LSRO: Chapter 147 - The Old Ways (Patreon)

This chapter was marginally therapeutic to write. And fun. Hope you all enjoy it. Some Malakai background is always fun.

It's not a cliffy. The ending is a statement.

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Chapter 147

The Old Ways

Quinn decided that, despite the eeriness of the perpetual twilight over the Espinar Peninsula, she found it quite to her liking. 

It was calm and there were no bright flashes of light. Although occasionally, white flashes illuminated more here and there, the lighting level was ultimately soothing. A serene energy underlay everything that everybody around them did.

Quinn and Malakai walked through the village, and all around it. The place wasn't as large as Quinn had been expecting, but more like a small town - where everyone knew one another. There were a few small shops with banners waving from the tops of their doors proclaiming what was sold within. While outside there were several stalls, like a farmer's market. They sold fruits and vegetables that Quinn couldn't recognize or place. One of which had a definitive pungency that reminded her ever so slightly of durian fruit, but tamped down.

She grinned at Malakai, who wouldn't stop frowning, trying to lift his spirits up somewhat. "It's okay," she said to him. "I think maybe we were expecting a bit much."

He shrugged and his shoulders fell dejectedly. "That's just it Quinn, I never really expect much from her. I know better by now."

Quinn wasn't really sure how to react to that. While in foster care she'd simply kept her head down and done what needed to be done. Before that, she distinctly remembered parents who loved her and always showed it. She nudged him in the arm, just gently, trying to let him know she was there.

Whatever instinct guided her to do that was right. Malakai sighed and spoke. "I was 15 the last time we were all here." He gestured around at the way nobody quite met his eyes, at the way nobody quite talked to him. He was definitely not one of the bunch. "I mean my parents and me. All together."

"Ah, that explains why nobody's running up to you and hugging you," she said with a smile so the edge didn't hit.

He chuckled. "To be fair, we both know nobody would be running up and hugging me anyway. I'm not really the hugging type."

Quinn laughed this time. "I'm glad to see you haven't lost your sense of humor, just because you had a fight with your mum."

"Quinn, don't go there." He looked away, like the subject was just annoying for him. "I always have a fight with my mother. Being a mom never really seemed to be her priority."

Quinn shrugged. "Everyone has different priorities. But that doesn't mean you can't learn things from her. Even if she doesn't realize she's teaching them." 

He watched Quinn for a moment. Perhaps he realized that she'd never really had a mother either. Then he reached down and squeezed her hand gently, smiled, and spoke. "This is getting heavy. How about we change the subject?"

"Excellent idea. How about we go back to talking about the fact that there's a faction out there trying to destroy the universe as we know it and put the Library out of commission?" 

Malakai laughed. They were far enough away from the rest of the settlement that nobody noticed quite how forced that laughter was.

She nudged him again. "Well, maybe we just need to give her a chance."

"A chance to do what, Quinn?" He asked with a long suffering sigh,

"Help us," Quinn said. 

He paused and watched her for a moment before continuing their walk. "You're rather upbeat for someone that got pulled into a situation that is do or die."

"Is there at least a little bit of sarcasm in that?" She asked.

"Maybe a tiny bit." He sighed. "I'm just not sure how you managed to stay on top of all that and not just scream and run away."

 Quinn shrugged. "It's true that I might have had several panic moments, especially when I found out that I'm not what I always thought I am. But you know... it doesn't change the person I am. My values, my motivations... they're all the same. And frankly, life would be rather boring by comparison if I were back on Earth."

"You wouldn't have any comparison for it, Quinn," Malakai said. "I mean, honestly, you wouldn't. You'd probably be happy with your life or at least content." 

"Not now and knowing I wouldn't be, though. I know how big the universe is and I know that we're just a speck of dust out there in it." Quinn grimaced. "Although I could really do with a little bit of downtime to cement myself, get myself in the right frame of mind for the rest of it."

"Hey, you had a couple of weeks." Malakai flashed her a grin.

"I had a couple of weeks where I devoured books every day." They'd begun meandering back toward Arnekai's house. "My stomach is getting a little hungry."

Malakai fished into his backpack and pulled out what looked like a protein bar. Quinn raised an eyebrow. "Something Cook made for us to take with us on journeys so we don't get hungry and we get all the nutrients we need or something like that."

"Oh, great." Quinn chomped down into it. It tasted like it had hints of white chocolate and macadamia nuts in it. She was going to have to ask him how he kept reading her mind.  "Anyway," Quinn said around a mouthful of food. "What should we do next?"

"I guess we wait for my mother to return so we can talk or whatever." He let himself fall into the chair on the porch and watched as the village bustled around doing their daily tasks, coming and going from hunting and patrols, people gathering around the farmers market section, chatting, exchanging wares and foods, maybe even recipes. 

Quinn was pretty sure she saw a couple of casseroles change hands.

"Have you been waiting long?" Arnekai's voice sounded so suddenly Quinn was surprised she hadn't noticed the elf's approach. She sounded less imposing and a bit more trepidatious as if she wasn't entirely certain of how she'd be received.

"We really haven't been waiting long at all," Quinn said. "We've just been watching. It's quite nice here. It has this really serene and comfortable feeling to it, sort of relaxed."

Arnekai laughed. "Yeah, I guess it does." She sat down next to Quinn and took a deep breath with closed eyes.

When she opened them again Arnekai was smiling. "Yes. You're right. It's quite comfortable here. I guess that's what we get for maintaining constant vigilance."

"Then you've done a very good job," Quinn said.

Arnekai sighed and leaned forward, her elbows on the table. "I owe you an apology," she said, directing her attention to her son. "I'm not the best when it comes to communicating with people in general, let alone people I care about, namely you, Malakai. I owe you an apology for not being there, for not explaining the why to you in a way you’d understand, and for my never clarifying it. I'm sorry. Maybe one day you can forgive me, but I don't really expect you to. I just hope you'll understand that sometimes we do things for reasons that others aren't always going to understand."

Malakai, for his part, paled slightly. His mouth hung open in shock and his eyes looked like they were being held open by somebody. For a couple of seconds he sat like that and then he shook himself and nodded, looking away from his mother's gaze. "Sure, I bet I'll understand more when I'm older."

"Maybe... hopefully," Arnekai said. "Anyway, I promised I would help you with information about my great-aunt. Milaro and the Library requested nicely, and thus I need to stop putting off the inevitable and talk about a very uncomfortable familial situation. You need to understand however, that I'm just a few hundred years old and thus a lot of this is going to be hearsay and things I've read in our history books and our recountings and in my other aunts' and grandparents' journals. So, I guess now is as good a time as any for you to ask me your questions about Ardenil."

Quinn didn't need magic to sense that Arnekai was extremely uncomfortable talking about this. She thought it might just be better to get the whole thing out of the way sooner than later. "Would there have been any reason you can think of that Arnekai would have removed a restricted vault book from the Library without permission from, you know, the Librarian, the Library itself, Lynx, or anyone?" Quinn asked. 

"Ardenil was never your commonplace person," Arnekai sighed. "She was contrary, rebellious, deliberately combative, and refused to do anything she was told. I've only ever met her three times in my life because by the time I came along she was already old. I do however have access to our official chronicles..."

"Ooo!" Quinn butted in. "Is that like an official chronicler? Like the slothilis?"

Arnekai blinked at Quinn. "Being a chronicler isn't restricted to a species..."

"Oh." Quinn felt entirely clueless. She'd just thought maybe Carafax had been around more of the histories than just the Library. "Of course. Sorry, carry on."

"Reasons, mother," Malakai said. "We need reasons why she was banished and why she would have been lurking around trying to figure out where to get these books from. We need to know why she took it."

"Ardenil, she... Well, it might be better if you wait and talk to my mother."

Malakai sighed. It was a deep, almost irritated sound. "And where, pray tell, is grandmother?"

"Well, you know her. She's busy." Arnekai avoided eye contact.

"Okay, fine. She's very busy. Doing what, mother?"

"She's on an expedition."

Quinn's eyes narrowed. She was pretty good at telling when people were evading questions even if they weren't being this blatantly obvious about it. Arnekai definitely didn't want to give out any more information than she had to. Given the situation, though, this wasn't a good sign. 

Quinn stepped in before Malakai boiled over. "Maybe we can talk about the expedition later. Can we just focus on the chronicles you gleaned your information from?" 

Arnekai nodded, shook herself ever so slightly, and focused on Quinn. "Ardenil was known for... She'd always been a little bit of a troublemaker. My grandfather never really managed to keep her under wraps. She was a willful spirit, which is fine, usually, except a few millennia ago, maybe three-ish, she ran into a crowd that wasn't exactly somebody that my grandfather, great-grandfather, anybody in the family approved of. She was simply not in good company, I guess."

"Most kids don't like being told who they can be friends with." Quinn mumbled.

"She was several hundred years old at that stage." Arnekai said softly by way of excuse.

"Elaborate," Malakai asked.

"She met a group of people who ran in bad circles. They dimension jumped, they caused havoc wherever they went, they basically acted like children, despite the fact that they were all several centuries old. It was a big melting pot of people too. There were Serpensiril, Ilgonomur, Esposians, some Firionas Fae, some Centaurs, the Sedimentites, even some Tecopsis which I always found odd, and probably several I'm not thinking of. It was a whole big group who caused mischief, and it all culminated in my great-aunt attempting to steal one of our lineage's sacred texts."

"Sacred texts? Like magical texts?" Quinn asked, this being the first she'd heard of them.

Arnekai shook her head. "Not quite. Just the histories of our people, and specific exercise techniques for our lineage and the chaos manipulations that allow us to dwell in this sector."

"Oh," Quinn said, oddly disappointed.

"There are copies in the Library. In the vault." Arnekai clarified before continuing. "This book holds techniques that help us maintain the boundaries around our domain, which is what I was scouting earlier. If you don't have these skillsets nailed down, if you aren't yet able to do that, well, then you can't patrol the grounds. Then our entire space becomes vulnerable. Because of that, the sacred texts are very specifically important to our species."

"And she attempted to steal these?" Quinn asked.

"Yes. They are similar to the magical texts that the Library has, but they are very species-specific, and are guarded heavily here in our stronghold. After she attempted to, well, after she attempted to steal them, she was banished, and they asked her not to come back."

"Did they ask her not to come back," Malakai said, "or did they very strongly suggest that there might not be a welcome reception for her, should she choose to do so in the end?"

"Got it in one," his mother said. She gave Quinn a wan smile. "Our history is not what I would call unblemished."

"So," Quinn interrupted, pausing to gather her thoughts. "Why did she try to steal it?"

Arnekai winced. "Yeah, I was hoping we wouldn't have to get into this. I can't stand politics."

"No one can." Quinn chuckled. "But we have to understand what we're up against."

"The universe is vast, and there was never any way everyone was always going to agree on everything." Arnekai began. "Even before things began to go awry with the Library, there were factions. The Serpensiril, Esposian Fae, and Ilgonomur have always had a fairly close relationship. Even if the degree to which they think it varies, those are three regions of space, three species that have always held that chaos just makes the magic more powerful."

"So those are good starting points, right?" Malakai asked, and for the first time Quinn could hear some actual enthusiasm in his voice.

"Very good starting points. But by now, there will be more people in cahoots with them. And just because I didn't list a species as having direct contact with our aunt, doesn't mean they didn't." Arnekai paused. "But I guess it's a good place to start."

"Better than what we had." Malakai muttered. "Anything else you can think of."

Arnekai hesitated momentarily. "If you get down to a point where you need assistance, know that the darigháhnish will always offer aid to the Library." Light flashed around her and a rune appeared briefly in front of Quinn's face, before pushing into her forehead and vanishing along with a short, sharp pang of pain.

"Ow!" Quinn glared at Arnekai.

"Wow." Malakai said. "I was not expecting an oath mom, thanks." His smile in her direction was genuine.

"Thank me when the time comes. For now it's just an empty promise that I hope to never have to fulfill." She held up a hand to forestall any irritation. "But we will fulfill it if it becomes necessary. For the good of us all."

"Thanks." Quinn said, genuinely happy at the gesture. "Any other hints or tips?"

"Just be aware that those I listed are simply those who stood out. They could all be involved or none." Arnekai gave her a small smile. "Always be cautious and careful. They are a conglomeration that believes that magic shouldn't be filtered, because it's supposed to weed out the weak, and thus leave the survivors stronger for it. It's a pretty fanatical viewpoint on life, but for whatever reason, Ardenil believed in it. The last time I saw her she left an impression. It was at my grandfather's funeral about two centuries ago. She stood up and she promised that the old ways were gone with his death, and that their time was nigh, and all of us would rue the day we banished her, because we were weak and we were meant to die."

"Wow. She sounds like the life of the party." Quinn said softly.

Arnekai smiled sadly. "I only wish it were as simple as that. Curses aren't taken lightly anywhere with magic in the universe."

~~

And now we go back to the Library and sort some more crap out, right?!

Much love

KT