come, give me my soul again | Glowfic Constellation

Lilia initially expects to be retrieved, but after a week starts to take seriously the possibility she won’t be. She is not sure, in that case, what to do. She does not know - would never have asked, would never have been told - if her mother was alive this long ago. If she was, she ought to find her and serve her. If she was not, she ought to - stay alive until she is, she supposes. The caches she knows of are empty, but there could have been reason to change them, over the centuries. A Sending doesn’t work, a scry doesn’t, but - they wouldn’t be expected to. Scrying or Sending Myrabelle stopped working when she died. The home Lilia grew up in is farmland. Messages in the message-drops go unclaimed.

She spends a month in Oppara as a foreign adventurer and determines of its court that 1) she adores it and 2) it’d take two decades to get good at it, two decades she is not going to invest without orders. Really, if there are no orders forthcoming, she needs to spend those decades figuring out immortality.

Tar-Baphon has immortality on offer, of course, of a sort, but joining the losing side of a war is a stupid thing to do and Lilia happens to know how this war ends. She settles after some contemplation on joining the Shining Crusade. One can get a title out of it - a title in Lastwall, which she finds privately tremendously amusing - she can probably get seventh circle out of it, and she thinks Myrabelle if she was around in this era would have at least considered participating and is likelier to be there than she is to be anywhere else. And she will admit to some curiosity about the war that made and felled gods. Not that she is planning to go anywhere near Iomedae or Arazni or the leadership of the Crusade.

She signs up as a fifth circle wizard, which she is (she's also a sixth circle wizard), Lawful Neutral, which she isn’t, and testifies under a truth spell that she doesn’t serve Tar-Baphon, which she doesn’t but their truth spell would hardly oblige her to confess it if she did, or any other foreign power, which she might; she isn't sure. If the Shining Crusade doesn't seem to be getting her anywhere she'll go visit some foreign powers and learn whether she does turn out to serve any of them.

Alfirin isn't entirely sure she doesn't want to take Lilia as an apprentice. The initial meeting wasn't an assassination attempt (She checked beforehand, of course) but that doesn't mean it's not part of some larger ploy beyond her limited ability to foresee -

- if Lilia was being truthful, she wasn't being honest. She gave only cursory reasons for choosing to apprentice under Alfirin and for avoiding Arazni; If those had been the sum of her reasons she would have picked any other eighth-circle and not requested secrecy in her introduction... Probably Lilia has more reasons to avoid Arazni's attention, and chose Alfirin as the wizard most likely to go along with the request for secrecy. Alfirin has never been to Arcadia, maybe the court in Xopatl really is a place where you can get to fifth circle. Or perhaps she's Azlanti and avoiding close acquaintances of Aroden's - either way it leaves the question of why she's here with the crusade in the first place. Most fifth-circle living wizards of Lilia's apparent age aren't selfishly worried about Tar-Baphon's eventual victory in twenty years, if it comes at all. Altruism would be an unsurprising motive but for some reason Lilia didn't mention it - if she's being literally truthful the reason might be that it doesn't move her at all. Interesting.

What if she wasn't being truthful? If it's all a lie - then Alfirin knows nothing, except that someone has gone to the effort to weave a very confusing deception to no clear end. For the sake of being mysterious, to be bait in a trap, perhaps, but the trap would have to be one that works even when the bait is recognized as such -

"Curiosity, remind me tomorrow to research demon lords, I vaguely recall there's one obsessed with puzzles..."

- Is there anyone else who'd set a trap like this? Tar-Baphon probably not, at least not for her, it might be a play at Arazni - it could be one of those hags from Brevoy, if they weren't all dead - she should confirm that they're all dead - nobody else comes to mind who'd mix this degree of convolution with this degree of unsubtlety. (It's pretty out of character for Tar-Baphon too...)

...And the third possibility, what if Lilia was being mostly but not perfectly truthful? If there was one lie, or two - Where she is from and/or whether her enemies can follow her, Alfirin thinks. The first world, or the city of brass, or Hell. Most likely the first world, though in that case probably there were no lies after all and it was all technical truths...