Mutiny - Letters - Ean 07

[lady_mab]

The Right Honorable

The Earl of Carneath, Clarence Temple

Dear Lord Temple,

I think I am prepared to speak on the rest of what happened that first night we were here. I write to you with the strictest confidence, as these letters are personal. And I promised them that I would not report this back to His and Her Majesty, and I only tell you because you are the other half of my heart.

We will start at the beginning, according to Grissa’s recounting. He condenses it for me, and I condense it further to recount to you.

He took the four -- Pasha, Adi, Tazyrr, and Trielae, to the temple complex on Ydir, and there they found three small black stones in an offering bowl to Nynae. He still has one of the stones, which he hands over to me, along with a letter -- but that will come later.

It is more like shale in texture, but small like a river stone. It is darker than pitch, and all light seems to be swallowed up by it. Even a holy light, summoned forth by Grissa for the purposes of demonstrating, is consumed by this.

I feel the terror before I feel the curiosity, but he asks me to investigate it, and so I promised him I will.

He says before he can stop them, the four step through a shimmering portal that appears, as if by magic, behind Nynae’s altar. It vanishes before he can follow, and he is left by himself at the temple complex.

I cannot even begin to imagine what he felt then. He had a hard time putting it into words, the sheer horror at losing them, the fear, the concern. Being stuck there, uncertain if he should leave to find me or to stay and wait. And if they came back, what then? What would be the state of them?

Nearly an hour passes before he is joined by Ydir and Rimu, who lead Ulutka between them. And, immediately, the portal opens back up and out stumbles Pasha, Adi, and Trielae, carrying an unconscious Tazyrr.

Perhaps the gods knew something was amiss, because Rimu went to Tazyrr immediately to heal him. He had tiny, thin green lights appearing and flickering to life beneath his armor, Grissa says, though he doesn’t know what the cause of it is. At least then, he didn’t. He has a guess, now.

Through back and forth between the others, Ydir attempting to gather information from them, he learns that they were transported to Nynae’s island. They were confronted by Nadah, who warned them to turn back, but they pressed on anyway.

Pasha asks Nynae if they can try, and she lets them.

Tazyrr reaches for something in the well, the source of her corruption, and he blacks out.

Perhaps “blacks out” is too mild a term for what happened. Grissa himself doesn’t know the full details, though Ydir and Rimu explain a bit to him later. The source of corruption, like this small stone that I was given, that was left on Nynae’s altar, pulls life -- pulls essence, being -- from anything it touches. Small as this sample is, the one in her well is huge. He is no match for it, and it leaves him nearer death than anyone would like.

Pasha does not react well to this failure, and he does not react well to Ydir’s defensiveness. Even at the time of this recounting, hours after, Grissa still seethes at the way his god was treated. At Pasha’s inability to simply listen, to behave rationally.

“He’s not a soldier,” I remind Grissa.

“No,” Grissa agrees, “He’s a child.”

It’s hard to remember how young they are. They they were born in a world at the end of the war, and to be sure, Pasha has led an incredibly difficult life until the point where he was brought onto the ship. But that does not make him old, and it does not make him wise. It does not prepare him for the quick pace and harsh consequences of a missed step.

So short-sighted, Ydir had said, and I am inclined to agree. Pasha is impulsive, destructively so, and he does not think through the things that he says sometimes. He begs to be put back on the island, because he is a “foreigner” (Ydir’s word), and thus he should be below Ydir’s concern.

And here, I see some of Grissa’s frustration leaking over from pure anger at Pasha’s behavior to regret, something akin to pity. That this person (this child) would be so willing to throw himself on the chopping block. Increasingly so, it seems, but again, that is later.

Rimu, eventually, agrees to allow the twins to study these stones from Nynae’s altar -- and he leaves one with Ydir and takes Tazyrr and Trielae to his island.

(I had mentioned to him earlier, when he came to visit, if he might look in on them the same way he looked in on me. That there was something beneath the surface that could not be healed, but would help explain. I am glad to hear that it sounds like they are willing to work with him, which could bode well if they remain on Aelem.)

Ydir takes those remaining to Muya.

A strange desire, to want to visit her. But perhaps none of the others would have wanted to say what needed to be said out loud: “The only way to fix this is to sacrifice something else.”

As Grissa explains to me, one would need to take her place, or to take the nothingness into themselves. And then someone would have to replace that which was lost, to maintain the balance.

Muya asks why this is so important to them. “What interests you so much in saving something that is not yours?”

Pasha is far kinder to her when he tries to explain the situation, about how he feels about all of it. “Something did this to her, altered her against her will. The solution seems to be to cut her off, but all that will do is… it doesn’t make it stop whatever is happening to her. It’s not right.”

No, it isn’t, Pasha. It isn’t right. But that is the way of things.

“Not even for us, is everything fair, is everything justifiable,” Muya explains to him, and I can hear the exhaustion in Grissa’s voice as he recounts it to me. The knowledge that it isn’t right, and it isn’t fair, but his people have combatted this for a century. There is the edge of insult in his exhaustion. “It could have happened to any one of us, and it could have landed on my temple, and it would have been awful, but people would have adjusted and moved on, But it landed on the temple of the aspect of chaos, and people have adjusted and moved on. If it had tampered with the ocean or our agriculture, it would have been devastating.”

She concludes with, “I don’t know that there is an easy solution, or there is one that you could willingly accept, or there is a solution that you could walk away from and feel like you have done something good.”

And that is the nature of our work. That is the knowledge we keep in the back of our mind every time we make a choice.

And, perhaps, Pasha still doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand the sacrifice he is so willingly to give will not be willingly accepted. Choices and consequences.

“Just because he finds himself disposable does not mean that others do,” Grissa says, his hands gripped together on my desk. He doesn’t look at me as he talks, and as our conversation goes on, I wonder what sort of expression he is keeping from me, what sort of truth he doesn’t want me to learn on his face.

Pasha continues to practically beg to allow himself to be used as a sacrifice, despite being told again and again that it would be useless. My stomach twists hearing this -- it was not so long ago that I was telling you how much of myself I saw in him, the potential, and now here he is: Ignorant, willing to throw himself away, even if it does nothing.

I am speaking from a position of privilege, and I know this, you have told me this before. But never in my darkest days did I think that my potential was worth nothing. I had the confidence in myself to know that I could do great things, and so I ran away from my title and my family and enlisted as a nameless person. To do work that would help.

Pasha does not have that confidence, has never thought he was worth something elsewhere. Have I been remiss in not nurturing that in him? At what point am I coddling him, and at what point am I intervening from letting him traverse a dangerous line?

This is the argument that Grissa has with him, though it is less reflective and more brutualy to the point: “You’re a mortal, it would rip you from limb to limb, and then you would scatter among star stuff, and there won’t be anything to remember you by, your soul would be gone, there would be nothing left to mourn, and we will be no step closer to solving this.”

What Grissa does not say, but I can glean, is that much of his anger comes from the way Pasha’s words turned this from a problem about Nynae, into his own worthlessness, in his own failure to save her, into his problem.

A puzzle that cannot be solved with empathy, and cannot be solved by crying.

(He’s not a soldier, he’s just a child.)

Grissa confesses to me that he was horrified at the idea that he might have to take Ydir’s position, but he says that he would, if asked, without flinching.

The bravery that must take, to rewrite the entire course of your history. (Do not throw it away, Pasha, take command of it.) To do what your god would ask of you, and to ask him of a similar sacrifice.

“I would have asked his favor to take Nynae’s place, or to take her burden, and he would have asked me to become the new god of the ocean,” Grissa says. “I do not doubt this is what would have happened, and when I stepped out of Muya’s temple to speak to Ydir, he understood. He would be willing to make this sacrifice because it would be for the good of his sister, one he stood on equal footing with, and the payment made would be my own life tied to his.”

Rest assured, Clarence, this is not the solution that they eventually reached. There is hope yet, but for all the celebration that their victory calls for, there are more questions, and unknown consequences.

But Grissa, when forced with the choice, made the offer with a clear head, and I do not think any of us would have been half as brave as he was in that moment. There is bravery in noble sacrifices, but there is cowardice and ignorance in hasty ones.

The twins and Rimu join them on Muya’s island, and the twins announce that they have a plan. It is an incredibly risky one, and as such, Grissa will not let them proceed without speaking to me.

So they do, and I send them back off again, because I did not know as much then as I do now.

Would I have made a different choice if I had heard all the possibilities? If I had known what Tazyrr’s plan was, if I had known that Grissa had been one step away from becoming the new god of the oceans. If I had known all the stakes, would I have made such a gamble?

I knew that their so-called reconnaissance was, well, not a lie. As I said previously, it was a truth that they wish they could have maintained.

What came out of their return to Nynae:

Tazyrr was able to transfer the stone from one point to another.

Nynae is, for all appearances, cured.

No sacrifices needed to be made.

Confronted with such a close call, Grissa has gone to spend time with Ydir, with his family, and I have let him know that if he needs more time, he is welcome to it. I have left a larger offering with Ydir than I have in years past, and with Elder Attaria as well. Ydir’s willingness to take the poison from Nynae shows his devotion to his work with Grissa, and the amount of respect that he gives unto his cleric, and I cannot be more thankful for his trust. The same to Elder Attaria for her grandson, though I will not pry to see if she knows how close she was to losing him. It is not a wound that will need to be revisited.

But more to the point, as I work through these things: Tazyrr’s ability to manipulate this substance which, through a base level of study, seems to resist all influence of any kind. At the time of my conversation with Grissa regarding the subject, I had not had the opportunity to study the stone, but at the time of writing, I have given it a bit of consideration.

What energies I am able to manipulate, the stone is simple able to swallow. As I understand it, from the way that Grissa said Rimu and Ydir described it, the stone is perhaps not the cause of the severing to the plane of water, which happened across all the islands, but is the reason for her madness. It fell into her temple, and landed in her well the same time that everyone else was cut off, and this is what prevented the darkness from spreading.

Luck, perhaps. Pure luck that saved these islands, though it does beg the question of what this material is, where it came from, and how it functions.

To the point of where this particular stone has come from, there is a character who made an appearance that intrigues me. According to Grissa, the man calls himself Ma’sud, a salesman of sorts, who simply appeared in the temple once Tazyrr extracted the stone from the well.

Grissa confesses that he did not pay attention to their conversation, as his attention was on Nynae, but he heard Ma’sud mention that he was the one who left the stones on Nynae’s altar, and hoped to have the one that Tazyrr now hovered over.

In the end, thankfully, Tazyrr surrendered the stone to the so-called salesman, who then simply vanished again. (I would love to know the methods he was able to do this, and the two of them spoke of arcane magic like a thing dear and familiar, yet dying. Dead. Energies scraped together. What does this mean. How have items been used to fuel spells, how are people -- a century later -- still able to do these things? Could, perhaps, I do more if I had access to something that I could drain of arcane magic? Could I drain something at all?)

What would have happened if Tazyrr decided that this thing was more a curiosity best served in his own hands than in Ma’sud’s? Would someone have been able to stop him, now knowing what powers he could use? Would Tazyrr have turned them against any of the crew who tried to prevent him? Would Ma’sud have intervened, overpowered him, prevented it in some way?

There are too many questions but I take solace in the fact that a larger version of this stone is not aboard my ship, for I do not know what it would do to the engines.

I do not know what those who were curious to Dr. Segus’ experiments would have reacted to the stone’s presence. (The twins, for all their apparent disinterest; Pasha, in his desire for vengeance; Natalya, in her casual push for power over others. Myself… myself.)

We are nearing our end in Aelem, and at least now I have been given the respite that I desired upon our initial arrival to port. Everyone has mostly gone their own direction -- with the exception of the occasional rendezvous between Pasha, Adi, and the twins. They are clearly up to something, but strangely, I am not alarmed by their secret project. I think they will keep each other in check, in their own ways.

Additionally, I think the twins have fashioned the cells we have into a laboratory of sorts. To the very least, they have adapted to the space with great ease, and seem to find considerable comfort in spending their time there.

Certainly, the cushions they have procured from somewhere do look quite plush.

More to the matter of Tazyrr and Trielae and their position aboard the Titan… I have spoken to them, and I kept pace as we danced around the subject.

They cornered me in the embassy, where I have been spending some time sending and receiving reports from Albion (I am glad you took the time to send an official missive on the termination of our favorite junior aide in the transcriptions office, Percival Gregory; I will be sorry to see him go). We step into one of the meeting rooms, and as soon as I close the door their demeanor shifts.

Not to one on the offensive, not one of desperation. Cautious, tiptoeing.

They wanted to know what Grissa had told me. And I told them the truth, that primarily, the conversation did not revolve around them. As for my own curiosity, I did not press Grissa for those details. He mentioned what they had done, and that he promised it would stay between us. Only the crew that traveled with them to Nynae, and myself, as nature of being the captain.

He stressed the importance that it remained that way, that it does not become widespread.

“Is it important to you that it doesn’t become widespread?” Tazyrr asks, which strikes me as a weird question.

Tazyrr had asked Grissa that it remained private, saved for needing to update me, and so I took that request seriously. “It is important to me what you think should be the result of this,” I tell him honestly, and this seems to surprise the two of them.

That I would take what they want, what they would desire, into consideration. “You’re not going to tell the empire about us? Don’t you have to?”

I assured them that I would only tell “the empire” what is a danger to them. And, as far as they thought, were the two of them presenting themselves as a danger to the crown and myself?

They confirmed that they were not. “At what point do we become a danger to the empire?”

I find it very strange that they keep referring to Albion as an “empire”. She was, perhaps, when we first met, but just barely. Only I have a feeling the pair of them have walked Assalia far longer than I originally thought, and they lived to see Albion at the height of her Empire days. But, also, I understand their concern, coming as they did from a faction that turned them into the weapons we met in Agartha, who did not care what their opinion was, and made them a danger.

I warned them, as I warned Natalya, that causing harm to any of the crew is when they would be considered a threat.

From the looks on their faces, this displeased them. Because they would want the authority to act against Natalya if she took their autonomy from them. And they say as much, that if they have to act defensively, then they will.

“And when that happens, I will have to review the case before passing judgement,” I tell them, and this seems, at least, to satisfy them. That I will keep their secret (and you, my heart, in strictest confidence). That, should he learn of the situation, that His Majesty would back my decisions.

I would not turn them into tools of the crown. I would not see them my own personal weapons. I would expect the same as I do from any of the crew, and while they maintain a position aboard my ship, the should expect that same level of treatment from the others as well (Natalya notwithstanding, but she is a different story that I am trying to ensure does not become a complication).

“I do not expect anything more, unless I specifically ask it of you, and you are willing to give it,” I conclude, and again, this catches them off-guard. For once, I do not feel like I have to struggle to keep up with their conversation. For once, and I think just this once, I have achieved the upper hand (through compassion, no less, I am far from the politician I think my father hoped I would be).

We leave Aelem tomorrow, and I have overwhelmed myself with thoughts and questions, possibilities and ponderings, that I cannot hope to answer.

The small stone, for what it is worth, I have passed on to Rimu for safe keeping. I will leave it in the hands of a god to get rid of. They are, thankfully, too small to do anything, but I think they will be of use to learn some of the cause and effect that happened at Nynae’s well.

I will leave now to send my final batch of reports on the scouts from Gwaelod and review incoming notes for Lemuria. I shall post this letter as well, so that you may receive it in due time. It is strange to feel like it has been so long since I have talked to you, when technically we have used the telegraph to exchange official news.

But I miss you, as I always do by this point in my tour. As I do the moment we depart from Yielden. As I do, whenever you are not at my side.

Maybe this time, I will think, whenever I miss you too fiercely. Maybe this time will be the last.

I hate that it never is. Despite everything, it never is.

For you, my heart, all my love,

Ean