I know that Teuila’s snark was because she has dozens of copies of Gae Buidhe in her inventory, and can make more, so I stifle a chuckle at her attitude. Te continues, unabashed, “So, right, anyway, also got Shellcracker’s Iceflame Spark, this here armor, it’s good at elemental thingies, ice, fire, lightning. Stuff still hurts, but he takes about half of the damage, and uses that to heal the other half of the damage that hit me. He used to be called Balchar’s Flame, but, well, my Airhead went and overwrote the artifact’s soul or something, you can see it’s colored like Air’s soul now—.”
Teuila is interrupted once again as Kinzul asks, “Your who, did what to an artifact?”
Teuila shrugs and responds, “Airhead, that’s Reggie, because Reggie’s an airhead sometimes. Anyway, yeah, they broke some sort of soul binding thing with someone else, and overwrote Icey’s soul, thus the name change. Essie also used to have a different name, I forget, something like requiem for the wounded or something scarier sounding. Silent Song is nicer. But also I can sort of leap basically however I want, pretty fast, partly because I can control gravity, bosons, quarks, gravitons, within my immediate range, like touch range. Friendly stuff is easier to affect than unfriendly stuff. The gravity stuff is natural to me, according to the Sisters, so I’ll always be able to do it, all the time.”
Kinzul’s astonishment is clearly written across her charcoal-porcelain features. Kinzul asks, “You’ve spoken with the Sisters Hidden in the Mist as well?”
Teuila rolls her eyes as she responds, causing me to gulp at Te’s audacity. Te answers, “Of course, that’s where Jarrah sent us to try to catch up with Lil, which, by the way you butt, why the hell did you make the Enookie buddies promise to not tell us where you went? Do you know how much happened there because of that!?”
Teuila’s ire rises, and I can sense the sadness looming within, the loss of Dawn is surfacing, pushing other emotions towards the fore as it bubbles up within her. I squeeze Teuila’s right hand, and left shoulder comfortingly. I kiss her left bicep, and shake my head as my forehead rests atop my hand atop her shoulder.
Lil pouts while answering, “I’m sorry Te. I couldn’t get my head screwed on right back then, I needed time. I couldn’t know how long I would need, so I cashed in my favor and asked for time. My It’s-a-secret, I didn’t mean to hurt you guys. I missed you too. There’s something you’re not saying, and you’re so mad, and crying, I don’t get it.”
Lil is right, Teuila is seething with fury as hot tears spill down her cheeks. Teuila virtually growls, “I need to excuse myself. I need some air. Not you Air, though that would help. You stay and explain though. Please. I can’t handle it.”
I nod sadly as I squeeze Teuila’s hand reassuringly, before she extricates herself from our position, and is gone in a flash. I draw a shuddering breath, trying not to sob, and I blink back tears in my own misty eyes. Where to begin?
I start out, recapturing the moments of our Rayileklian journey, laying out the scope of the tale that describes the major players, and the events that have transpired. It takes some time to build up how important Dawn was, not just to us, but to Aasimovia, and possibly all of Rayileklia. Luni is aghast as she puts the pieces together first, very early in the tale, and I can see the turmoil within her as she struggles with whether or not to come to me and offer me comfort, knowing the emotional distress I’m in. Lil and Kinzul ask silly, or practical questions, respectively, about various segments in my journey. Lil comments on me basically getting blown up by dynamite, when Dippy and I saved each other, and I shudder, trying not to lapse into panic at the thought of rock elementals.
Covering the Cult of the Bright Lord, Kinzul is impressed, and glad that we’d taken down their operations around the Cathedral of Blood, however minor that it might have been. She admits she’s positive that Terrorzin is somehow cowed by, or in league with, the Celestial Emperor. She also explains that we’ll be needing to dig for more evidence of that, to figure out what their plans are, to be able to ensure that we stop them, in case anything has been put into motion.
As I cover the bit about Milbert of Navica, near the Castle Inn in Victo, Luni’s face goes pale, ghost-white. I describe how I wept for Selunie, even though she was only a character from my dreams, and Luni hides her face as she cries sympathetically. I explain how Selunie must have died around the time we arrived on Rayileklia, and that I wish we’d arrived in Victo instead, so that we perhaps could have done something to save her. I barely prevent myself from wailing as I once did in the cellar of the Castle Inn in Victo. I can’t explain why her death hit me so hard, to those that are assembled. They weren’t there with me on the journey, and even those that were with me, could barely make sense of it.
I have to pause, because I’m reliving so many hurts, and it’s building up to one of my greatest failures, and a pain that lingers so deeply within me, that I can barely bear the strain of it upon my soul. When we’d essentially beaten Milbert, though he was dealt with for us, we came into possession of a lot of knowledge, which we’ve slowly been translating into power. I explain how Bud, Requiem for the Windless Wilds, seems dormant now, but it was thanks to him that we made it safely into the Heart of the Wilds, the Fae’s Wilds.
I explain training with Jarrah, discovering that I can not wield any sort of mnemonic, and that my powers defy classification. I draw a shuddering breath, loosing a sob and a sigh afterwards. So many emotions are swirling up within me. I gulp back saliva and shake my head, gently rattling it, trying to shake loose my demons, so that I can focus on the task at hand.
I cover how we’d faced difficulties in the heart, how I almost died there several times, and how we left, anxious to see the Sisters Hidden in the Mist. While speaking of our time in the heart, Kinzul is very keen on learning exactly what I did in the fight with Sindred, that stripped and overwrote the artifacts of their soul-bonds. She’s also alleviated to hear that the wands which petrify dragons were all used up, on me. I allow myself to snort a disdainful laugh, as she realizes how tasteless such a comment is, since the act basically killed me.
When I describe Dawn’s final days, while we stayed with the Sisters, there is a somber air, and even Lil isn’t oblivious enough to misunderstand any longer why Teuila was so upset about us being delayed in the Hidden Heart. I break down weeping as I try to describe it.
Through sobs, I half mumble, half wail, “The, glp, the curse, it was closing in on her, shredding her soul, taking every last bit of her essence. She died crying fearfully in my arms, begging me to stay with her, unable to even tell that I remained with her to the end, as the curse stole her senses from her. She disintegrated in my arms! I grasped the curse, the strings of magic, and I pulled with all my might, and magic tried to fight back, it tried to claim me too, but I managed to save three infinitesimal specs of Dawn, somehow preventing our memories from being wiped. And then I failed all the more, because I sent them through the void, in the direction of Can’Z’aas, hoping to give her the possibility of a rebirth someday. There’s no space in the void! No speed! No velocity! No travel! No time! Her soul particles can’t make progress towards Can’Z’aas! Do you understand how utter and absolute my failure was!?”
I burst into tears, and I’m wracked with sobs. Lil leans into his mother for support, as he weeps openly for me, feeling the subconscious blame that Teuila had placed on him for the loss of Dawn. It’s not Lil’s fault. My time with Jarrah Bettergrove was well spent, and I wouldn’t have been any better prepared had we struck out for the Sisters a week earlier. It’s my failure, and I emphasize that over, and over, and over.
As I begin to tear my hair out in frustration, and alternate between screaming at myself, and wailing in loss, I find Luni kneeling in my lap, cupping my face with her hands. She brings our foreheads together and then drapes her arms over my shoulders, to squeeze me tightly. Kinzul’s expression is plain as day that she understands the grief of loss, totally and completely. She offers no judgment, no complaint, only a silent tilt of her head, the nod of understanding.
With my heart hammering home the ache of loss, reminding me how heavy the weight of my grief is, I nearly faint as the blood sends alternating waves of high and low pressure about my cranium. I’m exhausted, and spent, but haven’t even really covered my abilities. I also haven’t covered the Felgre horde, or the evacuation of the Aasimovians, or the vampire me.
Resigning myself to bottling my pain in order to address it later, I continue with my tale, the story that brought us to finally reunite with Lil. The bit about the vampire version of me draws confused glances, but thankfully they hold their questions, because I can’t bear pausing this tale any more times. I gloss over the battle with the Felgre horde, and this time, Kinzul understands that in my grief, I don’t want to be pressed for details at the moment. Lil holds his tongue as well, trying to process how upset Teuila must be. Lil knows Teuila almost as deeply as I do. He understands how mixed up her emotions can get when they’re stronger ones. He understands why she fears being emotional, and letting her emotions show, because of things like this, where irrational anger will come out in place of the sadness she feels. Even with all that understanding, he’s hurting because he knows that in some way, he hurt his It’s-a-secret. He knows that there is some tiny part of what they share that is irreparably cracked, damaged by the delay, the deflection, the avoidance.
Drawing a shuddering breath, I finally explain basically the last four weeks, the canyon, meeting Astridus and Olashax, nearly losing Teuila, getting her back, having to part ways with our new friend Tiktik, and everything else. The bit about Olashax freezing Teuila sets a fire in Lil’s eyes like I’ve never seen before. The fury that burns within him is the desire for vengeance, and I can tell a tiny part of that vengeful desire is backed by his wish to repair his relationship with Teuila. Lil manages to laugh at the bit where I describe crawling through a hydra, and napping within it, as I downplay the urgency with which I passed out inside of it. Lu simply continues to kneel in my lap, and simply brush my hair, continually finding strands that fall in front of my face, to push behind my ears.
Gulping, and panting with the exhaustion of the emotional roller-coaster of reliving these last few months, I draw a shuddering breath for a moment so I can finally describe myself. I start, “Right, so now you know how we got here, but you don’t know me, who I am, or the powers I possess that left me capable in the face of all these atrocities. I’ve had my nerve pathways irrevocably damaged, and tunneled through by lightning, I’ve been point blank next to explosions, I’ve had a blinding torch’s light attempt, and fail, to draw forth my soul. I walked through an annihilating aura of disintegrating radiation to end the Cult of the Bright Lord’s actions in the Cathedral of Blood. I’ve been poisoned, stabbed, crushed, beaten, and I literally come back stronger from each affront, because of my Can’Z’aasian digital critterkin adjacent biology. I’m an archsorcerer that is incapable of using menmonics, yet I can can cast at least eighth circle magics, and enable permanency in certain enchantments. I’ve a repertoire of spells that is expanding every week or so, and an S P pool that grows continuously as well. I’m literally operating my body through internal lightning. I’m Reggie Shellcracker, and while Teuila was described as having precise control over the forces of attraction, the power that the Sisters claimed are inherent to me are summed up in a single word. Nothing.”