With the start of a plan to make serious trouble for the local fanatics, I felt a lot lighter than I had before, as if a burden I hadn’t noticed had been lifted, no longer weighing me down. My earlier indecision and the feeling of powerlessness started to fade. However, I was well aware that those sensations would only completely disappear once I made actual progress on the issue. Now, the obvious next step was to get Lia involved; she’d probably be quite happy to start making trouble for them, and it would give her ample opportunity to train her own Mind Magic abilities. She had some, but she never had the inclination or interest to explore them. Maybe that’d change now.
Thankfully, we were within my tower, a space saturated with my magical power and largely under my personal control; otherwise, finding her might have been difficult. She had seated herself near the top of the tower, at one of the windows facing north, staring into the distance. I had a feeling she wasn’t looking at anything in particular, just letting the view serve as a backdrop for the images conjured by her mind, so I decided to give her a bit of time to work through whatever was bothering her.
A quick thought, and a subtle flare of magic, created a comfortable seat for me, and then I just sat there, waiting. It took a lot longer than I had expected, especially given how vigilant she usually was, but I had a feeling she simply had a lot on her mind. I only wished she would confide in me, even if another part was scared of just that. What if she told me about her troubles and I was unable to help her? What if I couldn’t even understand what troubled her, which was a disturbingly realistic possibility, given my own issues with emotions. Sure, those issues had changed a lot since I had embraced the legacy of Morgana, and even before then, thanks to Road to Purgatory. But just because my issues had changed, and I thought I had overcome some of them, it didn’t mean I could empathise with a teenager. And that was without consideration of the additional issues Lia faced as the first of her kind.
Finally, after almost an hour of waiting patiently, her eyes flickered over to me, and she startled, the reaction bringing a faint smile to my face.
“Noticed me, did you?” I asked, the grin on my face stretching just a little wider.
“Mhm,” she nodded, her eyes returning to the outside, possibly starting to count the snowflakes that started to fall from the sky. “What brings you here? If you wanted to watch the snow, you’d probably be upstairs, on the top of the tower.”
“True, sitting up there, with the wind blowing around me, is my preferred perch,” I nodded, “But no, I’m here because I wanted to talk to you,” I told her, pausing for a moment, briefly considering what to start with. I considered prodding her about her issues once again, but decided against it. Earlier, I had offered to listen, so giving her the time she needed might be the best way to handle this. However, before I could speak again, Lia surprised me by opening up without any prodding.
“When I was out yesterday, I saw Samantha,” she said, her voice lacking any inflexion. It was as smooth and cold as ice in winter, giving nothing away.
Instead of replying verbally, I simply nodded, noticing that her eyes were observing me in the window’s reflection.
“I don’t know what to do,” she admitted, her voice still as cold and quiet as it had been earlier. As I sat there, quietly listening to her, avoiding anything that might spook or pressure her, the entire story came spilling out, slowly at first, disjointed at times, but it all came out. She spoke about her worries and fears, the comfort and security the walls of Jademoon Tower gave her, or rather, the way my magic’s presence worked as a comforting blanket. But at the same time, living within the tower, while Samantha and her group had to travel for hours through hazardous terrain to visit, added a level of isolation that proved problematic.
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The longer she spoke, the more I realised I had been premature in blaming Samantha. Sure, she could be considered the root cause, because she had been Lia’s motivation to stay in the tower, but the underlying issues had already been there.
Lia’s dependence on me, both emotionally and physically, hadn’t been caused by Samantha. Instead, I had to shoulder the blame for those, especially since the dependence wasn’t coincidental.
Back, when I restored Lia’s broken mind and turned the Shattered who used to be a teenager named Chantalle, into something new, it hadn’t set out to make her my daughter. Hel, I hadn’t even expected that I could restore her mind. I had set out to create a servant, a weapon to be unleashed upon my foes. Binding her to me had, quite literally, been part of the magic that created Lia, so should I be surprised that she remained bound to me? Especially after getting fed my blood for months on end, relying entirely on me to survive?
For a moment, as she was quietly speaking, I glanced at her with my Soul Sight, just to see if I might find anything out of the ordinary. However, she looked like she always did. Some of the oddities of her soul, the metaphorical sharp edges, might have smoothed over to some degree, but there was nothing I could point at, no singular connection that might be unravelled with great care and patience. There was only Lia, just as she had always been, since I restored her mind in the cellar of Apple Gate Farm.
While I listened to her describe how she had felt as if the walls of my tower were swallowing her up, I began to consider whether her dependence was something I would be able to unravel or if it was a fundamental part of her being. The more I thought, and the longer I listened, the less confident I felt either way. This was something that might very well destroy her, unravel the threads holding together her soul and cause it to shatter once again.
Similarly, I wasn’t sure the dependence was magically enforced. Sure, I had originally tried to bind the being who became Carnelia to my will, but I had been a lot weaker back then, and she had grown powerful in her own right. Would that mean the binding was unravelling, or did it mean the constant supply of my blood I had given her had only bound her to me tighter, to the point that she’d never be able to escape the bindings?
By the time Lia was done with her retelling and had laid out her various worries, I wasn’t any closer to an answer than I had been when she started to speak. Instead of trying to say something, I simply pulled my daughter into an embrace, trying to figure out what to tell her.
For a moment, I considered if there was a way to use the burgeoning divinity of the Mother to sever, or at least alter, the binding and turn it into something that would eventually dissolve. After all, part of being a good mother was to let one’s children stand on their own, once they have the strength to do so. To allow them to grow up and become productive members of society, something the binding made impossible for Lia.
However, I had no idea what to say or do about the issue, so I simply held Lia, offering her my full support as she worked to figure out this entire mess. I considered telling her about my worries, about the questions I was now asking myself. But what would I say? What could I say with confidence?
At best, I could add to her troubles, making her think that she’d never be able to be independent of me. I would have to study this binding and do my best to make things right. I couldn’t call my actions back then a mistake, because that would imply Lia, as she is now, was a mistake.
Instead of telling her about the potential issues, I changed the topic and told her about my plans for the local worshippers of Sunna. The idea of mental warfare, of skulking in the shadows and slowly sowing the seeds of discontent and conflict, brought a grin to her face.
It didn’t take long for her to have her own ideas, though some of them pushed what I considered plausible, especially given that we didn’t understand their warding. It was obvious that Lia was fully on board with the idea of making these people's lives utterly miserable, just as they would make ours if they could.
Eventually, we both rose, looking out into the distance, noticing the shadows settling across the mountains. Soon, it would be time to hunt.
