Great falls

When Baetheas Sunvale turned one hundred years old and was well into his training as a healer, he had thought he had life figured out, that he understood everything, and that there was nothing he could not do.

By the time he had turned one thousand years old, he had learned life was mysterious, he understood very little, and despaired as he could not possibly do enough.

He had stopped counting birthdays after turning two thousand years old, when he realized that life was made up of mundane, every-day little things that made waking up worth it. He was fine with not understanding the mysteries of the world because he had better things to do with his time than get headaches from the kind of thinking that would not make a difference anyway, and instead spent his days discovering and performing what he had come to see as little miracles. Like making the perfect egg and tomato sandwich, or finding the headache he went to bed with had disappeared like a disgruntled lover by the morning.

One prime example of a little miracle lay in a small basket in the shade, unaware of the drama she had been born into. As an old healer, he now often found himself delivering the great-great-granddaughers of the women he had delivered back when he accidentally tripped into the field of healthcare that only in an indirect sort of way involved the male population. This result one took more after her grandmother than her mother.

Baetheas glanced down at her. Unnamed and pink skinned with a fuzz of blonde hair, she slept through the first hours of her life with her little fists clenched like the fighter she had proven to be. The wrinkles on her face were already straightening out, her head-shape becoming less pointed, she was looking less like the bullet-headed gnome many newborn resembled after a long lasting birth and more like the perfect child that friends and mother-in-laws fawned over when they came visiting. There was no admiration to receive for this one, though, not yet. For that to happen, another little miracle had to happen.

Baetheas smiled and turned back to the little garden of herbs and flowers he kept on his balcony, humming to himself as a gentle breeze swept through his ashen grey hair, brushing away the worst of the humid, mid-day heat. Eversong held few surprises as far as weather conditions were concerned, only the flowering of seasonal foilage and a lack of bite on the breeze hinted at an early summer. The woods looked good at this time of year. Fragrant. From his balcony, Baetheas could see the edge of the forest and the path leading up from the ruins of Silvermoon. The grand city glimmered as much as it could in the sun, basking in the renewed power radiating from the Sunwell and if he just forgot the recent past for a moment, added some nostalgia, a touch of deafness and a lot of blind spots, he could almost imagine all was well.

The baby made a disgruntled sound and pulled him out of the memories of life as it had been. Baetheas picked her up and placed her on his arm, her aimless gaze sweeping over his face as she pursed her lips and grunted again, ready for a meal that he could not provide for her.

“Soon,” he promised her, knowing that a girl who was his distant many-times probably grand-daughter would be coming by soon. He held the baby to his chest and mumbled to her: "This is Fairbreeze Village, it is where you were born."

He proceeded to talk nonsense to her. Gentle bouncing and a deep, calm voice could often halt the wailing until the wetnurse arrived. So he spoke of herbs, flowers and seasons while his mind wandered elsewhere, stuck in rememberance and examining change. Here at the outskirts of Fairbreeze Village the buildings had been saved from the worst of the Scourge's attack and only some work like replacing windows, cleaning up and painting over the blood stains had been required to make the building into accommodations, surgery and communal kitchens for a small band of healers and nurses who came and went as they were wanted or cared to do the work. They were not the Spire, and had no ambition in competing with them in terms of healing power and skill, but they had four bedposts, a small surgery, two examination rooms and living quarters for the ever rotating staff. They had two wetnurses on call, both his many-times granddaughters, and they took turns with those who needed a little help, either because they lacked the ability or the care to breastfeed. One of them had a child two months of age and so much milk she could not walk the stairs without staining her dress to the knees, the other had an unrivaled passion for motherhood, four adult children and a five year old child, and mostly did it because she liked the job, her milk did not dry up and she knew the income it brought to the establishment was very welcome. The young ladies provided unrivaled quality nourishment to the much needed newest generation of Sin'dorei and Baetheas treated them as such.

He leaned against the railings and half closed his eyes against the pale sun, the unhappy baby mewling softly now. Fairbreeze Village was as quiet and lacking in excitement as the name suggested, and this backdrop of calm made anything and everything apart from the norm particularly noticeable. He remembered last year, when a young elf came in with his father's cart freshly painted in a provocative black and silver, it had been the topic of discussion for weeks.

Inquisitor Dawnlight’s veil shadowrunner, a formidable stallion dark as night and with a horn that could make even the most crazed opponent pause to consider the prospect of pacifism, was still considered an unrivaled topic of choice when running into the neighbor by the mailbox. The stallion was proud and dominant, had magical abilities, and while it had proven to be the Inquisitor’s complete opposite when it came to interest in the fairer sex, they were a pair well matched in stubbornness.

He was also a bully. At the moment, he was happily prancing about with his tail held high, skipping around and kicking up grass just out of reach of the boy who had likely been ordered to get him back into the stables.

“There you are,” Laylinn trilled, cooing as she stepped out onto the balcony and reached out for the fussy baby. Baetheas looked at her in slight surprise, but handed her the baby whose noise level slowly increased like an oncoming storm.

“Was it not-”

“Oh, Rianne decided to fill some bottles instead,” Laylinn smiled, pulling her thick, blonde

braid aside as she slipped her dress off her right shoulder and nudged the baby into position. “She was so full she feared the flow would be too much for a newborn. I don't mind, I had hoped to have a talk to the poor mother again today. She did nothing but weep last night, she believes she is truly alone.”

“If all goes well, I'll have another card ready to add to the metaphorical house you're building,” Baetheas said, glancing over to the paddock again. Laylinn stepped over to him and sighed softly.

“I swear, it is cruel to order the boy to deal with -that-,” Laylinn said, easily lapsing into the villager's habit of blind gossip and having opinions. “Look, the horse does not respect him at all, and he has no idea what he is doing so he is only enabling the beast.”

Baetheas stroked his hand across his mouth to hide the smile as he watched the stallion allow the boy to take the rope which hung loosely around his neck, only to use the opportunity to drag the boy along in the opposite direction towards a promising looking little patch of sunflowers. “One must trust that the good Inquisitor has a plan,” Baetheas said, unable to keep the smile out of his voice, even as he managed to keep it from his face. Laylinn looked up at him with a gaze that could have cut steel. “However, what that plan is and for whose benefit, I cannot begin to guess.”

“If it is a plan, I do hope it is working for this sight is getting very repetitive,” Laylinn countered, keeping her voice soft for the sake of the nursing child. Down on the grass, the boy lay flat out while the stallion demonstratively massacred some flowers. After a few moments the stricken elf slowly got to his feet and trudged over to the fence to sit on it and wait for the stallion to become bored with his lack of reaction.

“It might not be the boy being trained, it might be the stallion?” Baetheas suggested lightly and just rolled his eyes when Laylinn automatically added a 'he has a name'. “It is not entirely unbelievable, Laylinn. If the horse only allows himself to be controlled by the Inquisitor and this is firmly taught to him by allowing him to push someone around on a regular basis, the chance is the stallion will only ever see the Inquisitor above himself in a hierarchy, and thus, he will not be easy to steal.”

“One day this will end in tears, grand-father,” Laylinn said in a dark tone. “He has already gorged one stable-hand and nearly ripped the ear off another, what if it happens to-”

“I believe any animal or elf has a right to defense when backed into a corner, dear.”

“A theory and a half, and you know it.”

“Word against word, of course,” Baetheas conceded. “Word against whinny, rather, in this particular instance. As far as I know, this breed of horses do not have the instinct of a normal horse. When attacked, a horse will reliably attempt to escape. This shadowrunner will reliably try to make it so that the attacker may never attack again.”

They fell silent as the stallion turned and sauntered over to the dejected elf sitting on the fence. The horse looked calm now, swishing away a few bugs with his tail, with the way he held his head one might think the stallion was apologetic about his previous behavior. The illusion only lasted until the elf tried to reach for the rope again, only to be nudged in the chest by a soft, black muzzle, so he toppled off the back of the fence. The stallion snorted, one might think it was a laugh, and did a run of the field before heading into the stables again for a drink of water and the lunch that had just been served.

“It is strange, though,” Laylinn said as she placed a towel on her shoulder and held the baby close, patting her back. “He deals with hawkstriders as if he had been born on one, and dragonhawks seem to be of little challenge as well, and they require the exact same handling as a horse.”

Baetheas watched as the boy sat up in the grass, watched where the horse had disappeared to, struggled to get on his feet and started brushing himself off.

“To understand Meyren Sevalar, you need to think about boxes,” Baetheas explained, glancing over as the baby girl seemed to have burped up all she could burp. Laylinn placed her in her basket again, rearranging the simple bedclothes around her.

“In only a few years, he has re-learned everything from talking to how to use a fork. He assembles all this knowledge, as far as I can understand, in mental groups. If he is in a food related situation, he knows how to use a fork, for cutlery and food are in the same box. Give him a fork out of the blue and he cannot explain the fork without relating it to food. He has merely failed to take horses from the 'animals who kill me' box and place them in the 'animals for transport' box.”

“That sounds awfully complicated,” Laylinn snorted, wiping the baby's face clean.

“It helps if you wish to try and predict his reactions,” he continued, sitting down by the table and pouring a glass of lemonade. He offered it to Laylinn, who smiled and shook her head. “Say, his reaction to women,” Baetheas mused, taking the lemondade glass for himself. “He has two distinct boxes for women. One is for 'females in social situations in public space'. This is a rather prudish box which, for example, finds off the shoulder dresses outright embarrassing. The other is full of females in any other situation, like battle, sparring, beach volley-ball tournaments, or in a private setting, a box which does not mind any lewdness whatsoever. The boxes do not mix, for he was taught one thing in one situation, and another in a different situation. Instead of putting both into the same box, he has managed to make two separate boxes.”

Laylinn stood and looked down at the young elf who was kicking at random tufts of grass as he walked slowly across the grounds. “And have you tried to explain this to him?”

“Until my tongue bled and my heart despaired, dear,” Baetheas sighed, rubbing his fingers to his temple.

“Is that what has him so incredibly sullen now?”

“No,” Baetheas said after a few moments. “I believe I have placed myself in a particularly unpleasant box by having promised him answers.”

Laylinn turned as she rearranged her clothing, giving him a very old look. “And you believe he will not like these answers?”

“Not at all.”

Laylinn left soon after to talk to the new mother, and Baetheas sat back to enjoy his lemonade while he could. The peace did not last long. Soon enough, there was a scent of jasmine on the air, increasing as the vines climbing up along the wall rustled softly.

The young elf dropping down onto the balcony was clad in his normal garments,

consisting of old, inherited leather armour that had been repaired so many times that it was unlikely to contain any original material at all. The tabard of the Eclipsion Blade was nowhere to be seen, but his weapons were in place. The boy looked like he had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar; slightly sheepish, full of guilt and ready for a fight.

"Hello, Meyren," Baetheas said in a lighthearted greeting. Meyren just stared back at him, so Baetheas took a sip of limonade and waited. That, among many other things, was an art he had mastered much better than his young friend.

"It's well past the fifteenth," Meyren said at last, apparently having been thrown off track from his internal manuscript. He was speaking slowly, and Baetheas could all but see the internal dialogue race on. "You promised."

Baetheas raised a thin, elegant eyebrow slowly, watching how this slight action caused Meyren to bristle as if he had been slapped. He raised his glass slightly, took a sip, and lowered it again. By then, Meyren was a bunch of nerves so tightly wound he could snap at any moment.

"We spoke about this, kid," Baetheas said, his voice so calm that Meyren was visibly shaking. "I will not have you in my home when you are like this."

"Like what," Meyren growled, then realized it was showing and tried, and failed, to hide it. His voice grew low, barely kept from yelling by now. "You promised, Baetheas, you said you'd find out and you'd tell me. You'd tell me who I am and what I come from. You refused the day before last, and the week before that."

"And I said, I will not have you in the house when you are like this," Baetheas replied, keeping his voice to that calm, patronising sing-song voice that would most likely make everything that much worse.

"Like what!?" Meyren all but howled, then lowered his voice as he noticed the child sleeping in her basket. "I'm not acting any-"

"I will tell you when your mind is open to actually listen, and not just argue."

"I can listen!"

"I know you can, but I also know that you will not," Baetheas said and stood, stepping closer to the young elf. Meyren straightened up from his usual slouch and rested his hands on his blades, all defiance, and just as the boy's muscles tensed, Baetheas's hands struck forward, quick as a snake for his age as he grabbed Meyren's wrists. He yanked the boy closer, his hands grinding the bones of Meyren's wrists together until the fire left the boy's eyes and fear started creeping in. "You will leave, and come back once you are ready to listen to me."

"I don't-"

Baetheas sighed, and pushed. Meyren's expression turned from pained rage to pure fear as he tumbled backwards over the railing, seeming to float in the air for one precarious moment before gravity took hold. His gloves gripped against the railing but the momentum and the vines covering it offered little hand-hold. The lilac rustled and ripped as the elf tumbled down and landed with a thud in the bushes below.

A loud clank, followed by another, had Baetheas turning and almost firing what he had of offensive light in pure self defense. He stopped himself in time, wide eyed and with his heart trying to jump out of his throat as he faced a tall, slender city guard who had just dropped his weapons and shield to the ground.

In retrospect, throwing a fellow blood elf off a building was perhaps the worst thing he could do with such witnesses around. Baetheas forced his features to relax and leaned casually against the railing, smiling and coughing theatrically to cover the pained moan from the stricken boy in the bushes, but soon realized he likely had not needed to worry.

The guard's eyes was locked on the still sleeping baby in the basket.

Baetheas looked down and cleared his throat, before he picked up the baby girl. She woke, but not much, waving a small fist in the air with her eyes closed as Baetheas held her close, watching how the guard's gaze followed his every move. He watched the guard, watching how his normally rigid ears seemed to melt as he walked closer.

"I...?" he squeaked, not taking his eyes off the baby.

"Yes, you made this," Baetheas confirmed. After a short update on the current situation which was probably not picked up on at all due to the crying, he showed the guard how to hold his first born and support her head, assured him that she was not as fragile as she looked and took them both inside to hopefully reunite the little family.

Meyren Sevalar would have to wait.