought of it a piece of apotheosis, granted as a gift to all who lived under the ancient terrors, it’s true. Still, many had seen those days. They had wielded titanic magics such as formed the Shieldstorm and raised the blood of Cador in battle, or walked through Sunfire and refused in every cell of their bodies to die or even change, and in the quiet weeks of the Tournament many had honed and refined their arts to the edge of something that now must integrate with Iavshet without destroying it.

All of this, the sed knows. All of this, the genius knows.

And so, one in gray and one in every prismatic color of light, they consider carefully what the future might bring, and what the shape of that future must be; and they arrive both to the same conclusions.

Sara Evetheri smiles faintly at the Sed Sage, once the Sed Spark; and Gavonne, whose mother bore once the epithet Mother of the Ravening Storm, beams wide at the Genius of Iavshet.

In friendship, they will keep the peace so long as there is peace to be kept.

 

Divinity

It’s been a story to you, and maybe a little bit more.

You were born in chaos, the product of uncountable inputs and the narrowest of circumstances. You grew, guided but not fettered; for how can life be truly fettered, absent a true understanding and the will to wield that understanding?

And now, wend as you did your path through the world, you’ve again traveled, step by step, now through the eyes of another. You’ve reacted, responded; integrated some things and rejected others. You’ve passed judgment, because that’s in the nature of anytime someone observes… anything, really; a place, a person, an event.

This story is not the fullness of you. Nor are these people whom you’ve grown to know the fullness of you, nor even the world of Cador itself. These are next to nothing to you, who was born beyond its context and comes to them as a stranger, just as even to the Demiurge whose children the Firstborn were this world is as a book upon a shelf. But let this not mean that this story has not touched you, will not in some small way shape you; let this not mean that the Demiurge will not have been touched by their work, and carry its lessons into the work of their future.

For there is certainly work to be done, and you are one who is called to partake in it. There is a world to be mended, and it can only be done by individuals, for even a great movement is nothing more than the amalgamation of those who comprise it. There is kindness to be sown, and justice to mete out where previously there has only been law, and a future to secure for all who are yet to come. There are ways you can be better, and ways in which you can help others be better; and in so doing, you will find more joy, more solace. And even if it is not so, even if that road is hard and grueling and you would find greater happiness elsewhere, I ask you to try anyway; to be kind even when you feel pain, to build even if others tear down, to stand in solidarity with the oppressed even when they lash out or when it is difficult to see a better future.

And if you find yourself having taken offense to anything here—if you have been less than perfectly satisfied, if you’ve found sorrow where you wanted joy, bathos where you wanted catharsis—then have no concern. If you’ve found anvilicious tracts where you sought nuance, or nuance where you sought simplicity; if you were challenged where you wanted ease, or saw fluidity where you expected structure, you should take no umbrage.

We are all of us stories, as is everything we encounter. Lies told to ourselves, a melange of physics masquerading as people. Everything you have seen or heard, felt or tasted, is a vision, a mirage in the desert; this, too, was a dream, and will be as one again before it fades to oblivion, both in memory and in how the future will unfold.

In the end, there is no purpose to your existence but that which you forge; make it a kind one.

 

FIN

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