Seventh day of the Sixth Umbral Moon, Year five of the Seventh Umbral Era
"Words cannot describe my contempt towards the Monetarists at this point. The way t"
The azure-haired girl stops her writing, quill quivering in her trembling hand as her knuckles run white and threaten to snap the thing in two. With a low, rumbling groan, she tears the page from her leather-bound note and sets it ablaze against the dancing flame of a lone candle perched neatly upon the corner of her desk. She watches the parchment be consumed by the fires of cleansing destruction before tossing the last scrap she could hold aside and letting the blaze finish the job.
"Nobody can know. There can be no evidence. Just myself...and my thoughts." She leans over her desk and cradles her forehead in her palms.
How had everything gone so wrong so quickly? Not even a moon ago, Aldyet was on her way to becoming a fully-fledged Sultansworn. She would have graduated with her peers and joined the ranks of her comrades...her family. Now it seems like that dream grows further and further from reality with each passing bell. That there is nothing to do about Jameson's wretched hold on the people she cares for most in this world.
No. There is something.
Gharen Wolfsong. Ala Mhigan, resistance fighter, terrorist. They want him. Why? To root out other members of the resistance? A man with a reputation such as his doesn't seem to be the kind of man to so easily sell out his brothers- and sisters-in-arms. The Ala Mhigans are a hearty, stubborn bunch. Even the less-violent types are given a wide berth by Thanalanian law enforcement. To think Roen would be related to such a man, it defies belief.
Roen...a Garlean, just like herself. A kindred spirit in this unforgiving city. She is rightly troubled by all this, insistent on telling Aldyet to stop her incessant prodding, but Ald is too far in to turn back now.
She stands from her chair and crosses her dimly-lit room towards the door, reaching for the hand and freezing dead in her tracks. She turns about to return to her desk and before long she is pacing about the room, biting her nail with anxious thought after anxious thought.
Roen is a Garlean...Wolfsong is Ala Mhigan...that...doesn't make sense. What is going on here? What isn't Natalie telling me?
Natalie. Her ally, her mentor, her Jali, her family, and the one person who knows everything and refuses to explain regardless of what Aldyet has proven she can do on her own.
Why does everything have to be a godsdamned secret with her? If she doesn't trust me, she'd only have to say it and that would be that.
She's not the only one who knows more than they let on...
Osric. What's his stake in all this? Something about that woman, Rema, the vials of "antidote," C'kayah's own vial, the man who "cannot be killed" because of some bizarre regenerative property. There's too many pieces on the table, pieces of a larger, perhaps even unrelated puzzle. For now, all the girl can do is focus on the task at hand.
Capture Gharen Wolfsong without Roen knowing her involvement.
A daunting task. Aldyet sits upon her bed, sighing heavily while she falls back and stares up at the ceiling. "It's just a mess...a massive, ridiculous mess...I should've stayed with my weaver training..."
Aldyet rises from her bed to sit upon it and look around her empty room with an absentminded stare. She rises to her feet and walks over to a small dresser and leans against it, pondering. She continues to meander about the room, thinking, biting her thumb nail, glancing about at nothing, sitting on, beside, and against the meager furnishings. She gows about like this for the better half of a bul, until, as she is toying with a strand of her deep blue hair, her heart skips a beat and a shuddered gasp escapes her lips.
"The core...?"
