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The God waited patiently for the striped child to pick free her thoughts from the rubble of her emotional experience. He had - quite literally - all the time in the world. The experiences he had placed upon her shoulders were not easy to traverse, but they had been a necessary difficulty when it came to her personal growth. He could not gift her with the magic she sought until he knew she understood the nuances of the power she would be wielding.
That her experiences had been tied with pain was not something he had intended, but fate had a funny way of underscoring the quests he often sent his disciples on. Whatever hand she had played in Maren's journey, he hoped that it had emphasized the qualities he'd wanted her to learn instead of leading her dangerously astray as some of his flock had been.
When at last she spoke, it was in a torrent of lilting words and stumbling, emotional confessions. Many had experienced quite the same reaction at his shrine before her, but it had almost always been beneficial to them in the end. And so he waited out her report, the answers she delivered and the adventure she began to outline through use of her words. He could easily peer into her mind to retrieve them himself, but what was important was how she perceived the events that had occurred. Had she learned the lesson he'd sought to teach her?
"You still have much to learn," he noted kindly, voice like shifting, rumbling earth but with a paternal softness that he hoped would put her at ease. Clearly the experience had a profound effect on her. "Blindness does bring a fragility to the life you lead. But overcoming it also takes quite a large amount of courage, and bravery. Those who were blinded in life and found it to be permanent? Those who were born as such, and will never perceive the world in the way you do? They lived with the effects far longer than you did on your quest. If you had, perhaps that strength you feel you missed out on would have come in time." He placed the scenarios before her gently, trying to expand her worldview, show her that blindness did not always mean fragility. That it did not mean you were broken, or incomplete in some way.
"The power you seek is a double-edged sword, Maren. There are many things a soul would wish to not see, and you can provide that. Just as a mother would hope to shield their child's eyes from the evil of the world, so too can you preserve innocence and calm the frightened." Whether that was what she sought the magic for or not was another, far more convoluted question. One that was dependent upon Maren's personality and beliefs, and one that she would have to answer on her own in time.
"But you also wield a power that - as the blindness made you feel breakable - can cause others to feel the same way. You must never forget what you are capable of, and always remember how this experience made you feel, for you are forcing someone else into that exact scenario." But she had done as he had bid her, and quite successfully. Her emotional turmoil may seem to be a burden to her as she stood nervously before him, but that discordance in her soul would keep her firmly on the path of control and consideration once the magic was in her possession.
The skies roiled above them, brilliantly colored clouds appearing in the dawn light, and a gentle shower of glowing white rain descended upon the striped child. It imbued itself into her skin, the magic working its way into her veins to lay dormant until she called upon it for the first time. "May it serve you well," the God noted kindly as the last raindrop fell, the clouds departing as if they had never been.
Maren has received her magic!
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[P] Photosynthesis [Quest return, Earth God]
