… We destroyed so many of them, willfully. We destroyed their homes, and in doing so, destroyed our own. Stop the killing, or the violence won’t stop. All our own blood we wade in by our own hands, that could stop…

… we are lifting the spell – not this dragonspell, but the older spell…

… the towers are gone, but we hold the pieces of them now. We kiss the talisman heirloom, tell the tale, and feel us returned to ourselves…

… What if I have to believe in the new-old magic in order to keep the beauty in my life? The moment I try to deny it, I feel something most precious begin to slip away, something I just got back, and I can’t, I just can’t…

Some started saying things aloud on the street, while others formed a new table of talk at their public house. People were finding ways to share new songs and poems, forming the next era of art – so far-reaching that somewhere, anywhere, a reminder would exist.

The remembering was making its way through every likely channel, through a multiplicity of voices. There were scraps from person to person and whispers-to-shouts over all wavebands, both the restored common means and the newly invented workarounds. People needed to share their processing of an event that was almost personally mundane – finding something lost – yet staggering in the sudden collective remembering.

… this is no illusion, this is the dispelling of an illusion…

… though we denied their very existence in an effort to erase them and call the realities they share with us ours alone, they are still willing to return to us the best parts of our history if we recant our falsehoods and tell the story as it should be told…

… and the memory of all good things in my life is clearer if I admit to myself and to others how I, my family, even my people in times long past (how do I know these things?) have known and interacted with the sidhe, or Kao-Sidhe more formally. I was afraid of being called a fraud, but my word became a stronger bond…