(Closed to Elthas. This thread is a mentor / mentee thread, and from Shinsou's perspective continues the story from the Gnarled Roots of Osiris. Characters and names of Canen Darkflight and Gideon Xerxes are used with permission from myself (Canen) and the pre-Althanas user formerly known as Fallen Angel (Gideon))
-Foreword-
The beauty of the coast of the island of Corone seemed to be wasted on Shinsou. The heat of the sun beating down upon his face and the shimmering azure sea should have been a nice memory for him to take away before a perilous voyage across the sea, yet somehow the Telgradian couldn’t absorb it at all. His mind instead wandered like a lost child back and forth between the memory of events that unfolded at the Cartographer three days ago, and the sickly anticipation of what he would end up doing now that Keats was dead and he had severed his ties with Telgradia.
This new found freedom was a strange bedfellow. His returning memories told him that, for as long as he could remember, Shinsou had always had some sort of agenda driving his actions up to this point in his life. He had always known what to do, and known, rightly or wrongly, who it was he was doing it for. It didn’t matter whether it was fighting the Jal Shey, or fighting under their control; he had never had to think about himself, about what he wanted.
Not really.
But now, putting an end to Temperance had become both his mission and his undying obsession. He remembered how everything had gone just right until it went terribly wrong, forever changing the course of his life. Murderer, emperor, villian - Telgradia's easy reference tags for him would always remain the same. But he knew himself well. There was the Shinsou Vaan Osiris who had had attacked Telgradia during the age of Temperance, and Shinsou Vaan Osiris of today. The two were very different men.
So, as he remained behind in the Cartographer to study the riches of Telgradian and Althanian texts that had lay there for years, he found for the first time ever he was lacking answers. What would he do from here? Where could he go? He was no longer an Emperor. He no longer cared about Telgradia at all, in fact, and as far as he was concerned Temperance was welcome to rend that world asunder. Both the Telgradians and the Jal Shey were a blight on the planet of Telgradia and the worlds around it, and they all deserved each other. But Shinsou knew, deep down, what letting Temperance destroy Telgradia on a whim would lead to. What Temperance was and what its survival entailed for other inhabited worlds within reach of their portals was too frightening a contemplation for Shinsou. Compared to Althanas, what happened on Telgradia simply didn’t matter, but Shinsou couldn’t allow Temperance to destroy this world, which was a guarantee unless he did something before the three years left on Temperance’s seal were up.
All of a sudden, as he paced up and down the Cartographer's marble floors pouring over years of knowledge contained in those red books, he realised that stopping Temperance was the only thing that mattered to him now and everything else failed miserably in comparison.
So, when he came across the township of Squall’s Calm in the Cartographer’s library, he knew what he had to do.
Squall’s Calm, an isolated township on the very fringes of the xenophobic lands of Fallien, had already been visited by the Jal Shey some years prior. There, the text said, a citadel was built to house an interplanetary gateway linking Telgradia and Althanas. Shinsou had suspected from the content of the book that the gateway was a precursor to an invasion lead by Temperance, given its supposed size, and he had decided that he would start by destroying it.
All that was left to do was to reach Squall's Calm and destroy that gate.
So, with his purpose set, Shinsou set sail from Corone and made haste to Fallien.
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