baby love me apocalyptic | Glowfic Constellation

reach-out-for-the-stars

Gleam's realm is flourishing.

It's a bit difficult to say how much of this is her. She carved this territory out of the edge of Creation many centuries ago, wavering along the border of the wyld. A place she could hide from the world. From those who would pursue her, chain her - dark and tangled and protective.

It turns out, a realm created to hide one escaped slave can hide more, and in those early days - it'd been more than freeing to learn how to walk the border marches, how to let the currents of story carry her across the world. Stealing slaves from the Blessed Isle is often beyond her - but she can strike fairly deeply from the edges, and she can adjust herself to the amorphous networks of abolitionists and freedom trails. (The center of Creation is more stable, anyways, the system of slavery set up with a path to citizenship, just enough rights, just enough hope to quell rebellions and discourage escape. Gleam used to burn at it, at that trap - but anger is a toxin in her mind, she's been learning, and cold triage just works so much better.)

(No one tends to miss a system that was already brutal and destructive, anyways.)

Her realm's borders have grown over the years, her personal power swelling with the population - a people who see no reason not to worship her, the feral silver tiger in the forest, guardian and companion and inspiration. It's flattering, often convenient - she can speak to her people in their dreams, which is nice for keeping an eye on things even from afar, and is very useful for finding people to worship her body as well as her power.

She doesn't rule the patchwork of states that call her region home. The leaders pray to her, seek her guidance - but she's often blunt about telling them to fix their own problems. They've found a wonderful array of solutions, and the only things she enforces are freedom and peace between the states. (Some of those solutions are difficult for her to wrap her mind around anyone ever wanting, but it's... Nice, to see her people happy. To see their children flourish.)

Much of Creation, for all of the vaunted rule of the Lawgivers, is still a shifting sea of non-state peoples. Gleam accepts those into her realm, too, many of them as itinerant residents, and the soft ripple of 'uncivilized wilderness' usually creates a nice buffer between her and other Exalts.

That's been changing, over the last century. Some of that was her fault - she doesn't like imperialism, and the peoples in the regions around her know who she is. When nearby states got delusions of easy new land for their empires - well, it'd been a little bit since she surged the space under her protection. Her peoples aren't really prepared for war, but she is, and she can handle any posturing here.

(She wins. None of the states on her new border have the full, dedicated protection of a Celestial Exalt, even if they're usually being egged on by the Dragonblooded servants of one. Gleam still remembers how "this is my fucking territory" diplomacy works, though, and most Solars - even many of the other Exalts - are under the impression that all Exalts are natural allies, mortal kingdoms at best set dressing for their tea parties.)

The kingdoms on her border shift and ripple, and her territory expands at a meandering pace, punctuated only rarely by surges - but she's getting close, she thinks, to a kingdom influenced but not ruled by a less baby Solar than the ones she's usually threatening off. Not an aggressive place, at least, instead a quite nicely stable state she's loosely aware many of her peoples trade with at some remove. Apparently they have multiple universities, and some of her more curious states are thinking of setting up enough diplomatic ties to trade knowledge and teaching.

(Gleam is curious, too. Most Exalts seem to forget the point of their appointment as stewards of the world is actual responsible management, not exploiting every resource and then emptying the treasury and taking off when the whole place collapses. (Maybe that's a tiny bit uncharitable, but, also, she's been to a lot of the corners of Creation. Older Solars especially seem a bit baffled by the idea of mortal flourishing as a goal separate from 'get to show off the shiniest elite culture to other Solars.'))

So, one spring, she sets out from her realm at a gentle pace, angling towards the foreign kingdom. She'll announce herself if she senses an actual claimed territory, but, otherwise, she's just poking around. Might meander over to directly and intentionally poke the Solar, but, eh, she'll see where her whim takes her.

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reach-out-for-the-stars

Hum, then: "I want to be surprised."

all-your-wrath

"Very well."

reach-out-for-the-stars

Grin.

"I should lure you over to my place sometime," she teases. "Show off my own library."

all-your-wrath

"Is that all you would have to show?"

reach-out-for-the-stars

"Of course not."

all-your-wrath

"What other wonders might I look forward to?"

reach-out-for-the-stars

She hums, thoughtful.

"You know, I think I'll leave you in suspense," she says.

all-your-wrath

"How exciting. But with that happy thought, I should start cooking if we are to eat at reasonable hour. If you wish to occupy yourself otherwise than observing my preparation," she taps the sorcery book. "You may find some of the workings described herein of especial interest."

reach-out-for-the-stars

"I'll start on it, then."

all-your-wrath

Elathea will show her to a comfortable spot to sit, and then disappear to make her preparations.

reach-out-for-the-stars

She smiles and starts on the book.

reach-out-for-the-stars

It's... Interesting. On a more in depth reading - a lot of this is still definitely well past her level, but it seems to be mostly theoretical work, and Elathea's way of thinking here is... Not the way Gleam thinks, but she can follow it very easily, get an aesthetic sense of the problems even if she wouldn't be able to do the relevant math or whatever in detail.

A lot of the spells described are things last used around the Primordial War that Elathea is trying to reconstruct, which, cool, and she apparently has access to at least one person's notes there...

There's one that's resting almost entirely on notes, with some further development and conjecture but not a lot of successfully new observations or experiments. It describes a method of stabilizing mate bonds - which break when one party to them dies - to last across hosts of the exaltations, extending between multiple lives. There's a more modern note, though - it doesn't consistently work, if it works at all, since Elathea is more or less sure at least one past host of her exaltation met the other involved exaltation's host at the time and didn't have the bond reform. But identifying exaltations across lives is hard, anyways...

Gleam squints. She thinks this working was to stabilize - not the bond across lives, but the 'across lives' part in normal reality, though also it was a major part of a complicated larger working, done by the bond's other half... It's entirely in the terminology of sorcery, which - is obfuscating it, and Gleam has to dig out her own paper and charcoal for a sketch -

...Huh, she hadn't known you could get sorcery to interact with wyld shaping. Cool.

She makes a little triumphant noise, adding a few scribbles to her sketch then leaning back to shake out her hand. (She needs to stop gripping her charcoal so tight.)

all-your-wrath

Elathea opens the door, allowing a blend of enticing aromas to infiltrate.

"The food is nearly ready, if you are. Was your reading enlightening?"

reach-out-for-the-stars

"Yeah! Lemme note page I was on..." She scribbles that, then cleans her hands before standing. "So, did the notes you found mention the bond thing was half wyld shaping? Because I'm very sure it was."

all-your-wrath

"...No, but that- would make sense."

reach-out-for-the-stars

"Yeah! So - that bit with, hm," she waves a hand and squints, her caste mark very briefly shimmering, then recites a bit of a paragraph, "Anyways I think that's why it didn't work in that one life you found a record of, there's this thing that's really strong in the stuff out past Creation that it's hooking into, but that used to be suppressed in Creation itself, where - "

"...Annnd I'm going to need to think on a metaphor for the thing, I think I'm about to run afoul of that thing where it's impossible to both coherently and accurately describe anything far enough outside of Creation."

all-your-wrath

"One reason why I prefer to keep to the Isle."

reach-out-for-the-stars

"I might have to add some of the places I've wyld shaped to your tour, then. Convince you of the beauty of it."

all-your-wrath

"Interesting."

reach-out-for-the-stars

"I'll start you on the well behaved ones, don't worry."

all-your-wrath

"Very thoughtful." She flourishes a bow and gestures out the door. "If the lady would care to join me...?"

reach-out-for-the-stars

Giggle. "I would."

And: to food!

all-your-wrath

To food.

Elathea has created a spread of seven courses, including several of the dishes Gleam was eying earlier. Each is both artistically arranged and very, very tasty.

reach-out-for-the-stars

Mmmmmmm!

She spends a little bit just admiring the food before starting, and mostly takes small bites, savoring each one with little noises of pleasure. She isn't jumping around between dishes at all, unlike what many Lunars Elathea's met tend to do, instead starting on the first dish - colorful vegetables in a creamy, spicy sauce - and apparently deciding to eat all of each food before going to the next, down to eating the individual vegetables clustered together by kind.

"This is so good," she says after a somewhat louder noise, leaning back and moving to her milk tea (to wash down some of the spice, but, also, she's doing the same one thing at a time thing with any non-water drinks). " - We were talking about something that wasn't delicious food, weren't we..."

all-your-wrath