Maker of Fire

Imstay King, at the Building Shrine of Giltak after Emily’s Revelation

I found it hard not to call the four other sapients races lesser since Cosm were superior in all the things that mattered: size, strength, craft, culture, and magic. We could feed, clothe, shelter, heal and protect all the other races through our efforts alone. It made sense for the Cosm to be positioned in rulership over the others in order to make provision and protection for them possible. As Tiki told the first High Priestess Mage Uskya haup Foskos in the very first revelation over four thousand years ago, the Cosm half of humanity was made to rule, protect and guide.

The current system of having the other races in service to the Cosm made sense from the perspective of Uskya's revelation, but should service entail what has become enslavement, at least according to the Blessed Emily? Ever since the Mounts War, the system of allowing free flying mounts to negotiate year-long trial contracts as well as multi-year contracts has worked, with tweaks here and there on the terms as we discovered what did or did not work. I think something that is not slavery will work for the flying mounts.

The problem is Emily. What she said to Giltak hit me hard, that after she finished with what the gods wanted from her, she would then "determine whether chattel slavery can be eliminated with or without bloodshed." I think the important kernel to that statement is not whether she can eliminate slavery, but whether she can do it without bloodshed.

Such a frightening statement and she made it in such a cold way, not screaming with passion but made with such calm deliberation as if she has already thought it through many times. Knowing the Blessed Emily, she probably has thought it through many times.

She might be the most dangerous person alive and she was living in my kingdom.

We sat the Blessed Lisaykos down at the Holy Raoleer's table after Giltak's revelation to Emily. Then we questioned her until the seventh bell when Raoleer had dinner served to the five of us. When we were done eating, we questioned her some more.

"Great One, you said you knew Emily wanted to dismantle Coyn servitude," I tackled what was bothering me directly. "How long have you known she thought this way?"

Lisaykos looked profoundly reluctant to even open her mouth.

"Kinswoman Lisaykos," I held my aching head in my hands, "even if I meant harm to that little dangerous Coyn called Emily, I can not touch her. You heard the god this afternoon: she is under their protection. Do I look suicidal to harm the first Coyn revelator chosen by the gods? I have no choice to try to make her the ally of Foskos because accidentally making her my enemy might destroy the realm."

"Oh please, cousin," Lisaykos rolled her eyes and moved the level of address to that of family and friends, now that I had given her an opening to do so. "She is clever and talented, but destructive? Seriously, Imstay. She got upset when Fassex lightly punished the Is'syal residents who insulted her in public. Emily hates violence of all kinds."

"I am serious," I looked at her with all the somberness I could muster. "Do you remember what she told the Convocation the first time you folks questioned her? She said she could make explosives ten times as powerful as the small amount of explosive powder she stored in her cavern home. Please take seriously the possibility of an angered Emily wanting to free enslaved Coyn. She has the means inside her head to destroy whole cities. Just because you are fond of her doesn't mean she isn't a threat."

Lisaykos studied me with a smoldering stare for a long time. Then she sighed, "Emily was thinking of the emancipation of the Coyn from the moment the Queen started to bargain with her, just a rotation after Aylem brought her to the shrine. The Queen had seen instant fire and she had seen Emily's steel knives and tools. She had been inside Emily's workshop and knew about her attempts to make glass. We all know that Aylem has an excellent head for business. She saw Emily as another clever Coyn she could collect and woo with her enlightened treatment of Coyn at the Villa." Lisaykos inhaled and let it out slowly, eyes closed.

"Raoleer, I could use a stiffer drink right now than beer," Lisaykos said, shocking her son.

"Wait," I held up a restraining hand while I dug into a pocket hidden on the inside of my overtunic. I rescued a small tin flask and passed it to the Blessed Lisaykos. "It's my emergency supply of Inkalim brandy."

"Imstay, I can't," she protested. "That's more valuable than crystal."

"You're my current emergency," I smiled, I hoped not insincerely. "Enjoy it."

She raised an eyebrow at me as she uncapped the flask and took a sip, rolling it around on her tongue and swallowing with a sigh, "that is very fine stuff, thank you."

"I can always send you some," I offered.

"Thank you, but no," she smiled naturally for a change, even though it still looked evil. "I like fine liquors like this just a bit too much, which is why I don't keep any. I have a shrine to run and a carefully-nurtured image to maintain."

This was some of the most honest talk I had ever heard out of my far cousin.

"The Queen wanted Emily to make a steel knife and Emily told her that the price of steel was the emancipation of the Coyn of Foskos. That started an argument between the two that almost killed me in my concern for Emily. Emily did not realize how dangerous Aylem's temper could be. Emily was not talking yet so I couldn't hear her side of the argument."

I was appalled, "that defenseless little Coyn argued with Aylem? Did Aylem restrain herself?"

"Yes and no," Lisaykos grimaced at the memory. "I don't know what Emily wrote that set Aylem off because the next thing I knew, Aylem picked Emily up very roughly. The bruises Emily came home on her back and the insides of her thighs were ugly. Aylem slammed Emily onto Asgotl's saddle, wrapped her in her oversized cloak so the girl couldn't use her arms, and flew down to the Crystal Shrine. She strapped Emily into just the thigh straps Emily had crafted for Asgotl's saddle. So Emily spent the trip having to balance on the saddle with no stirrups and no arms, hurting from Aylem's rough handling.

"Aylem did nothing to help her at all during the trip on Asgotl. Then, when they got to the shrine, Tiki appeared and made Emily a revelator. When they returned the next day, I could tell things had changed for Emily. When she first came to the shrine, all she wanted to do was escape back to her home on the other side of the lava plains.

"After Tiki blessed her, Emily's resolve hardened. She still wanted out of Foskos but now she added the desire to destroy Coyn slavery and the ability of our race to abuse the Coyn simply through size and strength." Lisaykos took a moment to appreciate another sip of brandy.

"Aylem lost her chance to woo Emily with that first display of temper aimed at Emily. After that, Emily was much more ambivalent toward the Queen and also even more wary of her. She knew the Queen was dangerous but she didn't realize just how dangerous. She understood that Tiki's revelation was to protect her from Aylem and well as others like you who wanted to enslave her. Does that answer your question, cousin Imstay?"

"Unfortunately, yes," my headache was getting worse. The existence of Emily has shredded everything I once thought about the Coyn. The Blessed Emily may be the most knowledgeable sapient being on the planet and perhaps the most intelligent too. Given I now knew about Coyn achievements at both the shrines of Giltak and Sassoo, I no longer believed that Coyn were just intelligent beasts like smart hunting hounds. I was left with the horrible conclusion that we had enslaved an entire race as smart as ourselves simply because we could.

"The problem now becomes how do we restrain the Blessed Emily so that her resolve for emancipation causes the least bloodshed." I allowed all the worry I felt to show for a change. I had to believe I was among friends since I need all of these people to work with me on this.

I explained my fears: "The knowledge of another world lives inside her mind, a frightening world where people know how to fly without magic and make machines that can make lightning, a world where a small and weak thing like Emily knows how to cook and mix different rocks and dirt together to make whole hillsides explode and create a burning white fire that can't be put out.

"The threat of Emily feels real to me," I admitted. "We can not afford to turn her into an enemy. Aylem Queen needs magic to destroy an army but I suspect Emily could destroy an Army with enough dirt and rocks, and resourcefulness. How much of our magic can be replicated by what resides inside Emily's inscrutable mind? And she has the protection of the gods!"

"I'm not sure I agree with all of that about Emily's potential to be an enemy," Lisaykos said, after another sip of brandy, "but I understand your reasoning."

"I thank the gods daily that she is not the girl with the golden eyes," I remarked, referring to the prophecy of the great breaking.

"The contents of that prophecy are not public," Kamagishi said in very level tones.

"How does the third verse go?" I asked rhetorically. "The girl with the golden eyes will free the winged ones to fly, and arm the tailed ones to rise. The greatest mage she will save to break the charm gems of the slaves, and set the nations aflame, beneath a queen all to tame. Without magic, she will make fire and find once more her heart's desire."

"How did you get the contents of that prophecy?" Kamagishi demanded. It lived in a locked room in the locked vault underneath the Fated Shrine of Galt.

I smiled for the first time in hours, "please, Holy One, I'm not totally incompetent as king. That prophecy might affect the health of the kingdom so of course, I know about it. I'm just saying that it is reassuring that Emily doesn't have golden eyes like yours or we would be looking forward to nothing but war and bloodshed for maybe decades. That makes it my duty to know since the protection of the realm is my job. Does this make you the foretold prophet, I wonder?"

"Of course I'm not the prophet," she frowned at me, not knowing how I knew, "I'm hardly a girl anymore. I'm about to be a grandmother, for love of Galt."

---

Emily, Building Shrine of Giltak

I woke up in my bed in the guest house with Thuorfosi sitting crosslegged on the floor with my guitar, her prell, and a Cosm-scaled guitar.

"You're awake, finally," she smiled at me. "My divine showed up. I'm trying to get it tuned since I just put the strings on it."

"Your divine?" I asked, confused.

"Short for Mugash's divine instrument." She frowned. "These tuning pegs take getting used to. It doesn't help that I discovered you loosened all the stings on yours. I was planning to use yours to tune mine."

"I knew we'd be flying, which means changes in temperature and pressure and probably humidity too, all of which would not be nice to the neck of the instrument if the strings were still tight. Tuning is a quick task so I loosened the strings."

"Show me how you tune it?"

"Get me my housecoat please?" I got out from under the covers, put on my housecoat, and went to use the necessary. I came back and sat on the side of the bed. "Guitar...divine, please."

I tightened the strings and started to hum a little solfege under my breath to locate E. I always sucked at solfege so I was sure it wasn't E that I settled on; regardless, it would be close enough. I sang the note for Thuorfosi. "That's about w...what the bottom string should be, of course, except a few octaves down." I started tuning my bottom string to the E note I had hummed.

"A few octaves?" Thuorfosi raised an eyebrow at me. "Emily, dearest, what is an octave?"

"Arg!" It was a face-palm moment.

"You did it again, Emily."

"Is there a nice hole I can crawl into for a w...while?"

"I'm all out of holes, Emily." She was grinning. "I won't torture you too much today, Grandma, but apparently, while you were chatting with Giltak yesterday, the King, Irhessa, and the three high priestesses heard much of the conversation between you and the god, most of which was incomprehensible, or so I am told. It confirmed what many suspected, that you are someone with memories from somewhere else, a place very different from this world.

"Good fish face, Emily. Lisaykos got cornered yesterday evening about how much she knew. We confirmed it with Asgotl, who Irhessa already suspected."

"The Queen told me not to tell anyone because it might place me in a position of greater danger," I said. I fell backward onto the mattress and stared at the ceiling. "This is awk...w...ward."

"Not really. Anyone who has spent any time with you was already guessing you might be one of the legendary reborn ones. The ancient records do not document any reborn ones in the last 2,500 years, but they did show up in the past before then. There are seven reborn ones recorded in the ancient records kept in the vault at the main Shrine of Galt."

"Did y...you suspect?"

"Well, yes. I knew something was very off about you. I thought you might have one of those weird metabolic conditions so that your physical appearance didn't match your physical age. I didn't guess you had lived another life before this one. I just thought you looked young but were much older."

"Well, crappola."

"Emily, you're what? Fourteen? Maybe fifteen? It's hard to tell because you're so small, but that's because you didn't get enough to eat while growing up. You're getting a woman's figure, but your third set of molars has yet to come in. The problem is that you talk like a mature adult, and you treat other adults as adults. Now that you can talk, you often sound like a teacher. You know how to explain complicated things, and that's not a skill a 14-year-old Coyn who never went to school or a shrine should have. The one thing you never do is act your age, or maybe I should say, the age you appear to be."

"So w...what now?" I asked.

"Teach me how to tune my divine and tell me what an octave is," she smiled.

"What?" I sat up.

"Why should anything change, Emily? Several members of the Convocation and the King and Irhessa already suspected this about you. So now it's been confirmed. That's all. It does nothing to change the existence of this strange Emily phenomenon which arrived on our doorstep a year ago."

I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around what Thuorfosi was saying.

"Oh, and Lisaykos said you're on enforced bed rest for today."

"Oh, joy," I grumped.

"And since you're not going anywhere, you can teach me how to play my divine? Oh, yes, Raoleer wants to know what you need to record the revelation from Giltak."

When Thuorfosi said that, it felt like a dam broke in my mind, and a flood of concepts drowned me and left me gasping for breath. It felt like I was suffocating by what was pouring out and my head exploded with pain. When I managed to open my eyes again, I was flat on my back on the bed with Thuorfosi clasping both sides of my head.

"Emily, say something," she ordered, concern writ large on her face.

I tried to speak but whimpered instead from the sharp pain. What was with these gods and their cursed revelations? Couldn't they manage to pass on knowledge without a side order of intense pain? What good is being a god and making your revelations worse than the worst hangover for the poor recipient like me?

"Emily?"

"W...when y...you said revelation," I managed to squeak, "everything for the r...revelation f...felt like it exploded in my head all at once and n...now it hurts."

"Here," she closed her eyes for a moment and then the pain vanished.

"Oh, that's better. Thank you." The beauty of the revelation spread out in front of me in my mind. "That's so elegant." I was floored by the knowledge that just burst into my head. Giltak didn't just give me the method of using two sliding logarithmic scales to do simple multiplication and division. That gender-confused god gave me the method of adding and subtracting functions in such a way that you could use it with any monotonic function, whether it was logarithms, 1/x, or x3, and apply to a graphical rule. It wasn't just logarithms, which for my whole previous life I thought it was. If you were clever, you could use the theory to create graphical rules for almost every function. It was a complete theory of graphical calculation.

It's simplicity was beautiful. Using the theory of graphical calculation, one can build any set of sliding scales for any two functions f (x) and g (y). So long as the values of x´and x˝ on one scale and values y´ and y˝ on the other scale had the property that f (x˝) – f (x´) = g (y˝) – g (y´), you can build any set of scales you want and they will work to build a slide rule. If you know any three of the four numbers of x', x'', y' and y'', you can use the sliding scales for f(x) and g(y) to find the fourth.

If the fundamental equation of graphical calculation is stated as h (x, y, z) = f-1(f(x) + g (y) – g (z)), then it becomes very easy to build function scales using the log scale as the reference scale of f(x). then any g scale can be built graphically with a compass by simple addition and subtraction of distances. I was floored as to how simple and elegant it really was. Those math freaks in Europe in the seventeenth century were amazing to have figured all this out for the first time.

It was as profound a moment for me as the day when I understood for the first time how taking a limit collapsed into an integral. I started to weep because I knew moments like this happen maybe only once in a lifetime and that some people never experience this incredible feeling of enlightenment at all. It was sad because this moment of epiphany had come and was already gone.

Thuorfosi had moved her hands to my shoulders, "Emily, are you alright? Why are you weeping?" The poor girl: it must be a trial to deal with someone like me who has been relegated to being used as a chess piece in a game between the gods where all the rules are ineffable.

"I'm fine, really," I said, feeling like the world had somehow gotten heavier. "It's just that understanding the revelation for the first time was so beautiful; and the moment of experiencing that transcendent beauty, like all beauty, has now come and gone, never to be encountered again in all its bright unique newness." I wiped away my tears. "It's sad because I'll never pass this w...way again."

She moved my guitar out of the way, sat me up and hugged me. "I'm glad that you're fine, but I don't think I will ever completely understand you."

"You and me both," I said and she laughed.

I've never been one for prayer or anything spiritual, but I thanked Giltak in my thoughts just then, and I heard distinctly a sultry alto say in my ear, "you're welcome Luv."

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