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“Can you tell me your name?” The priest asks. His name is Lumen Ghoris. She reminds herself of it so she can commit it to memory, the way she does with her family’s regular customers.
They’re sitting cross-legged, facing each other in the local storefront temple - the one that adults still refer to as the glassworks, even though that business moved further in long before Xandi was born. It means that there’s still some glass designs embedded in the floor, which are interesting to look at, at least.
“Xandi a Mena,” she says, and hopes that second it takes her to respond was only obvious to her. She doesn’t want to seem nervous.
“Do you remember any of your other names?”
“ ... No, not yet.”
“That’s perfectly fine. It’s why we’re here, after all. Now, please relax, take a deep breath, and let me know when you’re ready.” His voice is nice, kind. His clothes are deceptively casual in cut, but Xandi can tell by the quality of the silk that they’d cost a good amount of money. She thinks they are supposed to put her at ease, too.
She takes a deep breath. Waits a second. Waits a few more, and wonders when this is supposed to make her feel calmer. Her feet itch. The smoke from the incense makes her kind of want to sneeze. This is probably the best it’s going to get.
“Okay, I’m ready,” she says, and tries her best to sound calm. She dislikes not being able to do things, even if it’s just failing at relaxing.
The priest smiles. “Let’s start with how you first discovered that you were consecuted.”
“Well, okay, there’s this spider dream I have a lot? It’s probably a stress thing, but at the end, I would always be handing off a bag to this lady who's reaching for me - I don’t remember who she is, but she seemed important to me.”
“Can you describe this spider dream?”
“I mean, I don’t think the spiders are part of a memory, I think it’s just that I can take on too much sometimes and get stressed out. Reisa says that spiders can symbolize unfinished tasks in your dreams. Reisa is my best friend. Well, one of them. It’s the lady that’s in the dream that’s important.”
“I understand. And you’re probably right. But sometimes the first memories we have aren’t clear, and if it’s a recurring dream, it might be helpful to hear it.”
“Well, okay. I’m being chased by spiders with some of my friends - not Tsaris or Reisa, but people who are really like them, or like them to me. Like, they’re probably the most important people in my life, only I don’t know them in this life. And I’m carrying a bag with, like, the most important thing in the world in it. Sometimes I think it’s my schoolwork, sometimes it’s receipts from the store, but most of the time I don’t really know, I just know it’s super important. And we’re all running for our lives, but I slip and there’s no time to get up and one of them is reaching for me. But instead of giving them my hand, I give them the bag and she takes it and then ... It stops. I wake up.”
She suddenly realizes she’s been talking with her hands, and was just about to shift completely out of meditation position to splay her legs out on the floor. Even with the pillows, it’s uncomfortable to be down here for long. She makes herself sit up straight again.
The priest is silent. Xandi has the horrible feeling that she’s doing this wrong. Or that it’s a mistake, she’s not supposed to be here. She should have started with something else. She should have sat more still. But instead, he asks, “Do you feel like sometimes you need to put other people’s wants and needs before your own?”
“Oh yeah - I mean, it’s just me and my mom, right? She’s got a lot to handle. And I like being helpful. It feels right to be needed. Good - correct, in a way, like I’m being who I’m supposed to be.”
His- Lumen Ghoris’s, she needs to remember that name - smile returns, “That’s good - pay attention to those feelings, it may help your memories come back. You were saying that the lady was the important part?”
“Oh yeah - so, the lady - the one I’m giving the bag to, but sometimes the other one, but mostly the first one… Anyway, I started having more dreams about them. And then my tutor - well, mine and Tsaris and Reisa’s, so if you want more witnesses they were there too - he was explaining some stuff about a pretty old part of Rosohna, and I asked some questions about it because I thought I’d seen something similar in one of my dreams. And then he asked around, and even he didn’t know about it -but I did! So that’s when he talked to my parents about me maybe being consecuted.”
The priest nods encouragingly, then pauses to write something down. “How are you feeling about your experiences with returning memories so far?”
“Good, I think? It’s weird, sure, but it’s kind of nice to have some stuff already figured out.” She smiles at this. It had been so freeing, that day when she’d woken up and had thought of herself as she - not for the first time, but the first time without doubt or confusion. So many other answers still lay like unopened gifts in her future; about who she was, who she gets to be. And she is excited to find out every one.
“It is true that you might have figured out a couple things in a past life that haven’t occurred to you yet, but you may have already figured out a couple things that might have escaped your past self. It can be a confusing time, but that’s why you’ll have a guide.” He closes his notebook, apparently satisfied with these answers. “I think we’ve had a good enough introduction for today. I’m going to lead you through some basic meditation techniques. These should help you open your mind for your old memories. I’d like you to take some time practicing this week. Next week, we’ll meet back here, and you can tell me what progress you have made.”
Xandi sits up, back straight and puts all of her focus on the lesson, anticipation flowing through her veins. She can’t wait to find out.
Half an hour later, Xandi opens the faded Vermaloc door to the Luxon temple and holds her breath as she looks outside.
Ten years ago, three families with shops on the outskirts of the Gallimaufry district realized they had children roughly the same age, and such could easy to pool their resources for a tutor. Since then, the girls have been inseparable; a battle-tested friendship forged in an empty storeroom used as a schoolhouse. Three hours a day, five days a week they spend studying, then on Folsen they meet with a different teacher - one year dance, another year magic - and some time away from their own shops to go out and be exacting customers for their neighbors, instead. And this year, it was the same - only Xandi is going to temple instead of music lessons with her friends.
If Xandi’s maybe a little worried that her friends have decided not to wait for her, she’s also smart enough to know that it’s a dumb thing to worry about. So what if she’s consecuted? The whole point of multiple lives is to learn new things from new people, right? She’ll just have to make room for her friends in her Den. Tsaris had spent the last storm season with her father’s family out in the Wastes. It had never occurred to her or Reisa that they should ditch their friend just because she was now half a foot taller, wore her hair loose with braids and still retained a hint of an accent. Why should consecution be any different? She’s still going to be her, she’ll just know what that’s supposed to be.
And sure enough, Tsaris and Reisa were waiting for her right outside, their instruments slung across her back. Xandi looks for Tsaris first - she’s a full head taller than most of the drow and has much paler hair than the hobgoblins and orcs, so she’s usually easy to find - even moreso in her newer Wastewalker leathers and howler quill satchel. Reisa might be as fashionable as ever - a star-patterned lace scarf covering her bald, dark grey head - but the duergar is also short enough to get lost in the crowd.
Tsaris pulls her into a bone crushing hug without a second thought. “You are so fucking lucky. The music teacher is horrible,” she says, half releasing Xandi.
“The music teacher is a forty year-old goblin who expects us to actually practice,” said Reisa, deadpan.
“Horrible.”
“You just miss the hot magic teacher,” Xandi teases her, and then starts to lead the group so they’re not just standing in the middle of the street. Even standing there for a few minutes will gain angry looks from shopkeepers and pedestrians for clogging the street - if they don’t get run over.
“I do, and I am self aware enough to admit it. But enough about me. Tell me about your alone time with the priest. What are they like?”
Xandi slows down to think about it. “Nice? Soothing, but not in that, like, ‘I think you’re five years old so I’m going to talk slowly to you and smile a lot’ sort of way. He treated me like I was a grown-up.”
“Was he hot?” asked Tsaris, predictably.
Xandi shrugs. “The whole ‘sit on some really nice rugs that were definitely brought in just for him and pretend that we can’t hear the neighbor’s chickens next door’ distracted me from thinking about his looks.”
“Xandi still only has eyes for Dinin,” teases Reisa.
“Ugh, not anymore!” Which was true enough - she hadn’t thought about them for, like, a week.
“Oh? Did anamnesis give you any new crushes?” Tsaris says, and then immediately changes tactics with a gasp. “Maybe you’re already married, and your husband is super fucking old and makes weird smacking sounds with their mouth like Reisa’s grandad and shit.” Her imitation of Reisa’s grandad is still spot on.
“Maybe I’m already married and they’re super fucking hot. Maybe I was super fucking hot and still have some hotness goodwill or something,” Xandi says, and Tsaris cocks her head to contemplate.
“Oh my light, do you think you’re Essek Thelyss? My mom still has the full set of commemorative plates they released when he became Shadowhand. It would be weird if my mom had a crush on you,” says Reisa.
“Uh, Essek was a dude, Xandi’s figured out she’s a girl, remember?” Tsaris says, hugging Xandi in support.
“Maybe Essek hadn’t figured things out yet or didn’t mind so much. It’s not like you have to figure out your gender in the first life,” says Reisa, only a little loftily.
“Well, Xandi? Do you think you’re the mysterious Essek Thelyss? Do you feel like betraying the dynasty for looooove?” Tsaris, never one for personal space, gets even closer, almost pressing her cheek to Xandi’s before tripping over her own feet.
“Ugh, that’s totally not what happened,” says Reisa, but Tsaris is too busy pretending she didn’t trip to react.
Xandi thinks to herself about the Dynasty. About Rosohna. About the city they built out of ruins, on imperfect soil, of the fumblings to make a just world with no true directions, only a dream of a vision. The struggles to change course when necessary, the conflict, the mistakes and scars that now only a select few would notice, and an overwhelming sense of pride and love.
Huh. That feels kinda different.
“No, I don’t think I feel like a traitor.”
“It’s all hearsay anyway,” mutters Reisa.
“You just say that because your mom doesn’t want to get rid of her plates.” Tsaris turns back to Reisa, proving she could hear her just fine.
“Xandi couldn’t be Essek anyway; if she was, I wouldn’t be better than her with cantrips,” says Reisa.
“Hey!” Xandi objects, even though all of them know it’s kind of true. It was the principle of the thing.
“Okay, okay, okay - fine. But if you do figure out anything else, we’ve got to be the first to know, okay? We can listen to the hot gossip and help you out. Plus Reisa knows things,” says Tsaris.
“Yeah, of course! I’m sure we’ll figure it out! But first, you still want to check out the new silks they have at the Spider’s Weave, right?” Xandi starts, barely stopping for Reisa’s nod. “Well, okay, hit that first and then we can get to Sunlit Square by the evening bells for the graviturgical silks troupe - it’s super cool, and then I think it’s fair if Tsaris picks the desserts since she’s been gone for so long?”
Xandi turns back and waits what she deems a judicious amount of time for an objection. Tsaris and Reisa look at each other and shrug, but don’t say anything, which is good enough. Laughing, she takes her friends’ hands and leads them, dodging their way through the streets of Rosohna.
Xandi’s always been a good student when she wants to be, and the possibility of learning a whole lifetime’s worth of knowledge motivates her. She meditates whenever she gets a chance - during slow moments at the shop, pushing the limits of how late she can leave to get to the tutor on time, or before collapsing into her trancing mat. It’s only backfired once or twice, and in exchange her dreams are much more vivid. They’re deciding something, multiple somethings - she and her friends; endlessly debating different strategies. She’d think she had been a general, except she still seems to think war is dumb. Maybe she’s a trader who had learned the hard way how to cross the wastes. Do they consecute traders, if they’re especially good at it? It’d help out her mom.
But then, she also suddenly knows a lot more about the city and the Luxon than she’d expect from a trader. She gets into an argument about who actually counts as the longest-consecuted person with her tutor - the Bright Queen may have been the first to glance into the beacon, but that alone is not consecution - the Umavi Mirimm was the first to go through it purposefully; and the Umavi Thelyss was the first to undergo the rebirth; as she was the first of the founding Umavi to die.
It’s the sort of fiddly argument that would have wholly bored her a month ago, and Tsaris and Reisa don’t seem to mind the diversion as an excuse to talk amongst themselves.
“What if you’re a cleric?” Reisa asks, one day after tutoring. Her beard, as much as she can grow one, is as well cared for as ever, except for a giant splotch that’s missing by her jaw, under her ear. Xandi makes a note to ask her about that later.
“Yeah, that fits, you do always like telling everyone what to do,” Tsaris keeps her voice light and nudges Xandi, then waits for Xandi to get her own shove in.
Something about leadership unsettles her stomach somewhat. “Maybe more of an advisor, so I can tell the people in charge what to do.” That does sit better. “Now that I’ve got the wisdom of the ages, are you going to actually listen to me before doing something stupid?”
Tsaris pretends to think about it for a second. “Nah.”
“Oh wait, does this mean that Xandi actually was the first one to make out with anybody?” Reisa’s just stirring the pot now. Tsaris had goaded Xandi into a bet last year to see who could get kissed first. Xandi had made a checklist of potential partners and Tsaris just asked as many people as she could. Tsaris had been proud of her victory.
“We don’t know if she was actually married! Maybe she didn’t make out with anybody!”
Xandi takes a deep breath and thinks. Remembers. A baby in her arms, another one looking up, already solemn.
“Xandi? Did you see the two weirdos again? Did we lose her?” Reisa says, which feels a little unfair to say, she hasn’t been spacing out that often. But then, Reisa had also been pulling her out of the way of an extremely impatient orc dragging a cart, so maybe she has a point.
But then there’d been two hobgoblins the other day that she’d been convinced, out of nowhere, were keeping tabs on her. She still isn’t sure what that was about, but hadn’t been able to stop looking for them out of the corner of her eye.
“I think I was a mother,” she says wonderingly.
“SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!” Tsaris shouts as she whirls in front of Xandi to face her, walking backward while giving her a quick hug, then switching back to her side. In her excitement she forgets to actually curse. It makes her sound uncannily like Tsaris’s mother, a very serious and devout drow woman about a foot shorter than Tsaris.
“Okay, who do we know who was a consecuted mom?” Reisa starts, taking out a new lunar moth patterned notebook to write down the new lead.
“What if your kids are still around? How old do you think they’d be? Would it be weird if I dated one of your kids?” asks Tsaris, frowning.
“I mean. I guess. They could be like, 300. I don’t know how old I was when I died.”
“Ew. Okay, no. But like, you could totally have age-appropriate Den members, right? That have just gone through anamnesis themselves or were like child prodigies or something?”
“You’re just using me to get access to a Den,” Xandi says.
Tsaris is unashamed. “How else are we going to stick together?”
Something in the back of her mind feels worried about going back to her Den, wherever that might be. “Maybe I’ll decide to stay here. The whole point is for me to learn something different, right? What if the thing I’m supposed to learn is what it’s like to be here?” That feels right.
“You think you’re supposed to learn how to take inventory in a general goods store?” says Tsaris, visibly confused.
Reisa smiles faintly at Xandi. “If you’re worried about your mom - don’t be. I’m sure you’ll still be able to have her over lots, and like, there’s no way our parents are going to leave her alone. She’ll be fine.”
“No, it’s not that.” She isn’t sure what it is.
She tries to meditate on it that night, and ends up in a strange dream-trance, not quite the deep and heavy sleep of her childhood, but an all-encompassing vision.
She and her closest friends were seated around a round, scarred table in a stifling room near the inner chambers. The smell of smoke and ash and death must have been long gone before they got there, but her mind still supplied it based upon the surroundings. These rooms had laid untouched since the war until their arrival - other scavengers had not dared to delve so far. The survey teams had to remove the desiccated remains themselves before occupation.
Maybe some cursed residue of the god of strife lay baked into the walls. It would explain why they had been negotiating for hours, with so little to show for it.
“If we are envisioning a world where anyone can do anything - what of us? Do we get to choose to give up leadership? Do we allow others to take it?” said her wisest friend, the one who was not Reisa.
“It’s an admirable goal, but I do not trust anyone but the two of you. It would be too easy for someone else to take control forever - someone who was not so dedicated to our vision,” said her boldest friend, the one who was not Tsaris.
“So we lead forever, with the understanding that we would not ever be able to change?” Not-Reisa raised her voice, just a little.
Xandi (the one who was not-Xandi, not in this lifetime) held her hand up to stop anything from escalating, “Should any of us want to experience another life, then we will reach out to the two others and simply tell them. Two of us should be fine, and I cannot imagine a time when we would not be able to tell one another anything.”
Or rather, a time when two would act unjustly against one.
“But what will we do without a third to stop our fighting?” Not-Tsaris said, but she was smiling as she said it, and so they took it as a decision made and moved on.
The dream - memory - thing - leaves Xandi feeling unbalanced the next morning. It feels embarrassing to be that close to sleep - too much like being sick or a child for her comfort. She rouses early but leaves her mat too late, rushing out the door for tutoring without even checking for the two hobgoblins, and spends the day slow-moving and unresponsive. The tutor gives her a concerned look, but she’s earned enough goodwill and caused enough headaches for him to leave her be.
She’d like to tell her friends about the new memory - but was it a new memory? Was it a dream? The place, the stuff they were talking about - it didn’t make sense. It didn’t look like anything around Rosohna - too weird and gross, like poorly varnished wood sweating in the heat. Maybe she was one of the original explorers into Bazzoxan? Had they been military or some other group? And if so, why were they talking about leadership?
She doesn’t see what the memory could tell her about anything - maybe if she thought and meditated on it a little longer, it would all make sense, and she could bring it up to her friends then.
“Xandi? Hey, Xandi - are you going to just stand in the street, or are you able to hang out with us?” interrupts Tsaris, snapping her fingers as she walks back to where Xandi had stopped, then back to a very slowly moving Reisa.
Oh right, they had been walking home. Xandi catches up to her and Reisa, and then mentally reviews her to-do list.
“Sorry, I’ve got to watch the store while mom tries to negotiate with the neighborhood Light Day committee today.” Their Light Day booth was less to actually sell stuff and more for goodwill - reminding everyone else they were part of the neighborhood. Xandi likes getting to paint everybody’s faces on the one day everybody gets to enjoy color anyhow.
“Okay, but anyway - speaking of your mom - like I spoke to her about manning her stall last night, no that’s not one of my best, moving on,” she says, waving her hands as if to clear a slate. “The important thing - Light Day celebration, is everything in place for your perfect plan?”
“Wait, what?” Has she been planning so much in her dreams that she’s forgotten to plan when she’s awake?
Tsaris slows, looking at her, a little concerned. “You know, your fun little labeling project? With the bottles?” She says, completely failing at being subtle.
A labeling project does sound like something Xandi would like to do - she’d really enjoyed going through and reorganizing their shop’s inventory a few years ago. But this was about stealing the most expensive things from her mom’s shop, with no one being the wiser. She’d been so proud of the plan a few weeks ago: they get to have fun, someone with too much money gets shafted, her mom doesn’t even lose out. But now… Her heart starts racing at the thought.
“Oh. Right.”
“Xandi? Did something happen to the labels?” Tsaris asks slowly.
“No. It’s fine. They’re fine. It’s just,” Xandi takes a deep breath, suddenly afraid and feeling sick, like something is horribly out of place but she can’t figure out what. Her reaction doesn’t make sense, which makes it worse. “I don’t know if I want to,” she gets out.
Tsaris whirls in front of Xandi and then stops walking completely, grabbing Xandi by the forearms even as the smaller girl runs straight into her, Someone behind them curses as they swerve around them. “What? Why not? It was your plan - you’re the one who talked us into it - it’s too late to switch back to mine, now.”
“Tsaris. Come on,” Reisa says, trying to lead them off the street. Tsaris is getting loud, and people are starting to pay a lot more attention to them. Xandi barely has time to check for the two hobgoblins in the crowd before finding herself in an alleyway.
“Oh, you just like this because it means you get to spend another night at home in bed reading a book,” Tsaris says, shaking off Reisa with a scowl. Which is probably true, but Xandi also doesn’t see the problem with that. “Xandi, come on, remember how you spent so much time thinking through everything -“
“Well. Maybe we shouldn’t lie about it. We’re going to get caught, and it’s going to be horrible, and it will ruin everything,” Xandi feels herself starting to hyperventilate.
“I mean, I’m sure it’s not going to be that bad,” says Reisa, who had been arguing against it a few weeks ago. Xandi knows in the back of her head that Reisa’s probably right, but it doesn’t matter, it’s going to be the worst, she can’t possibly go through with this ...
“Why would we get caught? You said that it would be simple to take two of the shitty bottles that your mom keeps near the front of the store specifically because they’re easy to shoplift - easy by design. You told us that you’d studied how to get the labels off and how to put the wax on - so either you lied to us or that’s taken care of. And that nobody who buys the expensive shit at a general store out in the sticks is doing it because they actually know what they’re doing, it’s that they want to show off that they have just, like, a little more money than the rest of us. They don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like, either!” Tsaris says, counting down the options on one hand.
“I still don’t get why we’re stealing the expensive shit if it doesn’t taste better than the stuff Xandi’s mom leaves by the door for the drunks.” Which was also the same point that Reisa had made a few weeks ago, though she sounded even grumpier about it now.
“Because shit tastes better if you’re fucking someone over at the same time!”
“And the person you’re fucking over is my mom,” Xandi points out, and only realizes how it sounds afterward. She usually tries to keep ‘fuck’ and ‘mom’ out of the same sentence around Tsaris.
Tsaris was so far gone that she didn’t even notice the opportunity Xandi had given her. “Just because you’re somebody’s mom out there doesn't mean you've got to act like mine,” which was low. Just because she knows about the Luxon doesn’t make her a religious scold.
“I’m not trying to be your mom, I’m just not okay with it.”
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t feel right.” Even as Xandi says it, she realizes that’s weak.
“Is this one of your Luxon revelations? Whatever happened to ‘Luxon worship is just another tool of the state’?” Tsaris says, cutting off both Xandi and Reisa before they could stop her. “Oh right, you figured out that you’d get to use it yourself. You know what? I think you’re making this up - all of it, you just figured out how to fake it.”
“Why would I be making this up?”
“You always want to be right, you always think that you know better than everybody else, no matter what it’s about. I think you’ve decided that we weren’t taking you seriously, and you get to talk to your special Luxon priest and skip music lessons and feel like for once in your life that you’re important and special and we’ll have to listen to every single fucking plan you come up with.”
“I suggest stuff that I think you’ll like and that’ll actually work!”
“You don’t like it when we point out when you get something wrong, though,” says Reisa quietly, and Xandi turns to look at her in betrayal. Reisa shrugs and looks down, but she doesn’t look apologetic at all. That weird shaved bald patch in her beard looks horrible.
“Look. Steal the cheap wine all you like. I’m not going to help you, especially if you treat me like this,” Xandi says, and leaves the alleyway.
“How have you been since we last met?” Lumen Ghoris has the same smile as before, but somehow it’s ten thousand times more annoying.
“Fine. It’s been fine.” She’s just having stupid feelings and getting into stupid fights with her friends, that’s all. If she says anything, she’s sure he’d laugh and tell her that he was thinking of important consecution things, not teenage girl stuff.
He gives her some silence to fill, then sighs when she declines. “All right. Did you get a chance to try meditating on your own?”
“A little.”
“Okay - and how did that go?” She thinks she hears a little bit of a strain in his voice.
“Fine. I haven’t remembered much. My friends were going to help me, but …” she starts, then stops when she remembers that she wasn’t going to talk about them.
“Did something happen?”
“I reacted to something, and it was weird. I knew it was nothing, but it didn’t feel like nothing, and once I got myself going it was hard to stop,” she caves, which makes her think it’s probably for the best that she didn’t try crime.
Lumen Ghoris nods in sympathy. “It can be difficult - your soul is trying to adjust to a whole lifetime of experiences, but your brain hasn’t caught up quite yet. When you think back to that experience, how would you describe how you felt?”
“Scared. Angry. Like - okay. There was this time a couple years ago when someone tried to get on my good side by talking crap about Tsaris, but like, I also know that they’d tried to get on Tsaris’s side by trying to get her to talk crap about me. And I was like - I know how much this hurts, right? Why would you expect me to go along with it? I mean, at least they were smart enough to not try to get me to talk crap about Reisa, it’s physically impossible for anyone to badmouth her.”
“I … think I understand,” he said, though he sounded unsure about that. “It sounds like a strong emotion, one that’s out of proportion with what you were going through?”
“Yeah. That’s it,” she says, feeling relieved.
“There’s a good chance you might have had a bad experience in a past life. Something you were doing reminded you of that experience - even subconsciously, and you reacted.”
“You think I got really hurt because someone stole some bottles of wine? Not that I did or anything.” She stops herself before she incriminates herself even more.
Lumen Ghoris just badly hides a single chuckle, which is even worse than him getting angry. This feels horrible for her, and she’d just got her hopes up that he’d take her seriously. What if she is lying? What if this is all fake and she’s too silly to be whoever she’s supposed to be? But before she can start to panic even more, the priest gestures for her attention - not quite a touch.
“Think of it this way - your last lifetime would have put you in a whole range of situations - some good, some bad. You had a good amount of time to learn a lot of things - but sometimes what you learned was only situationally true, or maybe you learned the wrong lesson. Say you ate a poisoned mushroom. You could learn to stay away from those poison mushrooms, but maybe you learn to avoid all mushrooms.”
She wrinkles her nose, then says “Sorry, I just really don’t like mushrooms. Wait, is that because of a bad experience?”
“It’s … possible. The important thing to remember is to try to discover what your feelings are trying to tell you. And then you can use all you have learned in this life to see if you think that feeling is worth listening to.”
Xandi frowns, listening to the sounds of the street coming in through the thin walls. She thinks she hears the neighbor’s chickens, too. It all sounds simple enough, but how is she supposed to do that in the moment? How is she supposed to respond right now?
“Is it really that common that people blow up over nothing?” She wishes she sounded older, stronger. She wishes she didn’t have to ask.
Ghoris nods. “It’s very common for someone’s first recovered memory to be of a previous death. It can be alarming for a lot of people.” He pauses for a second, giving her a strange look - frightened for a second. Was he thinking back to his own death? “You’re fine - we’ll work on some grounding exercises that can help in the moment, then some meditation that can help after. Your friends would probably understand.”
But when she leaves the storefront temple, Tsaris and Reisa aren’t there. A chill races down Xandi’s back, as she gives up a hope she didn’t realize she had.
She’s not really sure what to do now. She considers shopping by herself, maybe getting sweets - but the possibility of running into them seems too likely, so she sneaks home, then straight into her room. She doesn’t want her mother to ask questions about why she’s home early. She flops down onto her trancing mat, stares up at the ceiling and turns over the fight in her mind, over and over, like a touch-worn copper piece, trying to imagine what she’s forgotten.
Eventually, she falls into a restless, dream-filled trance.
She walked with purpose down the halls of her home. Not too fast, and certainly not stomping, no - but with a definite purpose. Still, she privately enjoyed how loud her steps sounded on the tiled floor. She allowed herself one moment to breathe deeply, calm her mind and the singing in her blood, and opened the door to her son’s room.
“Your father has decided to cut his visit home short. Whatever you had to say to each other, it seems to have convinced him that he was of better use guarding a bunch of rocks than with his Den.” She tried for light, but she couldn’t keep some of the edge out of her voice. Oh well. If they hadn’t wanted her to be angry, they should have at least let dinner be served before starting the fight. There was no reason why her son couldn’t have shown up with a shorn head at dessert, or tomorrow morning.
There was certainly no reason for her husband to take the bait, to allow the argument to escalate to even sorer subjects, but he was no longer near enough to receive her anger.
She looked at the son in question, still in as much of a lather as his father had been, and sighed. He sat, back straight, feet placed on the floor in front of him, on his trancing platform. His mouth was set in a mulish line, but he angled his face down in a way that made it clear he had forgotten his hair would not cover it. He was so young, and at this moment, looked younger still. It was hard not to find him cute, in some way, as well as infuriating. Like a toddler refusing a nap, or a child expecting punishment.
It would be nice, she supposed, to be allowed to rant and rave and leave someone else to pick up the pieces. But that hadn’t been her lot, not in any of her lives. She fixed things.
“This is what is going to happen. You do not have to be consecuted now. I will cover for you in Court. Your father need not know, nor your brother.” She stared at him for a second, willed him to understand the amount of risk she was taking for him. “In return for this, our Queen is looking for a new Shadowhand. I will offer her your name, and she will accept. You will serve in Court, instead of locking yourself within the Marble Tomes and wasting your intellect on baseless heretical theories.”
This had been a compromise she’d been mulling over for quite some time - one she had already tested on her queen. She had hoped to have the time to slowly convince him, not force him into this position when he was too angry to be open to anything. But he’d had to push against consecution - push against his father - push against the rules the Den had laid out for everyone.
Being in court would keep him intellectually stimulated - nobody without a brain ever lasted long. And her son would excel at it - he was good at figuring out other people, even if it was mostly used for picking fights. But she also thought that Leylas and Quana and Abrianna would be a good influence on him. Children his age rarely listened to their mothers. Let him spend time outside of the Den; maybe they’ll be able to talk some sense into him.
“It is not a waste! I want -” her son argued, incapable of recognizing the good deal in front of him.
She cut him off with a gesture, and he fell silent. She waited a second to confirm, then said “I understand what you want. Consider this your first lesson for Court - how to compromise. The other alternative is that I do not lie for you. You will never be consecuted, you will be removed from the Den, you will lose your access to the Marble Tomes - oh, I’m sure they might take you up in a few decades or so, when some of the controversy dies down, but your access would never quite be the same.”
“You would lose too, by kicking me out. It would not look good, for an Umavi to not be able to control her own son.” He said, clearly baiting her into another fight. She had learned better than her husband about refusing one.
“You’re right. So why don’t we choose the path that allows both of us to benefit? And when you decide to be consecuted, you will still have other paths open for you.”
“You will not convince me to be consecuted by keeping me from my studies.”
“And that is not what I am trying to do,” she said, then softened, sat down next to him on the trancing platform and stroked his now-shorn hair. He really did butcher it. “My lovely boy, you are young. You can still change your mind about a great many things. Think of the position of Shadowhand as a challenge - I’m sure you can find a way to fulfill your court duties and do your research on the side. The choice, as ever, is yours.”
And then she stood up, as gracefully as she could manage, and walked out of the room. As the door shut, Xandi comes back to herself, shaking off the vision with a newfound dread.
It takes her mother all but throwing her out of her room for her to remember that she has to attend tutoring. She could try to beg off sick - her mother might let her get away with it, even. It’s not like she tries very often. She doesn’t think she’d be able to concentrate on anything but her dream. She wishes she could talk to Tsaris and Reisa about it, but it was too much, too big, too weird a claim. It sounded fake, especially after their last fight.
I think I might be an Umavi. Light, they’d never let her hear the end of it. Except - she was making deals with the Queen, thinking of her as an old friend. And her son had more than a passing resemblance to the person on Reisa’s mom’s plates…
Somehow, she makes it to the schoolhouse, only a little late. Tsaris and Reisa are already sitting down, and neither can quite meet her eye when she takes her usual spot. But when the tutor tries to start his lesson for the day, Tsaris stands up.
“Excuse me sir, but I think I would feel more comfortable if Xandi wasn’t here.”
The tutor mostly looks confused, as if this is a prank that’s going to end up with him as the target. In all fairness, that has happened before. “Is there any reason why?”
“It’s hard to grow to your greatest potential if there’s someone else who already has all of the answers,” Tsaris says, eyes wide and simpering too much to be believed. “She doesn’t need to be here anyway. She’s already learned so much.”
Their tutor looks between the three girls; all three of whom had paying parents who could complain.
Xandi gets up and tries not to look relieved. “It’s all right. I can sit outside and continue my meditations,” she says, and tries to ignore her supposed friend making fun of her behind her back.
The first shift streets of the Gallimaufry district aren’t the best place for quiet contemplation. There’s shouting and mud and carts to avoid and a couple more well meaning folk try to give her money, which is just awkward. But all of it, even keeping an eye out for the two hobgoblins, is secondary to scribbling everything she can remember about her dream into her notebooks, then scrabbling through her old history notes to see if what she had learned made any sense.
Then there’s that feeling of muted fear that had haunted her ever since she had shaken off that vision-memory. Was that just her own anxiety? This is big, it feels like she should be anxious about it. Or does this come from the same place as the wine, and how would that make sense? It’s hard to imagine an Umavi getting in trouble for wine theft.
Figuring out what her fear is trying to tell her sounds like great advice, but it turns out it’s pretty hard to figure out what to do when you only have half the memories needed and no help.
It doesn’t feel like long before someone sits down next to her - Reisa. It must be the lunch break already. Xandi looks around for Tsaris, but she’s not in her customary spot.
Reisa smiles apologetically as she reaches for her food. “Tsaris just needs more time.”
“Tsaris needs to get over herself and realize I’m not living to spite her,” Xandi says, but she reaches into her pack and pulls out her own leaf-wrapped lunch.
Reisa shrugs. She’s good at being tactful, but Xandi knows her well enough to realize she thinks Xandi could get over herself, too. She’s got little stars painted on her nails, Xandi realizes. And then belatedly realizes that’s what she must have tried to shave into her beard.
“Oh hey, nice star.”
Reisa’s fingers ghost over the star-shape in her loose attempt at a beard. “I was hoping it’d have grown out by now, it didn’t come out right. It was for the light-day celebration tonight- I was thinking a star and a sun, because a beacon is way too hard, but.”
“Did you two have new plans?” Xandi gets herself to ask. She’d asked for a double shift at the booth, anyhow.
“Yeah, it should be fine,” Reisa says, choosing to unwrap her lunch over elaborating. “I know it’s hard for you, but it’s hard for us, too, you know? We’re losing our best friend. I think Tsaris is just pulling away first.”
“You’re not losing me,” she says emphatically.
“You’re not going to be hanging out with us all the time anymore. Even if you wanted to hang out with some kids, you’re going to be in a Den doing whatever advisor things you actually do.”
“What if I want to stay here?”
Reisa only gives her a look, like it is impossible that she’d want those things. But instead of saying anything, she starts systematically picking out the yuyo pieces and setting them aside.
“So are you going to leave Tsaris to be on her own?” Xandi asks, almost not wanting the answer.
“Tsaris gets me during school time … and probably on the walk home. But for now, I’ll still be taking all of your mushrooms. I don’t care if you’re the Bright Queen herself, we’re doing lunch trades,” Reisa says, plopping all of the yuyo pieces into Xandi’s lunch.
By the end of the day, their tutor has written a note explaining the situation to Xandi’s mother, including part of a refund for this month’s schooling. Tsaris and Reisa leave while she’s getting the note, and she walks by herself a little slower than normal, just to make sure she doesn’t accidentally catch up.
It’s fine. School would just be a distraction at this point, anyway. She needs some time to process everything. Tsaris apparently needs time to process what Xandi’s going through, which doesn’t seem fair, but whatever. It doesn’t seem like they’d be much of a help anyway.
So she meditates, and writes, and tries to make sense of it all. When she needs to do something else, anything else, she helps out with the store, taking the time to do inventory and write down all of the procedures that she and her mom know by heart, just in case. Reisa had been right, she might not be able to be around to help out as much, even if she wanted to. Maybe her problem is that she needs to accept that things will change. Everyone thinks she should go back to her Den, and as a probable-Umavi, doesn’t she kind of have to?
But still, the fear and dread remain. Stronger now, and sometimes she catches her body bracing itself like it does when she needs to walk near the stench of the tannery. What happened? Did something go wrong?
Most of what she learns through her meditations is about love - of passion for her people, pride in the other members of her Den, of how they flourish. Of her children, marveling at how they change and grow and the new relationships and perspectives they bring. There are disappointments, yes - costly mistakes, along with fights and losses. But nothing that explains the sick anticipation she still feels at the idea of going back.
Her mom worries - of course she does. She has suddenly stopped going to school - something she’d always enjoyed, before. She has stopped hanging out with her friends, she started preparing to leave.
She catches her mother watching her, cataloging the way she looks and storing it for later. There’s little that she can do to console her, but she feels like she should try - it’s something she wishes her consecuted children would have done for her, in a previous life.
So she stops her one day, when it’s late, and her mother is lingering a little too long in the doorway. “I’m still your daughter, you know. And I still will be, no matter what. It’s just that I’m finding out that I’m more than that, too. And really, that was going to happen anyway.”
Her mother looks at her and smiles tightly, and there’s nothing that would stop Xandi from hugging her. Her mother holds her tightly, rests her chin on the top of her head and breathes in.
“I know baby, I know. And I want to be there for you. You were always going to grow up, but it’s just happening a little faster than I thought. You’re not going to need me much anymore,” she says, voice just a little muffled.
“I know it can be hard - it always feels like you’re losing your child, even if you’re consecuted yourself. But it doesn’t work that way - trust me, I’ve been a parent a dozen times.”
There’s silence. Xandi tries to pull back just a little to look up. Her mother’s arms tighten around her, face frozen for a second before stubbornly returning to that same tight smile, tears in her eyes. Ah. Xandi supposes it wouldn’t be comforting to be reminded about who else her daughter is at this moment.
“I should finish up here. I’ll be fine on my own, but I don’t want to leave this and forget where I’m at.” Her mother takes the excuse to leave, nodding quickly, and Xandi hates herself for breathing a little easier when she’s gone.
The night before her next session with Lumen Ghoris, she slips again into a dream-trance.
She looked at the paper in horror.
Not that anyone else would see anything of importance on that paper, or any possible message contained. An Illusory Script covered a miniscule Glyph of Warding, which, when activated, released a whispered Message, encoded on its own. One did not smuggle messages out of the Cobalt Soul without a great deal of security.
The Cobalt Soul operative was her own, not the Dynasty’s. When her son disappeared - potentially regarding some business with the Mighty Nein potentially framing him for murdering an Empire official; potentially him deciding to actually murder that Empire official; some strange findings in Aeor; worries about being suspected of treason or wanderlust - Deirta had set up her own investigation, limiting the number of people to a few former Lens operatives in the Den. It hadn’t taken much to realize that the Mighty Nein’s former housekeeper - not the one that they forgot to pay, the poor woman, but the one previous - had been an operative for the Cobalt Soul. And so, with that possible lead, she’d dispatched her own asset to infiltrate to foreign organization to see what they had been investigating, and what interest they might have in settling themselves into a Den Thelyss household.
In truth, she hadn’t expected much from that lead. It had seemed more likely that the Cobalt Soul had been spying on the Mighty Nein. And perhaps they had - maybe it was pure luck that this message made its way into her hands. A report of a sealed testimony from Essek Thelyss, having delivered pieces of the Luxon into enemy hands for study. Against Ludinus Da’Leth, who had approached Essek nearly a decade before.
It seems like they were unconcerned about the impact this might have in the Dynasty - the concern was about the Empire’s wizards abusing their office. The Cobalt Soul had no jurisdiction in the Dynasty, and had not even tried to approach the Bright Queen. Or, if they had, Essek had successfully deterred them.
He’d given away two pieces of their god for what? A little bit of knowledge? A few small promises?
She didn’t understand him. She was now coming to the conclusion that she had never understood him, and it was folly to think she had. She had made a mistake somewhere. She didn’t fool herself into thinking that she could have controlled Essek’s actions, but she had given him the access he had needed. She should have never accepted him into her Den. She should have made him wait or found another way to show her love. She should have believed him when he told her the unvarnished truth of who he was.
What was she to do now?
If this - action by her son was to come to light, there was no way that she would be able to prevent the Dynasty from enacting justice on the traitor. She could not stomach it - betraying her people - not her people by birth, but her people by choice - her choice and effort, whose lives and culture she had helped shape into being. The ones that trusted her to be good, and just, and to lead them. She would be betraying her god, the one who saved her from a lifetime of misery; the one she had dedicated lifetimes of progress and study and for - for what? One person?
But could she truly step aside, now? Her own role looked suspicious through a stranger’s eyes. She lied for him, put him in Court - she even goaded him into continuing his research! And now, every second she waited to give this knowledge to the Bright Queen looked suspicious, but taking action without having a moment to plan and meditate also seemed deadly foolish - someone will take advantage.
And she still loved her son, and was aware that the love for her son had clouded her judgment in the past, possibly - almost certainly was clouding it now.
Had anyone else suspected Essek? Did Abrianna or Leylas know? Had they had discussions about it - was she kept out of them because they suspected she was helping him? Because they suspected, after all these years, that she was losing it, the way some of the other Umavis (of whose names they no longer spoke) had?
Maybe they were right. Only a few knew of Typhros, and as far as she knew, nobody had bothered to ask those suffering of their experiences. Is this what Typhros felt like from the inside?
No, there was no reason to believe that. She needed time. Distance. More distance than she could get in this lifetime, as Essek’s mother and an Umavi both. She thought of that moment, lifetimes ago, where she had proposed a method of stepping down - only she would have to explain why. Did she trust them? Leylas was not the same person - did not have the same temperament - that she had a thousand years ago. There was, of course, achess. But achess was meant for those who still needed more lifetimes to learn, and Umavis were supposed to know themselves completely.
What a joke. Her own feelings for her son had blinded her to his unsuitability, her arrogance had convinced her that he would eventually settle down. Fit in. And look at what mess that had caused.
Claiming what she was planning could be deemed achess was its own mockery of the practice, but who was she to tell, anyway? If she was indeed unsuitable and needed to learn more, only she could know, and as an Umavi, she was sufficient to judge. Fine then, out of the impossible situations that laid before her, that seemed at least feasible enough that it shouldn’t be discarded.
Only, there was also the matter of Da’leth. Should Da’leth go to trial, he would have no reason to keep Essek’s identity secret. And even if the details of the trial were to be kept secret, there would be ways for the information to be leaked - especially if Da’leth were to find out that Essek had betrayed them.
The information was too public already. If Deirta could find out about this through a well-placed operative, so could the Bright Queen or any of the other Umavis. It was only sheer luck that Leylas was preoccupied with other matters at present, as was Quana.
It wasn’t interfering with the Dynasty’s system of justice to take care of Ludinus Da’leth, she reasoned. Not by much. It could be seen as a form of justice even - weren’t the Dynasty the ones wronged? She imagined Essek’s voice, from years ago, accusing her of only benefiting herself. And yes, maybe if she were who she was supposed to be - a perfect soul, a perfect disciple - she would offer herself up on justice’s altar without question. But she was just herself. If it also helped her rage to punish this man for tempting her son, taking him away from her, and also saved herself? Well then. Who could judge?
A course settled on, Deirta started her work.
“Have you made any progress in the last week, Xandi?” Lumen Ghoris asks.
The storefront temple is the same as it had been the weeks before. But now she cannot help but layer other halls, other temples, other experiences on top of it. This is the furthest she’s been reborn from the Dens in a while. Though, admittedly, her last death was less planned. Publicly planned, at least.
“Xandi?” She looks at her priest and tries to determine how much she trusts him. He’s been kind to her, hasn’t he?
“I think I figured out who I was. But I think I stopped being them for a reason, and I don’t know if I should go back. At least, not yet.” Her voice is still her own, small, quiet, uncertain.
“I understand these memories can seem confusing at first. They can be a lot for a teenager! But I believe you’ll soon come to accept them as just a part of yourself…” He continues on, but Xandi is no longer listening. There is something off about his smile. The way he glances to the corner of the room, not meeting her eyes. She’d always been too nervous to notice before. He doesn’t ask any questions about what she had remembered - he hadn’t, not since the first session. The other times she’d gone through anamnesis, she’d been questioned thoroughly once there was even a hint of who she was - often before, if they had other reason to suspect.
“You already know who I am,” she interrupted, staring at him.
Lumen Ghoris stops, then says slowly, “I may have an idea.”
“And yet, you choose to condescend to me.”
The words wash over him and his back straightens, even as his gaze goes to the floor out of respect. “… I apologize, your Brightness, for anything I may have done to offend.”
“How did you know?”
“Your first dream. With the spiders. You know what that is, now?”
“My first death.” She remembers now more clearly - those last few desperate moments, where she had to choose between her god’s safety and her life and chose her god. How she had sacrificed herself not knowing that she would be granted return - and then the confusion when she appeared, again.
“Umavi, the Bright Queen has many questions she wants answered. Of how you died. Of the connection between your death and Ludinus Da’leth’s. Of the part your son might have played in those deaths. And while I would never question our Queen’s patience, she has been waiting for fifteen years.” His cadence was still calm, methodical.
“Has she been told that I am here?”
“I don’t know if you would understand how close we came to war after your death, and after Da’leth’s. It took some foreign wizard’s meddling to calm the tensions again.” She admitted she was curious which wizards were responsible - perhaps that blonde woman who worked to secure peace? Or that redhead who had returned the beacon in the first place. But she knew a distraction when directed towards one.
“That is not an answer. Has she been told?”
“I sent word after our first session.” That was weeks ago. Right before the mysterious hobgoblins had started appearing - Lens agents, of course.
“When am I to be summoned to Court?”
“When I can ascertain that you remember enough to answer the Bright Queen’s questions.”
“And if I tell you that I have not yet reached that point?” Had she been anyone but who she was, he could have pulled rank. Had his orders come from anyone but the Bright Queen, the subject would have been immediately dropped. As it is, the rank of whose truth would prevail is unclear.
“Then, your Brilliance, I would be forced to take your word. For another week, at least.”
“And if I say that I am not who you think I am, and that you need to let me go?”
“Umavi. If given a choice between obeying you or obeying our Queen, I will choose our Queen. Please do not make me choose,” he begged, “I can give you another week, maybe two at most.”
Ah. She had pushed too far. “I understand,” she says, and they fall silent.
“Your Brightness, please remember that your choices will affect those around you. If you disappear, others may be held responsible in your absence.” She studies the priest. In her doubled vision, she sees him both as middle aged and impossibly young - only on his second life. He is worried about his own fate - but isn’t that his right? He had been kind to her, when she was vulnerable (and malleable).
“My choices have always affected others, Lumen, that is the nature of who I am,” she says, and suddenly she sounds so tired, even to her own ears.
“Do you want to continue the session? We have half an hour left.”
“I would like some time to think. You may leave the room, if you wish, but I believe the Lens agents are outside.” She had meant it as an invitation but it sounded like an order. She was unused to the amount of weight her voice now carried. It may take a while to rebalance it.
In the last week she’s gotten used to meditating alone, and the next half hour passes quickly. She leaves promptly after hour’s bells ring through the district, only to find Tsaris and Reisa are waiting for her near the entrance.
They both look the same. Of course they do, it’s been less than a week. Tsaris is on her in a second, and she is enveloped in familiar leather, as if she was the same girl she’d always been.
“Hey. So. I’m sorry. I don’t actually think you’re lying, I’m just kind of a shit sometimes.” She backs up to look at Xandi. “Have you been crying? Is everything okay? Did that fucker do anything to you? Just give me the word and I’ll end him.”
“No, no - it’s fine. Really. I don’t want to think about it right now,” Tsaris seems like she’s going to object, but before she can, Xandi gets out a thin and desperate, “Can we just have fun together?”
“Yeah, of course we can,” Reisa says, before Tsaris can get anything out. “What would you like to do first?”
“I’d really, really like to not have to make a decision right now.”
“O-kay. Uh, in that case, I’ve got word that we should check out the tailor on Vermaloc Way, there’s some cute deals from out of town,” Tsaris says, looking to Reisa for support.
The cute deals have less to do with the cloth and more to do with a handsome elf-orc. The visiting merchant is apparently one of the tailor’s suppliers for heavier, durable fabrics, and has a makeshift table display with an ‘Ulaba Family Textiles’ sign hung around the front of it. Reisa takes one glance and makes her way to the lacework, but Tsaris pulls Xandi with her to the table. Xandi, making a conscious choice to only be herself, lets her.
“What can I help you two with?” the elf-orc asks, a consummate professional in the way he ignores that they are, in no way, his expected customers. Xandi is pretty sure she would want to make a habit of leaving her neighborhood before trying to rough it in the Barbed Fields.
“Why don’t you explain to me what I’m looking at, and I’ll figure out what I’m looking for?” Tsaris says, smooth as anything - she must have heard people try this on her enough times that she can copy it.
“You’re interested in cityfolk adventuring stuff now?” Last she’d known, Tsaris had alternated between complaining about the lack of food stalls in the Wastes and fighting everyone who would dare infringe on the superiority of Wastewalker clothing material and styles.
“Shut up, he’s cute,” muttered Tsaris.
“Not looking to make your way across the Wastes anytime soon? Is it that you’re not interested in exploring, or just that people assumed you couldn’t, so you never learned where to start?” says the merchant, looking right at Xandi.
“Well, I mean…” Maybe she would be good at adventuring, if only someone would show her how. She takes a closer look at the heavy waxed canvas, ignoring the triumphant smile that’s forming on the elf-orc’s face.
“Oooh, Xandi, it’s like he knows you! A traveling bard used that line on her once, got her to buy their lute. Tried to play it once, sounded horrible, never tried again,” Tsaris says, both as a warning to Xandi and a way to get the shopkeeper’s attention back onto her. It’s a testament to their friendship that they could have spent a week fighting and Xandi still knows that she means nothing by it.
“I can imagine,” the merchant says, chuckling and looking fond, before catching himself and pulling back.
Tsaris gives her a meaningfully eyebrow wiggle after seeing his reaction. Oh, ew. He’s old.
But there’s something familiar about him, too - comforting, trustworthy, canny but not like the hobgoblin Lens operatives. Is it that he knows her, and is too intimidated by one of the twelve living saints? Neither the name nor the face is striking any memories. She tries to get another look at him, trying to figure out if he was actually interested or if he was grossed out by the suggestion, but the merchant reaches under the table to get another special fabric. “Here, take a look at this - It’s the newest sensation in Tal’Dorei. It’s called plaid.”
Xandi is too polite to refuse completely, and besides, she does like the idea that she might have a hidden talent for adventuring. She takes the sheet of paper hidden underneath it without thinking. The shape and feel of the paper sparks a memory. and with barely a glance, she swipes the sigil to activate the message. The shopkeeper has moved back over to Tsaris, not even bothering to look at her.He either doesn’t know what he’s given her or he’s better at subterfuge than most, but she doesn’t have time to consider before the message begins.
It’s Essek. She recognizes that voice, sure as anything, even if the accent has shifted to something more foreign.
“If you need an escape, you can trust him. Come by tomorrow after the shops close. Consider it repayment for your help, if you must.”
Xandi looks down. The sigil has disappeared with the spell; there’s nothing but a blank slip of paper and some warm, scratchy fabric in her hands. No way to confirm what she heard, and nobody she can talk to to help decide. The elf-orc is politely ignoring Tsaris’s attempts to flirt.
She remembers suddenly the first time she looked into a Beacon, the endless possibilities it showed her. How open the world seemed, the freedom to imagine that there was a way to have more than she had previously dared dreamed. She imagines what the Luxon would show her now. A world where she flees from the homeland she helped create - her mother and friends never knowing her fate. A world where she is persuasive enough to remind her oldest friends of a promise they once made, to give her time to reflect. A world where she is killed by her oldest friends under suspicion of Typhros. A world where she commits regicide to save herself … a world where Tsaris gets there first.
So many possibilities, but none she wants. She’s tired of trying to forge her own path.
Reisa bumps up against Xandi to get her attention, then mutters as close to her ear as she can reach. “Hey yeah, sorry, this guy seems like a creep. What do you say you get out of here and get something to eat?”
The spell is broken. Yes, she’d like more time, better choices. But this is a truth that most have forgotten - she was not the first to look into the beacon, but she was the first to die. She has been cheating fate, carving out a few more years, for over a millennia now. What’s a few more hours?
She looks at her friends and decides to just be here, one insignificant person, for as long as she can manage. Tsaris makes a dumb joke, and Reisa takes her hand, and Xandi laughs, and lets herself be dragged into the unknown.