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Joy's idea of privacy had always been - at least since powering up - to be in the open as much as possible. This was not, perhaps, the same idea that Lyndin had, and so she had after some consideration split the difference when proposing a place for them to speak together.

At some point the little neighborhood spread out at the bottom of the hill had been a brand new one, full of promise and community projects, until surburban rot had set in. It now clung sadly to its more optimistic roots, sagging away from them as ivy sags away from the crumbling wall it has itself slowly torn to the ground, and even half the buildings below had long-worn For Sale signs in the front lawns, let alone here, on their little perch where the development had never quite reached its initial plans.

One of those optimistic roots was an abandoned community garden, complete with its tiny and ramshackle shed, now long disused and bereft of tools. She sat on a stack of tires in the lee of one wall, that had at one time been used to mark out little beds of flowers and herbs: looking quite queenly and majestic despite her perch and the fact that she was eating cherries out of a plastic bag, kicking her spurred heels gently to and fro in the shadows that were especially deep between the shed and the nearby treeline. Open enough to see anyone approaching; hopefully secure enough to make her liaison feel comfortable.

The mint had been a problem, she observed, blankly running her eyes over the rampant overgrowth, but surprisingly so had the rosemary, which had completely taken over a corner and turned it into a kind of fragrant thicket which further made the place hostile to trespassing or, indeed, to legitimate visitors.

She had no idea what to expect. Lysanna especially had given her mixed ideas of the Commodore. But he had made the time for her, which had to be blunt somewhat surprised her. Perhaps Rhysi had given him an inaccurate idea of her claims to attention. She was a little annoyed by her own sudden nerves.

Lysanna and Rhysi had taught her not to expect the tell-tale ping of an approaching energy signature, but she looked up at a little sound that, had she not been on alert, might have escaped her notice entirely.

"Haven't kept me waiting at all," she answered cheerfully, hesitating before sticking out a hand to shake. Lysanna, after all, had been willing to shake her hand. Perhaps it was the politest option available to her. "Thank you so much for your time. I know you're very busy. Rhysi was very kind and helpful to me - in getting this message to you - and in, you know." She had to think for a second. "Being Rhysi," she decided.

Another pause ensued. She had, of course, somewhat sorted out what she wanted to say beforehand. But all the same, it's easier to do such things in the uninterrupted and easy silence of your own head than in the flesh.

“I would just like to say, first of all, that I have heard a lot recently about your goals here on Earth, and I respect and admire both you and your family here. I cannot imagine the pressure you are under, and how much resilience it must take to keep going in the face of everything. And I am, of course, grateful to you. We all must be.” She said this simply, without flattery or indulgent simpering, offering her gratitude up as the plain fact that it was. It was easier to say thank you to Lyndin, who seemed a little aloof from petty humanity in a way that Almadel hadn't, whether the idea was accurate or not.

Besides, she had gone in with the assumption that Almadel was a conman. It was a little harder to know what Lyndin was.

“I wish you every success. I hope you save your world, like you helped save ours. And I wanted to talk to you because I am trying to save a very, very tiny and insignificant world myself - the world for just one person, you know. It’s not as vital or anywhere near as demanding and it may be futile in the ways that I have faith your own endeavors can’t be. I believe that you will save your world, and I don’t mean to distract you from that - I only want to ask you for a little information that I think might help in saving mine. His. And I am here to offer what information I might give in return, although I believe that it isn't much - or maybe anything.”

Well, now for it. "I do not know how much you know of a knight's Wonders - or the ghosts that some of them house. I imagine you must know a great deal. I imagine more than me, if I'm being honest," she added bluntly. "But I know that you must know a lot about the Hollow - about the energy that was involved in that entire mess. The way those things intersected at that time is - of interest to me."

It was difficult to say aloud what she had been denying saying even to herself.

Still.

“Maybe it's too much effort to expend on one life that got thrown away the first time,” she said. “But have you ever - well. I guess not. But sometimes you get handed a single life to be responsible for that you didn't ask for - I hate to compare a grown man to a stray dog, but - and it's hard to just put it aside and pretend not to care. I don't know what…”

She hesitated. “During the Hollow - after all those years of patient resignation to what sounds to me like a pretty shitty fate - something happened, and the ghost of my Wonder - Gouvernail, is his name - was able to touch the real world for a moment, during a storm. And I think in that moment it destroyed all of his peace. Because there's despair - resignation - you know? And then there's hope, and isn't hope just awful? Because you can't stop feeding it. You have a responsibility to it. And I think he thought maybe he would have a chance to - to do over some part of what he'd done wrong the first time, and live in a way he'd never let himself. But it was only a moment.

Her voice was steady, but it was clearly a struggle. “He was very bent on his work. To the exclusion of his life. And he has regrets, not for the work, but for not finding a way to live alongside it. Because what do we even fight for - what's the point of any of it? Why not just walk away? - if not to celebrate the lives we save by enjoying ours? Why fight for the sake of making more fighting?”

She was speaking very quickly now, run away with by feeling, and corrected herself. “Forgive me. I'm getting sidetracked and wasting your time. In brief, he has been tormented by hope he did not ask for into stirring up regrets he'd put to sleep centuries ago. I spoke briefly to Almadel and he said that there were stories, maybe true stories, that the Hollow can - can bring back the dead, I guess. But that's too high a cost. It could be a thousand men I loved,” she finished, the word tumbling out of her unbidden and without thinking, “and it would be too high a price to negotiate with something so awful, if you even can negotiate with it at all. I will not throw away anyone else's life just to give him a second chance at his. But I came to ask - about that energy - and whether it exists in some other way. The Cauldron or Something Else has seen fit to give him this awful immortality, and I feel like there must be some avenue to using it for good - to fix mistakes - rather than it being this prison of them, and if the door was opened once somehow, maybe there are other keys to open it again. I think even an hour - a day -

“It's not in my power to help everyone, but I have to help who I can. No one else can help him if I can't. If you know anything I could look into - any avenue at all of investigation - if you can tell me what happened during that storm, even, so I can tell him whether he needs to kill that hope as a mercy to himself -”

And then, finally, the weeks of sleep deprivation and her own unfed hope spilled over into a rare, uncharacteristic display of emotion. “Forgive me,” she repeated, her voice choked. “I'm not usually so maudlin and sentimental. I'm ashamed of myself. But if you knew him - he’s a good man,” she finished simply, with a final, brief gush of frustrated tears, almost instantly mastered.

She was silent for a long time, but it was obvious that it was only for the sake of collecting her thoughts, her eyes wandering over something unseen and contained within her own head. She had at some point procured from subspace some little trinket - nothing remarkable; a ribbon on which was tied some piece of jewelry - and she was running it between her fingers as an outlet to the restless need to move, in stark contrast to Lyndin's patient stillness.

"I don't know what 'malfunctioning' would mean in this instance," she said at last, starting there. "It doesn't always work like I want it to, but I don't think that's - some sort of glitch. I think it's just not infallible." She thought of Ekstrom, reaching slowly and with visible confusion to defy Joy's sing-song command, and surprising her with a manifestation of unforeseen willpower in someone she'd been used to thinking of as weak. "But it's hobbled, like all Knight magic seems to be. Stronger, on the Wonder, but still hobbled. I think it was different, in his time - or maybe he just had better control of it - he gets frustrated with how little it can do, sometimes." As did, apparently, Joy herself. "You ought to be able to kill a man with a bullwhip," she said. "But I couldn't even break skin with it until recently, and even now it can't do it for very long. The Code -"

She broke off, swallowing back visible disgust.

"I spoke to it, and it let me do that. Let me," she repeated, almost spitting the words. "With a lot of BS about how it's for my good that I couldn't do it sooner." She didn't need to explain how she felt about the Code: it was evident and dripping off every word. "It says that funneling too much power into a starseed at first will break it, that you have to let it grow into it, but I know it lies, so I have no reason to believe it does anything for my personal benefit. It lied to a friend of mine, and told her that was for her own good, too, as if lying is ever for anyone's good. And I don't much appreciate being conscripted unwillingly and then coddled, you know? As for the Wonder itself -"

This was more complicated. She hated that it was complicated. It would have been nice to simply shun it, as the Code had suggested she could.

"I have put a lot into it, and I've done it well," she said, without arrogance. It was a simple statement of truth. "And as far as I can tell, it's responded by doing the closest thing it can to thriving, but the process is - ongoing. Maybe it's ongoing forever. It looks a lot different than it did when I found it. It was dead, you know. Just - completely dead. Even the plants seemed kinda like they were choking on themselves. Now, sometimes, I open the door to a room that was empty and there's furniture in it, like it's waiting to receive a guest. Birds coming back - fish. Even some deer. That's sort of - that's sort of why I've been after this. Like, it keeps coming back to life around me but I can't control how it does it - every time I pray for seagulls to come back and every time there's no seagulls, so I know it’s not just purely according to my wishes - and there he is at the middle of it, dead as ever, like I'm being told I can't ever finish what I started there. Feels like I'm being made fun of."

She hesitated, again. "I know - I have met some Knights who have bonded with their Wonder - Transcended, they call it - in such a way that it changes who they are. More power; more energy. I've heard - a starseed that can't be corrupted. But you can't force it, and I don't think it's ever going to happen for me. I hate the Code too much," she said flatly, "and I'd almost rather negotiate with the ******** Hollow than with it. And I think if I bent my knee to the goddamned thing he would never forgive me, anyway. He'd be insulted by the price. So in some way, maybe, I'm always gonna be hobbled. Never going to be able to get the full strength that I could. But I'm ******** strong without the Code," she added, again not as if bragging - as if simply stating a truth. "I always have been. And it claims it doesn't care whether I hate it or not. As to whether it's been mutually beneficial for me personally -"

She spread her hands, the ribbon woven around her fingers. "I didn't ask for any of this. But forcing the place back to life is the only part I've taken any joy from. It's in the name, you know," she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. "But as for power - there are many Knights who neglect their Wonder, and they still gain power, so maybe the correlation isn't as simple as getting out what you put in. But maybe they'd have more, if they tried to be there more and nurture it. Certainly, if they achieved Transcending from it, but even beyond that. I've dug up things that were dead even in his time. Magic that they'd forgotten when he came into power there. I can sort of - sleepwalk, lucid dream, with it. I thought, at first -" and this came out in a sudden rush, as if the confession of some embarrassing sin "- that maybe I could sort of patch the gap - between him and me - because you know. Sleep is somewhere between being alive and being dead. Let him feel what it is to walk around the Garde again even in a dream - wind and water and all. But he isn’t there. But it's a magic that I found there and brought back, somehow, and I've used it, and I've helped people with it. However - there's - other magic that can bridge the gap, somehow, that has nothing to do with the Wonder. Almadel gave me an instrument that both he and I can hold but only he can play. But if what you're saying is right and I understand you, then it's not a question of bridging gaps, exactly - at least not doing only that. It’s also making the Wonder strong enough to hold him - right? But I don't know how else to make the Wonder stronger than to keep doing what I'm doing, and I'm far from the first person to be doing it. There are others with Wonders stronger than mine, by far."

And then, quietly: “Maybe the way they strengthen theirs isn't the way I care about strengthening mine, though."

The wariness with which she eyed the stone gave way a little at the idea that it had been ethically created. There had been, after all, that voluntary giving of energy during the time of the Hollow, which she had even herself contributed to.

It occurred to her that she had no reason to believe that Lyndin's definition of "ethical" might be the same as hers. But it might just as well be stronger than her own - aware, as she was, that her own system of morality had been questioned by some, and recently - and so after only a moment of reluctance, she reached out to take it, her hesitation giving way to a mild surprise. She held it in her hand with whatever trinket she had been fidgeting with, and as she examined it, a little glowing wisp emerged from somewhere within her mantle, hovering around it as if to provide light, although in truth Joy knew - as she had become acquainted with it - that it was simply jealous of her giving her attention to any small thing that was not itself. She shooed it gently away, and slipped the stone into subspace, along with the rest of what she held.

"Thank you," she said simply. "I hadn't expected more than your expertise, and I was already very much indebted to you for that. I'll do as you suggest - see if I can find more, and try this in combination with what I have already found - and I'll relay that information to you through Rhysi. Maybe I can bring Rhysi back again to help me look for those pockets of energy, if that's something she has the tools to do. I didn't show her a great deal of the Wonder at the time - she was more interested in natural resources above the ground, I think, so I didn't think to do it - but I'll ask her. I hope," she added, after a pause, "that whatever I learn - we learn - that it can be useful to you, as well."

She hesitated, compelled into a sudden and uncharacteristic confessional urge to overshare: "I have spent a lot of my life working really hard to make it look like something I want it to be. I'm going to keep doing that, but this was the first time I didn't know where to start - what direction to even face - and I appreciate you giving me that. I do hope it helps you too, but if it does or doesn't, thank you for helping me."

"Please," she said, "don't be in any hurry. I am limited in how often I can return to my Wonder, so if it needs to wait a while, or if Rhysi does, it wouldn't be any inconvenience to me. But I do appreciate the offer, and I will be glad to have Rhysi back whenever I can get her there. And I'll relay what we find back to you. I'll write it down," she added, tactfully acknowledging that this would be a better way to convey information than, probably, Rhysi's monosyllables. Or maybe not. Perhaps Rhysi's monosyllables would be better than her own excesses, if this conversation was any indication.

She paused, then, unsure if there was anything else she ought to say. But among the crowding ideas and questions there didn't seem to be any that weren't an entirely frivolous and self-centered waste of both their time, so she opted simply to repeat herself as she shook out her skirts, apparently preparing to leave.

"Thank you again," she said. "I'll do my best not to waste this opportunity."