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kajones_writing“Even though the natural Moonjumpers were the only ones who existed they still had to keep most of what they knew a secret from the fae, which meant being careful about who you spoke to.” Lucille shrugged. “It’s never easy to be something different, especially when you’re an unexpected evolution of the magic that was used to create the worlds, and being born a Moonjumper…” She shook her head. “There are going to be some people who never know what they are, simply because they don’t ever come across a door, while others will experiment to find out, because learning that you can travel to the other worlds freely is a temptation. Without the Council there is no control and due to what we know Moonjumpers can change the worlds, for better or for worse. We have done before, no matter how hard the fae tried to stop it from happening, because sometimes it’s not possible to watch things happening from a distance – and it’s hardest when you happen to have some connection to the race who are being affected.”
“Beshaki.”
Lucille nodded. “Exactly. We know the Moonjumper was either born on or connected to Beshaki and she wanted the war to end without there being any more loss of life. It made sense to her to create the barrier between the twilight race and the night race in order to make that happen, so that’s exactly what she did, even though she knew, in her position, she shouldn’t have become so involved.” Biting her lip she looked at Meriwether. “The exact same way I shouldn’t have become so involved her, but if I hadn’t things could easily have become more worse than they already were and that’s something I couldn’t let happen. Counterfeits are hard enough to deal with when they affect one world. For them to go through one of the doors to another world… imaging the damage is bad enough.
“That is why the Council accepted my argument. We might never have seen something like it happen before, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know how bad things could be if it did, and I’m certain they’re coming to realise that we might have had more of an effect on the Web than we probably should have done – taking the first rule into consideration. Fortunately they can never know for certain who did what, because there’s no way of tracing a Moonjumper when they step through one of the doors, unless that door happens to be guarded by a gargoyle.”
“Who often do exactly the opposite thing to the one that they’re supposed to, because they have come to understand the reason the Moonjumpers evolved in the first place.” Meriwether smiled. “It doesn’t matter to them who is actually stepping through the door, as long as whoever it is has a reason for doing so, and I’ve never known any Moonjumper to step through one of the doors without a reason, even though the reason might well be nothing more than ‘to explore the world I have just stepped onto’.”
“From what Quiar said I’m led to believe that the gargoyles and the worlds have been in contact for millennia, which doesn’t surprise me.”
“Including the gargoyle who eats people.”
“Apparently he only eats people who he doesn’t think should be travelling to one of the other worlds.” Lucille shrugged. “Quiar thinks I’d be fine if I stepped through one of his doors, because of what I am, but I told her it’s not something that I’m going to be trying any time soon. Not when it’s more than likely that I’ll end up dead.”
Meriwether rubbed his antler. “There have been people before who got through that door safely, so it’s entirely possible that what Quiar told you is true. Before the fae decided that the Moonjumpers were too dangerous to exist there was one, at least, I remember, who was taken to a world that he wasn’t expecting to go to, but he got there safely after an interesting conversation with the gargoyle who ate people.” He stared at the wall and Lucille knew from all of the time she had spent with him that he was thinking, so she didn’t say anything, and eventually he looked back at her. “I’m not entirely certain of who it was, although I do remember he was meant to be travelling to Quiar and ended up on Gaelom 6, and it will, like all the journeys, be recorded. Check the books between the year 196 and 200, because I’m almost certain it happened around then. The gargoyles had been created about a hundred years before, so there were plenty of stories already about that one eating people, yet he still chose that door to use.”
“Why?”
“Due to the magic that we used to create the doors it wasn’t unusual for them to change and he put his life at risk that first time to learn where that door went, because we had three that went to the same place at one point.” Meriwether shrugged. “It’s one of those things that happened during the early years that we weren’t expecting. The door itself didn’t actually lead to Gaelom 6, it led, I believe, to Beshaki, but the gargoyle wouldn’t take the Moonjumper there because he had no connection to Beshaki at all, not even a slight interest, so felt it was much better if he went to one of the Gaeloms instead.”
“Yet more signs that you had no idea what you were doing when you created the Web.”
“We did our best, Lucy, at a time when we’d all been through an experience I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy, using a magic we’d never been permitted to experiment with before, and we made mistakes because of the choices our ancestors had made.” Meriwether looked at Lucille, his eyes full of pain. “The fae are not good people, in general. Some of us try to be, but my original race is not one I would chose to be born into now, because I have learnt so much about them, and they made really bad choices. Everything we did we for our own benefit. Other races, the worlds we lived on, didn’t matter to us. We destroyed two worlds, due to our need for magic, before choosing, because it seemed the best option, to destroy any records of them. It was pure luck that we didn’t do the same when we came here.” He shook his head. “Willow appears to be doing her best to inform the fae who went with her of the choices their ancestors made with very little luck. The other fae have all made their choices and are now dealing with them as best they can.”
“How many of the fae survived the end of Kalinia?”
“Are you talking about my Kalinia or all of them?”
Lucille sighed. “Both, really, if you have an answer to give me.”
“What happened to my Kalinia was survived by just over 10% of the fae who had once lived there. Willow went to Earth, Mab came here, and two other groups went to other worlds. I know that both of those groups have survived, but I don’t know anything else about them. There are questions that even I don’t want to ask.” Meriwether rubbed his antler again. “It wasn’t until I was slightly older, when I was learning about the race I had walked away from, that I found out one of the other groups had the ability to travel through time. That was when Mab and I were waiting for the next crisis, because they kept happening, so any little bit of time we had she made sure to pass on what she knew of our people to me, as I was younger and would, in the future, be able to pass on what I had learnt to others.
“She told me that their King had come to her, to tell her that Kalinia was fading, but she wouldn’t accept what he was saying. He told her that her only option would be to flee, because it was too late to change the future of our world, although he was going to do his best to change the future of Kalinia…” Meriwether shook his head. “At the time she had no idea what he was talking about. There being more than one Kalinia wasn’t something she had ever contemplated before and it wasn’t until she talking to Emrys about the other Athares that she realised what the King was talking about. It wasn’t something she’d had a reason to think about before, not when she was Queen of the Thirteen Families and had enough to do without thinking about what her counterpart might be doing on another Kalinia or if even existed on that world. Really it wasn’t something any of us had thought about, even when we first started creating the Web, until Emrys sat with us and told us everything that he knew about the Webs.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.
