I awoke with great lethargy, face pressed into the rolled parka that served as my pillow. Rolling over, I sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my eyes to clear the sleep from them.
I miss coffee, I thought. The last time I'd had some was…
The memory fled from my grasp, and I floundered for a moment, before centering myself and moving on with the process of waking up.
For once, I felt almost rested, my eyes still closed as I stumbled to my feet and meandered over to the light switch on the wall. I slapped at it a few times, missing until I found it. The switch gave a satisfying clunk as I flipped it, and the expected change from subtle moonlight to morning daylight failed to happen.
Blinking my eyes open, I tried it again, and again the switch clicked, and nothing happened.
It felt too early to worry about something like this, I considered as I rubbed feeling back into my cheeks. Curiously, the lighting had changed overnight. Before, the light had been emitted by the ceiling in even tones, but now it seemed as though a paler luminescence had replaced it, lighting everything equally. Even the pipes on the wall, usually hidden in shadow, were clearly illuminated in the same dim light.
Frowning, I checked the switch again, and to my surprise, it seemed to have reset itself when I wasn't looking. It still clunked when I flipped it, at least, but it hadn't made a noise when it reset.
Mentally shrugging at the oddity, I passed through the open door leading to the foyer of my pocket space, where the lighting had also changed. A few steps into the entry hall, I paused. That door was supposed to be closed, right? I remembered closing it before I went to bed, but yesterday had been exhausting, and I might have just forgotten.
Turning to look at the now-closed door, I stared at it in befuddlement. I absolutely hadn't closed it, and it had made no sound, like the light switch in my makeshift bedroom. Blinking slowly and deliberately, I mentally ran back the last few moments. No, I hadn't touched the door at all, and it
had been open.
In the brief period of darkness when my eyes had been fully closed, the door had changed
again, now wide open again. I watched it with wariness, and it staunchly refused to shift while I was looking at it. Blinking again, the door
had moved, slightly, closing almost halfway.
Frowning to myself, I turned and surveyed the other doors. The one leading out into the lodge was still wedged mostly closed, the strangely futuristic bulkhead of my latest light was still closed, but the rest seemed to change between open and closed when I wasn't looking.
I had the oddest feeling of dissociation; For a moment, felt I wasn't looking at anything real, but the sensation passed as soon as it came. Running to the door outside, I almost yanked it open before realizing I'd yet to put on any clothes. Yet, looking at myself, I was
already wearing my comfortable parka, the one that I'd left back in my bedroom.
Confused and concerned, I stepped out into the lodge, and I was deeply disconcerted by the same lighting
out here as there had been
in there. Worse, the lodge was empty of people! There should have been over a hundred people resting in here, but there were absolutely
none. As I looked around, bedrolls and benches shifted whenever I wasn't looking, much like the doors had, disappearing completely or moving to different spots. The large hearth was empty save for the bed of cold coals that, quite disturbingly, also seemed to move.
From outside, I heard the muffled cawing of a bird. Was that a raven, or a crow? It sounded like some sort of corvid, certainly. Part of me was distracted by trying to remember what one sounded like over the other, while another part realized that was the first sign of life I'd perceived since waking up.
The great doors to the lodge seemed to stay open for the most part, and I hastily made my way outside. Beyond, the world seemed lit in the same even tone, and it put my hackles on edge. The window shutters of the houses I'd built for Grenwin and Symon did the same odd opening and closing thing, and even some of the muddy paths worked into the ground as people moved about over the last couple of weeks shifted slightly between blinks.
There was no wind, and the forest beyond the village seemed still and unchanging. The skies were clear of clouds, though it seemed off, somehow. I stared up at the stars for a while, trying to figure it out, before realizing that the moon was missing for this time of night and that the stars themselves had changed, forming constellations I wasn't familiar with.
I was certainly relieved when they stayed mostly still, completely unlike the constellations of lights in the other space. Another caw brought my attention back, and I looked in the direction it seemed to have come from. The only thing over there was the old weirwood and a couple of huts that we'd not taken down yet.
Deeply unsettled by the oddness of the situation, I reached out for
saidar, only to find the One Power evading my embrace. Even the comfortingly familiar warmth at the back of my mind felt strange and distant, almost insubstantial.
After a few minutes of trying to gain a hold of it, I pushed it away in frustration. If it wasn't going to cooperate, there probably wasn't anything I could do to
make it work with me, so trying harder probably wouldn't help.
Another cawing brought my attention back to the weirwood, and I felt a peculiar compulsion to investigate the source of the noise. It was, so far, the
only sound I'd heard beyond my own breathing or the crunch of my boots in the snow.
Cautiously walking over, I tried to spot whatever bird was making that noise, to no avail. It came again, an almost lonely caw echoing out over the empty landscape. The bird kept cawing, and eventually, I spied it in the lower branches of the weirwood, a spot of darkness against the pale white wood and blood-red leaves.
The weirwood itself seemed slightly different, now that I looked at it. There wasn't a trace of bloody sap weeping from the carving, and that lack gave the tree a much more peaceful look. The face looked more like a man peacefully resting than a man crying and drooling blood.
The bird itself seemed smaller than a raven ought to be, but I wasn't certain. It watched me with an inscrutable gaze, and I slowly approached the corvid.
"Caw," it sounded, almost at the same volume as normal speech. It was a sharp contrast to the loud cries of before. "
Caw," it seemed to
speak. Weren't these birds supposed to be smart? I was almost convinced that it was trying to talk to me, which was a ridiculous notion.
"Hello there," I softly spoke to it. Its feathered head rotated in what might have been birdlike curiosity as it cawed just as quietly, matching my volume.
There was something
off about this bird, and the more I looked at it, the more I felt it was
wrong somehow.
"Are you…" I trailed off, not sure what I was going to ask. Was it alone? Was it some sort of delusion of mine,
something that seemed alive that my brain was conjuring up to help offset the wrongness of the world?
"
Caw," it supplied, followed by a low chortling noise that felt like it was
laughing at me. Head tilted, it looked at me through one eye, before turning its head to look at me through the other,
before looking straight at me and staring with a third eye.
Flinching, I stumbled backward, feeling like this
thing was the type of thing I saw in my
nightmares of fighting and bloodshed and
bleeding skinless skulls-
A crunch of snow underfoot came from behind me, and I whirled around, sword- when had I drawn that?- in my hands and ready to use. There was a tall man standing there, hands raised in a gesture of peace, garbed in a simple cloak of black with red highlights.
He had a hood pulled up and over his head, but I noted a great rash of red skin on the side of his face, reaching down his neck. White hair draped his head, falling out over his shoulders and partially covering up one of his eyes. His face was long, and was even rather handsome, though I had difficulty pinning an age to him. I muffled a gasp when I finally saw that the eye covered by hair was merely a scarred and empty socket, and the man smirked slightly before his expression became flat and neutral again.
Wavering between him and the
thing pretending to be a bird, I stepped around, backing up and making space. He didn't follow, all his attention seemingly on the
thing in the branches.
He spoke to the bird, and yet his words sounded like nothing so much as static, fluctuating as his jaw moved, and I backed away from the two creatures as fast as I could, sword ready to use.
Where's saidar
when I need it? I mentally groused, trying and failing to embrace the Power over and over again even as the panic slowly took hold of me.
I was so focused on the struggle that a blur of motion from the weirwood caught me by surprise, my blade rising too slowly as the bird-shaped
thing flew at me. With an ululating
"Caw," it slammed into my forehead hard enough to knock me flat on my back.
In the next moment, it seemed the man-shaped
thing was standing over me, empty eyesocket lending his smirking face a grim visage as it lifted
my sword and examined it. I scrabbled backward as it made a few swings with it, saying something that was
just static before walking up to me. My limbs felt like lead as it raised my sword, suddenly plunging down and skewering me to the ground through my heart. I watched numbly as blood welled out of the wound, staining my parka.
It
static'ed again, this time to the bird thing, and I realized even as things grew fuzzy that this was
just a nightmare. I knew how to leave nightmares! All I had to do was
open my eyes!
Everything went black before, with what seemed a great struggle, my eyes opened. Rubbing the crust out of them, I barely started a sigh of relief as
pain slammed into me, like a line of fire through my heart. Throwing off the blankets, I saw the wound I'd taken in the
nightmare, welling up blood even as my nanites screamed damage reports at me. The flow stopped as the machines repaired my flesh, leaving unblemished skin behind as I frantically wiped away the blood.
Rolling back to my feet only served to tangle me up in my blanket as I fell out of my small bed, dim moonlight shining from the ceiling in a painfully familiar way. Shuddering, I disentangled myself and stood, rubbing the remnants of numbness from my arms.
I reached out to
saidar, the warmth feeling
normal now, though it took me several attempts before I was calm enough to embrace it. That warmth suffused me, and feeling like a great comfort after
that.
Sniffling a bit, I realized I'd started crying at some point, and I wiped away the tears. Ever since arriving here, I'd never felt so
helpless, unable to even move to defend myself, or escape, or do
anything at all. I
hated the feeling, because it
always set me off this way, and… It made sense if it was a nightmare. I didn't understand why the wound was there, and retrieving my sword, I didn't find a trace of blood on it, though the way the grip warmed my hand felt as comforting as
saidar filling me.
Sitting on the floor and leaning back against my bed, I tried to put it all into context, forcefully process it, and shove it away like all the other nightmares. It didn't have any
meaning, it was just my own fears eating at me, and I could handle that with a bit of effort.
Scrubbing away the tears with the back of my hand, I stood and returned the blade to its scabbard. I had work to do, and it wasn't going to get done if I wallowed in anxiety. Wrapping tendrils of Air around the bed, I tossed the whole thing into the recycler and went about ordering replacements from the terminal.
The pipes hummed, the mechanisms of the machine working with steadfastness, and within a few minutes, I had a replacement bed set up. I needed to change out the pine boughs every couple of days anyway, so it wasn't any great effort to take care of it now.
Practice with
saidar as usual in the early mornings, then I'd have a few free hours before a planning meeting, followed by another couple of hours of educating, and then Ellir would be taking me to meet with the local forest giants. I might be able to give Hardhome a quick look over in those free hours, or at least poke at those "cursed" caves.
If I was being honest with myself, the idea of heading into a cave system alone to determine the cause of the discomforting noises Ellir had described was invigorating as much as it was terrifying. Then again, I'd always liked a good adventure, but all the caves back home had been charted and made traversable to tourists.
I could still remember my first caving experience, though it was fuzzy in some places. My father had a working trip that sent him to the United States, down in Kentucky, and he'd brought us along. We had spent a whole weekend visiting Mammoth Cave, and the awe-inspiring experience of walking through those caverns sparked a love of geology in me.
These caves, though, wouldn't be like that. There were no helpful walkways to stay on or guideposts to follow. I might even have to squeeze through narrow passages, and the only reason I was even considering going alone was my seeming affinity for manipulating stone with
saidar, as well as being able to Travel back out with a short-ranged Gateway if I needed to. Still, it would be incredibly dark, and who knew what animals might live down there. Would boar shelter in caves?
On second thought, I should leave looking into unexplored caves for a time when I'm not rattled by a very strange nightmare. There was no way I was going to risk running into an angry feral hog when I wasn't at my best, and even then, I should bring backup with me. Eyeing the entry hall through the door, apprehension slithered down my spine. What if this was one of those multi-layered dreams? What if I hadn't woken up completely?
Peeking my head out of the door leading to the lodge, I was immensely relieved to see everyone where they ought to be. Most were sleeping, though a few were awake and watching over the sleepers, working on small crafts or otherwise amusing themselves.
Pretty much all of them noticed me, and I gave them a friendly wave that they returned with bemusement.
Retreating a few feet and closing the door as much as I could, the overwhelming relief I felt blew out of me in a great sigh. Yeah, I should leave caving for another day. As I am now, I'm sure I'd end up being spooked by my own shadow.
That still left me several hours to fill, but I'd figure something out when it came up. Maybe I'd just poke at the stubborn metal bulkhead sitting ominously on the far wall and see if I can't get it open somehow.
The stubborn thing only appeared when I caught the light in my constellation space that held some sort of database. It seemed fairly obvious that the two were connected, and I figured the database itself was held on the other side of the bulkhead. Still, I'd not figured out how to open it, given a complete lack of visible mechanisms, switches, latches, or really anything that would distinguish it as a door and not a metallic patch of wall.
Another mystery, but at least this one was close to home. Putting it out of my mind for the moment, I meandered into my wardrobe. I'd had it for weeks now and having a mirror I could use to make sure I was looking presentable was something I still deeply appreciated.
I took my time with the brush, the repetitive motions soothing away some of the unease I felt. As I did, I ruminated over the day prior.
Turns out, I'd been
very optimistic with my education estimates. I
wasn't a teacher, and I had to learn as I went. The curriculum was aimed at children who lived in a society that would already instill in them some of the common concepts, but I had to work backward and adapt it to my people here.
It wasn't insurmountable, but only because Symon helped bridge the gap. Without his help, the entire project would have been a disaster, but he'd done most of the heavy lifting. The man
had apparently taught the children of the lord he'd served, and I was learning from him as much as anyone else was. As it stood, it would be weeks of these daily classes before we built a solid foundation of knowledge before moving on to more advanced topics. If more people started joining in, they'd need to be caught up, but I was planning on having those who learned faster help teach the others. Hopefully, they'd be even better at presenting things in a way that was more easily understood to the newcomers and bring them up to speed faster than Symon and I could.
Still, everything should move more smoothly after the foundations have been built. I'm more than satisfied with it taking weeks instead of years or decades, and we'd learned our own lessons in teaching that first class. In two to three months, I think we'd be able to move from a grade school equivalent to junior high and
hopefully move on to high school in another few months after that.
What came after would need more planning, as I had no idea how the situation might change before then. For all I knew, there might be some light in one of those constellations that held the secrets to being a great teacher, or we might have an influx of people that would need more classes, or we might end up moving below the wall, or any number of things that could throw my guesses off.
Finally happy with my hair, I set aside the brush. Carefully making my way out of the lodge through the kitchen doors, so as to not wake anyone still resting, I was pleased to see that it was another clear night. The moon was shining brightly and illuminating the area quite clearly, helped along by the way the light bounced off the light snow cover.
There were a few people outside standing watch over the surroundings, bundled up against the chill.
The air seemed a little cooler than it'd been yesterday morning. Pulling my tablet out of the bag I'd fashioned for carrying it, I poked around until I pulled up the environmental sensors. The built-in thermometer declared it a brisk negative five degrees Celsius.
Come to think, hadn't Symon mentioned that it was supposed to be summer? I hadn't realized before, taking the environment at face value, but that seemed
very cold. Unseasonably cold, even, considering that even northern Canada had pretty warm summers.
Meandering over to one of the bundled-up watchmen, I crunched through the fresh-ish snow to make my approach obvious.
"Morning," I called lowly when I was close enough.
The bundle turned, revealing a bearded face I recognized as one of Ellir's people. Torm, I thought his name was, had a penchant for weaving small carved bones into his hair.
He grunted at me, rubbing at his nose with a gloved hand. "What do you want?" He asked, gruff but without malice.
I shrugged, "Just came over to see how things were. Anything to see out there?"
Torm faced back to the forest, "Not sure. I thought I saw something moving earlier out there, animal maybe." He sounded uncertain, "Eyes playing tricks on me."
"Something moving?" I asked before a thought came to me. "You don't suppose it's a scout for a raiding party or something, do you?"
He shook his head, "Nah, whatever was out there wasn't making an effort to hide. So, animal is my guess."
Surveying the treeline, I couldn't really see anything out of the ordinary. Then again, I didn't know what to look for, hence why I didn't really take any night watches.
"What did it look like to you? If you saw something, I believe you."
"Well," he drew out the word, "It was out there past that undergrowth, so I didn't get a clear look. Saw it a couple of times, like it was walking along, but didn't care that I was watching it." He shivered, "Felt like it knew I saw it. Looked like a shadow, but not."
Pausing, he pointed out a patch of ground, dappled with moonlight and the shadows of the trees swaying in the slight breeze. "Sorta like how the shadows and light there look, but pale in the darkness."
I blew out a breath, a cloud of mist slowly dissipating. "Okay," I said with confidence that I didn't really feel, "When you're off watch, do you mind asking around and finding out if anyone else saw these things?"
He grunted, "I'm just jumping at shadows is all, doubt it's a problem. Moonlight looks weird out there."
Putting a hand on his shoulder, "Look, we've already had one encounter with the Others, and we've had slavers come by. Both times, they didn't seem to care that we saw them. Better to err on the side of caution and treat it seriously."
Shrugging my hand away, he puffed out a breath. "Fine, I'll ask."
"Thank you," I replied with genuine gratitude, "Personally, I hope it does end up that you were just seeing things. If not, we need to know, yeah? Anyway, I'm gonna head out a ways, you know how it is."
He snorted a laugh, "You gonna go burn some more wool or something? Nah, go on, go do your sorcery or whatever it is you're doing out there."
I waved him farewell and walked out into the treeline. I tried to look for any tracks something moving around might have made, but there was nothing I could find. Gren or an actual hunter might be able to find something that my amateur eyes couldn't, so I'll ask someone to check it out after I get back.
As I made my way to my testing zone in the forest, I wondered how this climate came about. I couldn't think of anything, but I wasn't a climatologist, and I'm sure there was a perfectly reasonable explanation that nobody bothered to tell me because it was one of those facts that
everybody knows around here.
Sadly, it put the kibosh on any sort of outdoor farming up here, unless there were some crops that were already adapted to the environment. Hopefully, the region south of the wall will be more hospitable. I'd have to ask someone who'd been on the other side, probably one of those who'd gone raiding as they'd probably be more familiar with the area than Symon was. The man was incredibly helpful, but he himself had told me that his role in the Watch was confined to the wall itself.
My musing was interrupted as a constellation swung towards me. My reach, by now, had reached its greatest extent yet, and every bit of it was expended on grabbing a cluster of familiarly colored lights. I had a brief moment to recognize the vermillion shade that the variable fighter and the singing skills cluster shared before raw information slammed into me.
It was an overwhelming flood, but this time I was able to stay mostly aware of myself instead of being subsumed. If the earliest acquisitions had been like vague impressions downloaded into my mind, and the most recent had been babbling sound, this time was a synesthetic morass of images in addition to impressions and sounds. Somehow, it was
easier to parse, and I felt like I was observing the process while suffering it.
There was a feeling of warm energy settling into me, almost like the flow of
saidar through me when I embraced the source; This, though, was contained within me, unlike the external energy of the One Power. It was finite and limited in nature, but was self-sustaining and wouldn't be extinguished easily. It felt like pulsing rhythmic tones and tasted like the joy I felt when I sang freely.
Music, I thought, even as the campfire flame of energy intensified, becoming a bonfire. It didn't hurt, and if anything, I felt revitalized by it. The stronger it became, the more aware I was of a sort of echoing in the distance. Like other fires, smaller in comparison, clustering together and amplifying the tonal energy. The echo was greatest in one direction I couldn't parse, like standing on a dark hilltop and seeing the reflection of city lights on the clouds in the distance.
Suddenly, I began falling, as though I'd been standing on nothing and only now had gravity caught up to me. Everything around me was folding in on itself, or maybe it was already folded, and I'd only just started noticing. The air tasted sad, and the melancholic purple tones whispered tantalizing hints of something
greater, like the hope that comes with making amends for past actions.
As I fell, the folding became more intense, and the new energy within me was changing. Not growing, if anything it diminished slightly, but it felt
purer. Almost like contaminants were being filtered out, the essence of the remainder intensifying. Unbidden, a word in a language
I didn't understand came to mind.
Anima Spiritua, my beleaguered brain translated after a moment, lacking the way the original word had been heavily laden with meaning. It was life, or a sort of energy that attached itself to life, or maybe something produced by life. It was abstract and trying to figure it out felt like folding my mind in the same way the space around me folded itself.
My descent stopped, or maybe I'd lost all my frames of reference, only able to watch the folding space. Almost like an afterthought, I distantly felt two other lights attach themselves to me, and the space around me flickered into patterns like wireframe images accompanying the ability of slightly faster tool swapping and the knack for taking apart technology to learn how it worked. The last two felt more complete, for some reason, like I'd been able to absorb their entirety in this space.
My face was pressed up against something cold and soft, and I opened my eyes to find myself lying flat in the snow. The sudden transition from there-ness to here-ness was disorienting, and I felt dizzy.
Pushing myself up into a sitting position, I fumbled for my tablet. This time, I figured I'd been out for a little over twenty minutes. A shiver unrelated to the chill ran through me, confusion warring with concern.
Not for the first time, I wished my nanites had some sort of recording function. As it was, I ran through a full check-up, which revealed nothing concerning or out of the ordinary. Whatever was happening to me when I gained lights didn't seem to affect me medically, or if it did, the nanites cleared it up before I could check.
Closing my eyes, I reached my awareness into the other space, and everything seemed normal at first glance.
With more examination, I found a peculiar anomaly. One of the lights I'd most recently gained was unusually dense, and peering at it more closely, I could see tiny seams, like a scrunched-up paper ball. It was folded, and the thought felt peculiar, though I didn't know why.
Walking back through what I remembered
just happening, I'd been… No, I'd felt a sort of energy, then it grew, and then I was watching reflected light, and… Something about tools and figuring things out?
I felt itchy when I looked at the scrunched-up light, and it seemed a familiar itchiness, but beyond that, I couldn't make heads or tails of what it did.
I'd just begun pulling my attention back when I noticed a faint thread of dim light stretching from it to some of the other lights in the cluster. Two of these were new, but the familiar light of singing now had one small tendril attached to it. The texture of the light had changed as well, gaining a very minuscule crinkling to it. It was as though that crumpled light had somehow altered these others. The light I was examining shone brighter than I remembered, and if the intensity of light was an aspect of how this worked, then the crumpled light had contributed to them, somehow.
I wondered if there were any other of these connections between lights, and surprisingly I found another strand linking Woodworking and Stoneworking. This strand was thicker and seemed almost like two separate threads wound together. Now that I was looking for it, the wood-grained texture of one had melded with the smooth granite of the other, both lights sharing aspects of themselves.
Returning to reality, I noted everything down on the tablet, and I was pleased to find I'd only lost ten minutes to the timelessness of the light realm.
Standing and brushing the snow off, I continued my trek to the testing grounds. I could handle mysterious light mysteries later, right now I needed to practice with the Power.
Out of everything in the sea of lights,
this was quickly becoming my favorite ability I'd gained from it.
Saidar made me feel
alive while I embraced it, in a way I don't think anything else ever had. The world was brighter and more vivid, sensations were more impactful, and my senses were sharper. Even if I'd only begun to scratch the surface of what I could do with it, the potential applications grew every time I worked with it.
Most of what I did was still instinctual, wanting to do something and performing it to a degree, only to try and figure out how it actually worked after the fact. Sometimes, it was complicated by the effects of some of my other lights. What I'd done yesterday with bringing an entire mineral deposit to the surface was probably
not something that should have been as easy as it was. When working within the earth, both Stoneworking and Shaping were applied simultaneously, making it as easy to work with threads of earth and air as I could mold wet clay with my hands.
Even carrying the chunk yesterday had been aided by them, as I'd kept it low enough to the ground for a multitude of anchoring threads to "walk" the stone as I moved.
Woodworking helped with, well, handling wood. Somehow, I'd been instinctively curing the wood as it was used for construction, though that may have just been limited to Woodworking combined with Shaping. Taking a tree apart with the Power, however, was certainly easier than trying to manipulate wool. At the thought, I recalled the stench of burning wool and rubbed at my nose to try and get rid of it.
On the other hand, whatever Talents I had with
saidar didn't seem to work the same way. Gateways took a great amount of effort and energy to open, as much as I'd been able to hide the exertion from the others. It
had been getting easier over time as I practiced, but nowhere near the same ease as pulling thousands of tons of iron-bearing minerals up from the depths of the earth. The Talent was probably just being able to form them at all, come to think, and I wasn't sure how I could improve it on my own.
Trying to recreate smaller sections of the overall weave had sort of worked, and I could think of all sorts of applications for a Power-based vacuum chamber, so there were certainly good results for tinkering with it.
I wasn't really any closer to figuring out how they actually
worked, but I had all the time in the world to learn.
Over the next few hours, I worked on trying to isolate the targeting mechanism. There had to be some way that I was feeding the weave the information necessary to make two areas of space "similar" enough for a Gateway to form. If I could figure it out, I might find further uses for something like that. Remote signaling might be a possibility, or, one day, maybe even static Gateways to link two locations on a more permanent basis.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to figure it out in the subjective weeks of concentrated effort before the three-hour alarm I'd set on the tablet went off. I didn't even think I was getting close to an answer yet, sadly, and in hindsight, I may have been better served by practicing using the Power in general. It wasn't a waste of time or effort, and I wasn't surprised by a lack of results, given I'd only been actively channeling for less than a subjective year at this point.
Starting my trek back to First Fork, I kept an eye on the constellation space, wary of any more incoming problems. My reach felt restive, as though still digesting a particularly large meal. Pausing my walk, I made a note on the tablet that, apparently, that had been the association my mind had brought up.
Dawn had broken by the time I returned to the village. Most people had woken up by now and started on the day's business, and it struck me how crowded the small space felt.
The land area of the whole village was quite a bit smaller than my former university campus, and with only a few major buildings and several of the old huts still standing by the weirwood, the inhabitants seemed to fill the space. It felt comfortable, and cozy, with people stopping to chat as they went about their lives.
It was a foreign feeling, and it was one I particularly liked. Sure, I was probably looking for the positives and trying not to see the negatives, like those two women standing off and looking near to blows by the bathhouse. Even as I watched, a burly man walked past and spoke a few words to both of them, and they peacefully parted ways.
Even a week ago, that would have come to blows, and both of them would assuredly ask for healing that I would refuse. I'd made it known that if anyone wanted to have unsanctioned combat, then they'd better expect to deal with the consequences of that. In this case, though, I don't think anything I did had anything to do with what just happened. Rather, it seemed an expected outcome as greater access to desired resources relieved pressures, and that in turn cooled existing tensions.
Pausing, I shook my head, trying to trace where
that thought had come from. With a sigh, I made another note on the tablet, resolving to talk to someone about this... At some point. Grenwin was a good listener, but I didn't want to bother her with my worries.
Heading back to my pocket reality, I stopped before the annoyingly inert metallic door. I glared at it, and it quite unreasonably remained unaffected.
Crossing my arms, I carefully looked it over, hoping I might spot something I'd missed in my prior examinations. Unfortunately, nothing new had revealed itself. It sat on the wall seamlessly, looking like nothing more than an out-of-place decoration.
Delving the metal with
saidar, the threads of Earth and Spirit skittered through it, feeling disturbingly slick. It wasn't repelling the weave exactly, but the peculiar feedback I was getting was useless. If there were internal mechanisms, I couldn't feel them out.
Sighing, I reached out and put my hand on it, the surface cool under my palm. "At least the plane came with a manual," I grumbled to myself. Sweeping my hand across the metal, I felt the texture change to slight ripples somewhere near the center. Tracing it out, there was a circle of rippled surface dead center in the door, and I started to hope that I'd made some sort of progress with it.
I pushed on the circular zone lightly with one hand, then harder, and finally with both hands as hard as I could, but it was fairly obvious that this wasn't some sort of giant button after a few moments of effort.
My fingers
did find a tiny seam, one I could barely feel with
saidar-enhanced senses, and one I couldn't see whatsoever. Interwoven threads of Earth and Air were able to latch onto both sides of it, though the scale I was working with was truly miniscule. I added more and more threads, ever so slowly gaining a firmer grip on the two halves of the door.
Stepping back a fair distance, my patience thoroughly exhausted, I took those threads and
pulled.
At first, it felt like trying to push a boulder with my bare hands. I tried to increase the force I was exerting smoothly and evenly, and after a few minutes, I felt it budge a
tiny bit. Emboldened, I poured more into the ad-hoc weave.
The metal began to creak, quietly at first, before suddenly wrenching free, peeling open to either side. The room beyond was large, at least as large as the hangar, lit with a dim blue light.
Panting from the exertion, I released
saidar, sitting and leaning against the wall. I felt drained, but that was probably the most of the Power I'd ever used at once.
After taking a breather, I stood and carefully stepped around the bent doorway and into the archive room. The door had led into a walkway between long rows of peculiar server shelves, each easily three meters tall and half as wide, and long enough that I couldn't easily eyeball the distance. The ceiling, smooth paneling broken up by evenly placed unlit lights, looked another three or four meters higher again. Peering down the walkway, it seemed like the rows of monolithic servers continued on for a good way before opening up into a clear space.
It was a little chilly in this room, and the echoes of my footsteps on the metal walkway lent the place a peculiar feeling; The designers hadn't expected long-term occupation of this space. The acoustics were fairly nice, and humming a cheery tune helped lift the oppressive atmosphere.
Reaching the clear area at the end of the walkway, the cavernous chamber had curved walls, and windows set into them revealing what could have been offices, doors presumably leading into them. The center of the clear space was dominated by a flat pedestal, four-ish meters in diameter and half a meter tall, beveled around the upper edges and smooth, aside from a small dome sitting in the center.
The doors on the wall opposite the walkway were larger than those on either side and seemed to be simple push doors. Thankfully, they were unlocked, and the room beyond was festooned with peculiar mechanisms. It vaguely reminded me of photos I'd seen of NASA's control center, and with that association in mind, I made out recessed screens and odd haptic interfaces. Keyboards were obvious, but they used a layout I didn't recognize. The function and number rows were familiar, but instead of the letters starting with QWERTY, they read DVORAK. Next to them, half-spheres large enough to be cupped in the hand sat on the desk, and I was greatly surprised by the whole thing sliding across the desk instead of rolling under my palm like it seemed it should.
Oddities aside, I walked up to what seemed to be the main bank of controls, smaller workstation screens against the far wall with larger screens higher up on the wall, presumably openly visible to everyone else working in the room.
Chairs were set up in front of the controls, and I found that they were quite comfortable upon sitting down. Swiveling from side to side, I looked for anything like a power switch for the workstation, eventually finding a button down on the side of the desk, with a smaller button next to it. Surmising the larger to be the power button and the smaller a reset, I pushed the larger in with a satisfying click.
Immediately, the sound of small fans whirring began as the screen flickered to life. It flashed a couple of times before a simple login screen appeared with a few tidbits of information on the side. This was apparently workstation A-3, which made sense given the two others to either side of me. In the lower right-hand corner, in small bold text, sat a peculiar acronym.
I mused over it for a few moments. The first thought that came to mind was some sort of public service announcement system, but I had no idea why one would need the rows and rows of servers in the main chamber.
Trying a few methods of generic logins, I was ultimately unsuccessful in guessing one. Shrugging, I restarted the machine, trying the function keys until one of them brought me to a boot menu, and from there I entered safe mode. From there, setting up a new admin account was easy enough, and this system didn't seem like it was high security
at all.
Ultimately, past the login screen was a simple command prompt. There were a few plain text files in the root directory, one titled simply "readme." Never one to turn aside a readme file, I opened it up. Far from a professional document as I'd expected, it was laden with jargon and what probably passed for humor, like it was ultimately one big in-joke.
The preface was simple, starting with a tongue-in-cheek "Apollo's Primary Systems Access and You," followed by a note that it was
not a public service announcement, continuing onto a broad overview of what the programmers and engineers were trying to achieve, bugs in the system they'd stumbled on and didn't have time to fix fully but found workarounds for, a changelog of fixes, and finally a mostly coherent guide to find the
actual manual of operations, "In the root directory of every workstation's local storage, labeled MANOPS, can't miss it."
It felt odd to be reading something like this, as foreign to this world as I was. Sure, I wasn't sentimental, but this felt like confirmation that I wasn't just delusional and convinced of a prior life that never existed.
This APOLLO system was the data archive I'd thought it was, the readme claiming it was the sum total of human culture and knowledge, "Or at least everything we could get our hands on before the servers dropped from the 'net." Ominous wording, but the whole document had little notes like that, implying an ongoing disaster that APOLLO was supposed to help ameliorate, somehow. There were mentions of integration into a larger system, but that wasn't the focus of this facility, apparently.
I opened up the manual, skimming it. There were fairly involved procedures used to manually reactivate everything from standby, and I eventually found the section on opening the sealed door. I winced as I read the simple steps of "Speak 'Open' loudly and clearly." It was apparently set up to respond to every language stored in the archive and meant to be as idiot-proof as possible. Glancing back through the window and up the long walkway, I looked at the twisted remains of the doors, wincing again.
Running through the many,
many steps to turn everything back on, I was finally rewarded with clear, clean lighting and the calm hum of coolant pumps. Small lights flickered on and off in the rows of servers, indicators of activity that made the place seem more alive, less a mausoleum than a futuristic data center.
Accessing the archives from the workstation, I ran through the next series of integrity checks and every other "optional but highly recommended" step listed. Fortunately, there weren't any errors, though curiously the system timer had only counted a few days since the facility entered standby. From all the verbiage in the readme, this time capsule was supposed to last for thousands of years, but I'd received the light that brought it here in the last couple of days, so I supposed I was lucky that whatever dictated the contents of my lights had decided to bring me a fresh facility instead of one that had actually existed for millennia.
Finally done, with everything operational and running well, I found myself paralyzed with indecision. What would I use this for? What
could I use it for?
Indecision chewed at me as I worried my lip before an idea came to me. My issue with lacking educational materials might be solved if I could find the relevant Eden Initiative documents. This
was touted as the end-all time capsule for humanity on a global scale, so that sort of thing might be in here!
Manually searching the petabytes of information stored here wasn't an option, but the manual helpfully pointed out various search functions. Disappointingly, the vast majority of references to Eden were religious scripture and other related texts, and the only Eden Initiative I could find was a hardcore Christian eco-terrorist group operating in devastated central Africa in the early 2040s, which was most certainly
not what I was looking for.
Leaning back in the comfortable chair, I closed my eyes and trawled my memory for any pertinent details. It didn't take long to recall the basic history of the organization, being formally organized after Seamus Green's manifesto was published in 2056.
Inspired, I tried to search by date in the archive. The most recent entries stopped in May of 2066, but even skimming through the time period between relevant articles didn't bring up
anything.
There were no results or mentions of any notable figures named Seamus Green, nor any mention of the ecological preservation organization with a
global presence.
I slapped my forehead as a realization came to me. I'd just assumed that the Ecotech came from a future Earth ravaged by climate change, but here I was looking at an archive from
a different future Earth ravaged by climate change. I'd just assumed that they'd be the same, but clearly, I'd been mistaken.
I brought up the manual again, searching for something hinted at in the readme. There'd been a cheeky mention of "That whole program to provide education services to ELEUTHIA facilities," and "They called them Lyceum, but we all know it's just a glorified classroom. Why not just call it that instead of leaning into obscure Greek?"
There
were mentions of Lyceum supervision subroutines in the manual, with warnings that manipulation or modification of their operation should be done by qualified artificial intelligence engineers
only,
"Meaning Sobeck's team, guys. Don't mess with it if you don't want to break it." That was certainly an interesting tidbit to read, confirmation that these people had access to higher level artificial intelligence than anything from home. Well, they
were a future human civilization that continued to develop rapidly, as opposed to stagnating somewhat as the Eden Initiative had.
The EVE units that assist the EI's operations around the world were fairly advanced, but still just assistants to whoever was in charge and not really capable of independent action. Here, these people had built something advanced enough to put it in a classroom reliably, but I didn't know if it was an assistant to a human teacher or if it
was the teacher.
Finally, I found the section on activating those subroutines, collectively labeled under ATHENA, which just seemed like unnecessary Greek to me. Still, I carefully read over the warnings, which
all warned against modifying the subroutine and not simply running it. Shrugging, I followed the steps, a new command window opening a few moments after starting it up. Lines of text scrolled past before stopping, and I was greeted by the little window closing immediately.
A check through the logs revealed a fatal error after a network connection issue. Sighing, I leaned back in the chair, immensely grateful for the ability to recline.
This wasn't something I could just fix right now. It'd be another project, and I was already stretching myself thin.
An echoing call from outside the chamber brought me out of my thoughts.
"Maia! You around?" Ygdis' voice sounded cheerful, so probably not an emergency.
"I'm in here!" I called back, standing and heading back towards the broken doors. A moment later, Ygdis and Grenwin stepped into view, looking at the bent and broken chunks of metal with curiosity. They looked at me, then seemed to share a glance, and something unspoken passed between them.
"So," Ygdis started as they poked their way through the wreckage, "Was this here the whole time?"
Gren looked around the comparatively vast space before her gaze honed in on the blinking lights along the server racks. She quietly walked forward, examining the structure while Ygdis kept my attention.
I shook my head, "No, it's a recent addition. This, ah," I nodded to the pile of debris in the doorway, "Turns out I could have just told it to 'open' and the door would've listened. I ended up breaking it pretty badly, I think."
The young woman laughed openly at this, even prompting a chuckle from Grenwin. Looking at the absurdity of the situation, I couldn't help but break out in giggles as well.
"Thanks for never doing that to me," my sparring partner joked, "I know you want to get better, but it's not like you need to. Just, do that to anyone who bothers you, and you'll probably be fine."
Momentarily flummoxed, I was at a loss for how to respond. Thankfully, Grenwin was an excellent distraction.
"What's all this, anyway? Why is it so cold in here?" She wondered aloud, not really asking so much as thinking for herself.
Ygdis nodded at her, "Yeah, what is all this?" She asked.
I opened my mouth, tapped my lips in thought-
"You don't need to do that, you know," Gren said, walking up to us. "You don't have to… Simplify, right? You don't need to dumb it down for us."
There wasn't any anger or negativity in her tone, but it was said with the firmness of absolute conviction. She continued as Ygdis moved to stand beside her, facing me.
"Stop treating us like children. You say you want to be just our equal, that our choice in raising you to lead is meaningless. Was it really, to you?" She stepped forward, not menacingly, but demanding an answer.
I shook my head, eyes wide. "It's not- I…" My shaking slowed until I was looking back and forth between them.
"You won't even tell us where you come from," Ygdis noted, "You've talked about it a little, but… You treat wonders like you're used to them. I've never seen you, not once, step into the lodge and shake off the snow and take in the warmth. We have a spigot for
hot water, whenever we want any. No need to fetch from the river and heat over a fire."
Grenwin put a hand on her apprentice's shoulder, quieting her. "Look, you understand, right?"
I blinked, nodding slowly. "I think so. I… I've been treating you and everyone like that, haven't I."
"Yeah." She nodded, her face turning grim. "You need to stop. Do you remember why I agreed to teach you how to fight?"
"I remember…" I said quietly, "I need to show that I'll fight alongside you. Is that what I've been missing?"
The two of them nodded soberly before Grenwin cracked a grin. "It is. You aren't above us, you're one of us now." She punched me lightly in the shoulder, Ygdis doing the same with the other. "You're free here, so forget whatever hold your past has on you. You need to start coming out more often with us, learning our ways, not just the curiosity you've shown."
Confused by the sudden shift, I stopped myself before speaking, trying to take in their words and really
listen.
"You're right, both of you." I bowed my head slightly, "Thank you. If it's not too much to ask, can you make sure I never forget that?" I didn't think I could trust myself to remember, not with the constant list of tasks that kept growing.
"Be a sad day if we ever failed, huh?" Ygdis joked, pulling me into a powerful hug. "We've got you as long as you've got us."
Grenwin cleared her throat, sounding uncertain for the first time this morning. "On that, you remember my objections to you looking for the forest giants?"
With some struggle, I managed to turn my head in Ygdis' muscled grasp enough to look at the older woman. "Yeah, you were pretty upset yesterday. I've thought about it and you're not wrong to be concerned. Everything you'd told me says that they're violent, territorial, and incredibly aggressive."
For some reason, she grimaced a bit. "I suppose. I don't want to leave you to go into that sort of thing alone."
"Same!" Ygdis said cheerfully as she gave me a rib-creaking squeeze. "We're going with you and Ellir."
I struggled vainly in her grasp before she finally relented. Rubbing my no-longer-aching sides for effect, I looked between them. They were so earnest…
A mancatcher's loop hooked around Ygdis's throat as her eyes bulged in surprise, and she was pulled backward into a grasping mass of arms. Grenwin smiled at me, blood dripping from the sides of her mouth as the bolts studding her torso shuddered with every breath-
"Hey!" Something jostled my shoulder, Ygdis pushing me a little. The vision faded like mist under the summer sun, leaving the two of them standing there unharmed. "You alright?" She asked.
"I… No, I don't think I am." I replied shakily, honestly. I told them what had just happened, and they both seemed to understand.
Grenwin sat down, leaning up against one of the server racks. Ygdis followed, pulling me down with her until I was sandwiched between them. It was immensely comforting in a way I hadn't thought I'd needed.
Patting my shoulder, Gren laughed mirthlessly. "It gets better. Trust me."
We sat like that for a time, emotions burbling inside me without any sense. I couldn't find any sense of order to it, but the feeling of my friends next to me kept me anchored. Eventually, tears leaked from my eyes as I couldn't stop myself from feeling the weight of my life since waking in the snow, and eventually, they dried as everything seemed to settle into contentment.
"I haven't told you what this place is yet," I realized aloud, getting twin grunts of affirmation. "It's a library. A whole civilization put this together in their final days, in the hopes it would be used to rebuild their world."
I could feel Ygdis mouth the word "Library?" as she looked around. "You said there were books in libraries. Books like Symon's, right, Gren?"
The other woman nodded, "Yeah. Maia, you showed me your tablet, is this library like that?"
"Yeah!" I said, happy that they got it, I felt a little guilt at thinking that about them, and I crushed that superiority impulse harshly. "It's exactly like that. All the books like Symon's that they put in here were written in a way to keep them safe for a long time, and there's so much more besides. I could spend my entire life looking through here and barely scratch the surface."
They sat quietly for a moment, absorbing that. It was a companionable silence, bereft of the weight of emotion that had held all of us down before.
"We need more Symons," Ygdis noted happily. We looked at her, her serene face at complete odds with her tone. "Maia just said she could spend her entire life looking into the things here, and there's probably really useful stuff in here."
I nodded, turning to Grenwin, "She's right, I know for a fact there are textbooks and other tools we could make really good use of. Beyond that, there are bound to be things that will help us in every way we can think of. We just need time to look through it all."
The older woman sighed, leaning her head back against the server rack. "I don't know if we have time. The Others have already come once, and Symon's already told you that the Crows will try to kill us if they find us."
"That was a private conversation! How did you hear that?" I asked, affronted.
Ygdis snickered, "You two were standing in front of an open window and his voice carries. Seriously, he spent a long time trying to get that through your thick head." She rapped my temple lightly with her knuckles.
I grumbled light-heartedly in response. It was a good grumble, just the right amount of muttering-to-cursing.
"We need to find people who can look through this while you focus on things only you can do." Ygdis told me, "We'll all be able to read and write soon, but I don't know anyone who can move things with their will or anything else that you can do."
"I do try to work on my own skills," I protested lightly, "I spend hours each morning trying to better my control over
Saidar."
"What have you learned so far?" Grenwin asked with genuine interest.
I thought about it. Everything could really be summed up quite simply.
"I've learned that doing it on my own is not working. I need someone to actually teach me, or lacking that, someone to teach, and maybe teaching helps me figure out what I'm doing wrong."
They were quiet for a very long moment, long enough that I started to worry I'd offended them somehow.
"You can teach how to do the things you do?" Grenwin asked slowly.
Nodding, "Maybe, if they have the aptitude. The place where this ability comes from, most people didn't. Those that did could be put into two camps, those who would touch
Saidar eventually, like me, and those that could be taught how to do it."
"How'd they find out who can learn, then?" Ygdis asked, Gren nodding along.
I shrugged, trying to recall. "Something about looking for a resonance when the teacher channels. I'm not entirely sure. I think they used a tool, like a gemstone or something."
That sparked a thought, "If you want to both bear with me, we can try really fast. Might not work at all and I don't have a ton of time before the meeting in a bit."
They both jumped to their feet, hauling me up with them. "What do we do?" The two of them asked in unison.
"I found a little quartz gem the other day and put it in my locker. Let's grab that."
We moved into the entry chamber, and upon retrieving my funny little gem, we stood huddled together. I held my hands palms up between the three of us, gem resting lightly. A trickle of Air and Spirit channeled into the gem gave it a brilliant light, and I had to tone it down with a "Sorry," at the winces on their faces.
"So, this is how we'll do this," I said confidently, "Part of this is a guided meditation. Follow my voice, listen to what I'm telling you, and do what I say when I say it. Is this acceptable?"
"Yeah," Grenwin nodded excitedly, and Ygdis was practically vibrating in excitement.
"Okay, what I need you to do is focus on the light within the crystal." I began, a lulling cadence entering my voice. "The crystal is a normal quartz, but it shines with the light of
Saidar. To me, this light is always with me, shining in the back of my mind. For now, just look at the way it moves within the crystal."
I strummed a tiny thread of Air, causing the light within the gem to dim before flaring brightly, then dimming again. "I'm starting a pattern, now. Watch how the light circulates, dimming before brightening. That's
saidar flowing through this tiny gem, through me, and through you. It's always here, waiting for our embrace."
They were focused entirely on the tiny flaring light, and my own mind started wandering. They were just so
energetic, the light of their souls moving with a vivacity that struck me as special. What did it mean for me that I could feel people this way? Ygdis'
spiritua pulsed in time with the light of the gem, her face serene and eyes half-lidded.
Grenwin, on the other hand, was glaring at the gem. Her
spiritua was also pulsing, in a similar way. I wonder what the difference was between the two that made them react so differently.
In my distraction, I'd stopped strumming on the thread of
Saidar. The light was still pulsing, and as I watched the fine threads of my creation, I saw how the pattern I'd woven was slowly decohering. The light began to dim, and then to my utter shock, two separate portions of the weave
twitched.
It wasn't the twitch of normal motion, but the twitch that comes with an unseen force tugging. The tugs destabilized the construct, the pattern accelerating as the flashes became more rapid, before fading entirely.
I took a shaky breath, and I was surprised to see my friends doing the same. Their brows were soaked in sweat and they looked as though they'd just run a marathon.
"I, ah," I started lamely before trailing off. It broke the stillness of the moment, and two sets of eyes were drilling into me.
"What was-" "I felt-" They spoke over each other, before stopping. Gren nodded to Ygdis, who started, "I thought I felt something, at the end. You had been talking about imagining being a flower bud and embracing the light. It was, warm?" She looked at me, then Grenwin, and blushed. "I must have been imagining it."
"I felt it too," Grenwin said quietly, leaving it at that.
There was a solemn, serious moment before a laugh escaped my mortified lips. I failed to stop the second, and the third, before it seemed all the bottled-up positivity was escaping in a bought of genuine, exhausting laughter. I embraced both of them, weeping as I held onto them tightly.
It finally made sense, why I had felt such a kinship with these two women specifically; Why Grenwin had let me speak that first encounter, and let me into the camp; Why Ygdis was happy to let me try and hit her with sticks while doing the same for me.
I'd been worried about losing the memories of my family and had ignored the sisters I'd had beside me this whole time. I wept, as for the first time in a very long time, I truly understood I wasn't alone.
My home had never been a place, it had been the people around me. My old home, my old people, had treated me like an accessory. My new home accepted me for what I was, told me when I was doing wrong, and still stood with me.
"I'm finally home," I burbled into Gren's shoulder.
