Kerennya/Logs/Wild Magic Vignette 0905024/Kerennya Ponders The Messengers

Kerennya stood staring at the spire and encasement that stood where Knife Clan used to be. How many times had she run out here to heal alongside Dokt or summon her dancing vela'tohr plant? Too many to count, that was for sure.Kerennya stood staring at the spire and encasement that stood where Knife Clan used to be. How many times had she run out here to heal alongside Dokt or summon her dancing vela'tohr plant? Too many to count, that was for sure.

The thought kept going through her mind that the spire was in some ways a picture of her own life—a few key choices forced on her by someone else's will until what remained was something that didn't feel entirely her own. She didn't like to dwell on that, though. It was too easy to start feeling sorry for herself.

She wasn't a fighter—not in the combat sense of the word. She could hold her own well enough against the onyx gargoyles just outside of Kaerna, but that was a far cry from standing up against the drakes that had attacked when Knife Clan was...spired. What she could do was fight hard for a patient's life in Triage. She wasn't always fast enough to save every single life, given that an empath also had to watch their own wounds in order to be of use to anyone, but she was faster at a lot of healing things than she used to be. She often felt like that was the only thing she had to bring to a fight.

Her thoughts turned to the four visitors who had arrived since the issues with Wild Magic had started. She found Miraena sympathetic, but her answers deeply unsatisfying. To Kerennya, she seemed the sort of innocent child who could be manipulated into serving someone else's cause, thinking she was doing the right thing. Still, she was out trying to do something about what she saw as a problem, and Kerennya had to respect that. But Miraena's subdermal keratosis and the way that creep Atuen hadn't been able to harm her at all despite using his toughest spells...either the girl was under the Heralds' protection or there was much more to her than a mere farmgirl.

Then there was Valenal. She found the Warrior Mage who knew so many bard spells to be interesting. Well, how could you *not* be interesting if you had elementals from the different planes living inside you vying for the right to wear "the human suit?" She decided not to hold against him the time when the fire elemental took over and summoned Fire Rain right on Magen Road in Crossing. He'd warned and she'd been so distracted by everything going on that she'd missed the warning, then not understood what it meant when people started leaving. She'd heard about the Warrior Mage spell Fire Rain, but her housemate and friend Mellaina, the warrior mage she was closest to, wasn't able to cast that one yet, and so she, Kerennya, didn't know anything about it. When the spell's fire had hit her, she'd died pretty quickly. It was really her own ignorance and distractedness that were responsible for that death. But Valenal's theories about the Wild Magic hadn't panned out, at least according to those who were more knowledgeable on the subject than she was. However, something about Valenal's circumstances felt opportunistic to her. If elementals needed the Plane of Abiding to be porous so they could more easily enter the plane, sorcery was what made the plane more porous, and a group of them sometimes had control of Valenal as a result of the experimenting he'd done, then it made sense that they'd want to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by Wild Magic and encourage more sorcery. But none of this told her whether the sorcery was really responsible for Wild Magic or not.

Then there was Liraxes. For all that it was a being of the Plane of Probability and kind of cold interpersonally speaking, she appreciated that it knew how to dig into the problem of wild magic and analyze the data so it could arrive at a conclusion, and that the strange being generally had concrete tasks to give them - those were things she could really sink her teeth into! The most troubling question about Liraxes was its origins. She knew that it both assembled and asserted itself, but who or what had set that in motion? Could a mage create a construct that could be made to not recognize that mage as its maker and think it had assembled itself? Why did all the creatures they'd seen in the visions of Liraxes and the Negotiants seem so afraid of it? Would Liraxes only be helpful as long as progress was being made toward restoring the balance? Was it working, however unknowingly, for some entity with more sinister designs for the plane?

Then there was Asildu. He had much in common with Miraena, but didn't present himself nearly as sympathetically or give satisfactory answers, either. He was clearly in the camp of the Heralds, as shown by his calling down of their wrath on Wolf Clan and Tiger Clan. She supposed the questions she had about him really came down to the Heralds. Why did she owe these beings her loyalty when they just kept to themselves doing whatever it is that Heralds do, then came down and expected her to leap when they said 'toad'? She found their heavy-handed ways utterly off-putting, and that was the kindest way she could think of to put it. "We do this my way or we hurt innocents to force you to toe the line." She knew that mindset all too well from the problems in her own past, and she had vowed not to let anyone manipulate her like that ever again. While the Heralds might possibly desire something good, their approach was all wrong and bordered on downright evil. There was way too much of a mindset with them that the ends justify the means for her to have any positive feelings toward the Heralds.

As for sorcery, she was a low-sorcery-only girl. She wasn't an in-your-face user of it and for that reason had made it a point to skip that crazy party at Arhat's Tower that Keridai's neighbor Imroth had thrown, but she wouldn't deny that she liked having the option to cast a few non-life spells if she wanted. And she had learned enough of it through indirect means to feel comfortable using it in a fight if she had to. She certainly wouldn't be able to combat undead effectively for the Merelew at Hollow's Eve without sorcery.

The Heralds, it seemed to her, were holding onto the past. And she would allow that there were some truly good things about that past. She could even understand how Elanthia itself might identify itself as that wild, primal place it once was, as had been shown in that ranger/empath ritual that Waydren and Illiya had led. That Elanthia itself was feeling wounded roused in her the desire to use her empathic abilities to see if she could help, and she liked the idea of the new ritual that the Ranger Waydren wanted to try to see if empaths and rangers could join with warrior mages and bards to try to heal Elanthia in the location of a suspected wound. But whereas Waydren wanted to return to that primal Elanthia entirely, she didn't love living in the wilds enough to want to have to live that way permanently if she didn't absolutely have to, and she wondered whether some kind of middle path might be possible, one where maybe they as residents of the plane could still cast sorcery if they wanted, but then work together to heal whatever damage the sorcery had done to Elanthia. Now, if only the spots that Liraxes' machine identified as being the most optimal for casting sorcery would prove to be spots where healing was most needed, or alternately, if Liraxes' machine could be tuned to calculate those spots...AND the Heralds could be brought to accept that as a compromise.

She gathered herself to head back to Crossing to complete her daily work orders thinking, One step at a time. We solve this one step at the time.