Cleenseau - Session 11.1

In Asineau, Celyn tells El how the Wyrdling gave him his name and how Eirian taught him to care for people born out of season. He offers to teach El what he knows and to lend them his book of herbs while he is away. El answers with their own story. When they describe their childhood in Gowerbourne, Celyn is visibly sympathetic. El continues with their dreams, their departure for Tollen to find Jor, and the enchantment that helped them become themself. Celyn says of Jor’s work, “Such powerful, beautiful work, to enable you be true to yourself.” El then shares the full poem.

El then asks Celyn about something newly awakened in them. They look at him: “And in the last few days, something new has awoken in me that I do not understand. A lightning storm dancing in my pelvis, to quote Jor. A tingle in my skin, a wildness in my heart. Is this what the Wyrdling feels like, when you do their magic?”

Celyn has to think about this for a bit. “I would not say the magic comes in a single sensation, a single emotion, though… particular things will have similar flavors. Light comes with hope, for me. When I call upon the power that let me settle the room for the meeting, that has lightning under it, tingling. A blessing of protection might shimmer like a rainbow.”

He has a long pause here. “Healing … healing miracles depend on the person, more than the magic, I’ve found. The first person I healed was my cousin, who’d been kicked by an ox. After I came back from learning from Eirian. That was a wild, savage feeling: he was stupid but I was not going to let him die, I wrestled the undertow for him. For people I have healed after battles, people I didn’t really know, I give the touch of hope, of pleasant dreams. It’s … changeable. Individual.”

“For me”, El says, “the dreams are comfortable, if strange. I am always in them, and I can walk and see and inspect. I knew to stop here when I walked the village in my dreams each night, cold. lost, but always finding my way to a hearth in Asineau. By that night, when the zombies came. It was different from my dreams, my beloved and understood dreams…”

They close their eyes, and have a look of part terror, part awe. “A burning came over me, an intensity like lightning, starting in my toes and burning its way to my mouth. It felt like chaos, like a whirlwind, a thunderstorm, like something outside myself I could barely contain. It came out of my mouth and hands and the zombies fled from that power. And Ari, he was outside, but the whirlwind from my mouth, it engulfed him, and the zombies, they could not touch him.”

“It was not comfortable, that feeling. I am not sure. Do I embrace it? It scared me, the chaos burning through me. But I felt so strong…”

Celyn considers that for a long while, drumming his fingers on his leg in complex rhythms. “The miracle of protection you were given is larger than any miracle I have brought through. I imagine it must … burn.” It’s clear that he’s sure this isn’t quite the right word but he doesn’t know what the right word is, so he’s just echoing El’s word. “I have brought a blessing of protection, but it is small and weak - one person, not an entire temple, and only lasting so long as that person does not bring violence or the strength of the small miracle fades.” Another pause, a laugh, and, “Though the temple grounds are unlikely to offer violence, I suppose, regardless of what the people going in and out do.”

He looks up, then away; he never meets people’s eyes more than fleetingly after all. “I have never had such a great miracle pass through me as yours. I expect I will not, unless fate brings need to me and the dice align, but I do not know. I can only hope that the strength I have learned from taking the twisting road would be enough to hold it as well as you did, if such a fate comes to me someday.”

His voice turns philosophical. “Small miracles - miracles that can be held by one person more easily, without the overwhelming power of the gale, overturning all things - can still be immense, can still turn someone’s fate. I laid hands on a man whose leg was going to rot and gave him back his hope, on a woman whose shoulderblade had been shattered so she could not hold her weapon, and gave her back her ferocity. These are smaller things than protecting the temple, perhaps, but to that man, to that woman, they are also everything. But I do not know what Robin knows, the cleansing of disease from the body, the miracle that the Wanderer has given him to summon, which he has used to try to heal Eleanor. That miracle holds too much for me to reach, now. Perhaps when I am wiser….”

El looks thoughtful at this, and lets it sit between you, comfortably. They don’t seem inclined to continue talking about magic and miracles, and after a moment, but something about the idea of small miracles seems to have caught their imagination.

“A small miracle, of a dream perhaps, that would be something to learn.” they say, before asking: “It is cold this afternoon. Would you like tea?” and turning the conversation to more mundane topics.