Dinner & A Memory Stone

So we sat down to enjoy a great dinner together as a family, for the first time in over a century.

As we sat down to eat there was small talk, and chatter of a large family sitting down for the first time in what was literally ages. Platters of steaming Alaskan King Salmon and crocks of Alaskan King Crab, platters of Seal Oil were all still taking their place on the table. There were greens that we had picked this spring, Pussy Willow leaves and Fireweed stems. Favorite dishes from other countries, and other nations fill in blank spaces on the table next to whose favorite dish it happens to be. House had done a fantastic job with the tablescape.

The room shifted itself as we all took our places. The table, an old slab of stone, was gray and carved with history collected over all its life. Names, ideas, portions of spells, and pictures that had been etched into the stone by family members over the ages. A circle at its center, where grandmother had once used for the oldest of oldest divination, bone throwing. The circle still had her last set of squirrel and ptarmigan bones burnt in a fire. It wasn't so much a throwing, as a pile of her burnt and discarded tools of her preferred trade. Grandmother loved to meddle with and watch other people's stories as they evolved from childhood into adults, and finally elders. She would say that she was looking for signs of things to come for the villagers and our home but everyone knew that even as wise as she was, as powerful she had been. Grandmother was still a nosy old woman and she was loved for it, for the most part. Each individual ruin and letter put off soft golden and silver lights as if our collective history had become a living light of its own. House had moved us from Stevens study to a solarium, my favorite place to hold dinner parties for beings from the Fey worlds. Old windows were frosted over with hoar frost broken and cracked long stalagmites of ice and snow regulated their way down the broken places from windows to standing highest and inches from the floor alike. Some ice sicles were as thick as a tree trunk others as thin as a willow branch. Great torches lined the walls, iron, rusty, and old by human standards. They had been purchased from an English Elvish family in the last millennium. Iron, normally immune to the effects of magic, had been heated, bent, twisted, and hammered by Fey fire and elvish tools until the torches were in the shapes of trees. Mighty Oaks, Elder, Maple trees growing from the floor in a patchy forest of Iron. The shoulder high woods, with their rusty, bushy leaves were ablaze with warm firelight. As Steven sat down at the table, the last to take his place said. "It is so nice to be home, thank you, House for this meal, for this table you've set." Steven was sitting in his place that had been empty far too long.

The glowing light of the ruins, the warm torches, the sporadic and varied skins that served as placemats and trivets for hot trays of food. The smell of great food and whips of steam filled the solarium.

The ice sicles from the windows started to glow with pale blue light scaring away the shadows left by the torches, countering the harsh orange and yellows of the fire. We could see the low and flat lands of the northern Alaskan tundra, small clumps of bushes growing out of the ground in the patchy quilts of frozen branches, and hills of snow comprising the view outside the solarium. For a projection House was doing an amazing job of giving us the illusion of being back home. I could feel the history in our stony table under my fingers as I filled my plate with stacks of caribou meat and fish and crab legs and my favorite the claws. It had been far too long since I last had fresh Seal Oil and the smell was so strong from the little dipping dish at my place on the table kept warm with essence from the house, that I could practically taste it, I added a couple of dashes of sea salt and I began to eat. Steven looked so happy, so pleased with the family, the food, maybe pleased with himself. In the time it took for House to bring the table and the room into our space, Steven had cleansed himself with essence. He was cleared of mud, dirt, and even smell. He looked fresh-pressed and in a new bright tangerine orange expression.

I can remember when he decided to make that color of expression the council colors of the magic and essence research guild, which also took care of recording the history of the realms of magical beings. Steven thought that it looked astute, educating, and classic so when he started the guild he used his essence to bind that color to the cause, and from then on anyone joining the research and histories guild had the tangerine orange woven into their clothes or added later with essence from the original work. Stevens was a robe-like piece of cloth, draped over him with a large cord that wrapped around his waist twice and tied at the side.

Essence filled the room from all of our collected strength, our power. Each shade of essence blended into the next as we went around the table and whole rainbows of power were almost dripping off the window panes and shelves. New expressions came into being with all of us collected there. Energy, life force, moods, and thoughts mixed with the etching on the great slab of a table, around the room expressions were born without any effort. One small example of our family's great power. Some expressions were small and average, a candle that shed a spectrum of light never costing the wax any life stood in the corner of the room atop a pillar of crystals that sang as the light passed through its facets. A green glass orb the size of a soccer ball floated lazily in the air, it churned with tides and rivers, a current with the force of a great river strained against the inside of the glass. Drips of sweet, fresh river water formed like dew on its surface, and fresh sprouts popped up in tiny clumps. The sprouts were sweet and fresh and a bite satisfied an entire meal's hunger. The drips only stopped forming when the orb was wrapped tight in a bag made from eel skin. A fact we wouldn't learn for a couple of months and the corner the orb floated in was all but a swamp. Other more complex expressions were born that night but out of sight and out of mind. House was kind enough to gather all the bits of clothes, the mirror, and other bobbles that came into being that night. House formed a small cabinet where it stored them all, they became a problem or solution for another day.

Our laughter sounded like a chorus as House changed the daylight to sunset then moonlight in the projection of the frozen north beyond the greenhouse's glass walls.

Finally, the night was growing old, the fire dying down and most of the food was gone. It was time for tales to be told, and truths to be discovered.

One of the expressions every member of our family had with them at all times was a memory stone. We figured out how to create them a long time ago. Unlike most expressions that were formed out of powers and emotions meeting and manifesting objects that had magic abilities when essence was applied to them or had an essence of their own that produces magical effects of their own. Some expressions were made out of specific items that are changed with essence applied to them. A memory stone required quartz and granite stone each serrated over the other about the size of someone's palm. After we used our essence to arrange the energies of the stone, the stone became a memory stone and was carried around with the magic user. It not only collected the memories of the person with the stone in their pouch, it made hollow projections with a candle or light source behind it. We can choose what instances to share from the stones collected memories. I can only imagine how much the stones could hold, each of us had a stone we made within the first hundred years of our life. So I think the stones can hold a lot of information in them. Our stones could even be linked not only across distances but from realm to realm and between the worlds. Steven brought out his stone, holding up his palm and calling it out of his endless pouch with a small pop and blink of light there it was. "We've always watched over the realms as a family, but we never actually got to know any of the families we watched over. Always watching but never a part of it." Steven said as he produced a small witch-light flame and placed it behind his stone on a platter. A ghostly slideshow flickered into being above the stone slab table. "I know we love everyone, I know that we try to show that love to every being we meet but we still keep ourselves at a distance, and for good reason, I think." He said as picture after picture of Elves, Gnomes, Trolls, and humans from all over the world slid past us in the misty light of the memory stones projection.

I had finished eating and was picking at figs and cheese on my plate. I spoke up."We have indeed lived among them and we have loved as much as any immortal heart can love but we have to stay apart from them. You remember what happened the last time someone from our family fell in love with one of the mundane people we watch over?" I asked the full family

Robbie's eyes glazed over for a moment as he remembered the fallout from that love, from that joining. He claimed responsibility for the expression that developed from that relationship. "It was great uncle Budou, he bit his husband's finger off in a fit of rage back in the early days of our lives.''Robbie's voice was small and distant as he spoke. The human we were talking about was mundane, he was kind, gentle, smart, funny, and a healer. As a healer, he wore the robes and colors of the healers guild, the brown and tan fabric complimented the rusty undertone of his brown skin. Even as a human, he was excellent when it came to collecting and preparing herbs and tinctures. Uncle Budou though not immortal was blessed with the ability to use essence as we do. His magic was weaker, it had less kick and fewer applications but it was strong enough for him to help protect our village. It was a small settlement then. Really it was a handful of groups that came together, maybe a few thousand of us in total. Falling in lust was common but falling in love and creating a story together was even rarer. So when Budou had chosen a partner to create a life with, it was cause for celebration for the entire village.

"I remember when they chose to live together when they chose one another over any other, I was there to help them bless their home," Robbie said he had even given a small portion of his essence to their home so that it would always stay a comfortable temperature, cooler in the summer and warm in the winter. It was a small spell and the magic didn't take much but in the inhospitable flat tundra we called home firewood was scary and there were no means of cooling a home so it was not just practical but a valuable gift.

"When Bodou and Ulipaa shared their lives together Ulipaa gained some small amount of ability to collect and direct essence, though that was to be expected. As you all know, whenever one of our family members joins with a mundane human there is a noticeable increase in their ability to use essence, and any offspring are born with fey powers." Robbie reflected on the joining of the two. As he spoke Stevens's memory stone projected our two great uncles' story together, it was their story from Steven's point of view. I remember the two having a very happy life together. Diametrically opposed to one another Bodou and Ulipaa created a balance and harmony that seemed to spread through the village. The stone's blue-white light brought images of captured kisses and small smiles across the fires that lit the village at night. Hands applying herbs and salves, giving tinctures and teas to those that needed them but also the acts of war that uncle committed in the name of protecting the people and family he loved. A club made of wood and bone, enhanced with essence swirling and burning around the club as it makes contact with the back of a Haida warrior. Tlingit and Haida live as separate people, they are both Southern Nation peoples who owe and share much of their genes and culture as much to our land, our culture. Somewhere in the thousands of years spent traveling the many, many tens of thousands of miles that Alaska consists of we lost contact, and with that loss, we lost our relationships with the distant cousins of our people. With that separation between us, wars broke out, and instead of being families connected with a common history, we became competitors for resources. As Robbie ended his telling of the story of Bodou and Ulipaa Robbie finished he brought out an expression from his pouch in the same manner as Steven had. As the memory stone shared its last video-like projection in the mist and vapor it produced. Our great uncle and his love fighting appeared. "It was during the last great war of the clans, North and South villages had divided into factions of the tribes. We could have drawn a clear line where the tribes split. During the fighting, Boduo brought down a great leader. His spear was stuck in the leader's back, stuck deep, essence and blood oozing onto the ground from the wound. Using the magic he had learned to gather and direct, Ulipaa as a healer was on those front lines and hid the body of the Haida war leader. Then behind our backs, he started to heal him. He not only used his power but the powers of our family to heal the Haida. When Bodou found them he was still enraged from battle and now made even angrier by seeing the love of his story healing the greatest threat and enemy Bodou had ever faced. Still heated from battle, uncle moved to pick up the Haida warrior only for Ulipaa to stop him somehow in the moments of discord between them a physical fight broke out. Uncle went to grab at the man laying under a blanket of spell-weaving, his muscles, his veins, his skin all knitting back together as the golden light filtered into his body. Bodou was doing his best to dance around the healer between him and his enemy. Then in a flash of movement and speed, the two were clashing together, each fighting for position to overcome the other, a tug-of-war of powers as it were. We all saw it happening as the projection flickered in front of us. Then Robbie's small voice came from his chair at the table but also from a distance, it came from the place where memory takes us when emotions are involved. "It was like a reflection of the war around us, two people that love one another, two clans that love one another, two lives that came together to create a new story, and two clans that had created a story, a history, and shared lineage both fighting one another. Even healers fought to keep warriors alive and fought to heal those that could only stand by and bear witness to the bloodshed." You could hear the memories in his voice as he spoke. Which only added to the misery we saw before us. "Bodou bit off his love's finger, in a fit of violence-filled rage." Robbie finished as the soft glow stopped in the instance just after the incident. Then Robbie held out his hand and another pop and blink of light, a finger dripping with silver-blue blood. Over two thousand years and it still drips silver-blue blood, blood that can heal almost any wound no matter how damaging, blood that can cure any illness but the blood that it drips can cause fires that will eat anything in its path. It will destroy anything it touches, flesh, wood, ivory, stone, or metal all reduced to ash. Robbie being a leader of the healers guild claimed responsibility for the anomaly of an expression. To date, it's the only expression that was produced by a living being. Some have come from trees, bushes, ivory, and rocks, but never before has a living thing been made into an expression of any kind. Not a bird, a fish, a mouse. No living thing, some scales have been introduced from a dead animal, feathers from birds have transformed but this a finger of a living person. It's the closest to a curse we have in our family. Other magical beings have used remains from living beings but it hasn't ever before or since been made from remains from a living being. "We in the healers guild think that the passion of a warrior, the power of a healer, and the heat of the moment caused two contradictions to fuse and the desire to hurt the enemy and protect the lover caused the finger to become an expression." Robbie having studied the finger so much more than any one of us seven could speak with authority on the subject. Though honestly, it was more or less the same conclusions that other guilds had decided on. Views differ slightly, the warrior guild thinks it's more a weapon, and life and the story guild thinks it's an example of a point in history that is monumental and not to be forgotten which explains its extraordinary creation. The guild of laws and orders thinks it's a matter for everyone to study and should be shared among the masses. Ect, and so on and whatnot. Everyone has an opinion on it, everyone has tried to use it in their own way, to heal, to guide, to start or end wars. It has been used to determine the ruler of Trolls, or Elves. One Fey realm or another has tried to use it to choose a ruler. The finger has a lot of applications that can be applied, just its healing ability alone makes it stronger and more useful than any other expression or spell. The drawback is that those that have been healed by it have also nearly been destroyed by it.

This was the reason we had all silently decided not to fall in love, not in true love. We have all dated and even enjoyed the company of lovers but we have never chosen a being to spend our stories with. Not human, and though we've tried to date beings from the Fey Worlds that never felt right. At this junction in my story, I don't think I could share any of its journey with anyone other than my brothers and sister. Well, and House, of course, a pile of wood, stone, and glass has been my most faithful companion over the millennia. I smiled as Steven's memory stone went into a pattern of lights and fireworks in front of us. A sign that he was done sharing that memory and hadn't found anything else to share with us yet.