A little girl, the points of her ears seeming to gleam in the light of the rising sun, plucks a blue flower from near the wall just outside her family compoud. She isn't supposed to be there, not at that hour, but like many of her clan she doesn't keep what most would call regular hours. She is awake, and sneaking out to explore. Gladehome has been made safe for decades; her grandmother, who is watching in secret, is not truly fearful. She plans to give the child a swat when she comes back in, just to emphasize the rule, but she permits the child to break it just the same. She wants to see what the child will do with the flower.
Will she make something beautiful with it? Put it in water? Use it to cast a spell, a child's magic that will give some hint that the family is raising a new wizardess? A sorceress? Or maybe just a farmer or architect. That would be a nice change, for the Titansglade folk.
The little girl deliberately breaks off as much of the stem as possible - so much for putting it in water - and picks up a handful of dirt. She chooses the dirt more carefully than she did the flower, studying the ground as intently as her six years permit to find just the right loam for her work. Now she cups the dirt in one hand, the flower resting on top, tracing the fingers of her free hand around the flower's edge. She has seen me, her mother and her aunts and uncles casting spells in various ways. Will she cast? Will she try and fail? Or is she just making art? Will she chant? Dance? Mutter?
The little girl does none of these. She clutches the handful of earth, dropping her free hand to crush the flower in a tomb of dirt, her face squinched as she bore down. Oh please, in the name of mercy, let her not take after her grandfather. Let her not have my husband's blood.
The little girl, Ellie, flings her dirt and the crushed flower into the air, straight up, heedless of the fact that much of it will rain down on her own head. A swat and a quick bath for that one, her grandmother reflects, before noticing the most important thing that will happen that day. If the light of the dawn weren't so good, she might have missed it.
The flower does not come back down. But a tiny blue butterfly traces erratic circles in the air over the beaming little dirtspattered girl.
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"Ellie!" She heard her name, but the rest of her father's speech was muffled in the cellar's echoes.
"What was that?" she yelled back. "I heard you say something, but I couldn't hear what."
He poked his head out of the storm door. "I said 'hand me the garblewarblefarble." Grabbing his entire toolbox he disappeared back under the house.
"It's a good thing I didn't hear you" Ellie replied. "That's a real thing, referring to the interstices of elemental patinas non-colored pollen. If I had handed you that, your closings would have opened and Morlaki's gel in the eyeball would have spumed vociferously..." She was capable of going on like this for some time if provoked.
Palos hustled back out. "Enough! I know you're my daughter, we have the same birthmark, so I can't figure out when you became half-gnome!" She saw that he was putting his tools away, and found herself suddenly sad. This is the last time I'm going to help him build anything until I get back. And any last time could be the last time ever.
She didn't have long to contemplate that, crushed as she was in her laughing father's arms. It was nearly impossible for someone of Eltanin's size to hug her father without being lifted entirely off the floor. Rumor had it there was orc in his ancestry; if true, it certainly didn't show in his daughter's frame. The half-gnome joke was a common one in the family, easy enough given her size and the prattle that had become only that much more incomprehensible after her Galdurian training.
"I know what you're thinking" said her father, neither putting her down nor letting her get enough air to interrupt. "Only a year back and you're going off again. This time with no bodyguard of cousins and such to walk you hither and thither. You'll be on your own mission, and you'll probably wind up somewhere uncivilized, and have to put some of your noisier teachings to good use. Just remember that Gladehomers don't have all the trusty people in the world. You'll find some on your own, and you'll be fine."
With that he finally put her down and held her at arm's length while she caught her breath. What he saw was a small and slender half-elf, much like the woman he had married, possessed of the unusual talent for rendering mundane objects and substances into magical ones. Perhaps someday she would be his true partner, 'improving' the works of his strength and his sweat with her own gifts, making Gladehome safer and stronger as had he and the rest of the family.
"Oh sure" she finally said. "I will. I'll be back in a while, and I'll write, and everything will end up fine. I just have no idea who is going to drive nails once I'm gone." Another family joke, little-girl Ellie had refused to let anyone else use the carpentry hammer. As a matter of tradition, she had been his nail driver for most of her life.
He sighed. "Your grandmother says she'll step in again. She taught me, after all. It's just not the same."
Ellie looked mollified. "Oh, it's all right then. She'll learn. For a sorceress, she's a good scout."
"Speaking of which", her father's craggy face suddenly looked more serious "she wants to see you. Before dinner. It won't wait, that's why I'm cleaning up now. Your mother and I'll be there while she fills you in on a little family lore, but I won't be saying much. It's her story to tell."
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Canali Titansglade looked scarcely older than she had eighteen years before, when she had watched her little grandchild Eltanin send a flower soaring skyward with just a little infusion of her growing power into a handful of dirt. Now that same child was sitting in sturdiest chair in her study while her parents sat on a sofa nearby, inheritor of a remarkable skill at building and knowing, and of a family whose history began three generations before but already included a few secret chapters.
"Ellie, your sojourn begins tomorrow. While it will start in Sandpoint I am hoping it will go further, and I am certain that it will not go in completely plannable directions." Canali eschewed the seat behind her desk, instead sitting on a tall stool near the window. This permitted her to guard against eavesdroppers, at least in their more mundane forms.
Ellie was comfortable but anxious. Her grandmother had a way of getting a person's undivided attention. Tall and willowy, she could go from almost innocuous to fearsomely imposing in a heartbeat. Eltanin fancied that she had gotten her grandmother's expressive face but little else. Her hair might have been a similar shade but it never grew so long, it's darkness contrasting brilliantly with the paleness of her skin. Ellie, on the other hand, had what her classmates at the Twilight Academy had called a farmgirl's tan. It just made her short and dark hair look - short and dark. She wasn't terribly critical of her appearance, knowing that wasn't where her gifts lay, but she did rather envy her grandmother at times. Canali's life was easier, in some ways, than her unprepossessing grandchild.
But seeing little flashes of old pain in her grandmother's eyes as she struggled to say something more poignant, Ellie knew that she had burdens that Ellie would be glad not to have.
"In the course of your journeys, you might find yourself learning more about The Blackgilt Knight, Savelle. You know already that he tried to destroy Gladehome shortly after we build it, and that we beat him though at great cost."
Ellie had a glimmer of intuition, guessing what might be coming next. "I know about the demons he led, and the people he killed, and how much of the keep had to be rebuilt when he was finally dead. But I know he did more than that, didn't he? Evin and Taranost write songs about him, but you and Uncle Isao and others of your years keep glancing at each other when they play them."
Canali nodded. "Oh, there is more. The most important thing to know about him is that his body was never found. The oracle from Whispersong said that the 'blackgilt blade is broken,' but that doesn't mean the man is dead, necessarily. You should most assuredly be on your guard. We took the name Titansglade to cut ties with those who knew us under old names, but there might very well be those abroad who mean ill to that name as well."
"But that's not the real secret. Part of the reason we took a new name was to hide from my husband. Your grandfather. A shining soldier, armored in golden light when we were first married, We deliberately refrain from speaking of how he died, and why he never joined us here in Gladehome. The trouble is, he did."
Ellie nodded, her eyes wide, her voice calmer than she felt. "Oh. Yes. We sometimes talk about the loose ends in the stories. Now it makes sense. He fell, somehow. Grandfather became the Blackgilt Knight."
Canali nodded again, glad that Ellie had gotten there quickly. "Somehow, yes. That is another reason to be on your guard. We know that power like his does not curdle into what he was without some sort of fiendish influence, but we have no real idea of where it came from or what was at work in his life. He deliberately kept himself aloof from me for months at a time. After our children started coming, it was easy for him to keep his movements secret from me. My spells are more vigorous than perceptive. But he couldn't hide the fact that his edges were growing sharper with the years; even our youngest, your mother, saw it. But I supposed that it was just a cool few years, not a deep change, just something we could work on."
"But now I'm going to tell you what I saw one night, what my husband did and said to make it clear that the change was deep indeed, and why we and many others fled Taldor even as young soldiers and leaders were claiming that a new rulership was arising. And I'll tell you what I suspect about why the revolution happened in Galt, but never Taldor."
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And the next day Eltanin Titansglade began her sojourn, as had many in her family before her. Starting in Sandpoint and from there to Argavist Island, her public mission was simply to find trading partners and opportunities for her tiny village of Gladehome. Privately, she was to study history and stories, trying to find the beginnings and the final fate of her grandfather (though surely that would be a long journey indeed, but she had the time and her family's blessing.)
But her true mission, the one in her own deepest heart, was to explore the phenomenon of Symbiosis, especially the connections of plants and animals. She had already, unknown to others, begun work on achieving more plantlike features in her own person...
