The World Walkers: Quiar: The Case of the Counterfeit Enchantments (part 9, 64th continuation)

[k_a_webb]

We have officially reached the 100th part of section 2.

Part 1

Part 9, 63rd continuation

Landing Page

“The longer they stay within the settlements the more abilities they are going to use.” Meriwether shrugged. “It’s their own fault. We told them it was likely that there would be problems in the future with their magic if they just bred with each other, but they didn’t want to listen. Even the thought of sleeping with someone who was a part of one of the races that we created was anathema. None of them understood that once the first babies were born they were no longer a purely created race and if they simply waited a few years there would be more who had been born on Athare than there would be created people. Unfortunately nothing we said seemed to get through to them.”

“It’s strange to think that someone once created an ancestor of mine.” Lucille bit her lip. “Do you think it’s possible that I might have a created soul?”

“Anything is possible, but it seems unlikely. There are probably millions of people living on the worlds of the Web now and when we created the races we made the smallest number possible, partly so we didn’t use up too much magic, which means the odds of you being one of those hundreds of created souls is very low.” Meriwether smiled. “I kind of wish you might find that, though, because it would be fascinating. We were never permitted to ask them what it was like, especially as the plan was for the three races to each be on a different continent to us, because the fae outside of the Council thought it was a bad idea for the races to find out that we’d created them – even though they worked it out quickly enough alone.

“Our opinion was that they thought the created races were stupid. I don’t know why they thought that, especially now with what they learnt from the Dragons, but when you create a group of people it’s really rather obvious that something unusual happened for them to be in such a small group and for none of them to be related to each other. That simply isn’t possible to do when you’re creating souls. We didn’t think putting them into fake families was a good idea, as they’d soon realise that the person we said was their mother actually wasn’t, so we went against the fae, who thought it would be for the best. As they’d never created a race of people we chose not to listen. Luckily we also had the Weavers.” Meriwether smiled. “Like the Dragons they were another race who had known exactly what was happening when they were in the jars we used to hold them until we’d made a body.

“When the first Weaver was created she made the choice to let it happen. If she’d have wanted to she could easily have walked away, if that’s the right phrase to us, but they decided they wanted to help us. After a long conversation with Athare the Weavers had accepted that our plan pretty much was the only option that made any sense and did what they could after that to help us with things, even though they hated anyone who wasn’t a part of the Creation Council. They didn’t think the fae had any right to be telling us what we should or shouldn’t be doing, because they weren’t doing any of the work and pretty much every choice they made was based entirely on what was right for them, instead of what was right for the races we were creation, and the longer they tried to control us the more the Weavers hated them.

“Even though I don’t think it was a bad thing that the Weavers hated the fae, especially as they’re still doing the work now that they started when we were first creating the Web, sometimes it made it hard to keep working. The Weavers would tell us we should be doing something because it was good for the Web, the fae told us they didn’t like that and we should do something else, and there we were, stuck in the middle, trying to work out a compromise between the two. Normally every compromise we made was more to what the Weavers wanted than the fae, because we didn’t like them telling us what we should be doing.

“Maybe, if they’d got their hands dirty and actually did something to help us, we might have tried to accommodate them more than we did. Instead all they did was watch from the sidelines and tell us exactly what we were doing wrong. Emrys kept telling us to ignore them, because he knew how important the Web was, but for the rest of us it wasn’t that simple. We all had family to think about. Riordan was the younger brother of the Blue elder, so he was doing his best to get her to understand why we were making the choices we were and she was doing her best to misunderstand, because she felt that what we were doing we wrong, even though she’d been the one to push the idea in the first place. From the time she realised how likely it was that she would become the elder, at sixty, she started working on the people around her, to get them to work with her.

“Then, once we were working with her, she made the decision that we were doing it all wrong, because we weren’t doing things the way she thought we should. Even though she had no idea how to create something larger than a thimble.” Meriwether sighed. “I found it really irritating that the Blue elder didn’t actually have the ability to create in the way that we did. She could, occasionally, create something small, but in comparison to Riordan she had no Blue magic at all. We kept telling Riordan he should be the elder, even though he was her younger brother, and I think, in the end, he came to agree with us, purely because she was annoying him so much. All she kept doing was sticking her nose it where it wasn’t wanted.

“Fortunately we didn’t have the same problem with the Yellow elder as he was actually working with us. He truly believed we were doing the right thing, so chose to stand down as the elder when the fae went into the settlements, in order to keep being a part of the Creation Council. All of his family thought he was being an idiot, but he told them he was one of us. Once he didn’t have them telling him that he was making a huge mistake he became more experimental and I think, if I remember correctly, he was one of the fae who helped Emrys to create the races of Quiar. The two of them got on really well, even though Emrys wasn’t open with him either.”

“Do you think Emrys had any friends?”

Meiwether shook his head. “It was hard for him. From a young age he was in contact with Athare, so he had secrets to keep and he knew he couldn’t tell anyone what was going to happen. That is the hardest part of knowing the future, really, the understanding that anything you say to anyone may change things.” He sighed. “I feel sorry for him, that he had to deal with all that alone, and it changed him, it really did. The silly thing was I didn’t even know him before we travelled to Athare and I could tell how much it had affected his life. Even when I thought he was a seer. Being a seer would have been hard enough, really, considering what we went through, but he knew so much more than a seer could, because Athare had told him all about the other Webs.

“If I’d been in the same position as him… well, all I can really say is that I’m glad I wasn’t, because I don’t think I’d have been able to cope with it. He had to learn everything he could about the mistakes that had been made in other Webs to try to make certain that we didn’t do the same thing again. Athare couldn’t be in contact with him all the time, because she had other things to do, and it wasn’t exactly impossible to think that we might do something stupid. When she heard about the race Mairin was creating, and that Piaras had offered them a place on one of his worlds, she wasn’t particularly happy, but the race had never been placed before so she had no real arguments about it.

“They aren’t a race I ever had much contact with, so I don’t even know if they survived the early years and I can’t help hoping that they didn’t, because I can’t imagine what the Web would be like if they ever left the hidden place they were given. Mairin’s inspiration was a very scary race she read about in a fiction book from Earth, which is where I think they should have stayed. She, unfortunately, didn’t agree with me, and neither did Piaras.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

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