Side A – Nia
Nia had expected to find her mother in Blue Falls, but the apartment which contained an echo of Naosha and Kayelle’s voices was empty.
She turned in the song, her beats undiminished brut speaking clearly of the absence she’d found. From a distance as far miles away and as close as the other side of the drumming circle, Nia heard Margrada’s answer.
Should they pull back?
No.
Could Nia find her mother? Was there anywhere else they could look?
Yes. Nia could find Naosha. As she played, she was filled with the echoes of Naosha’s absence from a dozen or a hundred places Naosha should have been. But Nia could find her.
They would push forward. Margrada would continue searching for Osdora, who’s heart Nia could hear drumming a familiar Stoneling beat which stood out sharply from the gentle melody of the woods.
Reassured that Osdora had made the journey somehow, even if the manner she’d managed to gain access to the Darkwood was unclear, Nia let that part of the song fall to Margrada’s hands along. Nia’s hands gathered up the matching beat which resonated outwards in search of Naosha.
Without Margrada’s help, Nia’s part of the song became wild and unrestrained. Where Margrada sought out Osdora, slipping past the trees and avoiding the touch of the Darkwood’s melody with almost every beat, Nia’s simply crashed through trees and stream.
With heavy hands, Nia demanded the wood provide a path to her mother and, predictably, the Darkwood refused.
Which was fine.
Nia could have claimed she hadn’t come looking for a fight, but there was a deep pit in her soul where she’d buried her discontent with so much of how the Darkwoods were structured. Expressing a lifetime of chaffing within a life which did not fit her was not perhaps the wisest of moves, but it did have the advantage that the Darkwood was used to the complaints and challenges posed by the soft-spoke Elves who lived within it.
Nia’s screaming beat was a rather different sort of challenge.
With shadows the wood tried to cloak itself, but shadows do nothing to diminish the beat of a drum.
With the cycle of life and death, growth, renewal, and cleansing flames, the Darkwood tried to answer the magic Nia hurled at it, demanding answers the Darkwood was bound not to give as it hide all within it.
They were power tools the Darkwood drew upon, but they were the forces of time, suitable for deterrence across the space of an age.
Nia wasn’t a subtle force of the ages.
She was present in the moment of her drumming.
Each beat bellowed for an answer immediately and would not wait, yielding only to the next beat and the one which followed.
“Give. Me. My. Mother.”
The Darkwood’s essence was to keep those within it hidden, but that essence was not absolute. Sunlight entered the wood. As did the winds from foreign lands. As did the hopes and fears of one of its lost daughters.
Nia rode that edge outwards, through the woods, to the hidden glens and forgotten dells.
But there was more than the Darkwood which was intent on hiding the location of Naosha M’Kellin.
As Nia played, Naosha’s captor heard the magic crashing around her and responded as best she knew how, sending Nia the sort of Troubles Nia had been so adept at avoiding in her time within the Darkwood.
Side B – Yasgrid
Ilia’s self deprecation aside, Yasgrid thought the rebirth of both the Heart and Ilia was likely to prove to be a good thing in the long run. The only tricky element was that, in the short term, both of them would vulnerable to Elshira’s machinations.
And then there was the former, perhaps, Fate Dancer to consider.
“Will you be safe here?” Yasgrid asked, casting a glance over to the Fate Dancer as an obvious amendment to her question.
“From me?” the Fate Dancer asked. “Certainly. From my former comrades? Certainly not.”
“I doubt there’s much they can do to him,” Ilia said, gesturing towards the Gardener. “I, on the other hand, am very much mortal now. So I suppose many people can be a problem for me now. Hmm, should I have held onto some of my power? Probably sensible, but no, that sounds like the misery would have continued, so this is probably for the best.”
“I can protect her,” the Gardener said.
“I assure you, if my former comrades learn of any of our existences, they will come for us along paths we cannot foresee,” the former Fate Dancer said.
“I can,” Yasgrid said. “Some of them at least.”
“Clearly,” the former Fate Dancer offered a smile of appreciation at that. “Had you not, I would still be as lost as I’d been.”
“Lost?” Yasgrid asked, uncertain what sort of change had overcome the man before her.
“When I chased you, I believed I was hunting down the worst threat the Darkwood had ever seen. There is nothing I wouldn’t have done to stop you, no price to great to pay.”
“That was fairly easy to see,” Yasgrid said.
“The question is why? Why should I have been so motivated? Why would anyone think you were so threatening to our world?”
“Likely because I am,” Yasgrid said.
“I don’t believe that. Not anymore.”
“My surviving an encounter with a hostile deity wasn’t enough to convince you?”
“Technically I survived it as well.”
“Yes and I’m still unsure how?”
“It was your fault, or perhaps you’re doing would be more accurate.”
“I don’t recall trying to save you? At the time I had my hands pretty full.”
“It wasn’t so much what you did as how you did it. Surviving the wrath of a goddess should never have been possible, but not only did you find a method of doing so, you gave that method to her, to allow her to change.”
“But you didn’t get that. I only offered one of the Hearts there.”
“Does it surprise you that people are capable of changing on their own? I admit, doing so as profoundly as ‘divesting oneself from one’s divinity’ likely benefits from a bit of outside assistance. In my case however, I had the magics I could wield as a Fate Dancer. When the reality I knew, the one I could perceive, shatter before me, I was faced with the choice of clinging to what was demonstrably a delusion, or finding a new Fate for myself.”
“How did that save you though?”
“Because the only path my life could take where I wouldn’t shatter with the world I believed to exist was to change everything I was, to let go and become someone new.”
“So your not a Fate Dancer anymore then?”
“I never was a Fate Dancer. Thanks to the example you gave, I saw that my past didn’t need to define me, and thanks to magics I held at the time, I was able to cast it away.”
He paused.
“The Fate Dancers will feel the absence I have left. They will know that Trizmel is no more. If they should find Lem, if they can connect me to the man I was, I assure you they will not rest until we are both destroyed. They cannot let people escape them as I have. And, for my part, I cannot let them hold people bound as they have.”
Yasgrid reflected on that for a moment.
“I seem to have gained some new companions then,” she said, and began plotting how she could leave them all safely behind.