#letter to: cerunwe | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

letterstosestrilles · 2 years

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Dear Tyko,

Well, you know that I’m out of range on my IICD now, and I’m conserving magic, knowing I could lose the ability at any minute and maybe foolishly feeling that not casting much will make it stretch out longer, so you won’t hear much from me by Sending unless something very big is going on, until I’m back somewhere with either more reception or more magic.

It’s been several days since I wrote, but days of walking and walking tend not to be the most interesting to write about, so I thought I would save it all up until something actually happened. So now I can tell you about the scenery and about the first steps of this quest all at once.

To start, before we even started out, while Cerunwe was still conferring with the Lady of the Ashenwalds, I had a talk with Maliah about the Wild Hunt. Because we’re hunting someone, and Maliah’s been invited to join the hunt, and if it’s the kind of hunt that tracks rather than the kind of hunt that chases, it would be foolish not to at least ask. From the legends she knew, it’s more the kind that chases, which won’t be a help to us in finding Onver but may be a help if things get desperate.

(Though Maliah did say that in the legends people who try to run with the hunt but haven’t actually been invited to join it can go a little odd and run feral off into the woods, so I wouldn’t call that my first option.)

She prayed to Cernunnos, to alert him, to ask if maybe the Wild Hunt could help in the circumstance that bothers me most, where we beat Onver but only by a hair, and there’s a whole night to wait while I recover the magic to get us out with him recovering too. She got a response, though Cernunnos doesn’t seem to respond to prayers in words. She smelled the rich Feywild loam even in the Mansion, and she heard a hunting horn call in the distance, so I’m hopeful that in extremity, anyway, we might see help from that quarter. Though she’s not sure Cernunnos goes to the dark side of the Feywild any more than the archfey might.

When Cerunwe came to finish our bargaining, zie had a very unexpected answer for us: zie is willing to guide us on our journey, though zie stipulated that zie has no desire to fight Onver, and we reassured zir that we have no intention of asking zir to do so. I suspect that the Lady of the Ashenwalds and her endless curiosity has more to do with zir agreement than any desire zie actually has to return to a place that seems to have been a miserable time for zir. I don’t like it, that zie might feel forced, but I’m so grateful for zir help that I decided not to push and make sure it was zir own choice.

We solidified the terms of that bargain: information for information, the swords from Reorx’s plane for zir guidance in more mundane areas, the Plane Shift scroll Gaizka made us for zir guidance in the dark side of the Feywild itself. Zie also reminded us, while we were bargaining, that if our first step was going to be to find a hag (as we’d decided so we can track Onver), we would need something to offer them, so we made note of that and, with the bargain struck and the formalities done, we left.

The realm of the Lady of the Ashenwalds isn’t in the dark, but neither is it very far from it—there’s a hint of twilight on the horizon, and we went toward it all day. The travel was easier than our last trip with Cerunwe. There were roads, settlements, places clearly well-traveled, easy walking.

And, through the days of travel that followed, they got a little less well-traveled piece by piece and bit by bit, until we were on well-trampled deer paths, and then less well-trampled ones, and further on and on. Cerunwe steered us through a fairly duskwards town somewhere in there, where they were glad to sell Niko and I warm coats against the possible chill of the constant darkness, but after that, what settlements we saw were few and small, only a family or two eking out their living as we passed out into the last areas where you can even pretend there’s light to see by.

It was a little cooler by then, but not cold. More like the end of the summer, when the days are still hot and the nights just cool enough that you can throw open the windows to help you sleep. The giant trees of the Feywild’s seemingly-endless forests dwindled bit by bit to saplings, and then to occasional stands of trees, and then we were standing in a field of tall grass, all the color leached from everything by starlight, so the grass seemed silver and Squirt was barely a shadow traveling through it.

Even behind us, when I looked, there was only a little dun on the horizon, like the lightening right before dawn, and over us and ahead of us, stars upon stars upon stars, none of them familiar but all of them comforting, as I thought of the Lady, her promise that where stars shine she can see. There may be places in the Feywild so dark even the stars can’t reach, but we haven’t found those yet, and maybe we won’t. I can only hope we won’t.

But stars or no stars, we’d passed a boundary without ever really seeing a clear delineation. And of course, the way light works here, there’d be no lines that way, but with the fear and hatred of this place, I’d half-expected a wall, sign-posts to warn you back. I’d say maybe that’s what the end of the forest was, but it’s not like every inch of the Feywild is forested. Maybe it’s just that they understand that the boundary is in a different place depending on who you are, and how much your fear weighs against your determination.

Far in the distance, so distant they barely made the horizon jagged, were some blurs that might have been mountains. Scattered in the silvery grasses were patches of shadow that might have been trees. And it was quiet, the only sound crickets, and those mostly behind us.

I made the Mansion there in the middle of the grass, and was relieved that I still could. We all got plenty of rest and plenty of food, and walked out in what felt like the morning into a dark midnight.

It didn’t get any less disorienting, that constant darkness, especially once we lost that little bit of light. Cerunwe steered us towards the mountains, close enough that we could see, remembering Chusya and our lectures on volcano safety, that one of them is a volcano, one that I very much hope isn’t active right now. It would be just our luck. At least we still have those proximity suits, though Cerunwe doesn’t.

The grass was louder that day, full of small creatures Cerunwe didn’t seem concerned about, so I did my best to mirror zir. I also asked how we were planning to find a hag in the first place, if zie knew one or if there was a place they go. Zie explained that beings out in the dark of the Feywild know where the local hags are, which makes sense. Everybody must need things, out here, where hag magic is one of the few kinds that works.

Once she knew we were looking for people, Maliah didn’t take long to spot some, in a small stand of trees we were passing. They were a pair of tree-dwelling fey, not inclined to chat or to get close, not unlike very large bats, in as much as any fey looks like any mortal creature. Cerunwe hailed them in Sylvan, and once it was established that they were willing to make a bargain, I cast Tongues, and it turned out to be one of the easier bargains we’ve made in the Feywild: I offered them a day’s rations each, and asked for the location of the nearest hag likely to be willing to make a bargain, and they took me up on it happily enough.

The hag, they said, was another thirty miles duskwards, up into the foothills of the mountains. We were to follow a string of sycamores up to a spring, and then look for a stand of ash where her hut would be. Those were clear directions, so we thanked them, gave them the requested rations, and went on our way.

We’d already been walking a while, but we decided we wanted to get to the start of the chain of sycamores before we went to sleep, so we walked up into the very smallest of the foothills until Cerunwe and Maliah both pointed out some trees that are apparently sycamores. We started looking out for a campsite, but before we got too far into the process, Maliah pointed out a dark coiled shape in the first of the trees—a huge snake, even larger than the ones we fought when we were getting Mera off Tlere.

She cast Speak With Animals, and apparently at first it was very intent on eating us, but she promised it a lot of meat, and eventually it allowed that jerky it didn’t have to work for was a better deal than a lot of fresh meat that would fight it every step of the way, so we lobbed enough rations at it that I was very glad we overpacked on them and retreated to what we decided was a safe enough distance.

I cast the Mansion again, more relieved about the ability to do it than the day before, and we rested again. None of us are talking much, on this trip. Outside the Mansion, there’s so little sound that it feels like conversation could carry miles upon miles. Inside, I think we’re all thinking hard about what we’re walking into, trying to find a way to step that will keep us all alive.

(Well, except Cerunwe. Zie just likes the quiet, I think.)

We stepped out today into another dark morning—every morning darker than the one before, it seems, and it’s beautiful here, but I don’t think it takes a jump ring to make you lose all sense of time, either. I was glad to have the sycamores to follow, and Cerunwe’s steady pace keeping the time as the day passed. At one point, Niko, bringing up the rear, tripped a little and warned us that the roots of the trees seemed to be moving, causing some kind of mischief. We kept an eye on them, and they did reach the occasional branch down, and the occasional root popped up, but I skirted to the side and Maliah muttered at them in Sylvan, and they didn’t try to do much besides prod us, so we didn’t stop to do anything else on our way to the spring, which we found late in the afternoon.

There were sets of almost-glowing eyes watching us, wondering who the interlopers at their watering hole were, and Maliah tried to reassure them, but they didn’t come out, and we didn’t stay long. She and Cerunwe could both see a stand of ashes nearby, and we didn’t want to put off the hag any longer than we had to, so forward we went.

It’s not that large a stand of trees, but the hag’s hut didn’t show up at first glance. The roof of it is thatched, but the walls are made of ash trees, one or two even with a branch still sticking out. Once you see it, though, you know someone powerful lives there. Maliah requested that I cast Tongues, and I did, but it felt odd, and only caught after a moment where I was sure it wouldn’t work at all.

Maliah asked what I meant when I said it felt odd, and I don’t think I did a good job of explaining. Mostly, it felt like the magic I used to cast it wasn’t mine, not really. I know how my magic feels at this point, the way I coax it out of the notes I play, which are a bridge to the Chords that I sometimes think I can hear a little clearer, now that I’ve heard them so clearly and constantly in Reorx’s realm. This took energy from me, but the magic felt like it came from closer, that the form of the spell came from my gloves but not the actual power that was backing it up. It felt more like it was drawing from the nearest easy source of magic, which must have been the hag.

If it was, though, it didn’t make a difference when we went up to the rough door in the hut’s wall and knocked. A moment later, it swung open, and we found ourselves in a room bigger than the hut should have been able to encompass. At least I’m used to that, these days, so it didn’t take me long to orient myself and look around the room, which was decorated like the worst-organized shop in the world, or like Am’elyn if her taste for trinkets got entirely out of hand. It was dim enough that I couldn’t see most of the strange objects the hag had arrayed around, only a flash of jewels in the window, and on a central table, glows emanating from bottles of all sizes, the contents opalescent, much like the songs Ella recorded in Caystone.

The hag told us to come in, not just stand there, and the rest of the room faded in importance to her. Ella was a fairly powerful hag, but this one seems to be much more so, from her appearance of great age and her confidence and just the depth of her eyes, which were almost dizzying.

She didn’t ask our names, and we didn’t offer them or ask hers. She seems like the kind of person it’s dangerous to give even an alias to. She asked instead what we want, and we told her: a way to find a man we’re hunting, whose name and appearance were probably lies. She told us she could make a map for us, using Niko’s previous battles with him as an anchor, but that it would take a lot of magic in a place where magic is scarce and that it would thus be very expensive.

The negotiations that followed felt dangerous—she outright said that Ella was much softer than she is, when I said I’d paid with song before. (Though in Ella’s defense, we were also asking much less of her than we asked of this hag.) After some talking around memories, which she deemed insufficient if we were just sharing them and not giving them to forget ourselves, Maliah thought to offer some of the water from the Deeping Wellemere we still have available, which caught her interest.

For a while, it seemed like it might be one vial and a memory of something, but the only memory she seemed interested in was when I half-offered the whole story of Maliah’s and my travels, and Cerunwe made zir disapproval of that idea very obvious, so we added a second vial instead, meaning we only have one left.

She wasn’t quite satisfied yet, though. Hags put a lot of weight on prices that cost something personal. If we wouldn’t offer our memories, our skills, our luck, she said, we could offer more physical things: hair, blood, bone. It was Maliah who stepped forward then, while I was frozen, wondering if I could bear to part with Hanai’s earring, knowing I have all the files from it kept safe now. Maliah, though, offered one of her braids, and the hag accepted, bargaining until Maliah said she would pick two and let the hag pick her preferred of those two. That was enough, at last, and we finished the formalities.

The hag unrolled a sheet of vellum on the table and picked up some ink. She asked for a drop of Niko’s blood, as the person who had drawn Onver’s blood and had her own drawn in turn, and Niko obliged, and she integrated it into the ink and then the map started to form. It started with the mountains we’re at the foot of and expanded from there: swirls indicating jump rings, volcanoes and barren spaces, and at the top of the map, a jut of rock in the plain, marked with a dot of red-black ink. And all across the page, crossing in and out of jump rings, crossing much of the map, was a thin gold line.

We rolled it up and paid our price: two vials of water from the Wellemere on the table, the ones from Maliah’s and my packs because we wanted Niko to have hers, and then Maliah’s braid, snipped off with gold shears.

The hag kicked us out happily after that and a few more pleasantries, and as soon as we left and turned our back on the hut, I got the eerie sense that if I turned around, it wouldn’t still be there, or if it was, it wouldn’t be there for me.

We got a little distance away across the hills, not comfortable being so close, and I gathered my courage after the near-failure of Tongues and was relieved to cast the Mansion and even for most of it to feel like it came from my own magic, though there was still a thread of strangeness in it.

In here, tonight, we’ve been looking at the map on and off. There’s no scale, and no way of knowing how long it will take to travel, though Cerunwe estimates perhaps a week, maybe a little less, if we run into fewer delays than we expect. That’s objective time, though, and I didn’t realize until later that I didn’t ask the hag to make us a map that wouldn’t take us through any jump rings that would lose us more than a few days of time. So we’re going to have to ask locals before we go following this route, and find alternate ways if we need to, but at least we know something about the features where he is.

I also had the chance to ask Cerunwe why zie had disapproved of my memory offer, since I need to keep learning about how to make these damn bargains, and zie pointed out, as I should have realized, that all my memories of the last few years contain some memories that people could use in extremely dangerous ways: the way to Avka’s hoard and the defenses there, to name just one, but also the names of stars, too much about Onver’s machine, a thousand other things, small and large, that could put people in danger.

I was crestfallen, but zie pointed out, with one of zir little smiles, that we got out of there without giving up any years of our lives or first-born children, so we should consider ourselves lucky, and that’s the comfort I’m taking with me.

Tomorrow, we start following the hag’s path. I hope we’ll find it easy, but I’m going to do my best to be prepared for whatever the Feywild can throw at me. And to try to keep bargaining with rations instead of blood.

I hope I’ll be seeing you in a week or two, if Cerunwe’s estimates are right.

Love,

Elyn

#in character #in character: letter #letter to: tyko #episode 205 #location: the feywild #person: maliah #person: mehrnikorsa(niko)#person: cerunwe

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letterstosestrilles · 2 years

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Dear Tyko,

As promised, a more detailed letter than the one I sent you when we first arrived in the Feywild, so you can reassure yourself that I’m safe right now, even if, as you point out, I’m about to go into some very bad danger indeed when the danger to the force of creativity and thus possibly the universe seems to be past. I will defend myself, though, by pointing out that what Onver did once he could certainly do again, and I’m not interested in leaving that up to chance.

And I will defend myself by saying that Niko would be doing this whether we went with her or not, and you like Niko. There’s no way you want her alone in what’s coming. So you’re just going to have to suffer through a few more weeks of me doing extremely dangerous things, and then I will do my best to only take on threats that don’t make me want to hide under my blankets for a week for a good long time. With a good long period of as few threats of any size as possible to start with.

We did, you’ll probably already have guessed from the time stamps and the timing of my Sending, have a few more days of rest and preparation on Reorx’s plane.

In between other things, Maliah and I did have a chance to sit down with Niko. At first, we mostly talked about the dark side of the Feywild, and what preparations we might need to go there. I asked Maliah what she’s heard, but any and every kind of monster that exists (and probably a good few that don’t) have been said to live there, by one parent or another. There are a few things that she can almost certainly eliminate—there are unlikely to be huge crabs that can shoot fire from their claws, for instance—but more where it’s impossible to guess what’s true, what’s exaggeration, and what’s made up of whole cloth.

We talked about picking up some warm clothes somewhere, since places where there’s no light at all tend to be quite cold, and speculated a little on what magic and what magic objects might or might not work in the dark areas, where everyone seems to agree that magic is at least somewhat curtailed. That terrifies me, when I’ve grown so used to relying on my magic that I don’t think I’ve drawn my sword except to clean it and run a drill or two in a year. When that got to be too much we talked about picking up extra rations both in case I lose the ability to cast my Mansion and because they’re good bargaining material in a place food might be scarce, and what barters to offer Cerunwe, including a set of short swords, the location of Avka’s hoard, and a few other inducements based on what zie is willing to offer us.

After that, Maliah and I sidestepped into asking Niko a few of the questions that have been building up since she got her full memories back. The first questions we had were just how long she’s been Reorx’s companion, and how she came to be one. The answer to the first was staggering, even though I’d come to half-expect it: a century, perhaps more, though she hasn’t tracked it. She’d been a devotee of Reorx for a long time, a paladin for quite some time, and when she made innovations to loom technology, they started speaking to her more often, and eventually offered her a place among their companions.

Since they’re a god more directly connected with mortals than most (Mishakal comes to mind, for instance), they like to have mortal company, and the stretch of lifespan seems to come from enjoying that company too much to want to give it up, not that I blame them. When they’re together, Niko says, doing anything with Reorx or on their plane, it’s a constant feeling of the best and most inspired sorts of collaboration, the kinds where once you’re on track you hardly have to tilt your head or blink to communicate what you want to say, where the project takes on a life of its own. It’s a tempting prospect, really, even if I’d miss all my friends and family too much to actually consider living that life.

I half-joked that I should ask Nuli and Thvara if there are any Crafter ballads about Niko, since that’s their specialty and there’s been much more time than previously assumed for legends about her to circulate. She blanched a little and said she hopes not, or at least that she doesn’t hear them until she has as little more time to reconcile with her memories, so I asked the next most logical question, if any of her companions have such ballads—just before I realized that Dwiona is a dwarvish harpist and there’s definitely a Crafter ballad about that, and amended the question to ask if I’d been in the presence of the Ollamh Harp without knowing.

The answer, it seems, is yes, Dwiona is the subject of Nuli and Thvara’s most-loved and best-known ballad. I’m going to have to track them down and tell them about all of this, though I have no idea if they’ll actually believe me.

There might, Niko says, be ballads about Emulf or the others, but none as widely circulated as Dwiona’s. I’ll have to keep my ears open, and add them to my repertoire if I found them.

That seemed like more than enough of that conversation, so we split off to try some various activities: Maliah to find short swords to offer Cerunwe, with Niko’s help (she found a beautiful matched set with a few useful enchantments on them) and me to badger Dwiona, which she graciously allowed. We spent most of the afternoon with me playing the harp (the Ollamh Harp! It’s beautiful, silvery-pale like driftwood, carved with a raven on the head and abstract designs elsewhere) and intermittently showing her how to work my gloves and the rest of the apparatus. She even let me re-record some harp samples with her harp, which has a gorgeous warm tone like the rooms here seem to bestow but on its own, and which is so responsive you hardly need to pluck a string before it’s sounding.

We also, before dinner, found Emulf in his workshop, where he’s dusting off projects he’d had to leave, and his glasswork is exquisite. We saw a stained glass window that’s as detailed and fluid as a painting, and blown glass flowers and vines that are so perfectly rendered as they climb their way up columns that it’s hard to imagine them being something made instead of grown.

Many things here feel like that, really, so beautiful the place feels like a museum, or would if it weren’t so lived-in and full of Reorx’s power. I had to convince myself to touch things, and it was a relief, as we went around the place, to find the offerings and gifts by people not quite yet masters of their crafts: a quilt in a mind-bogglingly mathematical patterns where some of the corners don’t quite line up, a hammer made from some experimental material that instead of being extremely resilient turned out rather floppy, something that looks rather like the yarn dog Jesson made for Maliah.

As we wandered, I talked to Niko about another part of this quest that’s worrying me: namely, the end of it. Not, for once, any of my big impossible questions about what comes next, but the practical worry that even with the restraining manacles, if we take Onver prisoner instead of killing him, we’re likely to be so spent that we’ll have no way of doing anything with him immediately. If I can’t reserve a Wish long enough to Plane Shift, if I can’t even Teleport to somewhere we could spend some credit for an overnight guard from someone, we would have a rough night to get through, since I doubt he’ll go down or stay down easy, if he’s wily enough to have run from Niko for twenty years.

Niko promised to think about it and ask Reorx about it, on the last night we planned to stay there, and the next day, she tossed me a gem made into a perfect sphere, which will hold the charge for a fairly powerful spell, if not quite as powerful as Wish would need to be. Still, it would be an extra Teleport, or a Mansion that I could build a cell into, and it could be the saving of us.

And later that day, after goodbyes and blessings from Reorx and their companions, they sent us to the Feywild.

After all my complaints about the discomfort of divine magic, I am pleased to tell you that Reorx’s magic didn’t quite feel like Gaizka’s Plane Shift, but it wasn’t as discomfiting as Mishakal’s. It makes sense, them being so used to mortals, and to transporting them from plane to plane on their journeys to meet various crafters, and I was relieved to land in the Feywild no more disoriented than I had to be, in the middle of a stretch of forest just far enough to the light side of the Feywild to make all of us wince after days of the constant dimness of Reorx’s plane.

Maliah, after a look around, said she had no idea where we were, so I made sure my messages to you and to Cerunwe sent and then whisked us away to Troihari, since we’d agreed to start off with rations shopping, which we knew we would need. We ended up buying roughly two months of rations, making a pessimistic guess about how long it will take to find Onver and then doubling that so we have emergency rations and plenty to trade with, since we assumed that people in the dark side of the Feywild might be interested in foods they wouldn’t usually have access to as a bargaining tool.

We spent the night in an inn and woke to a message from Cerunwe inquiring why I hadn’t mentioned the bolthole zie gave me access to among our possible meeting locations (the answer is that I’d thought of it so exclusively as a bolthole that it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be useful for other purposes) but indicating zir willingness to meet. So, after breakfast and a bit of twiddling our thumbs so we wouldn’t show up early, I took out the token zie’d given me and Teleported us over.

It was another stretch of woods we didn’t recognize, though the trees were different from the ones near Troihari, much thinner and paler, and there were mountains nearby. If we aren’t (because we’re still here) in the actual domain of the Lady of the Ashenwalds, I suspect we’re very close, from what I remember of descriptions of her lands. After a moment where I wondered where this supposed bolthole might be, a curtain of foliage was pushed to the side, and then there were Cerunwe’s usual red hair ornaments and the rest of Cerunwe with them, gesturing us into a bolthole I hadn’t seen.

It’s a bare bones spot, not much more than a fairly comfortable cot, a few shelves of rations and useful items, but it was enough (and I can make a Mansion for more comfortable lodgings for us tonight), and we sat down to discuss the dark side of the Feywild.

To start, we laid out terms: information about Avka’s hoard for information, the beautiful short swords for more material help like maps and such things, and for actual guidance into the dark, pretty much whatever zie asks for. It was obvious from the start, though, that zie has less than no desire to go back there. It’s possible that the Lady of the Ashenwalds might urge zir into it, or we’ll hit on a temptation big enough to convince zir, but for the moment, I’m not counting on their guidance as we try to track Onver down.

Information, though, zie was more than willing to give us, and we asked for heaps of it.

Environment, to start—whether I was right in assuming cold, whether there are trends to what sort of spaces we might find, all that kind of thing. The Feywild, of course, isn’t given to easy answers. Cerunwe allowed that a thick jacket or cloak would be appreciated in many areas, and that it’s overall cool, but not the ice fields I was unhappily imagining, at least not until you get very deep in. It’s not the environment, zie explained with exasperated patience, that is so impassable and dangerous that it’s made nearly a third of the Feywild taboo. It’s the places where magic is hard or impossible to use, the beasts, the other things. The environment is merely the environment.

So we asked about the beasts next, a smaller question to grapple with than the use of magic. There are large dogs and wolves and cats with razor-sharp claws, and sometimes blink dogs and displacer beasts. Plants with wills of their own (which made me think about a story Maliah mentioned off-hand about plant zombies that can control people’s will with despair). Some fey, particularly those whose magics are innate rather than pulled from a well of magic and bent by will. Tree spirits, hags. The rumors of a dragon or two out there somewhere, though zie was scrupulous in saying zie can’t confirm those.

Getting food, zie volunteered, can also be a difficulty. You can hunt most recognizable beasts, or even spiders if circumstances are desperate, but we shouldn’t trust any forage, even if it looks safe—too many poisons and hallucinogens, which makes me very glad about the amount of food we bought, especially considering I can’t count on being able to cast the Mansion for us.

Cerunwe also warned us that while it’s less of an issue for us, we can’t count on healing being available. That’s partly due to magic being chancy (though zie thinks healing potions are likely to keep working, thankfully), and partly because there aren’t many healers we can go to if we’re tapped out. The lack of magic means wounds can stick around longer than we’re used to, be more likely to infection and worse, so we’ll have to be scrupulous about keeping injuries clean and changing bandages often, which makes me glad we’ve picked up a few healing kits lately.

Zie also said, though the list of beasts zie gave us didn’t sound too much worse than what we’ve seen elsewhere, that even with four of us, powerful as we are, there are going to be times when we want to retreat rather than fight, and I plan to take that information to heart as much as I possibly can. (I’d already mentioned, back on Reorx’s plane, that with everyone else able to go much faster than I can, it might be that if we have to retreat I’ll leap on Squirt’s back. Especially if I’m already so much dead weight half the time, swinging a sword instead of doing what I’m good at.) Zie emphasized the importance of covering our tracks, and I am glad, as I always am, that we have Maliah, who knows how to do that kind of thing very well indeed.

From there, we moved on to the more esoteric worries. There unfortunately doesn’t seem to be any way of detecting one of the spaces where magic doesn’t work as well until you’re in it and something doesn’t work, though Maliah’s bow glows in the cold so it’s possible we’ll have early warning if that flickers out while it’s still cold. Time distortion fields, though, are much easier to detect: they’re hiding in jump rings. We should not, zie stressed, go through any jump ring we haven’t had confirmed by a local under honest bargain as safe, with either no or minimal time dilation.

(I’d love to avoid jump rings entirely, with that worry ahead of us, but given the Feywild’s layout, there’s not much hope of that.)

As for magic, it’s anyone’s guess what will work and what won’t. Most of our spells, I’m guessing, will be less powerful or nonexistent for good portions of the journey, but things like Niko’s ability to heal with a touch, or mine to give my friends a little boost of inspiration in a battle or to use that same force of inspiration in other ways, aren’t really spells, and I don’t know if they’re innate enough that we’d get by the same way Squirt will still be able to blink, or hags apparently can still use most of their powers out there.

Then come the questions that Cerunwe can’t really answer, of where Onver is, in all that vast space. We don’t really have anything of his to track him by, though a hag might be able to help us if we did. We don’t know the space well enough to know where boltholes are, though again in such a vast space there could be thousands. Cerunwe volunteered that there are some ruins, but they’re so ruined that it’s more trouble than it’s worth to put them to any use, so there aren’t likely to be landmarks to help us find him either. And he was wily enough to avoid Niko for twenty years, on that first hunt, though Niko didn’t have Maliah with her back then.

It’s possible that if we do meet something as powerful as a dragon, they would have some knowledge of a recently-arrived powerful being, and might be willing to trade for that knowledge, but that’s anyone’s guess. If we get very close, the piece of Reorx’s power that he stole might let Niko lead us, but I’m guessing that would lead us right into his probably-very-defensible position, when I’d rather tempt him out of it to get on more even footing.

I also asked how far into the dark side someone, even someone very powerful, can safely live, especially since Cerunwe had spoken about zir memories of the deepest parts of the darkness as barely coherent, which made me worry time might get odd there. Zie didn’t care to guess, but said it’s really more a matter of the magic problems than time problems (implication was that the time problems might have been because of those time distortion jump rings, or possibly simple delirium, zie was very detailed about the risks of injuries getting infected and rotting. I’m not sure I should ask). As very few beings are prepared to live in the extreme conditions of the very brightest parts of the Feywild, though, very few are adapted for the opposite extremes in the darkness, so at least chances are we might be able to avoid going that far?

We all had to digest that information for a while, so we told Cerunwe part of the information we’d offered zir: the story of what we’ve been up to since we left the Feywild last, Avka’s hoard and the Astral Sea and everything in between.

In the middle of that, I couldn’t contain some curiosity: ever since I found out that Jhasdej’s primary planet was mostly spent and uninhabited, even back when I cast Legend Lore with a Wish and heard a single elvish voice reading out a poem about them, I wondered, in the back of my mind, if maybe they were the star that shone on the Honorien Dominion, and thus on Cerunwe’s earlier years. So I asked zir the name of zir planet of origin, and after a moment, they said it was Aland—the same name Jhasdej gave us, which seems like an incredible coincidence to the point that I wonder if the Lady had some hand in it, knowing who Jhasdej was when she gave us their name.

Not long after that, Cerunwe excused zirself, partly to talk to the Lady of the Ashenwalds about everything, and probably partly to consider whether zie can bring zirself to return to the dark parts of the Feywild (though zie is already kindly offering to bring us up to the edge of it, which is a help and no doubt worthy of the swords), and also probably party to have a chance to think about us telling zir we’d spoken to zir star of origin in person and that Maliah is returning to the planet zie left to restore it and offered to bring zie along if zie would like.

We’ll have plenty of time to ask them more questions on our way to the dark side of the Feywild, though, so I don’t mind giving them the time. I could certainly use some time myself, to try to get my fear under some measure of control.

As long as I have reception, maybe we can find time when you’re off work and I’m in camp to do a short video call so you can reassure yourself of my safety and I can see how you (and PA) are doing? No problem if not, but it seems silly not to at least say hello before I go somewhere inaccessible again.

There’s another rule I’ll make for myself after that long vacation I promised you at the start of this letter: I’ll try and stay mostly in places with reception for all that time, with the exception of some visits to Kirim. But maybe I can try to convince you to visit with me, one of those times? I’ll wear you down one of these days, I promise Teleport isn’t bad, especially when I know precisely where I’m going.

Love,

Elyn

#in character #in character: letter #letter to: tyko #episode 204 #location: reorx's plane #location: the feywild #person: maliah #person: mehrnikorsa(niko)#deity: reorx #person: dwiona #person: emulf #person: cerunwe #looking ahead #information gathering

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letterstosestrilles · 2 years

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Dear Brennu,

I am safely out of that volcano I told you about, with the Khardab’zielach in hand! (Well, in pack. Navigational instruments are definitely too delicate to carry about everywhere, and while it’s not an object a lot of people have heard about, we still don’t want to carry it openly.) I always like to start with the good news, when I’m writing to someone and it’s been a few weeks, especially when they’ve sent me messages with veiled concern in them, as well as pictures of nice but unobjectionable common areas to consider for my Mansion when I have guests.

(The volcano was not a pleasant experience by any means and included a trip across an invisible bridge over a lava lake. That was fairly horrible, but I can highly recommend the hot springs in the area, which were a perfect relaxation when we were out.)

Are you back in Mashoy yet, or still lingering on your vacation? I hope if you’re back in Mashoy, the routine is a bolster to you, and I hope if you’re still on vacation, you’re not missing the sounds of the city quite as much. The parts of my adventuring where nowhere I could possibly be feels quite right are some of the worst parts, so I very much hope you aren’t stuck in one of those phases.

Once we were done with Chusya and the hot springs, we went off to visit a friend who had some information for us about our search for a star, which is going to be coming up fairly quickly now that we have both of the major components to get us there, I think. We may have to do some shopping around for protection, and definitely have to trade in some currency, in part just because we have far too much cash and in part because it will probably be helpful to have some things of more universal value than stamped coins at certain weights of metal if we’re going to a plane as alien as the one we’ll be on.

There are a lot of questions waiting to be answered when we reach the Astral Sea, and Maliah and I have been asking them of the one person we know who’s visited, if only briefly, the one who found us the tuning fork, but she doesn’t know many of them. She warned that travel across the plane has as much to do with the metaphysical as the physical, and that how fast you go depends a bit on how fast you think you’re going. The Khardab’zielach should help us with that, anyway, since Identify tells me that it gives you a sign or signal to tug you towards the star you’re seeking once you’re on the plane. She also said that ships help, though sailing ships and starships seem to be much the same there, and warned us that there are pools that are portals all over the place that could dump us out in all sorts of inhospitable locations if we do walk (float?) instead of taking a ship.

Our questions about the etiquette one uses when asking stars for very big favors were less helpfully answered, since she’s never met a star. There are cities on the Astral Sea, though. I wonder if one of them has an etiquette guide somewhere. Pity you aristocrats in Mashoy seem more connected to the Feywild than the Astral Sea or I’d ask if that was the kind of thing you might know! If there’s no etiquette book, I will just be very polite by our standards and hope that it carries over. (And hope that my friend Niko, who at least speaks Celestial, might know a few formal addresses.)

Mostly, though, she was a very excellent resource on the water from the Deeping Wellemere, since everyone’s very fond of saying that it’s powerful and has a myriad of uses but doesn’t actually tell you how or if you can control those uses. Primarily, it seems to heal … well, whatever it thinks most needs healing. If you have three injuries and pour the water on one, it will heal the one. If you have three injuries and drink it, it will probably start with the one it thinks is most severe but do its best to help with the others too. (I imagine how much it can help depends on the amount you use.) We may need to use it to transfuse, and she thinks for that, using it intravenously will be like pouring it over a wound, though injecting it as one might insulin might be more like drinking it. (Though she admitted that’s conjecture, it’s not like there’s been academic study of this.)

(Also, I don’t know how to transfuse people. I should ask Niko if she does, emergency transfusion seems like the kind of skill a traveling paladin might acquire.)

I also asked a few questions about the water that I’ll admit have nothing to do with a star and a bargain for its heart’s blood and everything to do with you. I want to apologize for that, I hate offering people help they haven’t asked for, and I really can’t make any promises until after we’ve seen the star and even then I’ve just told you this isn’t the world’s most reliable substance, but the fog in your brain seems to be distressing you. If you prefer to keep working on it with doctors and therapists and time, I’m happy to support you and will keep recommending you poetry and short stories.

But, with a lot of conditionals, mostly, to be very frank, conditionals of me surviving long enough to try it safely with you (especially if I need to go back to the Wellemere at some point), it might help. But it might help with side effects. None of them seem to be objectively bad ones, but some might be distressing, and the water seems to behave a little differently with everyone. And I only know two people who have tried it and they aren’t exactly open about the reasons they drank it or drink it and what intended and unintended impacts it might have had. One has lived a very long time, and that longevity seems to be one of the unintended effects, from what I picked up by implication, so I’d recommend reading a legend or two and considering if that’s the kind of thing you could live with, for having your mind to yourself again.

And in the meantime, you can join me in metaphysical questions in what exactly happens when you give water from the so-called Fountain of Youth to a star on the Astral Sea, and what effects from that carry over to the Prime Material Plane. Maybe nothing, but maybe a star will get brighter than it should soon. I’ll let you know as much as I can.

And I really will visit, but I think Maliah and I are both feeling the urgency of getting to the Astral Sea now that we have the means to do so. When that’s done, though, I think we’ll need a break and some time to plan before we go deal with the true object of our current quest, restoring Reorx if we possibly can. It’s going to be a dangerous quest, and there are things I want to do, people I want to see, before I put myself in that much danger of my life, and you are certainly not least among them.

I don’t know how long my journey to the stars will take, but I imagine you need plenty of time to think, so you won’t mind if it takes a month or two before I work my way around to Mashoy. I’ll keep you updated as much as I can, though.

In the meantime, I’m always glad to hear from you, and no, the details of what you’re reading and what the view from the beach looks like and the latest piece of music you’re learning never bore me. Just ask my brother, who has been known to send me three paragraphs of dense text about the specs on a ship’s custom gravity system and had me react with delight and interest.

Elyn

#in character #in character: letter #letter to: brennu zahin #episode 192 #location: chusya #location: hangi syr #person: ektarika #person: cerunwe #person: maliah #person: mehrnikorsa(niko)#feelings #elyn and brennu

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letterstosestrilles · 2 years

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Dear Tyko,

Sounds like you’ve had a nice week! Glad you took a few days off, I know managing a business is busy, but you need to think about staffing for when Alma does retire. And especially glad that you got out of town for a night, an inn on the beach sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

I know, I know. I’m just trying to figure out how to explain that I wrote you letters every day down there and I can’t send you any of them. Everything in the Feywild has a price, right? And this one is set, not something you can bargain down. Anything you see in the waters of the Wellemere, you can only talk about to people who have already seen it. So if someday you go down there for some reason, I can send you a bunch of letters, but until then, I can’t say too much.

(Please don’t, though.)

Feelings I can give. There was a lot of frustration, and a lot of exhaustion, but a lot of wonder too, and a lot of worry. There was pain, pretty sharp a few times, and I’m recovering from some now, because I can tell you that I fucked up the Teleport to get us back to the surface and ended up getting us thrown into walls multiple times and owe everyone a lot of apologies for that.

I can tell (or at least I’d better be!) you tiny details that have no bearing on anything, that you might guess from the fact that it’s an underwater cave system, which was pretty well-established before we went down there. I can say, for instance, that Maliah made friends with a tiny fish on the first day and saw it again today, and that in between it went on a quest to be named and was named, with great triumph and glory, the Brave Fish. I can tell you that there might have been wonders I missed because even being able to see at least a little ways in the dark doesn’t help when the dark is so omnipresent.

Probably, without feeling too bad about it, I can tell you about resources used—several Water Breathing scrolls, a few tanks of oxygen, a gem of Conjure Elementals, a few gems from our stock, spells and crossbow bolts.

I can—there’s something I’m going to have to tell you, about vivid memories of the crash of the Procyon, though I can’t tell you why they came up, but it wasn’t brought on by the Wellemere itself, and it can go fuck itself if it wants me to keep that secret from my family.

And it’s not as though I haven’t told you secrets before, like you aren’t always the silent exception in my head when I promise discretion, because adventurers need people to confide in. But these are forces I don’t understand, and I don’t know if telling would hurt me, or hurt you, or cause this much-needed water to lose its virtue, or something else, so I’m going to abide by what I promised.

You know what I can tell you, though, with perfect honesty and no guilt at all? Anything that happened on this journey that did not happen in the actual water system of the Wellemere, which was more than you’d think, since Magnificent Mansion is technically its own pocket dimension, so while its entrance may have been in the Wellemere, its interior was not. And of course, almost every night was just the four of us drying out and eating the delicious food the Mansion provides.

There was, however, a night when we had a guest in the Mansion! Her name is Jelah and she’s absolutely gorgeous and extremely powerful and intimidating and kind. (No, I didn’t, but I do regret that I didn’t.) We were all tired, but we set her up with some movies and sent her off with a rigged-up amalgamation of our old LICDs with a lot of media storage put on them in the morning. I think that’s most of what I can actually tell you about her without going into things that would require knowledge of things in the Wellemere, but at least I can tell you that much, and resent secrets a little less, since making her acquaintance was my favorite part of this journey.

And I can tell you that when we’d recovered from my botched Teleport and made it to the surface, poor Maliah was struck down by a horrible headache from the scant twilit light out of the constant darkness and has retired to her room in the Mansion to sit in the dark and nap it off. Cerunwe is off with Peanut, hunting for some game, and will probably be back within an hour or two, so I hope Maliah’s headache passes soon, as I’m guessing Peanut is going to be very excited to see her and have a whole lot of feelings about her return after being gone for several days.

After that, I’m not sure. I imagine we’ll debrief with Cerunwe, and ask zir where ze wants to go. If I’m lucky, I may persuade zir into talking about the dark side of the Feywild at last, or maybe it will just remain a mystery. I’ve already promised to Teleport zir to whatever place I’ve seen that ze wishes to go, and then we’ll have to decide what to do. I’m guessing we’ll rendezvous with Maliah’s mothers, since we should still have time on our temporary badges of safe passage. We need to figure out what we’re doing with Peanut, too, a discussion I am not at all looking forward to.

And then, I think, back to the Prime Material Plane. We have the Khardab’zielach to look for, and a star to find and persuade to help us with help from this water. If it will work on a star. (It would be nice if it came with instruction cards, people talk around its virtues so much, I don’t even know what it does.)

Everything feels very real, now that we’re over this hurdle. Apparently I have to start writing a speech that might persuade a star to give us their heart’s blood to save a god.

Sorry about the secrets. Believe me, they’re not my choice.

Love,

Elyn

#in character #in character: letter #letter to: tyko #episode 180 #location: the feywild #person: maliah #person: cerunwe #Person: Peanut #person: jelah #looking ahead

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letterstosestrilles · 2 years

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Dear Tyko,

Okay, the polite anger is very fair, and I’m glad you understand even if I definitely think that you saying you won’t tell me about the play that Kari was cast in is petty. (Especially when you know I’ll just ask Tiriel about it. Though I will meekly take my punishment and wait a week before I do that.) If the stakes were lower, and if Maliah and Niko weren’t relying on me, you know I’d try to find a way to tell you anyway, but I’ve got no interest in messing with weird Feywild forces, I already find this place stressful enough.

The past day, though, has been very nearly peaceful.

Soon after I sent my last letter, while Maliah was still napping off her awful headache, Cerunwe came back, with Peanut in tow (and Peanut, unfortunately, with a rabbit carcass in tow. Cerunwe said at some point, with some pride, that she’s a more effective hunter than she was when we left her. I will more happily grant that however true that is, ze has also trained her to yowl a little less when she’s being put in a harness). So I greeted zir and talked a little about what we encountered in the Wellemere as opposed to what ze did—some things the same and some different, but considering we’d already discussed that everyone’s path to the Wellemere is different, that wasn’t shocking.

When Maliah emerged and was joyously greeted by Peanut, we settled down to eat and to talk over things a little more, our varying stories about how it was down there. (Our time was more exciting, probably because there were more of us and we couldn’t travel as quietly.)

Much to my embarrassment, I also gave in and asked Cerunwe what the water even does, now that we have it. I know, from Mishakal, that it must have some powerful healing properties, but I don’t know what it does on its own, and the answer seems to be mostly “what it needs to.” (Cerunwe’s very excellent poker face saved zir from no doubt shouting at us to ask why we were looking for the water without even knowing what we want it for, or perhaps from laughing until ze cried at us.) It can’t resurrect, and it can’t undo damage or aging done, but it can pause people at the age they are and prevent conditions from worsening (and can deal with poisoning sometimes). It can accelerate the growths of plants and strengthen their essences, which makes me think of Maliah’s Plant Growth and wonder if the magics are related. Cerunwe also offhand mentioned that it can be a replacement for blood when necessary, but ze hasn’t tested that. Still, good to know when we have to talk heart’s blood with a star.

Now that we’re part of the same group, now that we’ve made it past this legendary test of the Feywild, Cerunwe was a little friendlier with us, and I felt a little freer to prod zir about zir past and travels around the Feywild. When the opportunity came up, me asking a little about geographical features and ze discussing them as mirrors to the Prime Material Plane, as the whole Feywild often is, I asked about the dark side of the Feywild again, knowing ze has been there, and wondering, as I have my whole time here, what it is that’s made nine planets avoid talking about it entirely.

I asked if it was some of that mirroring that make it so bad, but ze doesn’t think so, and, after asking if I had a reason to ask and being amused when I frankly admitted that I just hate not knowing things and don’t like having written a song about a whole plane while not being able to talk about a third of it, told me a little of what’s there. A lot of the problem seems to be regions where magic behaves strangely or won’t come at all, which according to Cerunwe puts the archfey, so used to being powerful forces, into a snit. Then there are the usual hazards, but in the dark and without a fey’s usual magical defenses, they’re all the harder. So altogether, it’s a dangerous place, and archfey don’t like that they can’t do what they usually can, so dislike and superstition have turned into taboo. It’s not that it’s not dangerous, I certainly don’t plan to be going for a pleasure hike there, but it’s good to know what is there, and how it came to be taboo. At least one person’s perspective on that.

I’d been prying, and Cerunwe hadn’t even asked for a bargain for it, but I offered zir one anyway, since I suspect ze would have been uncomfortable if I’d just thanked zir for zir kindness, and offered a return to the tit-for-tat we had on the way to the mouth of the Wellemere. Ze asked about our next steps, since we’ve really only talked about our final goal, and I talked about searching for stars and the khardab’zielach, and asked if ze had heard about such an object, given ze is sort of part of the historical record. Ze hadn’t, admitting that the Honorien Dominion was quite isolated and didn’t really have interactions with gnomish communities, but offered to speak to the Lady of the Ashenwalds about it, and mentioned other fey who collect artifacts who might know something. I took zir up on it, though I don’t love the thought of someone else making bargains for me, and what information and favors may be exacted for information.

We talked a little about Kirim, too—less the parts about my family and the Procyon’s history, more about Gaizka’s spellwork and our travels through the woods, including the fight with the roc. They don’t hear often about the discoveries of new demiplanes in the Feywild, so ze was curious, and I imagine the story may stand zir in good stead sometime.

Since we were on our last night with zir, I looked over to Maliah and asked one more time about the insignia, if there were any way to know whose it might have been. Cerunwe looked it over one more time, and eventually, after a close inspection and a wistful smile, said that while ze can narrow it down to zir troop of fifty rather than the battalion of three hundred, there’s no way of knowing the individual. Some people carved signifiers on the back, but not this one, so who it was is going to be a mystery forever, I suspect.

That seemed like plenty of seriousness for the night, so I asked a transparent question about Drewyn in hopes of a funny story to amuse Maliah and got one about him trapping himself in a tree while trying to learn Misty Step (honestly, after my recent Teleport disaster I’ve got some sympathy there). Most of our funny stories are about us embarrassing ourselves, which isn’t ideal for telling someone as competent as Cerunwe, but ze seemed to appreciate the story about the warehouse and Maliah’s and my failed attempt at subterfuge, at least.

(Damn, should have told zir about the griffons, that might be our best one that makes us look competent.)

Ze also asked what our plans are, and how much longer we’re planning to stay in the Feywild. We do have a few last things we want to do here, specifically getting Maliah some new arrows and a bit of other shopping (I know that getting you nice gifts when I upset you is technically bribery, but I also don’t think you’ll turn it down). Ze frowned a little and warned us, quite sweetly, that things can be quite insular in the various settlements and we should be careful not to get cheated in the marketplace—we don’t look like fey or like elves, and Maliah’s excellent Sylvan and my Elvish (especially with it not being Feywild Elvish) won’t outweigh that.

(I wonder if ze knows how very much we tended to overpay messengers in the Seelie Court. Though that was out of anxiety to please, we cheated ourselves more than anyone cheated us.)

When we asked for recommendations of where to go, ze recommended a forest city called Troihari, where Maliah hasn’t been but has heard of. It’s a ways away from here, but we don’t really have to worry about that, because ze also very kindly provided me with a knife ze bought there not long ago, which should serve as a focus to get us there. It has a good balance of artisans and practical necessities, apparently, and it’s a little more open to outsiders than some places can be.

I thanked zir for the recommendation and especially for the knife (which came on the heels of ze offering to guide us and me releasing zir from zir six-week contract with us very early indeed), and the night devolved into quiet, Maliah playing with Peanut and all of us eating and drinking wine before we retired to our respective rooms to recover fully from the trip, and particularly that last mess of a Teleport.

All of us slept in this morning, and then spent the first part of the day in quiet, me checking fully over all the wires in my gloves and really making sure there were no leaks and then checking through PA’s insides to make sure I’d dried it out well enough after its mishap, discovering no rust spots, to my relief. I still need to replace some wiring and get it a new display screen to be sure, but that’s not so bad, and if I’m already planning to give it some new hardware, that’s not a bad time to do more work on it as well.

Eventually, though, Cerunwe found me, clearly packed up and ready to go, and said that ze had two things to say to me, the first personally and the second in zir office as a retainer of the Lady of the Ashenwalds. The first, to my surprise, was a braid of dried grass tied in a loop with a few stones threaded on, which ze gave me as a Teleport focus to a bolthole in the Feywild, should we have need of one in the future—I suspect it’s a private bolthole of zirs that even the Lady of the Ashenwalds doesn’t have much to do with. Ze said I’ll need to contact zir once I arrive, no alarms to let zir know or anything, but it’s an incredibly kind offer and a gesture of trust from zir, especially when ze very explicitly said it was a personal gift and not part of a bargain.

(You’ve heard me talk about zir for the last few weeks, so I think you’ll understand me when I say that I really did not think there was a possible way for us to earn this much of Cerunwe’s trust. I had the unfortunate sense that ze had little use for us and, more than that, thought that we’re of little use in general, given the way we’ve been flailing around on this journey and prying shockingly into zir private history to give Maliah more context for a talisman and to indulge my curiosity about things I’m not supposed to know.)

The second thing, in zir capacity as a representative, was just as much of a surprise, though maybe it shouldn’t have been: I’ve been offered a job with the Lady of the Ashenwalds, should I ever want one. I don’t know if she means as a warlock, to tie myself to her with the last bits of magic that a person can learn before burning out trying to learn more, or simply as a bard in her court. Either way, it’s a flattering offer, and not one I intend to take her up on, because I think living in the Feywild long-term would have me screaming within a month. Cerunwe was very flattering about my ability to handle the Feywild, when I demurred in a way meant not to offend, and amused when I credited that to Mashoy (especially given ze has heard the story about the warehouse), and was overall more friendly than I could have imagined zir to be a week ago.

I suspect ze wouldn’t have minded being Teleported right out from there (ze strikes me as a person not given to sentimental goodbyes), but gracefully allowed zirself to be herded to say goodbye to Maliah, Niko, Squirt, and Peanut before taking out a focus object that would let me send zir to the Ashenwalds and giving me one last nod before I sent zir off.

Maliah, almost as soon as ze was gone, echoed my thoughts about being pleased to have won zir over—I’m certainly glad and grateful to count them as a friend and not an uneasy ally now. (Though I think ze would break out in hives if ze tried to use the word friend, we got as far as “friendly contact” and I wasn’t going to push my luck.)

We could have headed out to Troihari, but we were waiting for a reply from her mothers (who have said that they won’t take us up on our invitation to join them but will meet us where we met them entering the Feywild when we’re done there, where we’re invited to stay a few days, which of course we will. Maliah deserves some time with her mothers), so we’ve been sitting around, talking about this and that—Teleport, and shopping in Troihari, and, above all, what comes next.

It seems impossible to think of the adventures we’re planning right now as anything actually real, anything someone might do outside of a legend. We’re looking for a long-lost artifact (and I wonder if Captain Matrai ever got my letter asking about that, I’ll have to ask them at some point) so we can meet a star, and we want to meet a star so we can convince them to give us their heart’s blood, and we want that to heal a god and save the universe from whatever Aturav Onver has planned.

(Oh right, Niko had one more possible memory or theory she thought she might mention at the end of our journey in the Feywild, I should ask her about that. Though maybe after we’ve been shopping. She deserves a break.)

The only part of it that feels real is that very last part, because Onver isn’t some legendary being. He’s someone Niko has met, and he may have apparently gained unimaginable power, but at least he’s something that feels like we can handle. (Especially if we can revive Reorx first.)

And then, as though all of that isn’t strange enough, then we have to think about, well, what people will think. It’s not like this problem with the force of creativity is widely known, though it’s going to be more obvious the longer it lasts, but some people know, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to walk up to someone and say, as though it’s something I expect them to believe, “I’ve talked to a star and helped save the universe.” Maybe I don’t have to, but I don’t know how to not talk about it, either.

I suppose that’s borrowing troubles early, though.

First, we have some steps to take. We’ve got things to do right when we get back to the prime material plane, queries to check in on, legends to learn and make into reality. Shopping to do, since we can’t get Maliah a new IICD or PA a drone to replace the toy car in Troihari.

In between, though, I’ve already made clear that we need to take weeks off when we can find them, because otherwise we’ll explode. Maliah needs to ride along with Marsa for a while, all three of us need time to see our therapists, and I want to hop around and visit people as I can—yes, Sestrilles is on my list, and Nosirion-1 is too. Maybe, if you take some time off work, I could even take you to Nosirion-1, because you should really meet the kids sometime. Or I can take them to Sestrilles, but the thought of corraling three children in a city sounds nerve-wracking, honestly.

But regardless, I’m trying to be smart, and trying to make sure I still have reserves in me, so when I’m standing in the celestial plane, trying to revive a god and deal with Onver, I know I can do what I need to do.

And in the meantime: please tell me you’ve read a good romance lately. I desperately need a resupply.

Love,

Elyn

#in character #in character: letter #letter to: tyko #episode 181 #location: the feywild #person: maliah #person: cerunwe #person: mehrnikorsa(niko)#Person: Peanut #looking ahead

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