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Cleosepha was- "Go edit the equipment section or something. I can tell my own backstory."
"I come from a place that we just called the City, or the Shining City, but it's officially the Greater Estual Prefecture, and it's made of a lot of little cities so close together that only bureaucrats can tell where one ends and the other begins. Only child, one and a half loving parents, and now I know mom was just trying to protect me. That's why I never heard much music growing up. It was foolish; she'd have been better off getting me to hate it somehow. I actually was transferred schools because participation in choir or ensemble was mandatory at the first. But eventually I started playing. The flute was best. And things changed for me. I didn't consciously realize it for a while, but I could control people with the song. I made everybody around me downright miserable when I was learning to play. But I didn't get what was going on, right? I did, I admit, think of music as something frivolous. So I studied. I was going to design airplanes. I was actually on a test flight when I arrived. We saw the buildings shift, and shrink away, becoming a new city. And I met this girl, woman, idea, I don't know, Kwenenerania, who helped me get the hang of this weird place. One of the best people I've met in any place, in any world. She was showing off some of the things she could do when she told me something about myself. I went back and talked to my cousin Ollie and confronted my mother, and, well
"I'll just let Alkania tell this part, actually. She likes the story."
"It was way back, let's see...dad's grandmother was a true fae, and it was her grandfather who first broke through to the lights, and I think it was 712 years before, exactly, that it began, so... it was twenty one generations back. We lived on the seventh world, which was well and truly filled with humans by then. Their technology was crude, but even the coldest places weren't beyond their reach, every island had been found by endless ships. Most went back to the faen or the void between the worlds, but Vulen led us into the cities. He made us believe in progress, in a great story that would connect all the world. We had grown very skilled in glamours, and used less and less the grammars, except the ones of feeling. We learned to be like humans, and we kept them safe from their own passions."
"Our cousins came back from outside the seventh world. They saw us as no different from humans by then, and they still remembered being forced out of their space. Their grammars were still complex and sharp. It was a very short war."
"That wasn't the fall, even. Most of the earthly fae were killed, but some of us were taken with them as slaves or trophies. Even as strong and strange as they were, they couldn't take a world from humanity. They went back, and we went with them. But before that, there was a struggle, right? Anyone who stood up as an earthly fae was found and killed, and those who weren't were with the monsters. Even the few who weren't slaves fought with them, out of desperation. We stopped being shepherds of mortals, and became predators. The first time we stripped all the heart from someone and left them an empty shell, they call our fall. They being melodramatic people like Ollie, but the term has a catchy weight to it."
"Ollie's my second cousin. He taught me my backstory all our history. Anyway, his name was Namu, this first one of us, and he was a great believer in Vulen's dream. He worked with Vincent, an inventor of machines and tools; they were trying to make a flying machine. But he paused that to work on more practical things. Some means of finding us through our glamours. Namu tried to distract his friend, and then when words did not work, simply to take his motivation, but when it was gone there was nothing left of Vincent at all."
"His work wasn't even needed. Our masters, as I said, lost. That time was unintentional, but when we learned what we could do, and it was only us, our enslavers were too distant from humanity, it didn't stay that way. In the future, when they came down to the worlds, we would be used to track and hunt certain humans for them. But we didn't have much chance to escape. Dealing with people was our skill, and navigating the void between the ten worlds was our masters' close secret. But then, my great great great grandmother, Kreon, she was part of the clan that escaped capture in the war, she stole the sun, and all the ten worlds were dark. The only thing that could be found was the lights of the cities on the seventh world. Without the rainbow sunlight blocking the way, we were able to escape and find our way there. Humans had forgotten, which they do so easily, and there were not many of us to hide. All of them vanished within the crowds of the shining city without being a noticeable fraction. Things had changed faster and faster. We like to think we set the humans on the path to changing so quickly, but, who can say? Metal and salt were everywhere. To even stay alive in such a poisonous place, we needed human thought. Not to kill them; that we just did because, well, they were merely humans. You know, it was a rite of passage once. You weren't grown until you'd broken a mortal mind beyond recovery. But anyway, once upon a time we only took their feelings to protect them; now we needed their feelings to protect us."
"I didn't know all the worst of it, but even the Shining City is not a good place. Oh, and they got the sun back eventually, don't worry."
"Alkania's my daughter, half the reason I stay here and the only reason, I think, that I got myself back together. I'm her father, actually, another incident with the weird almost magical technology you can find here, by my beloved Zophiel. I...no, anyway, I wasn't in the best state after his departure (to no place I could follow), but after I got back here, after all of the rescue and the machines, the less I say about the better, honestly. I got a job teaching music, working for this elven lady who was frankly a little bit mad. This was about the lime Alkania was away at this school called PACK, which seemed very solidly educational. A little after that school's stay was over, I joined this new, well, actually it's old, organization called ARCANUS, where I got put in charge of research and new kinds of magic."
"Anyway that's thew historical part. I'm leaving out all the adventure here, like the spiders and the sunfish and the concerts and the demons, but really, those each deserve their own story, so they don't go here."
Let me pull away this cover of shame and trepidation. I have taken the joys of the elements for myself, I have abandoned my mother's hateful humanity, I can not hide this. I was in the shore-cave for a very short time, and at the tower in Icehome far longer than I had implied. A little bit mad, I described them. Which was true. A lady, I described them. More or less true, though designs of the flesh were their plaything. Mad, great, terrible. A fourth love of mine, though I was little more than a tool in their hand. My past imprint of the nano-machines made me an unusual one though, twice taken, besides teaching.
It become a pattern, that those I care for depart for their old homes. I feel no such call; I can't understand what draws them back. It's true, I almost lost a friend in Zophiel by returning to the Shining City, but it was a brief stay, and I was called by Olliver, not by the place. My memories would prefer to fly away. Perhaps that's all the difference there is.
Icehome has changed since she left. Great and terrible still, but dark, assured and ruthless. Perhaps one day I will return, but for now I have the sky and the Stormguard.