Mutiny - Letters - Ean 06

[lady_mab]

The Right Honorable

The Earl of Carneath, Clarence Temple

Dear Lord Temple,

It has not yet been a full day, and I think, unfortunately, I have spoken too soon about it being a relaxing time here. Currently, it is somewhere after one in the morning. I left my pocket watch in my room, I did not think to bring it with me, and I can’t go back there or I will just pace and fret.

The day proceeded much as I expected that it would. The crew went about their tasks, Arculf and I double checked the repairs to the ship, and Grissa went to spend well-deserved time with his family. Pasha and Adi have taken quite quickly to Tazyrr and Trielae, and what’s more, the twins seem to… well, if not welcome their presence, then accept it in due course.

I did not see the others for the rest of the day, as I had not planned to. I busied myself with the flow of reports from home and your letters and the usual.

At some point, I was paid a visit by the god Rimu. Even after all these years, the shock of a living god sitting across from me has still not worn off. (Perhaps I would understand better if I met the god-king of Gwaelod, but he does not appear to outsiders, not even when we negotiated peace with his people.) He asked after my health, as he does. Informed me that this slow spreading curse as we have come to call my own situation has not worsened. It is a bleak reassurance, but I have tried to stop worrying about it.

He must have sensed something, because he set aside his tea and asked if there were any changes, anything he could not see. I told him of my dreams (have I told you? That they come with increasing frequency these days? Ever since I left Albion, it is like a steady noose around my heart that pulls just too tight. I thought it merely the usual anxiety that I have learned to cope with, but now, I am not sure), I told him of my increased worries.

Ironic, isn’t it -- I improve mastery over my own abilities, and in doing so, I feel worse for it.

Rimu hesitated before speculating that it could just be an increased anxiety. He does not dabble with the spirits that have tied themselves to me, though his curiosity was originally piqued because of, as he calls it, the memory of poor health. Not a spirit of its own, but something that clung to me after my childhood illness. The thing that drew those spirits to me in the first place.

But that is neither here nor there. It is our usual run of conversation, and I am stalling. Wrapping my head around the events of the last hour.

Rest assured: I am healthy, physically. Better, mentally, to know I will have this opportunity to (mostly) relax.

After Rimu left, I remained in my cabin to mull over what he said. I could hear Nynae in the distance, but I did not think anything of it. We have been here several times over the last ten years. Her presence, her situation, is familiar to us, and we paid a lone wolf no heed. Those of us who have been here before, I should say.

I was awoken not long ago by an insistent pounding at my door and then Tazyrr shouting for me. And, still yet half asleep, I thought the worst had happened. The ship was burning, a member of the crew had been murdered, the sky was falling -- any number of things.

Instead, I opened the door to find the twins and Grissa, who looked far more embarrassed than I thought the urgency entailed, crammed into my doorway. Behind them, clustered together, were Pasha, Ulutka, and Adi.

Natalya has done something, I think with a lurch.

But then Grissa speaks before the twins get the chance. “The basic situation,” he explains, “Is that they believe they have found a way to save Nynae from the madness that plagues her.”

There is too much to unpack from that simple statement that I did not have the time or the coherence to ask for. So I stand there in shocked silence.

He suggests that we speak to discuss the various options that the crew wishes to take.

We meet in the map room, and I ask them to start from the beginning.

For once, the twins do not seem keen on being the ones to dictate the tale. They look to Pasha, who looks mortified at being put on the spot. Slowly, painfully, he says, “We might be able to uncorrupt her island.”

For all the things I thought they would say, even after Grissa announced it just moments before, I did not think it would be this. “And what are you going to attempt that the gods here have not already attempted? What makes you think that now is the time?” After a hundred years, what does it mean that they could shift it? Who are these people who stand before me, to be able to accomplish that?

Pasha, a bit braver now, mentions that he had somehow gained the trust of the goddess, despite the madness she has. That, maybe, she wants to be saved. And that she wants them to save her.

When I ask Grissa for his opinion on the matter, as these are his gods, his people, he had the expression of a man clearly in conflict. To go against something that had been ingrained in his culture for a century, to go about it at the hands of outsiders. But the desire to set to right something that has plagued a goddess of his faith for so long… That, perhaps, outweighed the negative feelings.

He said that there is the chance that an outsider’s perspective is perhaps what the goddess needs, that outside hands might be able to do something where her own kin and kind couldn’t. (The possibility that she acts outside of reason, outside of logic, does not escape him, as he’s not certain how much of her faculties she still remains after being cut off for so long, after being reduced to pure chaos.)

So I ask the group at large, “What are these options that you are wishing to explore?”

The twins do a marvelous attempt at appearing like this question does not make them uncomfortable. Though when Pasha, in turn, puts them on the spot, the attempt at subtlety flees and they full on grimace.

Knowing them as I do, I wonder if it’s not something that they would want to tell me in confidence. A part of the history that they know I’m aware of, that their more “direct method”, as Pasha put it, is not what he expects it to be.

There is a lack of the hemming and hawing that they do when they try to dance around a subject. There is a seriousness to their expressions that denotes the weight of what they plan on telling me. Here they stand, soldiers, ready to act.

They lay out the details of their plan: They believe there is the possibility that they could remove whatever the malignant cause is directly from Nynae’s well. “If it’s not too large of an entity,” Tazyrr adds, and I wonder what sort of thing must be down in that well. They want to go back and get a better idea of what they are dealing with, now that they have a theory in mind.

(Go back is a phrase I latch onto, and one that makes Grissa lower his gaze. No one mentioned having been on the island in the first place, but then again, how else would they have expected to receive the blessing of Nynae? Did I honestly think that she would have visited them here, on Ydir, simply because she had a feeling about these new arrivals? No there is something else, another part of this adventure, that they have not told me, because it does not matter to the situation at hand. And I worry.)

Trielae adds that they only wish to run a diagnosis once they get to the island, but that “we can’t make any promises”. They cannot promise that this will be something that they can do, that can be done.

Or, perhaps, they are not certain that they can promise it will be a simple reconnaissance mission.

“I can’t predict that something wouldn’t happen,” Tazyrr says, and I am certain we both know of the unpredictability of war.

“We have no intention,” Trielae says with all seriousness, and I wish as much as they do that by speaking those words, we could will them to be true.

I do they only thing I can in that moment. “Grissa or I will go with you and accompany you.” I let them know that I cannot allow them to go unsupervised in case something does happen. Our presence is only to ensure a modicum of damage control.

If something happens, I would like either one of us to be there to help control it.

A part of me, a small part that I have gotten better at ignoring, wants to be there for the sheer curiosity of it.

A captain first, a scientist second. I don’t know if it is the presence of the twins that makes this harder to maintain, that I feel like I am once again a soldier, Sebastian’s aide, able to move freely and take chances. To delve into these questions that fascinate me and search for answers.

“I don’t think there is much that you can do to control the situation if something does happen but… we can’t say no.” Tazyrr says this like a man ready to face execution. It is a heavy weight, dragged out of him and does not offer any relief after having been spoken.

I wonder if I make it better by reminding him that he is technically not part of my crew. They are not signed, they are not gaining wages. He is not under my authority.

He is allowed to say “no”.

I can tell that he wants to believe me, and then there is a sort of resigned set to his shoulders as he sighs. “Well, technically I have to say yes because I need one of your crew mates because he’s the only one that has charmed the goddess’ heart and has been allowed entrance.” He turns to look at Pasha, and there is so much I cannot believe I have missed in such a few short hours.

Pasha, charming goddesses now? How much of him had to bleed to elicit that sort of reaction from Nynae, to pierce through the haze of the chaos. How much of him has he given up, surrendered, to gain her trust?

How much of himself does he see in her, and is this the right move for both of them? If they fail, will that destroy him? Will that lead him to believe that he, too, cannot be saved? (Pasha, you are not a being of chaos, you are not an aspect that people pray to. You are your own person, and the chains that bind you are ones that you are making steps to pull free.)

Grissa volunteers to take the five of them back to Nynae’s island. “These are my people,” he says, though I do not know if he means the crew, or the culture that they are going to be attempting to amend. “So I will take responsibility.”

All I could do was to send them off with a “be safe”. Ignoring the resignation on Grissa’s face, the knowledge that there is something that he will not say to me in front of the others. The determination in Tazyrr’s expression, in Pasha’s. The danger that they set off to confront, and I remained behind my desk, asking them to be safe.

It’s not that I miss being in the line of action -- well, perhaps, a little bit of it is. I spent so long between the various fronts during the war, that to be stuck at my desk feels strange. But also, I think, a little bit of me is curious to see how the twins will perform this miracle. What Tazyrr thinks he has uncovered that the others could not do. That Pasha could open himself so freely to this goddess that she would trust him.

That something could upset Grissa so, who is normally so reserved, the bastion of calm in stormy seas. I cannot press him for answers, but I hope that he will tell me.

I hope that--

There is a knock at my door. I will leave this letter for now, because it is the exhausted ramblings of a man in the middle of the night. I hope the next will bring better news.

All my love,

Ean