Celyn’s Musings on Magic

This is Celyn’s thoughts on magic; please don’t read it unless it has been revealed in game

In the end, Celyn really went on the road with Viepuck because he felt nudged.  He was not sure what useful he could do - the boy was much better at the quick-thinking social plays than he was, he’d noticed that - but he had brought the Wyrdling in to lean on the former lord, and he felt responsible to make sure the situation was resolved usefully.

Anyway, watching Viepuck do the things that Viepuck did was fun.  Even if he drew his power from some alien source, the spirit he approached things from felt comfortable, familiar, a little Wyrdling-touched.  He wanted to see what would happen, even though it meant leaving Robin behind.  Though Robin was doing a bunch of organizing things and Celyn was no good at those and did not particularly want to be.

In any case, someone needed to go, and talking to the horses made it clear that Celyn was most likely to be useful about it, so he went.  The ride was quiet, barring the occasional pause to investigate something and then move on because they did not have time to stay.  (Celyn wondered a little when he had gotten so calm about dead bodies.  But there had been a lot of them.  He supposed if he was going a little mad that was probably fine.)

Rather than brood on such morbid things, he decided to spend his time on the ride thinking about miracles.  There wasn’t much else to do other than listening to Viepuck talking to himself, and whatever Viepuck was saying did not actually seem to make much sense.  But miracles were on his mind.

El had said his magic to talk to the horses was controlled, not like their miracles.  But that had not been a miracle, that had been something else.
Unless magic was all miracles.  That was a weird tangent.  The blessing of the Sibyl brushed lightly across the populace, perhaps, and those who could take it up might.  He wasn’t sure who to ask, whether her devotees might have something to say about it.  And that didn’t explain Izgil anyway; Celyn was pretty sure dwarves dealt with different powers than the Divines.  Even if obsession, research, and the moon was pretty much exactly Izgil’s whole deal.

But Ampelos back at home hadn’t been a miracle; he was a fey.  The village might not have known he was there, out in the wilder lands where the trees grew thicker, but the possibility that there might be fey in general was obvious.  Celyn knew that there was a consistent one, at least.  He thought of the satyr as a childhood friend, but he didn’t know whether that was what the fey thought at all.  It seemed rude to ask, so he hadn’t, and now he was miles and miles away and couldn’t.  Not that he would; it was still rude.

Ampelos had taught Celyn a lot of things.  The more complicated drum rhythms, for example, the ones that matched the wildness of the music he played on his pipes.  Tricks to being quiet in the woods.  And, of course, in exchange for a bottle of wine, “The good stuff,” he’d said, the bottles that were usually reserved for sending to the earl as part of the labor tithe, he taught Celyn magic.  “Be careful, little bird,” he had said, “and don’t get caught.”  Ampelos had always called him ‘little bird’ back then; his first name, the one the Wyrdling’s birds had carried away, had meant a particular bird, after all.

He had been careful.  He had studied locks, figuring out how they worked, figuring out how to open them.  He had practiced moving silently, and studying the rhythms of things.  And when he thought he was ready - Ampelos had been clear that he was in no particular hurry about it, so Celyn had plenty of time - he slipped in to the storage, found a bottle that was not tucked into the neat and orderly ranks of things that would be easily spotted as missing, and escaped with it trumphantly.

Now, thinking back, he wondered if there might have been some sort of problem with the earl if the theft had been caught, but back then he had been something like twelve, and still in the immortality of childhood and the sheer victorious thrill of having gotten away with it.  It was before he had gotten old enough to have curves, like El had told in their story, or any of the things that made him despairing and angry and furiously taking out vengeance on a world that had stopped making sense.

The Wyrdling was drawn with two faces, shifting, like he saw the two birds.  Celyn himself had two faces.  The one he used most often was more pleasant to live in, the one that was calm.  He suspected, now, that the other face, the furious one that had ruled him through so much of his teen years, would come out sometime.  There were enough things to make him furious and despairing.  He still wanted to track down whatever was responsible - all the way back - for Cedric’s death and put his sword through its eye.  The thought just seethed there quietly, surfacing occasionally and then vanishing again, like a fish in the water.

But anyway, Ampelos had kept up his end of the deal, with a strange sort of fey patience.  They would drink wine - the normal stuff, not the fancy bottle - and the satyr would let him practice his archery, and show, again and again, the little flick of magic that sent a true arrow awry.   He had laughed, a great deal, at the difficulty a mortal child had with mastering something he clearly considered trivial, though as Celyn had gotten more and more furious at the world, the laughter had faded, and sometimes instead of the bow, it was a stick made to be like a sword, and letting him work out the fury of it on the trunks of trees, his own shadow, learning the ways that fury made him pinpoint-dangerous now, even if the strikes did not help calm him.

He had learned it, over time.  “Now try this one!” Ampelos had said, and had jumped, and been somewhere else, sitting up in the branch of a tree with his pipes in his hands.

Learning one thing made the other easier, even though it was, really, the more complex magic.  It did not take as long to learn the jump, now that he had a grip on the shimmering twist of the way fey magic worked.  It made his destructive streak worse, which was probably not what Ampelos had intended by it, but that was how things were, by then.

But anyway, the fey magic was not a miracle.  Not by the standards of the way the Wyrdling’s power felt when it shimmered through his hands.  That was different, and it had not required so much hard work.

The miracle, now, with talking to the horses, that was seeing Ampelos again.  Or maybe just the seeming of him; dreams were strange and shimmering things too, after all.  But he had learned in his dreams, from something that he felt was Ampelos, or something that understood him well enough to show him a friend.  He did not genuinely know whether it had been the satyr or an illusion of the satyr, in the dream.  If he ever saw Ampelos again, he would have to ask.  He supposed it could also have been the rather shy and oblique local fey finding something that he knew and putting on that illusion; he was not going to pretend that masters of illusion would necessarily show up as themselves.  Especially in dreams.

The miracle was in the teaching, was in the reaching across space, was in the dream.  It meant, for the first time in a long time, that Celyn wondered about the fey and the gods.  The Wyrdling clearly did not disapprove of the fey, if they were willing to give him such dreams, or not prevent him from having them.  And he had missed home so terribly, recently, where people made sense and did not throw open their doors willy-nilly without even the slightest hint of a promise against mischief.  It had been a kindness, to dream of home; it had been a miracle to find a friend there, who would show him magic, and laugh about wine.

The fey clearly did not disapprove of the gods.  Not with the agreement Queen Ethlenn had made so long ago, to allow the gods in; not, on a more personal level, that Celyn could have found the Wyrdling’s out of season tree without the nymph that had shown it to him.  He could not remember, anymore, in the haze of that time and experience, whether she had been introduced to him by Ampelos; she had not offered him a name to use, at least not that he recalled.

And the gods did not disapprove of the fey, clearly, even though the fey were probably - like most people who weren’t human - not part of what the gods he knew concerned themselves with.  At least the Wyrdling didn’t, if they were opening Celyn’s dreams to learning more fey magic.  Which made him wonder about what the Wyrdling thought of them, really.  The fey were not out of season, or at least the great ones could not be, since an archfey’s realm was the archfey’s season at all times.  But maybe holding one’s own season regardless of the calendar was a different sort of out of season?

Somewhere in this was a mystery that could occupy him for ages.  The Wyrdling had saved him, from himself, from mad despair, but it was the fey that brought him there; the fey had been his first— words were hard.  Responsibility?  The bounds and bonds there had been his responsibility, his love, his duty, his devotion.  He had learned how to put faith in that wild chaotic otherness before he had been saved.  The similarities teased at his mind, up until the point that they inverted into opposites.  Which seemed like a Wyrdling sort of thing to do, as much as it seemed a fey trick.  It left him wondering if the Wyrdling’s birds were fey creatures, somehow, or if they bent the lines - he had thought of them as the god, but they had also appeared in that dream that had been fey space, when other people were touched by fey influences.  It was a puzzle.

Celyn had spent a lot of time pondering, on and off, what his purpose was, since he had first articulated it to Grandfather Trefor.  That he was not for the vines, or rather that the road where he was for the vines was one he had stepped off of at some point without noticing it, like he had stumbled off the road to womanhood without understanding that, either, before the Wyrdling had sorted him out.  He had not been for temples, either.  It had turned out in the long run that he had not been for the travelling theatre, though he had taught several people what herbs they needed to ease their spirits and get their bodies to behave more properly while he was there.  That was a thing he was for, for sure: helping with that.

When he’d been given the nudges that put him on the road to Cleenseau, he had not thought of it as being for a particular purpose.  Sometimes he followed a dream, or an impulse, or guidance, and that was just how things were; it did not come with deeper meaning.  Only this had turned out to be more than that, more than another person uneasy with gender who needed his help, more than some unsteady coincidence by which something happened to come out for the best, more than picking up a new variant rule for the dice.

He had been nudged into something larger.  By the fey, yes, but the Wyrdling had made their opinion known about the situation by protecting the temple, a feat of sanctuary well beyond Celyn’s small miracles.  He suspected El had a grand capacity for miracles, really, more than he felt he could handle.  Or maybe the great, implausible miracles, the ones grander than the ones he had, were some different category of thing.  The fey had brought him, the Wyrdling approved, and here in this space where the fey would not come out directly, he saw fey in his dreams, who taught him things, who put on the seeming at least of ones he knew.

And some old enemy of the Queen claimed this land.  His roots ached wth the knowledge of that, at times, and at wondering if there was some sort of unity of all of himself, brought by chance and fate, to this place where he was fundamentally a stranger, but where what he knew seemed a lever to bend events.

Thoughts like that occupied him up until he spotted the heap of dead sheep.  He didn’t know much about sheep but that was certainly not how they ought to behave.