SessionThree

22 Descending Wood

As I touch this brush to paper, I sit at an orichalcum table, in a fortress that has survived, undamaged, fifteen centuries in a shadowland. More powerful sorcery and more opulent wealth surrounds me than it did even in my wife's estates in Jilin.

And yet, I fear.

First, we have met two of the Maidens. I know that Mouse sees their visit as a good omen, but I do not: the world is as the great gods have ordered it. And everywhere the lesser gods are corrupt, save only in the Realm, where the spirits work hand-in-glove with the very Immaculate Order that hunts us!

I think they gazed upon us so that they might better forge a fate for us, and so I fear for my wife and children. Men are small things before fate, and yet it is them whom I love, rather than the grand designs of destiny. Perhaps Khazarkhan the Heresiarch, reborn sorcerer-king of old, can set himself against Heaven and survive -- but can Naeshan? And even if she can win to me through her will and skill, can either of us protect Nual and Tiia? The Maidens love the poetic and the ironic, and thus are ever cruel.

Second, we have met Glides-with-Hope. Of itself a good thing, but Mouse has misjudged his response to her: she does not need a call to crusade, but rather she needs simple human companionship. She wants him to pledge his love for her, and to praise her long constancy and faith, but he is not the same person as he was in days before, and it can lead only to sorrow to pretend that he is. He is young, but this much wisdom he has. I should speak to her and befriend her, so she sees that I have my doubts as well. She must know that the sun has not blinded me, so that when we have need of her she will not hesitate out of fear that she has fallen in with fanatics.

Third, I have set my eyes upon the grim stars of the Underworld, and they have convinced me that a simple war with the Deathlords is a doomed pursuit. Our weapons are broken, our sorceries forgotten, and our Manses lost. But the dead remember the lore we living have forgotten -- the ghosts and the deathknights and the dead gods they serve possess a strength we cannot match. If we set force against force, we will surely meet defeat.

This paradox, that our aims and our means conflict, implies that one or the other will have to change. Here, I look to my daiklave for inspiration. I forged it in elder days, even before the First Age, and its edge has drunk the blood of Primordials. But now it is broken. (I will have to reforge it, for it dishonors the memory of The Prince Who Was A Thousand for the weapon that slew it to remain shattered.) But it lies in shards, and from like it the old ways are broken. The old lore and the old ways are the strength of the dead, and the for our strength we will have to make new lore and new ways.

I shall write more upon this anon -- now I must see to it that young sprout studies his lessons.