{-Casrane-}
Bezyu mostly offered nervous rambling as they walked to her house.
“I’ve been trying to look into what could be causing it,” she explained. “I… was able to come up with a good guess, between my own observations and speaking with some of my ‘coworkers.’ Before you came, I’d also tried getting others to help me, but… most people have resigned to their fate here.”
“Why?” Myr asked cautiously. “Have they really just… accepted that it’s all going to happen?”
Bezyu shook her head. “They don’t think they have a choice. This is one of many parts of the situation—a delicate balance we have to maintain. Once one thing starts to falter, they see it as a matter of time before everything else does. They don’t know what to do. And we will not—or, in many cases, cannot—take matters into our own hands the way others might.”
“So, it’s kind of starting to sound like even if we fix this, it’s not going to change a lot,” Llewel pointed out. “If they’re always waiting for the next bad thing to happen, then that’s just what they’re going to do. They might have their oasis, but they’re going to focus on whatever else might happen other than what they could do to prevent it.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Casrane remarked. “But we’ve still got to try. Perhaps all we have to do is show them that there’s always a second option—a way to triumph over a situation.”
She kept the part to herself, but she wondered if she should’ve added, Or at least, figure out a way to live despite it—to find something good worth looking forward to.
“We might need a hero,” Bezyu mused. “If my efforts had meant anything, this situation might not have felt so dire now. But if you could play a role in it, and if they realized you could do much more… things will improve. I know they will.”
“But they shouldn’t rely on a hero to solve all of their problems,” Llewel pointed out. “If they’re not able to do anything on their own, then how are they going to be any better off when we’re not there?”
The idea was left unanswered, though, as Bezyu was quick to announce, “This is where I live. Just give me a moment.” She fumbled with the lock before pushing the door open and gesturing them inside. “Go on and have a seat. I just need to gather a couple of things from another room, and then we can talk about what I know.”
They all nodded and walked in with her. She soon went off somewhere else, but the rest of them settled down near the couch. Myr, especially, made care to work around the mess of papers and other items strewn across the room.
Bezyu came back with another stack of papers, setting them on the coffee table in the center of the room. “I… know these won’t make a lot of sense, but this is all the notes I’ve gathered. If you give me a moment, I should be able to sort out what you need help with….”
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“So if that’s what’s important,” Llewel began, giving a wide gesture to the room, “then what’s the rest of this for?”
She’d been shuffling through the papers before, but that made her stop and look around the room. She let out a bit of nervous laughter. “Oh, that’s, ah… what happens, when you’ve got a job like mine. I don’t often think about it—and I don’t have a lot of visitors, either. So excuse the mess, too. It hadn’t crossed my mind…”
Casrane, seeing an opportunity to make some progress, asked, “Where do you work?”
“It’s… out of the city,” Bezyu responded slowly. Maybe it wasn’t the kind of information she should be admitting completely. She shook her head. “It might make a bit more sense if we just start working on this. Then I can explain whatever else we need to.”
She pulled out a sketch of a building and showed it to all of them. “This is of a temple within Eslasera. It’s very likely to have been the ‘source’ of the oasis—up until a couple of weeks ago, there’d been a rune in its center. It took a few days for the effect to be observable, but… my ‘coworkers’ and I decided that this has to be the cause of it.”
“Do you know what it looked like?” Llewel prompted.
Bezyu nodded and pulled out another drawing. This one was colored, and nearly matched the rune that they’d seen in Ilataesi. “It was rather large—about twice as big as the size of my palm. I heard from others that it was also quite heavy. But it just disappeared one evening, and no one’s been able to determine where it’s gone since.”
Casrane, slowly, took the piece of the rune from Ilataesi and showed it to her. “Did it… look a little bit like this?”
It seemed that, at first, Bezyu was just going to take it. She stopped, though, and instead asked, “M-may I see it?” Casrane nodded and handed it to her. She looked it over carefully; it must’ve been what she was looking for, because she visibly eased to see it. But then she thought of something that made her cautious. “It… seems to be nearly identical to the one that used to be in the temple—smaller, yes, but the same overall. Where did you find it..?”
“We got it from Ilataesi,” Myr replied casually. “It caused some bad storms there, too… and really bothered a friend of ours. It had just kept growing…”
Bezyu gave a grim nod. “I believe I’ve heard one or two people claim those to be some of its qualities—they’re managed within the temple, but… outside of it, there’d certainly be some issues.”
Llewel found the opportunity to ask a new question: “Do you know anything about the specifics? It kept growing in Ilataesi. I was led to believe that wasn’t exactly normal—that it came from outside forces. But if you happen to know something…”
“I’m afraid I don’t know anything,” she said, shaking her head. “I admit, I… have spent a fair bit of time around it, but I never deeply considered its growth. I assumed it was just a special case—it didn’t seem as much of an issue while it was in the temple, after all. If there’s any more details to it than that, I was never told.”
“Then do you know anything about why or how it had been taken?”
“I don’t know much about that, either. Not many understand what it can do. At face value, it isn’t worth the effort to steal. If that had been someone’s intention, we’d have heard of it again, if not just for bargaining. There’s… a bit of propaganda around it, though I haven’t found myself believing any of those theories, either.”
“The important thing is,” Casrane said, “if we bring this to the temple, does it have a chance of helping things?”
“I’m almost certain that it will. Even if it’s not as big as it was before, it’s better than nothing—and, in time, it will grow to its original size.” Bezyu gathered up a couple of papers, though she made no attempt to put them away. “If you’re ready, we could head there now. I know where the temple is.”