2017-05-22: Consume or Refine
- Cutscene: Consume or Refine
- Cast:Kestrel Apricity
- Where: Outskirts of Adlehyde
- Date: 22 May 2017
- Summary: Unanticipated events lead to reflection on the part of a young woman with a purpose that cannot afford to be waylaid.
Adlehyde burns.
The sky had opened and disclosed the end of all that was green and good. Declared, with sonorous finality, the death of a city and countless of its citizens. The brutal, truncated end of many things, not according to any grander plan but as a consequence of timing and misfortune. Line up the bodies of the catastrophe and carve headstones for each of them and many, too many, would read verbatim the same: 'here lies one scourged by chance; in the wrong place, at the wrong time.'
Such a waste.
It was doubtless only her imagination that produced the suspicion of many voices raised in anguish as she watched through a telescope the roof of a boarding house collapse in on itself, sending a phoenix plume of sparks swirling upward into the darkened skies. Those ears of hers were pointed, not preternaturally sensitive...and yet she might have sworn she heard them, carried on some capricious breeze.
Viewed from a distance the city had always suffused the night sky, radiating a dun-yellow smudge of smoke-thickened light well into the wee hours. Port cities never truly sleep. Tonight it was -- in the way of many dying things -- feverish. Too bright. Too hot. Too much movement. Dim reflections of the ravenous blaze played over the illusory field that concealed her from view, light bent and warped around her to mimic the charred hill on which she sat. Anonymous and overlooked, she dutifully penned each evolution of the disaster down in the leather-bound volume resting atop her knees, but it was for the first time in her life a bitter task. Beneath the page on which she detailed Adlehyde's violent unmaking she could almost sense the wasted potential bleeding up into her ink-stained fingers from the sheets beneath. Interviews with the citizens of Adlehyde, most of them, or Drifters drawn there by the lure of the Exhibition. How many of them dead, now? How many explorations cut abruptly short?
It did not, she knew, in the grand view actually matter. She had been made to learn that lesson well. Adlehyde was one city of many and the people of Ignas were plentiful. If it could be thought of as a setback at all -- and she felt, intuitively, that it might actually equally represent an opportunity -- then it was only a setback on the order of weeks. Nothing learned was ever wasted.
But the potential...
"'History' is the present conceptualizing the past. Reviving the past as you speak it is impossible. The present can only ever build a future."
The words of the woman with the indigo head of hair trickle past behind pale eyes as she watches tongues of flame leap upward as though they might lick the traitorous stars. The fae lines of her face, caught in something gentle, tighten appreciatively around the splinter of irony buried there. Monsters out of millennium-old myth had revisited Adlehyde and done to it what they had done to so many other places once before. And yet the woman, Miang, had not been wrong; the Ignas of today was hardly the Ignas of a thousand years ago. It had been reforged on the anvil of those privations. It was a different world the Metal Demons had revealed themselves to menace, and she had no doubt that events would play out differently in the minutiae than they had before.
But what of that aforementioned grand view? Once, humanity had elevated technology to turn the tide of conflict against these very foes, and that technology had ultimately been their undoing -- or so says the history. Already busily in the process of unearthing old secrets to fight a war closer to home, could they really be expected to avoid making the same mistakes?
"That depends on the character of the people doing the conceptualizing, don't you think? Therefore all my talk of interesting people. One wonders what they'll do differently when given the opportunity to pass judgment."
One does wonder, Kestrel thinks, as the rest of the boarding house collapses to join its roof in dissolving into embers, soon to be ash.
One certainly does.