Day 411
Our pubcrawl ends with Kaide, Alec, and I in a beautiful, childlike treehouse inn. Van has pressed a slip of paper into my hand and promised that it will take me to see him and Anna tomorrow by some magic that I'm too tired to identify. Presumably it will become clear tomorrow.
The concierge, a young summer fae, shows me to a large tented room that would normally fit five or six regularly sized fae and leads Alec to a separate room. I am happily taking in the colours and delicate fabric when she returns with a basket of food and asks to chat for a while.
You seem familiar... Sometimes this happens to me - a stranger will look familiar and the next day we share a table at a crowded tavern and so I know I must be remembering something in the future. It's never been this intense before...you feel like a big sister. I remember that we have conversations, like we talked about something important!
Of course we sit and talk, nestled amongst soft pillows that are gentle on the wings (I must make some of these for home - here I have been resorting to perching myself on elf-sized furniture). With a prompt as vague yet specific as "something important" I know we must have something to do with family and so I tell her why I'm here: Eldritch spirits.
To my surprise she knows of them and where they gather and even something of how to speak with them. When she was much younger she had an eldritch song stuck in her head and her mother took her to the Grotto where the spirits gather. It sounds as though her mother is one of the Vanguard and remembered meeting spirits there with whole memories and not just the vague impressions of the fae of seasons. As Ameni tells me about the gentle, slow tree spirits I sift through the faces in Dreamfall and try to place one that reminds me of her.
Instead, I just ask her name: Castevi. She's a young wildling who has taken a completely different approach to Dusk than me. The lucky fae gets to sleep until noon and still looks bleary-eyed until tea-time but as soon as the sun dips beneath the trees she's like a cat dashing after a mouse. Explaining this necessitates an explanation of the fae of Day and Night, which I think I do a better job of than with Alec. But Ameni is quiet as I talk about how long they can expect to live.
I'm going to make her sad, aren't I?
Which...of course, in a way that is all too familiar to me. In the same way that I sort of suspect some members of my family to find their own path to an extended life (how long does a true dragon live...?) this time I can reassure Ameni that if she wants, she could also be this type of fae. All of the Vanguard chose this path and so could she. But more importantly for now I can help them find each other again - they could meet in Drognar or Ameni could make her way to Dreamfall or Castevi could accompany Andstella when she make her first visit to the Northern Grove proper.
It is this joy of reunion that we carry deeper into the night, sharing hot cocoa and singing together while she teaches me eldritch songs and I teach her songs from my own memory. The song she teaches is in the eldritch language (I hadn't realized there was another language!) and it muses on the nature of growth, stretching upwards with your branches and sheltering those who come beneath your canopy. It is a very, very tree-like song. I can't wait to see what Kadia thinks of it!
Day 412
Much earlier than I would prefer I wake to find fresh pastries and a delightfully caffeinated tea waiting for me courtesy of Ameni. Fuelled by food and tea, Kaide and I set off into the town to find Anna using the slip of paper. In the light of day (and now clear-headed) I am delighted by its magic - it has some sort of anchor point keyed into it and then it traces out the clearest path to find its anchor at the height we are at. It points us around corners and spins to direct us down roads until we find ourselves at a sprawling blue house painted as a gradient between sky and sea. On the steps is a young human girl knitting something very magical. She tells us that it is a blanket to keep the new babies safe and warm as she leads us in to find "third mother".
Inside the home is as tasteful as I've ever seen for a human dwelling, especially the sunroom where we find Anna reclining on a chaise surrounded by plants and the sound of water flowing from a fountain. She is a tiny, tiny woman with an enormous belly.
You have interesting magic! Both elf and fae but neither of them diminished. A human with two bloodlines has both of them diminished but yours both feel full.
Anna is a
fascinating mage interested in the mixing and blending of magic. She laughs and agrees when I tell her that human magic simply doesn't play well with others. When the dust has settled on everything I'm working on I envision long conversations with her, Tira, Alwen, and Amytri. It's a research group I am so anxious to put together!
One of Anna's major projects right now is in blending two unusual schools - illusion and fire. The winged cat that she conjures is visually flawless, has heft and weight, purrs, and gives off heat like it has been sunning its fur for a while outdoors. It's the most lifelike illusion I've seen...it's fascinating.
The thing she's missing is the magic of will that would allow such a creature to act on its own. There are pieces she's collected here and there - sword spirits from an ancient Dwarven kingdom in the mountains, bits and pieces from the Raita (I correct her language) but it hasn't clicked yet. I tell her about elvish magic that transfers a person's will into something else in an act of sacrifice, something adjacent to what she is doing. But a quick glance at Kaide reveals that she knows precisely how to do what Anna is doing.
Like a good teacher she shows Anna a piece of the puzzle: Runes to conjure a spirit out of water that will reinvigorate itself and continue fighting. They were invaluable against the Ingans, of course. The circles she jots down are complex and Anna seems almost aghast that her project has created itself in terribly difficult circles that someone else scrawled out from memory. Kaide smiles and tells her that it's just ancient magic that everyone else has forgotten - it's still a complex project that she will need to continue working on.
What follows is a delicious conversation about theory and combining layers of magic that normally would not fit together. Anna shows us the laminated scrolls of circles that she has been laying atop one another to create an extended three-dimensional circle: A magic cylinder, I suppose. For a moment Kaide and Anna carry the conversation as I get completely lost in the combination of this cylinder concept and what Tira and Bran and I might do with
time. Contingency magic monitors the present time and searches for its trigger before releasing itself. What Bran described about falling through time and emerging at a different point is just moving through still another dimension... Here, Anna has clearly extended a two-dimensional concept in a way that might have turned out nonsensical but is clearly working.
I recall the guidance I had once given Hella: If it seems so obvious that it's shocking no one has done it before, stop what you're doing and consult your teacher. I can work on this theory (alone, with Kaide later) but it's not something to experiment with yet.
When I have shaken off this tangent the conversation has moved towards how an illusory cat might understand what it is to be a cat. My own illusion work is well-equipped for this and I demonstrate the difference in painting from your own conception of what an illusion should look like compared to painting directly from your memory without guiding the vision. An illusory creature might be able to do the same if you infuse it with all your memories of what a cat is, and then it might develop its own understanding if it interacts with other cats. In my mental journal I draw out the circles I might use for this and find my heartsong magic leaking into the runes. The result is an accompanist who might play with me under simple direction, shaping the heartsong to suit something that I'm playing by myself. I can't wait to try it with one of our parrots and send it back to Liliales.
I will have to send my son here as well, along with some other Vanguard wizards. This is a person I want to share magic with. The first step, of course, is to teach her how to make a letterbox. I anticipate long nights of rapid letters between my budding research group when we have the time.
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