#person: khama'air ni udyati sul-saani

[letterstosestrilles]

Dear Brennu,

It will be a bit before I can send this one, and believe me, I’m going to be very relieved when Kirim is connected to wider communications networks, which is apparently due to happen in the next year or so, so it will be much easier to keep up with family here then, and to keep up with everyone at home when I’m here.

This time, at least, I have many of the people I care about with me—my Sestrilles family are all here for nearly a full month, and Maliah and Niko have promised to stay as long as I need them.

I’ve needed them, because even great joy is hard sometimes.

The first thing I had to do when I got here, aside from settle into the house set aside for us here in the city of Sunwest, was collect my Kirimi family around me: my grandmother Am’elyn, my aunt Khama’air, my cousin Tidge. I told them enough of what my latest and biggest quest was to explain why gods would feel they owed me a boon, and then I told them what that boon was. There were tears, and a lot more explanations, and we all took a few days to prepare, to talk about all of it some more, and in my and Am’elyn’s cases, to stop by the temple to the Lady of the Stars to give her fervent thanks.

Mishakal gave me the power to cast the spell three times without cost, and I thought that I could probably do them all at once, but that it was likely to drain me of nearly all my energy and bring my parents back to life with the very poor welcome of their daughter fainting on the floor.

So instead I wasted a whole day debating with myself what order to bring them back in, when I was so desperate to have all of them close enough to hold at the last moment that I couldn’t for the life of me decide. In the end, with a bit of cowardice, I decided to go not on my own desires but on the other family members left to my parents: to give Am’elyn back her son, Khama’air her sibling, Tidge his cousin.

That meant that, when I finally gathered everyone together (nearly a week ago now—as you might guess, I’ve been busy), I prayed to Mishakal and to the Lady of Stars and drew on my magic and called back my father Kadan. I’ve cast Raise Dead a few times, and Resurrection, watched a dead body stir back into life, but there was something strange and almost unbelievable in casting a huge magic and then there being a person where there wasn’t before, from nothing at all to someone who hasn’t been alive in half a century standing there in front of me, taking me in his arms, both of us staggering a little until we ended up on the floor.

I talked without realizing I was talking, trying to tell him everything at once, until he quieted me a little to say the more important things, and then I could pull myself together well enough to introduce him to my family, and my family to him. They all greeted him warmly, asked him questions but not too many, until both of us started to nod off, at which point my brother carried me off to bed over my somewhat muzzy objections.

The next day I brought back Hanai, who stepped forward to press our foreheads together almost immediately. They’re the one who gave me my earring before they put me in an escape pod and saved me, and they commented on it, with an apology for leaving me alone, and what could I say but that I wasn’t, with that close—and with the rest of my family as well? And then they could be introduced around as well, and to hold on tight to Kadan, to meet Alion and have a few pleasant minutes of scientific conversation. I was hardly out of range of touch of either of them for the rest of the day.

And the next day, with the last of my reserves of magic from Mishakal, with one more prayer, I brought back Ezenki, my other father, who paused just long enough to be startled at the very impressive match of our hair colors before hugging me, holding on tight until I beckoned and Kadan and Hanai could join us, all four of us together again for the first time since the day the Procyon wrecked.

Since then, it’s been days upon days of talking, in every possible combination. None of us wants to let the others out of our sight, so we’ve mostly set up camp in the house’s living room, only peeling off one or two at a time to take a break and cry or take a walk or simply nap alone.

The rest of my family seems to know exactly when to stay close and when to find things to do elsewhere. Maliah has been wandering the trails outside of Sunwest, sometimes taking Tidge or Niko along, and Niko has been exploring some textiles and working on learning a bit of gnomish. Alion and Tiriel, my Sestrilles parents, have after some brief awkwardness seemed to decide to adopt my Kirimi parents as honorary siblings, and my Kirimi parents have decided that since I consider Tyko a brother, he’s another son to them. I’ve already found Alion and Hanai talking about data storage, Tiriel getting a recipe from Ezenki, Kadan asking Tyko about his plans for buying the shop he runs.

It hasn’t all been easy. I never expected that it would be. Ezenki and Tidge have been working through a lot of awkwardness and grief, since a lot of their branch of the family was on the Procyon, Tidge’s parents included, and I couldn’t bring back everyone. Hanai and Khama’air have had at least one hissed argument they thought I couldn’t hear. Am’elyn can hardly seem to look at Kadan without crumbling into tears. I keep waking up at night wondering if I’ve made it all up, if I died after all in Onver’s lair and this is all just something I’m imagining.

We’ll be here a while, as we work through it. A few months, I’d say, though I hope you’ll get this letter before that, and more letters too. When my Sestrilles family goes home, maybe they’ll do a relay, or if Gaizka finds a diplomatic excuse to come as they threatened when they found out what I was doing, they should be able to set something up, or take a relay likewise.

And then I’ll come back, and start learning what I want my life to look like now. There are a few fixed points: the quest for Jhasdej, my own and Maliah’s, which I want to help her with. Giving some concerts, now that I’ve promised you, Maliah, and Tyko that I’ll do some. Devon’s college tour. You.

Other things are a mystery, but I can almost see the shape of them. I’ll find a somewhat permanent residence, and my parents want to live near me, to make up for some lost time, so I’ll have them close. I’ll find something useful to do, more about building than searching or destroying. I’ll have the people I love around me. And, I hope, very soon the joy will feel more real.

I think it will. One of my fathers just called for me, and it didn’t cause a moment of disbelief. It’s a good beginning, isn’t it?

Love,

Elyn

[letterstosestrilles]

Dear Brennu,

I’m due to meet back up with Maliah and Niko in just a day or two, and I know I’ve been too busy to write much, so I thought I’d give you more detail on what I’ve been up to since I left Mashoy and my companions. That’s its own kind of oddness, it’s the second longest I’ve been apart from Maliah since we started traveling together, but I’ve heard from her about as much as from you, so at least I know she had a lovely visit with Marsa and is now running all over the Feywild with her mothers and is bitterly disappointed that she didn’t get a chance to visit with the displacer beast kitten she cared for while we were there.

(I don’t think you got the whole of that story, I’ll have to remember to tell it sometime.)

Meanwhile, I went to Kirim, as you know, since you only got a Sending from me while I was there. I spent some time seeing the sights, a new neighborhood or two of Sunwest whenever I visit, since it was the city my parents were from and I want to know it well. This time I found a wonderful cafe that has live performances and got to listen to some local performers over tea and pastries.

I know I told you about the home that was, amazingly, gifted to us on Nellaser’s Landing, but I can’t remember if I told you that there’s going to be a counterpart on Kirim as well, in a lovely corner of Sunwest, in a neighborhood not too far from my grandmother’s, I think. They’re still working on finding a precise place that will meet our needs (and I imagine there will have to be at least a bit of renovation so we can have tall guests, they asked me for some height estimates for doorways and things and I did request at least one guest bedroom sized for taller people), but they think by my next visit, whenever that is, I should at least have a place to stop in, even if the renovations aren’t totally done.

The rest of my visit was taken up by family, and more exactly, by telling my family what I experienced through the Lady of Stars and her kindness: the visit with my parents that I told you about when I was there. None of the three of them—my grandmother, my aunt, and my cousin, each belonging to a different parent—seemed to know what to do with themselves, hearing about it, and in each conversation every one of us ended up weeping, but I think they were grateful, too, to hear about it, and I was grateful to say it. My cousin Tidge didn’t seem sure how to deal with the sheer concept of it, but was glad to hear that I’ve come to some answers about Resurrection, and glad to share more memories of my father Ezenki. My aunt Khama’air, my parent Hanai’s sister, kept her thoughts more to herself, but hugged me for a long time. My grandmother asked me to go to the temple with her, to give the Lady of Stars thanks herself at my side, which I think helped to steady us both, perhaps all the more so because nothing divine happened at all, at least that I noticed.

When I’d done that and then had my time and my explorations, I came back to the Prime Material Plane and to Sestrilles, where I’ve been with my family nearly every waking moment. My brother Tyko likes to reassure himself that I’m safe and to yell at me to make up for the fact that he can’t protect me, so a lot of time was devoted to that, though I also had a nice dinner with him and his boyfriend, followed by drinks with the members of a book club they’re both in, all of whom were full of questions, more about Tyko, childhood stories and the like, than about me.

(Which, to be clear, I am beyond grateful about. The gods know I end up talking about myself plenty.)

I’ve also seen my Sestrilles parents a lot. My mother Tiriel is delighted I have a home to decorate, and after inquiring about my taste, Maliah’s, and Niko’s, as well as getting approximate dimensions of the windows of the apartment from me, she whipped together a vast array of curtains that we could change out every season and still not use all of in a year, just from sheer delight at me asking for her help. My other parent, Alion, is always a bit quiet, but they had a few family photographs printed and framed for me, so I know they’re happy as well. Their current foster children, Kari and Thari, contributed mostly by making faces at my taste, but that’s their job, as adolescents.

In between that, and seeing old bosses and the bard who first trained me, and visiting a few favorite restaurants, I caught up with Damaris Nimate, who’s overseeing the excavation of the wreck of the Wrath of Procyon, which is going well. They found some security cubbies of some kind and are bringing those up before they break into them. I’m hoping that whatever is found inside can be returned to some families, or maybe even provide answers, though whatever happened was so sudden that I can’t imagine anyone had time to stow anything securely. Damaris will tell me when she figures things out, though.

When I meet up with Maliah and Niko again, we’ll go to Mir, where Maliah and I first met, to visit some friends, and then down to Nosirion-1, where the children I’ve told you about live. (Though Devon will be looking at universities very soon, I owe him a trip to look at a few, so I don’t know if I should really be calling him a child.) I don’t know what we’re doing after that—we don’t have any steps planned between the star and what we hope will be the final battle, but I do think that at the very least we need to consult with Mishakal again, so perhaps we’ll be heading to her temple. I’ll keep you updated, though. I don’t want to disappear off to that battle without you knowing where I am.

I’ve also, I want you to know, been thinking about our promised vacation, and what quiet planets and stations I know where few people would bother us and where you wouldn’t be forced to be introduced to my children or my brother and my parents, which it seems a bit soon for. If you like the mountains, Hangi Syr is nice. Or there’s Caliz Beta, where there are beautiful beaches and where you would bump your head on a lot of doors. Or a dozen other places, depending on our moods. If I have any brilliant ideas, I’ll let you know, as long as you promise to do the same.

Is all well there? I won’t hover and ask about lingering effects of the water like the worst kind of mother hen, but tell me about everything else. Are your cousins still badgering you? Are you still working on that tricky bit of fingering in the music you showed me? How did that latest anthology work out? You seemed unsure if enough of the stories were good to be worth reading the whole collection, last time you wrote.

I’m forwarding a chapbook of Kirimi poetry in Common by a poet who wanted to write on the theme of the reconnection with the Prime Material Plane in a language more people could read. Note the acknowledgments! I am far more famous than I am comfortable being, most days, but the poetry is wonderful so I’m sending it anyway.

More news soon! I’m supposed to go to family dinner—five minutes ago, actually.

Elyn

[letterstosestrilles]

Dear Tyko,

Today felt almost like a normal day and not like a normal day at all—working on tech in the morning, shopping in the afternoon, and it all sounds like I'm back on Sestrilles, and then I remember that I'm here on Kirim and everything gets a lot more complicated. Well, the tech does anyway. The shopping felt like shopping always does, lots of fun until from one second to the next it becomes exhausting.

The tech was starting to get files off my earring at Khama's house. She brought out a box of neatly stored machines, and a computer that she assured me they should hook up to, and I went hunting for one that looked like it had a port the same shape and size as my earring, while asking Khama a few questions and getting distracted by the tech (a lot of it seems to be iterations of the earring project, but there are a few other machines in there that could be hard drives themselves, or something else entirely). My distraction put me behind, and it was Maliah who sorted through everything and found the right machine.

Getting it hooked up and working with the software on the machine so we could see the file directory took some time, and then I was left with a file list a lot longer than the few files Drixam Vimning could extract. I scrolled through, trying to figure out Hanai'fe's file naming system, and found an image file of one of the pictures Vimning did find for me, the one of me as a baby that had some corruption at the top and bottom. To my relief, it was clear, with a better resolution to boot, and my worries that all these years of constant wear had maybe corrupted the files beyond complete recovery were assuaged.

The machine, being old and not the final prototype (which presumably came on the Procyon with Hanai), was whirring alarmingly, so I made haste to find a way to get the files safely stored on Khama's computer. She pulled out some work notebooks of Hanai's, which I really want to go through more fully sometime, and after a little while we found some command prompts that would let us do it without moving all the files manually, and set it to work. That was going to take some time, so we sat back to talk a little.

I asked about how Hanai got the tear in the first place, wondering if it was a gift or a purchase, and Khama told me that they were working with a team on data storage, including some elementals, and she doesn't know many details, but an old co-worker of Hanai's has been in touch with Khama asking about me, so I have the contact information for a Yavhiz'reen ni Ganib desh-Nuraah who may have more of those answers for me. That aside, I asked Khama about herself, since talking about the dead all the time is exhausting and she is my aunt, after all. She's a legal clerk, it seems, putting cases together but not arguing them in court. Her and Hanai's parents lived elsewhere when they were alive and are gone now, and there were no more siblings, and Khama has no children, so she's that side of the family for me, the same way Tidge is his—and I suppose Am'elyn is hers, though I haven't actually asked her specifically to confirm that (I know Kadan was an only child, but maybe Am'elyn herself has siblings yet living or something). Maybe all of them needed family just as much as I have, and in some ways, I'm luckier—I had you, and Alion and Tiriel, after all.

Maliah also bragged about me and my gloves, so I showed them off, and it took Khama a minute to understand (probably because I was tripping over myself) and then she was delighted to hear more (and, I think, a little sad that Hanai couldn't be there to see what their daughter has made, but we didn't talk about that). I gave her a little performance of a few verses of Perrick's ballad, and while she said she doesn't know much about music, she'd see what she can recommend to me around town, which I'm excited about. I haven't run across any street musicians yet, but I'll find somewhere there's music soon, and play some.

And find some more excitement for Maliah and Cloudleaper too, they're both very politely bored out of their minds.

At least Maliah (and Squirt along with her) got some more excitement in the afternoon. We both wanted to find gifts for people, and after saying goodbye to Khama and having some lunch, we went off in search of some shops.

We stopped at four in the end, before we got tired. The first was really lovely trinkets (there were beautiful windchimes in the window, which brought me in in the first place, but I don't really have a home to hang them in, so they remained there to tempt someone else), where Maliah found a pretty puzzle box and I found a crystal box that unfolds into a mirror that I think Tiriel will love and a flute that plays different birdsongs for Loren. Then, inspired by that, we went looking for a toy store for Jesson and Kikun, and found one. Somehow, I'm continually shocked by the size of gnomish children and the things made for them, maybe because on Sestrilles child-sized things were my size, in general.

We did find a few things for Jesson and Kikun, though—a game with counters for Jesson, and a few gnomish children's movies for Kikun, which I will admit is at least half to aggravate Pika by giving him my dialect rather than hers. There's one movie that seems to involve a princess and a griffin that Kirim seems to share with the Prime Material Plane and a curse, and another about two children lost in the woods making friends with some magic involved that seems to be a Kirimi folktale. We definitely intend to watch both, especially since we have to get them in a file format that LICDs will read.

Our next stop was an antiques store that Maliah picked because there was a framed map in the window, where she bought a stunning array of beautiful maps of Kirim and its skies and I bought a little set of plays from Kirim that I think Alion will like to practice their gnomish with. With that done, we started wandering our way back to the hotel, but Maliah made one last stop to buy some jewelry for her mothers, some really lovely nature-inspired pieces. At least one of the maps (maybe more) is for them too, so they'll have a very nice gift whenever we manage to see them.

(I'd like to meet them at some point if only so I know them to Send to, for future instances like this when Maliah is taken out of contact from them.)

Maliah was ready to be back at the hotel, and Squirt was bored of standing without wagging his tail in shops trying not to knock anything over, so once I was sure they knew their way back, I went in search of my last errand of the day: a stop at a temple of the Lady of Stars.

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to. I don't really have a god, other than maybe Aluarashi, who I've only left offerings for since it's only polite with deities you've met, I feel. But so many people—Matrai of Thricusi's Horn, Mayor Miroya, Am'elyn—have said the Lady of Stars must have been watching over me. If it's true, I don't think it's wise to leave a god unacknowledged, and if it isn't, well, I'm sure no deity would object to credit for something they didn't have a hand in.

The temple I found was in a quiet part of town, and it's a place I wouldn't mind exploring or learning a little more about, if I pluck up the courage. Am'elyn seems to be devout, at least to some extent, so maybe I'll ask her someday. There was a little green space with a path, and a stone door worn in a way that shows it's been touched a lot over the years, and inside, the device from the Procyon's wall inlaid in the floor, and a statue of the goddess herself up a little set of stairs, with bowls of fire in her hands to represent starlight.

People had left offerings—flowers, stones, candles—and since I'd come on impulse, I didn't have anything, but I knelt anyway, and prayed as well as I know how, which isn't very. But I thanked her, if she had a hand in me surviving, and said what I felt I needed to say (no, I didn't insult her, or at least I really hope I didn't, though she doesn't seem like a very testy goddess), and I think she heard me, anyway. I felt heard, at least, and isn't that the point of praying?

And then, feeling as disconcerted as I always do when I have anything to do with gods, I came back here to the hotel, where we're planning on watching one of those movies we got for Kikun, and where I got to ask Gaizka a little bit about how things are going on their end. The introductory work seems to be wrapping up, and now they're into the point of Kirim, city by city, needing to make a few decisions about how much it wants to reintegrate with the Prime Material Plane. I've offered my help again in whatever ways they might need, and we'll see where it leads.

Still no idea how long we're going to be here. I could stay for months and still not know everyone as well as I want to, but I think that process is going to have to happen a few weeks at a time over a longer period, once there's transportation between the places that doesn't require an archmage. (I wonder how far they are from the portal that took them from the Prime Material Plane and if it's a stable one. Maybe in the long term there can be a shuttle to a small station right through the gate with a Transportation Circle set up in it? Gaizka will know better than I do what's possible, and I should ask.) Maliah and Cloudleaper can't sit here twiddling their thumbs forever, and while I want to get to know my family, I also want to keep adventuring. Though another week or three on this initial visit certainly wouldn't hurt. I'll just have to look for something interesting for all of us to do while we're here.

I'll Send again soon, and hopefully I'll find a good present for you as well. And Pika and Devon! Kirim seems like a good symbolic place to buy presents.

Love,

Elyn