Chapter 335: Children of the Heavens
"Ah, so it’s come to her has it?" Amahle said with a heavy sigh. With a series of clicks as she used her spider-like limbs to stand, Amahle walked across the room to a bookshelf, sorting through some of the least used tomes on the top shelf before retrieving an old and dusty leather-bound book and returning to the table.
The book itself bore no title and the leather cover on the book looked like it had suffered a number of abuses over the years. From the scars and creases on the cover that had worn smooth with time, Ashlynn guessed that it was more of a notebook than a formal publication of any sort. But to be kept around for so long and from the reverent way that Amahle handled it, it was clearly no ordinary journal.
"I always intended to tell you about her," Amahle said as she took her seat. "Maybe not as soon as you came back from vacation, but certainly before you could leave the Briar. This isn’t a secret that should be kept from you after all."
"You can’t escape confronting these things once you return home," the older witch added. "I wouldn’t ask you to, and if I thought that you had any hope of living the rest of your life away from other humans, I would ask you to avoid getting involved in these matters."
"I know that’s impossible, and unreasonable to ask as well," Amahle said with a heavy sigh. "You have unfinished business in human lands and family there as well. Staying apart from this is impossible, so I will tell you everything I can in the hopes that the knowledge will help to keep you safe when you return."
"Then, did you know her? The human Mother of Trees?" Ashlynn asked. Amahle had never revealed her age to her, but the Kingdom of Gaal was as nearly the same age as Nyrielle. It had been the First Crusade, launched by Charles the First, that drove Nyrielle’s parents from their homes to seek shelter in the Vale of Mists in the first place. But even though Nyrielle was almost as old as the Kingdom of Gaal, she had yet to be born at the time of Claire du Gaal’s death. If Amahle was even older...
"I didn’t know her," Amahle said with a shake of her head. "She can be considered my ’big sister’ in the same way that you’re my ’little sister.’ We were both taught by the previous Mother of Storms, but Sister Claire died decades before I was born. It was a long time ago," she said, brushing her fingers across the surface of the ancient book before she opened it to reveal page after page of precise eldritch script in an older dialect than Ashlynn had seen outside of Nyrielle’s library.
Ghosts danced among the many pupils in Amahle’s eyes and her gaze grew distant as if she could see the steel-haired woman of the Gull Wing Clan who had patiently tutored her in much the same way that she now tutored Ashlynn.
She had always found the meticulous precision of her teacher’s methods at odds with the wild, often chaotic energy she commanded but that very contradiction had helped her to understand that as the Mother of Thorns, she could define for herself what it meant to surround herself with sharp, often deadly power. The power didn’t have to define the kind of person that she would become.
"Tell me," Amahle said quietly, her crimson eyes never leaving the words written in her teacher’s neat, precise hand. "What did you and Claire talk about? If she’s preserved a portion of her spirit and her power, she must have had some purpose in doing so."