22.1 Your Scattered Heart

General Summary

Day 354

Magdalena comes to speak with me the day after the Spring fae go to sleep. She sits me down and asks me simply: What comes next?
This time she lets me talk through my thoughts out loud.

• There is Dreamfall, obviously a first candidate to come under the Imperial banner.
• Amytri and Solace are a clear candidate as well, though crossing the Desolation is not something I'll do again for a while.
• Torrick and Drognar are nearer and probably a better second choice.
• Whitewater, finally. When I return to the South I need to visit and it will be appropriate to ask them to join us.

I settle on: Dal, Dreamfall, Drognar, and then the Desolation.

These are tactical decisions. Are you ready for what's to come? I am worried more about your healing.

I have to laugh. A Dread Lord (no...a Hand) making tactical decisions? "You are too far adrift, Heiassa. You have your feet in two worlds as a fae and a Hand but you can't see yourself as more than your mission right now. You need to heal or you will not be able to go further. Is now a time when you need to flit about and deal with things directly? Or should you be in seclusion while you entrust these tasks to your family? You need to recover your heart,"
Again, I laugh. My heart is scattered across cities, states, and countries. Speeding through my current tasks is my best hope for bringing my heart near again. How many people have I scattered and then lost to the wind with fervent goodbyes that I don't even remember? I probably wasn't even the same person when I said goodbye. To this, Magdalena nods. She offers me a secret I cannot share. This, I note, is unusual for her. Knowledge is knowledge and while you might judge whether the price for it is worth it, it's unusual to have a secret this grave. We find ourselves in front of the very same sprouts that Camellia showed me before she left. These, Magdalena tells me, are silver-leafed dream flowers. She had thought them extinct for thousands of years. They are flowers that bloom only following the greatest adversity (the Storm...I wonder...) and have their roots in the Dreaming She launches into the instructions immediately:

• In 15 days when they bloom I will need to collect as many as I possibly can. 7 at a minimum.
• Bran will have to make containers out of grovewood to hold them.
• I will have to transcribe specific runes on the containers, many of which I don't understand. The best I can understand is that they are time runes to slow the decay of the flowers.
• Some things she will need to fetch as I won't be able to get them myself.
• When she leaves the grove she will leave behind some things for me to work on in the interim.
• One of these is a scroll with instructions for creating a pocket of extradimensional space right next to my heart. I will be able to maintain it while sleeping but it will sap some of my energy so I must not overextend myself. The components I carry in this space will be safe from harm.
• Above all, I must not tell anyone what I'm doing.

She tells me that she will guard the flowers while I journey to Drognar, then she'll have to leave. And she waits until the very end to tell me what these flowers will do: They are one critical component of a ritual to rescue Thalien.

Once you have all of your family around you again then you will be whole.

With only 15 days to travel to Drognar, craft the containers and return I must leave immediately. I say goodbye to Andstella and Mystery and disappear into the fading storm. It's like something out of a story I would have heard as a child but instead of the wide-eyed amazement and admiration of I child I have only the single-minded focus of making this journey as quickly as I can.
I travel late into the night, playing my instrument and trying to let the heartsong harmonizer play along with me. As much as I might think myself focused and driven...the heartsong tells me otherwise. Alone in the snowy wasteland I let me instrument go silent and listen to the melody of fast-paced beats and melancholy, hopeful keening from my spell. Gradually I can pick it up again with the instrument and play along until it's a seamless duet again. As I settle down to camp I feel more at peace than I have in a while.

Day 358 - 364

I arrive in Drognar in 4 days' time, faster than we've ever travelled it before. Bran is surprised and delighted to see me; less so when I joke that I'm here to ask him to make more nails for our construction efforts.
But with his usual good spirits we spend the next three days toiling over the grovewood boxes, improving as we go. The first few crack and have to be discarded and then we manage to churn out usable containers. He watches the runes I inscribe with some concern, especially as I refer to multiple sheets of paper with fragments of the rune diagrams spread across them. Some pieces of these diagrams are so elusive to me that I can barely hold them in my mind as I inscribe them.
At the end of it we have 20 usable containers and barely a shred of leftover grovewood. Before I leave Bran gives me another project he had been working on - a beautiful case for my instrument, decorated with the sky fading through night, day, and back again.

Day 368

Twelve days after I left, I return to Dreamfall. The flowers have yet to bloom.

Campaign

Morning Glory

Protagonists

Report Date

17 Jun 2021

Primary Location

Dreamfall

Secondary Location

Drognar