Okay. I’m getting caught up again a bit. I’m on Episode 30: Here In The Dark. And I’m just.
Vaelus’ choice. Vaelus’ choice and the way it reverberates, thematically, through this whole tangle of things between her, Thaisha, Hal, Hannan, Vokjan, Azune, Occtis, the Shapers, the orcs, the elves …
Okay. I’m gonna talk about this for a second.
Brennan: Azune, you see the terrible choice before Vaelus, as the power of the stone is rippling out before her. You hear the voice of a beast older than time say: Remember. You see the veil that Vaelus is wearing being taken off her sister’s body. You see her family in the underworld. But you also see all of the spirits of Vokjan’s revolution that need this thing to anchor them. It can’t do both.
Azune: What do you want? What do you want, what do you dream? What do you hope? A year from now, 10 years from now, what do you wish? What do you wish?
Vaelus: I wish to be with my family. But. But I don’t think I can live the rest of my days knowing that I let everybody else suffer.
What she did in this moment. What she chose to do.
The Stone of Nightsong, in the light of the ritual at the theatre, was the hope for the dead elves. It was the hope of something like Kother’ai happening for the elven afterlife as well, a salvation for those they have lost. And the elves are barren. They cannot have children. The dead are their only … Someday soon, the dead is all there will be of the elves. The hope for the dead is, in some very real, very terrible ways, if nothing else can be changed, the only hope for their people.
And Vaelus just sacrificed it.
And then. On the personal level as well. For herself.
Vaelus: All I have wanted was to get my family to a better place. That is all I’ve wanted. In this moment, there are so many people who have that want as well, and I can’t deny them that.
The orcs, beneath the Shapers, were the people sacrificed for everyone else. The only ones without a reward. The ones so many people resent, for destroying the relative safety so many enjoyed under the Shapers for this new and terrifying world with so many problems.
Vokjan and his people sacrificed everything they had, knowing that if they failed they would know an eternity of suffering as a result, but trying anyway, because they would know an eternity of suffering anyway. There was never going to be a reward either way. But Vaelus …
Her reward was right there. She could hear her family in the underworld. She knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she could reach out, gather them, sacrificing only her own life in the process, and go to be with them in eternal peace. Paradise, for her and those she loved. She could join them in a beautiful death, have back everything she’s lost.
And all she would have to do is sell the orcish people once again. Abandon them back to the cage of their afterlife, to the world as the Shapers had made it, the order of things they had created, and take her reward in her Shapers afterlife, using the Stone of Nightsong as its creator had intended.
She could have had her family. And all she had to do was sell …
Everything she has learned. From Thaisha, from Hannan. From being out in this world, from seeing it as it is and not as Sylandri, or her order, or her grief have portrayed it. Vaelus …
She gave up her chance. Her family. Her ability to save them. She gave up the certainty of the world as it once was. She tried to have it all, yes, she tried to save the orcs and her family, because you do, of course you do, you have to try, but when push came to shove, when her gambit failed, when she had everything to lose …
She sacrificed the certainty … for the hope. She gave up her own happy ending, for the sake of everyone else.
And it had … It had consequences. Occtis. She didn’t even think. She almost destroyed him in a single instant, and didn’t even think of it, not under the weight of all the other souls quite literally in her hands in that moment. But she almost killed him. Or … worse than killed him? Given that his soul was unravelled and it seemed like the Stone was the only thing holding it together, who knows what its destruction might have done to him. She almost did something unthinkably terrible and unthinkably permanent to someone she calls a friend, someone who gave her hope, someone who helped show her that there was more to this world than the grief she had drowned herself in.
But that’s … That’s the way of it? Choices of this scale, this consequence. There are always consequences you can’t foresee. Even with the best will in the world, the best intentions in the world, choices of this magnitude always ripple, and people are always hurt. The Lloys, the Rungjani, they felt that when their freedom ripped the world apart. Innocents suffered, because they do. They always do. You have to make a choice. And then you have to bear the consequences.
It's such a … Such a tangled thing. The things she sacrificed, both her own and other people’s. Her family, her chance. The good death she’s been subconsciously seeking. The Stone as an anchor for the lost elves of the afterlife. Nearly Occtis’ life. Selfless and selfish all in one. And the things she sacrificed them for. A people no one else has ever helped. Not until it was forced from them for survival’s sake, not until the war was already joined. Vaelus had none of that demand. No one could have made her do anything in that moment. The choice was hers. Her family was right there.
But so was the hope. That it doesn’t have to be ‘either or’. Even if this choice had to be, even if her hope for more failed, even if she had to choose in this instant, the sheer fact of this ritual, Kother’ai, what they have done …
There’s hope. That the world does not have to be as the Shapers have made it. That there are more things, other things, other paths, and that we can make those paths. With just a little help. She sacrificed this chance, but she also …
Hannan, holding her to him and kissing her cheek, struggling to speak: You have done something so selfless. And I promise you this. The victory you won for this city, these people, today … I understand that you missed the certainty of what you wished to do for your family. I join your fight, that the home you have bought for them, we will buy for yours. We will see it done. And it will be done the longer and harder way, and I relish that journey with you.
We can do it the longer and harder way. It isn’t easy, it isn’t sure, it isn’t certain, but it’s not impossible, either. What this place, this city, these people have showed her, promised her, is that it doesn’t have to be certain to be worth fighting for. It doesn’t have to be easy to be worth fighting for. It can be hard, and terrible, and horrible. But, just maybe, it can also be done.
We can fight. We don’t have to lie down and die. We don’t have to obey in order to be kept safe. We can make the hard choice, and we can fight. Not only for ourselves, but for those who have been abandoned.
Azune. That of everyone who could have been with her in this moment. Not Thaisha, not Occtis. Not anyone she knew. Just Hannan, who has guided her through so many terrible things, and Azune. Someone she doesn’t even know. But who does …
The veil of a dead sister. The memory of the dead. A life defined by the lost, by the yearning to regain those we have lost.
Azune, who more than almost anyone else would understand the true horror of her choice. Her sacrifice. Azune, who in this moment … understands why she has to make it anyway.
And who, for the first time, when he reaches out his hand into this magic and bids it remember, is NOT reaching for the dead, the memory of the dead, the echoes of the Shapers War and the Falconers Rebellion, Thjazi Fang, his endless list of names, but is reaching out …
Is reaching out to help someone who has just sacrificed her list. Her names. Her family. Her death. Vaelus has just sacrificed her own death, her own peace, to try for something better, not just for herself but for so many more people.
Azune, this time, when he bids the world remember, is not reaching for the dead, but for something deeper, more desperate, more hopeful. Older. A world before the Shapers, before the shape it wears today.
And so he’s answered … by something older. So much older. And more hopeful.
Just. What a tangled thing. What a terrible, heavy, wonderous, tangled thing. What is sacrificed, what is hoped for, what is surrendered, what is won. In an instant. The work of a moment. One act, one swing. One choice.
Because choices have to be made. And then the consequences lived with.
But I just. I love what she said. The essence it all boiled down to. “All I have wanted was to get my family to a better place. That is all I’ve wanted. In this moment, there are so many people who have that want as well, and I can’t deny them that.”
All I want is to save my family. But so many people want that. And I can’t deny them.
And in that moment, an elf sacrifices the potential hope of her people, her own family, and every certainty of a previous life, to finally help a people that an entire world once abandoned.
And I just want to say, just as a small finish, a lot of what I’ve seen discussed around Vaelus has just been … Vaelus/Thaisha or Vaelus/Hannan, about romance, about shipping, and I just … Vaelus has spent this story slowly and steadily facing down an unending gauntlet of uncertainty, everything she ever thought she knew being eroded and shifted around her, horrors that she has been complicit in and horrors that have been done to her all unknowing, disguised as gifts. Her world has been utterly uprooted. She has had to face everything head on, been challenged right from the start, from the moment she showed up at Thjazi’s funeral. And she has not responded with violence, with denial, with turning a blind eye. She has forced herself to look. And to change.
No one could have stopped her choice in this moment. The entire fate of the ritual, of every soul in that theatre, rested on her choice. No one could have stopped her. All she has wanted was to be with her family again. It’s a wish that no one could begrudge her.
But that’s not what she chose. In the end, it’s not what she did.
Her bonds with Thaisha, with Hannan, with the people she’s met out here, the people who have changed her and in turn been changed by her, are so much deeper than …
I don’t mind if there is romance? I’m not saying that. But the sheer weight of what she did here. What she decided. What she has faced and become. That has nothing to do with romance, and everything to with a soul who was willing to look, and to see, and to change, no matter how hard and how terrible it was, with just someone to help show her the way when she needed it. She made a choice. No one else made it for her. They helped her, but she made the choice to reach back.
There are more connections that just … There are loves that are not about romance, but about people who will help you shatter and then put your whole soul back together. There are people who help you or destroy you without even knowing you, people you stand beside and die beside and make monumental choices beside who know nothing about you beyond this moment of shared pain and uncertainty and terror and hope. People who reach out their hands just because they’re there.
People who will sacrifice their hope of seeing their family, the only hope remaining to them, just to see to it that your soul is not abandoned to a caged eternity a second time.
Just. Give them all their due, yeah? The choices they’re all having to make right now are … a lot bigger these days.
