919–920, 9th Era
Endergaln
Destiny was something they thought about often that year.
It was not a concept she’d ever put much thought or faith into previously. The creed of the Hunt, Harvest and Torch rarely touched upon it, and while many of those she’d grown up with were a superstitious lot, that perforce came with the idea that the rites they enacted to ward off bad luck could have an effect—which obviously couldn’t be the case if destiny was a thing.
Of course, the plays and stories liked to talk about it, usually in the ways trying to defy destiny would go horribly wrong for the would-be defiants. Witness the tale of King Aedipos, for instance, or the fate-crossed lovers Roselia and Jewel. She’d overheard Reis once say, when debating with Porik whether to include The General’s Daughter for the next season, that it was funny how “fate” and “destiny” usually translated to “you get what you were born into and don’t you dare try for more.” She hadn’t understood it at the time, of course, but the bitterness and the way he’d laughed immediately after, trying—it seemed to her even then—to hide that he had meant it seriously, had sealed it in her brain. She remembered it later when Arjuvh, deep in his cups in a way he rarely ever got, growled about Fate playing a cruel joke, giving him dreams of flying only to consign him to a nothing backwater shooting one pawn or another. But beyond those passing moments, she hadn’t thought much of it.
At the time, she hadn’t thought deeply about what Sylas Remnant had revealed to her, either, except for the implications of what it had meant for her mother and the resources that it might allow them to draw upon. There had just been too much else going on to leave room to consider her paternity, a subject she’d never cared much about before—it had always just been her and her mum, and then just her. Later, she’d thought once, if we survive, and then Remnant—the only one with any real answers—hadn’t.
Change, and loss.
Between everything else going on, it wasn’t until the quiet hours in the Northgate Observatory, fruitlessly struggling to pierce the Veil around the Garden from afar, that she’d stopped to review and reflect on all that Sylas Remnant had said about Adelard Sylas.
(When Sav then realized that it was technically their father that had wrought the primary architecture of Vanja’s suffering, and Sav had tried to kill her for the way in which she dealt with it, they stopped, stared unseeing at the wall for a solid quarter-candle, then turned themself into an owl for as long as the Stuff would let them.)
What had made a man fight alongside an aasimar, then hunt down and ruthlessly exploit all those connected to magic? What did it mean that Sav, all unwittingly, would end up joining some of the descendants of those her father had accompanied, however temporarily? What were the chances? In a world of pure randomness, larger than even they could compute.
And if it weren’t random?
If it was fate—what did that mean for their own choices, their actions? Had they ever made a free decision of their own?
In the new world, Destiny pressed ever-firmer prints in her thoughts as she followed that urgent Pull, with each familiar face she found, with each coincidence that occurred. How was it possible that she had ended up contacting the boy who became responsible for the fragmentation of reality? That she would meet with childhood friends of that boy? That she might reunite with some of the few she’d known from the world before who’d meant anything to her?
Their growing conviction that something was setting their paths became shaken on closer conversations with Peach and Salinger on the realities they had experienced, with Ashen and Hark’ul on the conditions of their own lives. How could Fate be singular, in the face of those realities witnessed first-hand? If indeed it existed, it must fork and splinter many times, in order to lead to wildly different and wildly similar worlds.
So perhaps what was pulling them all together was less a predestined path, and more like… gravity. Given certain conditions, things would roll one way; change those conditions, and those things might act another way. Certain people—and fates—might come together again and again, their preconditions more likely to occur than others, just as an apple was more likely to fall directly to the ground than a feather. Every action taken, every decision made could well be guided by it, but to act against it might also be possible, with sufficient counter-force.
If time was simply a face of the Weave (or Rhythm, as Salinger would call it), perhaps this idea of destiny was an expression of Craft, as fundamental but less-obvious a force as Life or Death.
A large part of them found comfort in that thought, that it might simply be another force of connection, acting along different vectors. The wary part disliked the impulse to agree with a simple explanation that aligned so tidily with their previous theories. But with none of it either falsifiable or verifiable, all of it could only exist as maundering, filling their mind and their notebooks in late hours.
Episode navigation
Previous
Previous:
Waiting for the Shoe to DropNext
Next:
A Point Lost in Time
Back to: