Thanks so much for reading, Keeper! I'm really, really glad that you enjoyed the stories.

If you ever have a chance to share that full response, I'd be fascinated to hear it.

This has been one crazy ride, from start to finish. Thanks so much for coming along!

Yeah, I've needed time to kind of get my thoughts in order but I should probably just dive in and share them since I don't know if they'll ever be totally coherent

I'll try to do that later today

Coherence is overrated.

Or so I hope...



(Seriously, don't sweat it! Say anything you like. Or nothing, for that matter! It's not like you're obligated to share anything.)

Ahaha guess who keeps putting off commenting on this! WELL NO MORE

I don't promise that any of this will be very comprehensible though.

So one of the things that I find fascinating about this all is that the genesis of it was so natural when the thematic throughline is so obvious and powerful. This strikes me as a story, thus far, about forgiveness and redemption, and so I think Barinellos is right to position the Shifter as the REAL villain of this story, because ultimately what he represents is a world consumed in flames for its sins, not out of any real ideological belief that this is righteous but just because it's convenient for him that the world should explode in violence. But more than that, he ultimately sets Beryl on a collision course with her sister that Beryl painstakingly and at great emotional cost ultimately succeeds in avoiding.

And this is potentially DISASTROUS for the Shifter, but not just in terms of his plans but in terms of what he represents within the story.

I think somewhere upthread Astria is described as getting what she deserves and I think the same could be said of the plane as a whole--like it's clearly in need of at least SOME guillotining here I'd say given what we've seen of the culture as a whole and the power of the noble houses, but what fascinates me in this is the way that like what's deserved maybe isn't what's right for the people meting out justice?

(I'd like to see Agmund and Beryl come into conflict...)

One of the things that impresses me a lot with these stories is the way the vast entities that are The Missing Pieces are relayed through stories that are sort of fundamentally human in scope and involve these kind of horrifying incursions of extremely powerful entities into the presence of mortals? But it's all through the lens of respectively Alessa's trauma and PTSD and Beryl's self loathing and associated mental health issues (and again traumas). So there's this paralleling between inward experience and outward fantasy story stuff. I'm increasingly interested in the way fantasy makes it possible to externalize and literalize the metaphorical and I think that's working really well here.

(Also do I detect a little of Bill Cypher in the Shifter here? Just a touch, just a little touch... )

Beyond all that literary nonsense though this storyline has been incredibly meaningful to me for reasons I've talked over a little with OL and hinted at elsewhere and stuff. I guess most broadly what I'd say (and haha wow feel free to just skip this paragraph if you don't want to watch me spill my guts all over the thread) is that as someone who sees zinself as sort of fundamentally villainous and not a particularly good person... and as someone who sees human interaction as sort of inherently fraught with more pain and terror the closer you get to others (there's that hedgehog's dilemma, again, always) Beryl's story has been too painful for me at times to follow but also very healing in some ways? Watching Alessa and Beryl together in these last two stories in particular has meant very much to me. I see something of myself in both, which can be agonizing when I see Alessa overstep a boundary or Beryl slide back into self-defeating patterns of thought, but can be very comforting when I see them both overcome their issues and move forward.

All of this is ridiculous and overdramatic of course but there it is, this is sort of how I've responded to this storyline.

And really, I want to thank and congratulate Barinellos and OL for this final chapter and more broadly everyone else involved in the conception and development of this storyline for putting together something that is, I think, incredibly powerful and one of the greatest things to come out of this project that I started a few years ago because I wasn't happy with the books produced for a fantasy trading card game

Congratulations.

And thank you.

Thanks so much for reading and for sharing your thoughts, Keeper! Both are deeply appreciated!


Hey, I followed your train of thought. So, if it was incomprehensible, then I must be incomprehensible, too.



I think you've identified one of the themes which my mind, at least, really sort of latched on to over the course of writing this arc. Namely, Beryl's story is very much a story about forgiveness. It's about whether and how we forgive those who trespass against us, yes. But, even more than that, it's about whether and how we learn to forgive our own trespasses. It's also, like you said, about atonement and redemption.

Specifically, I think that what comes to a climax in this story is Beryl's attempt to understand just what redemption means to her. Beryl, as much as I love her, is not a perfect person. She has faults, and she makes errors in judgment -- several of which come back to haunt her in spectacular fashion in this piece. She has made mistakes in her life, for which she carries the physical and emotional scars. She is aware of her own failings, and self-critical about them -- often to a fault. And she desperately wants to make amends for the crimes -- real or imagined -- she has committed. She wants to be redeemed. She wants to be saved. She wants to prove to herself and to the world that she isn't the person she has always feared she might be, the monster that Astria almost convinced her that she was, the woman with the horrible scar who children stare at in the street.

But what does that mean? How does Beryl learn to forgive herself? What does atoning for her past mean?

I think we've seen her consider two possible answers to that question over these past several stories.

One answer is that atonement means doing a some good deed which is of commensurate value to the evil she believes she has done. Call this the "debits and credits theory of salvation," if you will. If you accept this view of forgiveness and redemption, then it means that Beryl's path to salvation hinges upon her finding a way to make amends, to pay back the debt she believe she owes to the people around her. This is about *earning* forgiveness. And I think that this is the mindset which Beryl has been in for a long time, and that it's reflected in how urgently she feels that she needs to "save" Astria, and to "fix" Aliavelli. Now, to be clear, I think that Beryl is committed to both of those things because she believes that they are the right things to do. Beryl wants to bring Astria to the side of the angels because she cares about Astria, in spite of everything Astria has done to her. And Beryl wants to improve the lot of the people of Aliavelli because she genuinely cares about the inequity and suffering she sees all around her. But I think it would be naive to believe that a part of Beryl's mind isn't also thinking that, if she can redeem her sister, and she can redeem her society, then she will have earned her own redemption in the process.

There's another possible way of thinking about forgiveness and redemption, though. Call it the "better self theory of salvation," if you like. In this frame of mind, forgiveness isn't something which has to be earned. It's something that we can merit just by virtue of what's in our hearts, by virtue of trying to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be. It isn't about paying down debts, or doing good. It's about just trying to live as well as possible -- to be kind, to be understanding, to be compassionate. It's about being good more than doing good. In this frame of mind, Beryl doesn't have to earn her redemption -- the mere fact that she is trying to redeem herself, to forgive herself, becomes self-fulfilling. And I don't think that this mindset comes naturally to Beryl. I think that it's a point of view which has started to appear in her mind based on things which Aloise has told her, which Nasperge has told her, which Moira has told her, and which even Alessa has told her. It's the notion that she is not defined by her past, or by her mistakes, or by her faults. It's the notion that she is defined by the person she chooses to be today, not the person she was yesterday.

Depending on which of those views you hold to, the events which happen in this story can leave Beryl is a vastly different place. If forgiveness and redemption is about making amends and doing compensatory good, then what happens in "The Fire" is crushing for Beryl. She doesn't save Astria. She doesn't save Aliavelli. She makes a tragic mistake in judgment, and, as a consequence, people die. If fixing her sister, and fixing her world, were the keys to Beryl's salvation, then that door is now locked, and the path ahead for her is very dark indeed.

But, if forgiveness and redemption is about what's in your heart, and trying to be the best person that you can be, then Beryl is not defeated. Deflated, sure. Demoralized, definitely. But not defeated. Because, as badly as things have gone to this point, Beryl is trying to do the right thing, to the best of her ability to divine what that is. She is trying to be the person she's supposed to be. She's trying to be a force for light rather than retreating back into the darkness. And that's a fight she'll have to keep fighting every single day of her life, but it's a fight which she is capable of waging and winning, even now.

I don't want to tip my hand as to which of those two directions Beryl is going to go. But I think that the end of the story offers a pretty clear hint.



Yeah, it's hard to feel like Astria and her cohorts don't deserve some measure of hard justice for the suffering that they've inflicted on the people unfortunate enough to wind up on the short end of the social stick. But I don't think that the justice they deserved is the justice they're going to get. That's the difference between Beryl and The Shifter here, if you will. Beryl wanted to open people's hearts. The Shifter would rather explode people's hearts. And that's why I think it hurts Beryl so badly to see how his scheme plays out, and to feel like she's at least partially responsible for it -- or, at the very least, like she failed to stop it and him.



Well, Keeper, for what it's worth, I don't think I agree with your assessment of your own character. And I think you know which of those two schools of thought about forgiveness and personal goodness I subscribe to. So, to the extent that you've derived even a tiny amount of comfort or reassurance from these stories, well, I'm deeply, deeply thankful for that.



Thank you for the very kind words, Keeper.

To some extent I think you're right that Beryl makes an error of judgement but I also think it's maybe true that given the sheer power of the Missing Pieces it's hard to see ANYTHING as an error of judgement that someone could be held too accountable for... their sheer gravity is such that they can act as a diabolus ex machina whenever they please. They don't seem to LIKE doing that and I really want to credit you and Barinellos (and Ruwin as well) for walking that line very adeptly between emphasizing their power and ability to walk in and just straight up trash a place, while also emphasizing how their game is played and how out of character that act would really be.

The Shifter after all only gets involved here after Beryl forces his hand... in a sense, she judged absolutely correctly, she just didn't know that a godlike entity was going to waltz in and totally undo all her work with a single spell (plus some well laid plans).

I think that's part of the tension of the twist climax of the story actually--we see her plans that seem to have actually worked undone in a matter of moments by someone far, far beyond her abilities politically, magically, and intellectually as far as experience goes. That could easily have played very... hm, very gratuitous, I think? But the Duchess has been so played up that the Shifter's sudden seeming surge in ability is more like a final puzzle piece falling into place, a matter of... ah, THIS is why he's Her opponent.

I'm sort of wandering at this point but I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's an interesting tension here between readings where you can read WITH BERYL or you can read as an outside observer (or maybe with Alessa) and recognize how heavily the deck was stacked against Beryl from the start. And I don't think that either reading is actually invalid because understanding the story requires, I think, affectively responding to both the experiences of Beryl as she interprets herself and her experiences in confronting a being beyond her imagination.

...Aaand I've turned this into another manifestation of my thesis work Welp.

Yeah, Beryl gets extremely unlucky here in terms of the enemies she has drawn. It's her first real run-in with an adversarial 'walker, and she just happens to end up getting paired against both The Duchess (indirectly) and The Shifter (much more directly).

As they say in sportsball, that is a tough first-round matchup...

(Man, it's like our Generator wrote this, or something! )

Poor Alessa is in the same boat, too.

When I say that I think she commits an error in judgment, I think her error is not appreciating the magnitude of Alessa's warnings about the forces she finds herself arrayed against. I don't think the error is that she tries to stand up to those forces -- because that's the right thing to do. Beryl cannot just turn a blind eye here (pun not intended). Doing so would kill her. It would corrode her soul. Her mistake is not realizing just how much she's playing with fire (pun intended this time), and, by the time she does realize what she has stumbled into, it's too late to put out the flames.

And your comments on the different ways you can read the story are interesting. I'm actually really flattered that you think there's that level of... something, at work here. (I can't think of the right word. I don't want to say "depth," because that sounds so darn pretentious. But I guess I can't think of another word which gets at what I'm trying to say but sounds a little less insufferable. "Complexity?" That's kind of awful, too. "Multi-layered?" I give up...)

Ah, yeah, not listening to Alessa was... definitely an error in judgement.

I'd say there's depth here for sure It's one of the reasons I consider M:EM as a whole to be a success: we've got a whole bunch of story(lines) now that definitely have depth. People are taking the setting of a children's card game and turning out stuff that's profoundly affecting and applicable.

I wish we could really figure out a solid way to promote this far and wide to non-players for that reason We've got so much good stuff here!

I just watched the How To Train Your Dragon movies for the first time actually because I was like work? screw work! I want a break! (and actually I can justify taking one because it's spring break next week thank god) and I was struck by some of the similarities in those movies to this story arc. Lots of stuff about putting aside the past and finding a way to coexist...

This definitely wasn't Alessa's first rodeo.
In fairness though, The Duchess wasn't either.

Alessa has a lot of past packed into a relatively short time. I still intend to get to those stories when the time is right.

Why isn't anyone listening to me!?
Professor! Lava! Hooooot!

Seriously, when the woman that can see the future tells you something LISTEN DAMMIT.

As to my own contributions to the story arc and various things you've said Keeper, I'm sure I have things to say. It's just there's a lot to cover between your response, Orcish's response to your response, and your response to his response to your response, ad nauseam...

I'll get to it, but in the direct meantime, there's a lot about Alessa's story arc that is jump started by this and you'll see more of her soon, I promise.

why it's almost like when OL and I get going about a topic we tend to create vast walls of text

it's almost like prompting wall of text responses from OL was my real plan all along

I can assure you, I can wall of text with the best of them. Except mine come with pictures. WORD PICTURES.

Though my most immediate response is also, there was not as much Bill Cypher as you might expect in there. There's a bit of a pastiche of personality traits and inspirations that make up the Shifter's base pallet, but there in does actually provide an interesting insight to the Shifter himself, because he is a being of loose archetypes in terms of roles. Similar to how the Duchess has the singular mask, as seen in Reflections, the Shifter has a whole host of masks, but, I think as demonstrated in Dance, he's got even less clue of why he bothers than the Duchess. His anarchist views, the ultimate desire to just watch everything burn, could be seen as symbolic to his own lack of a singular identity.

But that's in other terms, instead of the terms laid out in the story, which are the more relevant to the discussion at hand.