![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
k_a_webb“There are people who wouldn’t agree,” Sini said, thinking of the settlement dwellers. “For you it’s all about learning to understand the worlds, which is something you always wanted, but those who are forced to travel from one world to another, or from one time to another, it’s entirely different.” She sighed. “Everyone has heard stories about a family who’s lost someone, because they found a door and for some reason the door decided to take them to another world or time. Although everyone assumes it’s just a different world that doesn’t make the likelihood of them returning to the world of their birth any higher. If someone disappears you know you’ll never see them again.”
“I know it’s not easy for them,” Lucille replied. “We have several settlements around my home town that have within them people who’ve found themselves on Athare accidentally and from what I heard during the Council meetings I went to the races are trying to change things, so anyone who’s been displaced can get free tattoos in order to return them home. The problem, as usual, is the fae, but for an unusual reason. I first heard about the fae’s dispute during my sixth exam and I thought it would have been to do with the expense, the reason they never let a Moonjumper leave without paying off the debt they owe.”
“Until you actually joined the Council and learnt that the fae don’t want to permit it because one of the things they do understand is the way the doors work.” Meriwether sighed. “The magic of the doors is such that it will move someone from one world to another, because that’s where they need to be, for whatever reason. What the fae could have done to make things a lot simpler would have been to allow the Moonjumpers help the settlers come to terms with what happened to them and why it’s likely that the world they’ve found themselves on is the world they’re meant to be on, but the decision they eventually made was to implement the first rule in an attempt to make the Moonjumpers nothing more than watchers, who spend their time recording the history of the worlds as best they can without ever getting involved with the races they’re writing about.”
“Which does make things very difficult. If you have a chance to talk to someone you can learn about the way they view what happened as well as writing it from an outsider’s perspective, and that always gives you a better understanding of why things have happened rather than just what happened.” Lucille shook her head. “All we record is what happened on a particular world. We aren’t permitted to ask questions to find out the reason it happened. Like when the Witch Queen of Raenarin was assassinated. The Moonjumper travelled to Raenarin a week after it happened, so she wasn’t ever there to see it, so she wrote about what she could, and that was the effect the assassination was having on the people of Raenarin. Even now the Council doesn’t know exactly what happened or why someone assassinated her.”
“From what I heard the Witch Queen was assassinated because six of the covens came to the conclusion it would be better for Raenarin if she wasn’t around any longer.” Meriwether shrugged. “It was the first time they’d chosen to work together and it will never happen again, but they made their decision, hired assassins from other worlds, and three days later she was dead.”
Lucille nodded. “I learnt that from one of the true Moonjumpers, who has a connection to Raenarin, and is having to deal with the world’s fear that one of the covens will finally manage to destroy another. He told me that Raenarin is working with the Sorcerers in order to stop the Witches and bring back the Queen, but that they only have one chance to make it work, because the last Queen only had one daughter and died in childbirth with the second.”
“Do you think it will work out?” Sini asked.
“The Sorcerers aren’t certain, the Seer working with the Queen is seeing so many different possibilities that he can’t give an answer right now, and even Persephone’s having trouble.” Lucille sighed. “It’s stressful for anyone who know that the Web could fall apart if the balance of magic on Raenarin changes, but the Council Moonjumpers just see it as the Witches being the Witches. Even the fae have no idea how dangerous their plans are, because they don’t know how the Web works, and I’m not sure they stop them even if they did know.”
“My old race have a strong survival instinct. If someone could make them believe the danger then they’d probably make things worse, because instead of dealing with the problem they’d probably focus on getting rid of it.” Meriwerther rubbed his antler. “The Witches and the fae would fight, which would cause our own Web War, and I have a feeling that’s probably happening right now on one of the other Athares.”
“Who’s Persephone?” It was a name Sini had never heard mentioned before, but for some reason she felt like she knew it, and she wondered if that had something to do with one of her old lives. “I take it she’s a Seer.”
“She’s one of the old Goddesses of Earth,” Meriwether replied. “When we first came here she, along with Hecate, travelled to Athare to talk to Mab, and see if they could help. They had a better understanding of the fae, because they’d been watching us bumble along for millennia, doing more stupid things than we really should have done, so they knew how we’d eventually react to what we’d done. Since then they’ve done their best to guide the races of the Web, but it isn’t easy. I know Persephone found her first connection to the Web when the male Witches were found to have the ability to see the future and they accepted her help in a way a lot of the races didn’t.”
“I think I might have been a priestess of Persephone in an old life,” Sini said, even though she wasn’t sure she should. “I don’t know which world I was on or who I was, but the name… it feels familiar and there’s something. I can’t describe it.”
Meriwether smiled as he patted her shoulder. “That’s normal, Sini. Once someone accepts the possibility of past lives sometimes it’s possible for the memories to affect you in some small way. If you never do the ritual you’ll never know for certain, but in the end it’s up to you. You need to do what’s right for you and sometimes learning about past lives isn’t something you should do.” He sighed. “I never wanted to be able to remember who I was, from the time of my first death, and yet I had no choice. Unlike me you have a choice, Sini, and you should think long and hard before you go into the ritual to learn about your past lives.”
“I know.” Sini smiled back at him. “You’ve told me that before and you’ll tell me that again.”
“It’s just I’ve seen people who learnt things they really weren’t comfortable with and then they had to learn to live with it. There was one Atharian I helped who found out that in one of his lives he’d murdered his best friend in order to marry the man’s wife and that best friend was his current partner.” Meriwether shook his head. “It took him his whole life to finally accept that the choices he made in his previous life didn’t need to change who he was in his current one, but by that time he’d already lost everything that mattered to him. When he died he chose to drink the potion that would destroy all of his memories so he could begin again, even though his old best friend and lover tried to convince him not to, telling him it was much more important to learn to deal with the mistakes they’d both made in the two previous lives rather than just giving up.”
“For every story of someone who shouldn’t have learnt about their past lives you have one for someone who was grateful to learn about who they’d been before.” Sini shrugged. “I’m going to listen to them all, but in the end I don’t think they’re going to make that much of a difference, because I’m not going to know how I’m going to react until it happens. All I can do is make the choice based on who I am now and why I want to learn about the lives I lived before.”
“You are right, but…” Meriwether looked at her, their eyes meeting. “I can’t help worrying about you, Sini. You’re one of my best friends and I don’t want to lose you because of something you did in a past life.” He sighed. “There was a time when I promised myself I wouldn’t teach anyone else the ritual.”
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Feedback
Date: 2013-09-10 04:19 am (UTC)Poor Meriwether, such a risky knowledge to carry.