Chapter 8: Reprise of Rebellion
Silence, not Dreams
My steps were measured as I descended the stairs. The temple's glow was steady and true as I returned to the heart of the space. When I reached the bottom, Micah was following close on my heels, and Eliana was furiously scratching away in her journal.
I ignored all of it. Something far more important was waiting for me just a bit away from the temple. Lysandra's garden high atop the Aerie.
Ten rows with ten plants. A hundred snowpetals slowly wilting without the care of their gardener. But they were the longsuffering bloom of the clouds. They could go on like that for years still.
At the far end of the carefully planned rows was a circle of blooms perfectly preserved against time. Two each of snowpetal, voidstem, bloodleaf, goldroot, and silverthorn. One for each Lady and one for her Mavi. Gormlaith's final legacy, preserved for her family.
"Nyx," Micah was still beside me, "what is this?"
I couldn't speak, only walk toward the circle and take the snowpetals from it, uprooting them whole. Micah's expression was all concern and confusion as I snapped the roots off of one and gave the rest of it to them. It was meant for them, after all.
Micah didn't immediately grasp the flower's meaning or purpose, but they took it from me without further question.
Reaching in my pocket, I knew I'd find a handful of the petals that had been cursing me for so many moons. I put them into a bowl and poured some water over them. They needed to soak for a while, so I sat within the circle. It wasn't a position meant for me, but the sun was rising, and I needed to see the view Gormlaith and Lysandra had shared for the time of peace.
Feeling some gravity of the moment, Micah took a seat beside me, still holding the snowpetal I had given them. We sat in silence for a long while as the mornward horizon lit up a brilliant blend of silver and gold. I heard Eliana and Tareth approach and sit on my other side.
"So this is what we came all this way for?" Eliana's reverence warmed me against the slowly rising winds. "I'll forgive you stealing my beau away. Just this once."
The light spread freely across Lafleur.
I knew we couldn't see the whole of the land, but such a wide spread of it was laid out before us I was certain I could nearly see to three of the five corners from my own seat so high in the clouds. It all looked so tiny. Even Greywatch Spire was barely a spec from so high and so far.
My gaze turned marward. The Black Lakes lay just beyond the shadow of the Aerie. Vast pools almost inland seas unto themselves. A tear worked itself from my eye and fell to the stones around me. I couldn't say why.
As I swept across toward the eveward lands, my eyes settled on a great plain at the foot of high cliffs. Deep within those cliffs and ravines would have been the Crucible, except I knew it had been destroyed. The bloodleaf flowers in my circle were two of the last three in all of Lafleur.
I could make out the edge of the valley where the Grand Temple should have been as I continued tracing the horizon toward the sun. Beyond that, I would've been able to make out the Thicket, but it was too far removed from my position.
Thornwood Hallow was the final area I let myself see. A vast forest covering the entire mornward region of Lafleur with the exception of Blue Stone. At the centre of the forest was a scar. No trees grew where Salora's temple stood. Hers was always the wildest garden, the entire forest her domain.
"Eliana," I said at last without looking toward her, "do you have your journal?"
She shuffled about for a moment. "I filled a lot of it when the temple lit up, but there's still a few pages."
"Write this down, exactly as I say it."
I relayed every detail of the dream, even down to the sensation of the wine dripping slowly down my throat and the warmth I felt standing with the others. Each woman's description to the letter. Salora's silver and emerald. Aurelin's gold and topaz. Lysandra's ivory and pearl. The sapphire hair of the Mavi with their various styles and weapons.
When I finished, she had a tiny bit of page left. "I've never filled one of these up so quickly," she said. "You should put your name to the last page, Nyxara."
Taking the book, I didn't write my name. Instead, I wrote in the Greywatch dialect, "Count the suns. Count the stars."
"What's that about, Nyx?" Micah asked while looking over my shoulder.
"It's for the next person to read this journal," I muttered. "Hopefully she'll be able to make sense of it. But it was Lysandra's final message for her sisters."
"More than ever, I need a better library," Eliana whispered. "And I get the feeling you won't be coming along when Tareth and I leave."
"You see the state of the flowers here," I indicated the hundred plants in their orderly rows. "Someone needs to nurse them back to health. It has to be me."
The bowl I'd set next to myself seemed to shimmer in the growing sunlight. It was ready. I took it from the stones and walked to the rows of snowpetal, the last legacy of Lysandra. At the base of each plant, I dripped a small amount of the water and thanked them for surviving so long. When all one hundred plants were managed, I returned to the circle and watered the remaining eight flowers, even though they didn't need it. They were preserved exactly as well as the ones I'd included on my list of snowpetal uses.
No one had spoken as I attended the task. When I finished, I looked back to them. They were all staring. "What's wrong?"
"It's nothing, Nyx," Micah replied. "For a moment, though, you looked like someone else. I couldn't place it, and I was just confused."
Tareth nodded his agreement. "Kind of scary if I'm honest. Like you would toss me off this mountain if I threatened your garden."
"Well, if I'm going to be here a while, then at least I'm scary enough to keep the mountain landaax away." I chuckled at my own stupid comment. Nothing could keep landaax away. "Eliana, you're right that I'm not coming with you. But Tareth is, whether he likes it or not."
"He likes it," Eliana said as she shoved the big man playfully. "Or else I'll make him like it. Plus, if you're not coming with us, I can make it worth his while." She wiggled her eyebrows at me. Good for her.
"I'm staying," Micah said, as if we hadn't all mutually understood it. "Clearly this place is connected to Dee somehow. And if standing with Nyx gets me closer to Dee, then this is my place."
"You two should stay as long as you must," I told Eliana and Tareth, "but you'll want to leave within the next moon. Travel in the cold season is not for the faint-hearted."
I had no more dreams after that. Not for a long time. But to tell the tale of the dreams' return here would be a disservice to the journey that led me to the end.
Lurkers, Lured
Excluding the wind, the Aerie was a quiet place without Tareth and Eliana. By the time they left, the snowpetal garden was beginning to look as vibrant as I knew it from my dreams, but there was still more work to be done.
Micah used the quiet as a way to hone their skills and work toward new applications of their cold-flame. "It was useful in the forest fire," they said plainly, "so I'll keep working at it until the flame consumes me whole."
Eliana had left me a blank journal – I never sorted how many she had or where she kept them all – just in case I had any further knowledge to share. I felt Micah's cold-flame research was far more valuable than the absence of visions I seemed to be having, so its first twenty or so pages were filled with diagrams and descriptions of all Micah was doing, rather than any news about Lysandra or Gormlaith or any of their kin.
I spent most of my time tending the garden. We had plenty of food to last us at least a year, even if the food wasn't what I would call appetising – mostly salt meats and dried vegetables. When the time came that we were close to running out of food, we would head down to Ivory or some other town and restock.
That's what we told ourselves.
A moon passed, and the cold weather came. The mountain landaax would be returning to the Petalcloud Mountains soon. We couldn't know how high they would climb or how violent they would be, but preparation was our best defence against uncertainty.
The temple stood without much damage, so I was certain the beasts would leave it be. And the flowers had been left and had grown in their slow and deliberate way. So our biggest liability at the end of the night would be ourselves, provided I was correct about the rest. If a mountain landaax of any size found its way into the Aerie proper, we would have to find a way to stop it.
When I realised that calling us a liability wasn't quite right, I asked Micah to spar with me. Unarmed combat at first, to build up the skills from a starting point I understood as a baker: using my hands to subdue a thing. Eventually we moved on to combat with small blades. Micah kept two hunting knives in their pack. "Just in case," they said when they showed me.
I made every effort to avoid turning to the warhammer, no matter how comfortable its grip felt in my hands. Placing it on the altar was my way of telling Lysandra she could keep her damned destiny. If she wanted me to fill in for her, she had another thing coming. I would tend her flowers and watch over her garden, but that was temporary. An appeasement and nothing more.
Winter's first snow was our sign we'd be staying in the Aerie for a time. If we tried to leave, that would be the death of us.
Not two suns passed after the first snow before our fears were realised. A mountain landaax wandered into the Aerie soon after the sun set. It didn't step foot within the temple, opting to walk clear around it. Instead, the beast lay down next to the hundred flowers, its eyes trained away as some ancestral guard.
Until the beast left, we opted to stay on the highest platform so we could watch its movements. When the sun was high, it would sleep beside the garden. After dark, it would stalk around the Aerie, sniffing about for something.
The second of them arrived almost four suns later. Rather than fight like their kind were occasionally known to do, they took turns carefully guarding the rows of snowpetal and sniffing about. Curiously, they paid no mind to the circle of flowers after the first night.
I noted these behaviours in the journal, uncertain what to make of them.
Three sevensuns passed, ten of the beasts gathered with us, before Micah and I both became somewhat stir-crazy and began making plans to handle our predicament.
"Why do you think they behave like that, Nyx?" Straight to the point, as always. "Seems odd that they appear to ignore this space."
I had been thinking on that odd trait every sun since the first of them arrived. "Stranger still is their fixation on the flowers. Not all of them. Just the one. Snowpetal."
"How mad will you be if I do something incredibly stupid, Nyx?"
Doubled over in laughter, I couldn't tell them that I was thinking the same thing. At least, I couldn't tell them in time to stop them. Micah descended the stair slowly, ever watchful of the beasts outside the temple.
Catching up to them was a challenge, and I arrived at the temple floor just in time to watch them walk out into the Aerie proper toward the garden. Their steps were contemplative. Step. Breathe. Step. Breathe. The mountain landaax just lazed, staring idly at the potential food that approached. I noticed then that Micah hadn't brought anything but themself for this test.
Tales of landaax, regardless of origin, always tell of violent beasts with a crazed manner about them. If you're fortunate, you see maybe one in your life, and it is already dead or dying. The less fortunate have to fend off terrifying beasts with great claws and powerful jaws. More than one? Absolutely no chance of survival.
And here was Micah, the apparent widow, standing just feet away from nearly a dozen of the things. They held their position for several seconds, speechless, before moving to take another step.
Growls from the lot.
Micah withdrew their step, and the growling silenced like they'd thrown some lever of passivity. I held my breath, watching as they drew a line in the snow between themself and the brood of landaax. Then, they turned their back on the beasts and walked briskly back to me.
"That, Micah," I said, at last exhaling, "was indeed incredibly stupid. I'm glad you did it first."
Without waiting for response, I stepped out of the temple, and immediately all ten of the beasts stood, a roaring growl alerting any who weren't party to join in. It shook me to my gut, and I stepped back onto the temple's floor. As hoped, all of them relaxed, but they began loping about the garden.
They were looking for something.
"So, I have another idea, and I think you're going to hate it," Micah smiled, "but at least it's far less stupid than my first idea."
They ran back up to the altar and returned with a handful of the petals I carried with me.
"Sorry. Stole these from your pillow," they were laughing around their laboured breath. "But I don't know if you've noticed. You kind of smell like these since you sleep on them all the time."
Micah dropped one of the petals on the ground just outside the temple floor. Immediately one of the landaax rushed over, sniffing the petal for a few seconds before gingerly lifting it with its teeth and wandering back to the rows of flowers and letting the petal fall among the other flowers.
"Guardians." My whisper was choked. "Do we have anything we can safely put some in for a test, Micah?"
They pulled out a small bottle, already filled with crushed petals. "Way ahead of you," they remarked as they rolled the bottle out onto the snow as far as they could.
Like dogs drawn to a fresh kill, the landaax all pounced on the bottle, knocking it about violently. They passed it between each other, kicking it atop the snow, trying uselessly to shatter the bottle. Their efforts were tireless until the bottle was fully emptied of the crushed petals, at which point they began giving the same treatment to the snow.
Ravenous, they worked at the task until there were no possible remnants of the flowers. Then, like nothing had happened, the lot of them returned to their places.
"Well, I suppose we have our answers there," Micah smiled. "I guess we're waiting until they leave. For anything, really."
The Primal Pilgrimage
Winter was slow. Three moons of snow and wind. Three moons of the increasing number of mountain landaax crowding the Aerie for space. Three long, interminable moons of me stuck in the expanse of the temple and Micah able to test the limits of the landaax's territorial nature.
The first sun without snow brought with it the start of melting snowpack. Eliana's journal was entirely full with our research of the creatures, Micah's work with cold-flame, and poetry I was transcribing from my warhammer, such as it was.
They were love poems. Not for a wife or a mistress, not a husband either. Not even a partner. Love poems, written for a daughter and for a friend. For her sisters and for the world. Every word, every character, every line. They saved the longing for safety Lysandra wished upon all her loves, passed down through the ages to her successor.
Poems of hope and love and desperation. Lysandra wanted one thing above all else: to know her love was felt by all those she held space for. Even the mortals. Especially the mortals.
After a sevensun of receding winter, the landaax began leaving, far more quickly than they had gathered. Another sevensun passed, and the Aerie was once again safe, quiet, but oh so lonely.
"I've been thinking," the words were little more than a declaration of intent.
"A dangerous proposition, I'm certain," Micah had taken to ruthless teasing after an incident with a slick temple floor. In their defence, I nearly died. In my defence meanwhile, the slip, fall, and near death were all their fault.
My faked laughter was slow and measured. "Lysandra had all these messages," I ran my hand along the haft of the warhammer, "that she wished she could share with Lafleur."
"So you say," Micah nodded.
"I've been thinking that her voice deserves to be heard."
"You mean to travel the world and preach of your goddess in defiance of the queen?"
"Well when you put it like that."
"I'm in," Micah's white in white eyes were nearly crazed. "How long can we be gone now that the flowers look healthy again?"
That had been one of my cornerstone thoughts since I was a little girl. If the mountains wanted me, would the flowers still live before I got there? My great aunt was the last Scion if I had things straight, and she'd left long before I was born. For all I knew, she died before I was born. It would make sense, with how quickly all the Scions faded.
"Long enough. Especially if we water them with concentrated snowpetal extract."
"You've really thought this through," they were impressed. For whatever reason, that made me blush.
"I'm not going to be Lysandra. I don't care how badly she wanted me to take her place," I said with my fullest voice. "This is my life. I can be her successor and still be me."
"Good girl," Micah's broad smile could melt snow. "So when we go, we're not coming back for a while." I nodded slowly, dipping my head. They lifted it back up with the back of their hand. Their eyes seemed to glow when we made eye contact. "When do we leave, my Lady?"