The Weight of Legacy

To Malwine's surprise, Mystery-Beryl didn't get yelled at on the spot. Instead, she got what looked suspiciously like a walk of shame, all the way back to the more bustling part of the settlement. From people's expressions as they walked, it seemed Mystery-Beryl and Aixez were at least recognizable, and more than a couple snickering old ladies seemed thrilled by this development.

The two women sat down around an unlit firepit, some distance away from the nearby buildings. No one else approached, but the people staring out the windows weren't being subtle in the slightest.

Aixez leaned forward on the wooden chair, eyes closed as she ran her hands through her hair, almost scratching at her own scalp in palpable frustration. "Of all people to have disagreements with, must you truly act like this towards one we can't afford to push away?"

"You give him too much leeway," Mystery-Beryl scoffed, but hesitance crossed her features. She kept an eye on Aixez as she continued. "Everyone praises what little he's done, but time and time again, he's nowhere to be seen when there's actual hostilities to handle. If you ask me, he doesn't do enough."

"Is anyone?"

Mystery-Beryl blinked. "Pardon?"

As Aixez straightened, she met the other woman's gaze with a scowl. "Is anyone asking you that?"

"No?"

"Then why are you acting like your thoughts on his actions matter?" Aixez hissed the question out. "You were to go to him and inform him of what happened—something you not only failed at, but somehow managed to turn into an argument everyone within a mile and a half is aware of by now."

"Oh, please, we both know I'm not the only one who feels this way," Mystery-Beryl shot back, though there was a stutter to her words. While her defiance remained, the confidence in her tone seemed to diminish by the second. "It's like cheering someone on for hosting a potluck while they let people starve on the streets."

"Beryl, we hardly have any way to bargain with the Banate on our own. He isn't under any obligation to do what he's done, and insisting otherwise might push him away and leave us with nothing."

"No, that's precisely the point! If we insist on believing he's the only way for us to keep the peace, then we have to acknowledge that he has to do this. The ability to do something like this comes with the responsibility to do it, when lives are on the line—either he's being honest about wanting to help us or he isn't."

Aixez shot her a glare, not immediately responding.

Malwine watched on, still detached from the scene, all the while getting an uneasy feeling about it. She wasn't particularly fond of the idea of drawing too many conclusions here, when her information was so limited, and Mystery-Beryl's answers here would have had her disliking the woman even if her general attitude hadn't done the job already.

Despite her inability to fully grasp the situation even now, at least one thing had become clear, and Malwine wished she had someone to be smug about it towards.

So I was right. They can be bargained with. It had seemed inevitable to her, for all she got the impression that every source she found about the fell acted as if it just wasn't possible. And that was what this was about—she was sure of it.

Though basic in his explanation, Veit had mentioned the fell had both Royal and Banate Courts. The rules of each were unknown to outsiders, but it was generally accepted that they were different. Between the topic of a Banate and Seolfer's mention of {Ore}, Malwine was pretty sure they were speaking of the fell.

That smith had some way to get the fell to agree to let people be—this was precisely the type of thing Malwine needed to learn more of, yet all she got was a front-row seat to Mystery-Beryl's grilling. Aixez was her superior in some way, that much seemed clear to Malwine, but neither had addressed just what their organization was about.

I want to think they might have been specifically all about shielding people from the fell, because that'd be awfully convenient to me, but it's probably not that. Even trying to mentally review everything she'd overheard so far, Malwine couldn't quite put much together. Everyone involved approached these conversations with the assumption that the others could understand with the bare minimum context—and that was quite inconvenient to the eight-year-old from the future that was eavesdropping on the magical equivalent of the event's replay.

It didn't help that Mystery-Beryl must have had one of the thickest skulls out there, as no matter how Aixez phrased her complaints, the woman still tried to insist she was in the right. It had to be something beyond stubbornness at this point—she seemed to genuinely believe that the smith not helping them with every single issue their people had with this Banate was worse than if he'd never helped them to all.

Malwine wanted to pat Aixez's back. With the headache Mystery-Beryl was giving her, she couldn't imagine how the woman actually arguing with her must have felt. Five more minutes passed with the repetitive back-and-forth, and Malwine started to tune it out.

It's strange to think this happened in the past. She felt silly for just reiterating the description of her new Trait, in a sense, but this felt like interacting with the past in a way her trials never did, despite how she could change nothing here. Maybe because she could change nothing here.

Trials had been simulations, drawn from memory but ultimately malleable. They were scenarios she was supposed to work within. Outright seeing a past event felt far more solemn than that, even when the event in question was this wince-inducing. No matter how much she disagreed with how things played out, or how she disliked Mystery-Beryl, all she could do was watch.

Wanting to do anything other than listen to the unending argument, Malwine ventured to the surrounding bushes. As with trials, she suspected only a limited area must have been rendered, but she wasn't held back from exploring. If she didn't focus, she'd slip back to where Mystery-Beryl was, being nearly yanked towards her. After the second time this happened, she noticed that while her surroundings were consistently clear, the more distant areas she was pulled from looked hazier once she was back by the firepit.

It wasn't the kind of difference that could be excused by distance. Is it only really caring to give detail to the area I'm at?

That sparked a fresh wave of curiosity in Malwine, and she jumped at the chance to test it out, immediately heading for the path. It felt like trying to carry a heavy weight while she walked, despite her current lack of a form. The connection between herself and Mystery-Beryl remained taut, but it seemed incapable of actually dragging her back if she remained intent on moving.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I really hope I'm not missing something important by doing this. The Trait was clear enough in how it showed her random events—had it been meant to target pivotal moments like [Imitation Beyond Filiality] had, she probably wouldn't have risked it, considering these were unlikely to be repeatable. She was banking on the chance that she'd ended up finding proof that the fell could be bargained with purely by chance, and that sticking around could very well just leave her having to listen to an argument for who knew how long.

Back at be restaurant, she'd noticed how the chatter remained a background event for her, and the same was true for passersby as she wandered. Some were talking, while others carried wicker baskets and went on their merry way. They just… existed. They were going about their lives, minding their own business—well, aside from the nosy ones.

But Malwine had to put some effort into it if she wanted to notice any of that. She could see their faces only if she forced herself to. Otherwise, they were all blurs. A curious fact she hadn't initially noticed was that they looked closer to the widow than to Grēdôcavans. Their skintones and hair colors varied in a way that would have made Margaret Smith weep. It might have been her bias pushing her towards such a theory—the widow was a part of her, after all—but Malwine wondered if this was their world's equivalent of an ambiguously Latin American place, in the same sense she thought the cities she'd seen beneath the waves looked vaguely German. An unfortunate amount of the logic behind both those impressions was based purely off vibes, but they just had this anachronistic yet 17th-to-18th alternate history feel to them.

Yoyo would be laughing so hard if he heard that. Despite her best efforts and her considerable knowledge, the widow's attempts at describing Xianxia back in her past life had not been the most eloquent. Her knowledge about matters beyond her expertise was broad but shallow—she'd just had a lot of practice at pretending it wasn't.

The inevitable thought that followed all that was curiosity and sorrow in equal measure. How was Yoyo doing? Malwine hadn't thought of him in a long time by now. Her grandson. The widow's grandson.

As with most topics relating the widow's life, Malwine had grown more and more conflicted about that as she aged. When she'd first woken up, it'd been easy to see herself as the widow, simply someplace new. But that wasn't a perspective that had endured the test of time—in an ideal world, she'd never have to answer the question of whether she believed they were truly the same person at this point.

Deftly averting an existential crisis, Malwine exhaled in relief—only to find there was another consequence of her wandering thoughts that she had very much failed to avoid.

Snapping back to the area around the firepit, she held back a groan as she beheld a weeping Mystery-Beryl.

"What do you know about loss?"

"You— See! This is precisely your problem. Everything has to be a competition about who's had the worst time, and you cannot possibly lose. Everyone has to be personally affected by the source of your woes. You couldn't save one person so now everyone has to share your guilt if they don't somehow save millions."

Okay, I might have missed something.

"So what am I to do? Are you honestly telling me," Mystery-Beryl paused to take a deep breath between sobs, and the matter of whether she was being genuine remained as much of a mystery as her specific identity, "that I should just sit by and do nothing while I watch you make the same mistakes I did?"

I definitely missed something.

"No," Aixez said with a dry tone. "We aren't you. We are not going to make the same mistakes that you did."

Holy fuck, that's—

Mystery-Beryl's response seemed to catch in her throat as she devolved into a blabbering mess, nothing coherent coming out of her mouth. It seemed the other woman had finally managed to stump her, at least enough for the argument to lose steam.

This did mean Malwine only caught that tail end of it. Oh, who am I kidding? She was curious out of nosyness, but there'd probably have been next to nothing else of use for her to learn if she'd stuck around—or at least she wanted to tell herself that, to remain sure that her decision to go experiment with the range of her new ability had been the right one.

She almost did that again, already starting to move away when everything grew marginally blurrier. Unlike with her trials, she became aware that the scene would unravel before it actually happened, making the transition far less jarring. Instead of being booted off a scenario, this scene's dissolution felt no different than refocusing on reality after having spent some time daydreaming.

Malwine blinked, sighing. For once, she hadn't exited the product of her Trait in anger, even if the scene had barely qualified as informational. She didn't even know who Seolfer or Aixez were—let alone what her exact connection to Mystery-Beryl was. An ancestor, certainly, but nothing seemed to point one way or the other with regards to whether she might be OBeryl or yet another namesake of her mother. She hadn't even found out where this had taken place.

I guess I do have an idea. A very vague idea. It'd been someplace close enough to an entrance to the world beneath the waves for the matter to come up, and a Banate Court for {Ore} was nearby. Something told her there couldn't be many places matching that description, but other factors could have played a part—for one, they were supposed to be almost entirely cut off from the surface in the present.

The other issue was… well, despite the bright outlook provided by finding out Seolfer had a way to come to an agreement with the fell, she suspected their nature still meant any specific Court would be difficult to locate, even if only because of how humans perceived them. And not without reason.

She'd been too preoccupied with feeling validated to really pay attention to how neither had really contradicted Mystery-Beryl on the note that these children with {Ore} that some merchant hired might find themselves in harm's way if unshielded from the fell, but that had caught up to her now. Mystery-Beryl had honestly still been in the wrong to somehow decide it was this one dude's responsibility to stop this, but her worries were probably valid.

I guess two things can be true at once. Not to mention her problem with Mystery-Beryl had started because of how the woman acted, even if her later comments made Malwine decide her initial impression had been correct. Maybe the woman was that dramatic in earnest.

Malwine shook her head. While she did try to take notes now, she wasn't sure if much else would come from analyzing the event she'd gotten from her first use of [Regard Aforetime]. It'd been slightly enlightening, but in an incidental way. At most, she found herself curious about the surface, but exploring this world was one of those things that felt like a matter of 'eventually' when Immortality was on the table, so she'd probably get answers on that sooner or later.

While the Trait no longer gave her rewards, it could also be said she hadn't left that scene emptyhanded, and not just because of the crumbs of information she'd gotten. Her efforts had netted her a single Skill level.

It'd taken her a moment to theorize just how that'd happened—sure, pushing against the soft bounds of the scene to explore beyond bad been somewhat straining, but it was nothing compared to how she'd gotten herself most of [Mental Defense]'s levels. For a Skill that almost only ever leveled for bad reasons, that'd been unexpected—concerning, even. Her newly Forged Trait was innocuous as far as she could tell, so just why had that counted?

The only thing she could think of was that maybe Resilience played a part. As that book had said, Resilience was the defense of the <Mind>, and if she had to guess which attribute would have been used when she forced her way through the outskirts of the scene, it had to be that.

She'd have to look into it later—another thing for the list!—but the Trait would now lay dormant for a year.

And there were so many to-do's standing between her and the passage of time right now.