Completed [The ED] A Page Torn From The Story We All Are Living

[Kelski]

Timestamp: 72nd of Fall +, 519 A.V.

Just when things were going fine, life was comfortable, and Kelski was starting to feel better after the stress of the move and establishing the Guild… life took a turn. It wasn’t one she expected nor anticipated, but it felt fated nonetheless. Her brand was gone. In its place, a resplendent eagle rose on her left buttock that burned with power, halting her aging so she could carry on a task that Nysel and Akajia had given her. It was hard for her to take in and she remembered Nysel’s words about her living a full life, having many many children, and guarding her family

A scroll case containing a blank scroll – one that would write itself as she explored – lay stretched across her lap. Its leather surface was etched with runes The Sea Eagle couldn’t read. They pulsed with power and that helped to soothe her, though the Kelvic couldn’t say why. Kelski stroked it where she sat, perched on the edge of her bed.

Her mind was so full it felt as if her thoughts were overflowing. She’d told Dessarian none of this, uncertain how to explain it even to herself let alone someone else outside of the sensation. Kelski had always fulfilled roles. She’d usually neatly fit into the role of possession, treasured valuable, and slave. She was a Master Jeweler now though, free, and in many ways a living weapon with her ability and aptitude with her daggers.

She could be an assassin easily enough, though killing held no appeal to her unless she was hungry and the prey was tasty. As a Nightstalker, she was a seeker of secrets for Akajia, always looking for answers to questions the Goddess didn’t usually share with her own.

Guild Leader… bondmate… mate. The roles she fulfilled circled through her mind, weaving a pattern over and over again. And now, Dreamwalker. She wasn’t sure how it worked, but Nysel had assured her that as his marked, she’d not fail to see the path before her.

Kelski sighed, scooted back on the bed, then lay down, still cradling the scroll case, though this time she did it as if it were a child, not a log laying across her lap. She felt her eyes drift closed. Kelski was, after all, tired. She was loathed to admit it to herself, but the exhaustion was there.

She worked long hours in her workshop, especially after the light failed, and during the day she kept pace with the others that were working so hard to make the Demesne something successful. It wasn’t work she could leave for others too. Hands on or nothing, the Kelvic felt it was more important than to be involved directly than supervise from afar.

It was with those thoughts in her head that she drifted off and felt herself somehow step sideways out of the mortal realm and directly into the chavena. The mark on her arm told her exactly what it was. Nysel’s power fed her information as well as directed her actions so she somehow knew exactly what to do. She was drifting in a great and beautiful nothing with silver cords floating all around her. The cords belonged to people. The name and purpose flooded her mind.

Chavi… everyone had one.

They were a written record of everyone’s life stored on a mystical cord that kept them anchored to the mortal realm and the mortal realm anchored to the divine realm. The Gods could play the chords like instrument strings… and the music the chavena made equated to the life that spread out upon Mizahar.

[Kelski]

Kelski gazed around in awe, floating with her mind in awe of the beauty around her. She reached down, wrapped a hand around the chord that anchored her to the two realms, and was immediately drawn in. She lived her life backward, slowly walking her chavi. It was the first thing almost every Dreamwalker did, retracing their pathways and finding out who and what they were and what lives they had lived before. Kelski walked backward, viewing her life as if she’d lived it, though from the outside as if someone else were enacting an intimate incredibly personal play. She moved backward, returning to Sunberth and then to her time at sea.

Moving even further back, she found Lhavit and her life there and strolled through the memories that time held. Then, further, her time in the wilds and her brief childhood in Alvadas. Further back still, she felt her birth and being held to her mother’s chest. She felt Dessarian hold her and saw him as he was a few years ago at her birth. Then she traveled backward, even further, trying to go past her birth.

There was nothing. Her Chavi had a noted beginning and contained no lives past the one she was living.

Kelski was a brand-new soul and this was her first life. The knowledge flooded her and she released the silver cord in a panic, the sense of only having had one life – of being newly birthed – making no sense to her nor did the concept of one clarify anything. One was wrong. One sent her sense of confidence reeling. And what was worse, while it felt completely wrong to her as a Dreamwalker with all her Dreamwalker senses, she had no idea why it felt wrong.

She grasped another cord, one randomly floating near, and traveled down some stranger’s memories. There were lives and lives and lives contained on the chavi, hundreds. She released it when she saw no end to them and grabbed another. It was the same. Chavi after chavi contained multiple lifetimes, more than she could traverse in one setting… more than she could even envision numbers for. None of them had only one life. None of them had a start she could find with a thought.

None of the other chavi was like hers. None where short. All of them… everyone she touched… was long and spiraled and tangled with other chavi in other times and places.

And that lead to her understanding of the wrongness of it. It confirmed her initial feeling. She knew it inherently the moment she hit the conception of her chavi and the moment she was crafted into the world. Newly-made. Newly formed. Her chavi recorded her explosion into being by the hand of the divine.

There were no stains on her soul, no past sins, no lives lived badly to influence the current one. Kelski knew all this due to the power of Nysel’s first mark, but she didn’t understand it. No clarity came from Nysel’s power to reassure her. In fact, her questions redoubled, tripled, and grew exponentially rather than got answered as she explored.

[Kelski]

It would be nearly impossible to find lost or abandoned Dominions this way. Kelski realized it immediately as she searched chavi after chavi, seeing mundane people’s lives. She’d touched dozens so far and none of them had even had a spark of magic in them much less a history of some of the great magics or those magics that had been lost. She found places chavi touched chavi when people tangled with the lives of others, and that sparked an idea in Kelski.

She released the chavi she was traveling on – a brewer’s life - and knew she had to go back to her own, floating in the Chavena’s beauty for a moment before she reached for her own cord. Kelski had looked at hundreds of silver cords, exploring thousands of lifetimes. None of them had mages in them. Mundane people were afraid of it… skirted it... hated seeing it. These weren’t the people that were going to know the locations of Dominons. Kelski needed to find mages – people who practiced magic actively – and walk their chavi’s… combing for the magic within those lifetimes.

Embracing this new strategy, Kelski laid out a pathway for herself using her own chavi as a starting point. She retraced her steps backwards in life once more, this time slower, until she tangled with Gilthas. Then she switched to his chavi. She searched his, going back as far as she could, looking for evidence of Dominions or any lost knowledge of them.

He didn’t know the art form. As her mentor, Kelski had hoped he would have or at least would have known someone that did. To her, Gilthas was a walking Magical Encyclopedia and she realized she’d kind of counted on him having some sort of knowledge. But there was nothing.

However, his chavi touched other mages, and it was in that situation that Kelski knew what she had to do. She went to the most recent mage Gilthas knew beside herself and traced his chavi backward, looking for the knowledge of Dominion. There was none. She redoubled back to Gilthas’ chavi and told herself she’d thoroughly investigate his life and every mage his life had touched before she moved back to that first mage in Gilthas’ chavi and investigated the mages that mage knew. It was like a great tree and she was traveling the branches backward.

It would be a long hard process, one designed most likely to make her crazy, but she was sure she could do it. It would just take time, planning, methodical notes, and a lot of Dreamwalking sessions. Kelski knew she couldn’t get the end result until she got started, so she did so, executing her methodical study and began her search.

Days passed.

Sessions passed.

And after a time Kelski started to see a trend. The knowledge of Dominion was gone from the world. It wasn’t just that it was a lost discipline. It was gone as if wiped from the world of men. Kelski didn’t understand why it would be so. Who did it? What did it? It wasn’t the Valterrian for she’d traveled back past that on some mages’ timelines and found nothing. It was like there was a huge void in the knowledge of man that should have been filled with something Kelski knew for a fact was very real.

[Kelski]

Voids.

Someone had taken the knowledge, stripped it clean, and left what in its place? False memories? Dreamwalkers could do that… not at her level, but she knew inherently that they could for in her travels she’d discovered chavi that had been obviously tampered with. She could not see who altered the memories, but she could tell they were altered. Her own was no different. She saw where Gilthas had taken the memory of Kynier from her and where he’d replaced it when she’d asked.

So maybe finding Dominion wasn’t about actually stumbling upon someone practicing the artform. Maybe finding Dominion was about looking for voids and alterations and filling in the missing puzzle pieces. Maybe Dominion couldn’t be found like the knowledge of a good pie recipe might be. Maybe one didn’t look for a baker making a pie.

Maybe one looked for a memory of a dirty pie plate being cleaned or a family sitting around after a desert course feeling full. Kelski mused over the idea, stretching her intelligence to the limit to try and wrap her head around the concept of finding something that wasn’t there not by looking for something straight on, but by looking for evidence of something having existed that was nowhere to be found.

Could knowledge be reclaimed by looking for evidence of its absence and stitching in the missing parts like patching the torn-out knees of a pair of britches? Did it even matter how the knees got torn out? Wear and tear were hard on clothing. Maybe Dominion’s situation as similar. Kelski wasn’t sure, but it was a place to start.

And so she tried. Dreamwalking. Waking. Taking extensive notes. Laying out trees of mages interconnecting. Kelski had names, dates, details on lives, and before she was done there was a thorough accounting of the Avancalas djedline. And slowly, as she worked through the lives and took notes, she noticed trends. Not often, not frequent, and not anything but the very very subtle. Sometimes the mages would have memories of being in unusual places – not dreams – but in places like her mountain top.

Non-typical skyscapes, grass of an unusual color, or a flash of with a simple thought changing the weather. That was not normal. That could not happen in the mortal realm when they walked within the living world. Kelski slowly began to suspect that these hints were indeed tantalizing bits and pieces of the fragments of an entire discipline of magic being torn from the knowledge of humans.

Humans.

Most mages were human or something like them…. Gilthas with his human seeming and human past lives though he wore the guise of an Eth now. The hints she acquired from glimpses of lives lived that were not normal were always from humans. And with them was a sense of entitlement or a sense of wanting more… needing more. Always greed. It was something she felt traveling the chavi of the mages in the past.

[Kelski]

By the past she noted they were the mages before The Fall. Before the Valterrian. The cataclysm was something the Kelvic had never studied. But as she traveled Chavi and saw mages go through it, she came to understand that it was not just a land changing event. It was an event that altered ideals. And before the Valterrian… when Dominion should have been prominent, there was almost no knowledge of it – as if it had been violently stripped from the minds of man.

And she noticed too that those men and women – those mages – had an arrogance to them. They were entitled, one and all, and mostly obsessed with the pursuit of power and being the best. Any threat to that superiority was dealt with swiftly. Some of the things she witnessed made the Mage takeover of Sunberth and its subsequent violent rule by them seem like child’s play. Kelski wasn’t proud of what she learned – of what she saw – and she saw it over and over again. Sure, there were exceptions, but by the time she’d done research for most of the season, the woman had a clear grasp of why someone – most likely a God – stripped mankind of the knowledge of Dominion.

They simply didn’t deserve it.

They simply didn’t respect it.

And though Kelski didn’t fully understand or know what Dominion could do, she suspected in a way it threatened something – most likely power – that the Gods held dearly and they had somehow stripped the knowledge of it away from man. It was all speculation on her part, but it was the only thing that made sense. Why strip something away from someone unless it was a threat to something or someone? And who would be powerful enough to do that? Not just to one individual but to thousands over time and space? And why did she know now? Was she herself in danger of the same sort of stripping mages in the past had gotten?

Kelski was suddenly afraid, very afraid, until she remembered and reminded herself that Gods had set her on this path. She was under no allusions that those same Gods would protect her. But it made her feel better that she was acting under their direction. Had this been something she’d stumbled upon without having her feet turned onto the path, then she would have truly had something to fear.

It was a tenday later and dozens Dreamwalks under her belt that Kelski stumbled upon her first real non-evidence evidence of Dominion and got a major clue as to where a Dominion might be hidden. She would have missed it completely had she not recognized the exit a mage used in one of his memories… of a glowing door that drew itself out of the stone walls of a fully formed fortress that in her time was nothing but ruin.

It was Gilthas’ new abode: The Syval Ruins.

Count: 2664

[Kelski]

G R A D E S

Research +5, Psychology +3, Logic +3, Strategy +5, Tactics +5, Scouting +5, Dominion +1

Dreamwalking: Walking Chavi’s, Dreamwalking: Entering And Exploring The Chavena, Kelski: Newly born soul with no past lives, Dreamwalking: Tracing Chavi’s And Connecting Chavi’s For Information, Dreamwalking: Navigating Family Trees, Dreamwalking: Reliving One’s Past, Dreamwalking: Someone had erased all knowledge of Dominion, Dominion: Finding Dominion Would Be Looking For Its Absence Not Its Presence, Dominion: One In The Syval Ruins.

PM me with questions or concerns.