Wilder padded into the crystal hut, pushing past the makeshift curtain she'd set up, into the warmly-lit interior that she'd come to know as home. She glanced, instinctively, towards the wall where three chrysalis were growing, warmth spreading through her heart. She would protect them - she would do right for them, as best she could. She promised herself, and them - you will live. You will be happy. And this...perhaps this would help.

She sat down in her nest, curling herself in comfortably, before she removed the satchet from around her neck. She opened the pouch and out tumbled all of her most precious treasures, as well as the new one she had collected from the swamps in Hydra. The painted stones from Let sat before her, the petalite, and the feathershard. The last was what she focused on now.

Carefully lifting it in her paw, she raised it. And cast magic forward to listen to its tenor. In the same way that she would check reflexively for Order or Chaos, she checked for what this was. Different? Or of what they were used to...?

@Wilder would feel a strange feedback, unknown and strange to her: this radiation was not Order, Disorder, or Natural Order. Its name she did not know but it was not a bad feedback. Like the muffled sounds of voices underwater, it bubbled in her mind but was ultimately out of reach. It was not so foreign that it was entirely new. A part of her would feel comfortable with this feedback, it was familiar, it was her and it was not her. Cosmic clouds of pink-purple-gold mimicked the colors of the feathershard in her mind's eye, then danced with the rainbow-turquoise of Natural Order briefly before fading entirely, to suggest they worked in tandem, at least regarding Wilder.

But by itself, she would not know its name from her spell alone.

She held the feathershard quietly then, pondering what she had felt. She had been right - this was different. This was something else, something beyond Chaos and Order and the magic of the Skystone Spire. It made her feel warm and dizzy, like she was in Tamulus's lap again before his crackling fire. It was comforting and familiar, but also strange and alien. She didn't know what to make of it for a moment, but then a sense of trust. It was good - from what she had experienced, at least. It had saved them from a false Paradise. It had known them. She remembered the meteor and the faint shape of the owl. She closed her eyes and remembered, a long time ago, the wishing stone. It had felt...similar, hadn't it? At least, the concept of wishing and being granted those things was similar. It was good. It had to be. Or else this was a gamble with a dangerous entity - the caves had had enough of those. She had had enough.

Perhaps one more.

As she set the shard down and prepared her wish at last, she tried to think of the way to word it. To be honest, there really wasn't a way to word it that was simple. A single line of "i wish for" whatever wouldn't suffice. It was an intent, grown for memories and experiences and a will to do good.

She took a deep breath and pulled the shard in close. "I'm going to wish now. But you have to listen carefully." Hopefully, the pure intent would get across and that would do. She didn't know if it was listening, if it could listen at all, if someone else was listening, she wasn't sure, but she tried. "I keep seeing a lot of bad things happen here. Chaos and Order always fighting each other and catching the innocent between their fights. Gembound die for no reason, they're hurt for nothing. We live over and over again, forgotten a thousand times only to live again and suffer more. It's not fair. I want to help, but I'm just one gembound. I'm just...I'm just a little cat with a little voice and little powers." She realized, as she looked up towards the baubled lights strung below the ceiling of her home, that she was crying. "And I know that we're small, so small, and so far away from you. I saw the sky and all the stars, I saw the sun and that huge planet and I know there's so many things bigger then us. But...we're here. We exist. We live and we love and we die. We matter too, even in the grand scheme of things, because we're alive."

She reached up a paw to wipe away the tears and took a breath. "So...I wish...that you were here with us in some way, too. More then you are. Because we could use you here, your wishes and your goodness and your life. If you need it, I'll be...I'll be what you need me to be. A conduit or a messenger or anything. But only if you can, if it won't hurt. I don't want to make anything worse then it already is." She remembered the petalite and the vision, how anyone else that hadn't seen it would have passed the crystal on, to be destroyed, for the memory of that beautiful love to be lost forever. She remembered the Vaa, that vast beauty they would never see. She remembered the cruelty of Order in her mind, forcing her to do evil in its name. All the words of Tamulus - Let is dying.

It wasn't fair. She wished it could be better then this. "There has to be a way to make things better then this." Her last words were a whisper, a plea, no longer able to form her thoughts into words, leaving the rest to her intent and the interpretation of whatever god or entity was listening, if there was any at all.

As Wilder finished her plea, her consciousness drifted. She would come to realize she was cradled in a flowering wisteria tree, nestled on all sides by a wildflower meadow that seemed to stretch the expanse of the vision and into the horizon. Pink-purple clouds shifted through the meadow, glimmering with sheens of gold, as if nebulas had reached down from the dim lilac sky and come to rest on the breeze. It seemed to be a time between twilight and night, with a crescent moon hanging lazily in the distant sky.

In the tree with Wilder was a barn owl, its yellow eyes searching the small cat with awe, love, and sadness as if it were truly listening to her words. Everything now, and everything to follow, was all part of how Wilder's wish had manifested, including the vision and the owl.

"I am here," spoke a warm, feminine voice, ethereal and drifting across the breeze in a collection of whispers. It was not coming from the owl but from everywhere. "Without me, your stone would not have given life to you; and this is true for all of you. It is my magic that gives you life." The owl shifted its wings and looked toward the horizon. "But I cannot be there more than that. I have tried, from my manifestations to reaching you through the cloaked one, and I will continue to do as much as possible but I cannot be there. Would that I could, child. I am bound to Earth: it is my charge, my duty, my ward. My womb and my tomb," continued the voice, its edges soft and somber. "And I will die here again. I will be reborn here again."

Yellow eyes focused back on Wilder. "Just like you. And know that no things are only good, and no things are only bad. They are both, they must be. It is the balance of things, benefits come at a cost, and costs afford benefits."

The meadow below them wavered and from their tree they viewed several parallel visions: good things, good deeds, karma lending her hand; bad things, unsavory deeds, karma wielding a knife. Some Wilder would recognize, such as the large creature of the swamp sacrificing itself for the smaller of the two—cost and benefit—and some she would not know. But they all suggested the same theme, they all carried the same weight: cost, benefit... benefit, cost.

"I am neither good nor bad. I cannot say something won't hurt. I cannot deny that you have put your intent into your plea. My magic causes both madness—the cost—and the act of intention—the benefit. It is my curse, too."

Another shift in the vision:

An olive-skinned man with short, black hair was shivering and seething as he held his hands out to heal the wound of another—a stranger. He turned away to retch, avoiding any mess on his grey and blue tracksuit.

"Not now Lárus, we have to keep moving!" barked a voice. A similar-looking woman stood beside him in a matching tracksuit, her long hair pulled back into a ponytail. Blue eyes cut like ice through the smoke that enveloped them.

"I can't help it, Siberian," he said through gritted teeth, toxic green eyes squinting against the acrid air.

Above them the sky shimmered pink, and if Wilder could focus long enough on it, a meteor bristling with fire was hurtling down toward them.

"A curse," sang a third voice, her blonde-white hair and milky eyes staring straight through all of them and up toward the meteor. "She laughs in her mansion of brimstone and blood."

"He had only wanted to heal his sister and his wife," came the ethereal voice once again, and though singular, it reached out to Wilder as it if were several different hands grasping for attention. Soft and gentle, but timed just off of one another. "But in his plight for healing magic, he had been driven mad, compelled to heal all that may need it."

The owl's focus was steady on Wilder as the visions faded and the wildflower meadow drifted sleepily back as if it had never gone. In an outreach of empathy, sadness grips them both, and Wilder may understand this as the magic she wished upon feeling sad for her. And truly, it was saddened: it was autonomous but it was not without understanding. It was to act on will and intention and Wilder's intent had been clear:

CONDUIT.

Conduit, messenger; beholder of burden. Wilder would become Enlightened as a follower of Hume. The owl reached forward with a wing, touching the tip of its longest feathers to Wilder's stone. Were she to inspect it later, she would find it shimmering with cosmic gold beneath the surface, like fingers of smoky nebula swirling within.

At the touch, Wilder was awake once again in her den and the warm, baubled lights flickered before again being steady. The feathershard had vanished from between her paws, leaving cosmic gold dust as the only suggestion that it ever existed there in the first place. While she may not feel it quite yet, she had truly been Enlightened: Wilder would be compelled to help others, to do good as well enough as she was able, even if the one she may do good for would not deserve it, even if she had to sacrifice the things close to her.

But she was not without aid. In the back of her mind sat the inkling of an idea, the warm and gentle voice that she had heard in the vision: Wish, beholder of burden; wish upon my wings. We are all creatures of the stars.

Briefly, the vision of an owl constellation glimmered in her mind and she would know its name: Noctua.

We live over and over again, forgotten a thousand times only to live again... I have been forgotten before, too, but am eternally reborn.

@Wilder obtains limited Wish magic in which she can act on intent in a way that benefits herself or others once per cycle. This can be expressed as a re-try on a failure, healing someone, creating something, etc. Ultimately the nature of the wish depends on the situation and how Wilder engages it; the wish can succeed or fail depending on circumstances and should be submitted via Game Master Request.

Madness: Wilder's madness is not time-based but situation-based. If she encounters a situation in which she feels like she must act, to do the right thing in whatever way is presented, she MUST do it, compelled by the urgency to do so lest she start to feel the madness burning at the edges of her mind. Repeatedly ignoring opportunities to help will spiral Wilder into full madness where she may revert to chrysalis but never truly be cured.

Wilder's eyes slowly slid close and she calmed into the wish, into the magic that briefly took her somewhere else. When she opened her eyes, within the wisteria tree, she immediately saw Her. And all the world, so beautiful as it was, was nowhere near as beautiful as she. The cat purred, not afraid, feeling a little sleepy. "Hello," she chirped, but said nothing as as Hume began to speak. She listened...and she was saddened. For herself, that she had somehow found a wish that was impossible, and for Hume, stuck somewhere else where she could not reach her creations (were they her creations? Or simply touched by Her? Wilder didn't truly understand - at least, not now, in this dream-like state).

She listened, she watched, and she tried to understand. Despite it pulling at her heart, her internal pain striking like poison in her veins, the desperate want for things to be right and okay protesting loudly. She frowned and shifted, ears tilting back. "But...there is so much...bad. Too much. What good comes out of it? What...reward comes out of needless destruction?" But then she saw the two in the swamp. Death so that one may live. A broken heart, the pain of loss, so that this one could survive another day and learn to love all over again. She thought of a forest fire, and the beauty that would grow in its wake. Of how she, herself, had been pulled to the surface, tormented, terrified, but had ultimately come back awakened, with knowledge, eyes open.

Benefit, cost. It all was a circle. Over and over again. She just didn't see it until now.

But you are good. Because you care. There is a cost, there always is, but at least you care. She didn't say it out loud - her tongue felt tied and a lump in her throat from the emotions of this meeting held any words before they were formed.

She felt the sadness, weighing heavily. And as Hume reached to touch her gently, as the magic gripped her and she understood what it imparted in her, what she was accepting, she purred again. You don't have to be sad, she whispered back to it, voice softly drifting through the air around her. This is okay. This is enough. As the feather brushed against her stone, she leaned into the touch, for the brief moment that they were connected.

And then she was awake again and there was nothing but dust between her paws and the baubles above her. For a moment, everything seemed strange, in shades of pink and gold, before they settled. Her eyes slid closed again and she listened to the last of Hume's voice, the echo that was slowly drifting away. Perhaps she would never hear it again, as she would never hear Tamulus's voice or see the sky again with her own eyes. She relished that last bit of Her, held it close to her heart, and accepted the burden she was promised.

"Thank you," she purred, even though she didn't fully understand. But that was okay. "I will not forget you." A promise she knew she couldn't keep. She would not live forever. Perhaps she'd be reborn, a new body and new memories. Without Hume. But if there was any power in her, she would not forget as long as she lived. She had wished for it and now she was Hers.

She breathed deeply and curled into herself, her mind and heart full, the voice echoing in her consciousness as she drifted into sleep, dreaming of pink skies and meteors and wishes fulfilled.

*exit