‘Weeks later,’ Aelyn Meah said, after I asked her when she became aware of what she had done. ‘It consumed me once I realized it. I saw it not just in my dreams, but in my moments of solitude. At night, I would see the storm giant I created tearing Yeflam apart. In the middle of the day, I would see the waves rise to crash into the pillars. But then my family . . .’ She paused on the word. ‘But then the Keepers,’ she resumed, the change well noted, ‘would reach me. They would pull me down from the sky roughly and sedate me.’
She fell silent. She would often pause while we talked, to gather her thoughts. What she said was important to her, even though she knew that very few people would read what I wrote. Histories threaded through the hold of my ship in Leviathan’s End, but few people came to read them.
‘I tried to tell myself that I was not responsible for what I had done,’ she said. ‘I was well aware by then of the extent of Kaqua’s control over the Keepers and me. But it was hard. When I woke in the Mountains of Ger he was beside me. In those weeks where I was consumed by my power, he cared for me. He made sure I did not hurt myself. He fed me. He changed my clothes and washed me. He was so much the friend he had always been that I fell easily into relying upon him. When I began to tell myself that I was not responsible, that it was in fact his fault, I would be filled with such self-loathing that I would consider killing myself. I tried more than once.
‘Kaqua was always there to stop me, of course.’
—Onaedo, Histories, Year 1029