Side A – Nia
Sometimes the best move when faced with an overwhelming problem is simply to leave it behind.
“Pelegar is going to be pretty unhappy that we just left her there when she wakes up, isn’t she?” Gossma said as llia lead them down a barely traveled path beside a burbling little brook.
“The key is that she’ll be awake,” Osdora said, from behind her, her gaze cast upwards to the towering trees above them without really seeing even a single branch or leaf.
Nia understood. She was listening more than she was looking as well, and what she was hearing was taunting her. There was a stillness in the forest.
And another stillness.
And another.
Listening for what wasn’t there was maddening. There were still the songs of birds and the chatter of insects. The wind still whistled through the boughs and branches. Leaves fluttered above and branches crunched under their feet. If she listened hard enough Nia was almost certain she could hear the far away mutterings of Elves going about the days and the hearts beating within the people around her. A song of life so very capable of distracting her from the stillness that held the answers that were so infuriatingly hiding from her.
“I’m surprised to find you involved in all this Ilia,” Kyra said. “I thought you wanted a simple and unexciting life after all your years living as you had?”
“A mortal life,” Ilia said. “What I asked for was a mortal life, and there is very little that is simple about any mortal life. But you must have known that already, did you not Seer?”
“Seer no longer,” Kyra said. “I am wondrously blind to the paths fate is following in this new age.”
“A truth which is as honest as it is deceptive,” Ilia said. “I believe I approve.”
“Deceptive?” Gossma asked.
“I truly do not know where the strands of fate, if any truly remain, are guiding us. I would even venture to guess that we are weaving them anew and as free of outside influence as any have been since the dawn of the last age,” Kyra said. “The deception, such as it is, lies in the fact that I have watched many, many futures play out and from them there are many secrets and possibilities which can be teased out.”
“But not an answer to this problem with the other Fate Dancers?” Gossma asked.
“Not in even one of the futures I gazed upon did this turn of events come to pass,” Kyra said. “Which I suspect is the only manner in which it could have.”
“Because if it could have been foreseen, the Fate Dancers would have been prepared for it,” Nia said, following the conversation since she couldn’t follow any of the stillness which was suffused the Darkwood.
“Could they have seen beyond it?” Osdora asked. “If we get them out of the Resonance State they’re in, are they going to emerge with some advantage or power they could only get by going through it?”
“The arts the Fate Dancers employed were predicated on the existence of the threads of fate,” Kyra said. “They could not have seen beyond the breaking of fate, especially not with as clouded as their vision was in those final days.”
“What was clouding their vision?” Gossma asked.
“Not what, who,” Nia said. “They fell into an alliance with Elshira who ultimately betrayed them as she had everyone else. They didn’t see that coming and that would have been a lot easier to figure out than this.”
“Can we be sure of that?” Gossma asked.
“Certainly is never the province of mortal lives,” Ilia said. “We worked very diligently to make that so. In this case however there is one we can turn to who can speak as clearly on the matter as anyone else in this age.”
“And who would that be?” Gossma asked.
“This age’s first god,” Ilia said.
Side B – Yasgrid
Karsda Naswulf wasn’t a Sorceress but that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. Yasgrid forced a relaxing breath out of her lips and fought back the surge of worry that came with the idea of someone from her old life having extensive conversations with Kyra.
Would it always be difficult to accept the child she’d once been? Or the young girl? Or the woman she’d been before the start of the year? Yasgrid couldn’t say but she felt a mote of pride at recognizing the spike of panic as lying solely within herself and breathing it out before it drove her to say or do anything foolish.
“You two were talking about me?” she asked with a touch more urgency in her voice than she’d intended to place there.
Perhaps she hadn’t breathed out quite all of the panic. Something for her to work keep working on it seemed.
“We spoke of many things,” Karsda said. “Pretty sure a few of those conversations are ones that one or the other of us can still recall too.”
“Gram? Plain language. Now please,” Margrada said, no longer at all concerned with any nerves about informing her grandmother about her coming nuptials.
“Oh, you’re just no fun at all. I raised you better than that didn’t I?” Karsda said.
“No. You raised me exactly like this,” Margrada said. “Now. Explain.”
“I think I can,” Yasgrid said, catching a glimpse of the odd limits a Seer had to labor under.
“Be my guest, literally I suppose,” Karsda said, gesturing to the home around them.
“Kyra spent months future gazing while she was being held prisoner. That included, somehow, witnessing futures where we ended up in the Stoneling lands.”
“Both of us were surprised by that,” Karsda said. “Funny how for all the paths we saw that would bring you here, it turned out the actual one looked nothing like any that we’d seen.”
“We sort of broke fate,” Yasgrid said. “And did some other stuff.”
“Heh. ‘Some other stuff’? And Mar’s complaining about me not speaking plainly?”
“I still don’t see how you and Kyra talked to each other?” Margrada said. “I thought she was just viewing the futures that might come?”
“Unless I miss my guess, that’s how your grandmother normally perceives the world,” Yasgrid said. “Not the moment we’re in but the next one to come, or farther ahead sometimes?”
“Not quite, but it’s close enough,” Karsda said.
“It’s probably not perfectly correct to say that when the two of you were observing the same events that you wound up observing each other as well?”
“Not entirely incorrect,” Karsda agreed with an amused smile dancing on her lips.
“Great now I’m picturing the two of you like a pair of old hens sitting in a theater box, heckling the rest of us from the side while we all stumble through our lines,” Margrada said.
“Not entirely incorrect,” Karsda repeated with an even more delighted smile.
“Which leaves me with one obvious question,” Yasgrid said. “If you and Kyra have been scheming together, why didn’t she come along to meet you in person?”