Ash Bringers: The Choice to Use Them

Purpose

Emily as she was given access to more and more information about the Archon Stones before she was allowed to set foot in The Elsewhere, would frequently question the History of the world as things started to fall into place. The nature of the Portals always needing a tender, why they were only limited to just a single planet when the Wayfare Guild would tout their rhetoric about being able to shift from anywhere in material planes.
The utter lack of information past the Dawn of Truths, the scouring of certain names and records from anything that was remotely related to them. Such as; the names of the various ruins dotting the mainland continent. Despite having always stood they never seemed to age, it would seem to Emily that many of these ruins were in place of strategic importance. These ruins have never had formal names even to the governments that repurposed them to their modern equivalents. Or the fact that every major city had a vast network of buildings, street layouts, and (until recently) vast utility networks they were built upon. Cities built in the dust of former cities.
She kept requesting from every available source known to her more and more information. When the re-emergence of the Shadows during the War with the caliphate ensued, she was gifted access to more information before the eventual evacuation of the City of Huron. She recorded a conversation she had with the General leading the force repelling the darkness from the east. A Faerie named Anlyth, First Son of Syn, when she had learned through various conversations with any of the Children that their technology far surpassed what Humanity had been able to conceive she wanted to know why much of this advanced technology was not being used in this conflict.

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Ash Bringers: The Choice to Use Them

Why not bring those ships here? Is it simply because they cannot function on the branches of the Tree?
Anlyth: No, they were orginally built here, kept in stasis inside the Elsewhere. Built on worlds far from The Cradle, meant to protect this place and any other that the Shadows had struck.
What do you by the Cradle, from what I understand this entire universe was the Cradle for the Children?
Anlyth: In a way you are right. That is the name the Brownies chose for the world they were originally born on, this planet.
I see, but you can still pilot these vessels, so why not use them?
Anlyth: The Ash Bringers... We did not use lightly, they were the apex to our might. A vessel meant to focus the collective power of the Faeries into pinpoint strikes, we... how to put it. The Ash Bringers may have been warships meant to supress the infection with various different means capable to them. But, they were in reality not so much as a warship, but a weapon with a ship built around it.
What do you mean?
Anlyth remained silent for quiet some time, a distant look in his eyes. The various other Faeries and Fae soldiers around us looked uncomfortable as they waited for the Arch Valkyrie to respond. I was growing suspious that I had somehow offended them, asking this same question to them.
Anlyth: No, Child of Alnya, you haven't said anything in offense. Those weapons were of singular purpose, they were meant to eradicate... we thought... Syn had thought... The Bringers were a focus, that Syn herself would only give the orders to use. The weapon would channel all our power into a strike on the world, Syn herself fueling the reactors. We would incerate the worlds, cracking their crust to create a recurrent cycle within the core of each of these planets. Those cores were needed to complete the reaction, burning the entire planet to ash, vaporizing the entire thing in a few moments. Leaving nothing but vast clouds of dust to drift in the wind of the cosmos.
I wasn't expecting that, a thing that could have such force could even exist. So I asked, what they thought.
Anlyth: We thought, that if we had destroyed the world the infection was on and all on them, it would slow the spread. We didn't know that the Shadows didn't care until much later.
So all those lives?
Anlyth: For nothing. We didn't have a cure, we didn't know if there even was one. They suffered, and we thought we could kill two birds with one stone.
End their suffering as well as contain this infection.
Anlyth: Yes. (Though he said this with his face in him palm, as if he didn't wish the shame evident on his face to be seen. The rest of the entourage around refused to look at me, much of the same expression on their faces as well.)
Why was Syn's direct order needed?
Anlyth: She felt that if Creation must be destroyed, then let it be by the hands of the Creators. To bloody our hands that had already been subject to atrocities, we will not speak of. She felt that we had suffered enough, that she would bear the weight of that decision alone. She forebad even me from suggesting the option, she would not have us commit slaughter on such scale, let her mind bear that choice.

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Type

Journal, Personal

Medium

Paper

Authors

• The Sage of Huron: Emily Von Eule

Signatories (Characters)

• Anlyth, First Son of Syn
• The Sage of Huron: Emily Von Eule