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k_a_webbMeriwether laughed. “I do.” He rubbed his antler as he grinned at Lucille. “Mab never wanted to create the worlds. From the beginning she thought we were making a huge mistake, but that didn’t stop her from getting involved. We were all furious with her for not leaving Kalinia behind sooner and yet she’d still spend hours with us in the planning meetings, writing notes, and learning about what we were doing. She didn’t have any magical abilities that could help us, because we wanted the people who followed us to be able to read what we were writing. Learning it all from scratch, as we had to leave all the old journals behind, was one of the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do, and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.
“Anyway, when the rest of the fae, the fae who had forced her into accepting that we needed to create the Web, decided they weren’t happy with the choice we’d made and hid themselves away in settlements all the resentment turned to fury. The elders who’d been so certain it was the only option we had, who’d forced her into something she really didn’t want to do, decided to hide instead of dealing with what they’d wrought. I think they believed she’d follow them because of who she’d been to them, even though she’d resigned as Queen when the World Creation Council was created. When the decision was first made not to elect another Queen a lot of people weren’t comfortable with the idea and they seemed to hope that Mab would simple step back in to the position she’d walked away from.
“We all knew that she wouldn’t. Once she made the decision to accept the Web, the worlds, and the races she didn’t look back. She was actually an asset, because she had a habit of asking the right question at the right time. It was strange how well we all got on after we managed to accept that she’d made a mistake that she regretted, in part due to fear and elders who didn’t want to deal with change, as she was much older than us. At the time we left Kalinia she was middle aged.
“She was closest to Emrys. The two of them seemed to have something in common and now that I’m thinking about it there’s every chance that what they had in common was a connection to Athare. I think Mab was forced to grow up a lot when she ended up with no choice but to find us a new world, because before then she hadn’t needed to. Having the help of her elders meant that she could leave a lot of the decision making to them, even though she probably shouldn’t have, and when they were gone she had no choice but to become our true Queen, rather than just a figure head.” Meriwether shook his head. “There were times when we had other Queens who were true Queens – it’s like the difference between a true Moonjumper and a Council Moonjumper – but Mab, she wanted to be Queen and didn’t want to be at the same time. It was, at time, as though there were two of her. One of them was the fae everyone voted for a believed in. The other… she didn’t want to be Queen, but felt she had to live up to expectations.
“Elected Queens usually lasted one term, which is ten years, and in fae terms that isn’t a long time. Mab’s mother was Queen for thirteen terms, so Mab… I believe it was when Mab’s mother died that she made the choice to put her name in. We never much talked about why she wanted to be Queen, because by then she wasn’t, and it was something she avoided mentioning for any reason. I think she felt she’d failed her people by listening to bad advice from those who were terrified of anything unusual happening, when she should have been listening to those who realised that it wouldn’t be long before Kalinia faded.
“Princess Willow knew that and as she hadn’t been raised to be Queen she made a decision her elders hated, but in the end it was the right decision. She did what was right for the people instead of what those in control thought was the best option. Mab, if she’d listened to the much younger Princess, might have got us out before we ended up with our population drastically lowered, our strongest magic users almost all dead, and a group of fae who were losing their magic.” Meriwether bit his lip. “I don’t know what happened to them, because they didn’t feel comfortable entering one of the settlements, and instead decided to walk away from their race for good. To be honest I think I would have done the same thing. We’d always placed so much emphasis on strong magic that to not have any would have been the end of the world for some.
“Mab did the same thing I did when she died, although that was long before I did, and chose to live another life, born into one of the races we created. I think this is where I need to explain the creation of souls, which is something I never understood until I watched someone do it. Bronwen knew I wanted to understand more about my own abilities and she was willing to teach me, something my family never wanted to do, in part, I think, because they didn’t want to believe that I truly was a creator, especially not a creator of living things. They instead focused on teaching me more about my weaker abilities. I could dreamwalk, but never as well as Mum could, and from somewhere in my family I gained the ability to use stone magic. We’re not entirely sure where it came from.
“Creating souls is a difficult process that involves more than I thought it would, when all I saw was little glowing balls in jars. It isn’t until they take over their first body that they begin working out what they think they should look like when they aren’t in a body and a soul will often change how they look to match who they feel like. The only race that were any different were the Weavers, but I’m sure that’s not much of a surprise.” Meriwether shrugged. “Honestly I’m not sure it’s an ability we should have, but for some reason we were given it, and Bronwen was only given permission to experiment because she was working with Riordan on a project. I think they might only have been given permission so they’d have some experience when Kalinia finally failed. Most of us accepted it would happen eventually, some had already done the sensible thing and left our world behind, while the rest of us waited for our rulers to realise the position our race was in.
“It took much longer than we believed possible. Bronwen and Riordan used that time to complete their city in a box project, learning with every mistake they made exactly what we’d need to do to recreate it when we found another world, even though they had no idea then that’s what their abilities would be used for. Riordan spent a long time worrying that he wouldn’t be able to help us, because he knew there was a big difference between creating a city and a world, but thanks to a lot of experimentation he managed to go from city to world. Emrys was chosen as his second, as he’d chosen to reveal that he’d already spent time on Athare, knew exactly what we were planning on doing, and how we needed to get it done, which I’m not sure any of us actually believed. Not until he started to tell us which worlds we shouldn’t create.
“He knew more about them than their creators did at that point and that was when we started to believe he really had dreamwalked on Athare. Unfortunately a lot of what he’d learnt had faded, because that’s often what happens with dreams, so he didn’t know everything we needed, but thankfully Athare did. Athare was the one who told us that three of the worlds we’d planned on placing were going to turn out to cause us some major problems in the future, six needed to be changed dramatically, and the others… well, somehow we managed to come up with a selection of worlds we’d never tried before, and Athare was happy to experiment. There is a chance we had already tried them, of course, and that Athare, for whatever reason, either couldn’t or chose not to tell our Athare.
“Mab connection with Athare and her belief that the Moonjumpers were meant to exist, that she had from the time Riordan first walked into the Council property with a worried look on his face to tell us that something had happened, means it makes sense that she would rejoin the Council in her future lives. I know she did it before. She told me about it and how much the Council had changed from what we had been trying to make it, because Riordan wasn’t there any more. We both talked about how we hoped that Riordan had timewalked the same way Emrys had, because we always hoped he would return, at a time when the Council most needed him, although there have been times before when we could have used his help.
“If Azure is Mab she would have joined the Council to try to change it. Maybe through you, Lucille, or maybe in another way. She tried it before a couple of times and she’s been executed once before for being a natural.” Meriwether rubbed his antler again. “Mab wants things to be the way we envisioned them, before we realised that the fae, the ones who had asked us to create the Web, started curtailing us. We knew what we wanted the Web to be like and we had to keep fighting them on every point, because they seemed to think that we didn’t know what we were doing, not really, even though we were the only people who could. For a long time I didn’t realise that.
“The magics we had were more powerful than any of the others, which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately that meant the people with creation magics were affected worse than anyone else, and we were the only one who remained. At our greatest number there were fifty of us and the rest of the fae seemed pretty happy about that. It was after we’d completed the Web that someone started trying to kill us off, so that number decreased by about ten before we managed to capture the person who was trying to rid Athare of our magic.” Meriwether sighed. “I can easily imagine a world where we didn’t and that’s terrifying.
“A couple of times we asked Emrys what he knew about the other Webs, but he wouldn’t tell us much. I don’t think he liked talking about them, knowing the position his other selves had been in before, and I think there must have been a Web where he walked away from it all, because I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be him. He went through so much and yet still did what Athare needed him to, even though it was hard for him, and then he ended up walking away from it all because that’s what Athare needed him to do. Now that I’ve learnt more about them I can understand why. Hearing about them was almost more than I could cope with.”
Lucille smiled at Sal. “That, Sal, is why we spend hours sitting here talking. We have so much to learn from Meriwether and it seems that you all want to learn from me just as much.” She shrugged. “When we’ve solved the case I will come back, because I want to spend some time travelling Larnach teaching.”
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.