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[sterngaze]

Liem Talbott

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Liem's mindscape is dark; quiet; contemplative. Any feelings or sensations that Liem doesn't intentionally project himself seem distant, as though echoing from a far-off room. Following any given sense to its source is bafflingly difficult.

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[sterngaze]

[Liem had gone to search for Manon’s shard at Yima’s behest, and he hadn’t thought anything of bringing it back to her at the time, even though her warning about its possible corruption had seemed odd. Why would he hesitate to bring back a Zenith shard to its faction of origin? Surely that was the safest place for it.

But now, he isn’t so sure. Manon had been a Zenith shard-bearer, and yet he had run to Meridian. Why? And what had happened between then and when they’d encountered him in Alenroux to make him end up there, in the state they’d found him? There might be a good reason why he hadn’t stayed in Meridian after all. Or he might simply have left to avoid harming anyone else because of his Discord.

Either way, it’s one of the only leads they currently have.]

He did, [Liem agrees.]

The Tribune might know more. If we brought the shard to him, perhaps he could be convinced to tell us.

[Liem lets his hands rest in his lap, leaning back against the Tree’s roots as he ponders.]

Lady Yima won’t be pleased when she finds out. But… I don’t think I was going to offer her my service again, in any case.

[warmare]

[So Liem heard it, too.

There were still too many things left unknown. No matter how much she turns them over in her head, even if she were a smarter, more educated woman familiar with this place… surely it still wouldn’t be enough? Perhaps she can cease blaming herself.

For a moment… she lets her fingers quest into the folds of the pelt fastened around her “waist”, cautiously pressing her fingertips to the shard there… but it is cold and dormant to her touch, and it does not speak to her. Does not tel her the right answer.

So between the two… with what limited information they had “from” the man himself…]

Then let us see what he has to say.

[This Tribune, Cyrus, who had placed in her hand a bead that seemed to show a glimpse of her world. She cannot say that she trusts him, because she doesn’t trust any of the people in this place, but between the two…]

I cannot trust that woman, Yima.

[And she has struggled to articulate why, to those who asked, because she is loathe to admit things about herself and her past to people she considers strangers. But this man… they had spoken in Venera of things she hadn’t been so forthcoming with others about. Of faith. Of brothers and sisters. Perhaps, if he recalled some of the chaotic memories she’d unintentionally made him privy to, in those stars so long ago-]

When she touched me it felt… familiar, somehow. Her embrace like… like a mother’s.

[Most people would likely take comfort in that. She hadn’t been able to do anything but, in the actual moment, sinking into that woman’s arms. But now, when she thinks of it… there is only mistrust and a strange sort of horror in her eye. Because-]

But my dam was Armless.

[So where had those emotions come from? Where could that familiarity and feeling of comfort come from… If not placed in her hearts by someone else?]

[sterngaze]

[Liem isn’t surprised to hear Hayame voice distrust of Yima, but the reason she raises is different from anything he would have guessed. His own interactions with Zenith’s leader had been pleasant enough, but she hadn’t ever tried to touch him the way Hayame describes. Perhaps he hadn’t been as badly affected by his arrival to Kenos as some, though; by the time he’d first spoken with her, although he’d still been shaky, he’d been composed enough that an embrace would have seemed a little unwarranted, even from one such as her.

He is silent for a moment, absorbing the implications of Hayame’s admission. It is strange that she would find the embrace motherly, without a reference of her own to base such a feeling off of. He also finds it hard to imagine the Hayame he’s known finding comfort in anyone’s arms, motherly or not. He can’t remember her ever letting anyone touch her without some dire reason, at least not in his presence.]

That is unusual, [he says finally. It might not be anything supernatural, but he has to admit it does seem strange.] She was a mother, I think. She communed with me when I first arrived, and it seemed that she’d been longing for a child she lost. Perhaps that longing turned to magic, after enough time.

[Such things could happen in Horos, he’d heard, at least to shard-bearers. Perhaps it is the same here as well.]

She said she wanted me to make my own choice; well, I don’t know what kind of world she intends to create, but I know I already promised myself to the one I left behind.

[warmare]

[Admittedly, they would find many differences in the ways in which they’d spoken to the woman who called herself Yima. Hayame had confronted her the very first thing she did after awaking from the pods, rejecting a Kenoma’s (now Zenith’s) offer of help and medical treatment to instead push towards the one in the room who seemed to be in charge, demanding the release of death over another foreign world and bewildering “mission”-

And that woman had embraced her when she stumbled and collapsed with weakness, held her close like a mother would… and most unforgivably… made her feel for a brief moment as if she was the sort of woman who was familiar with a mother’s love. Liem says it’s unusual, but-]

It’s impossible.

[On this, she seems adamantly sure. There is no way she could have felt that emotion by herself. Even if she were so weak as to crave a maternal warmth in her weakness, to seek what she could only assume that was supposed to feel like… there was know way she would know. She’d been taken from her Armless dam the moment she’d tumbled into the hay. They’d put her on the woman’s chest for feedings, at first, but then it was the bottle, and since then she was raised amongst other armed jinba and their grooms. The only time she’d seen the woman was from a distance, and then… she had only felt disgust.

She would never be so weak, so swaybacked, so filthy, so pitiful. She would be a warrior-

One who couldn’t ever feel a sense of familiarity when embraced by a mother. Yet that is what she’d had experienced in Yima’s arms, and that same emotion which had brought many to Zenith’s side… drove Hayame away, instead. And even if that alone did not… Hayame and Liem are united by one more thread.]

I do not want her new world. I have duties I must see through in my own.

[Even if that duty is to die.]