For days the Muse sat on the piles of rubble constituting the remains of
what was once Her temple. Her gaze, clearly troubled, fixed solidly on
the horizon behind the water of the Beryl Sea. Iosyne knew what it was
that Her Sister wanted and She realized the consequences of Her recent
escape. The exposure of the leylines to Sapience had become inevitable
now, as had the return of Her Sister. Even the Muse could not imagine
what great change these events would bring about, eventually. Her
thoughts drifted as fleeting visions of the horrors She had lived
through under the Preceptors experiments took shape before Her eyes.

A voice resounds in the darkness, "It is not really a choice at all,
dearest Sister. You cannot be without Your thoughts, Your imagery, Your
minds eye cannot remain dark for long." Fluxes of power surround and
constrict Her, the occasional tingle startling Her into consciousness.
The voice is closer now, "Whatever you see, Sister, I see now, and in
time I will learn how You come to see these things."

A rumble not far from the Muse dissipates the vivid recollection. The
Muse knows it is Her, knows it has begun.

The mortals that had aided the Muse in Her escape months earlier had
been warned for this day; so they gathered quickly, in great numbers and
they had a plan. Iosyne had stressed that in order to return, the
essence of Her Sister would need to be able to pinpoint a location on
the prime material plane. A fair-sized group sped through the newly
uncovered tunnels leading into the belly of the Siroccian Mountains
until they reached a magma-filled chamber. The chamber contained a
fissure similar to the one from which The Muse had escaped, above it
hovered a locus of energy, sparkling and moving as if it were alive.
When the mortals arrived they knew the task that lay before them. They
remembered it had been a voice that guided the Muse from Her
imprisonment, so the sorceress Truft Mirari spun her crystals,
enveloping the chamber in a sullen silence as the others formed a
protective circle around her.

The mind of the Preceptor, however, was too strong. The will of Niuri
reached from beyond the locus in the fissure and Her thoughts reached
out to Her students, Neoma Krogh and Inaeternum Bouchard. They too,
quickly made their way into the fiery heart of the mountain. Upon the
arrival of Niuri's faithful, tensions grew between the mortals present.
Niuri had strengthened Her bond with the prime material plane and forced
the remainder of Her essence through the locus. The mortals gazed in
astonishment as a stream of essence flowed forth from the locus over the
fissure. The essence twirled and curled as if it were writing symbols in
the sky, before taking the corporeal form of the Goddess of Mystery.

The Goddess stretched Her arms languidly and spoke with a calm
demeanour, "Sister dearest, did You really think You could run and hide
from Me, from... all this?" Her arms swung wide in a nigh-theatrical
gesture. The Muse suddenly materialized, standing directly in the path
of Niuri's gaze. A faint grimace contorting Her features, the Muse
turned to those dear to Her, "This cannot be stopped by you, not now."

"Not ever." Niuri rectified with a truthful face. "Why should we hide
the Truth from these mortals, neglecting all that capacity they have for
learning and eventually understanding the world around them?"

"Even I cannot envision the consequences, Sister, you are proving
increasingly careless and dangerous in your experiments." The words of
the Muse echoed off the chamber walls as Her image softly rippled away.

A soft chuckle escaped the Goddess of Mystery, "She lives in Her
imagined world, clueless to the realities of this one. Look at where you
are, mortals. You stand near the relics of your very history. Do you not
thirst to uncover its secrets? To learn?" She spoke softly, slowly
moving Her cerulean figure towards the assembly of mortals. "Come, My
students, let Me show you." She said, as She took the hands of Neoma and
Inaeternum into Her own and vanished, rippling like a desert mirage.

Penned by my hand on the 5th of Severin, in the year 263 MA.