Many months ago, Eithna Primriver descended into a curious well. A fateful encounter, with the Meddling One, and the Child of the Fog, caught between a mild spat.
A dissonance of values, perhaps? She arrived here wanting to make something new of herself, standings sour with those at home, free from old obligations yet trapped in the sorrow of old habits. Was it even ambition, or just a fear of failure? Really, Her favor certainly would have aided in this, but that bridge was burnt in the first encounter, now, wasn’t it? She was never one to lay the first plank of a reconciled connection, either way... And if the lady heralded by lightning seeks for others to make something of themselves, then what of the child of the fog? To give and to take on a whim, as the ocean tides do? Certainly, setting down this path, she will be something else, for better, or for worse. An interesting parallel, or perhaps a worrying inversion.
As the Mistan poet Dalia Mourning once wrote, there is a certain beauty in decay, destruction, dissolution–beauty in fire, beauty in the thrashing sea that tears a ship asunder, and beauty in crumbling, vine-choked stone. To be more straightforward, of course, one could simply say that devastation is entertaining, to an extent. The wick burns ever downwards.
Best not think of where Eithna fits into that idea. She’s since pushed such troubling thoughts (not just Dalia, but such consequences of power. The coals must burn to heat the hearth) to her hind mind, something louder and more immediate coming through: desire and desperation.
Years ago, bitter jealousy pushed her to delve into research of the arcane–more common, and more dubious, to put it in a certain way. She never could quite reach what she thought of as actualization of such skills, however, just barely out of grasp. A story told in one failure of a series in a cycle. Eithna, Eithne, always so prone to failure, lacking the grace to fall freely despite how she dreamed.
She’s desperate now, too, a feeling she tries her best to obscure from such prying eyes. Yes, a feeling more refined, but one that pushes many to do things rather rash, at times. The stars shine down on a land that is ripe with danger, tragedy, and most importantly, power. It’s different here. Sooner or later, she will find something shocking, horrifying, mystifying. This is simply the nature of the Reach.
In the well, she was promised something vague by the fog child themselves, after dooming those wretched souls siding with them in that curiously indirect scuffle. It didn’t matter how flimsy the favor of the fey truly was, in that moment–any angler’s bait she would snap up, thinking she may slither away as does the cunning eel. And yet, flitting in the corner of her monochrome chestnut eyes, faint laughter from the woodlands at night, troubled sleep gnawed by the Nocturne. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, senses hearing what they expect.
Maybe it's an omen of the things to come.
