#(the potential)

The raw scale of what has just happened is just … It’s incredible. They found an afterlife. They freed the dead. They reached out, through the power of courage and hope and stories and freedom, and they took back the lost afterlife of Azgra, and they freed their dead. The scale of …

We killed our gods. We freed ourselves in life, in this world. And now we’ve gone back, and we’ve freed the dead as well. They can’t have them. The gods. They can’t keep any of us captive anymore.

The sheer implication of this ritual. The raw scale of what they’ve done. Of what they’ve made possible.

And it can be done again. Thjazi was already working on at least two other collections of components. The ones involving the box and Termina didn’t work, they weren’t anchored. That ritual will have to be redone, freeing the halflings. And then the Stone of Nightsong. Freeing the elves. That one’s in progress. All we need are the right objects, and people … people willing to fight this fight. People willing to reach out and reclaim their dead, their afterlives, their hopes, their freedom. To cast off the last claims of the Shapers, and know true freedom, in all its glory and its terror.

Is this what we’re doing? Are we freeing …? Is this what we’re doing?

But. On the subject of those components already collected. On those potential rituals.

It looks like three components are needed per afterlife. The weapon that killed the god. A place of power of that god. And something that bridges life and death, this world and the afterlife of that god, usually a body part associated with a psychopomp of some kind.

And once they are gathered, those components need to be reshaped, to make them into anchors. Swords to ploughshares. They need to break free of their intended use, what the dead Shapers intended for them, and forged into something new and different, present in this world, for the benefit of people, not those who shaped them. And all the components of the ritual need to be transformed this way. Weapons becoming props, blood becoming murals, places of appeasement becoming the rallying grounds of freedom. Each component needs to be reshaped.

The Stone …

I think the Stone has already been transformed. It reacted to the ritual of Kother’ai. And it … I mean, of course it’s been transformed. After what happened with Occtis? How could it be anything but.

With all that we now know about Sylandri. How she viewed her ‘children’. What she wanted from them, demanded of them. To live only according to her design. To be only what she wanted them to be, and go only where she intended them to go, and nowhere else, and nothing else.

Occtis, in the afterlife, just before he grabbed the stone inside his own chest, and was torn apart between two paths, and was only rescued by an act, a miracle, of mortal magic. Just before that.

Occtis: “No, I’m not supposed to go there. Father. I don’t belong to you.”

Father. Mother. I don’t belong to you.

Yeah. I think the Stone has been transformed. No more a tool to guide wayward children to where they’re supposed to go. Now, in the first true miracle of this story, it’s become a tool to give someone a choice. Even beyond death. I think … I think it’s been transformed.

And for the other collection. The halfling artefacts.

Swords to ploughshares. Weapons that aren’t weapons anymore. Weapons that have chosen not to be weapons anymore. Weapons that have become people.

I think Bolaire is a component. I think he is. Or he’s at least a potential component.

It should be Termina. She was the one who dealt the fatal blow, the one who wore Rauwyn as she died. And it … it still could be Termina. It could. But she’s not there yet. Her latest conversation hammered that point home. Termina is still a weapon. All she wants is to be able to do it again, her greatest act, her greatest purpose. She is a weapon. She wants nothing more.

But Bolaire …

He’s still a weapon. He’s still a killer. He still clings to his identity as an object, a thing. He’s so hesitant to think of himself as a person. He’s not there yet. Not him either. He’s not there.

But he’s closer. He’s closer. And he has people, friends, reasons, that Termina doesn’t.

If there was another ritual. A different play, echoing that first and most terrible. What role would Bolaire, do we think, want to play?

But at the same time … Which is more powerful? To claim your personhood for yourself, and in doing so help to free others? Or to teach your family what personhood is. Could be. It might be him. But it could be Termina. Maybe he could save not just himself, but his family.

(It’s so gutwrenching that he didn’t get to witness it. Kother’ai. What a thing. What a thing. If only he could have seen).

This … What this did. This play, this ritual. What it’s done. It’s not hopeless. It’s not predetermined. We can change it, we can fix it. We can find what was stolen. We can bring our dead, our people, our families, back. Not to life, but … To freedom. To choice. To the world, to the Path, to the choice to be something more that what these tyrant gods demanded.

The gods don’t get to keep them. Us. We don’t belong to them. In life or in death. We belong to us.

I just. The raw scale of the thing. The implication. The meaning.

It’s not hopeless. Even in death, it’s not hopeless. Choice exists. Freedom exists. And with just a little help, no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter who has laid claim to you, it can be found.