Previously on Saga of the Jewels…
The life of seventeen-year-old RYN, bookish son of a wealthy landowner, changes forever when his hometown is destroyed by the EMPIRE and everyone he has ever known is killed. He discovers that the Empire are seeking TWELVE PRIMEVAL JEWELS which grant the power to manipulate different elements, and that his father had been hiding the Fire Ruby. Ryn sets out to take revenge on the Imperial General who killed his family and retrieve the Fire Ruby, and along the way meets NUTHEA the lightning-slinging princess, SAGAR the swaggering skypirate, ELRANN the tomboy engineer, CID the wizened old healer, and VISH the poppy-seed-addicted bounty hunter. Together the adventurers decide to find all of the Jewels in order to stop the EMPEROR from finding them first and taking over the world. The companions now find themselves traversing the skies of Mid in Sagar’s airship, heading to the land of FARR to attempt to retrieve the EARTH EMERALD…
SEASON TWO EPISODE 23:
ABOARD THE GOOD AIRSHIP WANDERLUST
Elrann hated to admit it, but pirate-man’s airship was an absolute beauty.
She strode out of the doors of the captain’s chambers in the forecastle and onto the main deck. Rushing air immediately greeted her, whipping her purple hair around her face, and she pulled her goggles down over her eyes. The skyscape, pale orange and blue and white, was decorated with the fluffy clouds of a dawn somewhere over Aibar, above which they were currently flying on their way to Farr.
“Ah…” Elrann exhaled after taking a drink of the cold crisp air. It’s good to be alive.
Ryn, Vish and Cid were already up, she was surprised to see, stood together looking out over the prow of the ship, yapping about something or other and taking turns to point at the clouds and scraps of desert visible below. They hadn’t heard her come onto the deck.
“‘Bout time you got up, woman!” someone called out over the wind from behind her.
Elrann whirled on her heel. Above her, atop the ship’s forecastle, underneath her black blimp from which the body of the ship hung suspended by steel ropes, behind the ship’s wheel, stood Sagar.
“I never got my wakeup call!” Elrann yelled back.
“Ha!” the pirate scoffed, his ponytail flapping in the wind behind him. “You’d be lucky! Where’s her majesty--still sleeping?”
Always with the asking about princess-girl, Elrann thought. “Yeah,” she said, “for the meantime. She needs her beauty sleep. I don’t need so much ’cause I’m more beautiful.” She grinned and winked at him.
“Ha!” Sagar laughed again. He seemed happy at the helm of his ship--literally in his element. “Listen, woman; go do a check over the engine for me. She’s flying fine--but you might be able to get a little more juice out of her.”
“Where d’ya think I was going?” Elrann shot back. “I’ll go of my own accord, not to obey an order, thank ya very much. You might be the pilot of this ship, but you ain’t her captain any more, whatever princess-girl calls ya.”
She turned away from the faint sound of Sagar’s “Rrrr,” hiding her smile, and paced across the deck to steps that led below. That’s for calling me ‘woman’ twice already today. She waved a good morning to Ryn, Vish and Cid before descending.
Belowdecks were five main rooms: a hold which had been stuffed full of food supplies by princess-girl’s ‘countrywomen’ before they left, a very small brig, a very small mess with chairs and a card table, the sleeping cabin, and the engine room.
Unfortunately, you had to go through the sleeping cabin to get to the engine room.
The sleeping cabin was filthy, the walls that enclosed its rows of hung hammocks scrawled with lewd paint graffiti or knife-scored with tallies of how many days the original crew had been in the air at a particular time. Even the Imperials hadn’t bothered to clean it up when they had occupied the ship for a while. All the same, Elrann wouldn’t have minded sleeping in the main cabin, and had done so on many other airships.
But on their first night in the air, when they had opened the door to the cabin and been hit by a wave of the stink of...boys, Nuthea had spoken up.
“No,” Nuthea had said, wrinkling her nose. “Absolutely not. This does not befit a Queen.”
“But you’re not a Queen,” Sagar said. “You weren’t coronated.”
“It does not befit a princess either. I am not sleeping in here. I am not having you men leching over me and Elrann while we get undressed.”
Sagar’s face fell. “Well, where do you suggest that you sleep? You can’t exactly sleep up on the deck, and the other rooms aren’t really big enough.”
“Elrann and I will sleep in the captain’s quarters.”
Sagar’s face lit up. “An excellent idea! I’ll be able to keep you both company.” His wolf-grin gripped his face.
Nuthea’s expression could have curdled milk. Nuthea’s expression could have boiled milk. “No, Captain Sagar: Elrann and I will sleep in the captain’s quarters by ourselves.”
Sagar’s face turned as purple as Elrann’s hair. “But it’s the captain’s quarters! That means it’s for the ‘captain’! The clue is in the name!”
“My mind is made up,” Nuthea said. One of her catchphrases, Elrann noticed.
“Rrrrr.”
They had argued some more, but eventually Sagar had been forced to back down when Nuthea had reminded him that he was in her pay, since she was funding this little Mid-trotting Jewel-hunting escapade and keeping him in coin to be the pilot for it.
Poor moronic pirate-man… Elrann thought as she opened the door to the engine room at the back of the ship, having successfully navigated the gauntlet of the vacant sleeping cabin. You just don’t have a clue, do you?
Wanderlust’s engine was a big, shining, black, iron beauty that filled the whole of its room. The main chamber, effectively a massive tank, had a door built into the front of it into which fuel could be shovelled--coal, usually, but this was a Class One Steam Engine made in Erm, which meant that she could run on pretty much whatever you put in her—coal, wood, oil, grass, leaves, poodoo, metal if it was hot enough, animals, even people… Elrann blinked away that particular memory from the one time she had worked on a ship with a Class One before. As long as the fuel burned or evaporated and produced some kind of smoke or gas to fly up the feeder pipe, into the engine’s compression system above and then eventually along the two fuel lines to the two air turbines that sat at the underside of Wanderlust’s bow, it would work.
She opened the door of the main chamber, its heat immediately warming her skin, and shovelled in some more coal from the nearby bag on the floor. The furnace inside glowed as it swallowed the fuel, and the whirring of the ship’s turbines from outside picked up in pitch a fraction.
She shut the door and took a spanner out of one of her utility pouches, relishing the feel of the cold metal as it sat comfortably in her palm, read the gauges on the top of the engine, and set to work on it.
A Class One engine was effectively a heart, except that instead of pumping blood it pumped smoke, or steam. The ship’s engineer’s main job was to fine-tune the compression and decompression system in the upper chambers of the engine, built above the feeder pipe that came from the fuel tank, so that the gas in it was expelled at maximum speed and efficiency along the two fuel lines to power the turbines which propelled the ship through the air. This was largely achieved by tightening and loosening various screws, knuts and bolts attached to the chambers to shrink or enlarge the different ‘ventricles’ of the engine system.
As she did this now, Elrann lost herself in her work. For a time there was only the engine and she only had space to think briefly that the place where she was happiest and most in her element was in front of a metal machine, preferably an engine, tinkering and investigating and adjusting, being warmed by the heat from its burning fuel, savouring the burnt taste of smoke on her tongue, listening to the industrious hum of the turbines.
Eventually she got the engine pretty much where she wanted her and her mind became free to wander again.
What had she been thinking about before she got to work on the engine? Something had been bothering her…
Oh, yeah. Pirate-man.
She was fairly sure that, as well as obviously ‘leching’ after Nuthea, Sagar had been sending some meaningful glances her way lately as well. It seemed that, after he had gotten over his initial shock at her short hair, tomboyishness and the facts that she was an engineer and could both drink and swear better than him, he had become interested in her as well. It seemed that his lechy-ness knew no bounds. He wasn’t very good at either hiding or showing it, though in different ways.
Little did the stupid man know that rather than letting him into her overalls she was much more interested in trying to work out whether or not he was actually her half-brother.
Truth be told, she reflected as she continued to tend to the engine, making some perfectionist and entirely unnecessary tweaks, Sagar had made her think of her father the very first time she had met him, in the Traveller’s Rest in Ast. Of course, she had never actually known her father, but he had been described to her as a dashing skypirate with a brown leather jacket with a high collar, a rugged beard, baby blue eyes and...a ponytail.
She turned a screw on the engine with her spanner, listening for the subtle change in the turbine’s hum, trying to get exactly the tone she wanted. She knew that her obsession with skypirates, airships, and eventually airship engines had originated from being told about her father, a skypirate who had landed in Zerlan once and got her mother pregnant from a single amorous encounter, but she didn’t care. She could no more change her love for them than she could change the colour of her purple eyes or her supernatural ability to hold her drink. They were a part of her.
Early on in her acquaintance with Sagar, when they had been escaping from Ast and then trekking across the Imfisi plains, she had developed a small crush on him. Her cheeks warmed now at the memory, and it wasn’t just the warmth of the engine. It was embarrassing to see now how obviously that had been connected to her longing for her father, but at the time she had just fallen right into it. It had been so scary being in Ast when it was invaded, and Sagar had taken charge and been so confident
She tightened another knut. But, the thing was, as time had gone by, slowly the crush had morphed into something else. She had begun to notice some little things, and some big things. The big things were so obvious that she hadn’t noticed them at first, thinking them too common not to be coincidences: the brown leather jacket with a high collar, the blue eyes, the handsome features, and that ponytail. But it was the little things that had begun to stack up and eventually make her wonder about the big things: The way his wolf-like grin sometimes reminded her of her own when she caught it in a looking glass. His slightly larger than normal front canine-teeth. His own love of airships, and all things to do with them. Even the way he growled when he got frustrated or irritated, though thankfully Elrann had so far managed to keep that particular trait of hers hidden from the other members of their traveling party. Too many coincidences had mounted up for her to continue to doubt that they were just coincidences with as much conviction.
The clincher had been when Sagar had revealed that he was in possession of the ‘Wind Shell’ and that his father was Captain Edbin Figaro. Elrann’s mother hadn’t even known the name of the man that had swept her off her feet and impregnated her on the same evening, but she had told Elrann that he had been a captain of a ship, since she had seen him sail off piloting it the next day. Elrann worried that her mother, and now she, had romanticised the man, wanting him not just to be some regular old scummy skysailor or randy cabin boy. But it was what her mother had told her.
So, gradually, little by little, she had pieced together the idea that maybe, just maybe, she and Sagar might share a father.
Maybe, just maybe, Sagar might be her half-brother.
And if Sagar was her half-brother then, maybe, just maybe, he might be able to help her to find her father.
That was a good enough reason to hang around with this crew a little longer—at least until she worked up the courage to tell him.
Of course, there was also the pay (courtesy of princess-girl), the protection, and the general sense of meaningfulness now that they were questing after these magical Jewel-thingamys to save the world or what have you. And the company was alright, she supposed. Princess-girl could talk like anything when she got going, though she was pretty interesting to listen to.
But yeah, the main reason she was still here was to see if she could get a shot at finding her father, she reminded herself. If he was still alive, that was.
She walked over to the bronze speaking tube set into the wall and put her mouth to it.
“Hey pirate-man!” she said into it. “What d’ya think?”
For a moment there was no reply, just the gaping protrusion of the speaking tube.
Then: “She’s sounding alright, woman.”
Elrann’s lip curled up at the corner. She knew well enough not to expect a ‘thank you’ or a ‘good job’. But she also knew that she had the engine functioning damn near perfectly. She had heard the reluctant acknowledgement of that in Sagar’s tone.
“You coming up for breakfast?” said Sagar’s voice through the speaking tube.
“In a bit,” Elrann answered. “I want to tend to her a bit more for a while.”
“Suit yourself.”
Elrann went back to the engine. There was absolutely no reason to do anything with her right now, but she liked being here, and she could always play with trying to get her functioning even more near perfectly.
She set about the screws and knuts again, and thought about how and when she was going to bring up her theory about their parentage with Sagar.
*
Sagar couldn’t decide who he was more attracted to, the princess or the engineer woman.
He checked the red needle of the compass built into the centre of Wanderlust’s wheel and adjusted her slightly to keep on course. It was pretty easy to navigate to Farr. He had never been out all that way before, but he knew you basically just had to head east for a long time. That was the direction he was flying them in now, into the bright Aibarian sunrise.
Of course, both ladies came with their problems. The princess was an obvious choice, what with her being drop-dead gorgeous, with that golden hair and slender face and full bust. And she had a lot of money. But she was a handful and a half—no, two handfuls, if not more. A right royal pain in the arse. Almost literally. She was basically mad. And being hit by lightning from her hurt. A lot.
So then there was the engineer woman too. Sagar had been almost embarrassed to admit to himself that he was attracted to her at first, and truth be told, he sort of still was. She looked too much like a boy with her short hair and engineer’s overalls and laddish way of speaking. Being attracted to her made him feel all sorts of uncomfortable feelings that he didn’t like to acknowledge. That was why he called her ‘woman’—to reassure himself that he was being attracted to a woman. For attracted to her he was. Something about her strut, something about her self-assuredness, something about the way she held a wrench and tended so well to his ship’s engine, got his winds gusting.
He licked his lips, enjoying the play of rushing air moving over them and cooling them where he wet them.
Yes, he promised himself, I’ll get one of them before this ‘Quest’ is done. Maybe both of them. Maybe both of them at the same time. They are sleeping in my quarters after all. How hard could it be?
Never mind that he had never actually slept with anybody before.
Never mind that he was hopelessly, desperately insecure and under-confident on the inside.
Never mind that his brash skypirate demeanour was just a persona he had had to develop fast when he had inherited this ship and its crew from his father much earlier than he had expected to.
The women didn’t need to know any of that.
None of the others needed to know any of that.
He tried to push these thoughts away, but they just came back stronger.
A great job he had done of looking after this ship and crew her… Things had started well, sure, with a few very successful early raids, and then taking down that Imperial ship.
But then it had all gone wrong. Not only had he lost the ship, for a time, but he had also gotten the whole of his crew killed. He winced at the memory, and almost choked up a little, but forced the sob down hard. No way anyone was going to see him cry up here. It was a good thing he hadn’t been too attached to the crew. It was a good thing he hadn’t been with them that long. But he still felt guilty that they had been killed. He had left them unattended, right after taking down an Imperial warship, and then that Imperial General had specifically attacked him in revenge.
Damn that General. If Ryn hadn’t killed him first, Sagar would have liked to have been the one to do it.
His eye itched underneath his eye patch. He did a quick scan of the deck. The pup, old timer and scumsucker were still yammering on about something or other at the prow. The woman was still in the engine room, for now. And the princess had not yet graced the morning with her presence.
Quickly, before anyone had a chance to turn around and see, he slid one hand up underneath his patch and gave his left eye a good old itch, then withdrew it again.
None of the others needed to know that he only wore the eye patch for show, to pretend that he had lost his eye in a battle and look tough.
He would never have lost his eye in a battle. Fighting was the one thing he was genuinely good at. He was good at it because he had practiced at swords with his father’s crew ever since he was young enough to hold one. And he was good at it because he cheated. He used his air projection abilities to throw his opponents off and give himself an unfair advantage.
Below him, the princess stepped out onto the main deck. She was wearing a pale lilac dress with a purple sash that wove around her chest and waist, and long purple gloves. She had had a chance to restock her wardrobe before they left her home country. Damn, but she’s looking good this morning, Sagar thought.
“Morning, princess!” Sagar called down at her before any of the other men got a chance to greet her. “So good of you to join us!”
Nuthea turned and looked up at him with a scowl that creased her exquisite forehead. “I did not sleep well,” she said over the wind and engine noise. “Your bed is not comfortable.”
“Works fine for me.” Sagar said, not able or wanting to stop himself. “I’m sure it would be a lot more comfortable with me in it. You should let me show you how to use it sometime.”
Casually, almost absent-mindedly, the princess raised a finger in the same gesture with which she had nearly singed him with lightning when he had been rude to her on his ship before.
Sagar let out a little yelp involuntarily and jumped from fright, losing control of the wheel for a moment, and the ship lurched to one side. He put out a foot to steady himself, got his grip on the wheel back and righted her.
“Rrrr,” he growled.
“What happened?” said the pup, who had run over to see what was going on.
“I was just reminding Captain Sagar here not to overstep his bounds and to speak respectfully in the presence of a princess. Everything is fine now.”
Ryn frowned up at Sagar, as if to say ‘Control yourself.’
Sagar wanted to blast the boy with a barrage of air, but he bit back his spellword. He was trying to get on better with Ryn. Particularly after that incident when the boy had horribly burned his face. Things would probably go better on this Quest if they could get on with each other.
Why am I on this stupid Quest again, anyway?
Oh yeah, that’s right. To see if I can get laid with the princess and/or the engineer woman. That’s not going too well so far… But also because I’m going to get paid a tonne of gold for going on it. And because I don’t have anything better to do.
And I suppose that saving the whole of Mid from the Emperor of Morekemia is a relatively worthwhile thing to do as well...
“Sagar,” Ryn called, “now we’re all awake, shall we have some breakfast?”
Sagar blinked, shaken out of his rare moment of self-reflection.
“Whatever,” he said. He turned to the speaking tube that rose out of the floor nearby and put his mouth in front of it. “Woman, it’s time for breakfast! Come on up, and bring some waybread with you from the hold while you’re at it!”
“I’m coming, but you can get your own damn waybread!” Elrann’s voice hollered back at him through the speaking tube. “Pilot, not captain, remember?”
“Rrrr,” growled Sagar as he locked the ship’s wheel in place with its mechanism and stomped off to go and find some food.
*
The open sky, wind caressing his skin, glimpses of cloud rushing past below.
Cid hated flying.
He had hated it when he had been part of his previous adventuring party years ago, and he hated it now. The back of his throat was moist, and he kept having to swallow, worried that he would be sick at any moment. Butterflies not only fluttered but crashed into each other in his stomach. He wished he knew a spell to cure him of his nausea. If there was one he hadn’t discovered it yet. Esuna didn’t work.
He hated flying, but he knew it was a necessary evil. It was the fastest way to get where they needed to go.
He tore a chunk of waybread from the communal plate that lay in the middle of them where they all sat in the centre of the main deck and tried to pay attention to what the young ‘uns were saying.
Sagar was speaking. “What were you three yammering about up there at the front of the ship for so long, anyway?”
Cid’s eyelids fluttered, and he tried to make it look like it was from offense and not from queasiness. “If you must know, we were talking to young man Vish here about his poppy addiction.”
“Ah, that old chestnut again,” scoffed Sagar. “What about it? You ready to come off the scum yet, scumsucker?”
Vish said nothing. He didn’t even favour the pirate with a look.
“As a matter of fact,” Cid said, “he is. He had a double hit recently and he’s still feeling some of the negative after-effects. The headache, the mind fog, the despair... He says he’s ready to start spacing out the hits for longer, and perhaps to stop them completely.”
“Ha!” said Sagar. “I’ll believe that when I see it!”
Now Vish did look at Sagar and his eyes slitted to tight grey lines behind his face covering.
“Alright team, so what’s the plan?” said Ryn, changing the subject.
Cid was grateful the boy was taking charge. Someone needed to lead this group, and Cid judged Ryn was the one to do it. Though the boy would have competition from his Grandaughter and the young pirate. And true, each of the two of them were good leader material, too. His Granddaughter was brave, fierce and knowledgeable. But she was also impetuous and condescending and had a tendency to fly off the handle. And the pirate was highly skilled with his blades and wind-projection, not to mention at piloting the ship, and he seemed to have a lot of adventuring experience. But he was also completely in this for his own personal gain, at least at this point in their Quest.
Cid himself was not the one to lead. That had not gone well for him before. The One wanted him here just to guide, to advise, to help, this time, he was sure.
“Well,” said Nuthea at length, “it will take us about another four days’ flying to reach Farr.”
“Four days!” said Sagar. “That’s ages!”
“Well, yes, it is a long way away.”
“We’ll have all killed each other by then!”
Vish looked at Sagar again, Cid noted.
“Let us hope not,” said Nuthea.
Cid really hoped not. If this party was to succeed where his previous one had failed, they would need to all get along with one another. He couldn’t face a repeat of what had happened the last time he had been part of a group trying to gather all the Jewels together…
“Actually,” Nuthea continued, “we will get to Farr a bit before then, but Shun Pei is in the extreme east of Farr, so it will be four days before we get there.”
“And what will we do when we get there?” asked Ryn.
“We will land Wanderlust and seek an audience with the Governor of Farr, who resides in Shun Pei. He should know where the Earth Emerald is kept.”
“That’s your plan?” said Elrann. A favourite question of hers. “Just walk in and ask for the shiny rock?”
“Yes. I am sure that once I explain the situation–that the Emperor of Morekemia is seeking the Jewels and that we are collecting them to keep them safe–the Governor will see that the most reasonable course of action is to entrust the Jewel to us.”
“Sorry, princess girl,” said Elrann, “but that’s just wishful thinking. I’ve been to Farr. The Farrians are a proud, stubborn, reserved sort of people. They ain’t going to give ya the rock just because ya march right in and ask for it.”
Cid stroked his beard. He was, of course, inclined to agree. There was no way that the Farrians were going to hand them the Jewel just because they walked in and asked for it. But don’t say that. Let them work things out for themselves. Guide, don’t lead. Influence, don’t control. It’s the only way they’ll end up doing the things they need to do.
“Well, we’ve got to at least try,” said Nuthea. “It’s the only other Jewel that we know about at the moment. We’ve got to make sure that it’s safe.”
“What makes you think that if the Farrians have it it isn’t safe already?” asked Ryn.
“Perhaps it is, but then we can at least warn them that the Empire might be coming for it. And…” Nuthea turned to Cid. “Grandfather, when it comes to the elemental ‘strengths and weaknesses’ you discovered, how does earth interact with fire?”
Cid searched his memory, glad of the distraction from his skysickness. “Hmmm. If I recall correctly, we can’t know for sure yet, but it seems likely that earth-aligned people would be either partially or highly vulnerable to fire attacks. Fire consumes and ravages the earth, after all. And fire burns up wood, leaves, grass, which are all associated with the element of earth.”
“There we are,” Nuthea said conclusively, folding her arms. “We may have the Fire Ruby now, but we don’t know if there are any remaining Imperial soldiers or officers who still retain any fire affinity from it. If there are, then they will be dangerous to any earth-aligned Farrians. I’ve made up my mind. The Earth Emerald will be much safer with us than remaining with them, as is the case for the Fire Ruby and the Lightning Crystal.” She fingered the glittering crystal that hung on the chain about her neck.
Cid agreed. He was utterly convinced that their task from the One was not only to find the Jewels, but to gather them together. The scriptures, his dreams, and his own sense of inner direction from the One all confirmed this to him. He was convinced that the Emperor of Morekemia was going to rise up to become a threat to the whole world and that the Jewels needed to be gathered together in order for him to be stopped. But don’t say that. Just guide, advise, gently encourage. Nothing too forceful. No matter that these weren’t the only things he was convinced of, either…
“There’s just one thing I want to ask,” said Ryn. “The same thing came up at your Council at Orma.”
Uh-oh, thought Cid.
“Yes?” invited Nuthea.
“I know we’re a long way off from this, as there are twelve jewels and we only have two of them–”
“--two and a bit,” interrupted Sagar, holding up his white fragment of the Wind Shell on its necklace.
“Right...two and a bit. So I know we’re a long way off, but let’s say, down the line, we do succeed in this crazy ‘Quest’ to gather all of the Primeval Jewels together. What then? You say there’s a legend which says that whoever does this will be granted unbelievable power. What would we do with that?”
The boy is clever, thought Cid. Definitely leader material.
“I know what I’d do…” said Sagar, licking his lips and getting a far-off look.
“That doesn’t matter at this stage,” said Nuthea. “The important thing at this stage is simply that we gather the Jewels together to keep them safe from the Emperor.”
“I know,” said Ryn, “but...you know…what if we actually manage it? What could we do with the Jewels? Do you think...do you think they would be powerful enough to do something like...bring people back from the dead?”
Ryn’s question stunned the whole group into temporary uncharacteristic silence. Even Sagar didn’t mock it.
Nuthea looked over at Cid again, deferring to him. “Grandfather?”
All eyes were on him.
Cid’s mind recoiled from what he was convinced he had worked out about the Jewels. He couldn’t even let himself think about it, let alone tell the young ‘uns about it. He spoke slowly and as plainly as he could, selecting his words with great care.
“Of course, nobody has yet actually succeeded in gathering all of the Jewels together, as far as we know. So I don’t know for certain. But the Jewels were made by the One, the Creator of Life itself. So it seems possible to me that, if the One made them, they could grant the power to restore life.”
Sagar groaned. “Urgh. There you go with your ‘One’ stuff again. What a load of nonsense.”
The pirate’s atheism was irksome, but not intolerable. Cid must tolerate it. It was also understandable, given what Cid knew of his life, but Sagar didn’t know what he knew.
“How do you even know this ‘legend’ about the Jewels is true, anyway?” Sagar said. “I mean, sure, there are Jewels and they do give people special elemental powers, I’ll grant you that much, but how do you know they were made by a ‘One’ and that something wacky will happen if you put them all together? Where does this legend come from, anyway?”
“It comes from earliest time, time before memory,” said Cid. “It comes from the earliest humans who saw the One face to face and walked with him at the Making of Mid. It comes from a time before writing and reading were invented, but the legend was passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, and when writing was invented, it was set down.”
“Where?” asked Ryn.
“Well,” Nuthea joined in. “There are a number of different texts. We have one in Orma, known as the Book of the Crystal, because it was kept with the Lightning Crystal.” She touched the Jewel at her chest again. “They are all copies of the originals, which have long been lost, but they were copied faithfully.”
“Oh,” said Sagar, “well that’s very convenient, isn’t it? How do you know that they were copied faithfully, and things weren’t changed?”
Cid took over again. “Because the copies all ended up in different places, many a long way away from each other, but they all say the same thing. Or essentially the same thing, with only minor divergences. I have seen many of them on my travels. There are texts in Manolia, in Imfis, in Umbar, in Farr…”
“Say what, pops?!” butted in Elrann. “You’ve been to Farr before as well?!”
“Yes.”
“Well why didn’t ya say so?”
Cid shrugged. “I hadn’t seen it necessary to mention it.” Guide, don’t lead.
“Alright, alright,” said Sagar, “so these copies of Oneist texts that are supposedly scattered around the place. What does this legend about the Jewels written down in them actually say?”
Cid recited the scripture he knew best:
“Twelve Jewels there are
For the Twelve Peoples of Mid:
Ruby, Crystal, Sapphire,
Emerald, Onyx, Diamond,
Beryl, Meteorite,
Chrysolite, Chrysoprase,
Pearl and Carnelain
Whenever they are gathered together,
The power of the One will be there,
To save Mid in her greatest hour of need.”
For a moment, only the rush of wind and the hum of Wanderlust’s turbines.
“What a load of hokey,” said Sagar.
Cid smiled at him. The boy would come to see in time.
His Granddaughter was not so accommodating. “Captain Sagar, you are being very rude. The legend has been passed down for generations. What is ‘hokey’ about it?”
“Well for a start, it only mentions eleven Jewels. Didn’t you spot that? Some ‘prophecy’. ‘The One’ can’t even count properly!”
“That’s easy to address,” said Granddaughter, holding her head up. “The twelfth Jewel is for the element of Void. The texts list the twelve elements elsewhere, and it’s not difficult to figure out there must be a twelfth Void Jewel. Just because they don’t mention it explicitly doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
“What about ‘Stone’?” said Ryn. “That isn’t even a Jewel?”
“Yes,” said Nuthea, “not a lot is known about the Nature Stone either, but the texts do mention it. It may be that it is another kind of jewel, since jewels are kinds of stones, after all.”
“Well it’s still nonsense,” said Sagar. “There ain’t no ‘One’ who made the Jewels. They are just part of nature, a quirk of Mid. All this stuff about a One and gathering the Jewels together is just stories that people made up to try to explain things they don’t understand. One day we’ll be able to explain it properly.”
Nuthea’s jaw tightened and her eyes grew in size. “Captain Sagar—” she began, but for once Cid thought it was time to intervene.
“Granddaughter,” he said gently, “there is no use in arguing further. We have our gamble on what we believe is true, and young Sagar has his. In the end, either we will turn out to be right in our beliefs, or he will. And before the end of our Quest, he may change what he believes too, though not likely through argument. Or he may not.”
“Whatever,” said Sagar. “You know what? So long as I get paid, I don’t really care.”
The party got on with their breakfast, drawing ever closer to Farr.
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