… 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…

In what was left of his childhood backyard, there was a boulder big enough to sit atop or lay over convex. Raev Sturlusson was out there, in leather pants and shirtless like usual. It wasn’t exactly the way he pictured himself when he first spent his days here, but life has many surprises.

A lit pillar candle was affixed atop the rock with its own wax. Raev lay across the boulder, writing on individual leaves of paper, then burning them.

i haven’t really thought of myself as someone living out a vendetta, though i know it reads that way in the articles. it seems to me that my part in this is coming to a close. i’ve assessed utility enough times to see the limits of my own. there may actually be an end to this; i know that for some the fight of a lifetime will last their entire lifetimes. if i can get out with this peak triumph, what would i become? i have normal skills for ordinary life, but would they seek me out again and again as they have?

this can’t become some kind of blood feud. i remember celebrating the ending of blood feuds in my childhood, when my father was a speaker. they so often undo any accomplishment. i should end my role before it becomes more and ever more of that. i wanted no throne nor to be a tool of a throne. our children were not required to inherit power.

yet i ask, what more can i, must i, do for this world? for people, the people, other people, and for myself as my responsibility? i remember having ideals, and i’m left with a lingering trace of them. what can my hands do with those now?

In the middle of everything and far from anything, Arcta Hydraia still enjoyed pursuing research in her field, now embodied in her world by her sole person – that is, she was the only one who named massive sphere dynamics as a discrete body of knowledge in the human fashion, while the Vedani wave of interest in her results treated it like any other flexibly applicable information. She was just pencil pushing, though unsupervised and alternatively inspired in a setting only she among her colleagues had accessed.

The Mothership Jottings, as she termed them, were casually released into aetherscape discussion, to go whichever way they would. They did make ripples there, which Arcta could sense, as someone who had already made quite a few. She wasn’t really held answerable as in the way she’d be in the human academic professions; Vedani held the information itself to task, and worked it collectively as they pleased till it yielded or rang true.

She had the feeling this work was being seized as something with immediate relevance, but she herself was under no direct pressure, and it was the unfettered playtime of a skilled mind in semi-retirement. She trusted learners to quickly outstrip originators, especially when the body of learners was unrestricted. The jottings may already be applied and in effect, but she was unconcerned. Arcta had stopped feeling conflict over whether she was abetting enemies of her kind, because the personhood of Vedani was so evident around her.

By now, she’d read every last poem given to her that Raev had written about his time in stillfreeze. She could access this mysterious experience, feel the extent of it beyond what words could touch. It was familiar, haunting, a world apart tangential to her own – as it seemed to him. There was a timeless sense of what he might be thinking from some other where. Arcta wondered if she should burn them.